We are in the immigration office after our second post-Brexit interview, hoping to secure residency rights in Greece. As we attempt to enter the building that also houses the police force of Kavala, we get shouted out by an agitated guard. Explaining to him that we are here for our biometric permits, he waves us in. Tentatively, we climb up the grim, dimly lit marble staircase. The place looks like it is still stuck in the seventies, the light fittings, the signs, the architecture, a sense of impenetrable bureaucracy from another era. We have no idea where we are supposed to go, all the signs are in Greek and we have not yet graduated to immigration level vocabulary.

It feels alien to us having to prove ourselves in a European country. We have always taken for granted the ease with which we could cross borders and roam around between countries. Having both grown up in countries other than our Motherland, we are children of Europe. With Brexit thrust upon us, the erosion of our rights to move, I would argue, our birth right, came much stress, grief and frustration. The choice was laid out before us: Europe or the UK. We couldn’t have both, at least not in the way that we would want it. Either we remained in the UK and only had the right to go to our new home in Greece for 3 months at a time (leaving a 3 month gap in between visits), passports stamped in and out and hefty fines if the dates are not adhered to. Or, we became residents of Greece with a minimum stay of 6 months a year (to be documented and proven after a 5 year period). If we tick all the boxes, we might be able to apply for citizenship in 7 years. We have heard this route is arduous and requires many exams, showing a proficiency in Greek language, a knowledge of the countries’ politics, mythology and history. The entry requirements recently made harder to deter desperate asylum seekers fleeing war, persecution and drought.

Having to find this level of commitment to one particular place had not been expected. We are both from nomadic families that move around frequently, scattered across Europe and beyond. We didn’t believe it could truly be possible to take this step back in time,  though people asked us throughout our move what we would do about Brexit, we couldn’t give clear answers, since it had taken the UK parliament and Europe four years to discuss the plans, then suddenly at the last minute the change had been imposed upon us and the Administrations of European countries had been left floundering trying to pick up the pieces.

The Greek authorities approve our application for residency under the Withdrawal Agreement which we are only eligible for since we arrived here before Brexit. We get given a brand new biometric card, a technological “advance” for Greece, until then, everything was paper documents. We are sent out of the office to wait in the cold strip-lit stairwell for our official papers. Two young men are sat on the inadequate amount of chairs on the landing. One of them gets up straight away to offer us his seat. Where are you from he asks? The UK, we reply, we are applying for residency. They seem surprised that we would need to do such a thing. They are young refugees from Somalia, applying for asylum, perhaps 19 years old. They have been in the country for a year, couch surfing, unable to work without asylum papers. Today, they have an appointment with the passport office.

On our first visit we had to get our passport checked and our finger prints taken by this department. The office had three desks. The first was adorned by sunny and exotic travel posters, the second had a tight row of shelves displaying police helmets and badges from around the world. The third, belonged to a stern, religious and officious woman. Behind her, was a vast collection of Orthodox icons hanging frame to frame. It seemed we were out of luck, she was the only one on duty that day. I tried to imagine what the other two missing bureaucrats would have been like. I hoped she wouldn’t ask me about my relationship to Abby, assuming that she may be less sympathetic to a gay couple making their home in Greece. I tried to make a joke but it fell flat. She did, however, laugh at my fingerprints, for some reason she found them hilarious, which I still can’t comprehend. Abby had an equally unnerving experience. The lady had commented on a red patch on her cheek which was accentuated by the terrible lighting in the ID photo.

‘What is that on your cheek?’ She demanded, pointing at the photograph. ‘You will have to get a medical check.’

Abby looked at her in disbelief and thankfully managed to persuade her that it was just her skin, as this would have put her application back many weeks.

I wanted to ask the young Somalians so many questions. Where are your families? What will you do? What happened? What perilous journey did you have to undertake to get here? Before I got the chance, the door flung open and a severe looking man signalled the boys to get up. I wondered if he owned the travel desk or the helmet desk. As they stood up we wished them the best on their life journey and hoped everything would work out for them. The official’s face softened after seeing our interaction. We never saw them again but I often think of what happened to them.

The same year Brexit came into force, movement was made more difficult still by the enforcement of state of emergency laws to mitigate the spread of the Corona virus. This visit to the immigration office was the first time we had been allowed to leave the island in nearly a year. One wonders how far we are willing to go as a species from our original nomadic nature. As we build bureaucratic walls between countries, we separate, parcel out and segregate humans from one another. With each new border, each new health pass, we are one step further from our innate freedom to roam the land that we are born into and out of. I can’t help but wonder what is happening to the few remaining nomadic peoples of the world and whether the virus measures are squeezing their way of life still further.

As M.I.A. sings:
'Borders, what's up with that?

Making our way back to Greece over land and sea from Italy after the first lockdown.

