Health and Safety in Greece

A few things we’ve spotted recently have all come together as a bit of an eyebrow raiser – it’s a land of contrasts.

The Good

We saw a pre-school with several plastic ride-on toys accompanied by a line-up of red cycle helmets.  Helmets must be an EU regulation for licensed childcare premises.  Seems a bit over-the-top, but then my son and most of the people I know survived pre-school without brain damage. 

Walk into a bar on a Friday night at home and almost everyone will be drinking alcohol.  Here, people (even young people) will rarely drink alcohol before 9pm.  Young people are more likely to be sipping on a frappe.  Here (as in Italy) it’s usually the tourists who drink to excess.

Spot the two large glasses of water!

In every café, bar or bakery where we’ve sat down to eat or drink they have always served us a large glass of water too, free of charge.

The Bad

Takeaway lunch

Helmets are compulsory here, but the law doesn’t specify that you need to wear them on your head.  It’s normal to see people zipping, or chugging, around on scooters and motorbikes without helmets.  Sometimes they'll comply with the law (if not the intent of it) by wearing it slung on their arm.  Children are often transported helmet-less too.  It looks like fun, but don’t do this at home!

It’s illegal to smoke in enclosed public places in Greece, but you wouldn’t know it.  Restaurants, cafes and bars are usually smoky, sometimes very smoky.  However, the only person we’ve seen smoking on a bus is the driver.  Cough, cough!

 In Greece (as in Italy) they do not have rubbish collection at the door – you need to take your rubbish to large bins along the road, which are emptied on a regular basis, usually.  These bins are usually ‘home’ to several feral cats, so you need to take care to not startle them.  I got a hell of a fright one day when a grotty looking moggy shot out of a bin in front of me as I off-loaded a bag of junk.  The SPCA would be running in circles here.

Imagine a paddock of olives trees partly enclosed by a fence.  Said fence consists of upright posts standing about a metre tall and connecting said posts is a twisted line of two lengths of rusted barbed wire.  Keep your children on a leash at all times!

Our hosts took us to their favourite local restaurant one evening and the owner nabs him (an architect in his previous ‘life’) to discuss the building work he’s planning to do the next day.  He was planning to remove a load-bearing wall upstairs and wanted to know if the planned supporting beam was strong enough.  Lucky we turned up that evening.  His planned beam was far too small.  He went ahead the next day but went with the concept that if double the size is required, quadruple must be better!  Our host is now concerned that the old mud-brick walls may not be able to handle the huge weight of the reinforced concrete beam.  In future we’ll try to make sure our downstairs table is not under that beam.  Looks like the EU doesn’t have a hand in building safety standards, yet!

Chainsaws are used to remove olive tree branches during the olive harvest - you can read more about it in our earlier post.  Does anyone else hear alarm bells ringing when someone mentions climbing a tree, with or without a ladder, with no protective gear, and a running chainsaw?

Of castles and (more) olives …

Methoni

After six weeks here we have been getting a bit stir-crazy. Winter time in rural Greece is very quiet, apart from the buzzing of chainsaws (a vital piece of olive harvesting equipment). We’ve walked to the nearest town (Koroni), our local village and supermarket (Harakopio), down to the beach, and to the other nearby villages. Many times. Though the scenery is lovely: olive groves, sea, sand, mountains, white houses, and more olive groves, we’ve felt the need to get out and explore.  We have taken the local bus to another nearby town but it is much the same. Luckily we now have use of a rental car so we put it to good use last weekend with a drive over to the other side of this peninsular.

Typical village

The Peloponnese are mountainous so most of the inland roads are narrow and very windy. The interior is almost exclusively olive groves. Very agricultural. So we headed due west across to the other coast, to the village of Methoni.

Now a quick historical interlude … after the fall of the Roman Empire (which controlled Greece at the time), the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantine), out of Constantinople (now Istanbul) took over. They had some control of Greece until the start of the Crusades, one of which sacked Constantinople. The Europeans (collectively known as “Franks”) took over parts of the coast to protect their fleets on the way to the Middle East. The Venetians also arrived to build castles to protect harbours for their fleets. Then the Turk arrived during the Ottoman Empire and controlled Greece till the 1820’s when it became independent. Hence most of the castles dominate ports and were variously built and extended by Franks, Venetians and Turks.

Koroni and Methoni are “twin” forts, both built by the Venetians and later enhanced by the Turks. Koroni is impressive but Methoni is magical. It has the full walls around a peninsula with towers and tunnels to explore, along with the remains of some old buildings. It is big enough to have contained an entire town, though the French shifted that inland in the 19^th Century. The walls are very strong with many openings for cannon. At one stage 7,000 Venetians held out 100,000 Turks until four supply ships arrived. They got so excited (Italians!) that they rushed to the ships and left the walls, the Turks promptly overran the fort and butchered everyone.

