A stone shoe

The light behind the curtains suggests another sunny day, with reservations. Enough to do laundry. Once the machine is rumbling reassuringly, the soaked mix tossing in the froth, I’ve emptied the waste into a plastic sack for walking to the wheelie bins, I boil the kettle for tea and coffee, slice two pieces of bread to toast, and take from the fridge my usual Christmas gift from Amy, anchovy paste – Partum Peperium –  ‘There’s only one shop in Birmingham I can get it, Dad’.

The balcony, where I take my tray, affords a view that spreads from Albania, across the border, along the high mountains of Epirus as far as the hazy space of Igoumenitsa over the shining sea between island and mainland. From the crags behind us...

...the island mountains disappear around to an inland cape covered in trees and shrubs from which stone cliffs jut now and then, over which, in winter, the sun will suddenly appear having risen red over the mainland peaks.

In April our sun rises further south, lighting three green hills a couple of miles away, clothed in olive trees that reach into the village, hiding the long shore between Pyrgi, an hour’s walk, and Dassia in the centre of the bay 10 kilometres wide between ugly Barbati, invisible from Ano Korakiana, and Corfu Town. Between the hills I can see, less than a mile from the Old Port of the city, Vido island. Due south the gentle undulations continue, completing the middle distance, dotted now and then with pink-violet blossomed Kokukyias, which some foreigners, including Lawrence Durrell, call Judas Trees.

Above them, usually in haze, sometimes invisible, more mountains – south of the city the saddle back around Agia Deka, 20 kilometres away, astride the island’s narrow tail, and to the west the mountains behind Cape Plaka forming precipices over the resorts of Ermones, Gliffada and Pelekas, facing the Ionian Sea – on their lower slopes, speckles amid the greenery, of villages. I call the time to Lin and prepare her coffee though she’ll lie abed another hour at least, muttering ‘Yes, maybe’. If only the swallows soaring across the distant haze of mountains gave people pensions; jocund weather converted to salaries; my joy in this place into its economy, but for all that we live here our contribution is paltry set against our detachment from the crisis whose slow and relentless development is being described on televisions behind shutters and doors, making the internet unreliably busy. The coach is turning back into a pumpkin, the footmen into mice. One delicate glass dancing shoe is turning to stone.
I had awoken from one of the loveliest of dreams about my mum; awoken happy too, rather than sad at realising I’d been asleep all along. Mum had been walking with me in the English countryside, stood at the lip of a long escarpment, surveying together a green landscape that stretched to a hazy horizon lit by a summer sun, then in the middle of Rome she’d sung from a balcony after breakfast ‘Mum’ I said ‘you’ve got crumbs on your tongue!’
She laughed and we were shopping in a fashionable arcade and she’d bought a dress in which she looked as beautiful as I’d ever remembered her. We hardly needed to speak; just comfortable and happy and at peace in one another’s company and all the time it seemed we both knew very well she was no longer here. It didn’t matter a jot.
'You know why we dream so much when we're here' said Lin 'Both of us! It's because our mattress is so hard we never get beyond REM sleep.'
That, not cheese?
*** *** ***
I was on the bus back to the village sat behind K.
‘Things are bad’
‘I know’ I said
It’s the first time I’ve heard her suggest we may return to the drachma.
Richard P had said that without money from Europe the first thing will be that the government can no longer pay its workers – civil servants, nurses, police, local government officers, refuse collectors, bus drivers, electricity and water workers.
‘They will strike' he said
Things will close down.
‘What do people in in England say?’ asked K
‘My brother-in-law, with many others, say it’s Greece’s fault. Get out of the Euro and let them make their own way out of the mess they created for themselves. Stop taking our money...I say I don’t want to hear such opinions.’
A friend for supper here has a similar refrain
‘Greeks have got to grow up.’
I get flustered at glib imperatives. I rehearse the counter-arguments that much of the time seem to make sense – of deliberately created national debt, the impossibility of trying to get water from a stone (or any more money that goes only to cover interest payments on a debt that is wholly unrepayable by people being turned into paupers), ‘fiscal waterboarding’; of the fact that Greece’s crisis is Europe’s, an amplified problem of advanced capitalism...my words are assailed by the worthy logic of economics.
But how is it across the nation? People must be watching TV as we don’t. What do they say in the streets of Ioannina, in Metsovo and Kalamata, on the islands of the Aegean, on Crete, let alone Larissa, Thessaloniki and Athens? I detect a resigned numbness with flashes of hope. People get by. Perhaps.
‘If everyone in Greece paid their taxes, the problem would be solved. If Greek institutions scoured themselves of corrupt practices...’
‘Who said that? It’s not so simple...’ I say...lamely
 On the bus I said how impressed I was by Yannis Varoufakis, and Alexis Tsipras ‘playing an impossible game with the weakest of hands.’
‘Yes, indeed’
‘Flying on empty’
‘Yes, indeed, Simon’
There is no conspicuous consumption in Ano Korakiana. People work. People nurse frappés and soft drinks as they chat in Piatsa. One family in our part of the village roasted a lamb for Easter. Vasiliki gave us plates of her delectable cakes on Easter Monday. The washing flies in the wind. People garden, as we do. Katerina gave us horta and pastichio. The people we meet are ever polite, generous and cheerful. It made the conversation on the bus the more worrying because the expression of such apprehensions. at least to us, is so rare.
Lin and I have pondered options.
I ask Mark, over a beer in Piatsa.
‘Quite simply, Simon, I don’t know anything anymore. So many people have so many opinions.’
******
We’ve been building a buttress to support the garden wall. Lin doing the skilled work with trowel and cement...

