Fiare Luăm

There often are some specific sounds that one associates with specific places, so much so that when you hear those sounds your brain seems to automatically register you present at that specific place. These sounds seem to have become so familiar and so connected to a place, that their presence is not questioned any more, they are part of the place, part of the background. For example in Athens, there have always been some mobile sellers who use pick up vans to sell everything, from pots and soil to fruits and vegetables. Others collect old household items, from chairs and beds to fridges and washing machines and others simply ride around to advertise forthcoming theatre productions. What they all have in common is a megaphone and someone calling out what they are selling or buying and what they are advertising. These days some of the sounds are pre-recorded, but when I was small they used to improvise on the spot and call out loudly to everyone, making rhymes or even singing out to advertise their services. The theatre production callers often used music too to attract their audience. These sounds are so familiar and associated with Athens in my mind, that if I heard them one day in London, for an instance my brain would think I am in Athens. It would be a confusing thing.  

I believe that a similar sound for a British person would be the ice cream van. I think that its music must be so synonymous to a childhood place or a vacation town, that it would bring you straight back there, were you to suddenly hear it in a foreign country. Ironically, when I first came to study in Newcastle, I often heard this strange music playing in the late spring afternoons underneath my house. I had no idea where it was coming from, as the van remained obscured from my view. I could tell that the sound was moving closer, then staying at one place and them moving away. But I found it an eerie and melancholic sound and it took me two whole years to finally work out it was an ice cream van announcing its appearance. I still find it quite extraordinary that two principally identical means of advertising mobile goods and services -using loud music or words- have such a distinct and unique association with a place, that I was unable to make the connection and guess that the music was there to advertise and sell something, just like it does in Athens.

A few years ago, I accompanied a good friend of mine to a short trip to Bucharest. Her apartment was in the centre of the city and we used it as our base for our ventures further out. The first day I was there, I was woken up by the most melodic singing voice I have ever heard in a man and sat up on the bed completely astounded. I had no idea what to think of it and I could only tell it was live and not recorded singing and that it was coming from outside the window. The second morning, I woke up before I heard anything and was waiting to see if I would hear the singing again. Soon enough I heard the same man singing and I opened the window to try and locate where it was coming from. I could not see anything below, the protruding balconies were blocking my view of the road. I could hear though some brass tingling and jiggling noises and some clicking noises too. I then thought that maybe someone was singing to a girl they liked below, in the fashion of  a "candatha" love song of some Greek islands. On that day I told my friend about it and was thinking of this singing voice and its tune all day. The voice was stuck in my head and the tune was very haunting, repeating the words that sounded to me like: fare lui, fare lui.

The next day I woke my friend up earlier yet and we sat out on the balcony to wait for the man to sing again. And then we saw it; a horse and a carriage coming from all the way down the road, the hooves of the horse on the pavement clicking and the voice approaching, already really melodic from so far away. The cart was full of metal bits, parts of copper pipes, rusty cylinders, oil drums, brass handles hanging from ropes; everything was moving and making brass bell like noises. The man's voice was approaching so loud and haunting, I wished I was some sort of talent hunter person to take him off the street and straight into the opera house. If he wanted of course. I have never heard anything like his singing and my friend said he was saying "Fiare Luăm", which means literally, metal I take. For the second time I was unable to identify sound as the means for mobile sellers to advertise their goods and services; my familiarity to the Greek mobile sellers was so place-specific, so localised, that years of listening to their megaphones in Athens seems to have made no difference at all.

I find this occurrence quite disturbing. I suspect that a similar thing might be happening with other very familiar things, not only with sounds and their connection to places. I find the beach where I spent a big part of my childhood summers so familiar to me that it almost feels it is my own. This summer I came across some pebbles on it which I have never seen there before. I came across them by chance when Aretousa picked up one and gave it to me. They look quite normal when dry, but once they are wet they reveal a very strange, almost futuristic network of lines all over their surface. There are not that many of them on the beach and I made a point of collecting only a few. These small little pebbles were such a shock to my sense of knowing the beach and my familiarity to it, that they fell literally like small bombshells on the whole summer. I took them out of my pockets and wet them and placed them on whatever was around and kept on checking them again and again. I found it quite amazing that a natural thing like those pebbles could have such a linear and geometric design on them; that what I considered a very natural place, with earthy colours and familiar single-colour pebbles, would suddenly produce these strange, almost man-drawn lines.

