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Alvarez Family Suffolks in Greece!

Hello all, or as they say in Greek, Γεία σας!!! I have been in sunny Athens, Greece for the past
semester, and I decided to spend part of that semester doing a project on Greek sheep farming! I
wrote an article which will hopefully soon be published in "the Banner!" Feel free to read it here
and explore some pictures. The last six are not sheep related, but are places I visited - Athens,
Delphi, Mycenae, Meteora, Nauplio, and Santorini!


	To all sheep breeders of the United States, hello from sunny Athens, Greece! This is Joshua Alvarez of Alvarez Family Suffolks, and I’m writing to everyone to share a little of my Study Abroad experience with the Arcadia University Program. For one of the Arcadia program’s core classes, entitled the “Greek Key Seminar,” all students are required to create a project all their own to help them connect with the modern Greek people and some aspect of their culture. One student chose the nightlife of Athens, another student decided to cover the many religious festivals of Greece, and yet another is writing about Greece’s efforts to integrate wind power technology into their electrical production. As for me, I decided that I didn’t want a topic which was too common, and I certainly wanted to take a break this semester from the strictly academic, so I chose something that would help me connect my experience in Greece to my family life back at home: the life of a modern Greek shepherd. Right now, the weather is starting to get hot and Athens is filled with the sounds of ringing church bells and the smells of blooming orange blossoms and roasting lamb as the country prepares for Easter this upcoming weekend (in the Greek Orthodox Church, Easter comes significantly later than the Easter of the Catholic and Protestant traditions). However, in order to speak with shepherds I had to move well outside the city. My program director put me in contact with several individuals in the rural countryside of the Peloponnesian peninsula, specifically near the ancient city of Corinth. Corinth is about an hour and a half southwest of Athens, and from the size and expanse of ruins there, one can tell that it was quite the bustling place in ancient times. In the Classical era of Greece, Corinth was a mighty sea empire which rivaled even Athens, and over the centuries it has been a critical position for the control of the Peloponnesian peninsula and Greece itself. During the middle of the first century AD, St. Paul of Tarsus set up the first Christian church of Corinth here, and his letters from Ephesus to the Christian community there make up the New Testament books 1 and 2 Corinthians. Nowadays Corinth is a quiet little town by the sea side with a few fish taverns, coffee shops, and museums, and it’s here that I spoke with my first shepherds, Aristomenes Arborores and his brother, Giorgos. However, before I get to Aristomenes (Menes for short), I’d like to tell you a little about the sheep industry in Greece and its history. The shepherding life has been an inseparable part of Greek culture since ancient times. Images of sheep and shepherds are often seen in Greek mythology: the Golden Fleece, images of Orpheus and his pan pipes playing to sheep in the fields, and the Greek concept of “Arcadia,” a paradise where humanity and nature live together in harmony and where men are often portrayed as shepherds. This pastoral world takes its name from a Greek province which still exists today, as does the Arcadia Program through which I came to study. In later times, even up till the 1950s, the life of the nomadic shepherd survived with the Sarakatsani, transhumance shepherds who lived with and completely dependent upon their sheep. They traveled in the mountains during the spring and summer months with their flocks and families, building huts where they needed them and spending the year moving thousands of sheep through the land to graze and milking them for cheese makers who would come and set up their mobile productions nearby. They made much of their own clothes from the wool of their animals, and many of their tools, including their shepherd’s crooks, were hand made. For the Sarakatsani, life revolves around their sheep. They do not measure the passing of time with a calendar, but by the season and the lifecycle of their animals; it is not lambing season because it is December, it is December because it is lambing season. However, in recent years reorganization and industrialization of agriculture, along with a variety of other factors, has caused their lifestyle to quickly disappear – there were about 80,000 Sarakatsani dispersed throughout Greece in the 1950s, while today there are far fewer. Today, Greece leads all Mediterranean European countries in sheep numbers and industry production (except for Spain, which has a larger meat market). Greece is a very mountainous country, has a dry Mediterranean climate, and the plant life here is often unsuitable to many kinds of livestock, but as we all know these are situations in which sheep excel. Due to their adaptability in a wide variety of environments, sheep thrive in the Greek countryside. Though Greek sheep farmers harvest wool and meat (Greece is still one of the world’s top consumers of lamb and mutton), the focus of sheep breeding by far lies in increasing milk quality and production. Greece is a dairy sheep country: lambs are sold at low market weights and very young, often as young as 40 days, in order to ensure that the most milk possible is harvested to sell to market. Greece is the only country in the world in which the production of cow’s milk is significantly less than that of small ruminants (sheep and goats) – over 95% of Greek ewes, regardless of breed, are milked. Though the Greeks consume sheep’s milk (a favorite breakfast of shepherds is sheep’s milk poured over bread), the vast majority goes to the production of yoghurt and cheeses such as kefalotyri (literally “head cheese”), graviere, and feta, which I’m sure you’ve seen exported to American supermarket. So, at about ten