EU bureaucracy finally finds Yannis
AS I rounded a bend in the track I saw the sheep heading towards me and climbed onto a wall so they and their accompanying cloud of dust could pass.
Herding them along – though with, as usual, no particular sense of urgency – was Yannis, riding sidesaddle on his donkey. He pulled up as he reached me, beamed, and launched into a torrent of (to me, regrettably, incomprehensible) Greek.
But from the way he pointed to me and then to his eyes the message was clear: though I hadn’t been to the island for three years he recognised me. We lapsed back into our old conversational ways: a method of communication consisting of 10 per cent Greek, 10 per cent English and 80 per cent sign language.
The sheep had now stopped on the track and were nibbling industriously at the parched vegetation lining it: shrubby spring weeds which were so desiccated that when the north wind, the meltemi, blew it simply snapped them off and they would roll down the steep track like tumbleweed.
But this time there was something different about the lean yet evidently healthy members of the flock: each one bore an ear tag. I tugged my own ear, pointed to the sheep and raised my eyebrows at Yannis.
He sighed, raised his eyebrows, lifted both hands heavenward then with his right hand gestured as though writing into the palm of his left. The meaning was clear. Paperwork. Bureaucracy.
Even out here in the Cyclades, about as far as it is possible to get in Europe from the centre of European power, the Brussels tentacles had finally stretched to their limits and 1,500 miles away caught up with Yannis. His situation had been regularised. EU rule and regulation had finally arrived on the island.
Well, up to a point. Up to the point, probably, where Yannis would obtain some financial benefit in return for filling out the right paperwork to allow a modest cash inflow into his account.
He waved, shouted at the sheep and moved them up the track before turning them into a field to forage amid a meagre crop of barley, autumn-sown but now already ripe and golden, though at no more than a few stems to the square foot hardly abundant. But that, as Georgios (who ran a few acres as a sideline to his job as a builder) told me was down to the winter. For the third year in a row there had been little, too little rain.
It had been cold. They had even had snow for the first time in most of the islanders’ lives. But nowhere near enough rain. It was a concern. Even if it arrived now it wouldn’t penetrate far onto the soil because the days were already so hot.
Everywhere there was evidence. The spring flowers which delivered the otherwise sand-coloured slopes of the island a two-month green mantle every year were already over, only the odd blossom surviving here and there in the lee of a wall. The fava bean harvest which provided the island with one of its culinary staples was in, but worryingly light.
Yet – as you might expect in a country which gave the world its greatest philosophers – the 80 islanders were accepting it all pretty philosophically. It would probably turn out OK in the end.
And anyway, the tourists were on their way. Soon would come the peak holiday season when the now empty-beaches would be rammed with noisy, garrulous Italians, fleets of expensive yachts would be anchored off waiting for the chance of a berth in the harbour, restaurant tables would need to be booked days in advance and the islanders would realise 90 per cent of their annual income in roughly 20 per cent of the year.
And what would those tourists find? An island where, with the rare exceptions such as Yannis and his farm’s paperwork, life still carried on as if time were frozen.
The only made-up road surface is the 200-yard main village street where crazy paving was financed by a wealthy shipping magnate who owns a holiday home here. Everywhere else it’s rough and stony tracks: tracks along which motorcyclists young and old career helmetless evidently in the unshakeable belief that St Christopher, the patron saint of travellers, is protecting them. Similarly if you live in one of the outlying houses and decide to drive your three-year-old son into the village in your rattletrap car to buy him an ice cream clearly it makes sense to do so with him standing on the passenger seat the better to get a view.
They had dug up half the width of the village street to lay on a water supply to a house being converted into holiday apartments. Here, such an operation would require barriers, traffic lights, warning signs and all the over-the-top hardwear of a health and safety obsessed society. There, pedestrians were expected to negotiate not merely the trenches but the length of the street where the builders had set up operations with concrete mixers churning, plaster mixers rumbling away and not a single hard hat or hi-vis jacket to be seen.
Overhead a precarious cat’s cradle of electricity cables, some lashed to trees, somehow delivers power to the shops, restaurants and homes but appears constantly at risk of failure. Sometimes failure occurred, such as the night when we were passing Nico’s hotel and watched as his power line fizzed, exploded, flamed and finally severed, plunging the rooms into darkness. As guests emerged to ask what had happened Nico told them not to worry about their suddenly darkened accommodation because the guy would be coming to fix it all on Monday. This was Friday.
They do have recycling on the island but it takes a while longer. The mounds of rubble resulting from the seemingly non-stop round of building projects are eventually repurposed as attractive landscape features once the wind has had a few years to soften their outlines and the weeds have had a chance to establish themselves.
Old lorries, vans, TV sets and fridges are left outside to allow the elements to work on them and dismantle them molecule by molecule: the bodywork of the abandoned lorry that we had walked past all of five years ago had crumbled away but it might take a bit longer for the motor, the chassis and the wheels to follow.
It is all completely out of step with the rules as observed in most other places and rather quaint – until you walk into Spiros’s bar and suddenly are reminded of the pleasure of being engulfed in a stifling cloud of chokingly dense tobacco smoke.
They buried old Dimitrios while we were there, hacking a grave from the rocky soil in the hilltop cemetery. Dimitrios had made it to 97 though his spiritual light had dimmed considerably.
Every afternoon he would occupy the same chair in his porch and sing the Greek orthodox hymns he remembered from his boyhood for the benefit of anyone who was passing.
As the months went and his memories shrank so did his repertoire until he just sang the same one over and over again. It was the one they sang at the service.
Ultimately it was a fall and a broken leg that did for Dimitrios. That meant a 10-hour ferry trip on a stretcher to a hospital ward in Athens where complications and an infection set in and his fluttering flame was finally snuffed out.
The islanders had their own explanation: what had killed him, they said, was neither the arduous journey nor the complications: it was the shock of encountering the outside world – a world he had not seen since he last left the island more than 70 years ago.
On reflection they were probably right.