Each time I visit Greece I spend most of my time in Cephalonia. This is where I was born. Like a powerful magnet, Cephalonia brings me back, year after year. It’s the chemistry of what Homer called Νόστιμον ἦμαρ (Nostimon emar), the day of return.
Odysseus, king of Ithaca-Cephalonia, had his day of return. Yes, he struggled for twenty years for that day. Undoubtedly, it is a pleasure to see one’s home. Returning to an old primeval world that no longer exists is encoded in our consciousness. It is the best time travel. It is a hope realized. Homer lived the experience he described in the Odyssey. Homecoming, the passionate day of return, is always with me, despite the fact I have been visiting Cephalonia nearly every year since 1983.
But, in addition to homecoming, it would be difficult to find another paradise on Earth like Cephalonia. The island is the largest of the Ionian Islands located between Greece and Italy. Its lush green natural world of forested hills, olive groves, vineyards, wild flowers and exquisite beaches creates a tremendous variety of attractive and livable landscapes.
The jewel of this natural world is Mt. Ainos. Cephalonia is Ainos. This “great mountain” was in ancient times home of Ainesios Zeus. Ainos in Greek means song, the epic song of the natural world to Zeus.
Mountain Ainos is wild and exceptionally beautiful. Its paths are dramatic in the rapid change of the landscape, now straight through the woods, now on the edge of sharp falls and danger. But the views from Ainos are thrilling. You can see the neighboring islands Ithaca and Zakynthos and the endless blue Ionian Sea.
The greatest peak of Ainos, Μέγας Σωρός (Megas Soros), is a large pile of stones topping the mountain to 1,627 meters in the sky. Some of these stones may be dated to the original temple dedicated to Zeus more than 3,000 years ago. The eighth century BCE epic poet Hesiod mentions the temple of Ainesios Zeus.
The dense forest of Ainos is primarily a forest of the majestic fir (Abies cephalonica), which is an endemic tree of the island. The Ainos forest, now a national protected park, shelters several other endemic and endangered and threatened species of plants and animals.
The main enemy of the forest is the goat and sheep, especially flocks of goats feeding in the protected park. Since goats and sheep are the backbone of the local rural economy, compromise reigns supreme: a ceaseless give and take make up the legal and political protection of Ainos. Experts I talked to assured me the damage is real but not severe, “manageable,” they said.
And this dilemma (of protecting the integrity of a valuable mountainous ecosystem or making the mountain pasture for goats and sheep) exposes a no less hazardous trend harming the fabric of rural society of Cephalonia: that of desolation and disintegration of culture afflicting the island and Greece.
Something unbelievable happened after WWII. Slowly but without interruption, rural people, one after another, began moving to the towns and cities. Were they seeking security from the pains of future wars? Were they exhausted from centuries of hard work? Did they fall victims of propaganda for an easier life in an urban environment than the harsh life in the village?
Whatever the real reasons for the rural migration to the cities, the effects, worldwide, and certainly in Cephalonia, have been catastrophic. Villages are only villages in name. They are no longer self-sufficient in food. Aristotle stressed “autarkeia” or self-sufficiency as the pillar of a polis. Peasants probably did not read Aristotle but they voted with their feet against “autarkeia.” They converted their villages to small towns without the infrastructure or philosophy or politics of towns. Now small trucks have replaced the donkeys, mules and horses of villages. Paved streets serve cars only. There are rarely sidewalks next to those streets. Baked bread from the city comes to the village, along with food!
This metamorphosis of rural Cephalonia to a fake urban island-wide tourist town is a work in progress. Not everybody is satisfied in rushing to towns to become a voluntary servant to foreigners for half a year.
Rural extinction, like other extinctions, takes time. And it is not uniform or irreversible. Some Greeks, especially young people, are returning back to their villages from the cities. They become farmers, feeding themselves and adding prosperity to the country. Most of the new farmers are rejecting the chemical cover of industrialized farming for the traditions of their fathers, which they sprinkle with ecological innovations.
Eurybiades Sklavos is such a peasant. He is a middle-age man working for twenty-five years in perfecting winemaking. He is becoming a model for marrying traditional knowledge, new ecological farming methods like biodynamic agriculture, and high tech in bottling his wines. He proudly showed me the large wooden barrels imported from France. I was astonished by the latest fashion in the technologies for protecting the wine.
His vineyards are in a paradise-like region of Cephalonia still having its ancient Greek name: Kechrionas of Pallikes or Lixouri. I tasted Mavrodaphne and divine Robola, wines my father also made.
Eurybiades explained how the vines were connected with roots under the soil. He said to me “Grape vines strive to reach the heavens. I raise my grapes and produce my wines in harmony with the natural world. The soil is alive and so are my vines.” He spoke softly like a man well read in the arcane language of ecologists and mystics.
Eurybiades employs several workers, one from Pakistan. He exports most of his organic wine to Europe.
There’s also an organic agricultural school at the edge of Argostoli, capital of Cephalonia. The school is a gift of Panages Vallianos, son of Cephalonia. Vallianos made his money in nineteenth-century Russia.
Like the rest of Greece, this practical little school has fallen on hard times, but it is there: promoting traditional agricultural knowledge wedded to ecological science.