My Temporary Involvement with the Italian Mafia

It was in 1990. I had just left my work in Harrods in London in order to pursue a life of freedom and adventure.

Together with three friends of mine, we drove from Denmark to Greece in an old Volvo Amazon. Listening to “Have You Ever Seen the Rain” by Creedence Clearwater Revival, and other counterculture music, we followed a route down through Italy to Brindisi, where we took a ferry to Corfu.

On Corfu we drove to Pelekas. Pelekas village is lying on the top of a mountain. From certain cafés you can view across the island to the mountains of Albania and the Greek mainland.

Below the village there are sandy beaches and traditional tavernas, fringed by timeless olive groves. We rented some rooms at Hotel Rolling Stone. Rolling Stone is one of the hidden gems of Pelekas Beach (also known as Kontogialos).  There was a panoramic view of the Ionian Sea and its coastline. The few nights we spend here we mostly chilled out on sunbeds or sofas while gazing at the stars and telling stories.

Pelekas beach has been subjected to the specter of mass unrestricted tourism ever since the 1960s and has ever since been a favorite destination for backpackers. Not the 'hippy paradise' it was in the '70s and '80s, outside the high season in August it is still a quiet and beautiful spot.

We also went for parties in the village. Apparently Pelekas was a popular holyday place for the Italians. I met a Sicilian girl, Gigia. She was always dressed in colorful dresses, and had white flowers in her black hair.

I invited her to a BBQ evening at Rolling Stone with fresh fish, grilled meats, tasty local food and homemade wine - inevitably leading to much dancing and partying! 

There was also an old hippie living at Rolling Stone, a person who still lived like an eternal traveler. He could sit at the taverna's long table and swap stories of his recent experiences in Goa, Malindi, Phuket, Bali, Kathmandu or Cuzco over dinner. 

Suddenly he would produce a guitar and play songs from his favorite band, The Guess Who. I especially remember the number, Silver Bird:

Rushing in, in the early morning and you're wondering.
Got a minute for another cup of coffee before you run.
And the silver bird is gone,
and you wonder where you belong.

Get a smile from the pretty waitress as she passes by.
She's the kind of person that could make you forget to cry.
And the silver bird is gone,
and you wonder where you belong.

Tell me where do you go from here?
Where do you belong my friend?
Tell me where do you run from here?
You've been running too long, my friend.

One night, when I sat in one of the sofas with Gigia, she asked me to follow her down to the beach. While the cicadas still buzzed and the air was full of scents of jasmine and wild herbs, she told a local legend about a group of rocks which we could see a few hundred metres from the beach. The story says that during a local wedding pirates landed on the beach, climbed up to the village and abducted the bride. As they carried her off, her distraught mother shrieked out a curse, saying, "I wish my daughter to be turned to stone so the waves will caress her rather than the hands of the unfaithful". Immediately the girl, the ship and the pirates were turned into rocks. Gigia said: “and even today, if you look closely, it's still possible to see them all close to the shore. Look!”

Gigia could ask me questions such as: “Do you believe there exist other worlds? Do you believe in the supernatural? Do you believe in magic?”

She could whisper in my ear:

“I believe you are a shapeshifter. I believe you turn into a bird when you are sleeping and fly to distant gardens and sing for longing girls.”

But one day the owner came and warned me:

“Look, you have to be careful with that girl. She is the daughter of one of the most notorious mafia bosses on Sicily. There are some very suspicious looking people on the look for you.”

We decided to leave Corfu the next morning, and we succeeded in getting the car on board a ferry to Athens. In Athens we parked the car and got on a ferry to the “Rock´n Roll Island” Ios. We were still walking in the footsteps of the hippies, but I had a nagging feeling of having failed Gigia.

We stayed at Mylopotas Beach. It is nearly a kilometre long of white sand and warm torquoise water protected by points on either side that make up the bay. It was the same beach that Cat Stevens used to give free concerts on for the hippies that frequented Ios in the sixties and seventies. You start the party here and end up at night in the main village Chora with its open air theatres that function as Rock ’n’ Roll dance palaces – the dance palaces of demons and angels under the stars.

In the day time I was reading The Colossos of Maroussi, by Henry Miller. 

Like the ancient colossus that stood over the harbor of Rhodes, this book stands as a seminal classic in travel literature. The book Miller would later cite as his favorite began with a young woman’s seductive description of Greece. Miller headed out with his friend Lawrence Durrell  to explore the Grecian countryside: a flock of sheep nearly tramples the two as they lie naked on a beach; the Greek poet Katsimbalis, the “colossus” of Miller’s book, stirs every rooster within earshot of the Acropolis with his own loud crowing; cold hard-boiled eggs are warmed in a village’s single stove, and they stay in hotels that “have seen better days, but which have an aroma of the past.”

Lawrence Durrell is the author of The Alexandria Quartet, at heart a sensuous and brilliant evocation of wartime Egypt. Durrell lived on Corfu between 1935-1939, and spent many years thereafter living around the world. A traveler at heart. He made Miller discover, that the dream and the reality, the historical and the mythological, were so artfully blended in Greece, and that this confusion is real and not due entirely to the poetic faculty.

If I should answer Gigia´s questions, then I was fascinated by people like Durrell and Miller, since I was obsessed by poetry. Not only the art of writing poetry, but poetry in the sense of magic; the magic of a place, a person, an event, etc. 

On Ios I was heavily influenced by this sense of poetry, or magic. Maybe not so strange after all, because the grave of Homer is located there. And I knew I had to pay the grave a visit and bring something back from it.