One of my favourite documentary films ‘Juliette of the Herbs’ follows an astounding woman called Juliette de Baïracli Levy. A trained vet, disenchanted by pharmaceutical treatments, she began her travels with the nomads of England in the 1930’s in search of alternative ways to heal animals. Later, she travelled Europe with the Romani people, then with the Berber of North Africa and later the indigenous populations of North America and Mexico. Along the way, she learned, gathered and shared herbal medicine remedies to treat animals (and humans). She has written an incredible number of books sharing her knowledge. Sadly, her writings are out of print and hard to come by. Watching that film makes my heart sing. She describes how she would always find a cave, an abandoned house or shelter to sleep in at night, she knew that nature would provide if she listened. Deep down in my core, I know that this is how I am meant to live, on the move, outside, immersed and in tune with plants and animals, moving in community across the land, tending to the wild garden along the way. It is a tragedy to think that for the most part, the Romani have been persecuted, pushed out of Europe or forced into sedentarism on fringe land. These communities hold so much precious knowledge that runs deep in our ancestral connections to land. Knowledge it seems, that is being deliberately erased by a civilisation hungry for technological fixes, data and extraction.

We forget that most of our history was that of the wanderer. ‘Civilisation’ defined by the adoption of agriculture and written records, only began around 12,000 years ago in Mesopotamia and much later in Europe according to the general consensus, though some controversially argue of the existence of civilisations to be much earlier. Nevertheless, we forget that pre-civilisation or pre-history as it is labelled spanned 300,000 years of Homo sapiens hunting and gathering across the continents. Furthermore, the Homo genus started 2.5 to 3 million years ago. I would argue that roaming the land is deep, deep within our bones. And yet, we have created the complete opposite in just 12,000 years and a huge amount of effort has been invested into eradicating nomadic shepherding and hunter gatherer societies.

Having to choose a country to live in goes completely against my nature. However, there is a part of me that is loving this enforced time to get to know a place deeply. I am lucky, for the island I live on, lends itself to roaming. There are few fences, few borders. I walk out my house and wander straight into the mountain, or into a luscious gorge. I can walk across the land on a dirt road or I can walk across the bush. I have the freedom to choose. I remember when I lived in the city and in the Belgian countryside that my only option was the concrete road that someone had laid out and predetermined for me. Barriers, private property and fences lay all around. Forever banished to a giant labyrinth of roads. Roads on which I was second class, the car always has priority.

The pain that Brexit brings me and the pain that I feel when I think of people fleeing war, persecution and famine then being denied entry at neighbouring borders is deep, rooted in a longing for that innate freedom to tread wherever our feet take us, to follow the flight path of the bird. In my idealistic and perhaps naïve dream, I see a world where borders are abolished. No longer living in a hostile paranoid world of us and them, where you are a suspect by default, instead, a compassionate world of us and us. Particularities of culture, heritage and place honoured, I see meandering populations with story, with ties and with connections to their land of birth and adoption, exchanging rich sediments of knowledge as they flow, free to go left or right when the time calls.

After a year and a half without leaving Greece, I must go to the UK for work. The stress levels are high, all the paperwork needed for travel is overwhelming. I must make sure that border control does not stamp my passport because I am now a legal resident of Greece. All those months of stress, paper gathering, official translations, interviews and searching the internet for patchy official information has paid off: they don’t stamp my passport. I feel smug as I walk through passport control, still hanging on to a slither of free movement, thanks to my Hellenic residency card and to the stern Greek Orthodox woman who laughed at my finger prints.

Written by Leah Heming

Trying to find your ‘voice’ is harder than it may seem. Many people have asked that Abby and I start documenting our journey from a bustling UK urban existence to a more stripped back life in a small mountain village on an island in Greece. The idea of sharing our experience is enticing but scary. Where do you start in a new world of technology where millions of people are divulging their stories and versions of reality? The constant visual noise of the internet is overwhelming.

The first thing that has been stopping me is this question:
why would anyone want to hear anything I would have to say?

The world is saturated with books, blogs, vlogs, Instagram accounts, podcasts, images, personal accounts of intrepid undertakings. What Abby and I are doing is not extraordinary, thousands have passed before us and in much more style and adventure. The last thing I want to do is another “Under the Tuscan Sun” or “Driving Over Lemons”, not that there is anything wrong with them. It just seems that they are products of the 80’s and 90’s. Then I think: well, even if I did entertain the idea, what would I write about? Dry scientific facts about ecology? Mundane day to day experiences, like how the compost toilet can take 7 days of two peoples’ shit before smelling? How to manuals on processing olives? Funny interactions with my local shepherd? And then what medium? Writing? Blog? Social media? Videos? Podcasts? And what would be the point of sharing anything anyway? For my ego? To show off? To educate? For light entertainment for frustrated city dwellers? For my parents’ approval? It seems easier not to do any of it and smooth the cat instead, as they say in Bristol.

