CHARLIE CHAPLIN WAVED TO ME

The captions to this and the rest of the pictures in this article may be discovered 

by reading Adam Yamey's  Charlie Chaplin waved to me 

Capturing memories of youth...

"The attic of my parents’ house in north London contained a number of old Revelation suitcases. These were plastered with ageing colourful paper stickers bearing the names of shipping lines and also of places such as: Cape Town, Southampton, Harwich, New York, Montreal, and Rotterdam. Had they been animate and able to speak, what tales they would have been able to tell!

If, as a child, I had become a suitcase, I too would have been covered with an exotic assortment of stickers including some of those mentioned above. But, I did not become a piece of baggage, and the stickers that I carry are not made of paper. Instead, they are memories stuck in various compartments of my brain. Unlike the inanimate objects in the attic in the eaves of our house, I am able to speak: to divulge my impressions of the places that I visited in my childhood; to describe the remarkable people I met in those places; and to reveal the unusual experiences that resulted from travelling with my learned father and my talented mother."

Adam Yamey's latest book, Charlie Chaplin waved to me, contains his memories of the holidays and trips that he took with his parents, mostly during the first eighteen years of his life. 

They are worth relating because they differed markedly from the kinds of holidays that most people took during the 1960s and 1970s. Rather than exposing their children to the sun on the beach, his parents preferred to expose their 'kids' to cultural experiences that, they hoped, would benefit them in the future. This was due to Adam's father’s great interest in the history of art, which resulted from his mother having been an artist. Whereas now he appreciates what they did for him then, he did not always do so at the time ...

Here is a very brief extract from the book:

 " ... my mother noticed a gondola draped with green cloths pulling up at the corner where the nearby small side canal, which ran alongside the Pensione Seguso, met the much larger Giudecca Canal. The gondolier, a young man, was dressed in green livery that matched the drapes on his highly polished black boat.

Soon after this gondola had moored, we noticed our elderly American fellow diner emerging from the main entrance of the Calcina. He headed straight for the recently arrived gondola, and then boarded it. Next, he sat down, and then started reading a newspaper whilst the gondolier began to row him across the Giudecca Canal. We watched his gondola crossing the water until it disappeared into one of the small canals that traversed the Giudecca Island. We were fascinated and intrigued. After he was out of sight, we began our morning’s activity.

My mother was never shy when she needed to know something. So, after lunch that day, she stopped our mysterious American lunch neighbour and asked him about the gondola and its liveried oarsman. He explained that everyday, he was ferried out into the lagoon in the gondola. When he reached the lagoon, he took over the oar and rowed around the waters of the lagoon for an hour before handing the oar back to the gondolier, who then rowed him back to the Calcina in time for lunch. Remarkable as it was that a non-Venetian could row a gondola competently, what he told us next was even more amazing.

Mr Milliken, as he identified himself, was, as my father was most excited to learn, none other than the director of the well-respected Cleveland Art Museum in the USA. The liveried gondolier, who we had observed, was the grandson of his late mother’s personal gondolier. She used to accompany Mr Milliken on his annual visits to Venice before WW2, and employed her own gondolier during her stays. "

"Charlie Chaplin waved to me"

by Adam Yamey

is available from:

WWW.LULU.COM

AMAZON (including KINDLE)

BARNES & NOBLE (Soon)

PRESPA - WHERE THREE COUNTRIES MEET

I have been passionately interested in Albania since about 1965. Until 1984, when I visited Albania, I spent a great deal of time visiting places from which I could catch even a distant glimpse of the country. One of these places was the area containing the Prespa lakes in the north-western corner of Greece. There are two of these lakes: the Small and the Great Prespa lakes. The smaller one shares its waters between Greece (mainly) and Albania. The larger one shares its waters with Greece, Albania, and FYROM (formerly the Yugoslav Macedonia). The lakes are separated from each other by a thin strip of land, which is currently Greek territory.

