In search of the White River, Acheloos, Greece | Fairytale rivers

As promised, we continue the series Fairytale rivers with Acheloos from Greece. A gorgeous, living river, from a world where water still flows through stories and legends, through people and time. One of the most beautiful rivers I've ever fished.

How did I end up fishing there? Simple. With his help Catalin D. Constantin, who this year asked me to help him with the idea and editing of a promotional film for the exhibition Beyond Yesterday, an anthropological journey through the Balkans, following the footsteps of the Manakia brothers, in 1900.

While analyzing the drone footage, I saw the Acheloos River. White and green, winding through the Pindus Mountains, in a light that seemed unreal. And I told Cătălin: I really want to go fishing there. That's how it all started. And I went twice this year. Continuing the idea River. Do you still remember our story?

But I'll tell you about fishing later. There are several episodes. I'll just tell you that I went down the river from the sources of Pindus to the Ionian Sea. I caught trout and native chub, barbel, seabass. And in the sea, also fed from the waters of Acheloos, seabass again, tuna, amberjack, dentex, barracuda, perch, sea bream and other species with legendary names.

I thank Cătălin again for everything: for the information, for the friendship, for the idea that connected our rivers. I asked him to write to us about his experience, as a nice man who is also a renowned anthropologist, on the Acheloos River in Greece.

Achelous River, between myth, pasture grass and forgotten words by Cătălin D. Constantin

The second largest river in Greece. It springs from ancient legends. Achelous, the god of the waters, son of Oceanus and Tethys, was always changing his appearance, sometimes a snake, sometimes a bull, sometimes a man, just as the river changes its bed and roar. He desired the beautiful Deianeira, also loved by Heracles. The two faced off, and the power of the river god was defeated. From the horn that Heracles tore from the god, the cornucopia was born, filled with nymphs with fruits and flowers. Since then, the river does not flow through Greece as water. It flows like a legend, carrying in its waves the force of abundance and original strength. Primordial waters, ritual waters, sacred waters.

Aspropotamos, the white river of the Vlachs from Pindus

The Acheloos River. That's how it still appears on the map today, but the inhabitants on its banks call it Aspropotamos, meaning the white river. And it has another name, in the language of the Mountain people from the rare villages that are scattered along its course of over 200 kilometers. The white river. Both at the sources and towards the mouth, the villages of the Acheloos valley are populated by Aromanians, Vlachs, Vlahos as the Greeks call them. Transhumant shepherds since time immemorial. Mountain people with a harsh life, always on the road, with an unwritten history, only told through spoken language. A language, today, on the verge of extinction and which has the warmth of unwritten languages, but learned, from childhood, from grandmother. The warmth and supreme naturalness of languages not shaped by school and grammatical rules.

The springs of Tzumerka and the legends of Lake Verliga

The real springs are located in the Tzumerka Massif (also known as Lakmos), somewhere south of Metsovo/Aminciu, the largest of the Aromanian settlements in Greece, a place I would return to anytime, any number of times. The real springs are as mysterious as the legendary springs. An alpine lake, with a strange name – Verliga, gives birth to the mythical river. Then the water stream snakes like a dragon, enters the ground and comes back to the surface. The local Vlachs say that there, at the springs, there is the best grass to graze for their flocks and the best feta is made from the milk of the sheep that graze there. From here, it is not too big a step to stories of battles and murders. Returning with their flocks in May, from the plains, to spend their summer in the mountains, at home, the Vlach shepherds fought over who would occupy the area near Lake Verliga with their flocks. Once upon a time, to put an end to fighting and hatred, they decided on a secret ritual that meant that the oilmen would draw lots to see who would spend the summer at Verliga. In their language, verliga/võrliga means around.

Haliki and Xristos, the Aromanian with the bar "La Verliga"„

I have countless stories about the people in the Vlach villages, Vlahohoria, as the Greeks call them. I happened upon Haliki, the first village after the springs, a decade ago, on a snowy February. There were only three inhabitants and a hunter, and we lived, in a cabin, a mysterious evening like in an English movie while it was snowing heavily outside, thinking we would spend at least a month in Haliki. There I met Xristos, a tall Aromanian, who has the most beautiful bar in the world in the wilderness between the mountains, called La Verliga. He also has a radio, for the Vlachs, in their language. Today, we are friends.

Kallarites and Syrako, the jeweler villages of Pindus

Over the peaks, passing through the Baros pass, you reach Kallarites and Syrako. Legendary villages, of shepherds, but also of jewelers. In Syrako/Sireacu in Aromanian, fabric was woven for the uniform of Napoleon's armies, when he fought in Russia. The Aromanians invented the first waterproof fabric in history, a mixture of sheep's wool and goat hair to protect themselves from the harsh weather of Pindus. And the Bulgari family originates from Kallarites. In Kallarites I also met Napoleon, a great character. Another Napoleon.

Napoleon Zaglis and the cafe that survived from 1840

In winter, in Kalarites, there are barely ten people left. Among them, Napoleon Zaglis, the owner of the cafe. He was an IT-ist in Athens for many years, but after his father's death he felt the call of the village and, after a quarter of a century of urban life, he suddenly returned home. He took over the family "business": a cafe kept almost unchanged since 1840, when it was opened by his great-great-grandfather. He had inherited it, in turn, in 1860. He was a shepherd, but also a leather merchant, with a small boat that connected the mountains to Trieste. He had sent his son to learn the shoemaker's trade, but fate overturned his plans: pirates stole the ship, and one of his sixteen sons ran away from home with money to buy back his love. Needing to return to the village, Napoleon's grandfather took over the café and tried to open a shoe workshop. But the shoes weren't selling: people were wearing tsarouhia, traditional, durable and simple sandals. The café remained, passed down through generations and saved the family.

