A week on Zakynthos
The night I arrived on the island of Zakynthos for Easter the Hale-Bopp comet was still visible, racing rapidly away from earth. Just the day before, I was told, great winds had carried sands from Northern Africa to Greece and the particles lent the nightsky an eerie yellow glow.
I stayed in the small mountain village of Aghious Pantes (All-Saints) about twenty kilometres inland. My hosts were farmers, an extended family complete with grandparents, parents and four children, aged three to twelve. The first morning (and every morning after that) I was woken by the rough cackle of cloistered chickens, the barking of hunting dogs and the occasional rifle shot. On this island of national poets, famous playwrights and heroic revolutionaries, Easter and hunting season had arrived at the same time.
The valley below the village was a palette of greens – the silver green of olive, the harsh green of cypress and the yellowy-green of weeping willow. The bountiful rains had given life to countless wildflowers and countless colors: daisies, bugles and all sorts of bristling thistles bent to the winds like god was blessing them.
The natural world seemed even more magical because of grandmother Aphroditi’s food. Her brick-oven saturated all meals with a wonderful burnt-wood flavour and at night when the stars joined our company, we sipped glass after glass of home-made retsina.
The youngest child, Marinos, quizzed all visiting relatives about their precise location in the family tree. Only once he knew that so-and-so was a third cousin twice removed or that this visitor was the second daughter of an aunt’s husband’s brother, then and then alone were we adults free to go one with our discussion.
Marinos called me Nikolaki as if he were the grown-up and I were the child. Once he had figured out my geneological chart (all grandparents gone, one parent surviving), he examined my head with care and wondered why, since my temples were greying, I wasn’t already dead. His grandfather — whose head was completely white — would live only if his hair turned black again.
For a few hundred drachmas I bought four blocks of fitoura – seminola fried in oil and sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon, something like fritters in the American south. In return for this meagre gift each child recited a poem for me – Aphroditi recited Solomos, Adamantini recited Kalvos, Marinos recited a poem that began “I’m a Greek,” and Ioannis, the eldest, sang the victory song for the Olympiakos basketball team.
We visited the family’s orange grove down in the valley. Using a long bamboo stick we sent the oranges to the ground and soon were wiping the blood-red juice from our hands and chins with blades of grass.
In the afternoon we drove a small tractor through the vineyards and tried our hand at clearing the grass with a scythe. The wild grass had grown unnaturally high from the unnatural rains and the piles of slack blades quickly reached our waists.
We came upon the remains of a mansion built back when Zakynthos had its counts, nobles, and serfs, all the accoutrements of the Italian state to which it had once belonged. The wall was of a faded clay colour. A window hung slovenly from rusted hinges and weeds pushed through cracks in the mortar. We collected giant lilies and purple-red vetches (awful name that, for such a lovely wildflower) and the girls made them into bouquets. Marinos made sure I didn’t step in any of the squat lumps of cow manure hidden inside the tall grass. The children ignored a sudden flight of ducks the way we ignore traffic. Back on the asphalt, scattered buckshot crunched beneath our feet.
While the two girls played patty-cake, Ioannis, Marinos’ twelve year old brother, listed some Zakynthean nicknames for me: Paparas, (oil-soaked bread), Katsikolos (goat-buttocks),Tzitzikas (cicada), Kontorasis (short-sighted), Klanieras (farter), Kapros (boar), and Memes (tits). On an island where over five hundred people might share the same surname, nicknames are the only way to avoid confusion. My host family’s nickname was Koloneos, taken from the name of the Italian gold coins which they had once owned in abundance.
Easter Friday the Bishop of Zakynthos blessed the four points of the horizon – a ceremony known as “Blessing the Universe.” That night we attended mass in the church of Aghious Pantes. A small wooden figure of Christ lay beneath glass, garlanded by lilies, and a vocally challenged choir boy outdid himself in the number of off-key notes he could belt out per hymnal.
Easter Sunday Marinos asked me if, when I died, I would wait for him at the “entrance.” He asked me why my father died last year. Was his hair grey? Had he lost his voice? When his grandfather thundered, “Marinos, enough!” Marinos clapped his hands and shouted: “Enough already, enough! No more talk of white hair and people who aren’t at the table!”
I left Zakynthos aboard the Ionis, carrying a jug of wine, four kilos of baby goat and a branch of rosemary to cook it with. It was twilight, the best time to see the comet, and I searched the skies for traces of its tail. Only with the help of the captain’s binoculars did the comet become visible, but just barely. As the mountains of Zakynthos grew darker and more distant, I sensed that a certain way of living was also fading fast.