Under Mount Korakiana

Another chilly blue dry day - perfect for our odd jobs. Aln came up in the late afternoon and fitted our flue. We sat enjoying the fire and the slight scent of the wood smoke drifting back through the rough hole that Lambros is coming up to finish tomorrow along with putting final touches to the roof, putting in a botched window properly, plastering and generally tidying the mess made of our upstairs last year. The weather promises to stay fine over the weekend and beyond.
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E-mail makes arranging future work pleasantly easy - over a soup and bread in the Beer Bucket in Kontokali. I got a circular from the university yesterday on an agreed ‘sustainable cooling policy’. It aims to limit the use of ‘active cooling’ - air-conditioning:

With the expected increase in temperatures due to global warming the need to adapt buildings to prevent overheating and ensure acceptable working conditions will become increasingly important…The University will adopt a cooling strategy based on the ‘switch off, absorb, blow away and cool principles’ with active cooling being a last resort. (i) Switch off: Reduce internal and external heat gains by minimising gains from lighting, IT and heat producing equipment. This includes minimising the need for heat producing equipment, locating such equipment in dedicated areas, and the use of passive techniques such as solar shading. (ii) Absorb: Where practical use the thermal mass of the building to absorb heat and/or by the introduction of phase change materials (SB note: technology for collecting night cooling for use in the day) (iii) Blow away: Ensure an intelligent ventilation strategy. For example the use of night time air to cool buildings, limiting ventilation when external temperatures are greater than internal. (iv) Cool: Where cooling is unavoidable, ensure that the system used is well controlled and is designed to minimise energy use and the production of CO2

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I finished Kevin Andrews' The Flight of Ikaros. I’m grateful for the web friend from Ikaria and the English north country, who is making a study of Andrews, who told me of him. Andrews' writing makes his book universal, but it could be read alongside Nicholas Gage’s Eleni – the latter first, partly for the summarised history inserted to give context to the story of his mother’s murder in the village of Lia in Epirus – by any non-Greek wanting to understand the Greek Civil War. Andrew's only meets communists very briefly, on their way to prison, but spends much time in the company of those who fought against the andartes.

The understanding that is emerging – very slowly as my stolid intelligence reaches for it - is the role, only recently teased out in a number of doctoral theses focusing on small areas of Greece in the period to which Professor Mark Mazower and fellow contributors refer in his sombre and scholarly collection After the war was over, is the way the civil war, so often viewed as the first surrogate hot war spawned by the Cold War, in which ignorant armies clashed under the aegis of greater powers, was also an occasion for escalating the violence of traditional feuding between villages, families and brothers. In Kevin Andrews’ encounters across Greece during that dire period people talked less of differences over the future government of Greece – the preoccupation of the Americans and the British and, to some extent the Russians, though Stalin had graciously agreed with Churchill to cede Greece to the West at Yalta – than about the settlement of scores, revenge and retribution. This is the story of all civil wars including ours - now entertainly re-enacted as a fancy dress picnic on Bank Holidays. Imagine that here. Thucycdides wrote of it with the start of the revolt in Corfu. Its ingredients include envy, jealousy, rage, the availability of weapons and the opportune moment. These fine grain interpretations are bound to be less welcome, even 50 years later, not just because they become so tortuously detailed, but because their currency is made up of villages, streets, families, the names of individuals and the messy subjectivity of personal accounts among people whose scores, even now, remain unsettled. No wonder some say ‘leave it be’.

Andrews, who’s sense of severance at leaving for New York at the end of his fellowship in the early 1950s perhaps surpasses Lawrence Durrell’s (‘The loss of Greece has been an amputation. All Epictetus could not console one against it’ Ch 8 Prospero’s Cell), recalled from the caique nosing past Cape Matapan towards Crete in April 1941, returned (unlike Durrell) to become a citizen of Greece, living there with his family until his end. Nicholas Gage, on the other hand, was born a Greek but, through his mother’s courage, escaped, as a child, to America to return as a man to research and tell her story.

‘History with her painful and unexpected changes cannot be made to pity or remember: that is our function’ Lawrence Durrell op cit 1945

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I had a good dream last night about ordering wet work on the person who set me up over the credit card theft – only joking. Katerina came up from the bus stop yesterday afternoon with more horta for us with names like famous battles – moskalahánu, prikalíthá, zaxhouliá and zágouna. It’s chilly but sunny enough to dry washing and feel warm in the day. Katherina sighed and exclaimed ‘Krio!’ I made gesture of flexed arms ‘Stin Anglia einai zesto!’ She laughed. I might have made some doltish sense despite every tense wrong. God how I wish I could speak this lovely clever language – and a hundred others but that can wait.

