Papas and the Englishman

Roy Hounsell

Description

In 1980, Roy Hounsell and his wife try to establish themselves in Corfu. In 1991 they buy a tumble-down property in mountainous Zagoria in Northern mainland Greece. They struggle with the rebuilding, helped by the village priest, Papa Kostas, create a garden out of the jungle and join in with the villagers to become regarded as locals.

Sujets

• Travel writing

Informations

• Publié par: Yiannis Books
• Date de parution: 07 janvier 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783013111
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

THE PAPAS AND THE ENGLISHMAN
From Corfu to Zagoria
Roy Hounsell
Introduced by John Waller
YIANNIS BOOKS England
Acknowledgements
I would like to say that without the enthusiasm and encouragement of Ainley Brownhill (my wife Effie), born and bred in Ilkley, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, it is unlikely any of these events would have happened, and this book would never have reached fruition. And thanks are owed to our good friend Tim Waller and his computer skills for the final editing. And particularly to John Waller, our publisher, who accepted the manuscript for publication.
THE PAPAS AND THE ENGLISHMAN
Copyright 1997 by Roy Hounsell
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without the permission of the publisher except for quotation of brief passages for reviews.
Published in 2007 by YIANNIS BOOKS 101, Strawberry Vale, Twickenham TW1 4SJ, UK
Typeset by Mike Cooper, 25 Orchard Rd, Sutton SM1 2QA Printed by Antony Rowe, Chippenham, Wiltshire
Front cover: Bridge near Koukouli by Peter Jenkins Back cover: Koukouli Church by Roy Hounsell Map of Zagoria by John Chipperfield
224 pp ISBN 978-0-9547887-3-5 ISBN 978-1783-0131-1-1(eBook)
THE PAPAS AND THE ENGLISHMAN
From Corfu to Zagoria
Acknowledgements
Preface
Introduction
Oh not to be in England ... !
A house in Zagoria?
Buying the house - a saga
Moving in
Koukouli - a lifestyle
Chipero and Christmas
Winter... and Spring excursions
Easter - Rebuilding begins
Walking the Vikos Gorge
Visitors to Koukouli
Village Panegyri, Ioannina and the Pasha
Day trip to Albania
The last chapter...
ZAGORIA AND THE VIKOS GORGE
PREFACE
He s crazed with the spells of Far Arabia. They have stolen his wits away.
Walter de la Mare
When we first announced our intention of buying a house and living in Zagoria, a virtually unknown area of Greece close to the Albanian border, our friends looked at us askance. Clearly they were thinking, They re crazed with the spell of far Zagoria. It has stolen their wits away!
Well, if our wits have been stolen away we can only say we are a good deal happier without them. Our life here, in the village of Koukouli, could not be more contented, more rewarding and trouble free. This is the story of our search for an idyll which, unlike most Holy Grails, we eventually found and held on to. As with all stories it has a beginning and, in our case, that beginning happens to be in Corfu. So, read on - come with us on our quest and delight with us, witless as we are, in that quest s end.
AUTHOR S NOTES
Some purists will insist that the area of Greece about which I write should more correctly be referred to as Zagori. However, many people are happy to call it Zagoria, a name more rounded, more evocative of distant lands. I invoke artistic licence.
All characters in this book and the places described are real. The observations recorded are mine, and mine alone.
INTRODUCTION
Robert Carver, in the prelude to his book The Accursed Mountains tells how he was interviewing Patrick Leigh Fermor for BBC Radio 3 and, off microphone, asked him If you were eighteen now, in 1991, and you wanted to go somewhere - somewhere right off the map, with no tourists or modern developments - where would you go?
He frowned and thought hard for several moments. Epirus - the north, the mountains. You might have a chance of finding places there.
It was in 1991 that Roy and Effie Hounsell moved into their place in Zagoria.
In 1966, Patrick Leigh Fermor wrote in Roumeli - Travels in Northern Greece : Through the sierras of the Zagora, beyond Vitza and Mondendri where they grazed their flocks in summer, runs the narrow and terrible gorge of Vichou, falling sheer in a chasm to great depth: a dark chaos of boulders and spikes through which, when it is in spate, a tributary of the Ao s river foams with a noise like faraway thunder. But whenever their talk veered to the summer pastures of the Zagora, all their eyes lit up like those of the children of Israel as they thought of Canaan.
It was in 1966 that we fell in love with Corfu. Soon afterwards we built a small summer-house above the deserted west coast.
In spring, as we went over the mountain behind us, we would look east across olive groves covered in flowers to the twin forts of the town, the silver sliver of sea and the snow-topped mountains of the mainland. In summer, the breeze would cool us under the shade of our huge olive tree and in the evening we would swim off empty beaches. In autumn, after great storms turned the bay far below white as rollers roared in across the open Mediterranean, glorious sunsets towards Italy would herald crystal clear days with the mainland mountains now covered in snow.
