Author: Vivien Wong

The crop that has defined Naxos for centuries is disappearing. What happens next?

by Vivien Wong

On a Tuesday afternoon in late June, sixty-year-old potato farmer Stelios Vathrakokoilis gestured with his cigarette lighter to a well some hundred yards from the field where he stood. “There is water there still,” he said. “In fifteen days, it will be dry.” In 2023, Vathrakokoilis planted seventeen acres of potatoes. That changed last year, when the wells on his land ran dry. “I didn’t plant a thing,” he said. “Nothing, nothing, nothing.” 

Vathrakokoilis and his brother, loading crates of potatoes from the morning’s harvest into his own nearby pickup, come from a long line of potato farmers on Naxos, the largest and most fertile of the Greek Cycladic islands. Here, no agricultural product is more famous than the buttery Naxian potato. But recent waves of drought have dried up the supply of water to farms across Naxos. Now, as the island’s potato production dwindles, the future of its producers hangs in the balance. 

Vathrakokoilis and his brother grew up in the nineties, when, according to Vathrakokoilis, “farmer parents didn’t want their children to have to endure the same pain and suffering they had.” In his late teens, his father sent him to school to learn English, hoping he’d pursue college instead of potato farming. But he constantly skipped class. “To flirt with chicks,” he added. “And then I fell madly in love with potatoes.”

Dimitris Kapounis, president of the Union of Agricultural Cooperatives of Naxos, considers the potato a kind of “ambassador” for the island. For the past decade, the island has drawn thousands of visitors for the annual Naxos Potato Festival, one of the most popular gastronomic festivals in the Aegean. During the most recent festival in 2019, Naxos broke the Guinness World Record for the largest quantity of fried potatoes served at once: 625 kilograms, or 0.7 tons. At the time, Naxos was producing over seven million kilograms of potatoes per year. This past year, according to Kapounis, the island has produced less than three thousand kilograms—about two to three tons. 

“It’s not my fault, nor God’s, nor nature’s,” Vathrakokoilis said when I visited his brother’s farm recently. “My question is, where is the human intervention?” Last year, there was a shortage of rainfall across the Mediterranean. After the wells dried up, the island’s mayor, Dimitris Lianos, announced that desalination units would treat enough sea water to “cover the shortfall for houses, hotels and pools.” A relief for the tourists who flocked to Naxos—in record numbers—last year. Farmers were less lucky. 

This year, Vathrakokoilis plans to use salty water for irrigation when his well dries up. That’s what he did last year. “It ruins the quality of the agricultural products,” he said. “But in the end, that’s what we’re going to use.”

Without a stable income from farming, Vathrakokoilis said his family has relied partly on wages earned by his children, who work his brother-in-law’s potato packaging factory. They’re twins—a boy and a girl—in high school. They’re the same age Vathrakokoilis was when he fell in love with potatoes. 

The boy has demonstrated interest in potato farming. “He can do it if he combines a stable job with free time in the field,” Vathrakokoilis said. Like his parents did before him, Vathrakokoilis doesn’t see a future where his children can rely on farming as a primary job. 

As for the potato fields his children will inherit, Vathrakokoilis hopes they might one day revamp the farmland as a tourist attraction—agrotourism, perhaps. “A secure income,” he added, “because I believe that tourism will never stop as long as there is sun and sea.”

Leaning over the bed of his Ford pickup, he relit his cigarette, took a drag, and let out a nostril of smoke. “Tourism is fine. Hotels and rooms to live are fine. Tourists are fine. We all profit from that,” he said. “But somehow we have to combine the rooms to live with a restaurant that doesn’t serve a steak that comes from France, but a steak that comes from this island.” ♦

The story of one farmer’s fight against the Greek island’s ongoing drought

by Isabella Dail

 Stelios Vathrakokoilis awakens at 6:00 AM to spray the fields with pesticides and weed killers. The 60-year-old works a potato farm on the island of  Naxos, Greece, alongside a few other employees. 

His days are long. He often goes to bed after midnight so he can first water the crops in the evening. With such a small workforce, he can spend 10 hours in the fields per day during the harvest season.

In recent years, Vathrakokoilis’s hard labor has only gotten harder as heat and drought threaten Naxos’s agricultural industries. In the late morning of June 24, the sun already blazed down on the tractor that trundled across the field and scooped potatoes into plastic bins. Vathrakokoilis seemed unconcerned that the truck he leaned against was searing to the touch. The prickly pear cacti dotting the field’s perimeter occasionally turned grey and withered.

Vathrakokoilis relies on farming for his livelihood. Last year, he couldn’t harvest any potatoes at all.

Naxos was an island once known for its staple crops. Now, as the agricultural industries are crumbling to heat and drought, a growing tourism industry has brought in new visitors, replaced potato fields with swimming pools, and disrupted local economies and lifestyles.

The island’s largest reservoir is desiccated, and a shortage of rainfall persists. Naxos’s average temperature in the summer has risen by about 4 degrees in the last 50 years. Due to the lack of available fresh water, sea water fills the wells used to irrigate farmland, damaging crop health.

