In search of the spirit of the place of the most authentic Greek Macedonia

Ruins of the sanctuary of Demeter, in ancient Díon.

María Belmonte squints, sprawled on a sofa in the bar of the Alma hotel in Barcelona and seems to be moving many kilometers away, to the ruins of old Pela, the ancient capital of the Macedonian kingdom.

“There have been Alexander, Philip, Aristotle and Euripides, and now I am;

You can't ask for more from a place, if that doesn't overwhelm you… ”.

It is the same magic of his new book,

In the land of Dionysus, wanderings through northern Greece

(Cliff), become one of the best sellers in the

dyad

Sant Jordi in Catalonia: “I could not contemplate what Pela looked like 2,400 years ago, but her truncated beauty manifested itself as if they were the fragments of an ancient poem gestated with the slow rhythm of the centuries.

It was up to me to bring them together again and imagine the old greatness ”, he relates in his new work.

More information

• The best crossings

• Mary, the travelers, the beauty

Again, as in the previous

Pilgrims of Beauty

(2015) and

Los senderos del mar

(2017), the writer (Bilbao, 68 years old) takes us by the hand through territories she loves, combining the direct experience of the trip with knowledge deep in literature and history and exquisite prose.

At your own pace and at your own pace, stopping where you want and what you like

(ses amours de voyage,

what Vernon Lee would say), traces its “intimate topography”: Díon, the Nymphaeum of Mieza, where Aristotle taught, the Tomb of the palmets in Lefkadia, Lake Prespa, a lonely beach in the old ruins of Estagira, the evanescent traces of the Xerxes channel in Nea Roda. Without obligation to explain anything that does not interest her (well, Maria is good), Belmonte takes us on a very personal route through that most rugged, unknown and even wild Greece, Dionysian, yes, “where the Greek world merges with the sensitivity Eastern and Balkan ”. Of course, there is no lack of Vergina and its royal tombs (and the memory of the great Manolis Andronikos, who excavated them), Mount Athos and the city of Thessaloniki, three great milestones of the trip, always described from the most absolute subjectivity of the writer . "It's what I know how to do,I do not pretend at all to give a tourist guide ”.

It is an itinerary born of the “desire for the north”, of “an urge to know the land of Alexander, Philip, of Aristotle”, in search of the

genius loci

, the spirit of the place, as Lawrence Durrell would say, with the masters of the author in her backpack ("Uncle Durrell" himself, Paddy Leigh Fermor, Henry Miller) and her favorite readings, from Statius to Robin Lane Fox, Bruce Chatwin and Dalrymple, from

The Greeks and the Irrational,

by ER Dodds, to the tragedies of Euripides, especially

The Bacchantes.

On the journey, also an unexpected compass: the films of Theo Angelopoulos and the declarations of the Greek filmmaker that the north of his country, darker and more enigmatic, inspires him more than the south.

The writer María Belmonte in an undated image.

There is transcendence and high culture along the way, and epic (although he finds too much testosterone in Alexander's military exploits, he is more interested in the cultured and “globalizing” man behind the conqueror), but also space for humble detail and life daily life, for the dust of the road, the fruits of the earth, the friendship with the people (like the dear hosts of the Liotopi hotel in Olympiade; greetings from here, Dimitri!), and the time to be ecstatic before the beautiful flower of the saffron. There is a lot of attention to nature: the Macedonian land is rich in turtles, badgers, marmots and beavers.

As to why Macedonia, María Belmonte recalls that other parts of Greece are already very frequented by literature.

“Mani, southern Peloponnese, Paddy definitely did;

the rest of the peninsula, Athens and Attica, the islands ... I buy a house in one of them and explain the problems with the bricklayer is a classic.

But there was that other Greece much less frequented, although there are also great works, like

Roumeli,

by Leigh Fermor himself, and I told myself I'm going to explore it ”.

He began by going through it physically, allowing himself to be impregnated and then he distilled it in which he emphasizes that it is "my Macedonia", faithful to Kazantzakis' consideration that "one becomes the country through which one travels".

Ruins of Pela, ancient capital of the Macedonian kingdom.

Paradoxically, the part of Macedonia that interests Belmonte the most and one of the one that he writes the most in his book, Mount Athos and its 20 monasteries, on the Chalkidiki peninsula, will always be banned for being a woman. "I am passionate about it, it is an obsession, but of course, I had to limit myself to seeing it from a boat because it is a gigantic space of male monastic enclosure". The author describes some notable cases of women who sneaked there by

circumventing

the rule of the

abaton,

which has been in force since 972 and prohibits the entry of "eunuchs, beardless young men and females". Among the

invaders,

Dalrymple's great-aunt, who also starred in a

ménage a trois

at the site, and Maryse Choisy, who had her breasts amputated and a fake penis inserted to enter the community.

Belmonte does not stop wondering about the future of Macedonia and fearing that it could become a great theme park.

"Alejandro is a mine and the region is betting heavily on cultural tourism," he says, "we hope it is done with respect, and that as far as possible everything remains as it is."

Let it remain, then, the land of Dionysus.

"Dionysus is there everywhere, he represents our dark side and that wild, barbarous Macedonia, which the ancient Greeks were so suspicious of and which at the same time fascinated them so much."

Dazzled by the Mediterranean

Until April 30, the exhibition

Dazzled by the Mediterranean

, based on María Belmonte's book

Pilgrims of Beauty

, can still be seen at the active Les Bernardes cultural center in the town of Salt (Girona)

. The exhibition, divided into several areas, includes a series of modules with approaches to several of the traveling authors through Italy and Greece that fascinate Belmonte, such as DH Lawrence, Norman Lewis, Henry Miller, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Kevin Andrews and Lawrence Durrell, as well as, in the space El exiliado de Capri, photographs and objects of another of his pilgrims, Axel Munthe. Also on display is a collection of photos of Wilhelm von Gloeden, including some of his famous nude ephebes, under the title

The Arcadia Photographer.

. Among the immediate plans of María Belmonte is a long sea voyage to Capri that will undoubtedly lead to new traveling pages ...