When the Ganadio, Molista and Monastiri villages were blooming, up until the 1920s, houses were differing for the healthy, the middle class and the poor. While the first were living in three-storeyed Π-shaped manors with large living rooms and attics, the least fortunate ones were making their way through small square huts in the perimeter of the villages. But, one whole century later, an inconvenient truth hides behind the shadows of these villages; when a house is empty and deserted, it is no different to any other house at all.
Nevertheless, almost none of these houses today is left to ruins and fauna. This is not due to the fact that, since the 1970s, these three villages have been declared by the Greek government as ‘protected settlements of the Greek tradition’. It is due to the love with which their residents, as in almost every other Greek village, take care of them during the ten or fifteen days a year which they spend here. At Easter, or during the week of the litanies of Mother Mary’s passing at August 15, these three villages seem over-crowded with almost 200 people coming from the big cities to the birth-place of their ancestors.
But now, Ganadio, Molista and Monastiri are still in the winter’s tail. At the dark and desolate nights, temperature falls well below 10 degrees Celcius, the trees still look like x-rays of a glorious past, the plane tree at the center of the piazza has not yet bloomed green to change the face of the village, and very few people are inside the houses: 15 at Ganadio, 3 or 4 in Molista and 6 in Monastiri.
The café of Ganadio, vivid and loud during the Easters and the dry summers, is now closed and dark· in a small low-ceiling room beneath the Cultural Center a fellowship of four people from the three villages surrounds the only table. The modern Sultan talks on the screen of a small TV on top of the fridge at the corner, but the days when Turkey had something to do with this area are bygone a long time now.
REALITY
Next on the news was an imminent new round of pension cuts. For the elderly inhabitants of these villages, far away from the fertile plains of Konitsa, the old saying that God took the rocks from the plains of Thessaly and threw them to Epirus seems like a harsh reality - and, thus, little can be done to compensate for the pension cuts.
The guesthouse of Molista has ceased its operations a long time now, and the one of Molista, in the majestic building of the old girl’s school, struggles for funding either by the Municipality or by privateers - even though this area seems like a paradise for alternative tourism.
The building activity, mainly for the restoration of the old houses, has reached rock bottom during the years of Greece’s financial crisis, on the 2010s. Thus, inhabitants here are left only with home vegetable growing, keeping small herds of sheeps or cows, and beekeeping - on the precondition that the gardens and the hives are surrounded by electrified wires. The desolation of these villages has left bears free to approach them, as well as wild boards which, as Mr. Zisis Tziminadis of Ganadio says, ‘dig the ground with their noses like a tractor’.
While beards and boars avoid the road, the vehicles and the sounds, during the last days of our visit there the bear -always one in number, like a remnant of an ancient superstitious legacy of the wild ghost which is threatening the village- was seen in the woods above Monastiri, or eating pumpkins in a garden 50 meters outside a house. Also, a dozen of hives were found turned-over, and thus the bad omen that the village elderly once foresaw, came true: that, ‘there will come a time when the bear will be coming to the piazza’s plane tree’.
DESOLATION
The bear ‘came to the plane tree’ after seven decades of hardship and escalating blows to these communities. The first blow, and by far the most ferocious, was the effects of the Greek Civil War, which started at the end of WW2 and reached its bloody conclusion in these neighborhoods of Grammos, Smolikas and Vitsi mountains of the Pindos Sierra, at 1949.
This triplet of stone villages are in the shadow of Kleftis peak, which -standing at 1.847 meters- is one of the medium-height peaks of Smolikas mountain. At the summer of 1948 Kleftis was the theater of the bloody battles and tremendous atrocities between the communist Democratic Army and the Governmental powers. Life at the villages after the the Civil War and up until the collapse of the Junta regime in 1974 was like a horrifying, furtive daily manoeuvre between the shadows of a haunting past.
