Panayiotis "Maneas" Gerakitis

The Land

Told by Panayotis “Maneas” Gerakitis

 

 I was born in the village of Trifyllianika. The name Maneas is a nickname of the Gerakitis family since my grandfather’s time. I have experienced the natural environment of Kythera at first hand and became interested in it when I saw it was being destroyed by illegal and criminal activities.

Once, as I was helping my father in his store, a foreign tourist told me that he had travelled the world and that our island was a paradise on earth. In those days we had ecological tourism. By this I mean visitors who come to enjoy the natural beauties of the island and stayed a while. Not those who come for one day and leave the next.

 

My father was born in Viglatori, a remote area at the foot of mount Koutsokefalo above Diakofti. In a flat area from where a steep cliff goes down to meet the sea at Heladi. There was only the one house there then. This was where my grandfather built his house and had his goat pen. His eight children were born there. The goats were their livelihood. There was a water tank close by so they were able to have a small vegetable garden. Further over towards Paleohora is the village of Freatsi. Today there are a few small ruined cabins there – spitakia – and some abandoned fields. There, people grew wheat, yellow split pea plants for fava and vetch for animal fodder. There was also a well from a spring that gave good cool water.

 

My grandfather would go down to the sea to fish. He also collected salt. There were plenty of fish in those days, even small sharks, and we often saw their fins on the waterline. Here he collected planks of wood he would find from shipwrecks and carry them on his shoulders the long distance up the steep cliff to use them for his home. He also fished using “boomboonakia” as we called it. The dynamite. After the explosion he dived in, and, using his net, collected the fish that remained in the foam on the surface. He dived in deeper and collected the fish that had sunk to the seabed. But of course he fished with a line too.

 

Whenever we visited our grandparents at Viglatori it would take us nearly two hours to get there by foot from Tryfillianika. We went through Vrohantarika, in the valley leading to Paleohora. My grandfather made his cane baskets there. Water flowed through the valley all year round and there was an abundance of cane and “skoina” bushes, the main materials needed for the baskets. So this was the perfect place to make them.

 

The water supply for Paleohora came from Vohantarika, as it was higher up, via a channel made of stone running along the side of the cliffs. It ran by gravity to the settlement, saving them having to go into the gorge for water. Today it is totally overgrown and you can’t even see it. At Heladi the water coming down from mountain springs flows into the sea at various points. It still flows today. At one point it spills out at sea level and, when there’s no wave from the sea, you can drink it in the cup of your hands. It has a strange taste – like ammonia. When the goats drank this water their droppings were runny. My grandfather called it “watery runs”. In those days a few people who knew about this spring drank the water in order to help them “go”.

 

My grandfather had a lyre and played at many festivals. In the evenings as he played he would encourage his children to dance. They all learnt to dance well. There were no radios in those days. Many years later when my 85 year old aunt visited us from Australia and we took her to the Mitata Wine Festival and she didn’t miss one dance.

 

In the olden days up in Viglatori the family made their living from the goats and their vegetable gardens as well as from fishing. Meat, milk, cheese, vegetables and fish. My grandfather would load the donkey with both soft and hard cheeses and walk as far as Hora to sell them. He couldn’t ride because the donkey was fully laden. Whenever they came down to town – either Aroniadika or Potamos – they would usually buy their macaroni. My father said that he first wore shoes when he was 18 years old.

 

Once the children had grown up and my grandfather had given up the goat herding, my grandparents moved to Trifyllianika, in the house I live in today. My father later built his own home in Trifyllianika. My mother was also from Trifyllianika. My grandfather spent most of his time on the property he had purchased in lower Amoutses where he planted a vineyard and cultivated wild greens – pharmakovlastara  – and broad beans – playiomanous – which he sold at the Potamos Sunday market.

The goats my grandfather left on the mountain became wild. My father and his two brothers took them on and found various ways of trapping them. By this time my father had opened a small taverna in Potamos specialising in wild goat and game such as hare, birds etc. This taverna was eventually taken over by his brother Yianni.

 

Koutsokefalo, between Agia Moni and the airport.

My parents worked very hard all their lives to make a living. I don’t know how they managed it all! I couldn’t do half of it, not even one tenth of what they did! When they picked olives, every olive counted. Not one was left behind in the field. Any surplus oil would be sold. In those days one kilo of oil was worth as much as a kilo of meat. They also sowed their fields. They toiled in their vineyard and planted their perivolia, their vegetable gardens. My father also fished and hunted. In the 60s he opened the first rental apartments in Agia Pelagia and named them “Neos Kosmos”. Many years later he handed them on to my brother Foti. They were recently demolished, rebuilt and renamed the “Maneas Beach Hotel”.