The summer of shepherds and the rhythm of transhumance

In summer, the villages of Pindus come to life. The houses abandoned over the winter reopen, and the streets fill with people. Theodor Capidan wrote about this cycle of shepherds' lives as early as 1942: "The life of Macedonian-Romanian shepherds takes place between the mountains and the plains. Summer, from April to October, they spend in the summer, on the heights of the mountains; winter, from October to the first days of spring, on the plains. They are so used to these periodic movements that there are Romanian villages whose inhabitants, even if they are no longer shepherds, still do not stay to winter in their mountain settlements. In autumn, they leave for the plains, like nomadic shepherds, leaving behind only a few families to guard the village."„

An ancient, nomadic, but cultivated world

It is hard to imagine today how contradictory this old world of the Vlachs was: isolated at the end of the road, with narrow paths barely fitting a line of horses, but always on the move. A community that, although it roamed, remained conservative, with strict laws respected by all, otherwise it would have scattered. People who spoke several languages, negotiated with foreign merchants, listened to the service in Greek, but at home, in the family, often on the road, they spoke Aromanian. Women left alone for half a year, carrying the house and children with an almost masculine strength, preserving archaic, magical rituals, but without any rights. And, yet, men who read the great newspapers of Europe and gathered libraries in their homes. A world that made gilded decorations for the pistols of the Albanians, sewed fine embroideries for all the peoples of the Balkans, but chose for itself a simple dress.

The Aromanians between tradition, refinement and oblivion

The Aromanians were a traditional community, but in every way an atypical one. Nomads, in a Europe of settled villages. And yet, not alone: from the Caucasus to Scotland, from Scandinavia to the Iberian Peninsula, shepherds climbed and descended the mountains according to the same ancient rhythm. Anthropologists have traced this custom back to the dawn of the Neolithic, when writing did not exist, the potter's wheel had not yet been discovered, and the gods were still forces of nature. Transhumance preserves fragments of that archaic religion to this day. But the Aromanians remain special: none of the nomadic communities of Europe has known such cultural refinement and such historical involvement. From wandering shepherds, successful merchants, goldsmiths, renowned doctors, scholars and presidents of academies, prime ministers and patriarchs, financiers of the first Olympic Games and schools in Athens, pioneers of Balkan cinema arose.

Perhaps this shows that, deep down, the shepherds' culture was not rudimentary, it was just waiting. They had to borrow the language of others in order to express themselves. Between the ancient rhythm of transhumance and their brilliance in history, there remains a contradiction that modernity cannot wait to understand. Irina Nicolau said it beautifully: "The Aromanians shone astonishingly in the night of the Middle Ages, to enter the shadow cone of the Present."„

Aromanian villages at the mouth of the Acheloos

Further downstream, where the Acheloos ends its journey into the sea, there are other Aromanian villages, less well-known, but still keeping the same thread of tradition. In the Agrinio region, at the foot of the mountains, you can find Aromanian communities at Stratos, for example. To the west, near Missolonghi and its lagoons, there are small settlements where the Aromanian dialect can still be heard at family dinners or in the stories of the elders. Further downstream, in Aetolia-Acarnania, a few scattered villages still bear the imprint of a discreet but still lively Aromanian presence. Here, at the edge of the river, the language mixes and transforms, giving rise to local variants that seem more like songs than dialects.

The symbols of the White River in the Vlach carpets

I like old carpets, kilims. On them, throughout the East and the Balkans, mysterious signs appear, geometric shapes that tell a story without words: spirals that represent waters, rhombuses that carry the protective eye within them, broken lines that draw the paths of shepherds, rams' horns. Often, weavers no longer know what these signs say, they repeat them because that's how they inherited them, and ethnographers try to recompose lost meanings. The weavers did not capture the geographical contour of the water in the wool, they captured its mythical essence. They did not reproduce the geography of the river, they preserved its memory. They transformed it into a sign that concentrates myths and existences, preserved in the wool as a wordless story. Thus, the White River becomes the axis of the universe, an axis mundi that connects earth to sky and past to future, flowing at the same time through history and through dreams. The drawing in the carpet is the proof that has come down to us that modern art did not invent the abstract.

Metsovo, the place where stories are woven into wool

But in Metsovo, the unofficial capital of the Aromanians in Greece, the geometric stories have not died out. The carpets there still speak. Among the patterns, there is a strange and disturbingly abstract one, representing the White River. In that fabric, the river becomes more than water: it is a road, it is destiny, it is the thread of life. For some it is a sign of fertility, for others a border between worlds. In all these interpretations, however, the memory of a river that fed shepherds, divided territories, inspired legends remains alive. Metsovo is a unique case: here, symbolic geometry has not been lost as in other places. The stories have stuck to people's lives, they have been transmitted like a silent song, woven together with the wool. In the carpets of the Vlachs, the White River continues to flow as a symbol, as a woven memory, as a myth preserved by the women who twist the thread.

Between fishing and anthropology, a story about primordial waters

I could write not just an article about the Arâul Albu and the people who live on its banks, but an entire book. Maybe even more. But Andy gave me another thought for the future: a story between fishing and anthropology. It seems an irresistible idea to me. In search of the primordial waters, listening to the local people in a rare but still living language, like an echo of the river that connects worlds.

Don't miss the following fishing stories from the Acheloos River in Greece. From the mountains. From the river. From the lakes. From the mouth. From the sea.
We write, we read, we flow together.
Because we, the people, are libraries.
We, the people, collect and pass on stories.
Will follow.