By Default - A Story About Modern Greece

This is an extract from the first chapter of a novel that is in progress. The reason for publishing this extract on hub pages is to gauge reactions of those of you who are lucky or unlucky enough to read it. I would appreciate honest feedback as this is the purpose of publishing here. Your feedback will help me decide whether to change style and theme or continue. Please let me know that if you read this it would be interesting enough for you to want to read more. Thank you.

The old woman stopped and sat down on a small rock by the cobbled road. She looked up and saw that she had fifty more yards to the summit. The summit was a rock that stood like a sentinel, one hundred and fifty metres above the village. She was tired and even though it was late in the evening and approaching late September, the temperature was still up in the mid-twenties centigrade. There was no need to hurry she thought. The dead are not going anywhere. The cemetery that overlooked the village of Achinos had been part of the village for thousands of years.

The village had been there for thousands of years too. The present village is built upon the ruins of ancient Echinos, and is still guarded over by its impressive castle, which dates back to the 4th century BC and sits on the side of a rocky mound one hundred and fifty meters tall. On the summit of the rock sits a cemetery and a small church. The church dates back to 786AD and was the place of worship for the villagers before the modern church of Saint Ekaterina was built in the village square.

Nowadays the church is used to store the bones of the dead after they have extracted from rotting coffins to make room for the new dead. The cemetery was small and the average age of the villagers was up in the mid-fifties so the church of Saint Ekaterina holds more than its fair share of funerals and the small church in the cemetery has more than its fair share of bones. Before the cemetery was built the rocky mound was part of the fortifications of the ancient village. In those days the sea was much higher than it is now and almost lapped at the doors of the ancient village. Just as over twelve kilometers south of the village across the bay of Maliakos is the pass of Thermopylae where in 500BC, three hundred Spartans died delaying the Persian armies from their march south into Athens by defending the only pass that allowed passage from the north between the sea and the mountains. Now there the sea has receded also and made room for the main six lane highway to Athens.

Nowadays the bay has receded enough that it is two kilometers from the village and the relinquished land supports thousands and thousands of olive trees. Some sections of the wall, the tower and the old city remain in good condition, as does the monument of the Roman era. Fortified homes of more recent periods suggest that the history of Achinos remained impressive throughout the ages as being in direct line of raiding hordes from Salonika and northern Greece passing through on their way to Athens. They needed a means of repelling pirate raids. So over thousands of years Achinos suffered victories and defeats but was never entirely vanquished and today beneath the houses and gardens of the village lie coffins buried in haste wherever there was a spare piece of land. Those that excavated to build their homes often had to repatriate coffins and skeletons to cemetery at the top of the rocky mound.

But the archaeological treasures they found in between the coffins didn’t end up in the cemetery or the local museum; they were hidden at first and then smuggled out of Greece to Europe and America. Some families in the village were extremely well off although they did not work and it was not unusual for German tourists to spend time near the village to dig up treasures they had buried during their occupation of Stylida, a small town port twelve kilometers south of Achinos.

As the old woman gazed out over the village, from her perch atop the rock on the cobbled road, beyond the village towards the sea, the sun slipped over the horizon, and dusk started to cast its dark shadow. Some lights already had been switched on in the village below. The most prominent being the blue cross that sits atop the dome of Saint Ekaterina, the village church. Further down from the church the lights of the café’s and the souflaki eating places were just coming on. A bunch of Albanian workers were sitting in George Magouda’s caffenion and souvlaki place. They had finished harvesting in the olive groves for the day and were taking a break before the job of grading the days olives begun.

George was the president of the village which meant that if anyone had a problem concerning a noisy neighbour, or a dog barking late at night, or the local council had failed to clean the rubbish off the streets again, they would go to George and he would politely listen to their complaint before announcing that the local council had no money and fixing the problem would require funds. Those that knew George were well aware that it was George that required some funds and that if they were not forthcoming nothing would be done about their problem. George justified his position by self imposing two criteria. If a village resident met his criteria he would not be so blunt about the need for funds. To get a polite answer you had to be an Olympiacos supporter. Olympiacos were a soccer team based in Piraeus who generally won the Greek soccer championship because they had more clout and more money than any other team in Greece's 'Super League'. The second criterion that George imposed was that you had to belong to the PASOK political party. They were the party in power which had started out as a left wing party in 1976 but as the years went by and their members of parliament became richer, they gradually moved towards the Liberal centre and some would say beyond. Not that anything would have been done even if George was an honest citizen because the council really didn't have any money at all. They were as bankrupt as Greece was.

The old woman didn’t like the Albanians at all; in fact she thought them disgusting. They smelled and they lived anywhere they could find. In warehouses or old stone houses that people had left empty. She had to admit they were hard workers though even if their daily wage was quite expensive at thirty Euros.

She could see people walking along the village’s main street, some carrying plastic bags holding the shopping they had just purchased from the supermarket owned by Maria Petridis. It was the only supermarket in the village and had been there in one form or another since 1947. It was in that year that Maria’s husband was handed the keys of a small dairy by his father. Over the years the small dairy became a mini market and then a small supermarket and except for one son Christos, the whole family worked in the business.