The day the Greeks said 'No'

Yesterday we helped Diana and Harilaos pick their olives.

It was a delicious day, as so often it is in late October, clear skies, 25 degrees, the silver shimmer of the olives leaves dancing in a light southerly breeze; blissful.

We spread the nets out under the first group of trees in front of the house, the land dropping down towards the beach at Pisilimonia. Towards the horizon we can see the islands of Kia and Yaros, a ferry carving a ruffled arrow across the glassy ocean. Getting the netting right is crucial as the raked olives roll like marbles, and given the slope of the land, if you are not careful half your precious crop runs off the mat into the sandy earth, from where they are devils to retrieve.

Everyone has their own picking style; shaking only works if the fruit are over ripe, by which time most have already fallen off. It is said that in Corfu they beat neither their women nor their olive trees, but thwacking is acceptable here, especially for the higher branches, but it is hard work. When not dried up and over ripe, they are tenacious little buggers, needing either to be plucked or raked. In fact, pluck is the wrong word; milking is better, running your gloved hands through the branches, letting the handfuls of fruit fall on the mat with the sound of the patter of rain.

It is always rather irksome when the patter under Hari’s tree is louder than from under mine. It’s not skill or effort necessarily, rather the amount of fruit on the branches, but to get the weight up, every little helps, as Tesco’s shoppers will know. There is chatter and banter, there is laughter, but there are silent times when it’s just you and the recalcitrant berries. A moment of introspection, perhaps distraction, or I am afraid to admit, sometimes the almost total absence of any measurable cortical activity.

Carolyn ends up climbing the tree to try to reach the topmost branches but even that is difficult. Hari remains firmly on terra firma, but after three hours it is time for lunch and krasi dopio, local white wine for both arboreal and ground based workers. Diana has nipped into the house a little before us to prepare a delicious red lentil soup and simple cabbage salad.

Hari looks no more tired than I, but perhaps greets the white wine with more enthusiasm. He is truly remarkable; next year he will be 96.

The son of an admiral he was brought up in a privileged house in Athens where his mother spoke to him in French. When he was eight he developed a severe mastoid infection that left him deaf in the left ear. He was in that city for the early part of the Nazi occupation and saw at first-hand the horrors and hardship. He then joined a group who escaped, over land and water to Turkey, where they boarded a ship to join the Greek Navy in exile in Eqypt. He spent the rest of the war as an ordinary seaman on a destroyer.

Back in Athens for the devastation of the Civil War, he entered medical school, trained in surgery and became a well-respected and much-loved general surgeon, making links and friendships with colleagues all over the world, especially at St Thomas’. After his first wife died of cancer, he met Diana, fifteen years his junior and a perfect match was made.

Her background couldn’t have been more different, a native New Yorker who grew up on Long Island her sugar trader father sent her to Europe on a sixties Grand Tour. She visited all the places that matter, but the tour ended when she fell in love and then married a charismatic Greek. She went everywhere and started writing about it. Not surprisingly she was then commissioned to contribute to various travel Greek travel guides. She loved the produce and the food and wrote cookery books, often personally exploring regions of Greece to find what the locals were cooking. She knows about everything Greek, be it Agamemnon or Aegina. When her marriage to the flamboyant Alexis floundered, there was Harilaos to continue her exciting adventure.

We know even this informal lunch will be delicious; not just the food but the chat. Harilaos’ stories are hugely entertaining, inexhaustible, always pertinent and have a punch line. He speaks perfect English which he learnt (as he recounts in one of delightful sagas) while on a surgical training course in Scotland, where for all that he could understand the locals could have been speaking Swahili. He always has a glint in his eye and is living proof that you can achieve greatness without taking yourself too seriously.

The conversation is peppered with words of at least four languages, many of them swear words. Diana chips in with corrections; no it wasn’t Epidavros it was Santorini, or not ’87 but ’84 when we driving to Finland. The talk often harks back to the Mediterranean of the sixties, to golden days and gilded people, to unspoilt villages and empty cities, to Hydra and Spetses, Corfu and Ithaka, but also to the ancients, fascinating friends, or to food and wine.

We spar a bit, trading medical jokes that the others don’t understand. The years fall away. This man was born the same year as my father, but we jest and joke like we trained together. We try to avoid Covid and politics, but don’t completely succeed, Hari has given up on me as representing one of the fools who sanctioned Britain leaving the EU. His view remains that the UK had a crucial role in offsetting the aspirations and power of Germany. He could be expected to think that, but he’s probably right.

October 28th is Oxi day, (ochi or no in Greek) a national holiday commemorating the day in 1940 that Metaxas, the then leader, famously said ‘no’ to Italian pressure to occupy several key sites across the country, and in effect surrender. There will be a marching band and an address by a uniformed official, (traffic warden? boy scout? St Yannis Ambulance?) standing by the war memorial under the light blue and white bunting, put up three days before.

Italy, allied to Hitler by ‘a bond of steel’, was already at war with Britain, Greece’s key ally. The Italian message, delivered by Grazzi the Italian ambassador, so late at night that the unwell Metaxas was in his dressing gown, was clear; Italy was moving in. The question was; were the Greeks going to let them in or fight?

