The Mountains of Greece - Trekking in the Pindhos Mountains

The mountains of Greece are beautiful, undeveloped, remote and yet accessible. The guide describes a month-long traverse of the Píndhos range, and provides routes around Athens and the east coast, and in the Peloponnese. Use the routes as day-walks or put them together as multi-day treks.

Mountains cover most of Greece; many are over 2000m in altitude. Most are limestone, the massifs cut by a complex and apparently illogical 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 cephallonica, is the characteristic tree cover from 800–1800m. Further north the black pine 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 unfortunately not untouched, but largely bypassed by modernity.

They are hillwalkers’ rather than climbers’ mountains, but you do need to be in good physical shape ro explore them. Routes – though 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 Greek as eleeneekós oreevatikós seendhesmós, and in English as the HAC or Hellenic Alpine Club), 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, both because road construction has damaged paths and – more importantly – made them redundant. Peope travel by vehicle, and the paths are no longer maintained.

On the plus side, there is a growing awareness among Greeks – formerly not at all interested in outdoor pursuits – 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 rural 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 are springing up in the remotest villages. Most importantly, from the walker’s point of view, the mapmaking publisher Anávasi has appeared on the scene with a growing series of detailed and accurate maps designed for walkers.
Armed with map, compass and guide, you should not encounter too many problems. Indeed, our guess is that you will come to see the relatively virgin, 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 last 30 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.

There is a certain melancholy in the overgrown fields and crumbling terraces, the ancient footpaths washed off the mountainside or impenetrably overgrown. 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

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 that, 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 – klephts– made their lairs 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 again took to their mountains 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 obsessive notion 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 prevent them supporting the guerrillas. Children went to school, adults found jobs. By the time peace came in the 1950s village fields had reverted to nature and there was no other work. Many families never returned to their mountain homes.

Flowers and Wildlife

You see surprisingly little wildlife for such wild and remote terrain. The occasional fox or hare, perhaps a deer, an adder, salamander, or tortoise, the odd eagle or griffon vulture, and smaller species like chough, partridge, wheatear, accentor, perhaps a wallcreeper. If you are lucky you might see mountain goats or a wild boar in the northwest. Bear and wolf exist – the latter, apparently, in increasing numbers – but you would be extremely lucky (or unlucky) to meet either.

Flowers, on the other hand, abound. The best season for seeing them depends on altitude and latitude. Take Mt Parnasós, for instance, in the southern part of central Greece. In the first half of May you will find fritillaries, orchids, ophrys, violets, aubretia, iris, anemones and daphne oloeides up to 1200m or so. As you approach the melting snow patches, around 1600–1800m, there are crocuses, squills, corydalis solida, saxifrages and many others. Further south spring comes earlier; further north, later. Tulips, gentians, narcissus, campanulas, geraniums, aquilegias, lilies – all sorts of glorious species are to be found, over 600 of them endemic.