“Water scarcity is a very big problem,” said Giorgios Lialios, an environmental journalist at Greece’s leading newspaper.

The drought isn’t Vathrakokoilis’s only concern. He says that the remaining water on the island isn’t directed primarily to him. Instead, it’s going to the tourism industry.

Naxos has become a prime tourist destination, boasting the ruins of the temple of Apollo, a series of resorts decked with quaint villas, and the freshness of its remaining crops. While farmers complain of little water, swimming pools materialize across the island, and trendy resorts maintain expansive gardens. Employees in the industry argue that tourism is essential for the Naxian economy, even agricultural sectors.

“If the hotels do not work in the summer, the farmers do not work in the winter,” Irene Lianou, the Reservations Manager at the Lianos Village Hotel, said.

In fact, the hotel has married agriculture and tourism, opening a farm that both supports the hotel’s kitchen and appeals to patrons. They offer zucchini, nectarines, and–of course–potatoes from their farm for customers.

“All the jobs here, on this island, are involved in tourism,” Lianou said.

Yet the agricultural industry on a whole seems impossible to sustain in light of the island’s current climate conditions. According to Dimitris Kapounis, President of the Union of Agricultural Cooperatives of Naxos, Naxos once produced over 13,000 tons (12,000,000 kilograms) of potatoes annually. In recent years, that number has plummeted to somewhere between 2 to 3 tons. 

Vathrakokoilis believes that the challenges facing farmers could improve, but it would require local authorities to step in. He hopes that a system which cleans sewage water for irrigation will be implemented. For now, he fears the well he uses will dry up within the next week. If the situation doesn’t improve, he may be unable to continue doing the job he loves.

If a solution to the drought doesn’t occur in the land once known for its potatoes, Vathrakokoilis believes that “in a few years there will be no agricultural production on this island.”

A Postcard from Distomo

by Vivien Wong

In the late 1960s, when the Hellenic Ministry of Culture commissioned sculptor Stelios Triantis to design a memorial for the Distomo Mausoleum, he found inspiration in the metopes of ancient Greek temples. Metopes, rectangular slabs between triglyphs on a Doric frieze, may be decorated or plain. The most famous incorporation of this architectural element appears at the Parthenon:  almost a hundred metopes adorn the four sides of the temple, each sculpted with a scene from a mythical Greek battle.

Triantis crafted seven metopes for the Distomo Mausoleum. Together, they narrate the German occupation troops’ massacre of over 200 inhabitants of the village of Distomo on June 10, 1944. In these panels, violence conveys tragedy rather than triumph: the forced march of six faceless figures, three men slumped on the ground, three women weeping. A stiff German soldier aims his machine gun at a family huddled around a square table. The father, weaponless, stands and leans over the table toward the soldier. 

Normally, metopes sit atop the vertical columns of a temple. Triantis’s panels, on the other hand, span a horizontal column, marble, a few feet off the ground; perpendicular to this lies another column, engraved with the names and ages of the massacre victims. The two axes converge at the mausoleum’s cubic ossuary. Each year, on the anniversary of the massacre, relatives may enter and light candles inside. Otherwise, the room is closed to the public. 

A slatted window allows visitors like myself a partial, obstructed glimpse of the victims’ remains inside, displayed in a wall of shelves to the right. The skulls are of varying condition: some cracked, others missing a mandible. Counted together, they still number fewer than the names engraved outside.

*

When my grandfather, whom I call Ankong, was seven, the Japanese invaded his hometown of Linyi, in the eastern province of Shandong, China. By the time he’d turned twelve, his father, accused of being part of the Japanese opposition movement, had been captured, tortured, executed, and beheaded. 

The Japanese occupied Linyi for seven years, until the end of the Second World War. After his father’s death, Ankong’s mother disappeared with his baby brother. His younger siblings sent off to an orphanage, Ankong fled south: the first leg of an exodus that eventually took him to the Philippines. There, in a village on Negros Island, he met my grandmother, my Amma, whose father, brothers, and uncles had once lined up before the Japanese machine guns and lived. 

There’s a picture of Ankong, sixty-eight, during his final trip to Linyi. He’s kneeling in the dirt of the Cemetery of the Revolutionary Martyrs of East China, which honors those who were killed for resisting the Japanese. Behind him crouch my mother and my aunt. Both are smiling; he is not. In the center sits a bouquet of flowers. 

My mother used to tell me Ankong’s father was buried in that cemetery. Recently, she returned with a correction from my great-aunt: in fact, he’d been buried in a completely different cemetery in Linyi. Only Ankong knew where it was. Years ago, Ankong had been there to visit his father’s grave and found the area razed for construction. “All the tombs and tombstones were gone and turned into flat land,” my great-aunt wrote. 

