Greece Journal: 2003 part 6

As I mentioned in a previous post, I decided to continue with my plans to visit Florina to find out about the Macedonian community there, though I was cautioned to watch my step. A trip to jail in service of a culture I had only an academic attachment to would serve no productive purpose in my life, but I did not change my plans. I felt like the innocent American, trusting in peoples' good nature, and in my benign appearance.

After passing through Agios Konstantinos, I drove over scrub-and-pine-covered mountains to the north of Greece.

There are a lot of things stuck out in the middle of nowhere in Greece: churches on the top of little hills, nestled in a little grotto, with NOTHING around them at all; some old corrugated iron sheds; bus stops in the middle of nowhere; little stone houses, everything closed up, nothing anywhere in sight, along the side of the road. There are bottles, Kleenex, cups with straws sticking out of them, juice bottles and cans, pieces of paper, candy wrappers – the roadside is depressingly litter-strewn.

I got out of the car to pee and take a little walk on the hillside which was lonely and beautiful with a soft mountain breeze, and I peed in my sandal. It was so steep going up there that I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to come down again, and it was hard to keep my balance.

I took a picture lying on my stomach so that I could get all the little flowers.
I had to stop to let goats run across the road in front of me. The shepherd with leathery dark reddish-brown skin, brown work pants and a blue denim jacket walked after the goats. He had a staff like goatherds in fairytales. He didn’t seem the slightest bit concerned that they were walking across the road. The goats were dark brown and black. In the best of conditions maybe they were white goats, but they weren’t white at this time. They had long hair and it was quite dirty. That’s what goats are supposed to be like.

It was Sunday and men were at work on a new railroad. There were bulldozer type things that ran on a railroad track that were cutting out the space for the track, and men laying the track. From the look of it, there had previously been a railroad here, which was being renewed.

There were mines and quarries and various large-scale industrial building up towards Florina, and huge electric plants. Huge. The line connecting these plants with the south of Greece was somehow cut once, causing a blackout across half the country.

I passed over the top of one mountain, onto the dry side. Humid air masses bump up against the mountain, unloading their moisture, but on the other side, the mountains were brown and sparsely forested. There was a green carpet of scrub below the pine trees and other evergreen trees; a few deciduous trees poking out of the rocks close to the road, but the view was decidedly more brown on this side of the mountain.

In one small town there were cones in the street, and a police car parked perpendicular to the road, apparently checking traffic coming in the other direction. Something like a road block, although you could get through.

I passed a sign for Athens, 539 kilometers (about 300 miles) away. That had been an interesting day’s drive for me, and my Toyota Varis still had plenty of gas. I lazily followed the signs to Florina up to Kozani, where signs to Florina disappeared, leaving me to wonder whether I should follow the signs to Albania. Was Florina on the way to Albania?

I came upon a man painting his fence, and stopped to ask him, in Greek, “How do I get to Florina?”

He gave me directions, and I then asked why there were no signs for Florina.

“Afti! Afti! Prepi na tous kopsoun to lemo!” “Oh them. Them!” He drew his finger across his throat. “They should cut their throats.” He said it as if he were good-naturedly talking about a rival football team.

I gulped, and persevered.

On the highway approaching Florina, I was flagged down by the police for supposedly speeding, though I wasn’t. I think I wasn’t. There were no signs that I could see stating what the speed limit was. My little Toyota was not a speedster, and my pace felt moderate at best. Cars had been passing me regularly. Could I have been speeding?

The first of two cops approached the car, motioning that I should get out. He asked for my papers, and I gave him my international driver’s license, my New Jersey driver’s license, and my passport.

“This license isn’t any good in Greece,” he frowned as he turned it over haughtily. He wrote down my passport and both license numbers.

“Really?” There was a hitch in my tummy as the vision of me in jail popped up again, but I smiled. Why had I spoken in Greek! I should have played the ignorant tourist!

His colleague, The Good Cop, who had one more stripe than the first cop, strolled over and interrupted, “I see you have a rental car. Is this your first time in this area?”

“Yes,” I answered.

“Oh well, then, you can just go on your way.” He motioned that his colleague should return my papers and started back toward his car, then turned back and asked, with a smile, “By the way, why are you going to Florina?”

I didn’t answer him, just smiled and got back into my car.

“Do you have family there?”

“No,” I smiled at him and drove off.

I remembered throughout my visit that they had written down my passport number and my license numbers, and hoped I wouldn’t see them again.

These two experiences chilled me. Ethnic hatred, and ethnic cleansing were by now familiar to me, and I felt a hint of the mutual fear which religion, geography, and genes have carpeted this area with.

I continued over the flat plain to Florina. Once in the city I consulted the map which my hotel had sent over the internet, wound through the small town roads, and up an incline, past a large church with its doors wide open, bells ringing, disgorging congregants, past the Ninth Infantry Division headquarters, reminiscent of a 1920’s movie, to the hotel.

My room on the second floor was large with high ceilings and floor-to-ceiling windows looking out on a garden, light blue mountains in the far distance. That was Albania. The floor was tiled in stone. The tiles had fine black and peachy brown striations. In the bathroom, there were plain peach tiles on the floor and on the wall were the really fine tiles, thick, textured, beautiful. They were a very very light peach with flecks of beige in them. Their surface was naturally part matte and part shiny. They had been prepared somehow so that not all of the surface was of the same sheen. The sheen was variably dull and luminous. Besides being beautiful, they were obviously easy to keep clean. This was my first encounter with the artistry of the vaunted Albanian masons.

Two flags flew over the front door of the hotel. One was the Greek flag, and one was a flag with I didn’t recognize, dark blue with about 20 yellow stars in a circle. Given my recent experiences with ethnic distrust, I refrained from asking what the second flag was.

Dinner was between adequate and good, the service was amateur but pleasant. I had the feeling that everyone was watching me, monitoring me, but after my door was closed behind me, I slept.