The Virtual Reinhard
Created | Updated Mar 20, 2002
A Letter from Macedonia Greece, September 2001
I'd been to Greece many times, to various islands and to Athens, but I'd always felt that the language and cultural barriers were so great that I could only ever be merely a superficial tourist. The ancient ruins and millennia of history, although fascinating in themselves, act as a smokescreen behind which the modern Greece hides away from the rest of the world. Get the tourists in, point them in the direction of a few dismembered pillars, feed and water them and then ship them back out with dusty memories and a sun tan; always enjoyable, but there had to be something more. What hides behind those whitewashed walls? Who are those ancient women, miles from anywhere, dragging entire trees behind them, and where are they going?
I therefore jumped at the chance to visit Maria's home village in the far north, in that hilly region snuggled up to the border with the former Jugoslavia, an area still somewhat unofficially but tenaciously known by the name of Macedonia.
From the air, the patchwork of fields around Thessaloniki looked surprisingly English, albeit dry and brown and cut by deep flash-flood gullies, but our Olympic Airways captain, who had lifted off serenely from Schiphol's high-tech runway, came in to land like a fighter pilot, sideslipping steeply to a touchdown marked by full reverse thrust the instant the tyres kissed the tarmac. Once in the arrivals hall, a frantic woman screamed from the address system, sounding as if somebody had just kidnapped her daughter and burned her house down; but it was just a no-smoking announcement, ignored by all present. We fought our way through the hubbub, hired a car and set off to the north.
An hour or so later we were passing abandoned concrete tollbooths by the highway - or were they border security posts? - and then we began the climb up into the foothills that hide the village of Goumenissa. We were heading initially for Maria's sister Tania's boyfriend's family's house, but serendipity arranged for Maria's mother to be walking down the middle of the road in front of us, and then Adonis himself passed by on his motorcycle, so it was a convoy of family members that finally arrived at Tania's piece of land outside the village.
Her hut, beautifully made and comprising a single tiny room with a lean-to kitchen, sits at the top of a steeply-sloping couple of acres packed with sunflowers, fruit trees, vegetables, flowers, chickens and a small stream of piped water. From here it was but a short step to the similarly shaped but utterly disorganised piece of land where Maria grew up. A shack for grandmother, one for her mother, a perennially half-finished building for her uncle Dinos and, in the far topmost corner, an incredibly neat-as-a-pin wooden hut where aunt Catherina lives. In the midst of all this sits the corrugated iron shedlet that Tania built for Maria so that she'd have somewhere to stay while she finished school.
Sitting in the lean-to outside grandmother's shed, under festoons of swinging plastic bags protecting perishables from the insects, it seemed to be a crazy place to live. On the other hand, it was all free, and the surrounding overgrowth provided plenty of fruit, vegetables and herbs. If the worst came to the worst, you could survive here with no money at all.
Just to prove it, we had a fig lunch under a nearby fig tree and, on another day, gorged ourselves with walnuts and grapes from one of Adonis' vineyards. In fact, I was so fascinated by the vineyards that one morning Tania took me to do some simple work in the fields. Working in the sun, chatting about this and that, proved a stark contrast to my usual working day in front of a keyboard. Not only that, but the hot grapes not only tasted beautiful raw, but also made a wonderful thick black wine.
The days passed, pottering about in the local area, bouncing around along potholed roads, visiting local markets filled with black-market produce from nearby Jugoslavia, and drinking gallons of wonderful Greek coffee. Adonis also took us to a local 'magnetic hill', where cars apparently roll up hill against gravity, something I've always wanted to see; I'd had no idea that there was one in Macedonia. We all lived at Adonis parents' place, crammed into the front room along with Tania and Adonis themselves, living on top of not only the parents but also Adonis' brother and family, and a whole string of passing friends and family members. Luckily, the town boasted a number of bars and discoteques to which we could escape when it all got too much, and there was plenty of walking in the nearby mountains. I also went for a swim in the Goumenissa municipal swimming pool; well, once I'd seen it, I just had to.
Maria, Tania, Adonis and I all decided to head down to the beach for a few days. There's a local place, Sarti, where the Greeks go for their summer holidays, so we went too. Adonis and I have no common language, but the two of us got on very well. Apparently, this is because we were the menfolk of Greek sisters, and 'barazaki' are traditional drinking companions. Over lunch one day, Adonis unveiled a dangerous-looking bottle of 'tsiporou', a kind of anise-flavoured moonshine for which Goumenissa is justly famous. It tastes not unlike ouzo. And what with the tsiporou, the sun, the Macedonian wine and the local fish dishes, we kept ourselves pleasantly occupied until, reluctantly, we had to set off for home.