 

Even though our parents had all this work to do they still found time every summer to take us four children on holiday down to the beach in Fyri Ammos where we rented the house belonging to the local council, which today is a ruin. Every summer the seals came, the turtles laid their eggs in the sand and at the end of the summer we watched the baby turtles make their way into the sea. My father had a boat and we fished. We gathered limpets, sea urchins, and golden samphire. In recent years many species have either vanished or are becoming rare, such as seals, turtles, grunions and sponges. 

 

There were only three houses in Fyri Ammos at that time. So there weren’t too many people around. Our evenings in Fyri Ammos were spent sitting on the sand, fishing for crabs and trips in the boat using the oars that my father had made. We also went for pyrofani – fishing with a hand held lantern and a spear. There were seals in the caves at Lorentzo and Agios Nikolas. We thought we were in paradise. I remember the Trifyllis and Bartsiokas families who used to come to their family home there for the summer. Their uncle Panos Fyllis was also there. He sang and played his guitar very early in the mornings, before the sun came up. I remember there were many swallows’ nests at their home.

Every Sunday my father would take us up to the Potamos market. He had a motorbike with a sidecar. Later on he bought a little tractor with a trailer and would pile in absolutely everyone who wanted to go up there. Very few people had cars in those days and so, whether going or coming, the tractor and trailer were always full. He didn’t open the shop every day during the week and on his days off he went fishing.

 

As a very young boy I remember my family threshing wheat. We would bale the wheat and load it onto the donkeys to take it to the threshing floor. As the donkeys made their way down the narrow bushy pathways many ears of wheat would either tangle in the bushes or fall to the ground. The donkeys went around and around on the threshing floor which was outside our home in Trifyllianika. Once we had a frisky donkey who gave me a hard kick – I still have the mark on my jaw to prove it. When the threshing was over we collected the tangled ears of wheat from the bushes and fed them to the chickens later on. Nothing was wasted. 

 

There was a wood-fired bakery in Potamos. My mother would tell us to gather wood and sell it to the bakery so we could make some pocket money for ourselves. We cut the wood, loaded it on the donkey, and sold it. And, hey presto, we were able to afford a patini – a scooter – made from a plank of wood and wheels. The metal worker, Manolis Pavlakis, gave us the metal pieces we needed and along with old ball bearings we had, which we used as wheels, we would make it ourselves. Whoever had a patini was the best kid in town! My mother would also say to me, “Instead of me getting a labourer to dig the vineyard, why don’t you do it instead and earn the money?” So I did – and it took me a week!

 

In the early 1940s, my father opened his general store in Potamos. The building had previously been used as a timber yard, as a theatre and lastly as a rifle range. He would tell me that in the beginning he didn’t have enough money to fully stock the store, so he stacked up any empty boxes he had on the shelves so it looked as though the store was full. He slowly built up the business and eventually all the empty boxes had become full boxes. Many years later I took it over and kept it for 36 years. Today it is run by my niece Aliki.

 

I still vividly remember my time at school. My teachers in primary school were Yiannis Melitas and Voula Lourantou. Once we’d finished high school most of my classmates left the island, some to study, and others migrated to Australia. My brother Yiorgo and my sister Zaharoula migrated there too. As a young man I watched them all leave Kythera and, although my father had plenty of work for me, I was desperate to escape as well. I left the island and trained as a radio officer after which I worked for two years as a radio telegrapher on the ships. Whilst I was away my father worked the general store along with my brother Foti. One time when I returned to the island on leave, my father told me he couldn’t keep up with all his jobs and suggested he pass the general store on to me. I accepted his offer and have remained on the island ever since. At this time he also passed the rental apartments business in Agia Pelagia on to my brother Foti.

 

I knew nearly all of the beaches on the island. I was very upset when I saw them being ruined. The biggest damage occurred when a company undertook the project for the harbour works in Kythera. The project was initiated by the local government technical department, predominantly people without an ecological conscience, but mostly interested in financial gain, and with hidden motives.

In 1985 in Agia Pelagia breakwaters of massive boulders were built to hold back the sand and stop it washing away. In 1994 an extension was made to the jetty along with further protections for the pier. The main ecological damage was done when they collected the materials for this work.