I carting heavy stones. We’ve made a workbench in the apothiki using recovered wood from the rebuilt balcony. These chores are pleasantly endless and simple; sawing logs, putting out washing to be dried in the wind; making a rough table, also from the old balcony. The days pass as they do in England, though here we collect firewood from the beaches and store it, sawed and chopped, in the apothiki.

Sun dried sheets

How many miles has this log floated...

...before we bring it home to saw and split for the stove?

This step we made eases the climb up the path at the back of the house

Winnie’s sent me photos of how my allotment’s coming along. Peas are rising, parsnips sprouting but where are my potatoes?
** ** ** ** **
We’ve now listed more or less every one of Aristeidis Metallinos’ works. From Tuesday to Friday for a couple of hours each midday Angeliki and I and Linda have worked through the collection, ensuring every item is numbered and measured. Serious with clipboards. We’ve added a small section for carvings of uncertain date, as well as the weathered works on the roof - stone boys astride the roof gables, a peacock at the apex, a tall woman in skirt and prim jacket and bare breasts. As work on the catalogue progresses Anna has brought us coffee, cakes and orange juice.

Andreas has helped improve our listings with recollections of his father. I am cautious with questions, learning more – but slowly. Aristeidis relied on his son to obtain his marble and stone and, since the sculptor’s death, Andreas has striven to be ‘the steward of his legacy’. The phrase is mine. After his father died in 1987 the museum that Aristeidis Metallinos wanted sustained as a gift to the village was, as far as I know, opened to visitors. I’m unclear for how many hours or days, or indeed for how many years before the place became the closed building we encountered when we arrived in Ano Korakiana in 2007. I suspect my initial difficulty gaining entry (K trying to get inside the Castle?) and even an introduction was because, after for whatever reasons the museum closed – and I speculate on these, Andreas has had quite a few individuals asking to be shown around. What happened? They had a look. They satisfied their curiosity. They went away. Did they remember anything? Were they even that impressed? Could they or did they have time for that contemplation essential to determine, in more than the most quotidian way, whether what they saw provided more than passing sensations. ‘Fascinating’ ‘Wonderful’ ‘Amazing’ ‘So interesting...where shall we have lunch?’ Where did that leave Andreas? Growing austerity in Greece must have made maintenance even trickier.
Before the sculptor died there had been promising academic articles about the ‘laic stone mason’, ‘the village sculptor’. Aristeidis seems to have had no interest in his own promotion. His interest was in the art, his trips to the open air cinema in town and views of what he watched on television, and a wish to give a gift to the village where he’d spent his life. He encountered - unknowing until near his death - the indifference of the world; hardly a problem for him, engaged with his chisels and mallets and the fascination of making things out of stolid stone and marble. At some point as he worked away in his open house he seems to have come upon disapproval. I don’t know enough about this. Just clues including the reference on his gravestone by Paraskevi Church to ‘slight bitterness’.  I suspect it may have been a problem for Andreas. Aristeidis countered with inscriptions – rebukes in marble that last, leaving a sensitive puzzle that calls for more understanding. I venture – tentatively – to explore something else missed by the academics who wrote about the laic sculptor while he was alive; Yianni M Mari in 1978 and Efrithikis Antzοulatοu-Retsila in 1985. They were intrigued by Aristeidis Metallinos as a carrier of folk-lore, of village tradition, history and culture.

