Page:The nomads of the Balkans, an account of life and customs among the Vlachs of Northern Pindus (1914).djvu/13

 number of Farsherots or Albanian Vlachs who formerly came from Pleasa. We happened to employ one of these as muleteer and from him began to learn a few words of Vlach. Though a resident in Thessaly our informant possessed a detailed knowledge of the Macedonian hills, as he had more than once been employed in Greek bands and failing these had made expeditions of his own. A few weeks later while looking for inscriptions in the plain of Elassona we spent the night at Vlakhoyianni a winter village of the Pindus Vlachs and there heard more details of Samarina and the other villages on Pindus. The tales told proved of interest, so that a few days later we employed another Vlach muleteer, this time a native of Samarina, and plied him with various questions as to Vlach life in general. He told us of mountains covered with grass and pasture for large flocks of sheep, of forests of oak and beech and pine and of innumerable mountain streams that never failed in summer and were almost too cold to drink. How every one at Samarina ate meat every day and wine was brought up from Shatishta three days’ journey with mules. We had spent the previous July excavating in the Thessalian plains amid heat, mosquitoes and dust, so these tales of woods and streams proved all the more enticing. There were other attractions also of a less material kind, a church wdth a miraculous pine tree growing on the roof (Plate XIV 1) ; a festival (Plate IV 2) at which all the marriages for the year were celebrated, and all wore their best clothes (Plate XIX) and danced for five consecutive days. Further God Almighty, when he made the world, dropped one of his four sacks of lies at Samarina. These either–the excuses vary–ran down hill to other parts of the globe or else being merely masculine became extinct. The attractions proved too strong and we determined to visit the Pindus villages the following summer. The obvious course was to travel up with the Vlach families who leave for the hills each year about the same day. We found the muleteer and his family willing to have an addition to their party ; and so agreed to meet at Timavos in time to start with them. Our first visit to Samarina and the villages on Pindus in 1910 has led to others since and we have also seen