The Vikos Gorge
The Vikos Gorge is located in Northwestern Greece, in the
province of Epirus and its region known as "Zagorochoria"
("Mountain Villages"), a group of forty or so villages that
remained largely autonomous during the Ottoman years; the
uninformed visitor is free to distinguish them based simply
on the "brilliant melancholy" of their roofs: instead of
the usual red, you are greeted by grey roof tiles, dictated
by local commerce and mineral availability rather than high
level aesthetics.
Roughly speaking, the gorge runs from the village of Monodendri
("Single Tree") to the village of Vikos; at least, this is the
right way to cross it, as long as you know where you are going.
For, exiting (ascending) the gorge at Monodendri should be
quite an operation; in fact, I would not even have been able to
find the beginning of the path without the help of a Dutchman
who in turn was consulting a book :-) The beginning of the path
is so uninviting that our "group" lost two members right at the
beginning: those young Frenchmen were planning to stay there
and search for fossils! While still a non-technical hike, the
gorge is not to be taken lightly: the crossing can easily take
6-8 hours, ending in an arduous ascend towards the village of
Vikos, rather than in a refreshing swim in the Libyan Sea--as
is the case with Greece's other well known (and considerably
easier) gorge (Samaria), discussed here not too long ago :-)
Once down at the gorge, you keep going and going ... Through
the river's dry bed in the beginning, climbing a bit on the
banks later on: for, the round stones that litter the gorge
keep growing, until they reach gigantic, unclimbable proportions,
silent witnessess to a turbulent past. The dirt path along the
bank is well defined, but not very "protected", and there are
a few tricky spots where it is "spoiled" ("chalasmeno"); those
spots you cross quickly standing "straight up" rather than
slightly leaning "perpendicularly to the path", as my Dutch
mountain consultant explained--a former Himalayan hiker, he
was marching from Metsovo to Ioannina *followed* by his French
girlfriend (I joined them for part of the hike).
Generally, there isn't much water at the bottom of the gorge;
none at all, in fact, until you reach the source of the river
Voidomatis ("Bull-eyed"), a tributary of Aoos River. Through
Aoos, Voidomatis leads all the way into Albania, and that
valley is nowadays crossed in the reverse direction, on foot,
by desperate Albanians (many of them of Greek ethnicity) looking
for jobs at the local sheepfolds or, mainly, in the fields of
Thessaly; I met two of them shortly after parting with my
Amsterdam companions, being rather nervous, only to be asked,
mostly with gestures, whether I had seen any "stratiotis"
(soldier). Most such encounters are "uneventful", because,
I suppose, these people are, however desperate or even hungry,
far from being innate criminals; or, perhaps, as a local man
put it to me, "if they do something wrong they know that they
are not going to leave the gorge alive". Anyway, while they
often enter Greece on foot, these Albanians tend to return
home by bus, carrying anything from a sack of flour to a TV:
indeed, the 5:15 AM bus that left Ioannina for the Kakavia
border station that morning (and every other morning, and
several more times per day) was packed.
As the path started to ascend towards Vikos (the village),
becoming more brown than green, I was able to see the source
of Voidomatis from high above, and saw someone taking a plunge
into it, and another person sunbathing; it looked absolutely
inviting, but I preferred to keep going as I didn't know how
far I was from the village. After some misadventures around
a "spoiled" portion of the path, I met a young woman whom
I first addressed in English, not realizing that she was a
Greek teenager from Vikos, on her way to look after some goats.
She plainly discarded my complaints about the path, but did
answer several questions about the region; she also told me
about the colorful kayaks running Voidomatis that the villagers
used to watch from that very spot--*when the river had more
water, that is*--and pointed out the location where a German
rock climber had been killed a few years back. Most important,
she assured me that I was virtually at "the village's gates".
Right before entering Vikos I met the people whom I had seen
enjoying Voidomatis' source: a young couple from Thessaloniki,
the woman slightly embarassed because of, I conjecture, some
naked sunbathing; I considered requesting a ride from them to
the bigger village (Papigo) where they were going, but chose
to find some lodging at Vikos (there are less than ten rooms
available, I estimate) with the idea of descending down to the
river--without that backpack this time. In the village I met
a number of interesting characters, like the guy from San
Francisco who now lives in Madrid and an American woman who
moved to Istanbul after six years in Athens: a potentially
explosive conversation was averted by her departure, together
with everybody else, for another village :-)
The descend to the Voidomatis' source was "orchestrated" by a
number of barking dogs that were returning to the sheepfolds
after a day's hard work. Save for an abandoned hut, there are
no signs of civilization anywhere near the source, which, by
the way, gradually moves toward ... Albania--as Greece, and
not only, becomes drier, that is :-( The water is said to
stay at 48F year round, attracting from local boys (later to
complain of arthritic pains, I was told) to urban women (mostly
from Ioannina) seeking a tighter skin. Plunging into that "silver"
pool of cold, pristine water around sunset time--no point in
thinking of sunset at the bottom of a gorge, of course--and after
"a day on the road" was great fun, but not for too long: once again,
I recalled Samaria and, in particular, that warm, gentle surf of
the Libyan Sea ...
