Sunday started with laments and ended with jazz. I headed off with a Maniot man called Giannis bright and early in the morning, recording equipment in bag, to do some fieldwork in Exochori, a mountain village in the Outer Mani. He’d managed to find a couple of his mother’s friends there who would sing laments to me (for my translation project, for those of you who are bemused...) so I spent a fruitful morning with Mrs Eleni and Mrs Elitsa, hearing all about the wonderful laments their mothers used to sing, and how they’re the only lament-singers left in the village, and recording some very rare and precious of Greek heritage. Recordings of these laments hardly exist because you can’t very well take a tape recorder to a funeral and it takes forward thinking women like these two to be prepared to go through the pain of grieving when nobody’s died in order to preserve their art for posterity. I am, needless to say, very grateful.

Giannis’ mother herself may have come up with the most quotable comment of the day, though. We were looking out from her terrace to the large, elaborate village church and she was explaining that sadly they didn’t have a priest any more: “we had one not so long ago, but he left. I can’t imagine why- they built him a house here, with an indoor toilet and everything!” That just about sums up the village. It was like a journey back in time, as if the 21st century had run out of breath getting up the mountain and given up somewhere just above Kardamyli. Exochori also offered sightings of a little owl and large (but apparently harmless) snake, and a superb rabbit stifado (stew) cooked by Giannis’ mother. It tasted even better if you didn’t think of it being rabbit too much... Of course, I was in the Mani, so I wasn’t allowed to go away empty handed, despite the fact that they had been helping me so I went back down to Kardamyli with a large box of home-grown potatoes and the yummiest, yellowist eggs you ever saw and waited for the bus back to Kalamata. Which never came. Two hours after it was due to turn up, the owners of the cafeteria opposite the bus stop took pity on me and got me a lift with some of their trusted clients, so I got back to Kalamata in time for the jazz.

Those of you keen on jazz may have heard of Nils Berg and his orchestra, a Swedish group who have been winning European prizes recently. They ended their Greek tour at the castle here and really were fantastic. That was just as well, because the first half of the concert (Greek songs sung along to a recording by a mainly foreign women’s choir) was dire.

Nils Berg was the third Important Thing to happen in Kalamata recently and I’ve been so lazy with my blog that I haven’t told you about the other two yet. The first was a concert given by the National Orchestra of Greek Music and conducted by the composer, Stavros Xarchakos. He is most famous for his film music, and this concert was indeed made up of 3 film scores. Imagine typical film music of the guitars, sax, double bass style, perhaps with the odd flute or clarinet. Good. Now add an accordion and two bouzoukis. It was brilliant. The second Important Thing was the last two rounds of the national water polo championships. I have yet to work out why a country with a new Olympic swimming pool in its capital city doesn’t use it for the last two rounds of its water polo championships, but given that it was here, and that I’d never seen water polo live before, I thought I should give it a go. I got to one of the semi-final games (Olympiakos-Panionios) and it was definitely worth it. The crowd acted as if they were watching a crucial football match but if you blocked your ears, the game was very exciting. (I envied the players with those plastic covers over their ears). So there. Kalamata is not a small insignificant place. Important Things happen here.