I started writing this on Οχι day, meaning ‘No’ day, which is a national holiday celebrating the day the Greeks said ‘No’ and resisted the Mussolini-led Italian troops who tried to enter the country in 1940. I spent the day in bed with a migraine and plenty of time to feel sorry for myself and question what it is I am doing with my life. Here I am, in bed on a late October Thursday, in a stone house, in a mountain village on an island in Northern Greece, in a country where I have no real ancestry.

What I am doing? Why am I here? What am I running away from? There is a long list of things that brought me up this mountain, far away from city life, perhaps that will be for another essay.

Even the islanders are baffled as to why we are living here. The most common question we get asked when we first meet a local Greek is: ‘How much did you pay for your house?’. The next question is: ‘Do you live in the village through the winter?’. When we reply yes, we get raised eyebrows (and usually a vocalised ‘why?’). You can see in their expression they are surprised that we would choose to go up there, when their ancestors chose to go down to the coast for an easier lifestyle. A lovely book about the island I am reading, written by two Dutch ladies, sums it up: ‘coastal life is pleasant, the ladies can walk along the beaches after the tourist season, mountain village life is hard, a lot of work…’

I have heard stories of some older folk who had never been to the coast there was so much work to do in the mountain villages.

The next question we are asked is regarding what work we do, that allows us to live in the mountain village all year. Explaining that I work as an illustrator via the internet always feels inadequate in this environment, where life would have been lived mostly outside. Survival would have involved your whole body and intimate knowledge of the flora and fauna. The inhabitants of this village would have been in relationship with every plant, rock, tree. They would have tended to the soil, used the clay for building and making, every act would have been of physical creativity, all would have been used are reused in a myriad of ways. In any case, the islanders still seem impressed that I have a job that allows me to be in a mountain village all year, some Greeks even long for the distant opportunity to return one day, I can see the wistful glint in their eye.

The first thing we knew after making our decision to buy this little house is that we would have to considerably reduce our belongings. Before moving, Abby and I went through a, painful, laborious process of sorting through things over and over again, asking ourselves:

‘is this really necessary in our lives?’

We gave away so many things to friends and to charity. We gave away good things: beautiful handmade bags, clothes, objects that we had collected over the years. It was hard to separate from all these wonderful works of art, many items had a story, a memory associated to them. We had accumulated more and more tokens of our life together, as we had progressed along our path. We began the great sort out with the knowledge that we had exactly two tonnes of ‘stuff’ trailing behind us. It sounds shocking when you hear it like that, but it was actually quite little in volume and didn’t involve any furniture apart from a coffee table and a mattress. The reason we knew this, was because when we left the UK and sent our ‘stuff’ on its way to Belgium, (our first stop before Greece), the truck got pulled over by the police, just outside of Bristol for being overweight. That day we found out just how much we owned.

It’s funny how we slowly began to notice that our ‘stuff’ seemed to be causing us repeated trouble. Eventually, when we had paired our precious belongings down to the bare minimum, we filled a Citroen Picasso that had been gifted to us and set off on our biggest road trip, with a pen in our pocket to sign for the house in Greece. Two days into the drive, the trusty car we nick-named the Mother-ship that had driven Abby’s mum across Europe numerous times before, did its last kilometre in Switzerland. On an uninspiring stretch of motorway, followed by a stressful few days in an equally uninspiring motorway town, we laid the Mother-Ship to rest. It was our three-year wedding anniversary and we had planned to be fine dining on lake Como with the film stars flying over in their private jets. Instead, we shared the most expensive (and uninspiring) pizza I have ever eaten in a Swiss motel in Egerkingen.

There we were with our ‘stuff’, a cumbersome load attached to our being which we had to somehow get from Switzerland to Greece. I sometimes think of all the ‘stuff’ I have consumed and picture it dragging behind me, like a giant weight. I can’t even begin to conceive how much packaging, white goods, paper, paints, plastic toys from my childhood and other sundry are trailing behind me. I am someone who has been attentive to my consumption for some years now. But imagine, everyone you walk past in the street, visualise the load that they are carrying. There would be no room around us, we wouldn’t be able to get into our houses. We would all be living atop our isolated islands of ‘stuff’, trying to remember what we owned and why we hung on to it.

Abby would sometimes torment me during our clear out: If you can’t remember what’s in that box, you’re not keeping any of it.

