A place to heal wounds.
The sky is overcast in Greece. It's cold on Mount Pelion. It rains at the end of September. Further north, it could snow on Mount Olympus. It will only last a few days, but you have time to visit places you otherwise wouldn't choose in the endless desire for the sea and the sun on your skin.
Thessaly is a magnificent region, not only for the mythology about the birth of Achilles, the golden fleece that healed the wounds stolen by Jason and the Argonauts or the unforgettable battle of Thermopylae, but for the thousand-year-old poplar trees, the cotton meadows, the chestnut trees with hedgehogs covering the roads, the infinite expanses of olive trees up to the ring-shaped gulf of the Pagaseum, which is like an endless embrace of water, full of inlets within other inlets, protected landing places, paths and even tracks on the water. Everything at your fingertips. All as sweet as its climate.
And then there is Meteora, one of the most fabulous places on Earth, with its sandstones that emerge unexpectedly from underground almost touching the clouds, suspended monasteries and spiderweb staircases like in a story by Italo Calvino.
The islands are enchanted, but mainland Greece is magnetic with the names of streets, cities and rivers that continually refer to the Iliad and the Odyssey, to the heroes of the everlasting battles, to countless places and stories that are symbols of Western civilisation. On the isolated slopes of prosperous hills or in a bay with a waveless sea, you have the feeling of being able to meet all those valiant men, their Muses and immortal Gods. And then you think, reading the recent events we are experiencing, that perhaps we too would still need heroes and muses.
In the Land of the Aeolians, you don't find the golden fleece, but you understand how even just one place can heal wounds. Even those of Achilles.
The sweet madness of Hurricane Zorba.
In the previous days the clouds were inexplicably still. Unaware we were already in the disturbance that would shortly thereafter unleash the strongest hurricane ever recorded in the history of our sea. In a few hours, Greece folded in two. First Athens, then the Cyclades, the Sporades and Thessaly. They identified the exceptional Medicane (as they call hurricanes in the Mediterranean) with the name Zorba.
All tourists in Skiathos are locked in hotel rooms, where they dock without waves in a surreal fog before the storm. Nobody here is prepared, after the Crisis, even for hurricanes. The faces at the reception are tense and scared: it's raining everywhere, even from the ceilings. The halls flooded, the restaurants closed, the boats bent by the wind almost capsizing. American holidaymakers braving the storm in flip-flops because there are over ten centimeters of water everywhere and you're soaked to the bone more than when, in the morning, you were under water challenging the seabed. Only the sound of the incessant rain and wind for days.
And what's more, even fasting, for endless hours behind the glass looking at the sea which, until a few hours before Zorba, had the colors of Greece, is now mud for hundreds of metres. The beaches eroded like canyons, the trees felled by the wind, sand mixed with earth dripping from the mountains everywhere.
The conference is postponed for a few days. But the electricity, with some jolts, resists.
So, after having sorted out the notes, the slides, the pronunciation, the only thing left for you to do is see the 1964 film Zorba, with Anthony Quinn in one of his most famous performances, in a Greece that is cruel but beautiful in its black and white images. It is a film that creates new music, Sirtaki, which will remain in the hearts of a generation. Those are crazy years. The sixties. The protagonist, Alexis Zorba, is the symbol of an invincible optimism, who always knows how to overcome difficulties even after catastrophes, who transmits a contagious energy even in the abyss.
And in a film you discover emotions, places, images and beautiful moments, like the memorable ending: “I love you too much not to tell you – says Alexis in the final scene – you mister have everything except one thing: madness. It takes a bit of madness otherwise you will never be able to tear the rope and be free". And his English friend Basil replies: "Teach me to dance”.
And then you understand that the meteorologist who had given the hurricane its name was young in the sixties, he had seen Cacoyannis' film, he was optimistic, he danced the Sirtaki and perhaps he thought like the protagonist of Zorba "it was a disaster, but beautiful” and it will pass like any other ruin.
Probably, without the hurricane, you would never have seen the film due to the craving for modernity that pervades us, and discovered Zorba's sweet madness.
The storm passed, it seemed to never end. Today the sun is shining. The still trees and the warm air. The sea is clear again as it is only in Greece.
You arrive at Αγία Κυριακή crossing kilometers of isolated coast south of Volo, between secret beaches defended by pines, olive trees and cypresses. It is a very small fishing village at the end of the Pelion Peninsula, frequented only by hikers, divers, sailors and independent travellers. Perhaps they too are a sort of modern centaurs that mythology says live on Mount Pelion - the last primary forest in the Mediterranean - where the wisest and most benevolent centaur, Chiron, raised Achilles.
In Agia Kyriaki they still work the wood of the boats with age-old techniques. In the small port the silence is broken only by the dull blows of a hammer on the wooden hull on the beach and by the wind-stretched sails of the boat that is docking.
In this isolated place, materials and things tell the story of the economic crisis more than words: old motorcycles, obsolete refrigerators, small fiberglass boats, concrete broken to the point of showing rust, seats tied with plastic that no longer exists. Worn, creaking, dangling objects: but all still in working order. Like their users, they have not surrendered to the technological fury, but have learned to resist, as if they had slowed down the time of consumption by slowly integrating into the landscape, into uses, uniting with the usual materials, the wood of boats that is repaired, the hemp of nets that is mended, the stones of ancient houses that are restored, the iron of the piers that is constantly protected with intense red, blue and yellow enamels. “Fifteen people and just over thirty cats to do everything”, this is how the innkeeper replies, smiling when asked how many inhabitants there are in the winter.
The Crisis has interrupted a line that seemed straight, it has created a gap, now we are as if on a watershed... and the objects in this frontier place show this condition of unstable equilibrium more than anywhere else. Even travellers, the real ones, those who seek silence, breaks, care, authenticity, details, have understood: the world of before, the world of tomorrow, and this middle ground that they have begun to love. A mixture of things with an ancient flavor and a more recent flavor, even sometimes reworked, not at all harmonious. But it's not being vintage or repudiating technology; it's not a trend, it's resisting, reacting. It's knowing you can't go back too far and not wanting to move forward too quickly. It is learning to defend a disorder, now full of years, which acts as a counterbalance to all that postmodernism of cold black chairs and white plastic tables, bombastic cars painted in titanium, sophisticated flavors like jazz chords, hotels of shining steel mirrored in the water, carbon boats like missiles towards a future of happiness promised in "minimal" design, in "master" cuisine, in "exclusive" residences, in "instant" connection.
In a solitary village on the edge of mainland Greece, you feel, in a certain sense, like in the Gulf of Salamis two thousand five hundred years before, again on the crest of History, because something has gone wrong, they don't yet know exactly what, but it has gone wrong. And you also notice it from the materials, from the objects, from the things; not only by looks, by words, by spirit.
This time the battle, without too many turns of phrase, is between the new Gods of Efficiency, Speed, Utility, Entertainment, Appearance, Consumerism, against the ancient Gods of Art, Wisdom, Knowledge, Beauty, Balance, Memory.
In Salamis some said that if Greece had become Persian, the world would have been better; no one can say. But like the Trojans, and together with the handful of fishermen of Agia Kyriaki, we side with the Athenians and their Gods this time too. Nor do we remain neutral.