In this weekend’s newspaper, my
attention was drawn to the name St Kilda in a tiny almost-hidden paragraph. It
was ninety years ago today, in 1930, that the last 36 residents of St Kilda, a
Scottish archipelago 100 miles west of the mainland, ‘asked to leave because
life was not sustainable’. The islands are now a World Heritage Site, home to
the world’s largest colony of Atlantic puffins.
Abandoned homes, villages and
ways of life in the Dodecanese islands of Greece are the subject of my new
book, Wild Abandon, so I’d been interested to find a book on Mark’s
shelves about St Kilda. I read a lot of books about wild, semi-abandoned Scottish
islands during the writing of mine, from Sea Room by Adam Nicolson about
the Shiants, to The Outrun by Amy Liptrot about Orkney. There are many similarities
with the Dodecanese, which are also remote from the Greek mainland and whose
populations were reduced during the twentieth century, often from several
thousands to next to nothing; and those deserted places, slowly reverting to
the wild, also provide safe havens for wildlife.
One thing that struck me about the
people of St Kilda was that, according to the book, the people who left didn’t
do well on the mainland. The people of the Dodecanese, from what I’ve
discovered, thrived when they left, many of those from Kalymnos and Nisyros,
Karpathos and Rhodes becoming successful businesspeople in America and
Australia and Africa. And some who left have fulfilled their longing to return.
I was fascinated by the variety of stories I discovered, and I loved talking to
those who stayed, who lived through the times when – as one man on Kastellorizo
said – ‘there wasn’t even earth to bury us!’
Another news story caught my
attention in the previous weekend’s Times (the newspapers have become
something of a weekend treat during lockdown in the UK, especially for the
crosswords). In Italy, the semi-abandoned rustic villages, emptying for years,
are being seen in the wake of the Covid-19 crisis as the country’s future as
Italians flee the crowded cities to work from home. As in Greece, the half-deserted
villages have attracted only foreigners in recent years, but now urban Italians
are beginning to see the appeal.
Here’s an excerpt from Wild
Abandon, talking about the village on Tilos that was well populated and
full of life until the mid-twentieth century, a place some of you will know
well if you’ve been following my blog for a while:
After my first couple of years on
Tilos, I moved into the heart of Megalo Horio (‘Big Village’) when a house with
a lemon tree and views of mountains and sea was offered for a small rent. To
one side was a home owned by a potter from Crete, who had bought a
ruin and restored it but visited only a few weeks a year. The neighbour on the other
side had died years ago and the house was slowly disintegrating, the garden
overgrown and the shutters hanging askew.
These days every third or fourth
house, many with a Christian cross carved into the stone lintel, sports a
handwritten ‘For Sale’ sign; for every one that’s inhabited, there’s
a ruin
with gaping walls and roof, wooden cupboards still intact, trees still dropping
fruit in the courtyard. The village with its narrow, twisting alleys is
half-empty, more than half-empty in winter, shutters closed. Many people don’t
have the money to fix up the hundred-year-old house built by their forebears.
The edges of Megalo Horio are scattered with abandoned dwellings built long and
low into the gently descending terraces, earth packed into double-skinned stone
walls and roofs of rough-cut logs, now covered with grass and flowers.
My village house had rusty metal
railings and broken door handles, and a frequently blocked kitchen drain that
couldn’t be fixed without breaking a stone wall half a metre thick. There were occasionally
cockroaches, and slugs at night from the disused well, but I loved the space,
the empty rooms, the rambling, ramshackle building with additions from
different eras: a heavy old wooden trapdoor divided upstairs from downstairs;
outside, modern concrete steps leading to the terrace were haphazardly built
over the stone archway of the original front door, which had ‘1868’ carved into
it – a century before my birth. In the summer I slept on the terrace, rigging
up a shelter to block the streetlight so I could see the stars. Scops owls made
their high-pitched calls in the evening.
The low rent allowed me a
different kind of life, less dominated by regular work, yet I marvelled every morning
that I could sit in my office overlooking the arched roof of a tiny medieval
chapel, and across the valley to Harkadio Cave, where the last elephants in
Europe died four thousand years ago. To the left on top of the mountain stood the
observatory, dating from the Italian occupation, the shell of a building with no
roof and gaping windows. The sun gradually lit and defined the terraces on the hill
below it, where people once grew everything they needed, when the island was
yellow with wheat fields, perhaps when the house was built for a newly married
couple.
In the 1880s, the British couple
Theodore and Mabel Bent came to Megalo Horio – albeit on a very brief visit – and
their diaries record what they saw. They were on a longer trip around the
Dodecanese, aiming to excavate and remove items of archaeological interest,
usually without permission or with Ottoman officials turning a blind eye in
return for baksheesh. In Tilos they stayed with the priest, who also cured
hides for making shoes. The houses were dark, they wrote, and women sat
spinning on their roofs. Tilos was ‘thinly populated, and as remote a spot as
well could be found from any centre of civilisation’, rarely visited by steamer
or even sailing boats. Women wore coats of homespun material, white shirts
edged with embroidery, and pointed leather shoes; they had wild, gypsy looks
and wore earrings so big they deformed their ears. There was no doctor; the
local people would ‘live and die as birds of the air’.
If you’re interested in reading
more about my journey around the deserted places of the Dodecanese islands, it’s
now available in e-book from Amazon and various other sellers. Thanks for your
support! And if you do read it and want to support me even more, please post a
review online to help others to find it.
And here’s the link to what
others have written about the book so far, and some photos from the deserted
places: https://wild-abandon-dodecanese.blogspot.com/
Hope you’re well!