The first of May is a bank holiday, so last Tuesday we all set off into the Mani to do first of May things: collect wild flowers, make wreaths and daisy chains and sing along to a guitar on the beach (or in our case my bouzouki). So, I observed the threatening looking clouds in the morning and optimistically put my swimsuit in the car alongside my bouzouki and raincoat. And then it rained- the first real rain we’d seen in weeks, heavily, all day. So we abandoned all hope of wild flowers, bouzoukis and beaches and spent the day running for cover from cafe to restaurant to cafe. It turns out we missed a trick. If it rains on the first of May, the rainwater is meant to have magical powers, so what we should have done was to collect the water in order to make our vinegar and cheese, and also stand out in it allowing our hair to get wet and thus making it grow long and get stronger. (According to our folklore lecturer who has a habit of telling us about seasonal traditions just after the event).
Towards the end of the day we decided to go home via another little village which we had all passed and admired before but never investigated. Having failed to find any road wide enough to take a car, we left the cars at the bottom and walked up through the village towards the Church, whose impressive Venetian steeple had first caught our attention from way down on the main road. As we approached we heard a vague sound of chanting from inside and went in to find a poor little priest singing vespers to himself. To our surprise, and probably more to the priest’s, two of our group took pity on him, climbed up to the cantor’s lectern and joined in. So, we stood watching the fog descend and hide the village entirely while they finished leading the service...
Since then, and luckily for Jack who came all the way from Holland in search of sun, the weather has improved considerably. We were on the beach in temperatures over 30 all weekend, in a refreshingly cool but not unpleasantly cold sea and the kind of sun that burns through several layers of factor 30 sun cream. Since summer seems well and truly here then, I think it’s time to start a new set of Summer Statistics:
Swims: 4 (well, 4 days, in and out several times each day- how do the Greeks count ‘swims’??)
Mosquito bites: I’ve lost count already but definitely into double figures, including 3 new ones since I sat down to write this entry. Grr.
Improbably oversized insect sightings: 1. A 5cm cricket who took up residence on our staircase for a couple of day.
For Jack’s impressions of Kalamata, and photos see www.thecornishexile.blogspot.com, if not yet then very soon!
And finally, a tip for gastronomes planning a visit to Greece: you can’t order small fish (sardines, anchovies and the like) the day after a full moon. Fishermen (who always fish at night here) aren’t allowed to fish when there’s a full moon, and a restaurant would never serve fish from the day before.

Christos Anesti! You get 40 days to wish each other Happy Easter here, so I haven’t quite missed the boat despite this being an appallingly late Easter entry... Where to begin? Perhaps Tuesday of Holy Week. My parents having arrived on Palm Sunday (which despite there being plenty of palm trees around here is more of a Bay Sunday really), so we decided to start Orthodox Holy Week in earnest on Tuesday. The Metropolitan Church was packed, so it’s hardly surprising that parts of the services on Friday and Saturday took place outside. In the meantime, Thursday was egg-painting day. Easter wouldn’t be Easter without red eggs to crack, although we proved ourselves completely incapable of following simple instructions and forgot to add vinegar to the dye mixture. Still, we had very pretty pink eggs to crack on Easter Sunday, and by some trick of the light they look quite convincingly red in the photographs! Friday night, then, was the night of the ‘Epitaphios’ procession. It is a symbolic funeral procession for Jesus, including a lavishly decorated funeral byre, the Epitaphios, heading the procession. About a thousand of us gathered for the event, many carrying candles and most in black mourning dress. As we processed, people came out and lit candles on their balconies, lining the route right round the town. I pity the poor incense bearers who had to walk backwards the whole way in front of the Epitaphios, keeping it well censed. The atmosphere couldn’t have been more different on Saturday night when even more people gathered on the plaza outside the Metropolitan Church for the reading of the Easter Gospel, the singing of the Christos Anesti (Christ is Risen) hymn, and the lighting of the Holy Flame. Everyone brought special candles or ‘lampades’ with them to receive the Easter flame, specially flown over from the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem to Greece that afternoon. The lampades themselves are a mystery- they range from plain white candles, to candles with transfer icons on them to children’s candles with their favourite superhero or barbie clinging to the side, through any degree of tasteful decoration on the way... Fireworks accompanied the hymn at midnight and we went home, leaving everyone to go back to their homes and feast on the famous mageiritsa soup. Don’t think we missed much there. We did have roast lamb on Sunday, but it was cooked in an oven, not on a spit on the balcony like some we saw, and smelled. We topped off the celebrations on Easter Tuesday when I had my postponed birthday party at the local sailing club. Holy Week is not a clever time to have a birthday in Greece: nobody eats. But they were all very happy to be eating again the following Tuesday and the party was a great success. So, here is the most elaborate Easter greeting I’ve heard here:
“May the light of the Resurrection guide your footsteps always in the ways of happiness and success. Many Years!”