The family in the fields - 195, 1986 40 x 64cms (Photo: Rob Groove)

The photos selected by Antzοulatοu-Retsila say as much. They show sculptures of villagers in traditional dress, of Greek dancing in Corfiot costume, of local individuals respected in the village and in some cases Greece – the statue of Makarios. The reliefs of the almost forgotten pastoral economy disappearing in Metallinos' final years are wonderful - a poignant lesson in another way of life. What these commentaries miss is the drubbing that Aristeidis Metallinos metes out to authority; his ridiculing of priests, of the police and the army, and the ever-present figure with cigar and top hat fondling a naked mistress, shopping for human flesh at the butchers ‘as a cure for piles’, roasting a native on a spit, ribald personifications of money men, ridicule and contempt for government – Greek, European and global. This was a man carving a permanency of anger at things he saw wrong in the world, depravity and exploitation; with this was his fascination with carnal pleasure...

"I am waiting for you. Naked" Extract 189, 1982 marble relief 40 x 59cms (Photo: Rob Groove)

 – sometimes celebrating the beauty and excitement of women, their lusciousness under the male gaze, his lust surely, yet also his interest and respect for women as strong, surging above their traditional roles as part of the farm-stock inventory, becoming  triumphant, even appropriating the traditional and oppressive weaponry of men, riding their phallic missiles, harnessing their grandiose and rather ridiculous penises. Now this must have been a handful for the family, even for parts of Ano Korakiana to which Aristeidis wished to dedicate his work.
‘So what next?’ asked Mark.
‘Well we’ve got the sculptor’s name in Greek and English wiki. One of his works will be mentioned in Richard Pine’s next book – about Greece from an Irish perspective – to be published in October. Angeliki and I speak of 'step-by-step', a year at a time to fathom the work of her grandfather. This catalogue is a logical next step – to have an inventory and an order that is more organised than the present list.’
I paused. This was insufficient.
‘And what then?’
‘Visiting the museum when we want is a privilege. The other day Andreas let me hold that first piece Aristeidis carved in stone when he was hardly 20, that women’s shoe which would have given a candidate for art school serious consideration...but how many people know about it being the only thing he carved for another fifty years? How many know about it at all? Few seeing unknown original art feel confident about its qualities – good or bad. So much art we know has been via introductions, references; from parents, teachers, books, friends, public esteem. Aristeidis’ work hasn’t been prepared for exposure or accreditation, hasn’t begun to run the familiar gauntlet of indifference, ridicule, or slight praise. People don’t know the man. His works are crowded on shelves and walls in four small rooms without commentary; a cluttered stockroom of souvenirs. His story, clearer and clearer to us, is vague, confusing, even uninviting.’
I knew I was going on too much.

The sculptor carves himself carving a ram in stone (Photo: Rob Groove)

‘Sorry’ I said ‘More has to be done to cultivate the eye of the beholder. A catalogue of the works; a selection of the most representative; themes clarified; commentaries by Greek critics – two I have in mind – a biography, perhaps by Angeliki, Andreas and I, building on my wikipedia article. Creating provenance. Our Richard could design the catalogue cover, using Jan Bowman’s sketch of the sculptor. Start with the shoe.’
‘Another pint?’

