Oral History and Kalamianos

In the absence of written records in prehistory, different forms of ethnographic and ethnoarchaeological research can contribute to enlightening hypotheses about the conditions of seafaring and the social and economic networks that prevailed in ancient small worlds. Members of SHARP were fortunate to be able to interview elder residents of Korphos, who described details of life in the village in the years during and before World War II, when there were no paved roads to Korphos and no motorized seacraft, yet the Saronic Gulf was teeming with social and economic activity. Lita Tzortzopoulou-Gregory conducted a program of interviews between May 2007 and June 2009, which I have mined for the observations that follow.10 Of particular relevance to the topic of this chapter are the relationships that the inhabitants of Korphos maintained with the inland village of Sophiko on the one hand, and the coasts and islands of the Saronic on the other.

Prior to the Second World War, Korphos was a fishing and seafaring village, with perhaps 90% of the male population engaged in fishing or merchant activities on the Saronic Gulf. Young boys learned by doing, taking to the boats at a young age to accompany their fathers and grandfathers on their rounds. The more ambitious or better connected aspired to be sea traders because there was good money in it. The fishermen were generally poor, as fish were plentiful and cheap throughout the Gulf. Their work provided subsistence and fish to exchange with farmers, shepherds, and forest workers for needed commodities. There were approximately 30 families living in Korphos, each owning at least one fishing boat or caique. As many as 60 rowboats, fishing boats, caiques, and small sailing boats were anchored at Korphos. Most of the boats were built at Perama on Salamis island.

The consensus among the seagoing Korphiotes is that the Saronic is a relatively trouble-free body of water to navigate. They use the word limni (lake) to describe it, asserting that the winds and currents are not especially dangerous, and the shallows and other hazards are few. This is not to say that environmental conditions had little effect on voyages. One experienced seaman reported that the trip from Korphos to Aigina in a small sailing boat could take anywhere from three to seven hours, depending on the winds. On longer trips, the merchants would overnight at ports of call in their boats before setting off for home the next morning; they generally did not travel on the Saronic at night.

The fishermen worked in local waters and preferred the fishing ground between Kalamianos and the small island of Ayios Petros offshore. It was there that the shallow waters off Kalamianos gave way to the steep drop-off of the sea bed, known locally as the “chasm," where the catch was plentiful. The fishermen rarely ventured more than a few kilometers from Korphos. In winter, fishing continued but kept close to shore. In addition to subsistence use, fish and seafood were transported by donkey to Sophiko, a trip of approximately one and a half hours by an old path that followed a stream bed west of town to the upland basins that open west to the interior Corinthia. One older woman remembers bartering for goods with Sophiko residents who did not have cash to pay for the fish.

Korphos was, in the early twentieth century, a proti skala, a major port in the Saronic trade, and this afforded the sea traders a more varied life, intimately connected with both inland producers and the merchants at ports and anchorages around the Saronic. Farmers and herders from Sophiko village owned most of the land in the hinterland of Korphos, and they engaged in several traditional pursuits. Farmers grew cereals, chiefly wheat but also barley, and tended olives, mainly for their own subsistence needs with the surplus traded in Korphos and elsewhere. Wheat and barley were also grown in the limited lowland basins, including the one directly above the Kalamianos site. Sheep and goat were herded in the upland areas and their primary and secondary products were offered in trade for maritime products and services. The most prevalent occupation in the upland zones around Korphos, however, was forest work. Wood, charcoal (mainly from bushes and bush roots), and pine resin were harvested in this heavily forested region and brought on donkeys to Korphos for shipment abroad. The sea traders purchased these varied products and exported them to Saronic markets, either in their own boats or in larger ships they contracted for the purpose. It was not only at Korphos that these products were collected for shipment. Often, when a farmer's fields or trees were closer to one of the many tiny anchorages in the area, the produce would be brought down and picked up there. One resident reported that the sea traders often took advantage of the inland producers who were dependent on sea transport by bargaining for unfairly low prices.

There was not a single dominant port in the Saronic, but instead a handful of large, bustling nodes of maritime connectivity. Several interviewees recalled bringing wood, charcoal, resin, and manure to markets at Piraeus, Eleusis, Salamis, Aigina, Poros, Nea Epidauros, and elsewhere. Frequently, a port town specialized in processing certain material or had high demand for specific products. At Eleusis there were factories processing resin, while charcoal and wood were in demand at all of the above-named ports. In exchange, the Korphiotes sought food and staples. From Aigina they imported flour and water jugs (even in modern times tempered with the volcanic inclusions that enhanced their performance), fruits and vegetables from Nea Epidauros, and foodstuffs and water from Piraeus, among many other items. On returning to Korphos, the merchants brought their wares to Sophiko and sometimes beyond, where local buyers acquired them and distributed them further on. The forest industries have long since become economically unprofitable. There are few uses for charcoal,11 And pine resin, once used in turpentine and other chemical products, has been superseded by synthetic substitutes, while the popularity of resinated wine has declined in recent years. A few farmers continue to harvest resin on a small scale.

