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Corfu, Second Round, 1966

Corfu surveys in the 1960s were confined to villages at the northern tip of the island, where olives were the predominant crop and olive oil export and tourism the principal commerce. After Venetian times, cultural dominance alternated between Italy and Great Britain. There was inter-marriage of the royal Greek families with both colonial cultures. The major nineteenth-century British colonial presence in Corfu left a residue of ugly Victorian architecture.

In the second-round Seven Countries survey in Corfu in 1966, the island was relatively unspoiled. The colonial powers were gone, King Constantine had his summer palace there and a few other aristocratic families were left. Most of the island remained inhabited by farmers living their time-honored lifestyle, but Corfu surveys were more difficult to organize because the people were more touched by foreign culture, tourism, even by labor unions. Nevertheless, Corfu remained a lovely, peaceful Ionian isle, extending from the magnificent bay and peninsula of Corfu City and lowly mudflats in the south, to the imposing clay falaize and natural arches, caves, and beaches of Sidari at the northern tip of the island.

Kastelli, a village north of the city, was our principal operational base. We resided in the comfortable Villa Kastello and dined under the twinkling light of its chandeliers. We operated the survey northward and westward to Paleokastritsa on the coast, the most romantic harbor of the island. On Corfu, there was a chronic problem in recruiting participants and meeting schedules, due apparently to an inherent resentment of officialdom by the farmers. Intensive diplomacy was needed in which the local Orthodox priest helped break resistance to the study. Once a few men had come in for examination, and reported back how they were amused by it and well- treated, the rest flocked in. Field director Arniotakis was central to the successful recruitment. In the photograph below he is engaged in earnest debate with the elderly, toothless mother of one of our invited participants. When Arniotakis convinced her of the value of the study, the errant son appeared soon after.

The Corfu diet in the '60s was the highest in fat of the Mediterranean countries in the study, twenty-two percent of daily calories came from monounsaturated acids, most of them from olive oil. The farms were larger and more automated and the men slightly heavier, and we had the impression of a lifestyle less traditional than that on Crete. But from a survey perspective, Corfu was more compact, transportation was easier, the meals were less primitive, the accommodations were more comfortable, and the Corfu team was more mellow and experienced. Corfu relatives of Dontas, and of my wife, Nelly TrocmŽ, lent a special local charm and hospitality to the 1966 survey.

During the customary extended mid-day pause, the northern beaches and bays of Corfu were exquisitely suited for private bathing. Coves could be reached by rented fishing boat, and there we bathed in the sea and enjoyed a pleasant lunch of Greek delicacies. After a restful nap we returned to the vigorous evening examination schedule. Our long survey days usually ended with a late night banquet at Villa Kastello.

The atmosphere of Corfu seems especially suited to "civilized" endeavors and repose. One is stimulated, not enervated. A light sea breeze mingles salty sea with sweet jasmine. Gentle shade provides relief from the ever-present sunlight. The appetite is finely whetted . Crusty, coarse peasant bread is broken and dipped into the delicate golden Corfu olive oil, spiced with succulent black olives.

The double days of Greece seem to double one's effectiveness. For example, good day's work is accomplished between 7 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. Then, because of the human size of the communities, people can return to their homes at noon. There can be a dip in the sea, chats and snacks in sandals and robes, a shower, a light lunch, and a nap in a cool, shuttered room on coarse linen sheets. Then there's a bath, a new shave, and a new workday that starts around 4:30 p.m. and lasts through the height of commerce, until 7:30 or 8 p.m.

Vacationers read, write, explore the narrow streets of the town, shop in the bazaars, and watch the parade of life in the streets. Whether working or on vacation, cocktails and dinner with family and friends begin at 9 p.m.

Dinner may be followed by pleasant conversation, a stroll under fragrant pines and a bright moon, and reading. In the night, we hear a distant donkey bray, then a near-by owl punctures the calm with a startling hoot. Through these two different, complete, fruitful units of the day, the life span seems, indeed, to be doubled.

This romantic view of life in the islands contrasts strongly to the experience of our colleagues in Athens, which is more characteristic of modern urban life in the West.

There, academic chiefs build powerful, exclusive fiefdoms, modified only by revolutions, juntas, and other social upheavals. I have heard of one medical chief so proud he will not present a hospital clinico-pathologic conference without foreknowledge of the pathological findings! Aristotle would surely turn in his grave.

