“Water and me”

Bodies of water anchor me, orient me. Without a lake, a river or a sea, I don’t know where I am.

I grew up in Euclid, a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, in a neighbourhood on Lake Erie. If I slipped out from my kitchen door, with 40 steps I could reach the cliff edge and look out over the choppy, grey lake, the liquid border between the United States and Canada. Lying in bed at night, through my bedroom window I would listen to the waves heaving rhythmically onto the shore. 

In the long summers of my childhood, my schoolteacher parents worked at a YMCA/YWCA camp built on the shores of Lake Geneva in southern Wisconsin, north of Chicago. I knew every inch of the camp and spent endless afternoons alone or with my sister: swimming, sailing, row boating, dreaming.  

As I grew, I followed the water. The Mississippi River meanders through St Paul-Minneapolis, the Twin Cities, where I attended Macalester College for my bachelor’s degree. Glacial lakes dot the network of city parklands.  Later, I moved to Chicago, built along Lake Michigan.  In between, I spent a year on a study abroad program in Greece. In July 1975, I travelled from Paris to Athens for 3 days by train, took a taxi to Piraeus, then boarded an overnight ferry across a gleaming Aegean Sea to Kastelli-Kissamos in northwest Crete. For two weeks, our teacher Maria taught us Greek: 3 hours in the morning, with a break for lunch and a siesta, then another 3 hours in the late afternoon. Days ended with long dinners at the seaside fish taverna, where Maria’s friends mercilessly teased us as we haltingly practiced our new words. 

In 1985, I moved to Swansea, Wales, the poet Dylan Thomas’ “ugly, lovely town” by the sea. After that, to Brighton, another seaside town, for my job. For twenty years, 1995-2015, I shuttled weekly between Eaux-Vives and Brighton. When I visit Geneva now, I stay in Hermance with my son Isaac and his partner Lora; my bedroom window looks out to Lac Leman and the Jura.

And since 1975, I keep returning to Greece, sometimes for months or years. In 2012 a dozen or so anthropologists from Greece, Holland, Britain, the US, Cyprus launched a 2-week long international summer school, “Cultures, Migrations, Borders” in Plomari, on Lesvos’ south coast. For 10 years, we shared with graduate and doctoral students our fascination and bewilderment with borders, bureaucrats, humanitarians and the mixing and unmixing of peoples. A hundred years before, in the First Balkan War in 1912, the Greek army and navy had seized many islands bordering Turkey. Statesmen then drew a new border in the eastern Aegean, blocking sea-borne trade, marriage negotiations and travelling musicians. Lesvians suddenly found themselves separated from their orange and olive groves, their Muslim and Jewish friends, their business partners and customers on the other side. Istanbullis and Smyrniots complained that they could no longer obtain the fine olive oil soap manufactured in Plomari, so Plomariots smuggled it across the new border in fishing boats.

After the Greco-Turkish war and the burning of Smyrna (which Greeks call “The Catastrophe”) in September 1922, Mytilene became a massive, frantic transit point for hundreds of thousands of Orthodox Christians fleeing Turkey. When the 1923 Lausanne Convention ordered a compulsory “exchange of populations” between Greece and Turkey, 20,000 Lesvian Muslims, now classified as “Turks”, were forced to board ships and sail 18 miles across the Aegean to Turkey, while 47,000 Orthodox Christians, now considered “Greeks”, arrived to Lesvos from various parts of Turkey, moving into the empty Turkish houses.

Grandchildren of those Orthodox refugees “remember” the Catastrophe as if they had lived through it themselves. In 2015-2016, when over a million migrants and refugees, many fleeing the Syrian war, set out in inflatable boats from Turkey to Greece, almost 600,000 of them landed on the rocky shores between Molyvos and Skala Sykamnia on Lesvos’ northern coast. This 8-mile stretch of coastline became the global epicenter of the European “Refugee Crisis”. Remembering their grandparents’ flight in the 1920s, the “refugee grandchildren” of Lesvos rushed to offer water, food and dry clothes to the Syrians, Afghans, Iraqis and Somalis climbing off their battered rafts.

We bought a house in Plomari in 2019 and come as often as we can. Every day I swim, watching the poseidonia waving gently on the sea floor.

Jane Cowan