I work in books, mostly children’s books. Often, when our illustrators send in their work to match stories set in Malta, there’s always a crane or three, lurking in the background of the illustration. They’ll be right there, bulking and hulking, towering next to drawings of tiny Maltese houses with wooden green balconies and doors with brass knockers.
Each time we get these illustrations, I spend days on end trying to spot crane-free spots and now I have reached a point where I’m despairing.
Cranes are, simply put, ugly monuments to the prolific affluenza that now reigns in our country; they are the prelude to monstrous, hideous, concrete blocks that obstruct the sun, cause even more traffic and often destroy heritage. I’ve come to hate these cranes with a passion and they are increasingly making Malta oppressive.
It is for this reason that I desperately needed to catch a plane and run away to a crane-less land, and this is how I ended up in the land of Odysseus, the hero of Homer’s epic poem.
For the uninitiated in Greek mythology, Odysseus was the king of the Ionian Greek island of Ithaka who, sometime in the 12th century BC left his homeland to fight the battle of Troy (he won, thanks to the ingenious idea of his: the Trojan Horse).
It then took Odysseus another 10 years to sail back home because not all gods were exactly fans of his and so they were unleashing all sorts of creatures and winds and storms. Incidentally, along the way he also ended up beached on Gozo, where for seven years out of those 10, he was under the lure of the nymph Calypso (further proof that wherever you go you’ll always bump into a Maltese).
Ten years, you say? Why didn’t he give up and settle down nicely somewhere else? Ah, once you’ve been to Ithaka, an island roughly half the size of Malta, you immediately understand Odysseus’s wistful longing for his homeland.
I am writing this on Ithakan soil, while trying not to look up, as wherever I turn my head, there is a view of nature in its most pristine form.
At a distance I can see other islands shrouded in mysterious mist; at close proximity, I can see the turquoise sea lined by deserted beaches and olive trees; and all I can hear is the swoosh of the waves against the pebbles and the bells of goats grazing nearby.
We need to take care of our soul and no concrete building, no crane can do that – only the beauty of nature
This is the place William Davies must have had in mind when he urged us all to “stand and stare” when he wrote Leisure. There is not much else to do but “turn at Beauty’s glance”.
How is it, I ask myself, that there are no cranes in sight? Don’t the Ithakans want ‘progress’? Don’t they build huge multi-storey hotels to accommodate the droves of summer tourists?
Absolutely no. Thankfully, the 3,600 people living here (Ah, the sense of space! The lack of overcrowding!) have a sharp sense of aesthetic. When a catastrophic earthquake in 1953 literally razed villages, they did not replace their houses with ‘flettsijiet tal-gvern’ or contractor-sponsored blocks of concrete. Instead, they rebuilt thatched-roof houses which blended in with the surrounding green landscape.
It is an island which today homes three lawyers, five policemen, one post office, two primary schools and one secondary school.
I met one of the three lawyers at the village pub. Are there any thefts or murders or crimes? He burst out laughing. “No, no of course not. People leave the keys in their doors here.”
In the main, Ithakans are happy with their lot. They are not driven by “Isss hey! He has more olive trees than me!” but by “I don’t mind if my neighbour takes the olives that I won’t be picking because I have more than enough for my family.”
They work hard in summer, and then in winter it’s time for restoring the home and the soul. They pick the olives and press the oil that they use for summer; they cut their citrus, which they freeze so they make home-made lemonade in summer, when they open their front room as a little tea room. They don’t wear make-up or designer clothes but they cut wood for their fires, and they live happily the slow life.
To get to Ithaka it is still quite a journey – fine, it won’t take you 10 years but it certainly will take you 24 hours. And then there might be a ferry strike which can last one day or stretch up to three weeks. And once you get there, you find that there is no buzzing activity, except… to touch base with the beauty of nature.
It is this beauty that reminds us that we are not the only people that matter in the world, that the community matters, and that we need to take care of our soul and no concrete building, no crane can do that – only the beauty of nature.
As Khalil Gibran said: “Beauty is not in the face; beauty is a light in the heart.”
Merry Christmas.
krischetcuti@gmail.com
Twitter: @KrisChetcuti