The Papas and The Englishman
In 1991 Patrick Leigh Fermor was asked, "If you wanted to go somewhere – somewhere right off the map, with no tourists or modern developments - where would you go?"
He replied "Epirus - the north, the mountains. You might have a chance of finding places there."
It was in 1991 that Roy and Effie Hounsell moved into their place in Zagoria.
In 1980, having been made redundant, Roy and his wife left England to try their hand at establishing themselves in Corfu. They visited mountainous Zagoria in Northern Mainland Greece and were captivated by its magnificent, rugged beauty and its mouldering, unspoiled stone villages. All desire to move there was dashed by their poor ability to speak Greek. Eventually they bought a tumble-down property in Koukouli. They struggled with the rebuilding, helped by the village priest, Papa Kostas, created a garden out of the jungle and joined in with the villagers to become regarded as locals.
Roy Hounsell was born in Woldingham, Surrey in 1942 and educated at Millfield College, Somerset. In 1980, made redundant, he and his wife decided to decamp from gloomy England and try their hand at establishing themselves in sunny, green, sea-bound Corfu. The Papas and the Englishman is his first book.
"Charting the progress of the author’s transformation from ‘outsider’ into genuine local, this book sets standards for the relocation genre. Roy Hounsell writes lovingly about the beautiful location, and unpatronizingly about the people he meets and befriends along the way."
Hilary Whitton-Paipeti, the Corfiot
"Many of us dream of buying and renovating a house in the mountains – but Roy Hounsell’s unusual tale of his Greek adventure is a useful and well-paced read."
Nigel Lewis, Managing Editor, A Place in the Sun Magazine
INDEX
Corfu
Corfu Port
The Logman
The Shepherd
Christmas in Koukouli
Papas Kostas on Ecclesiastical Business
Too Close for Comfort
Easter
Greek Hospitality
Our Neighbours
Walking the Gorge
Ioannina Today
Ioannina's History
Albania
The End of the Story
We had a wonderful reunion. It was evening, and sitting under the great walnut tree at the restaurant they ran, just down the road from their cottage complex, we talked, drank and ate lazily, for hours. All those special flavours, smells and sounds which are Greece once more enveloped us. The sharpness of fresh cut salad dressed with lemon juice and an all pervading scent of oregano; the tang of tzatziki and the mellowing effect of retsina; bunches of gaily coloured geraniums on the tables, candlelight and soft playing bouzoukia; the last late cicadas chirruping and the slender black silhouettes of cypress trees against a darkening sky.
Men were shouting and pushing each other, gesticulating with threatening fists and stamping feet. A hat was thrown down in challenge, the crowd got bigger and everyone joined in. Sirens blaring, blue lights flashing, two Port Police jeeps swept round the corner and screeched to a halt. Smartly gaitered, pistol-packing policemen strode into the fray. Failing to quell the crowd they arrested six men at random, pushed them into the jeeps and screeched away, tyres smoking. What on earth was going on?
The logman, introduced by Papa Kostas, proudly showed me some ferocious looking splitting machines which he said he had constructed himself and judging by missing fingers on his hand, it was obvious that a considerable amount of research and development had gone into their making. Totally overloaded, the truck, Papa Kostas and I attacked the mountain road for the return journey. Fortunately for my shattered nerves, this was a more leisurely trip, uphill with two tons of logs on board.
One shepherd we met on a warm June day, walking beside the Voidhomatis River under the coolness of a forest of leafy plane trees, had no base whatsoever. Accompanied solely by his mule which carried all his belongings - bedroll, food, ropes and the typical black cape woven from goat hair, half an inch thick and weighing a good fifteen pounds - he took his three hundred goats on a massive five month trek of Zagoria. By August they would reach the high grasslands of Astraka nearly 2,500 metres above sea level.
The twinkling lights from the kafeneon opposite, opened for the occasion, were invitation enough to the numbed flock and we all fell into its tiny but roasting interior. Petros and Maria buzzed about serving chipero and brandy and plates of hot chips, fried sausages and toasted bread. The children, who never seemed to tire, were lifted up to sit on the edge of the tables and were fussed over and talked to by everyone. Soon, with body and soul warmed, we got up to leave. Crossing the square in the cold, crisp night with the lights and happy hum of the kafeneon behind us, Vasilis said, contentedly, “Now this is what I call Christmas”.
