ROAD TO NOWHERE…

Our newly acquired thirst for rivers took us right up north to Oreistiada, a town set up in 1923 by Greek refugees from Adrianople during the population exchange between Greece and Turkey. The River Evros runs some 203 km, forming a natural border between the two countries. We hit the road mid-morning, blundered through the directions from the GPS…I’m not sure who’s to blame. I know for a fact that once in search of a particular waterfall in Crete, those robotic instructions took us uphill on a stony track, with Yiannis  revving the engine of the jeep to clamber over ruts and rocks which set us off galloping until we reached the top… to find no waterfall… but two elderly ladies, equally disappointed …`Never mind the waterfall, how did they get up here?’ we wondered…` Our car’s parked over there,’ they said pointing to the right, where there was a mountain road, all nice and smooth with overuse. They had followed the signboards. So you can’t really blame us when we sometimes override directions from our back seat driver.

Once we latched on to the northern motorway, the Egnatia, it was plain sailing… two and a half hours of listening to music and watching the scenery unfold. On either side of the road as we approached our destination, built on the plain of the River Evros, acres and acres of flat agricultural land rolled out, rimmed by blurry mountains in the distance. There were swathes of corn and sunflowers, brown and ready for harvesting and tobacco with their delicate flower buds of pink and white. Yiannis’ family had lived in Oreistiada for a short spell, some fifty years ago because his father, the ex-general, had been posted there. His mother once told me that in early summer, the endless fields of sunflowers in full bloom was a spectacular sight… flowers as big as plates, raising their faces of brilliant yellow to the sky…as if in worship of the sun.

We had booked a room at a hotel that was set up in 1923. I remember the discussion at home when he booked it online…` Wow! Must be some grand old thing,’ I exclaimed in excitement…` Don’t know, it’s been refurbished and it’s the only one that pops up on the screen,’ he replied. The thing is we could have easily crossed the border into Adrianople or Edirne as the Turks have named this magnificent historic city of… mosques and minarets and ancient arch bridges spanning waterways… and booked into one of its sumptuous hotels. But given the present political tension between Greece and Turkey at this point of the border, we were not willing to venture there. We might be seen as Greek spies in the guise of benign golden agers and be thrown into a Turkish dungeon…so we decided to go for this 1923 affair. Who knows it could be like a museum, old and enchanting… marble floors, period furniture and drapes in resplendent colours.

So there we were in Oreistiada…our back seat driver had decided to go mute… so we went around in circles through a residential neighbourhood until we found the hotel…` WHAT! THAT’S IT?’ I asked, utterly stupefied… It was wedged between some three storied blocks of flats and over the glass door was the name of the hotel and…`established in 1923’… its selling point. We dragged our luggage up a flight of steps and stepped into the reception area. It was cramped and dark and I couldn’t tear my eyes off the décor. It looked like a… jaded harem…from some old Turkish movie…with faded wallpaper of red and gold, huge prayer beads hanging from the low ceiling and a large pomegranate charm nailed to the wall, to bless us with… fertility and abundance… and a period armchair, sitting quite forlorn, trying to evoke some romantic era of the past. All that was missing were the ladies of the harem with painted eyes behind veiled faces, rustling along the dark corridor in their shimmering skirts and a pot-bellied turbaned pasha in hot pursuit, sweating and swaggering behind.

 There was a forbidding dark and narrow staircase on the right and in front, an arch opening… YES… like a doorway to a harem… leading to an ancient lift. We had to pull the metal door shut and it jerked and shuddered all the way to the first floor. The room was like some sitting room of the 70’s…not quite retro as I can’t see it coming into vogue. We dropped our luggage and made a quick exit to the town centre to have lunch. At the town square we asked a few people, who were all very eager to assist, where a nice place to eat would be. A lady nodded enthusiastically and said…` Go to the place next to the police station.’ When she left, Yiannis looked at me blankly…` We didn’t ask where the police station was.’ But no matter, we decided to trust our inner compass which set us marching straight on… there was no other way to go… and saw the police station and the restaurant, at the end of the square.

