They only found it because a plane crashed

Field notes from Antia: a language you can't write down

the bus driver actually asked if I was sure… I went on, boots on gravel, and then quiet…

Let me set this down properly, from the beginning, because how I came to be standing on a Greek mountain at dusk is half of what I learned.

It started with a single line in an old travel account I'd been reading by lamplight a few months back — a throwaway sentence about shepherds in one corner of Ελλάδα (Greece) who "did not call to one another across the valleys, but whistled."

I read it three times.

I assumed it was the romantic exaggeration travel writers reach for. But it lodged, the way a seed gets into your sock and walks with you for miles, and so I went looking.

The trail led to Evia (also written Euboea in the old books) — the second-largest of the Greek islands, a long spine of mountains an hour from Athens that almost no foreigner thinks to visit. From the port it was a leoforío (a public bus), then a smaller one, then a road that gave up pretending to be a road. The odigós (the driver) of that last leg watched me in his mirror the whole climb and, when he finally let me out at the top, asked αν ήμουν σίγουρος (if I was sure). Below me, the lights of the coast. Above me, a scatter of stone houses going blue in the dusk. This is the island of Evia, the village of Antia — the horió (village) I'd spent all day climbing toward.

and this is what I carried back down the mountain

Filed under

Vanishing languages → sfyria, the whistled tongue of Antia (Evia, Greece)

The short of it

A language made entirely of whistles, spoken on one Greek mountain for some 2,500 years — so nearly gone that the wider world only stumbled on it when a plane crashed, and today perhaps six people are left who can truly speak it.

The long of it

Thirty-seven people live here, the last time anyone counted — and by full dark I think I had met four of them. One of them changed what I think a language even is.

He is, I'm told, one of perhaps six people left alive who can truly whistle sfyria — the name comes from the Greek sfyrizo, simply "to whistle." I won't put his name in here; he asked me not to make a fuss, and a fuss is the last thing this needs. I'll just tell you what he showed me, while my ears still remember it.

We sat outside, and to begin he turned his head toward the far side of the gorge, put a crooked finger to his lips, and whistled a sentence — a long, banking, trilling line of sound. A moment later, from somewhere across the valley I couldn't even see, an answer came back. "I told him you'd arrived," he said, as if that were nothing at all.

It is not nothing. Sfyria, he explained — patiently, the way you'd explain the tide — is not a code, and it is not birdsong. It is Greek. The very same words he'd say to my face, but turned into pitch and breath and thrown across the canyon on the wind. Where a shout dies in the first ravine, a whistle carries four kilometres — ten times farther — and the voskoí (the shepherds) here have been holding whole conversations this way for something like two and a half thousand years. Older than the alphabet they'd otherwise write in.

Then the part I keep coming back to. The outside world did not know sfyria existed until 1969 — and it learned by pure accident. A small plane came down in these mountains; a search party climbed up after the missing pilot, and as they went they kept hearing it — scales and trills volleying along the ridgelines, the whole mountainside seeming to talk. They took it for some strange bird. It was the villagers, passing word of the strangers from peak to peak, faster than the strangers could walk.

He laughed telling me this.

The language had hidden in plain hearing for twenty-five centuries, and it took a crash to introduce it. Today UNESCO reckons no other language in Europe — whistled or spoken — has fewer living speakers. Sfyria, UNESCO's people say, may be the most endangered tongue on the continent.

I asked the question I'd come all this way to ask: why is it dying?

He didn't reach for anything dramatic. The young move down to the cities, he said. And fewer families keep sheep now — which matters far more than it sounds, because sfyria was, above all, a shepherds' language. It was the way two herders, each alone on a far slope with their flock, could hold a conversation across a valley too wide and too steep to walk. Fewer flocks on the mountain means fewer shepherds scattered across it — and fewer shepherds means fewer people who ever need to whistle from one ridge to the next. There's a phone in every pocket now, and a phone doesn't need a mountain. When there's no one on the far ridge to answer, you stop whistling.

And — the cruel part, and he knew it — you cannot really save sfyria the way you'd save an old song. There is nothing to write down; it has no letters. It barely survives a recording, because to learn it you must stand on this exact mountain, feel how this exact valley throws the sound, and whistle back to someone you can see across the gap. It exists only in the using.

Take away the people, or the mountain, or the need, he said, and it doesn't go into a museum. It just goes quiet.

That, I think, is the whole reason I keep doing this — why I keep climbing onto these long, grinding buses at all, and filling these notebooks. Some things will never sit behind glass. The most any of us can do is climb up while the person who knows it is still here, sit a while, and write down everything around the thing — who taught him, what he whistled about as a boy, what this valley sounded like at dusk when forty people were talking and not one of them was making a word.

He walked me to the edge of the village when the light went. Before I turned down the track, he whistled something after me — short, rising — and then said it in words too: "Sto kaló" — a Greek farewell that means, more or less, "go toward the good." "Safe down," he added. "And come back."

I intend to.

— The Curator

Note: the practitioner is kept unnamed/composite.

Sourcesgreekreporter.com, neoskosmos.com, theoutline.com, keeptalkinggreece.com