For the younger physician in Athens, medical life is a series of frustrating days in and outside the hospital. These begin with early meetings to plan the day with the staff, a visit to the administrator's office to beg for funds for minor repairs, and repeated ward rounds, followed by a frantic drive at noon across a congested, polluted city for a harried family lunch. Then come several hours of private practice out of the home, which allows for survival on an academic salary. Later in the day, young doctors return to the hospital for emergency rounds and, if able, to conduct their research.

September 6

Today we queried routinely one of our subjects on this lovely island. The bright-eyed, wizened gentlemen replied proudly to our question about his occupation: "The hardest work on earth," he said, "and the most beautiful. I am fisherman!" Poet, peasant, and nobleman combined.

September 8 : Kastelli

I am always shocked to hear the desperate, convulsive plaint of the donkey's bray, trailing away as it does in pitiable sobs. The sound is probably as natural and meaningless as a yawn, but to me it seems a shriek, expressing dumb incomprehension and the burden of being a jackass! Is it simply a response to some discomfort, such as hunger? Is it a basic language among isolated animals? Or is it a primal cry of some lost soul reincarnate?

August 15 : Archanes

In this old village, we had twenty-four subjects the first morning and everyone was in a panic. There seems to be no use repeating over and over, "Please, only a half schedule the first day." Each area team has to learn its own hard lesson, it seems, in each new village.

The sun and the katydids recall the reverberations in Van Gogh's Provencal paintings. I frequently check my face, not believing that sunglasses are really in place. I remember no such overwhelming brightness since Florida childhood. The cicadas started buzzing promptly at 7:10 a.m. today. I will time their concert again tomorrow. Watching closely I see no motion in their legs, which I had thought produced the vibrations. When their sawings hush in the evening, the strange sounds that replace them soon become familiar: the bray of a donkey; and a musical bird whose song is as regular as a metronome - every three seconds.

Archanes is situated on a promontory above a lush valley. There's a minor peak to the west and a major mountain range in the distant east. Our lodging, Hotel Dias, is a kilometer above the village. The region is known for superb table grapes and for women of rare beauty. We are here during a minor feast celebrating the Virgin Mary and the grape harvest. The people are in a festive mood.

August 17 : Thropsanon

We set up clinic on Sunday afternoon in Thropsanon Major, a sizable village. Its mayor, in straw hat, baggy britches and boots, invited us for coffee at the local tavern. We visitors, curious about the community, directed many questions to the mayor. Instead of translating them for us, our good colleague Aravanis would try to answer them from his own, sometimes incomplete knowledge.

The customers in the tavern were cordial, Sunday-clean, and were having little or nothing to drink. In fact, we see no public drunkenness in any village. The children often gathered about the team, delighted with my "magic" - the disappearing coin and disappearing lower teeth tricks (a prosthesis).

Our survey headquarters is clean and adequate and all should go well here. The local beer is awful, the Minos white wine heavy and sharp, but I am looking forward to trying the red. The bottled water is bland, the cuisine peasant-poor and greasy but edible. Evaporated milk on my self-imported Grape Nuts for breakfast keeps me going until noon.

The roads to Thropsanon are macadam most of the way. Motoring about this part of Crete is great fun but hazardous because of the locals' propensity to drive on the left side of the road. Arniotakis jokes: "It's only the Communists that drive on the left side."

Mosquitoes, usually rare, are out in force tonight. I can't quite determine whether the lady mosquito's rump is parallel or obliquely elevated on biting, the sign of Anopheles. Both filariasis and echinococcus disease occur here, plus typhus, malaria, and even sand fly-borne kala azar. We'll do well to take care against insects, and against uncooked food.

The streets are clean, but all privies are exposed, with only a tiled floor and hole. This makes the moderate fly infestation disconcerting. How sad it is that we don't export metal screens instead of Coca Cola. What a major public health contribution the United States would make to introduce screening of privies about the world.

Crete is greener, more prosperous, and seemingly happier than I had anticipated from earlier experience. But tourism will surely become more important here and new roads are already strongly influencing lifestyle. All-purpose, motor-powered carts are evident and, of course, television is on its way.

Our colleague, Adrian Corcondilas, is warm, intelligent, intense, and passionately Greek. His vocabulary and ability in both French and English are imposing, as are his knowledge of Greek history and interest in the sea. I look forward to good visits with him. He and Lekos run the cardiac cath. lab in the Department of Cardiology at Hippokrateion Hospital in Athens.