Metaxas, speaking in the formal diplomatic French, fingered the document presented to him with tears in his eyes.

‘Alors, c’est la guerre?’

‘Not necessarily so,’ was the reply, ‘if you order your troops to let us in.’

That was when Metaxas, the sixty-nine-year-old retired general, reverted to his native language, and said the one word that would still be remembered eighty years later; ‘ochi’.

Mussolini believed that the invasion, launched from Albania, would be over in two weeks, but the doughty Greeks, dug into the inhospitable mountains of Macedonia had other ideas. In appalling wet and cold, the invading force was repeatedly repelled such that by March of 1941, with Mussolini now personally in attendance, the putsch was abandoned. The campaign was a disaster for the Italians, who lost 12,000 men without gaining a yard of territory. The outcome was that Hitler took over, and in the spring, with 600,000 battle hardened troops, rapidly stormed through Northern Greece taking Thessoloniki in four days and entering Athens on 27th April.

Konstantinos Koukidis the guard charged with taking down the Greek flag from the Acropolis, did as requested but refused to hand it to the invaders, instead, wrapping it around himself, he threw himself off the monument, dying in the fall. The Government fled to Cairo before the invaders reached Athens to become the impotent Government in Exile.

The Greeks had a terrible war.

The occupation was brutal. By the time the Nazis finally retreated in 1944, 80% of the country’s industry had been destroyed, 95% of the roads, ports, bridges and railways were wrecked, the economy was decimated, and ten percent of the population were dead. Seventy thousand Greeks had been shot by the occupying forces, 879 villages had been razed, and a million were homeless. Eighty percent of the 60,000 Greek Jews had been murdered and the famine that followed the occupation killed a further 50,000. The atrocities meted on villages such as Kalavryta, Distono and Kommeno are amongst the worst waged against civilians anywhere in the conflict. By the end of the war, the Greek trading company, set up by Germany to pay for good and resources plundered from the country, was owed 476 million Reichsmark, which has never been repaid.

So, another question could be asked; would it have been any different had Metaxas said yes?

Had the Greeks acquiesced, those half a million troops would have been heading for Moscow and would not have been caught in the Russian winter that was to be a major factor in their undoing. Who knows what the outcome of that might have been? Certainly, history views the Greek invasion as an error and Hitler himself later acknowledged that the debacle was a costly mistake.

The Germans would have still arrived at some time, possibly before the Italian capitulation in 1943, and much would have looked the same; resistance for sure, raids and shooting of the occupying force, and reprisal killings, the destruction of crops, the purloining of assets. But the Italians were the least brutal of the invaders and some form of accommodation with the Government could surely have lessened the cataclysm of the first two years of the invasion, and the worst of the famine avoided. It has been suggested that the political exasperation by the desperate Greeks during annexation, contributed to their loss of faith in political processes, and this underpinned the conflict at the heart of the Civil War that followed.

Sorry I forgot to mention that.

While the rest of Europe was licking their wounds, reconstructing shattered infrastructures, coming to terms with their losses and rebuilding economies, the Greeks entered a terrible conflict between Government and communist rebels. Strife, killing and poverty wracked the country for another four years. Thousands were killed, and over 100,000 imprisoned, 10,000 on the now deserted prison island Yaros, (which we can see from Hari and Diana’s terrace, a dark and unwelcoming shape on the horizon). At the end of the civil war Greece was more economically broken and divided than before the Italian invasion.

The continuing political instability and divisions ultimately manifested themselves, after years of unsatisfactory government, in the military coup of 1969, leading to the Regime of the Colonels until 1974. Most of us know the more recent history.

In 1960 Germany paid 115 million Marks as compensation of war crimes, which the Greeks saw as a down payment. There have been no further instalments. In 2015, Prime Minister Tsipras evaluated the amount owing by Germany as €279 billion.

Perhaps when Harilaos expresses his dislike and distrust of politicians it is nothing more than a reflection of the turmoil his country has faced over the last seventy years, which staggeringly, he is able to recall first-hand. But his broad-minded outlook and lack of bitterness also expresses something of the open heartedness, charm and friendship that is also part of the Greek personality.

I ask him what would have happened if Metaxa had said na, yes.

‘It wouldn’t have made any difference,’ he replies ‘all he did was reflect the views of the population. We would have fought whatever he’d said.’ he says.

So, the reason why the Greeks still celebrate Ochi Day is because it was not one man saying no; it was the whole country saying no, and it is right that they should remember that, as their dogged defiance came at a terrible cost.

Back to the olives. The afternoon is gentler, Harilous takes a nap but Caro and I pick another tree before calling it a day. We end up with four sacks full to bursting, which result in 15 kg of oil (like wine always kilos not litres) of very good quality oil. Everyone is delighted.

Next week we pick our own. D & H say they will come and help, but I can’t let them. I have told Diana she can make a pie for lunch and Hari will open the white wine. Given the man and the task I suspect he will be early!