In his fairy tale, A Rose from Homer´s Grave, Hans Christian Andersen wrote about a nightingale which came and sang to a rose on Homer´s grave, because:

Through all the songs of the east, the eternal theme is the nightingale's love for the rose. In the silent, starlit nights, the winged songster sings his serenade to his beautiful scented flower.

and to the rose on Homer´s grave the nightingale poured out its song of grief. Andersen writes:

But the rose on Homer´s grave was silent; no dewdrop lay like a tear of pity on her petals, and with the branch on which she grew, she bent down toward a heap of large stones.

"Here lies the sweetest singer the world has ever heard," said the rose proudly. "I will scent his grave, and when the storms tear off my petals, they shall fall on him. For the singer of the Iliad returned to this good earth whence I sprang! I, a rose from Homer's grave, am too sacred a bloom for a poor mere nightingale!"

And the nightingale sang himself to death.

But then there comes a singer “from the north. From the land of drifting mists and crackling northern lights”, and, carried “her off with him to his distant home of mists and northern lights. The rose rests now like a mummy between the leaves of his Iliad.”

I decided to go to the grave and bring something back. However, there were no roses, but I brought back a small stone.

While sitting at the Far Out café at the beach, we often listened to David Bowie, who certainly was a person with a magical touch. The mystique of Bowie´s persona (s) is what we felt when we listened to numbers such as Starman and Life on Mars?

Bowie´s popularity on Ios had a reason. From the beach we could see Cat Stevens´ strange house with a surrealistic full-size sculpture of Pegasus, the winged horse from Greek mythology. The urban legends of Ios said that Bowie also had owned this house, or at least, that he was a frequent guest there. It is also said that it is owned by Bob Dylan, well in fact, a lot of rock stars is said to have owned the house. 

The house was lying on the rocks near the water some hundred meters out in the bay.

One day we went out to it on a pedalo. In a nearby servants house we could see a few people dressed in black robes. We could hear quiet classical music streaming out over the water. We made a berth beneath the main house, and walked up and looked in through the windows. The living room was build into the rock, like a cave, and there were exclusive furniture and…art; sculptures and paintings which all depicted satanic scenes.

To my surprise I saw a painting of a falconry scene. A goddess-like figure stood with a falcon on her arm. The figure looked familiar. At first, I thought it was the hunting goddess Diana, but at second look, it looked like Gigia. But maybe I was too influenced by the poetry of the house.

When we were sailing back, we talked about that the house perhaps belonged to the Italian mafia.  

In the evening, in the village, we actually spotted some of the guys from Corfu. One of my friends began to get paranoid:

“I don´t want to stay here anymore. It is the mafia, and they will kill us and dump us in the ocean.”

I said:

”Hardly. We haven´t done anything.”

Another of my friends said to me:

“We? Not us. You! It is you they are after. It is Gigia, who has ordered them to bring you back, so that she can keep you in a cage on Sicily.”

“Very funny!” I said.

But we decided to leave. It was time to go back to Denmark anyway, and, completely irrationally, we decided it would be wise not to follow the route up through Italy. Instead we chose to follow a route up through Yugoslavia.

In Dubrovnik we decided to follow the costal road by the crystal Adriatic Sea. But we got caught in a traffic jam. There is a long stretch of Mountains which separate the fertile inland plain from the narrow, rocky Adriatic coastline. On a map we could see a road leading up through the mountainous regions to the highway on the inland.

 The road was a dust road, and we began driving up through a forest covered mountain. There was a strange atmosphere. We passed several forests farms which seemed deserted. On the trees someone had hanged troll heads carved in wood, as some kind of scare figures, like the Gargoyles at Catholic churches.

When we reached the top of the mountain, it was beginning to get darker. There was a mist hanging among the trees on the mountainside leading down on the other side. We stopped the car and went out. Complete silence. The wind increased and heavy rain clouds were gliding in front of the setting sun. Just before the sun disappeared, I believe I saw the silhouette of a bird of prey. Then we heard it´s shriek.

We all had a sense of the forest watching us, and I said, that we better started driving down the mountain before it was getting dark.

As we drove down it began to rain heavily, and the wind got stronger. A gust blew one of the windshield wipers off, so that the driver couldn´t see anything. We stopped the car, and went out to fix it. We couldn´t. 

To our wonder, we discovered that the earth was filled with frogs. It was impossible to walk or drive without crushing some. 

Another car passed us, and we decided to follow it´s red back lights, just to get away from the strange place. We jumped into the car, and started the chase. But then the other car was speeding up. My friend, who was driving, said:

“I can´t follow it, this is too hazardous!”

But he did, and finally we drove into a small village at the foot of the mountain. The gasoline was low, and we couldn´t find any gasoline station. We went into an Inn where the lights were on. The room was filled with smoke and there was a fireplace and a few tables with some local men. They looked up, almost terrified. As if we weren´t humans, but something else.

But then they relaxed. No one could speak English, but they managed to direct us towards a gasoline station, which would be open the next day. We spend the night in the car.

We succeeded in coming back to Denmark in our old Volvo Amazon with only one windshield wiper intact. Luckily it didn´t began to rain.

Half a year later, the war in Yugoslavia began.

…

Every time I´m telling this story, I do as the pilgrims do. I go to my pilgrimage altar, bring back my boon, a copy of the Iliad, with a bookmark made of a leather string. At the end is hanging a small stone. I point at the stone and say:

“Look, here is the stone from Homer´s grave”.