Maniot olive farmers


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December 5th 2008
Published: December 5th 2008
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Today we left our olive farm in Proastio, a small village near Kardamili, which is a town in Mani, the southern part of the Peloponnese (that big island on the SW of Greece). It's been a beautiful past 2 weeks. We lived in the bottom part of a house surrounded by old yellow stone houses and olive tree terraces until the Ionian on one side and the Taygetos mtns on the other. As you approach Kardamili from Kalamata (a city an hour away where we spend a few nights), you see the mountains descend into a plateau that stays flat for quite some time, with its own villages, and then another steep descent into the sea, with just room for Kardamili between the cliffs and the water. It is a beautiful, rocky, austere view, as though the mountains were restraining themselves.

On the 25th, our WWOOFing host Erhard met us in Kardamili - a German guy in his mid-50s who does not consider himself German because he left in 1976 for England and then Ireland and now Greece. He drove us up to his home, and on the way point out the house of Patrick Leigh Furmer, who wrote the book, to us at least, on Mani. The Maniots, as he explains, are famous for being tough and old world. They were the last in Greece to accept Christianity so there are all sorts of pagan mix-ins and weird churches. This is where the revolt that started the Greek War of Independence (from the Turks) began. There are mid-aged people here who remember the first car and the first TV set and it is still pretty inaccessible - Jan has been getting a little carsick b/c the roads are so bumpy and curvy.

Everyday for the past week and a half we met him at 8:15 and drove out to the fields. Jan "scrimmed" (weed-whacked) and I gathered and burned brush and moved stones until 1-ish, when we stopped for lunch. Lunch was a highlight, even though it was the same everyday. We had sliced bread with Erhard's own olive oil, which tastes and looks different than normal oil, with local feta cheese and tomatoes. We could eat it everyday. It gave us the energy to keep going until 4ish, though many days, b/c it is winter, we had rain and stopped early. (The olives in this part of the world are some of the best b/c they get so little rain, which makes them less acidic, but we still got a good amount of rain.) We would return to our little apartment and read and write - it is so nice, sometimes, to have no where to go, no internet or tv, and no one to talk to! We would eat dinner around 7:30 with good local red wine in a 1 liter plastic water bottle and Erhard's delicious cooking, and sit and chat, then go back down and entertain ourselves. It was a very quiet existence, especially after all the cities we've visited. It is nice, for once in our lives, to live the "simple life" - even going to Kalamata for the market was a big excitement.

On days off we would take long walks, though sometimes we would get too tired to make our way back and would just stick out our thumbs and immediately get picked up. It's still fairly common here to hitchhike, and so safe that a single middle aged women stopped. Because cars are so (relatively) new many older people never learned to drive, and because the villages are so small buses come rarely, which adds up to a good amount of hitching, which is very convenient when you have a hill to climb and are hungry and forgot to pack lunch. We had many a nice lunch under olive trees, stopping to pick oranges as we went, accompanied only by goats. We wandered through miles of terraces overlooking the crashing waves (they really do crash here, like there is constantly a storm), down to the orchards and little beaches near Patrick Leigh Fermer's. We scrambled to the next town up the mountain (Exochori) which is even nicer than our town, unbelievably charming as it barely clings onto the mountainside and has a huge church or two that look completely out of place next to the modest homes.

It has been a fantastic place to quietly while away a few weeks and learn about organic farming. Sorry this is such a rambling blog entry. We are going to board a train to Patras soon, then try to get a bus to Larisa to get to Kalambaka - transportation is not easy. All this is to try to get to Meteora, the monastaries in the sky, before returning to the madness that is Athens, and then flying into Dublin.

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