‘I would rather this article was more about Arcadia than about me,’ says Wendy Copage, quite sincerely – although she has done more than anyone in recent times literally to put this fabled but very real part of Greece on the map.
So, yes, let’s talk about Arcadia – before we come on to the remarkable work done by this 60-year-old Yorkshirewoman, who has just been granted Greek citizenship, thanks to her fluency in the language and her decades-long passion for her adopted country, particularly the wild beauty of its most unspoilt area.
In the history of art and literature, Arcadia is as much an idea as a place. In myth, it was the realm of the god Pan and featured in the poetry of Theocritus in the third century BC. Later, Virgil helped develop its image as a rural idyll populated by nymphs and shepherds.
But as Gregson Davis, a Classics professor at New York University, has pointed out, Virgil’s Arcadia was not ‘a world of escapist bliss’ but rather ‘permeated with portrayals of human infelicity, catastrophic loss and emotional turbulence. Virgil’s primary concern is with the world of human misery rather than with frivolous escapist constructions purified of anguish and angst.’
Yet artists of the Renaissance couldn’t get enough of Arcadia the rustic dream world. Sannazaro’s pastoral poem Arcadia (1504) was a major influence on Shakespeare and Milton.
In the early-17th century, inspired by a line from Virgil, Guercino painted Et in Arcadia Ego, in which two shepherds study the inscription ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’ (‘I am even in Arcadia’) beneath a skull, a reminder of death being present even in the midst of rural paradise.
Twenty years later, Poussin, in his classier picture with the same title, painted shepherds grouped round an Arcadian tomb (pictured above).
Since then, the potency of this dream world has endured via Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn; the first chapter, ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’, of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited; and Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia (1993).
And recently we were treated to the publication of Paul Holberton’s lavish two-volume A History of Arcadia in Art and Literature.
But the real Arcadia does exist – in the Peloponnese, a hundred miles south-west of Athens. Yes, it is an area of amazing natural beauty – but, in an echo of Professor Davis, it is also a place where only the tough survive.
Few know this better than Wendy Copage, whose traditional little Greek house stands in the coastal village of Tyros, in the shadow of the mighty Parnon mountains.
How did this come to be her home? ‘I was a Shirley Valentine,’ she smiles, ‘although I’ve never seen the film!’
Thirty-five years ago, she came to Greece on holiday, fell for a local and married him. They had a son and then divorced after ten years. Wendy stayed on, bringing up her child in Athens and working there as a sales manager for a major publishing company.
After her divorce, she met and married her present husband, Nigel. They lived in Athens and then, 16 years ago, bought the house in Arcadia. ‘I have always been an outdoor person and have always loved wild places,’ she says. ‘That whole coast is still so unspoilt – because it’s not on the way to anywhere. There is the mountain wilderness on one side and the sea on the other. We bought the house in Tyros knowing we were going to move there as soon as life allowed.’
When Wendy was made redundant, Arcadia beckoned. Wiry and fit from her days of trail-running, she looked for paths to go walking. ‘But there was no walking map. I would set off on a walk from the house and just get lost! The people here are very local. They tend just to go as far as the rock on the horizon.’
She acquired a Russian map of the area made in 1830 – there was a strong connection between the Russian and Greek Orthodox churches, and a lot of monasteries in Arcadia. ‘It showed a cobweb of paths,’ she says. A 1950 Greek army map helped, and she also drew on the knowledge of local shepherds – still a major part of Arcadian life.
She located the paths, but many were disused and overgrown. She made it her mission to walk them and reclaim them. (To date, she has cleared 50 or so paths, covering a distance of around 300 miles.) Systematically she made her way through the vegetation, carefully cutting back bushes and marking the way with little strips of material cut from old bed sheets.
Eight years ago, she started her own walking company, Greece on Foot, guiding groups of independent hikers through the wilds of Arcadia. Her jaunts are not for the faint-hearted.
When leading people on a six-day ‘Arcadian journey’ staying in shepherds’ huts or at monasteries, she warns them, ‘There will not be a single step on tarmac. You need to be prepared for wilderness camping – without a tent. There will be no washing.’
Then came COVID and Brexit. 'They meant taking a step back,' she says. 'COVID completely shrank my world. But I found so much that was just ten minutes outside my door.'
Brexit didn’t have such an upside; in fact, it made it impossible for Greece on Foot, as a British company, to continue. The hoops to be gone through to restart it as a Greek company were too much – but by this time Wendy had locals working for her, so the solution was for them to take over and for her to work for them.
‘I am still a resource,’ she says. ‘I’m still taking people walking. And I am working more with the local authority.’
That work has led to making paths more accessible, putting up information boards, creating leaflets and producing a new large-scale map of her part of Arcadia, which is South Kynouria.
And after that? ‘We have three or four big canyons here. The idea is to install ladders and rungs so that people can get access. The scenery is breathtaking, absolutely spectacular. We will have six or eight circular routes.’
Wendy’s future is very much here in Arcadia. ‘The first time I came to Greece, I felt I had come home,’ she says. And now she is a fully-fledged citizen. ‘I have my Greek passport – and when my British passport expires, I will not renew it.
‘There are so many places described as unspoilt – but when you get there, they are actually spoilt. Arcadia is the least spoilt part of Greece. There are still subsistence farmers here; still people living in caves – it has always been tough. One of my best friends is a shepherd, the same age as me – she has no electricity, no running water, no pension. But here they appreciate the important things: the silence of the mountains, watching the sheep…
‘You stay pretty fit here because nowhere is flat! And the people live long, particularly the women. I knew a mother who was the last of eight girls; at the age of 92, having never been ill in her life, she took to her bed for two days and died.’
Would Wendy hope to be like that? ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I’ll still be out on my mountains!’
But isn’t there yet a danger of Arcadia being spoilt? She answers firmly, ‘Not on my watch.’
Arcadia walking information: greeceonfoot.com
A History of Arcadia in Art and Literature by Paul Holberton is worth reading
The Oldie February 2023
