Artifacts left Behind: Epirote Women

Epirus, Greece, has leapt from the 19th century to the 21st in a matter of thirty years. Until the 1980s, life remained as grueling and difficult as the centuries before. And it had been the women of Epirus who'd kept that world turning through wars, political upheaval and devastating poverty.

This blog post is about the artifacts they've left behind and by extension, a tribute to their strength.

I was fortunate enough to witness that lifestyle --  a piece of Epirus history, the history of its women -- before it faded to an insignificant rhetoric. In the summer of 1983, when I first arrived in Margariti, Epirus was still moving at a slow crawl toward modernization with no indoor plumbing, primitive roads, limited communication to the outside world and a paralyzing culture shock that had me locked in a fog for quite a while. Dictated by chance of gender and birthplace, these women worked tirelessly during every moment of the day for the simplest necessities of life, such as clean drinking water and edible food. During that first visit, despite the fact that I was the daughter-in-law (the nifi), my foreign status seemed to exempt me from such labor as my sisters-in-law worked beside my mother-in-law, Chevi, for what seemed to me like every waking hour.

Chevi left behind many objects of this laborious era. They are memories and reminders, but not so long ago they were Chevi's valuable possessions.

The round wooden board for making pita would be placed on the floor where the dough would be rolled out to paper thinness.

The actual cooking took place in the fourno, the dome-shaped oven that was often covered by a small structure for protection from the weather. The heat for cooking inside the fourno came from wood collected and stored by the women during the fall months.

This wood-collecting contributed to the bald appearance of the mountains and surrounding area during that time. Such deforestation had numerous effects on the weather, as well as on the women's spines which often were loaded beyond that of any pack mule. They learned to carry this weigh as young girls while their bones were still developing.

That wood was placed inside the fourno and lit. One of my most jarring memories is that of the morning smoke that would hover over the village as everyone was lighting fires to begin the day's cooking. Still, when I smell smoke on the mountainside, a rare occasion in the dry summer months, it brings me back to that first encounter with Margariti. Those charred branches eventually became glowing hot coals creating varying temperatures along the inside surface of the fourno.

But how would a woman cook from a pot in such a contraption, among burning coals? The pot would be placed on a triangular stand. The stand had a curve in its side for grabbing and pushing it around to the various temperatures within the fourno. The small curve could also hold a brigi, the tiny pot for making coffee. The brigi's rounded bottom could sit on the rounded edge of the curved stand, allowing the women to prepare coffee at a moment's notice.

The Epriote ecological footprint was tiny in those days. Household items were either made of biodegradable materials like wood and cloth or they were made of metal, almost indestructible and therefore rarely needing to be replaced.

Chickens, goats, sheep and other animals were often kept close to the home, rather than the farm. Scraps of food that might be left after preparing a meal would be thrown to the animals. Leftover food was covered with a cloth to be eaten at the next meal. I may have contributed to the impending proliferation of plastic by bringing ziploc plastic bags to replace those cloth covers. At the time, it seemed more sanitary to me. (I hang my head in shame.)

There was also a round wooden spatula for moving the large pans of pita around the inside of the fourno. It reminds me a bit of the modern-day pizza-oven spatulas. In those early Margariti days, Chevi used one daily. It hangs beside her giant rectangular container for dough. The container is hollowed out on one side where the dough would be placed and covered, waiting for it to rise.

My Greek family rarely used butter. It was a foreign taste to them.

I tried to sneak it into some recipes a few times and the results were not very positive. However, my father-in-law from Ano Kotsonopolo, far up in the Pindus Mountains, came from butter-eaters and his mother's wooden butter churn made its way to our Margaiti wall of artifacts.

Among those artifacts there are also several irons, but they're very different from the historic American version my grandmother, Anne Petelle-Delisle, who had lived in New York's Adirondack Mountains had shown me. Hers was an iron made of solid metal from her youth in the 1920s. It was put onto the stove top to heat and then used to de-wrinkle clothing. Chevi's irons are hollow. The top opens and would be filled with hot coals from the fourno, then closed and ready to use.

These tools were a regular part of Epirote life for a long time. Even after Chevi's children bought her some new kitchen utensils for a kitchen that was moved indoors to improve her life, she continued to cook in the fourno and to use several of these older possessions.

I was fortunate to have arrived when I did. I was able to see Epirus just before the dawn of those slow-moving changes. The experience not only shaped the rest of my life, but will also stay with me forever reminding me of those who carried the burden of early Epirote life.   The women of Epirus!

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