 

Using a large crane on a barge, clawing up material from the sea, the contractors worked illegally for weeks, going wherever they wanted, gathering huge quantities of boulders and massive rocks from the beaches, the depths of the sea and the surrounding shoreline of the island. These rocks and boulders protected the sands. Now when the tide comes in in full force it takes the sand and drags it right to sea, transporting it elsewhere. The sand doesn’t come back. Some people think “well, the movements of the sands are geological phenomena, they are like streams which move” and the like. Why then are areas like Kaladi and Fyri Ammos near Kalamos which weren’t disturbed, still pristine and intact?  A lot of us here on the island knew this was damaging and wrong but unfortunately our protests were ignored. We were called reactionaries, pseudo-ecologists and were threatened with being held responsible if the harbour works were stopped. So the contractors continued their illegal activities unhindered.

 

 

Later, in the years to come, we saw the evidence that the ecological damage was catastrophic and irreversible. Wherever they took material from the sea they left behind severely damaged habitats and badly impaired environments. The stripping of the beaches and the reduction in the riches and diversity of the ocean is unprecedented as far back as people in this region can remember. People who didn’t know what the beaches were like before can’t understand. I could show you photographs of many places which would illustrate the differences. In Fyri Ammos at Pelagia for example, not even half the beach remains. Where there used to be sand, now you can only see the bedrock. The ecological equanimity has been destroyed. Can you imagine: they even took rocks and boulders from the beaches of Kythera for harbour works as far away as Antikythera! Ironically, when we discussed a partial rectification of the damage done, we were told that it could not happen without an environmental study.

 

The Mitata fires in 2010.

I also want to tell you how we fought the fires. In those days there was no fire brigade or water-bomber planes to fight them. A group of us would gather together and cut branches from the mastic bushes – skoina – to beat the fire. They didn’t easily shed their leaves and could resist the heat. We would wait until the fire had died down a bit in low vegetation and then we would all run together to beat it out. Sometimes we would light a counter-fire. We would look for a road that the fire was coming towards and light another fire along that road. So when the two fires met, one would put out the other. The fire we lit was controlled. It needed care and a lot of people until it moved away from the road because it was burning against the wind. We never left the scene after the fire had been extinguished. We waited all night just in case it flared up again.

At the fires in Mitata in 2010, after the first blaze had been put out, the fire rekindled and a lot of damage was done to the beehives and the thyme. Thyme doesn’t grow back easily. The first plants that grow and take over are the prickly scrub like the astivi, afana and aspalatho. By the time the thyme has had a chance to grow, the prickly plants have grown so much that they overtake and overwhelm it. Much of Mitata’s cultivated areas were lost. And it was due to negligence!

I’m now a pensioner and spend my time in organic gardening. All that I experienced in the days when I lived close to my parents and grandparents and helped them has proven invaluable to me today. I’ve gained something from each and every one of them.

 

My parents had sheep and goats which kept their fields clean. Now many fields are overgrown because very few people keep animals to eat the weeds and wild grasses – maratho  and katsoules for example. Not even one donkey. So today, those weeds that were once valuable to the farmer for his livestock, have now become a menace. During the winter it is difficult to find edible wild greens because the other coarser plants have strangled them. Everything is connected. Now when people try to find good edible greens in the winter they pick everything and don’t leave any to go to seed. Personally, I leave some until after they have gone to seed and then sow my own new plants from the seeds I have collected. 

 

As well as the watered garden – the perivoli – we also have the unwatered garden: the babakia. This dry garden is made ready by a series of ploughings – cultivating and levelling – after which it is planted or sown – usually around the festival day of Agios Theodoros on the12th of May, give or take a week. The babakia is subsequently nurtured by the early morning dew and damp from the westerly winds. We call this wet wind proventza. Potatoes, onions, melons, tomatoes, beans, corn, vlita (greens), okra and zucchinis are some of the vegetables that can be grown in a babakia.

 

One of the most undervalued occupations in our time is that of the farmer. This is why young people today don’t take up farming. The work of the farmer is never-ending and hard work, but hard work alone doesn’t always guarantee success. The yield also depends on the weather conditions and the quality of the land. The farmer is not paid for all the hours that he or she puts in. 

On the other hand, when you organically fertilise and grow your food yourself, you know that what you are eating is fresh and free from pesticides. 

 

Kythera is an ideal place for this way of life.