Revisiting Juliette's Stone Home in 2014

In herbal and naturopathy circles the name Juliette de Baïracli Levy is well known. She lived on Kythera for many years in the 1980s and 90s. A wonderful woman, full of folklore and knowledge, she wrote books on herbalism and her travels, many of which are still on sale. On Kythera she stayed in a tiny stone house a few hundred metres from the stunning second Palaiopoli beach which is still referred to by those who knew her as "Juliette's Beach". My cousin Justine, who was also friends with Juliette and had many an eventful outing with her on the island, returned to visit this year and together with me we went to look for Juliette's house. I had tried to visit it a few years ago but could find no trace and assumed the owner had demolished it. 

So this time we waded through the head-high stalks of fennel between ancient olive trees towards the site of the old house, expecting to find a few stones at the most. But instead, hidden behind thorn bushes and high branches, we found the house intact. The garden, though overgrown, was still recognisable. Justine and her partner Johnny cleared the growth from the little glassless window - Juliette hated closed windows - behind which she used to tap away on her typewriter. 

And the twisted olive tree she often tied her beautiful Afghan dogs to - she was at least as famous for her dogs as for her writings! - was still thriving; patiently waiting for Juliette to return to talk to it. Most exciting of all were the heart-shaped stones scattered around the structure, which we knew Juliette had collected over the years from her beach, convinced as she was, that Aphrodite had been born off that very shore and the stones were shaped that way because of it. 

Here are the pictures we - Johnny, Justine and I - took on the visit, mixed with others I took of Juliette and her house and dogs back in the 1980s. Justine and I thought it would be wonderful to rent the house and make it a little museum to Juliette. 

If anyone out there is interested in helping us and is also willing to put their money where their heart is, we could create something really fitting to her memory: selling her books, displaying her pictures, perhaps even creating her most useful ointments and toiletries.

Juliette

From: The Kytherians by James Prineas

I remember where I first saw Juliette: in Potamos at the Sunday market. From a distance she looked like an elderly new-age hippy – loose jewellery on her wrists and a floral head-scarf holding down her springy greying hair. Layers of translucent lace blouses and skirts straight out of a Cairo bazaar were wrapped around her small frame. Heavy necklaces, some supporting metal talismans, seemed to pull her head down, and a woven bag constantly slid off her shoulder and made her look lopsided. Standing next to her was her taxi driver, George “Tarzan” Kastrisios. He straddled her many full shopping bags which I later found mostly contained freshly butchered meat for her dogs, and a few dried figs for her vegetarian self. 

Juliette and Tarzan made a peculiar but harmonious couple. They looked like two garden gnomes dressed up by children, one as a gypsie witch and the other a rustic troll. Tarzan tapped one foot impatiently. “All shop good now? We go?” he asked in the simplest Greek he could think of. Juliette’s grasp of Greek was tenuous at best. Brought up in the lap of luxury in England, with French nannies and in the best private schools, her mother from Egypt and father a successful merchant from Turkey, she still only managed to master one language – English – fluently. And while her English was a delight to listen to, her other four or five languages didn’t make it out of the “pigeon” hole. Her many years in Spain, Mexico, Israel and now Greece were no match for her lack of linguistic talent. 

“Tarzan wait. Juliette buy string for rat killing.” She put one hand to her throat and made gurgling sounds to aid Tarzan’s comprehension. Tarzan gazed and nodded – he had given up attempting to understand his most lucrative passenger long ago. If she had anything important to say, she would say it at least three times. 

Juliette de Bairacli Levy, certainly the “grandmother” of herbal medicine for dogs, cats, stable, home and everyone else, was a renowned organic vet whose recipes and remedies had saved thousands of dogs from distemper in the 1930’s and cured millions of animals around the world from a range of ailments. She was possibly the greatest friend the animal world had seen since Saint Francis of Assisi. Except when it came to rats. Her champion Afghan hounds were most dear to her when ruthlessly dispatching rats, and they frequently dropped half dead specimens at her feet. Thus the need for string. She would end the vile rodent’s misery with a tight knot around its throat. 

