ZAGORIAN HIRE-CAR

ODYSSEY

            On our way to the mainland ferry, our little hire-car was sucked, quite involuntarily, into the Byzantine one-way system of Corfu Town.  Walled in by fantastic mossy Venetian mansions and monumental Parisian arcades, Jayne, my wife, summoned her ancestral Greek blood and took the wheel whilst I dangled from the window, looking for clues that might lead us back to the sea.  We slithered down tiny, stone channels worn smooth by soldiers’ boots and trippers’ flip-flops.  We lurched under gas lights and strings of washing, past minarets and smoking church doors, Hackney carriages and those bold attempts of British consuls to make Greece look like, well, Ancient Greece.  Suddenly, we were on a cricket pitch and then we were plunged into a local wedding where, against a chorus of encouragement from the cars behind, we slowed to admire the bride’s patriotic dress.  Then We found the town band, each musician in white drill and playing his own laconic favourite, and, as they were marching downhill, we fell in behind.  The signs were good when we passed a family of cats, harvesting prawn shells and then, to a rising crescendo of car horns, the labyrinth disgorged us all onto the waterfront.  Faced by so much fresh air, the bandsmen lit up cigarettes and were immediately swamped by a freak wave.  In glorious autumnal sunshine, we gingerly boarded The Christ Almighty, leaving the island behind for a week in wildest Greece.

           

            As Madame Corfu paled, the well-muscled, masculine coastline of Epirus bulged ahead of us.  An orderly queue formed at the bow ramp but as we docked at Igoumenitsa, old ladies and trucks disembarked in a cavalry charge.  We were swept along in a hooting current of hot metal and borne up into the limestone crags that fortify wildest Greece.  There,  where our fellow passengers roared ahead. but We stayed behind with the goat wagons and the mopeds - booted along by wild-haired boys with pump-action shotguns - off to the garigue to rootle around for partridges.  At the roadside, bee-hives betrayed the famous Greek sweet-tooth and glass shrines their equally famous lapses of concentration.

 

            Our car started dawdling again in Ioannina, whilst we were looking for our hotel, and sent a young couple ploughing into the central reservation.  Although undamaged, they, quite reasonably, got out to murder us and start a century-long family feud.  Once they realised that we were English, however, fury turned to pity and then curiosity.  The English were so eccentric, they were thinking; we wore pyjamas and liked to Stay In, we got uptight about adultery and drank retsina on holiday.  The Greeks drink more Scotch than anyone else in the world and think that mineral water is poofy.  Dewy-eyed, they showed us to our hotel.

            The hotel sat on the edge of Lake Pamvotis, a great gulp of green water among the well-scrubbed mountains.  Next to it, hidden among sycamores and maples, was the Frourio, Ali Pasha’s castle.  Ali’s enduring popularity is puzzling; he torched much of Ioannina, raped and drowned his son’s girlfriend and coveted Lord Byron for his pretty ears.  Perhaps he redeemed himself by tormenting the Turkish oppressors.  His palace, his hideaway and his tomb are faithfully preserved,  all handsome Ottoman buildings hewn from honeyed limestone.  But the Turks, too, had left a legacy that was hard to shrug off.  Their mosques had survived, albeit as museums and pumpkin shops, and their bazaar still rang with the hammers of fleshy old ladies, beating vases out of artillery shells and axes from pig iron.

 

            On Sunday, we joined the locals on a boat-trip to Nissi Island.  They feasted on eels, crayfish and frogs and then wandered dyspeptically among the macabre Byzantine murals of the Philanthropinon Monastery.   In exquisite blues, golds and pinks, the saints were having their eyes and teeth plucked out and their bowels unravelled.  An elderly caretaker stood in the doorway and clicked her tongue when she thought that we had had enough.  Some Athenians, ever watchful for signs of barbarity in others, swept a video round the room and then scuttled guiltily back into the sunlight.

 

            That afternoon, After seeking assurances that our picnics would be raided by bears and wolves, we set off for Zagorohoria, the villages of the high peaks of Zagori.  Ottoman rule was only loosely enforced up there and even Mussolini’s Italians wisely decided that the area was best explored in peacetime.  The road climbed higher and higher through woods of maples, willows and oaks and then wriggled across slopes of maquis that were magnificently fractured by limestone canyons.  Eastern Zagori was cleft by the Aoos Gorge and western Zagori by the Vikos Gorge, the deepest canyon in the world.  Between them, lived the Zagorians, the Vlachs and the Sarakatsans, each speaking different dialects and accusing each other of being foreign, secretive and rich.  Their villages were perched on the edges of cliffs or nuzzled into the mountainside, settlements of imposing slate mansions, cobbled streets and tiny gardens of cherries, walnuts and chestnuts.  We stopped first at Tsepelevo.