But mainly, the shock was to my sense of familiarity to the place, to a place where I feel extremely comfortable, and to the arrogant -and of course false- notion that one might really know a place or a person inside out. The crucial detail that things could change or that you simply fail to notice things seems to become obscured by that sense of comfort and familiarity, to the extent that I was unable to recognise something so familiar as a sound advertising some mobile goods, in a slightly different context, twice. But these pebbles were such a big surprise to my personal notion of the beach, that I suspect in the summers to come I will be much more perceptive to it and the way it has become now, after so many years.

Sea Monsters, Part Two

I might have only been able to find some small and fragmented samples of "Sea Monsters" on the beach this year, but a new breed of things seems to be making itself present there, in a very conspicuous way, not solemnly reserved for after-stormy weather. The best time to observe this is just after sunrise during a walk along the beach. Many people with dogs choose to do that in the early morning, so that the dogs have a chance to swim too before the beach gets busy with kids and people who object to dog bathing. They are the people who typically pick up these things, not because they want to clean the beach or necessarily pass them on to someone, but merely because it is almost impossible for anyone not to stop and pick them up. During such a walk you would be sure to come across many forgotten beach toys. People stay on the beach till after sunset, so probably by the time they decide to leave they can hardly see what is been left behind. The toys just lie there on the sand, on the pebbles and amongst the dried seaweed. Most commonly there are plastic rakes, moulds, spades, boats, buckets, cars, balls and so on. What makes them irresistible, even to serious adults, is their bright colours and the way they stand out like huge candies scattered on the beach.

The first time I was aware of this, is when my aunty brought back from her walk a pink plastic spade and a green plastic rake for Aretousa. I thought it was an one-off incident to come across these things, but as the weeks passed by more and more things were brought back. Of course Aretousa was much more taken by these things than any other present bought for her, including her own brand new set of beach toys, which remained almost untouched throughout the summer. Many thoughts passed through my mind then, things like: why do people keep on forgetting and losing their toys week after week? How come that amongst the toys we have been finding we still have not come across the same design twice? How many different designs of rakes and spades are out there? If the toys are not picked up by anyone -which is very rare as by ten thirty in the morning the beach is almost always clean- or if they are left on a bench in the pine forest, then someone will eventually pick them up, pass them on to a kid they know, who will eventually forget them on the beach and so start the circle again. So the beach becomes a place for exchanging toys really, as no one seems to care whether they still have their original set of beach toys or they are just playing with found ones.

A sample of beach toys found within a fortnight

This might have started like a little summer surprise and a treat for a small girl, but it soon turned into a bit of an obsession with me. Every morning I was waiting to see what kind of shape was brought back and what colour and size it would be. I observed that the colours which came up most were, pink, purple, green and orange. They all had a kind of powdery, pastel finish to them, which made them look like some sort of sweets even more. Then a very sad and unreasonable thought came to me about this new kind of "Sea Monsters". When such colourful, useful and fun things lay on the beach on a daily basis, how would any kids be expected to look for the kind of "Sea Monsters" of my childhood? On the beach, with its natural, earthy colours, these objects stand out so much, it is almost offensive to my eyes. My love for natural colours, my inability to apply paint on top of any three dimensional object vaguely resembling a sculpture and my reminiscing of old "Sea Monsters", all rebel against these newcomers. But then, I remember that with a closer look, the pebbles and the sand itself have quite bright colours. My cousins and I used to collect bright pebbles and bring them home. When we reached home they were dry and looked pale and dull. But when we put them under water again all their colours came back to life. Then the most absurd thought came to my mind: what would it take for my small, delicate samples of old style "Sea Monsters" to be noticed on the beach? What if they were the same colours as these beach toys; is that what it takes for a natural shape like that to stand out? Of course, little did I care about other people's perception of painted bits of broken and twisted roots. What I was really interested in was to see if I could bare to paint these things with bright colours and to observe what became of them once painted.

And so, with a few left over wall paints, I started to try and recreate the prominent colours of the toys: pink, light purple, dark purple, orange and green. I got the colour combinations right almost instantly and intuitively for some, but I found it almost impossible to arrive at the very powdery, pale purple used in these toys and the very distinctive green, which seemed to have an enormous amount of yellow in it. It was very important to me that the colours were as close to that of the toys as possible, to recreate this soft, plastic, toy-like feel that is so distinctive and characteristic about them. Dipping the pieces of old fashioned "Sea Monsters" in the paint was actually quite a satisfactory experience, but I only managed to cover two of them completely; the rest remained only half submerged in paint.

After that all that remained for me to do was take them to the beach and see how they looked there.