Although Juliette had survived on Kythera for years with her pigeon Greek, moments after we were introduced she adopted me as her personal liaison officer. With me and my rough Greek at her side, she felt liberated and could now ramble on in English to the Greek shop-keepers in her distracted way and leave me to tidy up the details. Our first performance together was at the general store run by the ever-courteous Panayoti Maneas.

“Tell him I want to strangle rodents and the string shouldn’t be thin enough to cut through the throat – I don’t want to decapitate them! I’d prefer natural twine and not that bright nylon stuff which looks and smells like it’s been dipped in poison. Tell him that Dimitri.”

“She’d like some brown string please,” I’d translate, and the friendly Maneas plopped just what Juliette wanted in front of her within a few seconds. Juliette never questioned the comprehensiveness of my translation – my effectiveness was judged solely on the final product placed before her. The shop-keepers were relieved as well: their English was even worse than Juliette’s Greek, and, if they ever ventured to try a word of it on her, she took it as an invitation to conduct all further interaction in her tangled English. With me at her side, they still politely nodded and smiled while she spoke but made no effort to comprehend, turning to me after she had finished and asking ti théli? – what does she want?

It wasn’t just the non-English speakers who were confused by Juliette’s babbling-brook mode of communication. Often her stories were so fantastic it was a bit like listening to a small child telling an improbable story. Juliette had had such a rich travelling life. This combined with her tireless imagination and esoteric leanings meant your average rational adult was, when listening to her talk, constantly wondering how much of it could possibly be true. 

The advantage of Juliette’s poor grasp of the local language – whether in Spain, Israel or Greece – was that she could fill in the gaps with her considerable inventiveness and make her reported conversations seem more sophisticated and colourful than they might ordinarily have been. She would describe complicated exchanges she had had with Greeks whom I knew spoke no English, and each time she repeated the experience to me or to others, more detail was added. Her adaptions were particularly generous towards the Bedouins, world-travellers and her favourite people of all, the gypsies. Juliette gushed about them being free spirits, at one with nature, naturally drawn to fresh clean water because of their supernatural affinity with the elements. She even married one. Their time together was dominated by misunderstanding and conflict and it didn’t last long. She married him to get closer to the world of the gypsies. And he married her to escape that very world. In practice it meant that she was continuously opening windows and he closing them. 

I had trouble reconciling her view of the noble gypsies with those I had met in various parts of Greece. None lived in the wooden wagons drawn by horses which she described in her books, but instead drove clanking old utility vehicles spewing black exhaust fumes, piled high with plastic chairs and tables, the sale of which appeared to be their only legal source of income. Instead of “discovering the most beautiful patch” to set up their encampments on, they parked their rust-buckets at the first bulldozed clearing they found, right on the main road, places used by the locals to dump old tyres and fridges and the like. These “children of nature” seem to spend their evenings grilling bits of chicken over burning refuse, the men chain-smoking – tobacco probably being the only plant they could name – while their chubby brown women multitasked by eating, smoking, yelling and feeding their babies at the same time. The older children, when they weren’t out stoning chained dogs, were testing the locks on scrap-yard gates. The men toured the villages with their trucks piled with a mountain of white plastic outside furniture, loud-speakers blazing their rough, deep, mumbled voices: Karekles! Trapezia! – “chairs and tables”! You could usually bargain them down to about half of their initial demands, but you had to watch that they didn’t slip a cracked chair between the good ones.

If their camp site wasn’t already littered when they arrived, by the time they left it was strewn with plastic, cardboard and mechanical junk of no value even to the resourceful gypsies. These were not the noble natural travellers of Juliette’s books and her imagination. In fact they seemed more environmentally negligent than even the rural Greeks, who regularly dumped fridges and cars and whatever trash they couldn’t burn into local gullies.

Perhaps Juliette’s communication with the mumbling gypsies took place on a higher, more spiritual level. Anyway, the less she understood, the wiser she took them to be. In contrast, any Italians camping on “her” beach or the Greek farmers who complained about her roaming hounds and missing chickens she took to be examples of the degeneration of modern society.

Juliette’s tiny stone cottage was only a minute’s walk from the “second” Paliopoli beach, officially called “Limni” but known to most of the foreign community on the island as “Juliette’s Beach”. An enchanted place below a headland, it was once the site of the ancient Minoan settlement. “Skandia”, as the ancient city was known, was more than a welcome way-station between Crete and the Peloponnese. Murex, the rare purple red dye used to colour royal clothing, was produced there by boiling the colour out of a species of mollusk. Skandia was also the second largest Minoan naval port as, at the time of that empire, Juliette’s Beach was actually the inlet to a huge protected bay strategically located between the Minoan and Mycenean capitals. 

