The 'Quiet' Village

The Quiet Village. (A place of beauty and many other things). 

You would think that living in an isolated spot somewhere in the mountains, in a village of less than 400 souls, would afford one a level of privacy which is not possible in the cramped Victorian Terraces of the English inner city.

You would, of course, be wrong. Privacy is diminished by an interest in people, that frankly is non-existent in colder climes. People remember your face.  Your name.  What you do.  You may quickly acquire a nickname, which describes you to others in a place where everyone knows everyone. They say that sometimes you can hear a large village, before you see it!.

Greek village life is not designed with quiet, or privacy in mind. It is a communal affair where due to the limited exposure to other entertainment, people are still seen as ‘interesting’.  The layout of the streets and the general planning, such as it is,  is not meant to separate people, but to bring them together. 

Houses face each other across narrow streets and the little roads are often an extension of someone’s house. It is almost impossible to get through a village in the summer evenings, without greeting someone or stopping to talk- but then, why would you? 

Then there are a surprising number of itinerant salesmen in trucks and four-by-fours, selling everything from watermelons to fresh fish. They, depending on their daily route can arrive before eight and blast you out of your slumber with their loudspeakers. Local farmers in four-by-fours  also come and go at various times, with whatever produce their fields or allotments  have yielded.

There are communal rituals, festivals, the making of raki, in November,  Christmas and the long Easter preparations, religious observances, and the final great feast at the end of the Holy week; St. Mary’s in August, with the great Glendi (fiesta) on the 15^th August, the deafening church bells that ring out repeatedly every Sunday (from 8 am) and dozens of important Saint-days (each day has a particular saint of saint or religious event, but luckily they are not all celebrated with the same aplomb). The gathering of flowers on the 1^st May, making wreaths for the doors to welcome in the Spring, then at the end of May burning the dried wreaths and jumping over the flames. If you like occasions and you want to be a part of a community, village life is for you. Villages vary of course, from the almost deserted, to those which are like small towns, so choose carefully. 

There are the greetings to the neighbours, cockerels every dawn and early afternoon, the occasional donkey braying, goats bleating, dogs barking, and of course the cats. Sometimes a weasel is loudly chased away, at times a walking stick cluttering behind it as it skedaddles to the nearest ditch. 

I was looking at a weasel pass by a cat and marvelled at how they differ.  Although cute, weasels lack the social skills of the cats and their cuddly looks. Cats are the masters of the cute and their manner and appearance are somehow designed to please us, engage us in an exchange, make us feel pity, or sacrifice a bit of kebab; in the case of tourists staying for a brief time, a regular supply of cat food.

Should you be seized by a desire to feed the errand cats near your temporary home, you would be making an error for which you may pay a price. Firstly, the cats are not the cats we keep as pets in England. They are by necessity skinny scavengers, who live a tough and semi-wild life.  Firstly, you will create a dependency. The Greek cats survive by hunting and picking up scraps from wherever they can. When they are fed, they will hang around waiting for food the next day. 

Some male cats may even spray the vicinity (where food was dispensed), to mark it and keep the incoming food for themselves, creating a pungent chemical curtain, which you will enjoy every time you open the windows or step out of the car. So, sad as it may be to see skinny cats, the best thing to do, is either really adopt them and feed them every day, (if you are staying for the long term) or leave them to their errant lifestyle. It breaks my heart to say this, and some will disagree with me, but this has been my experience. Greek cats, like all cats, understand people very well indeed. The tavern cats know who will feed and who won’t,  by your body posture and probably even the smell that you give off. Those taverna cats are the masters of the mixed scavenge and dependency lifestyle.  Animal charities are doing their best to minimise the plight of cats, by keeping the population under control. It is hard to stop talking about cats once you start, but here, I must leave it for now. So back to the village.

The Houses in the villages were originally just put together on what land was available, not to mention materials and labour. Things like privacy, views of the landscape and space within the house came into play, if at all, only after the basic needs for shelter and warmth were met. The wealthy had more land and could afford to employ people to build a better house, but the poor that moved to the interior of Crete, probably had very little in mind, apart from getting to a place of safety away from the various marauding fleets of Arabs, Turks and Venetians or Greek brigands. Once there, there was the matter of the punishing hard work of collecting the stones that would form their simple one up one down. They would have to be carried one by one (on a donkey, if you were lucky enough to have one) and then would begin the difficult task of shaping the unyielding stones with simple tools and hopefully making a structure that would keep the family safe from the elements.

Modern adaptations of these simple dwellings in the 60’s used concrete to replace wooden floors and roofs, leading to the ugly square boxes that are now lying empty in so many villages. Later more sympathetic restorations have exposed the stone walls and used wooden beams and tiled roofs, thank God. One can still see the clear division between the  lower floor dedicated to keeping the livestock and the upper room, which served as the main sleeping area for the family.

Of course, there are still great swathes of time, when nothing stirs in the village, namely between noon and 4 pm. If you are not partaking of the local habit of sleeping at lunch, this is a time for the quiet-loving souls to do things, but with proper protection from the searing summer sun.