Andreas, the sculptor's son, allowed me to hold this precious shoe his father made in 1927 

Mimosa

Mimosa - the tree that knows you're there

I feel this place fixing in memory, filling up those parts of my head that store happiness, edging out others once in fuller occupation – places now so changed they would, if revisited, only beget despondency – blighted by golf courses, executive estates, urban kerbed and straightened country roads, dual carriageways with out of scale EU signage. It happens almost everywhere. Yet even as I grouse, I know little’s worse than a place fixed in the amber of nostalgia. Better take it as it comes since what matters in any landscape, however drab or sublime, is its people. A dose of psychogeography has taught me the gems to be discovered walking through a littered car park under pylons to where some break in the chain-link leads to the remains of an unmarked path ending in a deserted junkie space of cans, plastic bottles, shards, shredded sleeping bags given over to vigorous proliferating weeds and their flowers – a reminder of what rust and moth corrupts, fecund nature recovers.

The western outskirts of Ano Korakiana

So laced is this village and its outskirts with paths, tracks and roads, the permutations available for our walks, are, if not numberless, unexhausted after six years of almost daily strolls in all seasons and weathers.  Private space and public space mingle to exclude severing walls or gates with a minimum of cul-de-sacs – matching unself-consciously, and without their intervention, urban planners’ recommendations for ‘livability’. This is not because there is no crime or its notorious equivalent ‘fear of crime’. There are plenty of spiked fences and locked gates and notices warning of guardian dogs. Somehow the need for domestic security has not blighted our village’s delightful permeability. 

“Is that a path we’ve not been along before?” Lin wonders as she inserts herself into a alleyway between high walls. I wait while she reconnoitres.

“Yes! It goes on through” 

I follow, skirting porches, shutters, window boxes, perhaps a parked scooter, chairs at a table and other personal belongings before our way opens into more shared space.  

“Let’s try this way?” I suggest as we see an untried track between fences off a road running below the village

“Where does it go?”

“Not sure. Let’s see”

Paths lead to small pastures off which run other paths which turn into dirt tracks then a road we recognise off which run other tracks in a general direction that more or less matches our wish to return at some stage to Democracy Street.

“Shall we try it?”

“But of course. I suspect it may comes out or go by Eklisia Paraskevi”

Sure enough. It’s the church just beyond the abandoned car that a few years ago looked quite run-down, now with a bell tower designed and built by our neighbour Lefteri and relatives; the whole joined together with a finely finished matte paint, many mitred wooden doors glistening Corfu green. Just over the track that runs beside the church is its cemetery where we expect to see the grave of Lefteris’ brother who died in 2011.

“This is also where we’ll find Arestides Metallinos and his wife Angeliki” 

Angeliki, their grand-daughter, had told us they were laid there. 

“That is our church”

It sits amid olive and cypress trees about half a mile on the flatter slopes below the village. 

“I’ve never really liked graves with photos and plastic or withered flowers and dead candles” I said to Lin “but I’m coming round to the idea that it might be comforting to visit an actual place where bones are interred below a memorial bearing a friendly gently smiling photo of the person who’s gone.”

Lin said nothing. I wondered if I could imagine such a place for my mum. I thought not, but wasn’t sure.

But Arestides Metallinos was someone who lived all his life in this village and is, like our neighbour
Lefteri, inalienably linked to Ano Korakiana.

The sculptor and his wife, Angeliki

Ήλθες στην πρόσκαιρη ζωή

κι έφυγες όπως όλοι

το γέρικοσου το κόρμι

ελύγιζαν οι πόνοι

---

Κι αν απ’τον τόποσου

έφυγες λιγάκι πικραμένος

ας ειν’το χώμα ελαφρύ

που είσαι σκεπασμένος*

My mother made the many and varied spaces we lived as children into our places. She was the place where she was with us.

