The six year citrus plague

 Ano Korakiana, Corfu - Albania and mother Greece across the Sea of Kerkyra

Our home in Birmingham - in the distance St Mary's Church tower amid the woods of Handsworth Park

Since 2006 we've travelled to-and-fro - πέρα δόθε - between out home in Handsworth Birmingham, where Lin and I have lived 45 years, and our home on Democracy Street in Ano Korakiana. Returning to the village after months away in England is a 'moment'. Will the power come on in the house? Will the taps flow? Will damp from rain have leaked down a wall? Will rats, mice or insects have been partying while we’re away? Has something died under, or worse, in a bed? It takes two days of errands - sweeping the curtilage, opening the door of the apothiki, hanging a tarp on hooks and bungees below the balcony against rain on the terrace, opening shutters; replacing a battery on the kitchen clock to set it ticking to local time; putting out balcony furniture stored indoors for winter; opening shutters; sweeping and vacuuming up dust; stocking shelves and fridge with the food bought on our first day’s big shop before dispensing with the hire car that Lin has driven up to the village; checking the tyres and charging the battery of my e-bike; making sure we have internet connection; greeting Vasiliki next door with embraces and kisses; being welcomed with words and smiles by neighbours, including Theodora and Pepe, her mum, in their bread shop. Then gardening and housework. 

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After 12 years of living to-and-fro between Greece and England, Linda and I arrived in Corfu for Easter 2018 - six years ago. We discovered to growing dismay that our blood orange tree and two lemon trees were thoroughly infested with minute constellations of insects on the underside of their leaves, the leaves'  upper surfaces covered in black mould. Scale insects had invaded and infested our citrus trees and were spreading through the whole island of Corfu. 'Sooty mould' had fixed itself, thriving in the wet of winter, over the surface of billions of leaves, preventing them absorbing light and breathing the carbon dioxide that produces glucose – photosynthesis vital to life. 

Female scale insects on the underside of citrus leaves

Citrus trees were suffocating across the island. Mould had spread over their trunks and branches; over the ground and up the sides of the low walls of the terrace, blackening the plaka on gardens, terraces and verandas. Everywhere. Driving, we glimpsed, beside the roads amid healthy burgeoning greenery, orchards of blackened citrus trees, mould smirching their remaining fruit. Some people had repainted trees with whitewash, sawn off larger branches, leaving amputated trunks. 

Sooty mould on a leaf's upper surface

What had happened? We asked questions of a local agronomists; researched the spread of citrus scale insects on the internet and spoke to other villagers. There was no memory of similar plagues, though the internet swiftly revealed the global ubiquity of citrus scale insect infestation, explaining how it worked, but not the provenance of these insects of the species Hemiptera, one of many sap feeders that, as well as scale insects, include aphid and whitefly. The male scale insect, short lived, can fly around spreading the infestation. In their thousands these insects stuck to the paper traps we hung in our trees. 

Male scale insects trapped

The females, once clustered on the underside of leaves remain immobile, sucking sap from the leaves with hair-like probosces, excreting honeydew that spreads to the leaves’ upper surfaces. Sooty mould, present like dust in the surrounding air, fixes on the honeydew. Ants, clambering about the garden, milk the female citrus scale insects producing more honeydew and more mould. called Cladosporium and Alternaria - widespread airborne fungi whose spores thrive on damp year around, now fixed by the scale insects’ syrup, growing and spreading, strangling our citrus trees. 

This was our last harvest of lemons, fruit already blackened by the sooty fungus. Oranges had fallen from their tree the previous winter. For years no blossom appeared and more or less all the other citrus trees on the island produced no fruit. We saw blackened skeleton trees everywhere - with now and then a survivor that must have held some unknown prophylactic, as well as promise. We asked around about what preventive measures had been taken. No answers. No pesticides were working. 

White protective coat on dead scale insects

On advice we dissolved olive oil soap and cooking oil fixative and sprayed. This may, with our sticky paper traps, have slowed down the effects of the infestation. I wrapped sticky paper round tree trunks or painted duct tape wrapped round them with a very sticky tinned product from a garden shop. This stopped most ants getting into the foliage, though in their ant-like ways some died creating walkways with their bodies for their fellows to climb on up. Two lots of sticky bands one above the other on a trunk lessened the toxic symbiosis of ants and scale insects.

