The vanishing line – Agios Efstratios

It seems like a funny week to talk about democracy. The morning after an election is all sore throats and dry eyes, a squint towards the White House and some of us will worry if the same reverberations will be again felt all across europe. The world awaits. Populist rhetoric has spoken. The oft butchered quote about those who fail to remember history get condemned to repeat it feels apt, but it also begs some questions about democracy.

There is only one Museum of Democracy in the whole world. It is on an island called Agios Efstratios. 

As we boarded the small clunky Aeolis ferry docked at Lemnos, it was abundantly clear this boat that with its plastic seats and piled up shopping bags and freezer boxes was not primarily a tourist boat, but a lifeline for the islanders. I looked around as the young captain asked for our names and birthdates, and just as he started to write them in his notebook. He chuckled nervously and handed over the pen, smiling ‘You write them, please’ 

I wonder why we gave our real names. Who would know? Who would know who we are this far from anywhere? The horizon is a fine line to disappear into.  

It had been a funny summer anyway – a kind of here and there sort-of-time where I’d found myself ricocheting from one situation to another, one country to another. Unsettled and unfocused, I’d suggested madly to go walking in France for a month along the wilds of the Brittany Coast. That was bliss, but we couldn’t walk forever. There were several points I’d thought had there been an unsubscribe button to click that unsubscribed me from my life I would have pushed it and not looked back. But less dramatically of course – what is a life if not fiction, wrapped up in a layer of loose facts?

After a few weeks in England, I’d gone alone to Lesvos at the end of August where under the olive trees and swampy waters of Kalloni my disappointment eventually calmed to nothing more than a little ebb of irritation. I found a renewed sense of purpose, a loose rope of intentions. I might have been restless, but I had plans, things to run away from, things to draw myself toward, and of course, to write. 

So we then went to Lemnos and met its brutal bare hills and odd mix of architecture. Myrina is a flat, blank seafront dotted with taverna’s and cafes – a smattering of English and Dutch holiday makers. On a cloudy day we walked up to its looming castle, met wild deer and even wilder goats. But what struck me about Lemnos is it’s an island that understands how much it seems to be willing to offer to the visitor. With this I mean we found a clear idea of separation ‘here is the tourists’ things; the beach bars, the car hire places and the tavernas where the menu hasn’t changed for 20 years’ and then over here is the local life that goes on regardless – the school, the people who eat late, who shop local, who work at the army outposts; the endless combat trucks that ferry workers to the base. The only island without any discernible bus service at all – I asked and asked, all people said was they ran out of money. It also has a strange number of abandoned hotels – overgrown plants, furniture strewn in pools, concrete ruins, monuments to ambitious 1990s dreams of planes full of international arrivals. It still only has one UK flight a week. There were a few signs that things are changing – houses for sale and a lot of renovations. 

Lemnos was calm and the beaches quiet so we kept on saying to one another, let’s stay a few more days. September started to end and the last plane loads of straggling tourists arrived. All we heard from apartment owners and restaurant waiters was how busy it had been, the busiest summer so far, soon we can all rest! One Sunday we lay on the scrappy beach in the port and felt an earthquake rumble beneath us, time to move on, I said. 

We made arrangements to go to Agios Efstratios ahead of time and were told that a woman named Galina would meet us at the port. I’d read there are very limited accommodation options and who could say if it would be busy or not. The Aeilos ferry to ‘Ai Stratis’ goes once a day and on the port we stood out; with our backpacks instead of Lidl bags and necessary provisions.  The journey was calm, the sky blue shimmering across the sea  – for a few hours it was possible to imagine this was how ferry hopping used to be. An open deck, a clunky slow boat, a ticket for less than a couple of beers. The old days before high-speed lines and monopoly pricing.  It was enchanting – but this island is not stuck in the past. It can’t afford to be.  

On the horizon and a pod of dolphins joined us halfway passing nothing, just open deep sea for two and a half hours from Lemnos. Ai Stratis is the last island on the barren edge of the eastern Aegean, population 312 at the last census.I have always been drawn to the idea of a small remote island as a singular escape. Figuratively. Literally. Physically. Some islands offer this. Others’ are places where escape is impossible. Round and round we go, eventually bumping into ourselves. 