Though our trips to the mainland were few, we always visited the majestic monasteries of Meteora but never explored the wild north-west of Greece with its Vikos Gorge and the 46 villages of Zagorochoria. Last October Nick the Pool persuaded us to go and stay with his friend and ex-pool man Roy Hounsell who had left Corfu and turned a derelict house in one of the villages into a bed-and-breakfast.
Less than an hour and a half after leaving Igoumenitsa we crossed the Gorge, near its source, beside a glorious Ottoman style pack-horse bridge and arrived in front of Koukouli church behind which was the square in the village centre - the plateia or mesochori - with its ancient plane tree in the middle and the exquisite fountain complex to one side. A narrow cobbled path led past houses, some derelict and some restored, to a stone roofed gate and into a tranquil, secluded, sun-trapping courtyard between two rebuilt traditional houses - Roy and Effie s Place.
Two days of self-indulgent tourism followed: beyond Monodendri at the viewpoint of Oxias we had our first sight of the Vikos gorge, the deepest in the world - the Grand Canyon is just a canyon - dropping 1,000 metres into the chasm below; over the top of the pass to the north, we investigated the monument to the Greek Army and the local people who stopped the Italian invasion of the country in November 1940; at the village of Aristi we stopped for spoonfuls of Glika , fruits preserved in sugar and their juices, and a glass of water; we forked right to Vikos with its arcaded church in the plateia and another dramatic view of the Gorge; after our return to Aristi we forked left over the Voidamatis river and took a dip in a cool pool before zigzagging up 19 hairpin bends to finish at Megalo then Mikro Papigo and the spectacular view of the Pyrgi or towers , as they turned pink in the sunset. In the churches we found frescoes and in the mansions magnificent wall paintings. We ate well, first in the little taverna on the Koukouli plateia and then at a taverna past the gorgeous three-arched bridge below Kipi. I even heard the haunting Epiriot Clarinet.
Over lazy breakfasts Roy told us of his life in undiscovered Zagoria and the trials and tribulations of re-building the two houses. I found that his story, though twenty years later, mirrored ours in Corfu. Before we left, I mentioned my two books, Greek Walls and Corfu Sunset .
Out of the blue, he produced his own manuscript. From its pages I found that Roy was quite a character - even if slightly curmudgeonly. He wrote with wicked humour and much feeling. He had restored a little bit of lost Greece in Koukouli and had brought income into a once-dying village. He was no fair-weather lover of Zagoria: in the winter he didn t leave for Athens or abroad but stayed with the remaining fifteen villagers to brave out the snow and the cold. He and Effie have now become part of the village. This is a story that too few of the new migrants to the Mediterranean can tell.
JOHN WALLER
Agios Gordis, CORFU August 2006
Oh not to be in England... !
Corfu in September is a truly beautiful island. The main mob of tourists has beaten a retreat and migrated back to the gloom and wet of the north. The Italians, who spill off large ferry boats onto the island during August, have packed up and gone with their cars, boats, blow-up beach toys and their grandmothers. All the heat and clamour and nerve frazzling intensity of the main tourist season have abated. Magnolia and Jacaranda trees hang heavy with blossom, grapes are ripening on the vines, people are altogether more relaxed and a delightful languor has taken over.
Redundancy, the great leveller, had been instrumental in bringing us to the Greek island of Corfu. The world of Marketing and Advertising is always the first to fall in a recession along with notable trades such as Car Sales and Household Furnishings. With magnificent miscalculation on my part I had moved, after fourteen years of service, from one company to another only to find myself, two years later, made redundant as the Marketing and Advertising Manager of the Household and Furnishing Department.
Thirty eight would not normally appear to be a great age, but in the advertising business it s the same as turning the pages of history backwards. I wrote a convincing C.V. showing a steady track record; went to interviews full of confidence and came back with none. Weeks of this demoralising procedure followed until, in my last interview, the truth was finally driven home to me. The interviewer was a smart young man of about twenty three, well groomed, clean and impeccably dressed in the way all young Account Executives are. He was perfectly polite but kept glancing at his watch as if he had something better he d rather be doing. Nevertheless we plodded on with the interview until suddenly he started to pack up his papers exactly as though he had come to the end of reading The Nine O clock News. Looking up, he smiled.
Without being personal, Mr. Hounsell, I m afraid that in this day and age you are... how can I put it? Well... just a bit too old for this sort of thing.
I came home with the finality of this news hanging over me to the comfort of my wife, an