Greece Journal: 2003 part 2

I awoke in my hotel in Florina, ready to drive to Ioannina.

I was coughing a lot in the morning and felt congestion in my throat throughout the day. I think it was these damned cigarettes around me all the time. We get so spoiled in America.

I ate in the open, light dining room, from which I would see Macedonia, and in the farther distance, they told me, Albania. Breakfast was served on a plate with six slices of two-inch across salami. I just tasted a little, and it was savory and nicely textured. There was a little, cheese, a croque monsieur with ham and cheese, some pound cake, toast and little metal containers of individual servings of strawberry jam orange marmalade, and three pieces of toast, plus coffee.

Over breakfast I reviewed my route. The map showed a straight-ish line, then a squiggly, squiggly line, then another straightish line. When I set out, I looked up in front of me and saw the mountains of the first squiggly line.

The roads from Florina to Ioannina are mountainous and curvy, but there are customs for dealing with that. They use the shoulder extensively, for example. If you want to go slowly, you pull over to the shoulder and everybody passes you. There is a feeling that you are communicating with the drivers of other cars. When I pull over to let somebody pass me, he beeps his horn in acknowledgement. If somebody wanted to pass me he blinked his lights at me. In America, it’s as if everybody is driving their own road, obeying the same laws, but not communicating with each other. This Greek, and European, custom makes me feel safer, although the drivers are eccentric from time to time. Under this system, safety depends on one’s awareness of the other drivers, so one is more likely to detect unusual driving behavior.

Nobody pays any attention to whether there is a dotted or straight line. Their passing decisions are made by a combination of each driver’s need and each driver’s judgment. I was not afraid driving on these roads.

Mountains stretched to the left in declining shades of blue, ever paler as they went farther into the distance. Closer, where the sun strikes them, they are green.

The countryside in the mountains there was quite deserted. There was an occasional church or homestead, bunches of sheep with a shepherd every once in a while, but long long stretches of beautiful nobody at all.

At long intervals, there were villages, sited strategically along the ancient road. The reasons for the original strategic choice for choosing this site for the village could only be imagined. A trade route perhaps? Protection from invaders? Protection from storms? Maybe a group was fleeing persecution. So much has happened throughout history in these hills that one could only guess.

I came around a curve to a little town. It consisted of several hundred houses with orange tile roofs, staggered along the mountain, all clumped together but in rows of ever-higher houses.

The village was cut in two by the road, and today was market day. On either side of the road were fruit and vegetable stands, and people walking around shopping and visiting. I was coming one way, two cars were coming the other way. The man selling potatoes was standing in the road next to his stall. There were three cars trying to get past. He didn’t move over or look at us. So someone stepped up to guide us around this blockage.

Black-clad old women with market baskets on their arms ambled across the road and back again. A man drove along in a van with a microphone announcing “cucumbers, I have cucumbers, tomatoes, eggplant, zucchini, romaine, and onions, potatoes”. He goes around the neighborhoods and the ladies buy from him, and today he was trolling through the market. I was wondering what all the loudspeakers were that I heard as I went around Florina. I heard them in Athens too. Now I know. They are the Greek equivalent of Mr. Softee, only bearing much more crucial, and healthier, goods.

Going through the market I had to drive at walking speed as the townspeople were ignoring cars. Not many pass through anyway, and if they do, they are ignored, putting avoidance of pedestrians squarely in the hands of the drivers.

On the road from Florina to Kastoria they grow grapes for wine.

Back on the open road, I passed a vegetable truck almost stopped, going maybe 5 kilometers an hour, in the middle of this highway, then I passed a tractor which had some lethal looking things sticking out from the side. It was extremely wide, taking up the whole lane and then a bit. In order to pass it you had to go well over into the opposing lane. Then I passed a car which was right in the middle of the right-hand lane, where I was driving, going backwards. You keep your wits about you out here.

I listened to Greek folk music. It is harsh, rhythmic, but the rhythms are hard to count out sometimes. The line of the music is very long. I love this stuff. The mountains cut out the reception and so I fade from one station into another.

For much of the ride, I was all alone on the mountain road and it was green like the Adirondacks, thick with trees and flowers by the road. Poppies appeared as exclamation points of poppies in the middle of lemon-yellow sprays of flowers, drapes of white blooms, and dome-shaped bushes with fragile white lacy blossoms. I identified one flower as primroses, some sort of rose, the lush pink blossoms shone on the bushes, the limbs of which I could see clearly under the blossoms.

Trees were lightly leaved so that their dark limbs also showed through, with pink blossoms fatly lounging on them. Tall trees had clusters of white blossoms in the shapes of grapes, with an elongated tip.

Being alone out there, stopping every once in a while on a deserted hillside to soak it up, have a drink of water, pee in the bushes, was inspiring and refreshing. Armies of angry people, including battalions of the furious faithful of one religion, then another, had washed across these mountains for thousands of years, uprooting one group, then another in their search for domination. Fleeing was part of life here for a very long time. The sense of distance and hardship hung in the air at all times here, but on that day, it gave a heightened poignancy and power to my sense of isolation, beauty, and security. I was far from police and persecution. Maybe I felt the liberation that some of those fleeing groups had felt as they settled in these mountains.