Fortunately, our accumulations are not circling around our being on a permanent basis. I like to take a moment to think what happened to the ‘stuff’ that we have discarded, that got broken or was not of use anymore. Waste is a new phenomenon. A few decades ago, it was just broken pieces of terracotta you find tipped in the earth on the edges of our garden here in Greece. But now imagine: if everything we used was attached to us by a piece of string and we had to carry it with us. Imagine if we consciously choose what to tie to that cord? It’s not for no reason that hunter gatherer societies only own what they can carry.

This was not the only time our ‘stuff’ had caused us trouble. A few years prior to our British exodus we were moving from the grimy city centre to the suburbs in a second-hand Peugeot named the ‘Shark’. One west-country evening, in sleet, as we were moving our precious belongings, I accidentally stalled and the engine fell out. The bolts holding the engine in place actually snapped right off the frame. Unlucky, the mechanic told us. We hadn’t realised then, that we were being sent a message about the weight of all we were trailing around with us.

Now that we have arrived, we have acquired things again, but what we accumulate is very different, a spade, some buckets, a hoe, a second-hand wool jumper, some preserving jars. People gift things to us like seeds, clamps, axes. We also do a lot of sharing of tools and equipment. Our neighbour has our spade at the moment, sometimes we use their machete. We are thinking of group-buying a chainsaw with them, although we have been talking about it for a year and I think we actually all prefer the meditation of using a hand saw. We reuse and save jars, string, wood, tins. We pick up things we find washed up on the beach or discarded next to the bins or at the end of the market. My Dad has discovered skip diving for food, which is something I would never have imagined him getting into. We now have a network of bins that we dip into.

When we first started out here, we needed to strip everything down to the bare minimum and see what it was like without modern luxuries and then slowly build up what we deemed was necessary. Our first stay was for six months, we had no car, no fridge, no toilet, no cooker, no bed. We walked out in the mountains for our number two and ventured out whatever the weather to pee in the garden. We did buy a small electric hob, as fires are banned in the summer and we placed it on a stone outside. We have been cooking like that for two years come rain or shine or snow or ice or storm. We bought two terracotta pots that fitted inside each other and collected some sand from the beach to fill in the gap between the two pots. This was our fridge, you wet the sand every day and it keeps the inside temperature cool. In the winter, we just hang the food outside, out of reach of the passing critters. We didn’t get a wood burning stove until quite late that winter, so we kept warm by working the land. At night, we slept on sheep skins. For those first six months we ran 5 km into town once a week on market day with backpacks on our back and hitch-hiked back up. We met so many people this way, this was pre-corona days.

Sometimes we would decide to go to the beach, that was a 7km run. I kind of miss those days, we were outside a lot and we used our bodies much more. I think during that time I was the fittest and healthiest I have ever been. We foraged around the village every morning for seasonal fruit and nuts, taking just what we needed that day. We bought fish on market day and treated ourselves to a meat dinner and an alcoholic drink once a week in the village taverna. With no fridge, the rest of the week was vegan and alcohol-free, as bottles were too heavy to carry up with the rest of the shopping. We really appreciated the food that we ate, which was usually a one pot dinner cooked on the electric hob outside, fighting off the stray village cats. We were very aware of the weather patterns, of the change in season and the flux of the animals and insects as they came in out and out of hibernation and reproductive seasons. We got to know some, like the geckos intimately, as they came out at the same time every day to go about their business.

Now we are just starting to upgrade, it comes with a sadness and a longing for simpler ways but we have had to find a middle ground. We are building a kitchen and we decided that we would get a cooker so that we could bake bread in the summer. In the winter we have a wood stove which doubles up as our heating and cooking oven. We have also bought a fridge for the summer months to help reduce the spoiling of our food. I really struggled with this decision and it took me two months before I accepted it, along with a lot of arguments. For the toilet, we have upgraded to a compost toilet which we built from scratch. Our next project is to build a separate toilet for the urine, for now we make do with the garden and a glass jar for the cold nights. We have a sofa and a bed. My parents have now moved to the village and we share the use of their car. With these luxuries we spend less time outside and it sometimes feels that we are stepping backwards by stepping forwards on the treadmill of growth. On a rainy day, it is easy to spend most of it without stepping out and even looking at the breath-taking view across the valley to the sea. With the stripped back life there was no other option but to live most of the days outdoors. That is the price to pay for things and comfort, you lose your connection to the real living world outside. This is a real loss. We can’t help but ask: how can we get back outside, now that we have everything we need inside?

It seems that I have managed to write something despite my hesitance and self-doubt. In may take some time to find my ‘voice’. Perhaps gradually something will emerge. For now, I will step out in the open air on this cold wet December day and head to my swim spot in the gorge and remember as I immerse myself in the rushing river where my flesh and bones come from. They may not have been birthed in these Northern Greek mountains but they were certainly birthed from the water, the soil, the minerals, the bacteria, the plants, the funghi and the energy of this beautiful planet Earth.

Written by Leah Heming