Скачать или смотреть Day 3 Ep 1: One morning at work / Lygereas - Drivianika (Λυγερέας - Δριβιάνικα)

Greece – Region of Peloponnese – Laconia.
The third day, I had to go to the village where my mother was born (in 1932) and we (me and my sister) inherited the old house and an olive grove estate. During the summer of 2019, all the place was burned down (not the house because it is made of stone) in a wildfire which caused enormous destruction throughout western Laconia.
I chose to publicize this video to show that Laconia is not merely a beautiful tourist destination but also a place where villages are being deserted and the very few "brave" people left, all of them over 65 years old, are working hard to extract the year's olive oil.
Certainly, these villages, up in the mountains, far from the sea, once proud of their wealth (the olive trees), are now completely abandoned. Lygereas once had 400 inhabitants, now has zero. In the communal cemetery, the grave of my mother and my father is there just two meters from the grave of my grandfather and grandmother.
The route to go from Gytheio to Lygereas is about 18km of a narrow, winding road, which is extremely difficult for someone to do once or twice a day. There was an old bus that made the route twice a week and brought bread and groceries to the residents (during the 80s). The road was paved with asphalt around the 1990s (till Konakia it was paved much sooner), before it was a dirt road (6 kms) that we used to drive in old cars. Electricity came to Lygereas in the 1980s and around that time my grandfather built an outdoor toilet near the house (before that, one went into the fields)...
We (my sister and me), back then, saw all this as very picturesque and, sometimes, we had fun with it (most of the time, isolation is unbearable for young people), but our grandfather insisted: "if war happens, this house and the olive trees will save you"! You see, he has seen the Greco-Italian war (WW II, he fought as a soldier and was hit by mortar fire, he even had a medal for this and after that, the civil war)... Our children no longer do feel like this... For this generation, every Lygereas is finished...