past times

Stoupa 60 Years Ago

There are a few tavernas and bars around Stoupa that have old black and white photos in them, showing a very different kind of life. We sent Glenda Dean off to talk to Babis Rapteas to find out what life was like in those days. Babis Rapteas is a familiar figure in and around Stoupa. You'll see him in the mornings driving his tractor to and from the olive trees he has farmed all his life. In the evenings he is busy in the taverna which his son runs now (and which in the past Babis ran as a kafenion and a shop). On Sundays it's his powerful voice you will hear coming from the church: he has sung in services there for more than fifty years.

G. Were you born here in Stoupa?

B. Yes, along with my two brothers and my sister. My oldest brother lives in Athens now but my other brother and my sister are still here.

G. And your children?

B. Yes, all three of them have married and settled in Stoupa and now have children of their own.

G. So, tell me about your own childhood here. What sort of life did your parents have?

B. They didn't have much in the way of income and their lives were hard, but like everyone else then, they were able to produce enough themselves to support the family. Their plot had its own well, so they could grow a whole range of foods: wheat, olives, vegetables, fruit trees. They kept chickens, pigs and goats (for meat and milk) and, of course, they went fishing. So they had enough to eat all year round. People are often surprised to learn that there weren't nearly as many olive trees then as you see today many of them were only planted when the price of wheat collapsed in the fifties.

G. And what about inside the house? How did you light it?

B. With oil lamps at first. And later paraffin lamps. But the big excitement came in '66 when I got my own generator and was able to flood my shop with lights and buy a big fridge!

G. So, when did electricity come to the whole village?

B. It must have been about 1970, more or less the same time that we had a proper water supply. The spring water from the mountains is still the best, though.

G. And how did your mother cook for the family?

B. We had a big wood-burning oven which was in constant use making bread. She cooked meat in it, too, but that was only on special occasions: we had pork at Christmas and lamb or goat at Easter. There was no meat to buy, so we had to slaughter one of our own animals and my mother knew how to make it last; when we killed a pig, for example, she cooked some of it in the oven and used the rest to make loukanika and pasto. The rest of the time we ate fish, cheese and lots of horta.

Loading the boats to take produce to market
in Kalmata

G. The famous Mediterranean diet. No wonder you look so healthy. Now let's move on to the village itself. How many people lived here then?

B. About 200 if you put Stoupa and Leftron together. Families were large then, so it didn't take many households to reach that number. For some reason the families in Leftron were larger 8 or 9 children in each, compared with 4 or 5 down here.


G. Did many people leave the area, as they did in other parts of Greece?

B. Certainly they did, especially at the time of the German occupation and the Civil War. But some left even earlier than that, for economic reasons: my own father went to America before I was born and took his three sisters with him. But they all came back.

G. How did people get from one place to another, when you were a child? What transport was available?

B. People moved freely from village to village, on foot or on a donkey. Those who lived in the mountain villages came down to buy what was on offer here and in the shops in Kardimili and Agios Nikolaos: anything from flour to sewing-needles. For bigger purchases or to sell their own produce, they went to Kalamata- by caique when the weather was good. They came down with their donkeys and tied them up on the beach, ready to be loaded up again on their return. During the war when the caiques couldn't sail they went on foot, a 9 hour journey.

A Caique loading for the trip to Kalamata

G. So, when was the road from Kalamata built?

B. The section as far as Kambos was built before 1940 but from there it was just a track down to Kardimili. We had to wait until Christmas 1956 for that part to be completed. Of course, it put the owners of the caiques out of business. So, in compensation, they became the bus drivers on the new route!

G. Was that when you began to see holiday- makers and foreigners in the area?
B. No, they arrived much earlier. Even before the war, doctors and solicitors from Kalamata would rent a house in Stoupa for the summer. They came down by boat and lived in our houses while we camped out in huts. Kalamata was a prosperous town, with big factories producing tobacco, wine and silk. They used to organise Sunday outings for the workers: they came down to Stoupa by boat, had a swim and then a meal in one of the three tavernas here before sailing back.