The ascent back to Vikos was kind of frantic: because of the
coming darkness, I opted for an "out of the path" short cut,
ending in running up a steep hill on my fours, desperately and
momentarily grabbing the bushes (for a better balance): no time
to appreciate the exquisite fragrance of some of them,
unfortunately. After returning to the path, a routine hike
brought me to the outskirts of Vikos, where I took a rest by
a tiny "outer chapel" ("ksoklissi"), one of many that dot the
Greek countryside, representing all kinds of "tamas" to various
saints. I had passed that same ksoklissi
when I first arrived at Vikos a few hours earlier, of course,
but this time I had a better
chance to look at it--together with the moon, that is. And there
was a touching surprise: the few bills that were left in it (the
financial aspect of the "tama"!) were not Greek, but Albanian!
Quite simply, the destitute Albanians take whatever Greek money
they find there and replace it by their (worthless in Greece)
Albanian currency; that way, the ksoklissi's saint will certainly
forgive them (Muslims and Christians) or, better yet, will protect
them during their rough, unpredictable, endless journeys ...
Next day I took a walk around the village, trying to comprehend
how small it was. I did not see the "goat girl" again, but I kept
thinking that she probably was the only girl of that age in Vikos;
she had told me, in fact, that she spends the winters elsewhere
in order to go to high school. There was very little to see or do
at Vikos, not even a cafenion--although the owners of the grosery
store do prepare meals for the tourists (in my case, a sandwitch of
home-made feta); so, I decided to walk to the nearby village of
Aristi, where one can catch a bus back to Ioannina. (I do not
think, by the way, that it is even "mathematically" possible to
depart and return to Ioannina (by public transportation) *and*
cross the gorge on the same day; other ride arrangements have to
be made if one does not want to spend a night in the gorge area.)
Aristi ("Best") features a "luxury" hotel, under the very hill where
the Greeks stopped the Italian Army's advance toward Kalpaki (November
1940, a turning point in that WWII episode). Relaxing there for a
day, I had a chance to meet a number of locals, including the hotel's
owner: a limb old man, who had spent years and years, day after day,
crossing a large portion of the gorge *twice*, (goat operations, again).
While I was having lunch, I saw him receiving two young Albanians
with friendly gestures and inviting them in for a free meal and
a (shared) beer. The two lads remained totally silent, in a very
sad way, both during and after the meal; then they departed quietly,
their final destination being Trikala (and the cotton fields, I guess).
According to a local young man, their ominous silence was not so much
a result of fatigue or depression, as of fear: several locals speak,
or at least understand, Albanian, therefore whatever they would have
said to each other could be heard and reported (??) The same man
explained to me how he deals with the possibility of unwanted, yet
inevitable, encounters with Albanians in the mountains: rather than
carrying an ax, as he used to do, he now simply wears an old Army
uniform, causing the Albanians to lift their arms and cry, fearing
immediate deportation: "stratiotis, stratiotis!"; oh well, I myself
did not see a single soldier in the greater gorge area. I heard of
other ways of dealing with the Albanians, too: like having a loaf
of bread handy and swiftly extend it towards them, without any
other gestures or words, for example ... Locals have also learned
that if they "mistreat" an Albanian, he and a gang of his friends
are likely to return after a few weeks or months: it's more or
less a frontier zone with its own laws and ethics!
In the evening, over dinner, that kind old man who had crossed the
gorge innumerable times and seen all kinds of people passing by,
made a pronouncement on the human race, when it came to discussing
the war in Bosnia; addressing the young "ax man", he asked him:
"if someone offered to you some good evidence of having a solid
chance of exterminating the people of ... (a nearby "unlikeable"
village), wouldn't you be tempted?"
(Memories from a trip through Northewestern Greece, July 1992)
[Posted on soc.culture.greek in April 1994]
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