On a beautiful day of July (but isn't each day in Greece beautiful? ;-) ), after a quite pleasant boat trip, we landed on Volos, a small village on the coastline. There we had the chance of meeting Fanis, a farmer and much more...

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Fanis has been taking this place for 3 years : his family's land nobody had been cultivating for years, and more specifically an seaside olive grove. There are worse places to discover the peasant's life...

 

Scattered there are chicken and guard dogs, the deep blue sea keeps catching our eyes. Here, Fanis grows olives for multi-purpose oil, for general cooking but also the making of local soaps. There's also a fruitful vegetable patch where he experiments with several agro-ecological methods, only for his own consumption at the moment.

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While his main income is generated by the olives, Fanis is making progress towards a polycultural farm. Lately he's been experimenting with an herb garden and looks forward to set up beehives on his land.

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Yet at the moment many projects are still in progress: Fanis has been very busy. Several self-built, ecological structure s have indeed been growing on the land. A small round-shaped 20 sqm clay house with a wooden structure and a vegetal roof : a soap workshop. It took a lot of work to build and many people have come to help.

 

This structure requires few technical knowledge and materials, yet it took time for Fanis to build it as it was his first building experience. There have been many mistakes and delays, but thanks to learning from those mistakes he gained a lot of know-how and he's satisfied with the result : a building is on the go.

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A bit further on the land a 55sqm building can be found. The initial project was a small straw house but it ended up as a cob building (clay, water, straw) after he wasn't able to find the haystacks necessary. Thus it took far more efforts, time and people than expected with a very different technique: 20 people can rise the walls 20cm a day, and 20 more on the following day if it has dryed enough.

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The most expensive aspect of this house (70 % of the total cost) is the roof. It's wood comes from the neighbouring mountains and it's waterproof thanks to several layers of black lining and specific tiles. Everything here is tailor-made even the windows which are self-made. Inside, the walls are covered in white lime. The temperature keeps pleasant all-year round.

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Now you get it, nothing here remains ideas, you have to pull up your sleeves and tackle the problems! Learning by doing. As to us, we have been working on the "superadobe" chickencoop, a successful teamwork rewarded by a well-deserved dive in the sea. From this place I recall the feeling of landing in a tiny heaven on earth.

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Looking for more info? You can reach Fanis in English by email : belafonte@gmail.com