Theodora Barbara - mum in 1917

I cannot associate her with any one place – rather with many special places where we were happy long ago -, in the heart of London, along the chalk streams of Hampshire and Berkshire, on the heathered moors and peaty waters of Inverness-shire, of the aching beauty of Ross and Cromarty; the places we went on childhood holidays, Exmoor, the dark jag-rocked white sanded Pembrokeshire coast, and later, when went together with her - Lin and I - to Istanbul, Cairo, Alexandria, Rajasthan, Crete, Venice. Like me and countless others who left the village centuries ago I have no ‘place’ where I’d wish, or even feel entitled, to have my remains interred - no place I can claim as especially mine. This is not a matter for regret. Being geographically unplaced means my places are ones of imagination, of many many memories. Perhaps that’s why people in my circumstances prefer cremation – illegal in Greece – so that if our relatives are so inclined our remains, as ash, may be spread among reminiscences, born on wind or water. Ironic that all my professional life I’ve been preoccupied with local government, and the elusive challenge of what’s now called ‘localism’. Lin is more determined than I. 

“I want no funeral’ she asserts “The refuse men can remove my corpse. Take it to the dump”

“Yeah well not my problem” I say “since I shall make a point of dying before you, and anyway I’ve donated my body to the NHS”

On the way home to Democracy Street, as we walk along National Opposition Street a woman sees us gazing up and murmuring admiration at her swirling flowering mimosa that hangs from her garden over half the road.
“Perimeni wait a moment” she says through her garden fence, then hands down to Lin two generous twigs of the yellow flowers and their delicate leaves.

** ** **

After the visit to the Metallinos Museum with Irini Savvani the Saturday before last I wrote:

Dear Irini. I’m so pleased we met. Lin too. That stone shoe seems a ‘transition’ between craft and art. Lin suggested Arestides might  have copied it from a real shoe that he had made.
Is there a Greek word for a man who has many crafts? Metallinos was good at shoemaking, building, furniture making, carving olive-oil millstones. Then in his last years - sculpting in stone and marble.
I think we are agreed that there is unlikely to be an expert or ‘authority' out there who can give any ‘certificate of value’ for this work.
I say - as one rather dependent on the opinion of others for my opinions about art - that the point at which a carved object becomes art has always been for those who see it to decide.
In the case of Arestides Metallinos there are still so few who have had the opportunity to make up their minds about him. We are nearly on our own, which makes me nervous amid my enthusiasm. My ‘qualification’ is that my interest was invited by the sculptor’s family; that Lin and I live in Ano Korakiana for many months of the year; that we love the village and Greece in ways that are far more than romantic or sentimental. (I know quite a lot of the history of modern Greece and of Corfu in particular).
Your qualifications? You are an art historian, critic and curator. You were born in the village. You are Greek, Corfiot and you met the artist when a child, and I’m sure there are other qualifications…One other thing we share; we are both ‘qualified’ by happy coincidence, in that in going to buy bread in the village we met in the centre of Democracy Street a few days ago. Had you or I left home a few minutes earlier or later this would not have happened. So. I treat luck in this matter as an asset.
I’m assuming you will write something about Aristedes Metallinos. I will be happy to get anything you draft sent to me to be translated (tho’ I know your English is very good). I imagine the challenge is to find the words and phrases to capture and convey to others something of the essence of this man’s art.
Thanks for the things you pointed out - especially the similarity of many of the faces to the artist’s own…I cannot get over the resonances of this ‘uneducated’ man’s talent. He understood Pygmalion - in that relief of him carving a woman and those words incised below  “Do not trouble your old bones…”. Also that 1984 sculpture of the ram which appears unfinished, but intentionally so. It’s a lesson in carving stone – ‘pitching’ (with that large chunk of rock left with point-chisel marks on the animal’s back)....

...‘roughing out’ with a claw chisel (I believe) and the process of ‘rasping’. That piece remains unpolished - the final stage. It makes me wonder if Arestides, like the great Italian sculptor, sought to release a form trapped inside his raw material…Kindest regards, Simon

Continuing with the project I contacted John Petsalis, so far only an internet acquaintance. Since the prospect of finding exhibition space remains for the time-being remote despite enquiries I felt that John’s ‘virtual museum’ would be a way of widening the audience for the work, providing links to an inventory that can evolve into a catalogue, and as a means of at least making images of the work accessible even if though its essence exists in dimensions and weight that can only be experienced directly. 

