Backpacking in Mani continue… August 30, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Accommodation, Europe, Greece, Rail Pass, Sightseeing, Tickets, Tour, Trip, Vaccinations , trackbackAnother memorable walk was the nine kilometres from Yerolimena to Vitheia. This is the deep Mani, almost as far south as one can go on mainland Greece. The road passes through a landscape dotted with crumbling towers, those ‘brooding castellations’ which are the most striking feature of the region. It was from their gaunt tower houses that the feuding Maniot families of the eighteenth century bombarded each other with musket, cannon and rock, while a cowed population of serfs crept from their semi-troglodyte hovels between the fusillades.
From a distance Vátheia looks like a stricken Camelot. The towers seem grey at first, but grow golden as you approach. Most of them are in a ruinous state with their upper storeys missing, shattered by earthquake, war, neglect. The Government is restoring several of them as holiday flats, a slow process but tastefully done. An odd experience it will be to sleep among these spooky and decapitated towers.
In fact, as I soon discovered, these ruins are inhabited. I met the old lady as I was walking down a steep path out of the village. She was struggling up, bent under a heavy sack. We greeted each other. The skin of her face hung in purple folds and the old eyes were blurred with cataract. When I offered to carry her sack she waved me aside. Who was this impertinent stranger eyeing her baggage? We moved on up to her tumbledown tower on the last crag of the village. At the base was a terrace with one stool on it. Before us stretched an enormous view of mountain, promontory and shimmering sea. From my pack I offered her an apple, the only food I had. She dismissed it with a regal gesture. Then I saw her toothless gums. I left her in peace with her bundle, her stool and her majestic view.
Like so many villages in the Mani, Vátheia is a ghostly relic. Life has receded from it. When Leigh Fermor passed this way and was quizzed and befriended by the fair-haired girl Vasilio with the lamb slung round her neck, it was still a living community. No longer. If renaissance comes it will be in a new form: foreign tourists in holiday flats.
The road continues south, though not much further. The enterprising walker could reach Cape Matapan and look for the cave entrance to Hades. For those like me who fail to make it to the banks of the Styx, there is compensation at Vlykhada to the north, near Areopolis. Here is one of the finest cave systems in Europe. It is in fact an underground river so extensive that the trip in a flat-bottomed boat lasts twenty-five minutes. You glide through endless caverns of gleaming stalactites and stalagmites and all this time the boatman, dour Charon, speaks only once: ‘Mind your heads.’ The passengers first whisper, then fall silent. And still you glide. The Mani, which offers many curious experiences, has none more bizarre than this.
Yet the Mani is not for all tastes. It is a place apart, the last bastion. To this bleak peninsula the Spartans came as refugees. The Maniots, who trace descent from them, boast of never having been subdued by Slav or Turk. The ruggedness of the terrain was its safeguard: an arid mountain region peopled by warring clans in a perpetual state of anarchy. No-one coveted it.
Where the Ottomans failed, the travel agencies are succeeding. Coastal towns with beaches are succumbing to the fat profits of the tourist trade, while the hill villages become ever more depopulated. Greece has changed immeasurably in recent years. Many of these changes are for the better: accommodation is much improved, the roads now are good. Even Greek food — previously lumps of meat and veg afloat in an oil slick — has acquired an unexpected finesse. But the impact of six million tourists on small vulnerable communities has been profound. The human landscape so lovingly evoked by Leigh Fermor, Lawrence Durrell and others is now a wistful memory.
But the hills remain, for these mountain ranges of southern Greece do not lend themselves to the blandishments of the travel brochure. The Mani above all is not cosy; this is no man’s dream of Arcadia. It is harsh and scarred and full of ghosts. Yet as you walk these hills you feel that nothing has changed. Goat bells, the smell of thyme, a path winding among olive trees, and the hot sun on your back: this is the Greece that endures. It is enough.
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