The Burning of the Morea

Never in the world did I think that I’d be writing about wildfires more than once in a summer. But I’m preoccupied by the Peloponnesian fires, and the implications of the government’s lack of insight (as well as the possibility of duplicity—scapegoating in order to deflect criticism). I ache when I think the tragic irony implicit in the deaths of a mother and her four children who fled the fire—but whose house survived intact—and those of the couple who refused to leave their only donkey. I’m cheered by the successful efforts of the man who doused his neighborhood with his homemade wine, using a hand-cranked crop sprayer, and saved several homes. But I’m also reminded that, for all our civilized veneer, we are, at times, at the complete mercy of natural processes (whether or not they occur naturally).

I had already begun to regret my mention of the fires yesterday, only in passing, on the way to a different rant, when I read today’s article in the Times, “In Greece, Wine Saves Life; a Mother’s Arms Do Not,” and saw the vivid pictures of the fires in progress, and the aftermath. The situation deserved more consideration than I gave it, because I have loved this particular part of Greece since I first read Nikos Kazantzakis’s description of it, Journey to the Morea, during the summer after I my first year in college. I checked it out of the Hickam Air Force Base library soon after I arrived in Honolulu to spend the summer with my parents, and to be reunited with my brother, whom I hadn’t seen in five years. I spent much of my time pumping gas at the base service station, arriving home exhausted, and retiring to my room to read another chapter. I renewed the book several times (mostly because I was also reading John Fowles’s The Magus, which was a bit more riveting), and am not sure I ever actually finished it. But the double dose of Greece I soaked up over that summer left me with a persistant affection. I stood many times on the beach, gazing out over the Pacific, imagining that I was standing on the verge of the Mediterranean instead.

Five years later, at the Greek town of Pylos, I stood on the ramparts of the old fort, overlooking Navarino Bay, thinking of Kazantzakis, and of that summer, as I entered the third year of my first marriage (which would last only four years altogether). Nearby stood the site of the ancient Palace of Nestor, where Telemachos had gone looking for his absent father. I had begun to study archaeology by then, and had embarked on a three-month trip to ancient sites with my husband, a budding classicist. Pylos was our second stop in the Morea, after Olympia—a site saved from the fires by enormous effort, and only just. That summer we had taken the train from Patras down the coast, through much of the territory that would be almost unrecognizable after this summer’s devastation.

And although I carried the Blue Guide to Greece and a copy of Pausanius as references, the manuscript that truly illuminated the journey was that of Kazantzakis.

My trip through the Morea and the rest of Greece amounted to a rite of passage. I learned firsthand about Greek food (which I would come to love above all other) by choosing from fragrant pans in taverna kitchens, about train and bus travel, about incredibly friendly people, and about staying in tiny unrated hotels. I got to use my fledgling modern Greek (even phoning for reservations in Athens), caught a nasty throat infection on the way to Crete (which led me to “the best otorhinolaryngologos” on the island), and took photographs that would stand me in fine stead decades later in my humanities and art history classes. I still have the painstaking notes I took at each site: Olympia, Pylos, Sparta, Mycenae, Tiryns, Delphi, Knossos, Mallia. And now I go in search of the book that led me there, driven to revisit Kazantzakis by news of wildfires that have nearly obliterated an entire landscape.