Preventing ants meeting scale insects

Scale insects are ‘hard’ or ‘soft’. These were hard.  While feeding on cells just under the surface of leaves, as well as producing honeydew, they excrete waste to form a waxy covering that protects them from sprays – tho’ not entirely. Looking at leaves with a magnifying glass Lin reckoned this explained white rings around the insect clusters. Pressing down on these clusters, after spraying, we could smear them off the leaves. Were they dead? Was this the female scale insects’ immobility? The internet told us the insects’ protective cover remains on leaves for years. By the second year of this horrid plague our friendly agronomist at a nearby garden centre offered us two kinds of remedy – a diluted mixture to kill the female insects attached under the leaves; another dilute to inhibit their reproductive cycle. “Will this kill them?” I asked her “Yes” She said “But will they die screaming in agony?” I asked. “Yes assuredly” she said with a smile, noting my unscientific animosity to these pests that nature had turned on us via the lemon and orange bounty, which outside of a wealthy winter garden, we could never have enjoyed further north. Year after year we sprayed and sprayed at two week intervals. The insects died. More arrived and still no sign of blossom. Leaves that were not entirely blackened turned mottled yellow and dessicated. 

I could no longer pop out our front door bump a tree with my shoulder and collect a lemon to squeeze on food, add to salad dressings, make citron pressé on sweltering days, mix myself, and guests, margaritas. 

Tequila, lemon, triple sec, salted glass

Lin could no longer make her lemon ice creams - served cold and hard inside scraped out lemon halve. We could no longer enjoy watching the seasonal changes from blossom, to tiny but expanding green lemons to knobbly skinned yellow fruits hanging in fecund clusters amid the greenery, dropping now and then with gentle thuds to be collected for us and neighbours, and to take to England where, if green, they last for weeks gradually turning yellow in our kitchen. In November 2012 I’d put lemons, brought from Greece, with other small treasures of her childhood, in my mum's coffin in the Highlands. We served an orange dessert made by halving a juicy blood orange, adding cherry liqueur and serving the halves, heated in the microwave, with a chunk of walnut ice cream gradually melting into the liqueured orange; and Lin, after a neighbour's tutoring, made orange pie – portokalopita.  There had, until 2018, been a ready supply of fresh orange easily squeezed. Now the orange tree suffered even more than the lemon trees. We watched its blackened branches becoming barer of leaves, atrophying into dead wood and parched twigs falling to the ground like dry bones. 

One evening we discussed the plague with our naturalist friends the Swedish herpetologists Bo and Marie Stille, living in Kokkini below the Ropa valley. Bo reckoned there was little we humans could do; that we must wait for predators on the scale insects and for the trees to develop a natural resistance to these parasites. “Trees, like all living things, learn.” 

Our friend Mark said that part of the problem was that lemons and oranges, though widespread, play no part - as once they did - in the island’s economy so there’s no research money, no prophylactic policies, no advice to people with citrus trees. So although we did continue spraying in hope, and as a means to torture these wicked vile depraved and evil insects. We also scoured the blackened surfaces of walls and plaka with an efficient bleach – Durochlor - bought from Ionic Chemicals a kilometre north of Tzavros, off the Paleokastritsa Road.

Then in the autumn of 2023 came a glimmer of hope. The scale insects were still fixing themselves to the underside of leaves but we began to see blossom – first on the lemon trees and a few on even the blighted orange tree. We rejoiced when that tree produced six oranges, but wondered if the tree, rather than making a recovery, was now enfeebled beyond hope by the years of infestation. We were told by Eleni, local agronomist at the garden shop on the main road near Tzolou – T-junction into the village – that predator pests had arrived, that the government had even introduced ‘nemetodes’. "So no more spraying" she advised "lest you kill the good insects." 

In 2024 we arrive in Ano Korakiana the first week of April. Wonder of wonders – the lemon trees are fecund with fruit, green and yellow clusters, while the orange tree is covered, top to bottom in florets, with their lovely smell. In weeks that blossom had set amid burgeoning foliage full of hundreds and hundreds of little green oranges swelling by the day.

Beside the bougainvillea, our orange tree, with signs of wear, but burgeoning again

Young oranges to be spotted amid reinvigorated foliage

A billiard ball sized orange coated with rain and wind born sand from Africa

How our orange tree was in 2017 before the arrival of the plague. How it will be again.