PAPAS KOSTAS ON ECCLESIASTICAL BUSINESS
We were having a late breakfast one morning, not long afterwards, when Papa Kostas, in cassock and stove pipe hat, suddenly burst into the kitchen. With his curling black hair and beard he appeared like a miniature Rasputin on the rampage! Swinging an incense burner and declaiming some religious incantation he dipped a sprig of oregano into a chased metal bowl which his eldest son, who accompanied him, was carrying, and proceeded to slosh us liberally over the head with Holy Water. When we and our breakfast were suitably soaked, he disappeared as suddenly as he’d arrived.
On and on we pressed through wooded rocky terrain, bumping and splashing through mud. Effie pointed out that there seemed to be a series of quaint little churches on rocky outcrops between the trees on the far side of the river, with strange horizontal windows. Perhaps they were shrines? Neither. They were pillboxes and if manned our progress was being followed by machine guns! A hamlet came into view which thankfully turned out to be Greek and a charming lady, hoeing her garden, explained that this was the end of the line.
It was a wonderful setting for a party, and we sat under a blossoming quince tree taking it all in: the dancing, the children, the grown-ups’ preoccupation with the spit, and the family dog sitting bolt upright watching it revolve with an expectant concentration. The view across the wooded hillside down to the Gorge gave this idyllic setting a fantastic backdrop and we wouldn’t have been surprised to turn round and find pagan Pan sitting under a tree, playing his pipes in the shade, as happily a part of the scene as we were.
Greek hospitality is renowned and we had been invited to several Easter Day celebrations, starting with Papa Kostas, and it was clear that a certain amount of self control was going to have to be brought to bear if we were to remain in any way sober. Kostas and the family urged us to stay on until the goat was cooked well enough for us to have a slice. But we simply couldn’t - we knew the little creature too well! From a small kid, born just before Christmas, we’d watched him being bottle fed by Elevtheria in their kitchen.
Michalis and Fo-fo had recently replaced their rotten, worm infested front doors, and offered them to us as a means of getting rid of them. We jumped at the chance. Not for the doors themselves, they had to be hacked up and burned, but for all the old metal fittings, particularly the great black lock with its key nearly a foot long. Our new gates now proudly carry all these old fitments and closing them at night with the huge heavy key making a loud ‘CLONK!’ has a finality and sense of security that a Yale lock will never possess.
Then they came to a flat land, way above the river bed which was wider now with monolithic boulders holding deep still pools of trapped, black water. Much larger trees grew here - thick trunks blackened with moss, growing in tortuous shapes. Dead branches hung at grotesque angles dangling lichen like rotting flesh; vast rocks covered in ferns, fungus and moss reared up between the trees but no light got through and nothing could be seen beyond. It had a grim and fairy-tale atmosphere and it was here they saw their first spotted salamander, a weird and primeval lizard-like creature, as black and shiny as wet liquorice with startling bright-yellow dashes of colour.
In the modern centre of Ioannina there are supermarkets and all the chain store shops with internationally known names to be found in any comparable European city. The more recent architecture has tended to be of the concrete box type in the form of layers of flats and offices over shops but through the centre runs a broad, open boulevard and park, and in all parts of the town you can find verdant, shady squares in which to while away hot summer days.
The city’s zenith came with the arrival, under Turkish occupation, of a new governor or Pasha, called Ali Pasha.
Ali Pasha’s trademarks were those of cruelty and terrorism. Born in the Albanian town of Tepeleni around 1740, he was the son of the Vice Governor of the town, Veli, called Pasha of the Two Tails. These Pashas were originally appointed by the Sultan’s government in Constantinople, but with power in their hands they usually ended up establishing and enlarging their own fiefdoms. As a result, greed and treachery found them fighting amongst themselves.
Finally we approached Argyrokastro the capital city of this southern part of Albania, home of the ethnic Greek minority. On the outskirts like any other town were the industrial areas. Except that here nothing appeared to be working. Everything seemed shut down. Lorries from China, great prehistoric monsters, rotted in factory forecourts. Equally prehistoric farming equipment, not now seen in the West, lay rusting by the roadside. At last we met up with traffic. Uniformed police materialised, whistles in mouth. The driving was scandalous; there were no roadsigns or road markings, no traffic lights, nothing.
Sitting on the stone wall round the plane tree was Petros’ son and a friend hanging around waiting to go up to university, idling the time playing cards. Seeing signs of life at last, they had gone up to them and eagerly asked the question that had been worrying them.
“Isn’t there anybody in this village doing anything to restore some of these beautiful old buildings?”
In unison there came the reply: “Only the Papas and the Englishman.”
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