I really did not know what to think of the pieces of "Sea Monsters" painted and dropped on the beach then, and I still do not know what to think of them now. I only know that I preferred finding the old fashioned "Sea Monsters" the way I did back then and I prefer finding the new, plastic toys the way we did now. But because I remained unsure of what to think of them, I brought a few back to London and what a surprise it was when I saw them laid out on typical London backdrops. They looked more at home here than they ever did covered in paint on the beach and seemingly unaffected by their journey as they were, they fell right into place amongst the colours of London's transport information leaflets. At the end of the holidays we had around four bags full of plastic beach toys, of which we gave away a big portion to friends and acquaintances with children. Near the time when we were preparing to leave, I had the reoccurring dream that I was walking on the beach at sunrise and I was scattering the remaining plastic toys around for the early walkers to find. I almost thought I should do that, but of course never did and they are all still in a bag waiting for Aretousa to play with next summer.  

Sea Monsters, Part One

When my cousins and I were young, we spent the biggest part of the long summer school holidays on the North coast of the Peloponnese, with our Grandmother. The small town we stayed at had an endless long stretch of beach looking into the Corinthian gulf, a beach with both sands and pebbles, which used to vary in quantity and order, depending on the tides and winds. The beach was the centre of the holidays for us, not just for the swimming and fishing, but because we spent the largest amount of time on it, exploring every little part of it and shifting through the sands and pebbles as the summer went on, through our games, our walks and with our hungry eyes. Every element of the beach with its ever-changing layers of sand and pebbles was an area of great importance to us, an area to search for shells, to build forts, to create cities, to discover strange and rare pebbles, to dig for water, to hide and bury treasures.

Just behind the part of the beach which belonged to the small town, lay a thin line of an old pine forest, no more than forty meters wide, which run parallel to the beach, creating a small almost imaginary world between the beach and the main road. The rare type of pines growing there were at least 130 years old, with very tall and thin trunks -which typically divided into two near the ground- and with a narrow canopy with a bright green colour to match. The pine trees which grew nearer to the beach, resembled old Japanese Bonsai trees and had trunks that were twisted and tormented by the winds, trunks running close and parallel to the ground, turning and winding as they went, as if they were caught dancing and froze to the spot. Below them they created hidden spaces, where you could spend a whole day reading, drawing and talking, without anyone ever knowing you were there. Other plants that grew along the beach were unruly bamboo and wild reeds. In the old forest also grew exotic eucalyptus trees which shed beautiful and fragrant silver-pinkish shavings off their bark and also some very large wild Greek , bitter smelling, laurel bushes.

The sense of time disappeared in that little stretch of forest, which miraculously was cool and shady, with strategically placed spraying hoses watering its rare trees. Countless times during the summer we completely forgot ourselves and stopped in the forest on the way back home from the beach, looking for pine nuts and hiding our treasures below the twisting pine trees, getting in a great amount of trouble when we eventually got home. Very very rarely did anything interrupt these summer days of ours and everything I remember of them is still as vivid as it was then, the intense scorching sun on the skin, the taste of salt that became permanent after the first months on us, the smell of the pine trees and the feel and familiarity of the sea and the beach, both of which had become our second home by the end of the holidays. But towards the end of August, almost every year without a miss, strong winds hit the gulf for a few days and then everything changed.

After a non-stop run of two months of swimming, playing and fishing, we had to stop and wait for a few days till the summer storms passed. That abrupt change was such a shock to our summer lives, that we practically did not know what to do with ourselves. The skies turned dark grey and deep purple, with heavy clouds racing through. The hours before the rain broke out were so intense, with the smell of the rain so real and the sky so unbearably heavy with low clouds, that it was almost impossible to sit and wait for it. We took our bikes and rode up and down the harbour (you were not allowed to ride bikes in the forest at the time) and stole glimpses of the beach opposite to see at what condition it was in. When the rain broke down it went on for ages and the waves rose high, more than five metres at times, swallowing up the beach and changing all the order of the sands and pebbles. The beach almost disappeared for a few days, we had to wear long sleeve blouses and I could almost smell the freshly sharpened pencils of school and September coming. Sometimes we thought that this would have been the best time to leave, we would be leaving in a couple of weeks anyway, while the beach was unrecognisable and off limits. Maybe this way we would not miss it as much in the winter.

But the storm always passed quickly and in a few days we were able again to resume our summer routines. But the first day back at the beach was always filled with great anticipation, for most kids, but also held a small amount of secret fear for some. I remember a small kid, younger than us, of a slender and short build and huge blue eyes, who was particularly dreading the first day back at the beach after the storm. He was the youngest son of a fisherman and hung around with us a lot as he was left to his own devices for most of the day. The waves, winds and rain had not only changed the sands and pebbles in the beach in such a dramatic way that we did not know any more one patch of the beach from the next, but they also had brought some very strange things with them.