o’clock in the morning I arrive with my translator (program director Jan Sanders) at a small coffee shop to meet Menes and his brother. Menes is in his seventies and has been retired from the sheep industry for quite a while, but though he now spend his days tending his orange and olive trees, he still remembers his shepherding days and keeps up to date with the current state of things in the industry. We introduce ourselves and sit down while Menes orders us some Ouzo, a Greek liquor mixed water and served with salted anchovies – it turns the water cloudy and tastes like black licorice. Of course he wouldn’t allow me to pay for it, and though I would normally have declined since I don’t really like Ouzo, I accepted, as it’s a dangerous thing to deny Greek hospitality. After we’ve sat for a few minutes and Jan and Menes, who are old friends, catch up on what’s been going on in each other’s lives, we get down to business. Menes’ sheep, as are most sheep in Greece, fall under the “Zackel” category, a group which encompasses many different breeds. Zackels are widely dispersed throughout Europe and Asia – males are characterized by long, spiral horns (females are mostly polled) and they have long, thin tails, but there is a lot of diversity between breeds. Menes’ sheep have their origins in the high Balkan mountains of southeastern Europe, where they were bred to survive in harsh conditions. Greek sheep are bred to be survivors and for high quality milk production, and it is their genetic diversity which makes them good at living in both the high, rocky mountains and the seaside lowlands. However, it is also this genetic diversity which makes their exact breed difficult to pin down – coat colors, body size, and morphology are different from individual to individual, and because recently a German breed has been imported to increase milking capacity, this makes their genealogy even more difficult to determine. Some are spotted while others are not; some have black faces while others have white. When I tell him that we raise a meat breed in America and that we’ve had Suffolk rams which have weighed over three-hundred and fifty pounds (roughly 160 kg for Menes), he laughs at me and tells me that we’ve bred cows in America, not sheep. Menes’ ewes rarely way over 130 pounds, and they certainly never reach the proportions of a Suffolk. It seems that the only consistency in the Greek sheep are their milk production – the animals have lactation periods of about 160-180 days and have to be milked three times per day, and better milkers might lactate past 200 days. The ewes are bred one time a year in the fall in order to get late December and early January lambs, and the lambs are weaned from their mothers as soon as possible so that milk can start being gathered for the cheese makers. During grazing, the milking ewes are separated from rams and unbred yearlings to make certain that the best grasses are available for the milkers, and their diets are often supplemented with corn and cotton seeds to make sure that the best milk possible is produced. Sometimes in the winter, they are even fed orange rinds to ensure that they’re getting enough vitamins. Menes moves on to tell me about some of the difficulties for modern Greek sheep farmers. It’s difficult to make a living as a shepherd anymore. Milk sells for about a Euro per kilo: the same price as a bottle of water in Athens. Menes tells me that he had read a university study which claimed that, with regards to market lambs, a shepherd invests about six Euro per kilo in his animals, but the market price for lamb is about 5 Euro per kilo. Sheep farming is almost completely a family business in Greece. Shepherds rarely hire help outside the family, and yet the average age of the Greek sheep farmer is in the 50s. Older farmers are finding it difficult to find help as young Greeks are abandoning the agricultural lifestyles of their parents, a lifestyle often viewed as involving too much physical work for too little profit. Instead, they are leaving for more profitable and more socially acceptable careers in larger towns and cities, a choice which Menes cannot blame them for – his own children have not followed in his footsteps. Menes predicts that soon, like with many other forms of agriculture in a rapidly industrializing country, the common family sheep farm, like the transhumance lifestyle, will give way to large-scale industrial farming. He has a deep love for his animals – he tells me stories about how Greek shepherds, including himself, used to play pipes in the fields to calm his animals while they laid chewing their cud. It is this love which makes him worry that the future of his occupation, the quality of life of the animals, and the quality of the products from his industry will suffer from some of the practices which come with modernized agriculture. As I leave, he shakes my hand, thanks me for the visit, and calls me “colleague.” I leave the café hoping that my next visit will involve someone as knowledgeable and friendly as Menes. On a different weekend I traveled back to Corinth to visit an actual Greek sheep farm as well as a cheese making facility. Some of my fellow Arcadia students came along, as many of them had never seen sheep and goats up close, and few can turn down the chance to try the various cheeses made in the Peloponnese. Our first stop was the cheese making facility. After we all got used to the pungent smell, the owner of the facility gave us a full guided tour, where we were shown where the milk is brought in from the local farms and pumped through cheesecloth to remove excessive fat, the machines which pasteurize the milk and in which cheese is cultured, and finally the devices which pressed the cheese to remove excessive liquid content. Because he was a local producer, the owner aged his cheese on site and then sold it to local supermarkets for resale. I was surprised at how wet and smelly the whole process is – the place smelled like that first colostrum milked for newborn lambs – but the end results were amazing! At the end of the tour, which was pretty short as the