You plunge into the overgrown passageway glad to be leaving the road. The two-metre-wide opening draws you in between dry stone walls of rough limestone which have given way in places, littering stones onto the path. The February sun has just crested the towering escarpment of orange stained sedimentary rock above lighting up the previously wine dark sea below. You pick your way carefully forcing a path through the prickly vegetation, overgrown after the winter rains. Spring is already in the air with the smell of pungent thyme in the air.  You look for its source and stoop to pick a flowering stalk. As you start up again you realise the spiney scorpion grass has snared you as if attempting to bar further progress. Below the rattle of an old truck braking for the sharp bend over the gorge mouth of Foneas already sounds distant. You have left the modern coast-road, with its asphalt and concrete shoulders, crash barriers and road markings to take the old way, a kalderimi, looping up the escarpment, headed for the village of Proastio.

The word kalderimi has Turkish roots.  It is derived from kaldır-‘to raise, erect’ via kaldırım ‘pavement’. A rival etymology claims it to be an elision of kalos (good) and dromos (road) loaned to Turkish and reimported to Greek which appears (after extensive research) an instance of Hellenistic wishful thinking. Whatever the derivation in a modern Greek context it has come to mean anything made of what, in English, would be known as cobbles. So when stone masons were laying a rustic stone terrace at our Greek house I was delighted to find it being referred to as ‘kalderimi’. For the purposes of this article we use the term to refer to the beautiful limestone mule paths that criss- cross Mani.

Pack animal tracks can be found all across the world. They were the roads of daily use, before the advent of motorised transport, by which people moved their goods, their animals and themselves. The islands and peninsulas of the northern Mediterranean offer uplifted limestone as a plentiful building material. The pedra en sec, the drystone routes criss-crossing Majorca are a notable example dating back to the Moorish occupation of the island.  The chemin muletier of Corsica are another fine example. Here on Mani we find ourselves the custodians of a profusion of trackways which were plied by people and animals within living memory.

The kalderimi of the Peloponnese in general and the Mani Peninsula in particular form a network of mulepaths linking villages and adjoining olive covered hillsides with upland summer grazing above and sheltered coves below.  Whilst some presumably follow ancient routeways dating back 4000 years to the Bronze age of palatial Mycenae and Pylos, the splendidly surviving limestone engineering we see today dates back to the Ottoman period.

The Ottoman empire was largely administered by provincial governors often referred to as Pasha. However given the practical difficulties of subduing the inhabitants of the Mani Peninsula the Ottoman authorities created the office of the Bey of Mani in 1776. Rather than an autocratic Pasha ruling in the name of the Sultan, the Bey depended on respect and the support of the powerful clans from which he was invariably drawn. The third Bey, Tzanetos Grigorakis (1782-1798), was especially effective with a vested interest in strengthening trade due to his power base at the port of Gytheio. Some of the most impressively engineered kalderimi are credited to this period though we lack documentary evidence by which to date particular trails.

Attempting to collect verbal history relating to the kalderimi I referred to a donkey in conversation with old Panayioti in Proastio. He immediately corrected me, μουλαρι (a mule) was the beast of burden round these parts. As he informed me you need  the strength of a mule (as opposed to a donkey) to carry two 50 Kg sacks of olives down to the mill. And he should know having spent much of his life moving olives between the upper villages (Saidona and Exohori) and the coastal olive factory of Kardamyli via Proastio. My enquiry as to the upkeep of the kalderimi triggered much heart searching. In living memory it was the role of the village Kapitan to assign ‘voluntary’ maintenance shifts but as old Panayioti recalled turn out could be patchy!  

Until the 1970’s the Kalderimi were the vital arteries of the local economy bringing imported goods up and locally produced olives down to the coast. There they connected with the daily boat which made its way up and down this coastline from Kalamata. The kalderimi were also the veins along which a steady stream of local residents migrated in the 1950’s from a life beset by hardship and conflict for the promise of new opportunities in the cities and new worlds beyond. 

The building of motor roads under the nationalist direction of the Junta, better known as the Greek Colonels, between 1967 and 1974 changed these connections. With the arrival of motorised transport the kalderimi were abandoned. But motor roads can’t cope with steep gradients and tend to run horizontally. This fractured the links between the upland villages and their coastal neighbours. As we all frequent the main road along the coast ribbon development is reinforced along the narrow coastal strip. Links to the upper villages are few and utilise lengthy switchbacks to gain altitude. But Kalderimi were designed to lead pack animals up the steep gradients and link vertically. Therefore they provide a ready means of communication between the upper, mid-level and lower villages for people able and willing to walk. After thirty years of neglect a new generation of incoming walkers waymarked those routes which remained in the 2000s. A walking guide book was published in 2003 by In The Mani’s Mat Dean.  The Anavasi mapping  of  the area in 2011 generated what has been the definitive record of waymarked kalderimi until the present upgrade programme of the West Mani Council.

As Robert Macfarlane[i] tells us in his book on the Old Ways ‘Paths are the habits of a landscape’…which…’without common care and common practice disappear’. As elsewhere the arrival of roads has led to neglect of the pre-existing mulepaths which are fast in danger of returning to nature.

[i] Robert Macfarlane The Old Ways 2012 Penguin ISBN 978-0-241-14381-0

A group of ‘kalderimi cleaners’ have been cleaning some of the better used local routes for several years now. This encouraging voluntary donation of time and effort reinforces the view that there IS a future for these old ways. We are into our fourth year and the kalderimi cleared to date are listed in table 1.

Table 1. Works undertaken to date

We are not the only voluntary effort happening in Mani. The Mountaineering Club of Kalamata (ΕΟΣ Καλαματας) are also active and most recently cleared the kalderimi leading from Kampos to Kardamyli.

Our local council are now engaged in an upgrade and enhancement programme for existing walking routes in the area. Many walkers will have noticed new signage which has already been implemented as part of this programme. This is based on a route designation as shown in the map below.

Going forward the council’s ambition is to identify recurrent resource to enable not only initial cleaning but annual maintenance of the network. There are also as yet undesignated routes known to local residents and keen walkers which it is hoped can be saved for future generations. Indeed a spin off group from our volunteers explore new routes on ‘Tough Tuesdays’.

European walking routes are of course a growth area generating income and there are many examples here in Greece of successful community engagement with sustainable hiking networks such as the Menelaon Trail, and others detailed on the Paths of Greece website. There is no reason why the Kalderimi of Mani can’t be developed into a sustainable source of eco tourism to the benefit of local residents and the local economy. Indeed Taygetos is a particular focus as a protected area under the Greek Ministry of the Environment with the support of the Hellenic Ecotourism Society.

As the project to enhance the paths moves forward our group of volunteers will continue our efforts to reopen kalderimi in danger of being lost to the undergrowth for ever. You can be part of this movement by participating in the enjoyable active fellowship of kalderimi cleaners. To find out how either contact either of the authors or simply join our crew out cleaning a kalderimi near you one Friday morning. Alternatively come and join our end of shift lunchtime refreshment session (currently at the Mani Brewery).

Craig Mclaren csmclaren67@gmail.com

Matthew Ellis ellis_matt@outlook.com