This evening, we went with Arniotakis to search for a missing subject, a villager who had moved to Iraklion. We found him in a side street, working in his pottery shop. There we were able to watch this master craftsman, taught by his father and grandfather before him, perform a craft that will surely die with this generation. Pottery is being replaced by plastic and aluminum.

For the moment, there is still a market for the traditional urns, because many maintain that oil never spoils in natural clay vessels. Construction of these vessels is called "angioplasty," the same word we use medically today for the repair of blood vessels.

In vigorous, coordinated motions, the potter kneads the reddish clay, wetting it on the base, turning the stone with a sure rhythm. He can produce small vases, ash trays, urns for oil, and incense containers at a rate of one a minute. He models for us both open and closed containers, destroys them, and makes still others for our amusement. He presented me a Minoan-style ashtray with apologies that the painting and glazing were not as tasteful as they should be.

During lunchtime today we watched the local potter in Thropsanon make huge vessels for olive oil and water out of a coarser clay and with a much lighter-weight flywheel. He is another master craftsman, in a tradition unchanged for thousands of years. He uses prickly sage to fire his kiln, and the scene around the kiln is a delightful chaos of ancient-style vessels in various stages of completion.

On my noon wanderings about the village many locals ask to be photographed - a common request in "primitive" cultures everywhere. One lad wanted to be taken shooting a sling-shot; another held up a dead mouse tied by the tail to annoy the girls. A little girl wanted her picture taken with a live cicada buzzing away between her fingers. An old veiled woman in black, occupied in the shade of her house, wanted to be pictured cutting up strips of rags for quilting.

In these villages, as in Dalmatia, a number of older men have returned here to their homeland after years of employment in the United States, mostly it seems, in Pennsylvania. One complained bitterly that Carnegie Steel at Homestead still owed him two weeks pay! When I promised to present his grievance to them on my return, he seemed little interested. Perhaps this would ruin the good story he has plied for thirty-five years.

George Zoumboulakis, a charming villager, invited us onto the veranda of his tavern this morning where there is a glorious view over the church and fields to the eastern mountains. He said in good English that he had returned to Thropsonon because, "Everybody loves the place where he was born." How beautiful it must be to see, at age seventy, where one played at age ten, and to be a part of the continuing life in one's natal community. Our host recounted the legend which all citizens of Thropsanon firmly believe - if someone should fall into the church well, the water will rise and throw them back safely. More believable is the claim that water from that well, used in baking, causes the bread to rise without yeast.

August 21 : Kastelli

We have reached the town of Kastelli after a beautiful drive through the rocks on a eucalyptus-lined roadway at the western edge of the mountain range. Though not as breathtaking a site as Thropsonon, this city, on a paved road, is more important and the dispensary more adequate. The survey work goes well.

We have here in Kastelli a new problem for the survey. Fathers often register children as several years older when they are born - an average of one or two years. It has something to do with military service eligibility, but certainly confuses record-keeping.

Mohacek and Menotti are experts at electrocardiography and it goes well here. Because of the participant" parachutists" in the younger and older age range, we will have a good sample for age-trend studies. In the "department of field improvisations," we are cutting the urine dip-sticks longitudinally to double their number because we are running short. We have found that a systematically high hematocrit reading was due to cleaning with saline instead of acetone between cases. This has been corrected.

August 27

Back in the survey center today, through translation by our spirometry technician, a local peasant described to us a Cretan arranged marriage. Though there is no formal written agreement, the pact is never broken. Any party breaking it, said the man, would be beaten to death by the other villagers (shades of the stoning in "Zorba"). He attempted to impress on us the necessity for the trial period of marriage which concludes when pregnancy occurs. This makes good sense evolutionarily, but is strictly in the tradition of male supremacy, of "blame the woman," and rejection for infertility!

We had a pleasant lunchtime today in the square of Kastelli with Ancel and Margaret Keys joining the survey team under lush berry trees. The Keys feel much as I, a bit out of place without direct responsibility in the survey work. There is less satisfaction in standby supervising than in participation. Aravanis' team and our Minnesota group could use a little more imagination in exploiting our visit, if only for professional "stimulation." But in "Latin" fashion, our Greek colleagues have gone to great effort to ensure that we are "comfortable and amused," rather than involved and useful.