complex was almost the same size as our family barn, the owner gave us free hats and allowed us to taste his products with some bread and soda on the side. I’d have to say, after being in Greece for a while, that soda doesn’t go quite as well with cheese as wine does, but I’m not complaining. Soon after leaving the cheese maker my group arrives at the farm of Anastarios Kakouras (Tasos for short) in the hills above Corinth. Tasos tells me that though he only has enough education to write his own name, he is a “professor of sheep.” As he takes me out to view his flock, he skillfully catches one of the females with a Greek tool-of-the-trade not often seen in America: a shepherd’s crook. As he already knows that I raise sheep back in America, he picks up a fully grown ewe and hands her to me so that he can catch another, certain that I’ll be able to handle her while he shows a lamb to the other students. While the others are looking at the lamb (and I’m holding the poor ewe), he tells me about his flock. Tasos has over two hundred sheep, which he takes out during the spring and summer months to graze on the countryside. In the fall, local farmers who have taken their crops off of their fields allow him to take his flocks through to graze – it’s free feed for the shepherd and free fertilizer for the farmer. He doesn’t take his sheep up into the mountains like the old shepherds used to, as with the introduction of the new German breed his sheep now prefer to live closer to sea level and on easier ground than the rocky heights. When I ask him about dogs, he tells me that though some Greeks use sheepdogs to control their flocks, he doesn’t need one. Because he spends most of the hours of almost every day with his animals, they are used to his presence and docile enough for him to easily control on his own. This is easy to see – even though there are a lot of students who are obviously new people to the sheep, they aren’t nearly as frightened as my flock would be if I, a familiar face, entered the pen at home. After seeing how quickly and skillfully he used his crook to catch a sheep, I ask him about the other tools he uses in his trade. For the most part, they seem like the tools of the trade on any American sheep farm, but unlike my family, which uses mechanical shears to take the wool off our animals, Tasos and his sons only use hand shears. I was lucky enough to have come on a shearing day, and as I was leaving I caught a glimpse of his sons shearing ewes. The men were shearing animals with hand shears much faster than we do it with mechanical shears. Though they didn’t seem so concerned about getting all the wool off the animals, they still did a relatively complete job in a couple minutes per animal. I was more than impressed. As I’m walking about his farm, I see that Tasos, like Menes, provides his animals with crates of orange rinds as vitamin supplements. I ask him about common health problems for Greek sheep – they have little trouble with worms and other parasites, as the amount of roughage the animals get and the fact that the animals are moved over many different pasturelands helps to control those problems and keep their digestion working well. Though they know of Scrapie, they rarely see it in their animals. The most common problem Greek sheep suffer from seems to be a virus which they call “red gut” – the sheep get a fever, gradually become weaker, and then die. The only true symptoms are red intestines, which cannot be diagnosed until the sheep has died and an autopsy has been performed. His animals receive vaccinations, and he keeps track of which animal is which via ear tags which look much like the ones we have at home. Instead of health problems or predators, it is his fellow man that costs Tasos the most sheep every year – sheep thievery is still a large problem in Greece. I’ve been told stories about how young shepherds used to test their skills by stealing from a neighbor’s flock during the night. Finally, after seeing how busy he is taking care of his flock day in and day out, I asked him about what he did with his free time. Remembering how I was raised in 4-H and how much of my youth included going to livestock conventions, lamb cook-offs, and competitions for best or most beautiful woven wool clothing, I asked him if he had anything similar. He laughs and tells me that the Greeks have no such competitions that he knows of that are similar to mine, but that shepherds (and other members of the village) do gather often, usually for religious festivals. The Greek Orthodox Church has many holidays on its calendar, from Saint’s days to Feast days, and shepherds often meet on these days to exchange stories, gossip, eat, and simply enjoy each other’s company. Soon our time is up, and I thank Tasos for showing me around his farm and sharing some of his life stories with me and, after he agrees to take a few pictures with me, I leave with the rest of my group smelling like sheep, which my fellow students don’t seem to appreciate but which reminds me of home. It’s been an amazing and enriching experience speaking to Menes and Tasos and connecting with a lifestyle older than Classical Greece itself. The end of my sheep adventures and the writing of this article remind me that my time in sunny, ancient Greece is soon to come to a close. I’m happy to have been able to connect my life at home to something so important to the Greek way of life, and I feel lucky and blessed to have been able to meet these people, talk with them, and share their stories with family and friends back home. Soon I’ll be returning to the states but until then, as a Greek shepherd would say to leaving friends, Γεία σας, or “to your health.” I would like to thank everyone which made this project possible, specifically Jan Sanders, the Arcadia program director in Athens and my translator during these adventures, and the shepherds Menes, Tasos, and the cheese-maker Mr. Tsouvas, all of whom were very knowledgeable, more than friendly, and without whose hospitality this article would not have been possible.

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