An Athens News horoscope tells me ‘its getting creepy but getting moving as the week goes on’ and that I should ‘get good luck from low-class little men up the backstairs and avoid the great and the good…’

Last night I took my new stick for a walk up the village. Lin held my gloved hand in the chill. “Left or right?” she asked at the top of our steps. “Let’s go up the village”. We strolled against the wind funnelled between the houses until we came to the wider slope that leads to the car park and bandstand and the lights of Corfu and the mainland coast twinkled between the dark shapes of swaying cypresses harking the winter breeze. ‘How could you prove to a child those lights, which look just the same, are closer than those stars?’ We strolled over the performance area by the bandstand and traced out the words on the low iron-fenced memorial to those who’d died for their country. Lights shone behind the windows of a substantial overlooking house from which hung the national flag. We walked on to where the road narrowed between small houses, some occupied some clearly not for some time. A heavy dog chained on a terrace barked suddenly and loudly as we passed and went on being noisy out of boredom. We came to the derelict music school. An earth tremor had made a crack that ran from the lintel above its third floor to the street. We started back from the second of the hairpin bends as the road starts to climb to Sokraki and the street lights end. ‘It’s got the same magic as Lydbrook’ - the village where we’ve had a home for over twenty years. On the fringe of the forest between high steep slopes sprinkled at night with lights along its steep unlit footpaths and a night sky almost free of city glow, we’ve walked on similar windy evenings and enjoyed the long village to ourselves as people sit snug indoors. Coming home we passed quietly by the new music school where a piano was being practised and the kafenion where elders were playing cards and backgammon.

The last few days

The men were here at 9.00. I’d been up earlier to see the sun rise. It rained all yesterday evening and into the night and, eating downstairs Lin, especially, kept waiting to hear the recurrence of drips through the roof, but Lambros and his men had sealed it with sturdy well laid felt - no nail holes exposed - over the old insulation.

This morning tiling has started. Alan popped in yesterday to make sure things were ready for him to do the electrics upstairs. Two of our first Corfu English friends from down the village visited. They mentioned they could recommend a plasterer. We’ve measured for the stove chimney and went on a stroll in the afternoon, after the builders left, to see some examples of chimneys. Down one of the many Korakiana alleys we encountered M, with whom I’d exchanged e-mails, strolling home with a fine Labrador beside him. He was joined by S who runs stables off the Ano-Kato road. They asked us in for wine. The day was going well. Back home we finished making sure the two planks fitted the gap between door and wall between kitchen and guest bedroom. My cod carpentry, with Lin’s measurements and markings succeeded. Now all that’s needed is finishing touches – a pair of handles for the rust-cleaned lock, paint and lacquer stripper, glass, putty - or its modern equivalent - and tacks for the panes and a couple of small bolts.
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Reading more of Kevin Andrews The Flight of Ikaros, I see parallels with Nicholas Gage’s Eleni. Gage is sometimes seen as writing an anti-communist tract - his op-ed pieces in the New York Times used as evidence. He's too intelligent; too good a researcher for that. It was the village – the horio – that had conspired against his mother in ways made up of vices we have in common.

Plato is called anti-democratic. What democrat isn’t, who knows himself and humans - perhaps Kazantzakis’ Zorba – but only after leaving the earth. Plato said ‘justice in life and the conduct of the state is possible only as first it resides in the hearts and souls of citizens’. My ancestor, Maine, warned idealists for democracy that 'democracy is just another form of government’; its success depended, he argued so well in Popular Government, on the constant exercise of moral intelligence to prevent it falling into the same despotic excesses the idealists presumed exclusive to monarchy.

Enclosed in the intimate company of family and neighbours for months in occupied Amsterdam, Anne Frank wrote ‘I don't believe that the big men, the politicians and the capitalists alone are guilty of the war. Oh, no, the little man is just as keen, otherwise the people of the world would have risen in revolt long ago! There is an urge and rage in people to destroy, to kill, to murder, and until all mankind, without exception, undergoes a great change, wars will be waged.’ (thanks to Information Clearing House 28/10/07 for the Plato and Ann Frank quotes)

Henry Miller visiting Greece, on the eve of its invasion, sees this and excoriates it in the attitudes of some of the Greeks, especially those on return visits from America, and foreigners he encounters. Kevin Andrews travelling between Athens and the rest of Greece during the civil war see it, and unlike Miller is historically well-informed and politically aware, knowing much, for the times, about the foreign policies of the great powers. A propos of the events surrounding 3 December 1944 - the Dekemvria - he notes Churchill’s self-quoted willingness to ‘strike out of the blue without an preliminary crisis.’ (V.11 p.251 The Second World War – tho’ did KA read this and some other histories for his revised edition of 1983? No I think he’s too honest a writer.)