Another busy week of national festivities and expeditions, this time shared with my first visitor from England. (Missing you already Katharina!) Delphi was indefinitely postponed, but we more than made up for it in the following few days...
The 25th March is a national festival, celebrating the beginning of the War of Independence, so Sunday saw a repeat performance of October’s parade through the streets, although with a completely different set of costumes on show. I decided to watch from the other side of the ropes this time and pass on the dressing up, but that didn’t get me out of Friday... Kalamata has its own festival two days earlier, on the 23rd March, since apparently the War of Independence in fact started HERE. Parading twice in three days would be boring, but dressing up twice in three days definitely isn’t, so on Friday we took to the streets in costume, and in driving rain, to re-enact the beginning of the Revolution. A small stage was erected outside the historical Church of the Apostles where the events are said to have taken place in 1821 and we all knelt, attempting to keep our totally unwashable costumes out of muddy puddles, while men dressed up as the heroes Kolokotronis, Mavromichalis and Papaflessas recited the oath to free their land or die. Then we started dancing, again taking longer than average steps in strategic places so as to avoid splashing our dresses. If you loyal readers remember, I said in October that I hoped we would have a dress rehearsal before actually having to dance in these outfits in March. No, no dress rehearsal, in fact, no rehearsal at all. The dresses (all four layers of them) are very heavy and the shoes (two sizes too small- I am officially a giant by Greek standards) are very slippery, especially in the rain. We pulled off the dance without injury though, went for a quick run round the back of the church to join the other dance groups and then enjoyed a mini parade back to the dance school.
On Saturday, Katharina, Nadine and I decided to go on an expedition, and piled into Nadine’s little car without being at all sure where we were going or how long the car would live, and under threat of torrential rain. (In memory of the temple incident, I did at least put a towel in the car). Reasoning that the car would decide how far it wanted us to go, we set off in a direction that took us through plenty of villages, so that we could stop as soon as we saw somewhere pretty, or the car had a fit. Our first stop was Petalidi where we enjoyed a walk up and down the harbour and decided to stay for lunch. Petalidi, it turns out, is one of the area’s seasonal towns, so there wasn’t a single restaurant or taverna open, and our expedition turned into a food hunt. Having stopped hopefully at every closed restaurant until four o’clock we ended up significantly further south in a tiny village called St Andrew’s (Agios Andreas) and spotted signs of life at a fish restaurant on the seafront. Nadine, a desperate hungry driver by this stage, went up and amused the waitress:
“Are you open?”
“Of course”
“Do you have FOOD?!?”
“Yes....”
It was well worth the wait and gave us enough energy to follow brown signs (brown signs lead the way to mystery sites of archaeological interest with no indication of distance) to what was left of a Mycenaean tholos tomb, fast filling up with rain by the time we arrived.
Sunday saw a repeat trip to Ancient Messene (see an entry mid-August somewhere) under very different weather conditions. We got home that night, the end of another week, rained out, happy and exhausted.

VENETIAN CASTLES AND MUDDY RAIN

Yesterday was Saturday- expedition day! A group of four of us visited the Venetian fortress towns of Koroni and Methoni, stopping off at a sweet little fishing town, Finicounda (“Palmy”), which was disappointingly lacking in palm trees but provided a very good fishy lunch. There’s not much left of the castle itself at Koroni, but the views around the bay are stunning, and the castle walls have plenty of holes to admire the view through! While walking up to the castle in Koroni, I was amused by the window of an ‘oporopantopoleio’ (everything shop) which took its title quite seriously. It proudly propped up silver plated icons between a hairdryer and an iron with a backdrop of trousers and dresses. Methoni’s castle is much more complete, impressively so in fact, but sadly it was closed when we arrived; material for a future expedition. Next week Delphi.
This morning I woke to find all the cars in the town covered in a fine coating of dry mud, as if they’d driven through a muddy puddle the day before and was informed that this was the result of ‘muddy rain’, which the weathermen had been expecting and which fell overnight. I was also informed of how this happened which rather destroyed my image of a muddy brown cloud hovering angrily over the town, but also made me realise how close we are to Africa and the desert (hint!). Small prize for the first geographer to post the correct explanation. The car washes will be doing a roaring trade tomorrow...