With only one settlement, no real paved roads, just dirt tracks that edge up towards a mountain and a line of wind turbines it’s difficult to locate yourself here. There’s no way to get around, no car hire, no bus service. There isn’t even a petrol station, because I imagine there is no need for anyone to go round the island unless you are one of the few remaining farmers with a 4×4 and need to round-up some sheep. The silence surprised me – not even a low hum, or  burst of a moped. But after a few days the small village showed us a recognizable rhythm. The mornings’ on Ai Startis start with church bells, the clatter of the garbage truck, birds singing. The woman next door talks to each person passing by. The island’s tiny town lives in a rhythm, the silence of what went before and won’t again. The same as a poet becoming a God. Slow at first then patterns emerge. The agony of words. The agony of isolation. The agony of being.  

The island has an undeniable history of exile and imprisonment. Named after Agios Efstratios who exiled himself in the mountains. Ever since the 1930s it was a place Greece sent internal political prisoners. First under Venizelos, and later during the Metaxas Regime  and then during the Military Dictatorship of the Junta, right up until 1974. This is why it houses the Museum of Democracy – to help navigate that often forgotten past. But what we discovered was that it was closed that week! 

But what is obvious when you are there is the close presence of the past – the harbour has a whole range of wall paintings of the artists, poets and musicians who were imprisoned there. Yiannis Ritsos, Makis Theodorakis to name a few. A poem stands out: 

I don’t have time to get tired

I don’t have time to cross my arms 

I don’t have time not to love, not to hate, not to want to be killed.

Give me your hand – and from the beginning – another beginning 

At 5, yes at the crossroads. The world is ours.  

It takes power for exiled artists to go on creating and writing thier way through the darkness, because what is art without resilience to claim back that narrative? The island filled me with a sense of hope – even in the ghostly remains. The whole original village of 500 buildings was destroyed by an earthquake in 1968. By 1951 the population of the island was 3,849 – (only 1,170 local inhabitants) over 2/3rds of the island were political exiles. How did that function?  I’ve read some papers and understand that in a way the island functioned normally and certain exiles lived as part of the community eventually – separate at first but then forming bonds over time. There were women and children there too; exiled families that lived in communities while the men lived in sparse camps on the hillsides. They were mainly left to fend for themselves – there were guards and order, but threats of death more likely from starvation than violence, but that’s the thing about a far flung island – there was nowhere to escape to.

 All that remains of the original settlement even now, just marble flagstones and the odd pathway leading upwards to nowhere but dust and rubble. It seems like the earthquake happened yesterday. When it happened, 22 people died and many of the buildings were partly salvageable – but the Junta Dictatorship said it wasn’t worth saving. So history gets rewritten again with the community erased, moved on to flat pastures by the river where people once farmed the land and had enough to survive. It was a political crisis of the Junta – an economic choice to rebuild cheaply and quickly just keep the island functioning as an open prison for exiles. The residents who owned damaged property who weren’t on the island on the day of the earthquake quite literally lost everything. Property size or numbers owned, meant nothing. A Military man decided that these mildly interesting architectural houses were of no use half ruined and commissioned a builder to build a new town over the farming land- now that builder was all about utilitarian functionality and built box-like houses, all with either one or two bedrooms depending on how big the family was I assume but perhaps that’s too generous. 

I am sure houses must have been grand in the older town – two stories, rooms, balconies a plenty and compensation of being given what essentially looked like concrete cube built shoulder to shoulder on a grid formation was little comfort when all was lost. But islanders relied silently, I am sure those who survived chose to stay for reasons and others who could start a new life elsewhere did. As for the exiles, they stayed right to the end in 1974. 