Wed 6 Feb: Where in September the sun appeared round the corner of the mountain to our east, this mornng I first saw it further south over Sayiada, rising over nimbus that took the gentlest shade of pink amid the dawn cirrus. To the south east two prelates, dining with he Holy Ghost in paradise, continued a slightly inebriated argument about their host’s relationship to his father before dissolving into one and disappearing in the spreading blue.
We’ve stayed in the village today. I texted birthday greetings to our son. Washing dried in the sun. In the evening I took ours off the line, but neighbours’ washing still flapped in a gentle breeze carrying the scent of woodsmoke. Earlier Lin planted our garden with things she’d found on nearby waste ground. I bagged more rubble. Together we eased a dusty pine door out of a mess of nail-filled lathes in the apothike, and, with a little chiselling, fitted it back in the gap between the guest bedroom and the kitchen where it had once been. I dug out the pair of brown painted planks that had completed the space. It’ll need handles and new glass. To fit the door required scraping layers of old paint off the hinges, waking them up with penetrating oil. I’ve done the same with the bathroom window hinges. “Change that cracked obscure glass. Put in plain glass so I can see to Albania from that little window” said Lin. On the next warm day the metal frames can be lifted out, cleaned of paint and rust and taken to the glazier when we go there to get safety glass for the bedroom door.
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I finished reading a chapter half way through Kevin Andrews book, where he admits himself worsted in an argument by a young gendarme who was blaming all Greece’s problems on the Americans – primarily by giving too little too late in the interests of their own high politics. It occurred to me that one of Greece’s bad ideas was that they’d once had and could recover an Aegean empire, when what they actually had was a civilisation that spread beyond the whole Mediterranean.

But we know these ideas are born of yearning among bread-fearers and neo-condors who think civilisation and empire the same – rather than in tension. Reading the profile in Athens News of Archbishop Christodoulos’ ‘troubled career’ I thought of the celestial scene I saw recently among the ‘extras’ on the DVD of Zorba that Cacoyannis left out (if he could make it look as if Anthony Quinn could dance, making him God would have been simple), but he knew that, in this case, what worked in prose wouldn’t in film. In the extract, Zorba, as the Pantokrator among cotton wool clouds, meets sinners arriving for selection at the gates of Paradise. He lets them all in. Kazantzakis thus implying they’ve had their time in hell. The film focused brilliantly on the contrasting character of Greek and Englishman, giving northerners a lasting, but over-singular, conception of Greek character, whereas Kazantzakis wrote the scene in heaven as the moral context for a study of Alexis Zorba - less as a Greek than as a character he'd known.
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Last weekend, at evening time, Aln arrived with Lula, Paul and Lambros – our rescue crew – and discussed our roof. We were allowed a word or two on other subjects, but their business was in Greek, putting things right ‘up there’. A good feeling. We’ve felt this reassurance before, but this time it came with an ISO grade.
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Yesterday it was nice to gaze through the window from a warm room at streams of rain carrying small leaves down the path beside the house, the gloom lit now and then by lightning. Thunder played behind a tympani of water drops falling into the containers upstairs while Lin sat reading with an eye on our washing drying before two halogen heaters. Today we’re as grateful for dazzling sun and a gentle breeze to dry the next wash on a line across the garden. Aln phoned to say things would start this morning and that he’d be up tomorrow, then while Lin was showering, Lambros arrived with two mates to shoulder six rolls of felt – thicker than used previously and with ISO markings - to the balcony. Lambros looked at our buckets and smiled ruefully, pointed upwards and signing gently upwards ‘Seemara - problem over’. Now if this was an episode of Casualty … but Democracy Street is neither soap nor series, it’s our life and we woke this morning with all Greece lying beside us. I can glimpse the Adriatic Sea on the other side of the island from our drying balcony – Penta Islet – Πεντανήσια, off Cape Varka, seems from here still attached to the coast due south beyond Mt Paramanos, while the mainland shore, though it’s hazing up in the warm, would be visible to Parga and beyond but for the local hill between us and Dassia. The cat Bubble rolls jocund in the sun, miaous for attention and flirts lasciviously with a marmalade tom twice her size who’s scared by her. Ladies are putting out washing on many balconies. I distinctly heard several lemons asking to be picked - now.
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The knife we found in the apothiki - the length of one of our table knives - was perhaps made by a local smith or bartered from a peddler of useful things. The blade has a slender flattened top, gently tapering fore and aft and broadest in the middle, such as you don't see, and which is probably unnecessary, on a factory-made knife. The initials ΣΚ seem stamped in the blade. We cleaned off a little rust. I can't explain the green paint on the blade and handle. To extend their shared life six turns of copper wire have been made round hilt and haft with the end nearest the blade running under the turns and back to a deft twist - a mend that makes the knife as robust as the day metal and wood were first joined. Its blade could take a sharper edge but can still cut bread. We don't know its age or its wood. I imagine beech, as in chair legs, but olive is common here. I suppose someone might accuse me of Elginism. "You can't bear to leave things where they are, to return from whence they came. Such fear of time! Such lack of trust in human ingenuity! These things were made and can be made again as and if needs be."

