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Winters in Paradise

Life at the rural reality of a Greek island, far away from the azure waters of its cosmopolitan beaches.

By Desolation Road

November 14^th, 2019

Far away from cosmopolitan Nydri and the azure waters of Egremni and Porto Katsiki beaches, at the “Kyra’s cob”, the southest spot of the island of Lefkada in Western Greece, where the rocky cape is covered like a carpet by the green cloth of the vegetation, the Doukato lighthouse was first illuminated in 1890, burning oil. During WW2 it was shut down, it was lit up again in 1945, and then in 1950 it was destroyed by an earthquake and was left operating as an acetylene torch. Its reconstruction finished in 1956, and from 1986 onwards it uses electricity.

Mountainous Lefkada, mystical and desolate, unrelated to the ghosts of Aristotelis Onasis’s Skorpios isle, the carte-postals of its azure beaches which lay inside the showcases of Nydri between Chinese souvenirs and toys, is no different at all to the rural Greek mainland: during the 20th Centrury it was balancing between the industrialization, the destruction caused by foreign investments, the local self-destruction, the rebuilding, the desolation and the uncontrolled modernization.

In Karya, a central village on the island’s mountains and home to more than a thousand inhabitants underneath the six thick plane trees of its piazza, the -more than 120- women than once were needle-crafting the famous ‘karsaniko’ embroidery, are now tending the hordes of tourists of August down by the sea.

Survival was the cause, too, that forced many of the active people of the beautiful stone-built villages of Alexandros, or Kolyvata, or any other village of the mountains, to move down to the sea-side Nikiana gradually after the 70s. At the same time, foreigners buy the stone houses at the villages, renovate them, and for the people left there reality is the same with all the other villagers of rural mainland Greece.

On a green island paradise, in the middle of the Ionian sea, the viticulture, the olive oil artisanship, the embroidery of Karya, the famous ‘porsanitic’ knives, all blooming once, seem now -in the difficult Greek economics- like challenges rough like steep mountains, before the flood of tourists on cheap and, at many cases, of dubious value all-inclusive packages.

Winters in Paradise

The fields around Karya, or Agios Elias, are covered with vines , the olive trees are everywhere, but their exploitation is a process trapped in state labyrinths, in obsolete mentalities, in the hands of foreign overlords, or deep inside the greek-crisis psychology of the locals. Everything seems to be a matter of the open-mindedness of each single person, and of his stubbornness.

Winters in Paradise

Winters in Paradise

Winters in Paradise

Winters in Paradise

The «Fabbrica» olive oil museum is housed in an renovated old oil mill in Syvros village. Its owner, Maria Vlassopoulou says that “nothing is easy in Greece. It’s difficult, and you must be stubborn. We produce, from around 900 olive trees, high quality green olive oil, and we keep production limited. We collect the olives around the end of October, because the sooner you collect them the better it is - but its also less in quantity, too.

Most [other producers] collect the olives later in order to get more quantity, at a lower price. And they leave the olives for around 5-10 days in big sacks in order to raise their temperature and get more sweetness. We do what we do at a higher cost: we go early in the morning, lay the cloths below the trees, we shake the trees, we collect the olives that have fallen to the cloths, and then we collect the cloths. Thus, the olive comes at a higher price. Taking into account the cost of the bottle and the packaging, we sell a bottle of 250 ml at a price of 10 Euros.

But, the foreigners consider this product something like a medicine, something beneficial to his health, and he appreciates it. We cannot sell a kilo at a price of 3 Euros. In order to get good quality, you must produce less quantity - it cannot be infinite”.

Mrs Vlassopoulou, like many other olive oil producers in Greece, find it hard to convince the owners of the mill to open earlier than usual, at late October. And, also, to use water for the procedure at a temperature no greater than 30 degrees Celcius - because the higher the temperature of the water is, the more it destroys the -precious for the human organism- polyphenols of olive oil.

“It takes two to three years to revitalize an inactive olive grove”, continues Maria Vlassopoulou. “It doesn’t take too much, and one can cultivate and collect the olives by himself, but it takes a lot of work. It could give you a serious income, with which you could make a living. Everyone has some olive trees. But there is no copartnership, and very few are willing to get open-minded. There are also some subsidy programmes from the European Union for woman copartnerships. Women could easily be collecting the oranges that are left rotting and produce marmalade”.