As for foreigners, they came here first in the thirties: Germans and Italians, mostly, passing through on their travels. Sometimes they stayed, especially if they were skilled workers and found jobs to suit them, although later there was a strong rumour that they were in fact spies. As proof, people told the story of an Italian called Giovanni who during the mid-thirties was the mechanic/driver in the olive-oil soap factory in Kardimili. He eventually left the area but in a very short time Giovanni was back- as an officer in the Italian army garrisoned in Kardimyli.

G. That brings us on nicely to the subject of the war. I know you have memories of it.
What was it like here?

B. I remember when the Italians declared war on Greece in 1940 after they had torpedoed the cruiser Elli. We heard the declaration on the radio that old Nikos Georgileas had. That was the first radio in Stoupa and it worked on car batteries; we used to gather every evening to listen to the news from Cairo- and from Berlin.
When the Germans advanced into Greece and the Greek and British forces were compelled to retreat, we hid the British soldiers down here in the Mani and helped them escape. One of the soldiers chose to stay here and he fought with the Resistance throughout the war. We called him O Mavros because of his dark skin.

The Harbour

G. Tell me more about the Resistance here.

B. The radio messages from Cairo and from London urged us all to join the Resistance. They used to say that if you just put a nail in the tyre of an enemy vehicle, that counted as resistance. And we responded. A local group was organised by Kostas Xudeas from Saidona. They helped the British and then turned their attention to the Italians who had established bases in Kardimili and Agios Nikolaos and put up tents in the fore-court of the church in Stoupa. These Italians used to go up into the mountain villages and seize their sheep, their oil and their cheese. What they didn't use themselves they would sell on. To our shame they were helped in all this by a Greek collaborator.

G. Was there a particular hero amongst the Resistance fighters here?

B. Oh yes. A man from Saidona, called Noeas, who organised a group of about a dozen fighters - the Englishman, O Mavros, was one of them and another, Michalis Xudeas, is still alive today. After one of their frequent skirmishes with the Italians, Noeas left two of them in the bushes, stripped of their clothes. After their rather ignominious return to Kardimili the Italians sent a bigger force to deal with these troublemakers in Saidona, but Noeas sent them packing as well.
Finally the Italians had to summon a regiment from Kalamata to come to deal with a group of ten men. They set fire to the houses in Saidona, took the women and children to Kardimili as hostages and sent a message to Noeas to surrender. The commander gave his word that he would not be harmed. Noeas gave himself up and took full responsibility for everything that had happened. But the Italians broke their word and shot him. When they went to blindfold him he refused and they say he was
still cursing them as he died.

G. A true hero. And after the war? What happened then?

B. Ah, that was the time of our big blunder. Instead of enjoying the victory we turned against ourselves, the communists against those on the right. We lost more people in the civil war than we did in the war against the Italians and the Germans. Agios Nikolaos was the centre of the right wing activity: the houses which you see on the harbour front today were, in ‘47, ‘48 and ‘49 the headquarters of an organisation called “Chi”. The mountain villages, on the other hand, were the strongholds of the communists. I was told by someone from Saidona, who was a member of a communist group, that they used to come down from the mountains and use force to recruit new soldiers amongst the young men. The situation became so serious that the government, which was, of course, anti-communist, evacuated all the people from Proastio, Exohori, Tseria, Saidona, and Kastania. No-one remained there. But more than 800 young men, I'm told, died in the fighting. Those wounds have taken a long time to heal.

Another boat loading for Kalamata

G. When did the fighting finally stop?

B. In 1950. And then we had a lot of help from the British and the Americans. They brought us things we hadn't seen before: jams, butter, and a whole variety of cheeses. These things must have been even more welcome in the cities where life had been really hard during the wars. In Athens people had had to sell their furniture, sometimes even their houses, to buy pitifully small amounts of food. Many died in Kalamata from hunger. Here we were more fortunate- it rained a lot, so everything we planted grew. We had our wheat and our oil and there was horta everywhere. But it was wonderful when the supplies from the British arrived- and they came every day.

G. I have really enjoyed our conversation, Babi, and I've learned so much. Can I just ask you, finally, what you think of all the changes you've seen in your life-time?

B. Life is easier now and people have more money, but………

A family photo - Babis is the young boy at the front.