In Ano Korakiana

The drinks are made of juice from some of our blood oranges. The books, CDs and DVDs I bought, from all those I’d gathered in the last fortnight, were Angelopoulos’s Τοπιο στην Ομιχλη or Landscapes in the Mist (with English subtitles), another version of Theodorakis' setting of Axion Esti, in which the soloists include Grigoris Bithikotsis, 30 Nocturnes by Manos Hadjidakis (which I’d given Lin for Christmas), the film of The spy who came in from the cold which I've not seen for decades, The Third Man, and an inexpensive CD of songs bought on ebay called Ανάμνηοη Σμύρνης – laments for the destruction of Smyrna. For books I’ve bought a Robert Wilson thriller, Henry Miller’s The Colossus of Maroussi and Kevin Andrews’ The flight of Ikaros. My detached liberal histories remain in Handsworth for the moment.

Writing on contentious subjects – and what else is worth reading – brings to mind that hoary distinction between the separate roles of egg and bacon in breakfast. The chicken is involved. The pig is committed. Eleni by Nicholas Cage is committed and should perhaps be read in conjunction with The Flight of Ikaros. Its author makes early mention of a group of shaven headed young men on his inter-island steamer, guarded by soldiers with rifles, on their way to the island concentration camp of Makronisis - having spent the war years in the mountains fighting the invaders of Greece.

Reading these books about the Greek Civil War, a chicken, like me, can be confronted with the difference between themselves and the bacon makers. I still strive, with the books of liberal historians – like Veremis and Koliopoulos (who, push come to shove, I'd strive to defend with bacon fervour) – to maintain the position of a chicken, but perhaps I should endure the confusion of listening simultaneously to Gage and Andrews. They are very different people.

Henry Miller’s loathing of war and eschewal of possessions puts him in the bacon party, but then I recall the story of his ‘colossus’ - George Katsimbalis - on his own, starting to sing the Greek National Anthem - the Hymn to Freedom - at a funeral in occupied Athens for the great poet Palamos, under the guns and eyes of Nazi soldiers, being joined in the second verse by ‘a fat Corfiot’, and then by the whole crowd. Perhaps Miller should be read beside Richard Hillary's The Last Enemy as writing this I'm reminded of its ending, after a dying woman, who's hand he was holding after helping rescue her from a bombed house, says "I see they got you too'. His initial rage at her (one needs to read him to explain this) is directed to his realisation why some things must be fought, and again he didn't mean just Germans or Nazis:

'... for I had recognized in that moment what it was that Peter and the others had instantly recognized as evil and to be destroyed utterly. I saw now that it was not crime; it was Evil itself.'

Through some of Sunday I’ve been reading Dh’s thesis outline ‘Shiísm, politics and development in post Saddam Iraq’. It’s a reminder of my lack of knowledge of other worlds. I’ll e-mail it back today with comments. Dh describes the impact of Muhammad Baqir As-Sadr on ‘the formation, roles and development of governance’ and the continuing influence of his son – the Second Sadr – both killed by Sadaam. My friend aims to describe ‘a world of imbalanced power relations’, and to devise a model ‘whereby the hegemony of a given discourse within the community under consideration, is curtailed to give way to development and well being’. I find this subtle and exciting. He says before this ‘The dominance of a given religious discourse and a particular faith group, and how this discourse is related to the construction of reality, cannot be seen in value-judgmental terms.’ I think ‘cannot’ is too strong and have said as much to Dh. We chickens have some neck too.

