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"There is another
Greece in
addition to the one we all have in mind, that of the philosophers and statues, another more
mysterious and dark
Greece
."
The discovery was made to María Belmonte (Bilbao, 1953), a former Greek teacher.
Encouraged by her memory, she decided to visit that other Greece.
From that experience was born his latest book that has just seen the light:
En tierra de Dioniso
(Ed. Acantilado, 2021).
A reference return to the Mediterranean that has taken her to the most unknown part of the Hellenic country.
The Bilbao writer ascribes her trip under the name of the
god of excesses.
"Dionysus is a mythological deity and there is not even an agreement on where he was born. In Asia? In Thrace? In Thebes? In India? ... Actually, the land of Dionysus is the entire world, since symbolizes the dark and irrational part of the human, but in
Macedonia
its cult was very widespread. Alexander the Great's own mother was a devout Bacchante and precisely there, in Macedonia, Euripides wrote his tragedy
The Bacchantes
, considered one of the strangest works. of ancient Greek literature ".
Belmonte reveals the existence in the Hellenic country of a north opposed to the bright and friendly south.
Something that the British writer
Patrick Leigh Fermor
perceived in his travels through northern Greece and which he reflected in
Roumeli
, a book also published by Cliff, and which he defines as the Hellenic-Roman dilemma.
"Summing it up a lot, it can be said that Greece has two
souls
, that of
the classical world,
whose symbols are the Acropolis of Athens and the Parthenon, and a
Byzantine
soul
, whose symbol would be Saint Sophia in Constantinople," he explains.
The author describes another more underground conflict, the one that separates Greek Macedonia from North Macedonia, which spans a land of people and common places, divided into two countries by a border drawn by men on the map.
The pages of the book jump over the artificiality of its layout.
"It is the first thing that the human being did when he stopped being nomadic: create settlements and borders and try to defend them tooth and nail. Bruce Chatwin said that all the evils of the human being come from having
abandoned nomadism
and become sedentary."
"While traveling through northern Greece," Belmonte continues, "I have met people who detested their neighbors in North Macedonia and others who traveled frequently to that country and had many friends there. Humans are territorial animals and as such we will continue raising borders. "
THE INVENTORS OF THE GRAND TOUR
The references of
English writers repeatedly
assault the pages of the book, something that leads us to think that the ability to travel is intimately linked to a certain economic level.
Belmonte explains: "British travelers invented the
Grand Tour,
that trip reserved for the upper classes so that young people could complete their studies by visiting the
classical ruins of Italy and Greece.
With the arrival of the railroad, that trip to the
South
was democratized and began to be many people who traveled to the Mediterranean driven by different reasons. Then, after World War II,
mass tourism
began
with the consequences that we all know ".
Cover of 'En tierra de Dioniso' (Ed. Cliff).
Mass tourism that he perceives as a
threat
that hangs over the loneliness, the remoteness and the consequent authenticity that is still found in Greek Macedonia.
"Today, northern Greece is a less known area and therefore less frequented. In many of the places that I describe in the book I have been alone, but also because I try to travel
out of season.
But it would not surprise me either
.
that, over time, northern Greece would become a kind of
theme park
about Alexander the Great. It is the strong asset that the north have to counter the sunny landscapes and dotted with classical ruins of the south. "
Alexander the Great, the character who gallops with more vigor through the pages of María Belmonte's book.
"Reading Robin Lane's Alexander the Great filled me with curiosity to get to know that land that he sees as 'provocatively Homeric', causing me to transform my original plan."
A hero among heroes, the son of Filippo II of Macedonia conquers those who discover him with the same ease that all the lands of the world then known fell under his power.
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"As soon as he died at thirty-two years and ten months, Alejandro was already transformed into a legendary hero who was attributed fabulous feats and unlikely anecdotes and only in the last one hundred and seventy-five years, the writings around his figure in the form of historical works, novels, articles and doctoral theses there are thousands ... He has his defenders and his detractors, but what cannot be denied is that his multifaceted figure still fascinates us. "
Belmonte acknowledges that he does not dislike traveling from time to time without any plan or route established in advance.
This is what she did on her
first trip to Macedonia,
"ready to be guided by chance or instinct", although she points out that, when writing a book, she knows in advance the places she wants to visit, "but then once there I I let myself be carried away by intuition and the things that arise. It is like advancing through a joyous maze through which you make your way and make discoveries. Things also remain along the way because, obviously, you cannot get to know everything ; but it is also a pleasant feeling: knowing that there are many things that are waiting for you. "
When talking with María Belmonte, the satisfaction of the knowledge acquired in a loved place is perceived, having enjoyed its places, drunk in her stories;
This book goes a little further and distills a frustration of the Basque writer: the one produced by
Mount Athos
, the monastic republic of the Chalcidian peninsula, where
the presence of women
is
prohibited,
and which she could only see from the deck of a ship .
"It is an ambivalent feeling. On the one hand, I would give anything to enter there and walk its old ways, go from monastery to monastery with the backpack on my back. I think it is the trip I would like to do the most in my life. At the same time, I know that it is a kind of gigantic male cloistered monastery and I respect that. Also, if I could go in, it would mean that Athos is open to mass tourism with all that that means. So I am happy to see it from a boat , five hundred meters from the coast. "
A TRAVEL GUIDE THAT IS NOT
María Belmonte warns that this is not a travel book, but a personal vision of northern Greece, although she finds it logical that it influences her readers and even uses it as a travel guide.
"Whenever we travel we do it with all our
cultural baggage on
our
shoulders and we see things under the influence of everything we have lived, read and heard, so if someone travels to northern Greece influenced by my book I think it's great, but his gaze will also be different from mine, he will see things that I have not seen and perhaps he will not get to share some of my enthusiasm for certain events and places. "
The story of a trip to that meeting place between East and West, the images in the book delineate the ins and outs that separate, but above all that unite, the severe Balkan world and the Mediterranean warmth, history and fables, legendary heroes and ordinary peasants.
Austere portion of the place where the Big Bang of Western civilization took place, Belmonte's words tear apart its mysteries like the beam of a flashlight the darkness of a cave and Belmonte admits the feeling that Hugo von Hormannsthal defines with which he opens the prologue of his book: "The revelation of the Macedonian landscape left a deeply moved heart in me."
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