The history of the place was cut short by the tsunami which hit it after Santorini exploded, destroying Skandia, drawing the city out into the ocean, and blocking the inlet and the harbour in the process. The wave made it to Crete as well and destroyed the Creten fleet there, commencing the fall of the Minoan civilisation. Juliette had a collection of rings and coins which she found during her decade at Paliopoli, but even more precious was her collection of heart-shaped stones found at her beach, which she, by the way, called “Aphrodite’s Beach”. Dozens of the love-stones, some as big as flattened watermelons, were piled up to one side of the house’s doorway next to her rosemary bush. Others lay on window-sills and ledges inside the house. I wondered if her slight hunch-back and generally crooked posture wasn’t the result of her intense search for hearts on the beach? Perhaps it was the other way around: always half-bent, her head naturally pointed downwards, making the stones all the more visible to her.

Juliette’s house was always blindingly bright from regular white-washing. She mixed her own quick-lime concoction with a dozen ingredients including coarse salt (to make it glitter), salad oil, a dozen eggs including the crushed shells, and a good slosh of urine which she claimed made it dry harder. She applied the mixture in a thick coat like batter and the sea-salt made the finished surface look like a cross between sand-paper and rough wedding-cake icing. The acidic white-wash disinfected and cleaned anything it touched, and she delighted in using the caustic paint on her next greatest enemy after rats: the ants. The sight of even a few trail-blazing ants scouting around her home inspired her to drag all her possessions out of the house, mix up a batch of urinated white-wash and, using a round-headed brush as wide as a child’s head, scrub the inside walls as well as the offending ants into albino oblivion with the vicious relish of a pirate wielding a sabre.

I sometimes wondered if she was lonely in her isolated spot in the middle of an olive grove. She smiled and shook her head. “I wish I had less visitors. I hardly have a moment to write in the summer with people coming by all the time.” You regularly met travellers from all over the world who had read her books and were asking around in Hora or Potamos after Juliette’s whereabouts. These were her fans who usually lived an alternative life away from cities and who had come half way around the world to meet her. She answered every letter she received – passed on to her from her publisher Faber and Faber – and put “Paliopoli, Kythera” as the return address. This her disciples often took as an invitation for a pilgrimage to the island, so Juliette was probably single-handedly and unwittingly increasing the tourist traffic to Kythera considerably. Many of her uninvited visitors fell in love with Kythera, bought ruins and fixed them up, then invited their friends to visit who did often the same. So indirectly Juliette was the best PR campaign for Kythera since Aphrodite sprang out of the foam off the shores of Juliette’s beach.

In addition to writing a half-dozen books while on the island, Juliette bred her famous Afghan hounds there too. They were prized around the world, and regularly won multiple medals at dog shows. Although they were in great demand, Juliette was less interested in earning money in their sale than ensuring that the new owners followed the holistic rearing methods she had written about in her Complete Herbal Handbook for the Dog in 1955, which is still in print. This included a diet of raw foods – no factory-processed dog-food; natural healing methods like herbs and fasting in place of vaccinations; at least two hours of exercise daily; and surroundings dominated by earth and grass flooring, not concrete.

Her beautiful hounds had long elaborate names like “Nuh Belae Turkuman Hennah” or “Turkuman Nissim’s Laurel”, but we all called them the pet names Juliette had given them: Owlie, Claire, Dolphin and Queenie. The dogs, born hunters, were fast and strong: Juliette often returned from the beach with bruises, having been dragged along it by two excited hounds that had caught the scent of a hen. Occasionally they slipped their lines and returned hours later with blood on their paws, soon followed by an irate farmer who wanted considerable compensation for his decimated chicken coop, plundered by one or more of Juliette’s wunder-hounds. She paid up indignantly yet was always proud when telling us of the dogs’ latest escapades, even if they cost her dearly. 

Still, nothing seemed to make her happier than to report the latest delivery of a half-dead rat at her feet. And the knot she used to strangle it with.