Trekking in Greece. Tim Salmon
and my route became the backbone of the first edition of this guide in 1986. Since then I have added descriptions of most of the interesting mainland massifs so that the book became a general guide to mountain trekking in Greece.
At the time of the last revision I acquired a colleague, Michael Cullen, who was born and grew up in Greece and founded its first ever trekking company. This time we decided to change the format of the guide quite radically, ditching almost everything in favour of a single route that runs pretty much the length of the country from the northern frontier with Albania to the southernmost reaches of the Peloponnese. We have accordingly also changed the title to The Peloponnese and Píndos Way, in the hope that this will give the book a clearer focus and identity and help to attract walkers to come and sample the real charms and beauties of Greece’s mountains.
If you are in any doubt, there is no better taster than the blog of Jane and Alan Laurie (http://greekhiking.com) describing their epic 2014 walk from the Préspa Lakes on the Albanian–Greek border to their home in the southern Peloponnese, most of it following a route identical with or very close to ours. And keep an eye on our websites, www.thepindosway.com and www.thepeloponneseway.com, for additional photographs and various extra snippets and bits of information which we will add as time goes by.
Tim Salmon
Ascent from Ayía Paraskeví to the Tsoúma col. Smólikas in the background (Píndos Way Stage 28)
INTRODUCTION
Mountains cover most of Greece; many are over 2000m (6500ft) in altitude. Most are limestone, the massifs cut by a complex geometry of deep ravines. To people who know only the summertime seaside, the mountains are surprisingly green, forested and well watered. In their more southerly reaches, the Greek fir, Abies cephalonica, is the characteristic tree cover from 800m to 1800m. Further north, the black pine, Pinus nigra, takes over, with extensive beech woods on the colder faces. Springs abound, and rivers run all year round. Snow cover lasts from November to April. But the mountains’ special beauty lies in the fact that they have remained not untouched, but largely bypassed by modernity.
They are hillwalkers’ rather than climbers’ mountains, but you do need to be in good physical shape to explore them. Routes – although not technical – are physically demanding because of the variations in altitude, the distances involved and the absence both of organised facilities for the walker and of restorative creature comforts. Meals and supplies – when available – are basic. There are a number of fairly active local branches of EOS, the Greek mountaineering club (known in English as the Hellenic Alpine Club or HAC), but they are not really of any use to the visiting walker and their huts are, with only two or three exceptions, unstaffed and locked.
Since the early editions of this guide, modern life has impinged on the mountains, mainly in the form of roads and bulldozed tracks. This has made navigation more difficult, because road construction has both destroyed paths and – more importantly – made them redundant. People travel by vehicle and the paths are no longer maintained.
Looking north-west from Áï-Liás chapel (Peloponnese Way, Stage 9)
On the plus side, there is a growing awareness among Greeks that their own back country is worth exploring and that walking, climbing, canyoning and mountain biking are worthwhile ways of doing it. There are also signs that even the local authorities have woken up to the fact that there may be some commercial advantage in encouraging such pursuits. It is not always consistent, but there are several areas where there have been attempts to clear and waymark paths. Guesthouses have sprung up in the remotest villages. Most importantly, from the walker’s point of view, the mapmaking publisher Anávasi (www.anavasi.gr) has appeared on the scene with an extensive series of detailed, accurate and GPS-friendly maps.
Armed with map, compass and guide, and possibly also with GPS, you should not encounter too many problems. Indeed, our hope is that you will come to see the relatively uncommercial and primitive nature of these mountains as an essential part of their charm.
Traditional mountain life
You can still get a sense of how traditional mountain life must once have been, although much has changed over the 40 years since this book was first researched. The biggest change has been the end of all economic – essentially agricultural – activity in the mountains. Already in the 1970s the population had been drastically reduced by emigration, but those who remained were still able to maintain a bit of farming activity. Now they are too old and too few. There is no longer any cultivation. There are no young children, no schools anywhere. The only economic activity is the arrival of the shepherds in May, bringing their flocks to the mountain pastures for the summer, and the seasonal return from the cities of now retired émigrés, sometimes with their children and grandchildren in the school holidays. Many villages are almost completely deserted in the winter.
Sheep grazing above Anavrití (Peloponnese Way, Stage 12)
There is a certain melancholy in the overgrown fields and crumbling houses. Yet, paradoxically, there is more life and investment than there has been for years. The children of those who emigrated have become prosperous enough to rebuild family homes for holiday times. Village squares are freshly paved. Churches are restored. There is at last a sense that there was something valuable about the life that has been lost, and people have begun to take a pride in saving what they can.
A little history
Mt Veloúkhi and the site of old Víniani (Píndos Way, Stage 9)
In the north and west of Greece you still find descendants of the shepherd clans, the Sarakatsani and the Vlachs, who have preserved a separate and distinctive identity to this day. The Vlachs in particular are interesting because their language, in contrast to all the other Balkan tongues south of Romania, is Latin-based. No one quite knows who they are or how they come to speak Latin. Traditionally semi-nomadic, with no written language, they have left no records. They call themselves arumani – Romans. While they are obviously not Romans, the language they speak is probably not much different from that heard round shepherds’ campfires 2000 years ago.
There are villages throughout the mountains, and you wonder why places so rugged and inaccessible should ever have been populated. But it is this very inaccessibility which provides the answer. People sought refuge in these natural fastnesses, especially from the Turks, who overran and controlled the lowlands from their capture of Constantinople in 1453 until, in the case of northern Greece, World War I. The outlawed sheep-rustlers and brigands – the klephts – made their hideouts in the mountains and formed what we would now call the liberation army that finally drove the Turks out and instituted the beginnings of the modern Greek state in the 1820s.
During World War II, many Greeks took to their mountains again to form one of Europe’s biggest Resistance movements. With the outbreak of Civil War in 1946 – for which many Greeks blame the British – a new generation of outlaws made the mountains their base. This time they were Communist guerrillas, mostly veterans of the Resistance, who felt that Anglo-American domination, restoration of the monarchy and the return of the old politicians from their safe wartime haven in Egypt was not what they had fought for. It was this war which occasioned the promulgation of the Truman Doctrine and America’s first attempt to halt the feared domino effect: the conviction that if one state fell under Communist influence, then others would follow.
The mountain communities endured 10 years of war in the 1940s, more than their fragile economy could stand. Populations were evacuated to the lowlands to