Every nightmare of the 1940s was just refusing to die. The extreme poverty of a nation left devastated and widely destroyed by the Germans during WW2 and the west during the Civil War, together with the need of a large number of inhabitants to live in anonymity, sent the population of the villages either to the big cities of Ioannina, Thessaloniki or Athens, or to a Germand factory in Dusseldorf or at the depths of a Belgian mine.
The large plane tree of the piazza, which was once colorful and loud, was now starting to lose its branches one by one. The cafes and grocery stores were closing rapidly, the families of the stone craftsmen were crushed by the weight of the cement, the concrete and the factory bricks, and 1970 was the last year -as the president of Ganadio, Mr. Vasilis Tziminadis, explains- that the Primary school of Ganadio was scattering loud child voices all over the tranquil village.
After a couple of years Molista’s Primary school shut its doors, too, and after that the kids had to walk four hours a day to attend school at Konitsa. The lack of a school in the villages was the next big blow for the people who decided to stay at their roots, even when at the gravel roads came ‘Carnavalos’, a large truck owned by Macedons of the nearby villages, to help the villagers with their transportations. ‘All cramped-in, like sacks, in the carnavalos!’ laughed Mr. Apostolos Nanos, from Molista.
The greatest concern for everyone here after the Civil War, continues Mr. Tziminadis, was to provide education to every villager of the area and to send all the kids to the high-school. This was not a given at the Greek province these days, not at all. They had the ‘Scholarcheio’ (school), the Girls-School, the first post-office (in Molista) in order to receive money-orders from their emigrant relatives working in Europe, Australia or the US, they had a Fire Department, they were organizing waltz, tango and foxtrot dancing parties, they were celebrating labor day at the fields of the countryside - and they even had a cinema.
But, soon desolation swept everything, like a wild wind over the barren fields. Telephone and tarmac came here 30 years ago, television came 20 years ago but without digital infrastructure its almost useless, internet connection is taking its time, and the old fisherman with his small truck, who was coming here day after day with a variety of sea fishes from Igoumenitsa, is now a very rare sight. And the only fish he has to sell are trouts, coming from the nearby rivers.
When the night falls, and you exit the café used to its lights, all smelling cigarettes and tsipouro, the dark is just too thick.
REBIRTH
‘A village without youngsters is doomed’, says Mr. Zisis Tziminadis, ‘and a youngster will stay only if he has motives and a job’. Back in Konitsa, a city which comes to life during the day -especially now that it’s hosting Syrian refugees- and deserts again at night, since a large number of the workers live in the larger city of Ioannina, vice-mayor Mr. George Kallinteris says: ‘If we set the example, the youngsters will follow. They come, now, and no one encourages them to continue. With a small field to crop, with the parental house and with a few animals, a young man or woman can survive. Its easier to earn 500 euros per month here, compared to the city. Alternatively, he can have a small guesthouse, grow oregano or keep bees. It is essential to change the mentality of the grown-ups and the established views we have about the public sector.’
The fields of Konitsa, continues Mr. Kallinteris, is tremendously fertile for herbs, even though some years ago it would be unthinkable for the people here to grow lavender, for example. Also, there is a large shortage of small dairy industries, and the terrible bureaucracy doesn’t help at all. ‘It’s simply not possible for a youngster who comes here to wait 15 months before he starts working’, he says.
And he concludes: ‘Unfortunately, urbanism is very hard to overturn, even though the financial crisis could possibly push on this direction - especially if leaving the city becomes a trend. People love their birthplace, and visit the villages in the summers, but spending half the hours that he spends in a coffeehouse one can earn his living here’.
Back in Ganadio, I am the only one in our little fellowship, because of my age, that is not capable to compare the poverty between now and the Fifties. ‘It’s just different now. Back then, we were all at the same boat. We weren’t used to the good life, and we never retreated to a worse way of living. We just had one radio, and we used to keep it closed in order to save the batteries. We weren’t short of anything, because we didn’t have high expectations’, concluded Mr. Tziminadis.
Expectations. A word that gets a whole new meaning if you stand alone in the thick darkness, surrounded by the dimming, trembling few lights, of these three small villages of stone.
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