Windfall lemons - a daily harvest again

“Which side, then, has committed more crimes here, the Right or the Left?”

A note to Iason Athanasiadis 'A sense of the region as a unit'? What a challenge - to make sense of any region prior to the super-imposition of its formal boundaries, negotiated by powerful men, as shown on 'political' atlases with separate colourings, titles and occasional coincidences with the natural features - rivers, deserts, mountain ranges, lakes - that we also see on those atlases that focus on terrain alone, or those created by old explorers with monsters and angels. I've been enjoying Mark Mazower's 2021 history - 'The Greek Revolution' - trying to make sense of 'the Morea' and 'Rumeli' and peoples who called themselves 'Rhōmaîoi', and the myriad ways their inhabitants identified themselves as individuals and social groups before the 'Romeiko'. 

Decades ago my stepfather was trying to make sense of 'the Balkans' and the term 'Balkanisation'. "In many places the peasants heard the soldiers coming, fled and hid in the woods, caves and cellars, and then, when the marauders had moved on, emerged to wander the smoking ruins, slaughtered animals and pillaged barns, they asked themselves 'In what country are we in now?". 

I, with feelings for Greece that you know, balk when my half-Greek brother, fiercely proud of his Greek ancestry - George Pericles Baddeley (my photo is of George and Dad in 1968)

- muttered that 'we' Greeks are a bunch of 'Balkan mongrels'. My dad, John Baddeley CMG, fluent in Greek, married to Maria Roussen (my spelling), previously wife of Yiannis Moralis, having invited me to Athens when I was 16 in 1957 ...

Yannis Moralis "Portrait of Maria Roussin", 1941 

... sat me in a cafe in Kolonaki and ordered us two diplos sketos διπλός σκέτος. When they arrived my dad pointed at each little dark brown drink and their accompanying glasses of water "That's Greek and that's Turkish. If you really want to try to understand this country you need to understand the difference between them."

I hope you'll share what you learn about pre-partitioned Thrace. Kevin Andrews (The Flight of Ikaros, (1959)) p.185: On his way towards Kalamata on a route up to the Langádha Pass, Andrews sees a village with burned-out houses. No-one locally will tell him who is responsible. A little later, a man on his road, a merchant refugee from Smyrna with a ‘thin cultivated voice’, offers his donkey to carry Andrews’ pack. They talk as they walk. Andrew feels it safer to ask ‘the question to which' he writes 'I had long been seeking the answer': 

“Which side, then, has committed more crimes here, the Right or the Left?”
“I can only tell you the side that happens to have most power in one district or another also has the most opportunity to commit them.” ’

Perhaps you need a map of the distribution of power in earlier Thrace. 

Nymphes in Corfu ~ May 2024 (photo: Richard Baddeley)

 

The Greek Revolution

For once during this greyest of Mays the sky's cloudless, blue as eyes but for a small cloud the size of a man's hand over a southern mountain. My bicycle is loaded with onions, a box of village rosé, a loaf, firestarters, dried sausage and a role of black plastic sacks. The countryside is jocund. The verges of roads and gravel tracks are dense with yellow, blue, pink, and red flowers. The kokkuyia trees are blushing with guilt. Easter's over. Kristos Anesti.  Lin said "I also need garlic and parsley" but only when I'd got home after bouncing the bicycle down 13 steps to the house. I have a cup of tea then go out again, up the steps helped by the e-bike's 'walk' gear, and back to the mainroad - 2 kilometres - then westward towards Skripero to the nearest grocer. I've looked up 'parsley' - maidones. They have it. Good. The breeze even in early afternoon is still  cold.

June - the descent from Democracy Street is like taking off. First there's an ascent of 50 metres, then round a corner my wheels bump over the messy repaired surface of a winding hill into three hairpin bends past a frieze of scarlet bougainvillea climbing widow Melinda's house, then down on renewed tarmac, gathering speed until the wheelie bin T-junction where I prop my bicycle on its stand to unload a black sack of weekly waste and the remains of a large broken plastic laundry bowl, then down again past greenery on either side to another short ascent. At the top I turn right on a narrow concrete track, corrugated, like turbulence on a plane, past a hoard of rubbish with glimpses of isolated houses and rich meadows of uncut grass and flowers, to another metalled road allowing me to join the main road to the north of the island via Skripero, Trompetta and Agros. 