Fresh water was and remains scarce in the village, and this was perhaps a strong incentive for Bronze Age people to settle at Kalamianos instead. Water was retrieved from coastal sites such as Nea Epidauros, Kyra island, and occasionally Kenchreai. One informant describes four men regularly taking a four-meter-long rowboat to Nea Epidauros to fill 150-kilogram barrels with water, taking turns rowing one and a half hours each way. Tiny Kyra island, several kilometers off Kalamianos, had a fine though not copious spring where fishermen would often fill up. In the years after World War II, small boats brought water daily from Piraeus or Salamis as part of government programs. Fetching water by boat was a summer activity, since cisterns in the village filled amply with winter rains. Women and girls traveled by boat or donkey to Kalamianos to wash clothing in two brackish wells there.

Some of the more intrepid seafarers ventured outside the Saronic, one mentioning that he had sailed out to islands such as Siros, and along the eastern Peloponnesian coast. We might think of these as the modern counterparts of the “expert" sailors discussed in previous chapters. Many Korphiotes spent some part of their adult life in the merchant marine, aboard big ships engaged in international commerce. They all returned to the village and their families after several years at sea.

Kinship relations with Sophiko were close, and there was much intermarriage. People also found spouses in Aigina and Salamis; many Korphiotes emigrated to Salamis and Aigina after marriage. This is one demonstration that social imperatives such as maintaining genetic and demographic viability bound together coastal communities in a small world. Another example is that children from Korphos, Nea Epidauros, and other coastal villages were sent to Aigina for high school because these small communities could support nothing more than a one-room elementary school. The notion presented in Chapter 5 That the landward limits of the coastscape were generally the passes and the first-encountered inland nodes finds support in the movements of the Korphiote merchants, as well as the fact that there was little interaction with Corinth before the modern road was built to join the Corinth—Epidauros coastal highway in the 1960s.

When prompted concerning the general orientation of the community, the informants were unanimous that the Korphiotes have always thought of themselves as an island people: they looked to the sea for their livelihood, wore island dress, listened to island music and danced island dances, and created networks of interaction with coastal and island people in the Saronic. They contrasted their outlook with that of the Sophikites, whom they considered inland, “mountain" people. That they nevertheless maintained close social and economic ties with Sophiko indicates the dual orientation of a maritime coastal community, and exemplifies the inland-coastal symbiosis that is an important feature of the dynamism of coastal life. Perhaps the coastal-inland symbiosis between Korphos and Sophiko in modern times is analogous to the relationship between Kalamianos and Stiri in the LBA. Several interviewees spoke of a pre-modern switchback walking path from the lowland north of Kalamianos up

The steep slope to Stiri, used to access the eleventh-century church of Panayia Stiris; thus, although the two sites seem mutually inaccessible, people on foot with their donkeys have managed to overcome an environmental obstacle to preserve connectivity in this microregion.

The Korphos—Sophiko system in the early modern period bears the stamp of a microregion in Horden and Purcell's terms, and Korphos emerges as a coastscape and a maritime coastal community. The people of Korphos forged the link between the terrestrial and maritime worlds and facilitated the exchange of desired commodities. The sea merchants truly occupied a position of centrality with respect to connectivity around the Saronic. Young boys were inculcated in the seafaring life and the essential knowledge was passed down within families, much as we have seen among South Pacific societies. In the first half of the twentieth century, the Saronic Gulf was a vibrant modern small world, with a proliferation of nodes on coasts and islands and innumerable crisscrossing paths connecting them.

What use are these oral histories to us as we contemplate life in the coastscapes of the Mycenaean period? With the customary caution against equating modern times with eras of the remote past, it is possible to suggest that the challenges and opportunities encountered by these two peoples inhabiting a Saronic small world bear many similarities. The traditional lifeways of early twentieth-century people and their Mycenaean counterparts in the Korphos region were not qualitatively dissimilar; they possessed comparable technologies of subsistence and seafaring. They lived at times of modest prosperity and vigorous interaction, when both were highly connected to spheres of interaction on land and sea. Much will have been different, of course; to name just one example, the structures of political power are not comparable. Nevertheless, the information we obtained from local residents tends to support the picture I have constructed from archaeological and ethnographic data, and therefore it seems appropriate to add it to the diverse strands of evidence bearing on the reconstruction of Mycenaean coastal worlds. The theoretical underpinnings of this position rest in a structure-contingency framework (Bintliff 1999; Tartaron 2005: 158— 59): essentially, there are long-term structures, corresponding in annales terms to the forces of the longue duree that influence the configuration of societies and their interactions with the world around them. Among the most important are the environment (including physical geology and geography, climate, and resources) and the human subsistence technologies (agropastoral, maritime) and other adaptive mechanisms (culture) that allow populations to survive and sometimes thrive over time. By establishing structural similarities between two societies or periods, it is acceptable to take the comparisons further, but this may not be done by ignoring the differences, which may reside already in the structural realm but are most salient in medium-term political and economic patterns (conjonctures) and in decisive events (evenements). It is in the interplay of long-term forces with shorter temporal and smaller spatial contexts that historical contingency arises, giving each locality and community a unique history. My contention is not that we can simply equate the Kor-phiotes of the early twentieth century with their counterparts at Kalamianos in the LBA. Rather, given key structural similarities of environment, technology, and location in the Saronic Gulf, their respective engagements and worldviews on facing the sea — their connectivity and interaction patterns — may also share important parallels, at least hypothetically as we await future phases of investigation.