We found these tiny Greek cyclamen growing in the most unpromising places – in rocky clefts and on bone-dry litter among the pines below Pylos Castle. We also found them clinging to the cliff above Peroulia Beach, rooted in the arid cliff path where people keep walking on them. They seemed to be thriving.
Travel With Intent This Sunday Debbie is in the pink. Please pay her a visit.
It was a family celebration that brought the six of us to the Peloponnese in late September. Thoughts of Greek sunshine lured us too – after a lacklustre English summer. But as the departure date drew near, and the scanning of world weather forecasts stepped up in the hopes of better news, it was clear that the weather in Messenia was set to change. With the equinox, daily temperatures were to drop by several degrees. Now there would be cloud, rain and storm along with the sunshine. Ah, well. Better pack the waterproofs.
Yet when we came into land at Kalamata airport on Sunday lunchtime all was blue. The plane banked over the Gulf of Messenia heading out to the Mediterranean before flying back up the Mani peninsula, following the Taygetos Mountains into the airport. Blue sea. Blue mountains. Blue sky.
We stepped off the plane into high-summer warmth to be met by Dimitri, who whisked us off in his smart Mercedes people carrier. You have chosen a good time to visit, he said; not too hot.
And so it proved.
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Hinterland Messenia is not pretty. It is a rugged, crumpled upland with deep valleys and winding roads, the vegetation parched from summer heat. Grass burned brown, bare earth between the trees and vines; wherever you look, the grey-green haze of olive groves spreading up and down hillsides and gullies, the dun colour palette spiked here and there: white-walled farmhouses, red tiled roofs, the odd designer villa, black spires of cypress and, at the roadside, soaring clumps of phragmites grasses with their parchment coloured plumes. There is stuff and clutter among the trees – old tyres, beach loungers, broken down farm machinery, dead cars and stranded boats. Ramshackle stalls offer pumpkins and oranges. And then the road bends towards the Gulf and you glimpse the sea, glinting like jewels, the woodcut frieze of the Mani mountains beyond.
The road south from the airport to Koroni follows the coast – we pass by Messini, Velika, Petalidi, Hrani, Nea Koroni, Vounaria – more work-a-day farming communities than high-profile tourist territory. We know that when we reach Harakopio we must leave the main road and wend up the hillside above Peroulia Beach. Michael and Maria, our hosts at the Iconpainter’s Villas, have provided a map, but in real life nothing looks straightforward. I’m relieved when it turns out that Dimitri mostly knows where he’s going.
The turn is not obvious despite the clutch of signs on the fence, and almost at once we are ‘off the beaten track’ and seemingly in someone’s front yard. The road narrows so quickly I breathe in, and next we’re zigzagging round house ends, nudging round blind corners, Dimitri tooting the horn (not too loudly), then climbing up beside a whitewashed church, then on through olive groves.
The road is single track, mostly concrete, but in places broken down to rubble. It undulates with bold intention.There are small ravines and gullies. At one point there’s a frisson of alarm from Dimitri as he fears for his Mercedes. This is no game, he says, and we agree. But he is a game lad, and he presses on. 
And suddenly we are turning into a smart gateway, pulling up the drive to a tall white house, and there is Michael to greet us and show us to three lovely little houses that will be home for the next seven days.
The bright turquoise doors are a good start. In our respective kitchens we find welcome boxes for lunch and the following day’s breakfast – tomatoes, oranges and figs from the garden, Maria’s home-made lemonade and bottled baby oranges, fig jam and chutney. In the fridge there are mini bottles of Ouzo, the Iconpainter’s own white wine, local yogurt, feta cheese and honey. There is also bread, milk, butter, ground coffee and tea, iced water, brown eggs, little fruit pastries, sesame biscuits, plums and bunches of grapes. It seems we have flown straight to heaven.