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I'm working into my third reading of Mark Mazower's book on the Greek Revolution, as well as dipping into pages and chapters and the index. This is an incomplete, as Mazower admits, and contested history. 

Marietta Giannakou 1951-2022

In 2007, conservative New Democracy Party Education Minister Marietta Giannakou had to resign after approving a school text book on the revolution which mentioned that it was not just one side who'd committed atrocities during the struggle for independence. 

Prof Mazower's book describes truths that were once politically unacceptable in Greece. In 2021, Mazower was awarded an honorary Greek citizenship by a Conservative government for 'the promotion of Greece, its long history and culture to the international general public.' 

I asked a Greek friend recently "Do you call the events that brought about modern Greece 'The Greek War of Independence' or 'The Greek Revolution'?" 

Alex reflected for a moment on the direction of my query and answered, indisputably, "'The Greek Revolution' "

Mark Mazower titles his history 'The Greek Revolution', but unfolds a more equivocal account.  This comes much later, but it's clear that the allied Navies that defeated the Turks and the Egyptians at Navarino in 1827 would not have fought to save a 'revolution'. Mazower's book has managed to come, as near as a work of historical scholarship can, to being a 'cliff-hanger'. Of course, the Greeks were victorious. The Hellenic Republic exists. It's on the euro-currency! But reading Mazower's history I was wondering to his last chapter who was going to win. 

Insurrectionary talk was widespread across Europe in the 1820s. Rebellion against the old orders had been sparked by the American War of Independence; then the French Revolution and revolts across South America and the other parts of Europe.  Metternich and the Tsar had convened the Congress of Vienna - nearly wrecked by Napoleon's escape from Elba and his 100 days... 

Napoleon returns from Elba to disrupt the Congress of Vienna (George Cruikshank)

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The Congress organised by Metternich was dominated by Austria, France, Prussia, Russia, and Britain.

The Congress's agreement was signed just nine days before Napoleon's final defeat at Waterloo on 18 June 1815. This magnificent gathering of 100s of conservative - some would say reactionary - monarchs, emperors and ministers welded an alliance designed to maintain the peace of the continent, suppress rebellion and share intelligence on all signs and symptoms of insurrection. This was not a good time for a revolution against the mighty Ottoman Empire. 

Prince Alexandros Ypsilanti

Yet the great Greek event - the 'Romeiko', the 'ethnogesea', began, in so far as there's a 'once upon a time', on 21st Feb 1821. 

Encouraged by a vastly distributed and secretive 'friendly' society founded in Odessa in 1814, full of commercial travellers on land and sea - the Filiki Etaireia - required oaths of loyalty, coded messages and secret signs on meeting a stranger.  Their black uniform, when they surfaced, bore the symbol of a skull and crossbones below a crucifix.  

Trade is a good cover for subversion; the language of commerce camouflaging the planning of revolt - price lists, inventories, consignments, cargoes, weights and measures, transactions, deadlines - protected by normal business discretion.  In 1820 the leaders of Filiki Etaireia asked Prince Alexander Ypsilanti to be their leader. Given the omens - not least the profound opposition of Ioannis Capodistria, to become first Prime Minister of Greece (more of him later), this aristocratic soldier was probably an excellent choice to start a dangerously impossible rebellion.

On 21st February this impulsive, bold, one-armed veteran of the war against Napoleon, falsely claiming the support of the Tzar, led a small and ragged force across the river Pruth from Russia into Ottoman Moldavia, far north of the land that would become Greece. Ypsilanti's expedition turned into a debacle of confusion and desertion, and, as others more cautious had warned, provoked bloody reprisals against Greeks from Sultan Mahmud II in Constantinople. The most prominent was the public hanging of the Ecumenical Patriarch, Gregory V, in front of The Saint Peter's Gate of the Patriarchate of Constantinople just after he'd celebrated Easter mass. 

Easter Sunday 22 April 1821 

With implicit approval of the Sultan, surrounding streets ran with the blood of Christian residents of the city. If this story were a Netflix series I'd end this first episode at this moment. The next episode would be about Greece in the early 19th century opening on a dramatic panorama of mountainous stone with glimpses of distant blue sea "Rumeli - mainland Greece 15 years earlier" and perhaps we'd open at the court of the rebel potentate Ali Pasha in Jannina. 

Audience chamber at the court of Ali Pasha in Jannina