Among olives

"Now there is a new boss," says Thanasis. The undergrowth disagrees.

“Theo, you must clean. Here and here. Look my friend, look. Very bad. You must clean! Clean!”

They were some of the first words that Thanasis had spoken to me when we first met, about three years ago, on this patch of sunny hillside in the Peloponnese, marching through the undergrowth with our feet held high. I assumed that “clean” was a misreading of “clear”, until I later learned that the Greeks use the same word for cleaning a house as clearing land: kathariso. A thickety scrub had grown all around the olive trees, making it difficult to access them on foot and impossible with a vehicle and trailer. If I was to cultivate these olives and see a proper harvest one day, I’d need to take lessons from Thanasis and some of the other olive farmers lower down the valley, and keep the land clear.

There’s work to be done in paradise.

I had arrived that day in 2022 to be shown around the property by the owners, with a view to deciding whether or not to go ahead with the purchase. In reality, my mind was already made up and this was something I needed to do. Thanasis led most of the tour, pointing with a stick to where he’d made splodges of green paint on half-obscured rocks to mark the boundary of the plot. For reasons that I didn’t understand at the time, he knew this land better than anyone, and he wanted me to know the kind of responsibility that was in front of me.

Although quite a lot of “cleaning” was achieved during my visit last year, I arrived last week (after a longer absence than planned) to find that most of the vegetation had grown back, and there still remain areas of increasingly tough undergrowth that I’m yet to attack. “Five years ago, I clean here. But now there is new boss,” Thanasis adds with a quick and playful smile. I get the message, and the guilt kicks a bit harder. It’s been about 30 years since this place was regularly looked after; the reversal of its decline (or the undoing of its return, depending on how you look at it) is now on me.

The problem is, right now my priority has to be the house. When it’s more of a house and less like a leaky barn, it’ll be easier to spend more time here, store tools, and get the land under control. That was the main purpose of my recent visit – to set wheels in motion so that Thanasis and his crew (consisting of his cousin and two Albanians each costing €80 a day) can set to work rebuilding the old roof from scratch. I’ve decided against trying to bodge the current iffy one into shape myself; I’d much rather see the house treated to a new roof that will last decades, built by locals who know their trade. If it all goes to plan (and this is Greece, so who knows?) the work will be done by next summer. Then I can start saving up for the rest of it…

Research mission to a timber merchant in Tripoli.

At least the place looks more welcoming now than it did a week ago. Thanasis and I spent a day with a chainsaw and strimmer, creating big mounds of undergrowth and olive cuttings. One man armed with a tiny petrol engine can achieve in 20 minutes the kind of clearance that takes a whole afternoon using more traditional methods. It does rather call into question the viability of my hours spent hacking away with a bow saw and a pair of secateurs, but there’s a soothing kind of realness to the slow version. It’s quiet, light and immediate. With hand tools you make individual choices about which stems are cut, and where, rather than subjecting the flora to more general sweeps of destruction. The work is achieved without reliance on fossil fuel companies or whichever intercontinental supply chains will be necessary to manufacture and distribute the spare parts which, even here in the middle of nowhere, you’re closer to requiring with every thousand spins of a frantic little crankshaft.

Thanasis sharpens the chain on his chainsaw.

But I’m not going to be too much of a purist about this, and let’s not over-romanticise manual toil. Although I want to manage this land with as light a touch as possible, I’m not here to create Bonsai artworks. A lot more strimming and chainsawing will be required.

As for the olives themselves, this was my first time seeing them at the cusp of harvest season, and wow… Some of them came with me on Ryanair back to Blighty. But that’s another learning curve, for another post.