NOELLE AND CATHERINE
Athens: 1946
20
The drive to Ioannina took nine hours. To Catherine, the scenery seemed almost Biblical,
something out of another age. They drove along the Aegean Sea, past small whitewashed
cottages with crosses on the roofs and endless fields of fruit trees, lemon and cherry and
apple and orange. Every inch of the land was terraced and farmed and the windows and
roofs of the farmhouses were painted with gay blue colors as though in defiance of the
hard life being carved out of the rocky soil. Stands of tall, graceful cypress trees grew in
wild profusion on the steep mountainsides.
“Look, Larry,” Catherine exclaimed, “aren’t they beautiful?”
“Not to the Greeks,” Larry said.
Catherine looked at him. “What do you mean?”
“They consider them a bad omen. They use them to decorate cemeteries.”
They passed field after field of primitive scarecrows, with a scrap of cloth tied to
each fence.
“They certainly must have gullible crows around here,” Catherine laughed.
They drove through a series of small villages with impossible names: Mesologian
and Agelkastron and Etolikon and Amfilhoia.
Late in the afternoon they reached the village of Rion, sloping gently down to the Rio
River, where they were to catch the ferryboat to Ioannina. Five minutes later they were
sailing toward the island of Epirus where Ioannina lay.
Catherine and Larry sat on a bench outside on the ferry’s upper deck where in the
distance ahead of them they saw a large island begin to loom out of the afternoon mist. It
seemed wild to Catherine and somehow a little ominous. It had a primitive look to it as
though it had been created for the Greek gods, and mere mortals were unwelcome
intruders. As the boat steamed closer, Catherine could see that the bottom of the island
was ringed with sheer rock that dropped off to the sea below. The foreboding mountain
had a scarred, gashed look where men had gouged a road out of it. Twenty-five minutes
later the ferry was docking at the little harbor of Epirus, and a few moments later
Catherine and Larry were driving up the mountain toward Ioannina.
Catherine was reading to Larry from the guidebook.
“Nestled high in the Pindus Mountains, in a steep bowl surrounded by towering Alps,
from a distance Ioannina takes on the shape of a double-headed eagle, and at the claw of