The above shot was taken a couple of days ago, just before sunset. The village is bathed in the last few minutes of sunshine and, if you look towards the bottom of the shot, you can make out some nets laid out beneath some olive trees down the slope from the village itself, in preparation for another early start next morning.

This past few days we’ve had quite a lot of interaction between ourselves and our neighbours in the village and its environs. We did a walk up the mountain on the opposite side of the valley, where we encountered Evgenia, wife of Manoli, the couple we met whilst walking there last winter. They have a house in the town, but usually weekend in the house on the hillside, across the way from the village. Evgenia was in one of the olive groves beside the lane, and was harvesting olives by hand, literally picking them like cherries. She realised that we were slightly nonplussed at the sight of the method she was employing, since it would mean that to harvest even the one tree would take about six months. Holding up the receptacle into which she was chucking the olives she’d picked, she explained that she was simply collecting enough to prepare some jars of ‘eating olives’ and that their proper harvest was carrying on apace over the hill, where hubby Manolis was currently labouring away. We asked her how many trees they have, to which she replied, “Oooh, about a thousand.”

Which leads me on to another conversation we had with a neighbour about the olive harvest. When a family has that many trees, they have always, in the past, taken on labourers on a daily wage to get the job done. This year, however, there is an acute shortage of workers, for a variety of reasons. Firstly, as another friend Giorgos told us, “The workers that are available simply want too much money for a day’s work. If they want to earn the kind of daily wage that many are demanding, they need to be skilled at the job and work a darned sight faster than many of them do,” he told us. At the rate some of them want, it isn’t financially viable to harvest the olives at all, which was why Giorgos said that he and his wife would be harvesting only enough for their own domestic supply of oil for the next year or so.

For there to be seasonal workers available to work only for the few weeks of the olive harvest is becoming more of a problem than in the past. Previously they’d have been Albanians, Romanians, even Pakistanis (many of whom work in the hothouses in the Lasithi area, which came as a surprise to us when we first learned of it). Such people, though, are simply not in the area any more, unless they already have regular work anyway, and that rules out them taking the time off to help with the olive harvest. It’s a problem that doesn’t appear to have any workable solution any time soon.

In our garden we have three olive trees, one in the upper garden, and two that are centuries old in the lower garden. We’ve now been in the house just over three years and this autumn we made the decision to give them all a hard pruning. We didn’t want to harvest the olives, even though they had a lot of fruit on them this year, because we have plants all around the trees, and to lay the nets would have devastated our flower garden (plus it’s a little too easy to get our oil from Dimitri and Maria next door!!). But we did want to keep the trees healthy and also let a little more light into the garden during the winter months. This is how the two in the lower garden look after the job was done…

Getting it done involved me shinning up into the trees with my trusty chainsaw on occasion, not an easy or even very safe thing to do, but there’s little alternative. It seems that our labours have met with the approval of the neighbours though, since several have commented that we’d done a good job and were especially happy because it means that there won’t now be showers of oily olives all over the lane for weeks on end as they fall in the wind. Once the ground is covered with fallers, you only have to drive over them or step on them to create a right slippery mess. Of course, we also received some advice about the job we ‘d done too. Lefteris, hubby of Filia, Evangelia‘s sister, took a look from below at the lower of the two trees and proceeded to tell me that I’d cut in in the wrong shape. It needed to be flatter along the top eye-line, he said. Frankly, it’s easier to get the chainsaw back out again than it is to try and argue, so I did as he suggested. Anything for an easy life.

A couple of mornings ago the phone went at around 8.50am. It was in the lounge and we were having our breakfast in bed. By the time I got to it it had stopped ringing, but I noticed that it had been Angla’i’a calling, and she only does so when it’s important, so I called her right back. It turned out that she and hubby Giorgos, a tender 86 years old (or thereabouts) were the only helpers that their son had as he was trying to lift a new bed-settee off the back of his pickup just across the lane from us and to take it into a house that’s unoccupied for much of the time. It’s owned by a family who now live in Athens, and they did use it back in the summer for a while. Seems that the dad, Dimitri, who was quite frail when he was here, has now died, sadly. Anyway, they had a new sofa-bed to install and another pair of hands was needed to get it off the pickup and into the house.

I told Angla’i’a that I’d be there in five minutes as, since she’s kindness itself, I actually look for opportunities to repay her kindness in some way. I threw on some clothes and went to offer what little brawn I have at my disposal to get the job done. After a fair degree of pushing and shoving, with ‘helpful’ advice about how to carry the thing and which way to turn or tip it, being offered by Angla’i’a and Giorgo, their son (who’d responded to the ‘advice’ with irritated retorts about us knowing what we were doing – which we didn’t really) he and I finally got it into position inside the house and I made my exit, back to bed and my breakfast.

Sure enough, as we expected, later in the day Angla’i’a phoned again. “Gianni,” she said, “Just pop down to the corner will you?” She finds it difficult to get up our steep drive with the problem she’s had with her knee lately, so I obliged and trotted down to meet her. I came back to the house with a bag full of fresh vegetables and some eggs from their hens. See, it’s a virtual impossibility to do anything for these people without them repaying you in some way.

We took a Greek coffee with Iraklis at the kafeneion on Saturday. It’s been a while so we thought we ought to put in an appearance. He said he still had one olive tree left to harvest, and had already brought home two tonnes of oil from the harvest so far. As you may know, they don’t measure the oil by the litre, but rather by the kilo. If you’ve read Rob Johnson‘s excellent and very funny book ‘A Kilo of String’ you’ll know that it’s not only oil they sell by weight, but a selection of other stuff too that would surprise the non-Greek. And if you haven’t read it, there’s the link right there, so do yourself a favour.

We couldn’t stay as long as we’d have liked with Irakli, as Yvonne needed the loo and, if you know Irakli, you’ll also know that he doesn’t like people to use the toilets at his kafeneion, because it means that he then has to clean them, a job that he tries to do as seldom as is possible. It’s been known for village regulars to pop home whilst passing some time at Irakli’s establishment, just so that they could have a pee. We were there long enough, though to learn that he owns three houses in Ierapetra. Poor soul, he’s so hard up. The place was quiet because everyone who’s not an old ya-ya, physically infirm or maybe a few sandwiches short of a picnic (and every village has one or two of those!) was in the olive groves, but one rough-looking horiatis did turn up in a battered old pickup, the engine of which was so badly in need of a tune-up that it chugged on for half a minute after he’d turned off the ignition and got out of the vehicle, the door creaking loud enough to wake the dead in the process, and he came and sat at the table with the three of us. He looked like he belonged in a Grizzly Adams movie, and his lined, bearded face cracked into a wide grin revealing a set of teeth that a dentist would rub their hands in glee at (thinking of what they could make while fixing it all) when Iraklis introduced us.

Appearances can be deceptive, eh? This extra from the movie “Deliverance” was quite erudite and revealed that his daughter had spent 7 years in the UK at University. Never judge an old pickup-driving Greek by the cover.

Yup, you guessed it, photo time…

The selection above are a few more from the village of Vasiliki, right across the valley from the impressive Ha Gorge.

Above: This one’s also from Vasiliki, but I wanted to show that door step, which must surely have seen a plethora of changes during its time in situ. It must surely have been there even when the Nazis walked this land back during the war, don’t you think?

That about does it for this one. Thanks for taking the time to read it, much appreciated.

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