I also recalled my mother saying she’d seen my great-grandfather’s name on a plaque in the revolutionary martyrs cemetery. Now she’s not certain. Ankong told her at the cemetery that he was happy his father was being commemorated, she said, “but I don’t know his father’s name was even there.” 

Why bring the flowers to a grave that didn’t exist? “I think Ankong just wanted to have a place to go to remember,” my mother said. 

Proposals to build a memorial for the victims of the Distomo massacre began in 1944; the mausoleum was not completed until 1976. According to Amalia Papaioannou, the historian who curates Distomo’s Museum of the Victims of Nazism, one survivor’s son had “never experienced a caress or a sign of tenderness from his own father,” whose brothers and fathers were killed in the Distomo massacre, until the day the bones of his father’s family were transferred to the mausoleum. “That was the first day that he showed affection to his son,” she said. 

Papaioannou is herself a third-generation descendant of Distomo massacre survivors. Growing up, she told me, “we didn’t hear any other story, any other fairy tale from our grandmothers and grandfathers, except the story of the victims of the massacre. Again and again and again.” 

“The memory is a debt,” Papaioannou explained. “The debt has become a way of life.” The biggest concern in Distomo, she added, “is that this memory will die together with the last survivors.” 

Since leaving China, Ankong has stopped talking about his father. He prefers to think of his mother and youngest brother as long buried. But there is some inexplicable force that compels his daughters and grandchildren, I among them, to continue exhuming their bodies, as if knowing exactly how they were killed or what they were wearing when it happened can make murder less bloody. 

Each Christmas, we gather—in Ankong’s living room, or else over Zoom—to hear about the day the Japanese invaded. The debt is paid: again and again and again. ♦

Stasinou 13, Pangrati

by Vivien Wong

It’s the perfect setup for a bad joke: “Three American college students and fifteen-odd expats walk into a bar…” Except the bartender is a Greek bookseller, and the bar—a full liquor shelf in a room half-closet, half-cavern—is concealed behind a set of sliding bookcases. 

This was the last meeting of the English-language book club at Lexikopoleio, the locally owned international bookstore in Pangrati, Athens. Diamantis Diamantidis, the events coordinator and bartender for the evening, told me that members have been petitioning him to extend meetings one more month, into July. 

Aside from the three of us, I count an American sociology professor, an Argentine actor, a digital nomad—Dutch—among the faces at the table. They’ve got a level of dedication that Diamantidis hasn’t seen in the bookstore’s Greek- and French-language book clubs. It has something to do with the transience of their time together, he believes. “These people came five years ago, or three years ago,” Diamantidis explained. “They’re going to go in two years. It’s not very fixed. But they’ve been loyal because they know that this is an anchor for them.” 

There’s a general divide between book club attendees who prefer to analyze the themes and content of a book, and those for whom the reading primarily serves as a jumping-off point for divulgences about their own lives. But what if the attendees’ lives really are the subject of the book? 

Wednesday’s discussion centered around Italian author Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection, translated into English by Sophie Hughes. The novel chronicles a relationship between two expats—digital “creatives”—living in Berlin in the 2010s.

A certain self-consciousness about the impact of expat professionals on the physical and economic landscape of Athens intermittently resurfaced at the table. “What’s the difference between an expat and a refugee?” a dark-haired woman, herself a digital nomad from Amsterdam, asked. Then she answered: “Someone who comes here voluntarily with money and someone who doesn’t.”

An American professor described herself as one of the “vampires” who  profited from coming to Athens when rent and real estate were relatively cheap. “I can have a really nice life that’s very difficult to have for the same amount of money in New York City,” she continued. “It makes me wonder what happens when Athens, all of a sudden, starts to become expensive and inaccessible?” 

“Ask the Athenians!” the Greek man across the table from her interjected, laughing. Attempts to describe the problem of gentrification carried a different tense for different readers at the table: future tense for the American professor, past tense for Greeks priced out of gentrified neighborhoods like Pangrati.

The physical architecture of the city makes these tense concrete. The part of Pangrati which surrounds Lexikopoleio was once called Vatrachonisi—meaning “frog island”—a nod to amphibians native to the bed of the Ilissos River. Urban expansion of Athens, dating back to the 1950s, has all but covered the ancient river. On the corner of Proskopon Square, the Athens café chain Petite Fleur, which features vinyls hanging from the ceiling and stools upholstered with black-and-white prints of Roy Haynes and Billie Holiday, rounds off one travel blog’s description of the Vatrachonisi area as “more like Paris than Athens.” 

Meanwhile, two blocks from Lexikopoleio, the side of an apartment has been spray-painted, in large green letters, “REFUGEES WELCOME / TOURISTS GO HOME.” Someone’s tried to white out the graffiti by scratching lines into the beige coat of the building.

The attendees discussed the helplessness of the expat couple in Perfection at length. Why didn’t they ever learn German? A debate ensued: perhaps technology was to blame, perhaps the characters’ parochialism.

“They didn’t seem to be able to do things differently, did they?” one woman said. A joke about their own inability to speak Greek drew laughter from around the table.  ♦