 Note the three stone cannonballs

On a glorious sunny day we spent several hours wandering all over the place, and only met three other people there. Being winter, the gate was open and no admission charge. We recuperated at a nearby café where we splashed out on a real meal rather than the pastries we normal economise with - the meal was fabulous.  We sat outside in the sunshine, partly to avoid the smoke from the locals inside. While there an old guy arrived on his scooter to sell the café owner some vegetables, followed by a couple of guys in a van with a selection of cheeses, which we were invited to sample. In the past it was common for people to load up their donkey (or van these days) and spend weeks roaming around the countryside selling off their produce. Whenever we are in the local towns we often here a loudspeaker, it comes from one of these mobile shops advertising their wares.

Nice views - and more olives!

The coast road north is interesting – if you like olives – and it takes you to the attractive town of Pylos (or Pilos*), laid out by the French in the 19^th Century. We thought it the most attractive town we have seen recently, nicer than Koroni. It has a lovely deep-water harbour – Navarino Bay, the site of an Athenian victory over Sparta and, 2,500 years later, a naval battle where the Turks were defeated, which led to Greek independence. Along the northern edge of the bay are long sandy beaches with closed-down restaurants and the remains of a Frankish castle on a hillside. We almost made it walking up to the castle but got attacked by some vicious natives. Many bites later we retreated to the car and protection from those mozzies … they even dined through clothing, landing on us as we walked, despite the breeze!

Farnkish castle at Navarino Bay

Also near the top end of the bay is “Nestor’s cave” where many ancient Greek tablets were found dating from Homeric times. There is so much history here in Greece, mostly ancient as it is hard to tell how old the houses and towns are, but there are the various castle remains (13^th - 17^th Century), the odd Turkish-era well, quite a few old Byzantine churches, and then the really old classical Greek remains.

Olives arriving at the Mill

We wandered back home via some very windy roads in the interior past, you guessed it, mostly olive groves. The locals were out harvesting some and at one stage we came across a mill which was full of people and their piles of sacks. A good day out in the mighty little Daihatsu which may, or may not, have been insured. We ring up when we want the car (it is parked in our drive all the time) and the rental company are supposed to book insurance for the day. I suspect they only do it after an accident …

* Note that there are several different spellings of many place names as there is no direct transliteration from the Greek alphabet to our Latin one. Our local village is marked on maps as Harakopio or Charakopio.

Olive Harvesting Greek-style

I thought Italians were excitable but they seem positively Germanic after a couple of days olive harvesting with the Greeks. We were subcontracted out to help a local harvest his trees.  He is a market gardener and certainly knows how to produce a good olive crop. While most people are getting a fraction of their normal crop this year he has a few spectacular trees. While we made do with three and a half 70kg sacks of olives from this entire place (38 last year!), our first two trees at Yorgo’s produced four sacks, that’s 140kg per tree for the mathematically disinclined. Admittedly they were huge trees and difficult to pick – they were well watered and probably well manured too. He has a plentiful supply of the latter from his chickens and goats.

Harvesting Greek-style is “different". Like the Italians, it starts with putting down the nets on either side of a tree. Then comes the arguments about where the nets should really go: good, full-bodied shouting matches, and this is just between the three generations of family members!  After a couple of reshuffles someone hops up the tree with a chainsaw running but without any sort of protective gear. Various olive-laden branches come crashing down while everyone else whacks at the remaining branches with a nervous eye looking upwards. They use sticks the size of walking sticks for the lower branches and long poles with a plastic fork attached for the higher ones. Hitting the branches as hard as possible seems to be the aim, olives fly in all directions. Often they land on the nets.

A local on the threshing machine ...

One useful invention is the use of the threshing machine.  This strips all the olives off a cut branch very quickly and feeds it into a sack – very efficient, though it also propels olives everywhere else too. Of course there is no protective equipment anywhere, we managed to use work gloves and wore hats which help ward off the torrent of olives when someone is hitting a branch on the same tree or using the thresher nearby. Safety goggles? We took some the second day once we realised the risk but they were not offered and no one else bothered. Strange when olives are hard and eyeball sized…

The worst of the twigs and branches get raked off the nets and then the olives get put into sacks. Carrying these sacks around isn’t pleasant when they are getting full (70kg). We far prefer the Italian plastic bins for this, they carry 20kg and are easy to carry and stack. But we’d hate to break with tradition and be associated with [apparently] whimpy Italians.  We're with the Italians on this one!

Lunch makes up for all the hard work. Almost everything we had was produced on the farm, from all the vegetables, olive oil, olives, feta (from the goats), and lashings of wine. Bread was the only item bought. After a lot of eating, drinking and conversation (none of which we understood), we were back to work. This was a repeat of the morning but with even more vocal arguments over net placement (presumably due to the large intake of wine) and some unsteady chain-sawing.

Much as it was interesting, neither of us would volunteer for more picking in Greece. All the stick beating is hard on your body and, by not understanding the language, the somewhat illogical way they work is frustrating. Given the arguments then perhaps they get frustrated too.  For example, we saw a lot of olives missing landing on a net so we placed a spare one next to it to catch them. Nope, not the right thing to do. One of the family rushed in and dragged the net off to the side and left it in a heap so the olives kept being lost. Oh well.

For our efforts Yorgo kindly dropped over a large water bottle of fresh olive oil, which we tasted with our Christmas lunch.  Very green and peppery and, at this stage, still cloudy - it's wonderful!