Into the museum comes, meanwhile, another group of foreign visitors. They start wandering in front of the large diesel machine, the vindi with the large toothed wheel of the crank, and the machine that was pressing the olive dough. This machine was pouring olive oil and water into a cask, the oil was rising at the surface of the cask through gravity, and the producers were collecting it with ladles made out of gourds. This pre-industrial technique and agriculture tradition passes through modernization to the reality of the contemporary olive oil mill.

Winters in Paradise

Winters in Paradise

Winters in Paradise

Winters in Paradise

Meanwhile in Karya, the fate of the ‘karsaniko’ embroidery, with which once ‘mothers were saving enough for the children’s education, needling day and night as fast as they could’ according to Mavretta Arvaniti, was not as good as the fate of the olive oil artisanship or the vilitculture of the village. Mrs Arvaniti, after three decades of hard work, up until 2008 was keeping four stores, providing jobs to dozens of women in the area. Now only one of her stores are left, and she is pessimistic about that too.

This is a result, as she says, not only of the economic crisis, but of the social crisis too: “Once the Greek mother, as poor as she was, was trying to gather some good things for her child. Many were coming to Karya just for that. Now this is not the case. There is now interest and no culture left for none of that. The state, also, is leaving gradually some traditional arts to disappear.

This year, in Athens, I was providing needling lessons to some highly educated women, who possess this kind of culture, but there are very few of them left. This is a doomed tradition, and as our generation is reaching the end of its life, in ten years there will be no woman knowing this art left in Lefkada. The technique will disappear”, Mrs Arvaniti said.

The poppies on the plateau of St. Donatus, near Eglouvi village, hide the most tasty and famous lentils of Greece.

Up in the Eglouvi plateau, on the mountains, the famous lentils of Eglouvi are a completely different story. This story could be summarized to a local farmer’s reaction, who said since everyone passing is taking a picture, you can take one yourself. He was at the process of ‘votanisma’, which means uprooting the grasses from the lentils field.

The bio-lentils of Eglouvi move by their reputation, which is a result only of their quality and taste, an outcome of the fertile and exquisite soil of the plateau. At Spring, most fields are covered with a red carpet of millions of poppies, when the lentils are early-due. This year’s cold winter wasn’t good at all for them, and the days now, at the end of May, are crucial for production.

The heavy clouds, swinging low, had only good news to bring, given that no chemicals are used in this bio process - chemicals that would prevent plant diseases in cases of drought. A good rainfall would give around 60 tons of lentils production, for the 60 or 70 families of Eglouvi that are occupied by this cultivation.

The sowing of the lentils is taking place from January 10 to April 10, and the harvest begins in early June. Then, the lentils are getting machine-cleaned, and then they are picked by hand - an exhausting procedure. “Now that I’m old, I come here at eight o’ clock in the morning and I manage to work six hours at the most”, says our local farmer. “It takes its toll.”

A glade inside the oak forest of Skaros offers the most amazing view of the majestic Vlychos gulf. The gulf is home to the “prince-isles”: Meganisi, Kalamos, Kastos, Madouri, Skorpios, Skopridi, Chaloni, Sparti, Tsokari.

Winters in Paradise

Winters in Paradise

Winters in Paradise

Winters in Paradise

Winters in Paradise

Winters in Paradise

Winters in Paradise

Winters in Paradise

Madouri island, opposite of Nydri, home of Aggelos Sikelianos and Aristotelis Valaoritis - two of the most renown poets of Greece in the 20th century.

The grave of the famous German archaeologist Wilhelm Dörpfeld, at the peninsula of Aghia Kyriaki. Dörpfeld believed that the island of Lefkada was the actual Ithaka of Homer’s Oddysey.

Winters in Paradise

Winters in Paradise

Winters in Paradise

Winters in Paradise

Winters in Paradise

Winters in Paradise

Winters in Paradise

Winters in Paradise

The caves of the neighbouring Meganisi isle were offering a hideout for the famous ‘Papanikolis’ submarine of the Greek Navy, during WWII. The small island of Skoprios, the famous summer residence of Aristotelis Onasis, bought by the famous shipowner

Winters in Paradise

Winters in Paradise

An old, abandoned US military radar on the mountainous road to Eglouvi.

The old Primary school of Alexandros village.

Winters in an island Paradise

Footnotes

Text & photography Copyright: Panos Diamantis 2016

FootNotes

Text & photography Copyright: Panos Diamantis 2016

© 2026 Desolation Road

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