‘On 19 February 1999, as he was heading home from Kufa Mosque after a fiery sermon delivered in the Friday prayer, Sadr’s car was intercepted by gunmen who showered it with automatic rifles.

SB comment:‘fire’ or ‘bullets’ not ‘rifles’ were in the shower.

His two sons, Mustafa, the oldest, who was driving, and Muámmal, next to the youngest died immediately. Sadr was taken to a hospital in Najaf center and died there. News, from various sources, confirmed the regime’s involvement in the incident. Delegates from Saddam were sent to the hospital to confirm Sadr’s death.

SB comment: So often the innocent get caught. Should Sadr, though he should have lived, have traveled with his children. Sorry I lose my academic detachment. Lin said "They were intelligent young men and probably knew the risks and chose to share them with their father."

I have been drawn into another world by Dh’s writing, having to concentrate on pointing out small errors of grammar. Here in England, and even in Greece (so long as I respect the flag), I can say what I like – except shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theatre, calling for attacks on other ethnic groups, praising paedophilia on the internet or joking about bombs to airport security – and fear little. One could be killed in a street in Birmingham for not showing ‘respect’, but in the public domain I’m free to say more or less what I like and the powers that be will defend my right to do that. In the world Dh describes, and has long inhabited, men and women say things in public which can lead to their imprisonment, torture and death and – worse – the imposition of similar penalties on family and friends - a hideous double punishment. It is not that my milieu doesn’t demand courage, but not this kind, which I associate with England and the rest of Europe up to and during the Reformation. It is strange and humbling to come across this world today. Dh has made it more real for me.

Sunday. The island lies under a wet overcast, with a distant beam of sun brightening the sea towards Igoumenitsa; a parade of white cloudlets over the strait and the lightest of south winds turning into rising rivulets of white mist as it encounters the wooded face of Trompetta. With my umbrella I strolled along wet Democracy Street to dump the rubbish in the bins beyond the platea.
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Drip drip drippa drip-drip, drip drip drippa drip-drip … and so on - despite Aln clambering lithely on the roof on Saturday to staple interim cover over the existing mess of rucked and missing felt. Leftheris had said “Beaufort 10” and signed - pointing to the lower ground - serious damage to a brother’s house. I, aware of needing to curb exaggeration about wind, imagined this true. The roof, already bare of tiles through the work I’d stopped when I came in December, had been subject to the feral shucking of a big wind. F8 bangs on the door. F10 breaks and enters. Some felt strips had landed over the hedge opposite from Leftheris. A sheet of insulation, from a pile left on the balcony, hung in a tree. The neighbours had retrieved other wayward pieces. “The rain was coming down in sheets” said Aln later. Our roof is letting in rain. I woke Sunday morning to find Lin spreading plastic sheets and bowls on the upstairs floor. Most leaks were sorted by Aln later in the morning, but his best efforts had not sealed the other end. Rain came in the night. This time Lin woke to find me catching more drips. “That ceiling’s done for” she said gloomily.










On Tuesday evening we’d arrived safely at Kapodistria, having passed through security at Birmingham, Zurich and Athens. Shoe removal has become random, but our taxi could not drop us at the terminal at Birmingham – barriers instituted since the doctors’ fiery drive-in assault at Glasgow airport last year - meant a short walk with luggage to check-in. In Zurich a tin of chicken in cream sauce that Lin had forgotten to put in our hold baggage – so we’d have a swift supper if the shops were closed in Corfu - and which had been noted but passed hrough at Birmingham, was discovered by X-ray and confiscated. ‘The white sauce is the problem’ said the guard apologetically, throwing the tin in a bin. One of Kostas’ and Georgia’s cars was parked for us at Kapodistria. Lin drove the familiar route, on quiet roads, to Ano Korakiana via a supermarket. The house was chilly but most rooms were dry and soon warmed. Over a light supper we made lists, then unpacked. The electric blanket, plus two hot water bottles, warmed our bed. In the morning we’d begin errands. Check Summer Song, phone re work inside and outside the house, sweep and tidy balcony and veranda, start bagging the pile of rubble removed from the roof, read the water meter and pay the bill, buy another heater.