All along the sea shore lay many alien things, amongst the wet seaweed, on top of the pebbles and spat far out in the dried sands near the pine forest and amongst the reeds. My cousins and I used to divide the newly brought things into categories for fun, and count which category had more members. There were man-made things, plant matter, dead things and unidentifiable objects. Most times there were strange twisted and manipulated by the sea roots, branches and sea plants, which did not exactly look menacing by themselves, but somehow looked odd and out of place on our beach. Often there were huge dead fish, half eaten and rotting, placed on the pebbles. If no one threw them away, they stayed there drying out by the sun, day after day, till they became mummified and shrank. I can see now, how in the eyes of the small boy these things could be a bit menacing and I think what was menacing about the whole thing was the anticipation, walking on the beach on tip toes, looking around and checking, lest you stepped or tripped on one of those things. The alien feel of something like that under bare feet was indeed a very unwelcome experience.

The little boy called these things "Sea Monsters". For me personally, the ones that were most scary, were the man-made objects. Bits of engines, shoes, clothes, ropes and cogs, boat bits, even bits of beds were spat out on the beach. They always gave me goosebumps, they carried a story with them in my mind, not an innocent one, and were so out of place there that I preferred to let other kids handle them and dispose of them, while I took care of the dead fish. Once there was a very odd thing on the beach, which made all kids, even the oldest ones hesitate. Near the water line a long shape lay there, like a crouching human body, moving slightly with the touch of the small waves. There were no identifiable legs, but the torso-like shape was so human that we all struggled to see what else it could be. Eventually someone must have gone to turn the thing around, while everyone else looked the other way, to reveal a long beach umbrella, broken and twisted, its frame creating this body-like shape, the faded fabric the body's clothes.

When other kids realised the little boy was really scared by these "Sea Monsters" and was keeping his distance avoiding to come near or touch them, they did their best to make things worse for him and teased and tormented him about it a lot. My efforts to make light of things for him and shake his fears away were in vein, so I thought as a last attempt to advise him to ask his dad, hoping that being a fisherman, he would put the little one's fear at ease and laugh the "Sea Monsters" away. The next summer, the little boy seemed quite grown up and less affected by the "Sea Monsters", so I assumed his chat with his father had helped ease his fears. But when I asked him he said he was very happy he had spoken to his dad, because his dad had told him that he did very well to be scared of these things, that he had to respect the sea and fear it and that what happened to these "Sea Monsters" is what happens to everyone who does not realise the strength of the sea. So the boy was now much calmer in the knowledge that his fear was justified and prepared to walk around and touch the "Monsters" with everyone else. I was not sure at all of what to make about this turn of events; better for a boy to be scared of relatively unreasonable things or better for him to be happy that his fears -even of unreasonable things- were founded and that belief making him calmer?

I did not really like the reasoning of the fisherman very much, especially as at the time our Grandmother was using on us all sorts of sayings and rhymes; like 'Just as you make your bed, that's the way you'll sleep in it', 'I was where you now are and you will soon come where I am', 'An apple a day keeps the doctor away' and so on and so forth. Amongst these sayings was one that I particularly disliked and I somehow combined with the fisherman's logic in my mind. Things the adults said in those days had a great weight for me and I tented to believe almost everything I was told. She used to say 'As you get older you become what you are most afraid of'. So, while the little boy was calmer by his father's advice on "Sea Monsters", I started to realise that what was making me uneasy about them, were my own stories that I made up surrounding each one of them. And then I thought that it would be that, my undoing, the power of my mind to imagine all sorts of stories. But the more I tried to control my mind not to think of any stories, being afraid of what I might come up with, the more absurd the stories became, so that eventually the stories themselves, and in their root my own mind, became my "Sea Monsters".

These days, unless a small shark is spat out by the waves, no one seems to be searching for "Sea Monsters" after the August storms on that beach. I could find only smaller pieces of things here and there and only one dead fish, albeit in pristine condition, with no visible clues as to why it had died. The "Sea Monsters" I have picked up now are much more miniature, delicate and refined than the ones of my childhood and they definitely do not create any fear in me. But then again I am thinking that maybe I have lost the power to see the "Monsters" as I did back then and the ability to weave stories around them. That, I think, is the reason that makes me bring them back to the house and eventually all the way to another country. The things look so out of place back in the house that I almost feel I should take them back to the beach. But they are the day's finds and how they stand next to the "real" things of the day is a very interesting thing.

Sea Monsters on the Political Scene

Sea Monsters of the Current Affairs

Sea Monsters and the George Polk case