We put out of our minds the fact that on Thursday there will be a big storm, and side line Michael’s apologies that the likelihood of rain is high. We have been longing for it, he tells us. All the olive farmers are waiting. I know it’s not what you want.
We shrug. For now the sun is shining and it is time to eat our picnic lunch under the terrace awning hung with grapes. And then…And then it is time to throw off our travelling clothes, put on something looser and cooler and so take the path to Peroulia Beach…
copyright 2017 Tish Farrell
PS I know I said I’d take you walking to Koroni. But that little trek will have to wait till the weather is cooler.
It was hard to leave, yet if we had stayed longer we might never have come home. We drank light, red wine pressed this summer from the ancient Greek Agiorgitiko grapes grown at our door, ate olives picked last autumn from the garden trees, laced our food with fragrant oil, drizzled honey over little clay pots of fresh yogurt, bit into sun-warmed figs, breathed in lavender, rosemary, oregano, rose geranium, then gazed, quite mesmerised, over the olive groves to the sea and the blue spine of the Taygetus Range. And then forgot. Everything.
We were here for seven days. On the Peloponnese (Πελοπόννησος) – the place where legend has geographical existence and the gods once roamed and made mischief. One of the gateways to the underworld is at the foot of the Mani penisula, another is at Lerne (Λέρνη) in the Argolis, where Heracles also slew the multi-headed serpent Hydra. Before that he had been in Nemea, slaying the Nemean lion. This is also the area from which Agiorgitiko vines are said to originate, and so the wine is also dubbed Blood of Hercules since it is believed to have fortified the hero before he vanquished the big cat.
Later he travelled across the northern Peloponnese in pursuit of the Ceryneian Hind and the Erymanthian Boar, while in the west he diverted the rivers Alfeois and Pineois to clean out the monumentally filthy Augean Stables. (Don’t you find it pleasing to know these fantastical events occurred in real places).
This is also the land of the Bronze Age Mycenaeans – they who were the builders of palaces, cities and tholos tombs – their centre the city of Mycenae in the north-east – until their mysterious disappearance in 1100 BCE. Homer’s tales in the Iliad have their beginnings here too, in Sparta, whence Paris eloped with Helen, and set off the whole bloody conflict that was the Trojan War.
In the Common Era, and especially from the early Middle Ages, the shores of the Peloponnese suffered serial conquests, falling under Byzantine rule twice, invaded by Slavs, Franks, Ottoman Turks (twice), Venetians (twice) – all of whom, one way and another, have left traces of their passing. And yet for all this and the many following upheavals, including the War of Independence against the Ottoman Empire in 1821 -1832, and the Civil War of 1946-49, one has the sense, at the very heart of things, that the Greeks have, and always will, remain true to their authentic selves. They live for, and of, and by land. For many, that living may be tough, and especially by cosy 21st century standards, but still they live well. You sense this as you wander the lanes past the ramshackle farms with their litter of tractor parts and decomposing cars. And here we come to the crux of the matter – the smiles and exchanges of kalimera (good morning) as we pass: for if the true measure of a civilised people is their capacity to welcome strangers, then the Greeks continue to show us the way. Indeed, many of us could learn a great deal from them.
Samuel ButlerThe Atlas of Ancient and Classical Greece, Project Gutenberg
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But in case you are wondering where exactly was the location of our collective forgetting – we were staying above Peroulia Beach, among the olive groves between Kombi and Harakopio villages, 6 km north of Koroni (Κορώνη) on the easterly tip of the westernmost peninsula. Our little house at the Iconpainter’s Villas had a veranda that looked east on the Gulf of Messinia and the mountains of the Mani across the water, and south to Koroni – a hillside fishing village hugged around its harbour, the promontory behind dominated by the monolithic bastion of a huge fortress built by the Venetians in the 13th century and added to by the Ottomans in the 16th. Perhaps I’ll take you there in the next post. But be warned: it is a fair hike through the olive groves.
copyright 2017 Tish Farrell
Tish Farrell 