Heading west along the strip of land separating 

the Great Prespa Lake (right) from the Small Prespa Lake (left)

In 1977, I visited the Prespa area with my parents in a chauffeur driven car. We left the main road that connects Florina with Kastoria somewhere near to the village of Vigla and joined a winding rough surfaced mountainous side-road that led more or less in a western direction. A few metres along it, we had to stop at a police post. An official recorded our car registration and our names in a huge old-fashioned ledger, and then allowed us to proceed. We had just entered the sensitive border area of Greece close to Albania.

Map of the Prespa lakes area showing places mentioned in this article.

(The arrows show my approximate itinerary in 1977).

In 1977, Albania and Greece were still technically at war with each other. One of the causes of this was the Albanian claim that northern Epirus (Çamëria, in Albanian) should be returned to the ethnic Albanians, who had been expelled from it. I get the impression that the problem remains unresolved even today, at least in the minds of some Albanians.

Aghios Germanos

The road we followed wound through wild mountainous terrain. Eventually, we arrived in the tiny village of Aghios Germanos. It had a deserted appearance as we stared at it in the midday sun. Nobody was about. From there we made our way to the neck of land that separates the two Prespa lakes. We stopped along it to have lunch - I believe that we ate fish -at a small restaurant.

The strip of land separating Great Lake Prespa (in the background) from Little

Lake Prespa. Adam Yamey is on the right of the group in the photo.

From where we stopped, we could see the peaks of Albanian mountains in one direction.

Great Lake Prespa. The distant headland in the right third of the picture 

and the barely visible mountains behind it are in Albania.

And, in the other direction we could see the distant hills of Macedonia.

Great Lake Prespa looking east towards the mountains of Macedonia (FYROM)

As we drove away from Great Prespa, we began to get good views of Little Prespa

Little Lake Prespa

We left the Prespa lakes region by way of a different road from that which we arrived there. We rejoined the main road that connects Florina with Kastoria near to the village of  Trigono, where we stopped because I wanted to take a photograph of the monument whose illustration appears at the beginning of this article. 

Trigono village

I had completely forgotten that I had taken this picture in 1977, and only rediscovered it this April (2014).  The simple monument in white stone bears an inscription, which I have illustrated below:

My rudimentary knowledge of the modern Greek alphabet allowed me to decipher the subject's name as "Skountris Emmannou??"  In vain, I searched for this name or variations of it on the Internet. Next, I wrote to  my relatively new acquaintance Professor Christina Koulouri in Athens. She told me that this statue was put up in memory of a Cretan volunteer, Emmanouil  Skountris. Furthermore, she informed me that he was a Greek fighter during the 'Macedonian Struggle' (1903-1908). 

In brief and at the risk of gross oversimplification, the Greeks were fighting the Bulgarians to gain control of Ottoman Macedonia. There is very little about Emm. Skountris on the internet, but what follows is what I have managed to discover so far.

Trigono is known as 'Osčima' by the Bulgarians.  On the 14th September 1904, Greek rebels led by the Cretan Efthimios Kaoudis fought with Bulgarian rebels at Trigono.  The Greeks won this battle, but amongst the injured was Emmanouil Skountris. 

A Bulgarian web-site ( click  here)  contains six lines of text about Skountris as well as the picture reproduced above. Using a computerised translator and a little common sense, this is what they say: 

"Emmanuel Skundris Adele was born in Crete. He entered the ranks of the Greek propagandists in Macedonia in 1904, joining the the band of Evtimios Kaudis. He took part in the fighting near Kostenariyata and was slightly wounded at the Battle of Oshtima on September 14, 1904"

The variations of spelling are to be expected when transliterating from one alphabet to another. I found another picture of Skountris in a Greek  website (click here). In this illustration, he is shown mounted:

When I took the picture of his monument back in 1977, I did so because I was attracted by the naivety of its sculptural style. At the time, I doubt that I even noticed the inscription below the bust. I only spotted it 37 years later!  Now that I have seen photographs of Skountris, I realise that far from being naive, this sculpture is a very realistic representation of its subject.