            “They’re all Sarakatsani,” warned a Zagorian “They used to live in tents.  Very odd.  They do everything together.”

            Whatever they were doing, it was going on behind huge doors, hewn from single tree trunks.  The platia was deserted except for a vast mountain dog which insisted that we had a thorough rub-down with a dog-tongue the size of a doormat.

            “That’s Susannah,” said the storekeeper but wouldn’t volunteer any further details about his village.  So, Susannah showed us around and we spent a blissfully happy evening, pottering around the lanes, looking for people and rodents.  Susannah was unlucky  but we found some locals in the hotel bar, watching President Clinton on television.  President Clinton was being grilled, in Greek, by an inquisitor.  They were speechless.

            “He’s the President,” they protested “Yet he only has two mistresses!”

 

            The next day, everyone turned out on the platia for the funeral of an old shepherd.  They carried him down to the cemetery in an open coffin and as the laments for another unreplaced, irreplaceable Sarakatsani drifted down the valley, the lads who had carried the coffin lid and candles raced back to the hotel for an evening of spirited coffee-drinking.  They never looked at the girls on the next table.

            “They don’t want scandal,” said the Zagorian “Better your eye come out than your name.”

 

            The following morning, as we set off up the mountain, a gypsy drove into the village in battered truck.  Whilst his little daughter sat, like an Indian princess, among boxes of apples, making telephone calls, he harangued the villagers through a loudhailer.  Only when we crossed into the next valley did his cries fade away, leaving us alone with the kestrels, wheatears and the tell-tale marks of the stone marten.

 

            Sadly, we had to move on.  Monodhendhri was a village of fabled pies and ebullient huntsman.

            “Our pies are so famous,” crowed Stalios the Hunter “That they are mentioned in the French Trivial Pursuits.”

            With that, a camouflaged waiter brought us cartwheels of cheese, chicken and vegetable alevropitta.  We were spotted by an old man with a shepherd’s crook.

            “I was a wireless operator in the war,” he chuckled “With the British officers.”  Did he remember their names ?

            “Of course” he said, “Tom, Spike and Ian”

            Fortified with cheese and the thought that the war was won by little groups of chums, we wobbled over to the Ayia Paraskeri monastery, which teetered queasily on the edge of the Vikos Gorge.  Way below us the mighty Voidamatis wiggled like a capillary through the cathedrals of rock.  At the other end of the gorge was the tiny crow’s nest village of Vikos where, again, we would be shown around by a hunting dog.  This time we were admonished by a cook for consorting with an egg-thief.

 

            Our little car climbed higher still, to Papingo.  A tarmac road crept up here in 1979 and now, four times a week, there was a bus to the World Below.  It was arrestingly beautiful and villagers had returned here from Athens to restore the mansions and churches with love and money.  They brought with them their strange civilising habits: tame cats, buried drains and juicy green salads.  One, George Papaevangelou had created a hotel from a traditional mansion, with painted cupboards, candle alcoves, stone fireplaces and thick rugs.  In the evening, he and his wife took us down to the village bar to lock ourselves in with the wine.  In the Next morning, we were revived with fresh fig jam, on a terrace facing down the gorge, and we pleaded with them to swap lives but they would have none of it. So, begrudgingly, we set off on our fateful anti-clockwise drive around Zagori to Bourazani.

            We passed the bridges of Kepi, the extraordinary parabolas of stone built by itinerant masons (They had travelled the Balkans guarding their engineering secrets with another impenetrable dialect).  We climbed into the forests on Mount Gamila, past lonely forest chapels and a village burnt to the ground by the Nazis.  Great slavering dogs, suspecting us of goat theft, threatened to rip our axles off and we hurried on.  The road turned first flaky and then to earth.  After three hours, we reached the bridge over the foaming Aoos, to find it smashed to pieces.  What happened?

            “The Mayor,” said the villagers, with unfamiliar candour, “is an arsehole.  He used the wrong cement.”

            We retraced our steps, clockwise, and arrived after nightfall at the Hotel Bourazani, an old hunting lodge wedged up against the Albanian frontier.  Overwhelmed by the heady aroma of roast venison, we collapsed.

In the morning, we found ourselves in an arcady of maple woods and parklands of deer, mouflon and boar.  Cold War fortifications had become oddly charming follies and even the angry Aoos now babbled along contentedly. The villagers still washed their carpets in a twin-tub powered by a coltish mountain stream and, those who wanted to keep their hands free for smoking, still travelled by donkey.

 

            At the last and most northerly point of our adventure, we clambered up to the church of Molyvdoskepasto. When they heard English voices, the border guards started to giggled but they soon eventually composed themselves.  Politely, they lent us their pink-lensed binoculars so that we could reassure ourselves that, though Albania was also crazy and uncomfortably close, nothing stirred. and together we craned our necks for game, before pulling ourselves away to trundle back down the mountain to gentle Corfu.