The author, looking for his next drink
There is a story behind this photograph. I wasn’t really looking for a drink, at least not at that stage of the morning. Rather I was walking out to inspect the ruined Frankish fortress that caps the promontory at the end of the ‘Tigani’, or Frying Pan, the long neck of land that encloses the western end of Mezapo bay in the southwest Peloponnese. Geographically speaking, I was in the heart of the Mani, that formerly remote and isolated part of Greece, with rather savage customs, that neither the Turks nor, it seems, anyone else was ever able to properly subdue. This parched and stony region forms the southern tip of the middle of three peninsulas in which the Peloponnese terminates, looking, as the English author Patrick Leigh Fermor recorded in his book Mani, travels in the southern Peloponnese, ‘like a misshapen tooth fresh torn from its gum with three peninsulas jutting southward in jagged and carious roots’.
The Mani, or Maina, is a spur of Mount Taygetos, the highest peak in the Peloponnese, which looms above the olive-and-citrus-strewn plain of Laconia in a great five-knuckled ridge which I had crossed, in two-and-a-half delightful days of walking, a week or so previously. The region is roughly 77 km in length and, as it tapers away towards its wave-lashed tip, divides the Ionian and the Aegean seas. The final cape, Matapan, is the ancient Taenarus, legendary site of one of the entrances to the Underworld, and also, incidentally, the southernmost point of mainland Greece.
In other words, it was a happening place, though not nearly as entertaining as it must have been in the old days when the leading families used to conduct running gun-battles with each other in the streets and, locking themselves away in fortress-like tower-houses, would attempt to reduce their opponent’s dwelling to rubble with powder and shot. Implacable blood-feuds that might continue for decades and wipe out whole families were a distinguishing feature of the region, as indeed were the elaborate dirges known as miroloyia, or ‘words of destiny’, with which the local women mourned their dead.
I had entered this once hoary and legendary domain from Areopolis, the old capital of the Mani, the previous day. I was on foot as I had been for the last four weeks. It was getting on to the middle of June and I had reached the final stages of a five-week walk from Kalavrita in the northern Peloponnese to Cape Matapan with its solitary lighthouse and haunted sea-cave. Recently I had found the going a challenge on account of the fact that, in contrast to its past isolation, the Mani was now open to all-comers. A modern road, suitable for lorries and large buses, wound through the region. Possibly because of this, the old footpaths that I had followed elsewhere in the Peloponnese had been forgotten and were all but overgrown, leaving no alterative but to take to the road. For the passionate trekker, there is nothing more boring or soul-destroying, not only because of the hot and unyielding tarmac unfurling endlessly beneath one’s feet, but also on account of the four-wheeled traffic whizzing carelessly past. To make matters worse, on this particular afternoon – a Saturday as it happened – there was a wedding taking place and the road was awash with revellers kitted out like heroes and driving with death-defying brio in their desire, no doubt, to be in the moment. Later, gunfire would rend the evening as the revellers emptied their rifles and whatever other ordnance they kept tucked away under their beds into the air….
So anyway I arrived at Mezapo after a long, hot day of walking, descending an eerily deserted road that wound steadily downhill through a treeless wasteland cut in places with broad terraces long buried under rocks and a mass of low thorny scrub. Away in the west, just beyond the insubstantial tip of the distant Messenian peninsula, the sun was sinking like a blood orange towards the sea through a nacreous sky tinted grey and amber and lilac. Shadows had swallowed the land and the distant sea owned a dark metallic sheen, the reflection of the dying sun etched upon it in a dwindling taper of mercury. All was calm and quiet and the air, which had blazed with a furnace-like intensity during the afternoon, had assumed a mild caressing quality. Weary and footsore, I was looking forward to settling down somewhere for the night; at the same time, I was painfully aware of the fact that, due to a careless oversight on my part when shopping that morning in Areopolis, I hadn’t a drop of wine with which to wash down my meal of tinned beans, paximadia and sardines.
Soon I reached the settlement of Mezapo. There wasn’t a soul around and, faced with a pair of signs that pointed respectfully to the upper and lower parts of the village, I instinctively chose the lower. A narrow lane, with grass and weeds sprouting between the uneven cobbles, led down over a narrow and sloping neck of land, past derelict houses built of rough limestone blocks half-buried in a wilderness of prickly pear and fig and chaste trees and bulbous domes of purple thyme. Rotten floorboards terminated in mid-air; doors and windows gaped in crumbling embrasures and dark interiors, damp and liberally strewn with debris, slumbered beneath vaulted roofs that spanned them in long and faultless barrels. Some of these structures were two stories high; their upper bastions were accessed by exterior staircases that were as narrow as they were steep, making them tricky proposition, I thought, if one happened to be returning home after a heavy night. Here and there among the ruins I came upon a building that had been restored, the renovations undertaken with impeccable taste that mysteriously fell short when it came to the doors and window shutters, which were hideous metal things with a fake timber appearance. Fortunately these outposts of modernism were holiday homes whose owners were absent; locked and bolted and silent as the proverbial grave, they portended the dubious pleasures of the fast-approaching summer.
Eventually my procession, which was hindered at times by infernally sticky webs woven from wall to wall by gigantic spiders I felt no inclination to trifle with, led me to a small bay at the end of a modest ravine. An aluminium runabout bobbed at its mooring off a crescent of shingle beach dignified by an enormous tamarisk tree. In a clearing overhead stood a chapel with a broad vaulted roof and weathered stone walls. Was the chapel dedicated to Agios Nikolaos, patron saint of sea-farers? My notes, which are not to be trusted, suggest that it was. I seem to recall an oil dip burning before a battered old icon, and faded mats strewn across a flagstone floor worn smooth and shiny by generations of fishermen’s feet, but that could be my imagination. In any case, I paid my respects before I backed out the door and, after closing it carefully behind me, set off to find somewhere to spend the night.
My search led me away from the bay across a broad shelf of rock dotted with tiny pools teeming with aquamarine life and liberally strewn with esoteric plants. My Scottish biologist friend Keith, it occurred to me, would have had a field day. I however gave the scene a wide berth, keen as I was to find a bolthole in which to spend the night before darkness closed in. To this end I climbed a set of concrete steps that led directly from the rock shelf onto the open terrace of one of the restored holiday homes looking straight out to sea. It was the perfect address, discreetly tucked away out of sight of any other houses, and I felt sure that the owners wouldn’t mind me taking advantage for the night. I did check, though, and very carefully, that there was no-one at home before unrolling my mat and sleeping bag and settling down to eat my wine-less – and therefore rather cheerless – evening meal.
When the Wine is Bitter 