Lost Shades, Found Stories: a Sunglasses Adventure in northern Greece

Sunski Sunglasses has a generous lifetime warranty for damaged shades but an ambiguous one if you lose them. The website states: “We cannot cover lost shades, but drop us a line and maybe we can make you a deal? (Tip: the crazier the story of how you lost them the better!)”

I loved those sunglasses, and I’m up for the challenge. Here’s my story.

I was in a remote village in northern Greece in the Pogoni region. My glorified research assistant, Maria, had just found a decent parking spot halfway down to the cemetery we were heading towards. I say glorified because she joined on to the last-minute data collection trip just as last minute as I had planned it and agreed to help me collect pictures of graves, translate and facilitate interviews, and drive (despite being a new driver). She is the only assistant I have found with all of these skills. Driving up and down into Balkan villages and around the curvaceous mountains that surround them is stressful, even for an experienced driver.

Once we found a place to park the car, we were off to a good start.

A weird fact about me: I am experienced in trekking to cemeteries in remote Balkan villages. I have used this as a method for my research for the past couple of years. So, I was prepared and I know that when we left the car, I had all the materials one might need for mini hikes when the roads become unpassable in a regular car: sunscreen, hats, sunglasses, snacks, water, phone, and phone charger.

The stone path to Palaiopyrgos cemetery, the entrance, and the tree-lined path between the graves

We descended a pleasant path to a gorgeous cemetery, took photos of each grave, trained Maria on how to interpret and code “identities” from the text and symbols showing on a grave, and almost started our walk back up towards the car before noticing perhaps the most interesting phenomenon of the whole trip: which are osteofilakios.

An osteofilakio is an ossuary, i.e. a container or room where dead people’s bones are kept. The term osteofilakio in Greek literally means protector of the bones. Some villages in Pogoni region have kept up an old practice in northern Greece of keeping relatives’ bones in boxes and visiting them from time to time, asking a priest to bless them and all their ancestors, and keeping their names visible and memorialized. Since I’m interested in family-level transmission of identities across generations, especially in border regions, osteofilakios were like a gold mine. We also photographed people’s names and memorialization practices in the osteofilakio.

Inside an osteofilakio

Then we started our trek back up to the car, feeling very good about ourselves.

In all, it was a productive, efficient, interesting, and rather peaceful stop, until…

… two, three, and finally, four angry dogs surrounded us and blocked our path back to the car! As a dog lover and owner, but also someone who has been bitten and pinned to the ground by an angry dog before, I knew to listen to the signals of an angry dog. So, we walked in the opposite direction of the car, pretending this was our normal path. I coaxed the nicest of the dogs with my best soothing voice, and most of them started to wag their tails a bit. One did not.

We soon passed an older man who was working in his garden. He assured us that the angriest of the dogs was nothing to be afraid of; he said something like “σκύλος που γαβγίζει δεν δαγκώνει” which meant “Don’t be afraid, he won’t bite” and literally means “a barking dog rarely bites” (the English language equivalent to “he’s all bark and no bite”).

Emboldened by the local knowledge, I began petting the nicer-looking dogs; Maria did too; eventually, the barkiest one calmed down. They even followed us back to our car to say goodbye. They turned out to be big softies in the end.

We passed the nice man on our way out. As it turned out, the local man we ran into had a fantastic story, a great book about the history of the Pogoni region, and a willingness to share his unique perspective. In addition to learning about identities through gravestones, I wanted to do some interviews about how people perceive the border of Greece (and the stories that shaped these perspectives) while I was in the field.

Local man pointing from northern Greece village Palaiopyrgos to the area he referred to as “Vorios Ipiros” (i.e. Northern Epirus) rather than southern Albania

So, after chatting and stalling the car’s engine for a good 5–10 minutes straight (which the man graciously said was because of the stone path even though we were on a paved road), we planned to return to the village one day soon. He and his wife ended up inviting us back for coffee and giving us a full interview.

Turkish delight or loukoumi in Greek on the right and on the left, local man leaning in to talk to Maria to make a point that Vorios Ipiros paralleled Kosovo, paraphrased: “basically, the US decided, and that was that.”

All of this to say, I lost my Sunski sunglasses somewhere during my visit to Palaiopyrgos! I don’t know where. I searched thoroughly for them — and even walked back down to the cemetery in case they’d fallen off in the cemetery or osteofilakio. I checked again when we returned to the village for an interview a few days later. They were ne’er to be found.

I left Palaiopyrgos village with an empty sunglasses case but with two new friends and a full heart.

Is this a crazy enough story, Sunski?