While waiting for our pasta dishes, we asked the waitress, a bubbly young thing, if there were any places of interest in the area. She lost the smile in her eyes…she was wearing a mask… and appeared thoughtful and said…` We usually hang around here,’… and we asked no more. Then the food came and along with it some hornets, buzzing around our pasta and aiming for the bits of bacon. We get hornets in summer in Crete as well and if you’re eating outdoors, the restaurants usually burn some coffee grains in a little bowl and the smoke wards them off. When it got extremely uncomfortable, trying to shoo away the stingers, I mentioned it to the waitress, hoping she would smoke them away. She laughed and agreed with me… `Yes we do get a lot of them around here.’ Then we found a hornet drowning in my drink and we left. A few paces away, we saw a small but modern hotel, squeezed in between two shops…` Hey didn’t you see this one?’…` Never came up on the computer screen,’ he replied, sticking to the same story. We later solved the puzzle. In his online search, he had asked for a hotel… in small town Oreistiada… with parking facilities…the town hotel had none… but our harem… yes … just pull up and park anywhere in the street.

We set off straight to Kastanies, the northernmost point where the River Evros flows into Greece from Bulgaria. Driving through Nea Vyssa, a village known for its broomgrass, brought recollections from a reliable source…my mother-in-law, who is 96 and possesses a memory far better than my waning one …about the colourful traditional clothes of the women in that area, during festivals. On their visit there, sometime in the early 70’s, she was totally enthralled by the women, young and old with their heads adorned with gold…chains and hanging medallions… and silken blouses and skirts, long and billowing, in deep reds and emerald greens and brilliant blues and yellows. Their skirts would bunch out… nine of them, worn one on top of the other, accentuating the narrowness of their waists. There’s a funny Greek ditty that makes light of this tradition…which I learnt from the same source…` e gria Emersoula, ennea vrakia forei, mexri na vgali to ena, ta alla ta katourei’… ` old Emersoula wears nine pairs of knickers and by the time she’s whipped off the first, she’s wet the other nine.’

The road to the river at Kastanies on the border between Greece and Turkey was completely blocked off and army trucks rumbled in with rolls of barbed wire. We had seen on the news about the barricades being built along the river banks to keep out the illegal immigrants flooding into Greece. I’m not sure what we were expecting to see. It’s just that the place had made so much news recently that we needed…to be there…just to see…a couple of Kilroys again. It reminds me of Bosnia, after the war when loads of tourists streamed into the city of Mostar to see the bullet riddled buildings and watch the young men dive into the Neretva River from the Mostar Bridge and then… the onlookers captured themselves on that magnificent Ottoman structure to show the folks at home…we were one of them.

We did get to see a river though, the River Ardas, a tributary of the Evros. It was beautiful and blue with sandy white banks and woodlands beyond. The low water crossing or Irish bridge that provided a passage to the opposite bank during low water, had been completely swept away by floods. From where we were standing we could see the bank opposite… the broken part of the bridge continuing into a narrow road in the woods, leading to the border between Greece and Bulgaria. My reliable source told me that once when the river had broken its banks and flooded the plains, only the tops of the trees were visible and drowned chickens and pigs from the nearby farms were seen floating in the floodwaters.

We returned to the hotel at six in the evening and crashed into bed with no thought of having dinner. The next morning Yiannis went down to collect our breakfast. The receptionist had informed us that because of the covid, the dining area was closed and they would be handing out breakfast parcels… like in soup kitchens. He came back toting two brown paper bags. The coffee was nice and hot, the sandwich was cold bread with ham and cheese, which we ingested with the help of the coffee and there were other small placatory offerings…a square of spinach pie, a slice of cake and a green apple…which made Yiannis turn away in horror. He has an aversion for apples because apparently he had a surfeit of them…apple creams and stewed apples… when he was a child…nothing remotely close to Marcel Proust’s bitter sweet memories of his childhood that a madeleine dipped in tea evoked in…IN Search Of Lost Time.

We left the room in no time at all, with the plastic orchids on our bedside tables gazing at us vacantly. There was no need to pack as we had not unpacked in the first place. We were driving straight to Alexandroupoli, 114 km to the south where we hoped to… get a regular hotel with our eggs sunny side up and warm crisp toast and coffee in a regular cup… and get a glimpse of Evros at its delta.

So cheers and come back for more…adventure.