In the silence birdsong is a cacophony – the flap of the crow’s wing audible for the first time away from man’s noises, engines and anger. As night fell on the day we arrived I heard mewling kittens cry a notch louder than the cicadas singing the last of their summer song in the dying September days. The cats sound like babies bundled up in the building site of the old stone church – a chorus of mewing cries rises from the stone. The small brown birds, thrushes so universal, scamper to nest in the gaps of the terracotta tiles in the medical centre’s roof.  

Last year there were three small mini-markets. Now there are two. In th height of summer it there are a number of small bars and eateries – but all had closed up by the end of Septmeber. Over a week eat at the same taverna 4 nights in a row – the younger waiter brings us the same drinks every night. He tells us what has been cooked today – three choices, salads, stews, something grilled. Locals drink coffee in a small cafe area at the side of the taverna. One woman comes in every night and brings her own packet of crisps. They watch TV and chat, read the news on thier phones. Tik Tock videos blare.   

At sunset we lie on the warm concrete of the basketball court and name the first lit stars as they pop into the violet sky. All week we are the only ones who go there. There is an outdoor gym that we don’t see anyone use. We count the people we see and can’t fathom that there’s 300 people here at all. At the port there is a large sign for a Green Island and E-Bike charger Initiative funded by some american eco company that talks about sustainability in the language of boardrooms and policy. People shrug when we ask them if they have enough supply from the wind turbine. I search online and it seems to be in press releases that in 2010 the island was announced as a Green Island and by Winter 2014 this year it will be running entirely off grid – all the locals’ houses will get heating powered by solar and wind.  

Some people have electric bikes, we see them use the shiny new electric charge point for bikes and vehicles. There is no petrol station but people still drive the 300m across the whole of the town ferrying older people to the shops. The only vehicles that leave the town are 4×4’s or farmers trucks. One of the men who sit outside the port station all day, doubling up as firemen, policemen and port authority workers – one walks all day, back and forth, along the harbour and back and back, sometimes on his phone talking, chatting away. Other times he listens to music headphones on, in another world. 

There was a small child running around with her mum and grandma. She say YA YA at us and we all smile and its impossible not to wonder how she will fare as the only child in her year at school. The kids are taught at one school at the back of the village, which also has a big basketball court. If there’s 30 kids here in total that would surprise me. A girl in her late teens pedals a mountain bike around the streets, right up to the port. At night she and her friend jog haphazardly across the same route, staring back at the men who stare at them. Each night the taverna has an array of men in groups, we play guessing games, engineers from the solar electric plant, workers posted here for a week or two. I realise they are not locals because the locals do not greet them as they do the others.  

On our last night a big yacht docked into the harbour causing a fuss with disco music blaring from speakers. It brought American voices echoing across the ink black water. They walked around and talk to one another like people who are shipwrecked pointing at buildings and wondering out loud who lives there. The locals carried on their evening volta, greeting one another in the streets – kids on bikes chasing their long shadows under the acidic orange street lights, the girls jogging again. Once the boat people have walked the perimeter of the town and the sun has dipped they go back on board, maintaining a distance from the island – our exile in the embers of summer. In the morning I hear the man from the shop tell them off for wandering on the paths. He gently tells them it’s not safe and asks them if they know about the earthquake. The woman answers ‘Yes, we know all about that’  backing away, stopping to pet a kitten in the churchyard. In the gaps between all the worlds so much is unsaid. 

The Museum of Democracy ended up being closed all week – so we walked up hills and looked at the monuments to the dead prisoners at Agios Minas. We read names of the Greeks and the lone German pilot who crashed onto the island. We hiked through oak trees where dry leaves were starting to turn a rust colour and wondered if the cows still roamed free (as the sign said, not a warming, just a fact.)

I looked up the Aelios boat just to see where it was. It’s moored up in another harbour. No connection to the mainland for anyone this winter. The Mayor of Agios Efstratios has been on the news talking about it. A decade ago EU funding of 19 million euros expanded the port so large ships can dock, but none do. The island with all that green power and no connection. 

I’d go back in a heartbeat not just because I never got to see the Museum of Democracy, but it’s a place that feels like hope. That’s what we all need right now.

Meet me at the basketball court as the sun fades into a line.

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