On Thursday Lin and I met John for coffee and cakes on the Liston – bathed in shade and bright sun. I showed him some pictures of the sculptures. The upshot was a meeting this Tuesday morning at the museum in Ano Korakiana. Angeliki arranged for her and her parents to be joined by her cousin Tassos. John Petsalis arrived with his wife Tina and an assistant Effie Stathia a photographer, studying for a history Phd.

John, Angeliki, Tina, Effie, Simon and Linda outside the Arestides Metallinos Museum in Ano Korakiana

As we assembled in Anna’s sitting room, I sitting between Linda on one side to nudge me if I talked out of turn and her husband Andrea. I could not have been more delighted as introductions were made. Tassos, John and Effie slipped easily between Greek and English. We had almost enough Greek to avoid being obtuse.

Angeliki and her cousin Tassos with one of their grandfather's works

Enthusiastic debate – some of which I could follow – as we enjoyed Anna’s coffee and cake, then we went out of one side of the house and back in through the door reserved for the display of sculptures. I don’t think I could ever become jaded by this rich collection, augmented on this occasion by the pleasure of seeing others looking at it for the first time.
"I did not know this man existed" said Effie as she strolled the collection planning a photographic record.
We wandered about the small room full of carved marble and stone - the Greeks helping me understand even more of Arestides’ art.
Mark said over a beer at the bar in the village last night
“I bet you never thought when you came here a few years back you’d be in this position”
“I know I know. This man has made a record of a world that's disappeared. He lived amid change from a pastoral society to the modern world, fuelled by mass tourism. And that’s just part of his work. There’s all the other things I’ve yet to understand! God, in whom I don’t believe (as if that would worry him in the slightest) works in mysterious ways sending such marvellous unanticipated gifts to me who loves this country and will never cease wanting to learn more about it”
I didn’t voice that last sentence but I sensed he agreed and sympathized. 

Before we left the museum after two hours continuous and excited conversation John thanked me for arranging for his meeting with the sculptor’s family and the opportunity to visit the museum. I and Effie exchanged emails so that we can stay in touch from England. I was almost glad to leave as I could see Lin getting gently frustrated at my impulsive effusiveness, exactly the un-English thing in me that I needed her to keep in check.
“You must stop saying ‘sorry’” said Angeliki at one point, as I apologized again for arranging the meeting at such short notice
“Sorry” I said “It’s an English habit”
“I know” she replied.
I have been entrusted with several papers from Tassos and Angeliki, two academic articles in Greek, one a chapter from a book, written in the late 1970s when the sculptor still had years more carving to do, and an inventory, one in Greek and one in English, twenty pages, listing – not in chronological order - all 252 pieces in the museum.

I confirmed that the stone shoe we’d seen on our first visit back in November last year, the first thing – so far as we know - Arestides carved; dated by the artist ‘25 September 1928’ when he was 20 years old, nearly 50 years before, as an old man of 67, he would invent himself as the sculptor of Ano Korakiana.

Irini remembered encountering this lion as a child when visiting the museum with her parents

*Last four lines - my translation: 'And if you leave this world a little embittered let the earth lie lightly on the place where you are buried'

*** ***

Google maps team sent me a message after I’d said the two main roads through the village had names different from those on the actual street signs...

Your report near Eparchiaki Odos Agiou Vasiliou in Ionian Islands
Hi Simon. We've reviewed your problem and you were right! The default view in Google Maps has already been updated to reflect your suggested change, as shown below.

Οδός Δημοκρατίας

The road was called Eparchiaki Odos Agiou Vasiliou because the village of Agiou Vasiliou lies on what used to be the main route to Corfu from Ano Korakiana. The lower road - National Opposition Street Οδός Εθνικής Αντίστασης - was unnamed on Google and previously called the district road from Pyrgi to Ano Korakiana Eparchiaki Odos Pirgiou-Korakiana.