What intrigues me is that this little monument in a tiny Greek village encapsulates the problems that have plagued the Balkan peninsula. Trigono was once just a small place in the large Ottoman Empire. Then, as this empire began to disintegrate at the end of the 19th century, it like so many other places began to be contested by the nations that evolved from the smouldering embers of the empire. Skountris is remembered because he helped to wrest the area from the rival Bulgarians. But, others in neighbouring states may still be looking hungrily at the area around Trigono and the Prespa lakes,  where the borders of three countries now meet. Let us hope that whatever the aspirations of those who feel that the borders have been incorrectly drawn, peace will continue to reign in the area.

This article has been written by 

Adam Yamey, who has published two books about the Balkans:

"Albania on my Mind"

&;

"Scrabble with Slivovitz"

Details of these books may be found by clicking

HERE!

IN LEAR'S FOOTSTEPS

 

This is an excerpt from the draft of Adam Yamey's new book, which will be called "SCRABBLE WITH SLIVOVITZ - Once Upon a Time in Yugoslavia". The book is a trail of memories of the many visits that I made to Yugoslavia and its neighbours during the years leading up to 1991.   More information about the forthcoming book is available by clicking HERE .

The pictures, which Adam took in 1979, were made whilst the events that he describes were unfolding.

The Vale of Tempe

"The main railway line, which connected Belgrade with Skopje and Salonika, passed through the middle of the town and was used as a footpath by many of the townsfolk. Seeing this reminded me of something that I did many years earlier in northern Greece.

In the late 1840s, the artist and poet Edward Lear walked through the Vale of Tempe. He had been particularly enamoured of this 10 Km section of the River Pineios, where it squeezes between the slopes of Mounts Olympus and Ossa. Having seen his illustration of it, I thought that it would be fun to attempt to retrace his footsteps. Robert and Margaret, with whom I was camping in the nearby seaside town of Platamon, kindly drove me along the modern road that skirts the Vale. It was so high above it that almost nothing could be seen of the valley far below. They deposited me at the southern end of it, and arranged to meet me a few hours later at its northern end.

Southern end of Vale of Tempe

I did not want to go along the valley the way we had come by car because I wanted to try to follow the path taken by Lear. As Robert and Margaret drove away leaving me standing by the roadside, I noticed two shepherds sitting on a slope. My Greek was not good enough to ask them the way to the place which I wanted to reach at the other end of the valley, but by pointing at my feet and walking a little, they understood me, and pointed at the railway track running along an embankment behind and far above them. I climbed up to the railway and began walking along the narrow path beside it.

The railway fromAthens  to Salonika passing through the Vale of Tempe

After a few minutes, I heard a sound behind me. Soon, the numerous carriages of the Athens to Munich express rumbled past me, heading on its way towards Yugoslavia. I continued on my way and followed the track into a deep narrow cutting between two high walls of roughly hewn rock. Almost without any warning a single diesel locomotive came dashing around a bend towards me. I pressed myself into the wall behind me and hoped that I would not be sucked towards the hurtling locomotive as it swept past me. I lived to tell the tale, and continued through the cutting and back out into the open, following the track along a high embankment from which I could just about see the river far beneath me.

A few hundred metres ahead of me, I saw the entrance to a tunnel. As I could not see the other end of it, I guessed that it might have been a long one. With my recent hazardous encounter with the locomotive in the forefront of my mind, I decided not to enter it. However, I had already come quite a distance, and did not want to retrace my steps. To avoid entering the tunnel, I scrambled, or rather slid, inelegantly down the steeply inclined scree-covered embankment, and reached a pathway far below, but close to the river.

Footbridge at Aghia Paraskevi in the Vale of Tempe

I realised that this is where the two shepherds had meant that I was to walk. It was the bed of a disused railway track. The rails had been removed and it made a perfect footpath. It followed the river, only a few feet above it. I breathed a sigh of relief, and walked along enjoying the kind of Arcadian landscape that Lear had sketched, as well as the peace and quiet. Near the northern end of the Vale, I arrived at what must have once been a station. It had been converted into a Greek Orthodox pilgrimage place complete with a refreshment stall. Soon after arriving there, I met up with Robert and Margaret, and related my hair-raising adventure to them."

Robert (far left) and Margaret (far right) in Rapsani, a village on the slopes of Mount Olympus 

Adam Yamey is the author of two novels about 19th century South Africa and a travel memoir about Albania. Click HERE for more information about these publications