I’m sure you will all be glad to know that the not-quite-shrove-er-Wednesday pancake party was a great success, despite the hiccup of a half-hour power cut in which I had no cooker to cook the pancakes on and only one candle to light the room. Atmospheric at least... Friday night’s party at the dance school was also great fun. We all entered into the masquerading carnival spirit (I dressed as a bird in the end- thanks for your lack of suggestions everyone!) and I have a new aim to add to my Aims for the Year list, which now goes something like:

1) Learn to drink coffee
2) Learn to enjoy olives
3) Learn to skim pebbles on the sea
4) Learn to cook mousaka*
5) Learn to swing a komboloi* in the appropriate fashion
6) Memorise the set up of a tavli* board
7) Learn to throw paper streamers...
Oh yes, and learning to speak Greek is on that list somewhere too :-P

Monday officially ended the carnival. It was ‘Clean Monday’ (kathari deftera), the beginning of Lent. We decided to go along to witness the events in one of the little villages between here and Sparta which holds onto some ancient traditions. It turns out that they were rather more ancient that we were expecting and, with the addition of a few villagers dressed up as priests for good measure, we were exposed to a full-on cult of Dionysus Bacchic orgy... I had my suspicions that it might be ancient when I saw all the girls wearing ivy wreaths- isn’t that what Ancient Greek priestesses wore? Or perhaps they wore vine-leaf wreaths, but there weren’t many vines around in this village. They were quite becoming though: Nadine and I started feeling left out after a while and went to make some ourselves. There was also a lot of black face paint. Everywhere. At the very least you were given a cross on your forehead on the way into the village (reminiscent of Ash Wednesday but oddly out of place), and if (like Ilias) you made the mistake of washing it off before you LEFT the village, you got black paint all over your face. Everywhere. The proceedings started off, a good hour late of course, with a slightly disturbing goat dance, in which groups of three people (dressed as a goatherd and 2 goats) leaped around hitting each other on the ‘horns’ with long wooden sticks, and then they left and made way for a very rude satirical wedding, death (of the groom), funeral and resurrection. I won’t go into too much detail about that here, because I don’t want to have to start putting an age-limit on my blog entries. After a bit of Greek dancing we left the villagers wishing each other a Happy Lent (!) and fasting on nothing but octopus, taramasalata and lashings of red wine and headed back to normality in Kalamata.
Lent is a big thing here, according to the TV adverts, even MacDonald’s has been forced to bring out a fasting range of seafood kebabs. Real deprivation.

* mousaka: yummy
* komboloi: string of beads resembling a rosary but for strictly non-religious finger-occupying purposes.
* tavli: not backgammon but almost.

Carnival has come to Greece. A chance to eat, drink, dress up and make merry before the rigours of an Orthodox fast throughout Lent. Lent, incidentally starts on Monday, not on Wednesday (isn’t that 42 days?!), which means that I’ll be inviting everyone here for a sort of traditional English Shrove “Wednesday” pancake party this Wednesday... The carnival began officially last Thursday, known as tsiknopempti (fat-Thursday), so I braved the rain- yes lots of rain now- to watch an entire lamb going round and round a spit and eat pork chops because the lamb wasn’t ready yet. I wonder whether the lamb ever finished cooking before the rain put the barbecue out. Only an American could tell me what the origin of the tsiknopempti tradition was- it turns out it was the day when everyone used to prepare their smoked meats for the coming year, but it’s turned into a day for just eating lots of meat. Yum. More carnival news after Friday which is the masquerade party at my dance school. Any ideas for costumes (cheap and easy ones please!) would be much appreciated :-)
On Saturday, Ilias and I braved the rain again and headed south to Pylos, which is famous for the Battle of Navarino (which you all know all about of course). It’s a pretty little town, built into a mountainside above the harbour and topped off with a castle. The castle could have been a fascinating archaeological site, but was presented more as a glorified park, with significantly more benches and flowerbeds than informative signs. There was one sign with an attempted map of the site and a key: small white circle= you are here. Well, there was no small white circle on the map so we left the map as bemused as we had been when we found it and went off to look for a view. A fortified castle on the top of a hill looking over a harbour ought to have a good view, and we were very hopeful when we found a way to get onto the walls of the acropolis. We went right the way round stopping off at each “vantage” point. Most of them looked out onto a mass of evergreen trees, beyond which you could just make out the rest of the hill or a part of the city. One did give us a stunning view over the bay, but if we had been Byzantine knights defending the castle and shooting cannons at Turkish ships, we would have shot our companions standing at one of the hopeless lookouts which was directly between us and the sea, and at much closer range. We decided we weren’t very surprised that the castle had been occupied by the Turks. They probably thought, “ooh that’s a pretty castle” and walked straight in.