Was my three-day photo trip to Aliveri, the mainland Roma settlement, a success? It cost way more than I would have liked and the rental car, a VW Polo that trawled dangerously low like a race car on the Aliveri dirt roads, caused no end of worry and trepidation. One deep rut and I could bottom out the car, damaging tires and fenders and costing me my $350 deposit. (Since I had booked my tickets late and all car ferries were full, a rental car was my only option.) My Roma friend, Maria, was clearly enamored with my sporty Polo and piled in with her kids for a ride from lower Aliveri to their house hardly a quarter-mile away.
I am feeling more comfortable photographing in this Roma settlement now after my fourth visit. Mitsos’s youngest daughter and cousins were my tour guides from house to house this last trip. In Aliveri, neighbors live one upon the other in unfinished concrete homes or small tin-roofed shanties. The kids overflow from one house to another and the mamas gossip together, the men smoke, the teenagers eat chips and drink soda outside the local Roma grocery store. Aliveri is a village, albeit a strange one where only some families have finished kitchens but most have a living room furnished with just a couch and giant TV. Mitsos and Konstandina’s house is unfinished concrete but their lot is graced with six large mulberry trees providing privacy and abundant shade. Their neighbors across the road sit outside every day in what might be their future living room but now is just a great opening in the concrete walls. This family shouts across the road to Mitsos’s and runs up and down a dirt embankment to go visiting, holding on to the straggly grass for balance. Like windows and doors, a proper staircase down to the road is still in their future. Meanwhile trucks and cars pass by rocking with music, a party on wheels and a neighbor, pushes her baby in a stroller and stops to chat with Konstandina. Does it remind you of any Greek village? There is more music, more chaos and, yes, more poverty.
For me, a double xeni, foreigner—not Roma, not even Greek—fitting in takes some hutzpah, the boldness to walk into the community, share a coffee with Konstandina or Maria, chat in Greek, make photos when they happen or create photographic situations for portraits. Today, I visit the school just as the kids are let out. It looks like any other school in Greece except the grandmas stand by in their patterned head scarves and the Mamas push strollers wearing long skirts. I take some photos outside then walk to the house of Maria and Stefanos and their three kids, Kostas, Babi, and Irini. I bring the photos I had previously taken of the kids. The family is delighted and invite me to eat gauvros, little fish, and salad with them. The food is tasty and the boys practice their English with me at their Mama’s urging while their little sister makes patties of all her food, rolling it in her hands then eating with her fingers. Their cousin, Diego drops by, a handsome 16 year old who enjoys playing football and is fluent in English. I’m learning that some Roma moms like Maria are progressive about schooling, others indifferent. Konstandina’s younger kids attend but once the older ones resist, she doesn’t press. I doubt that Konstandina spent much time in school herself, having married at age 11.
Tonight, I’m looking out my doors in Room 601, Alexandros Hotel. It is 11:00 p.m. and I see far in the distance the orange lights of the highway leading out of Volos all the way to Athens. I feel nostalgic for the days I would drive away into the vast Greek countryside, where the hills roll then abruptly change to mountains, finally dropping into the ever-present sea. Those days I was enroute to beautiful Epirus, the mountainous region bordering Albania where I photographed the landscape, the farmers, the vast herds of goats and sheep.
Roma communities do not exist in the beautiful Greek landscape. Instead their settlements are usually the unwanted land on the edge of towns by the railroad tracks or the landfill. Evangelia and Marinos’s shanty in the olive grove of Skopelos is the most beautiful Roma settlement I know. Photographing in the Roma communities is challenging and requires me to look beyond the shabby structures, the absence of productivity and to invest instead in the people and their brave struggle for survival. Perhaps next year, I can marry the two objectives and schedule a trip out west to Farsala to photograph the wagons full of cotton fuzz and the fields all abloom with cotton balls. Surely Mitsos or Konstandina can provide me with a contact—a cousin, an aunt— living in the large Roma settlement on the edge of Farsala.