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Historic agricultural and stock farming systems in mountainous land; The example of the “kladera” of Zagori, Epirus

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Vasilis Dalkavoukis Associate professor

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Democritus University of Thrace, Department of History and Ethnology

Panagi Tsaldari 1, 69132, Komotini vdalkavo@he.duth.gr

The word “forest” is not always an easy case, especially when dealing with Mediterranean woody vegetation. Going beyond the strictly technical parameters provided by the science of Forestry, definitions of the forest typically include social factors, such as human/social interference and use, as well as legal ones, through which issues of its ownership status or the form of social usage are regulated (Smyris, 2012).

On the other hand, the concept of “sustainability” or “sustainable development” is derived from Forestry and initially (in the 19th century) concerned regulating the exploitation of forest resources so that the quantity of yielded products (mainly wood) would remain stable, steady, and symmetrical. In the last few decades, the concept has been broadened to encompass the type of development that satisfies the needs of the present, without undermining those of future generations (Athanasakis 1996). The scientific community regards sustainability in a generally positive manner, in the context of an “ecological realism” (which criticizes neoliberal economic assumptions that economic systems are closed and linear), by highlighting that the economy functions solely thanks to the support of its ecological foundations, and is, therefore, subject to natural limitations (Spilanis 1995 and Turner – Pearce – Bateman 1994).

The framework for the discussion of a “sustainable management of the forest” can become even more complex with the addition of a socio-temporal component, namely, that of pre-modern social and economic organization, particularly in the area of Zagori, Region of Epirus, NW Greece. The social management and use of the forest in Zagori constitute a particular case, which stems from the special regime of self-governance that was applied to the area by the Ottoman administration, as was indeed the case with other rural areas (e.g. Agrafa) of the conquered European lands. In local historiographic discourse, at least, this connection is presented as the catalytic circumstance through which “private ownership” of land appears in the area, which also includes forest plots, named with the local term “kladera”, the plural of “kladero”, deriving from “kladi” or “klados” (in Greek means branch), which is the topic of the present paper/contribution.

But what exactly are the kladera? They are small, cultivable plots that rarely exceed two thousand square meters and are situated between two or more wooded slopes. The farmable part of a single kladero typically produced the “yearly bread” or leguminous crops and vegetables, without ever being able to provide some form of agricultural surplus. In short, it supported a family’s household agricultural production for own consumption. The wooded part of the kladero consisted of pollarded and shredded trees and provided its owners firstly with the necessary fuel for heating, cooking, clothes-washing and other domestic activities, and secondly, with branches with fresh leaves either for direct feeding of their domestic, milkproducing livestock or branches with leaves which were left to dry and to be used, in winter, as “kladaries” (bundles of branches tied together) in order to feed cattle in the snowy seasons.

However, because the existence of kladera is exclusively related to the vegetation of the “para-Mediterranean zone” (Smyris 2012: 14), meaning the zone of deciduous trees developing in middle mountain altitudes and up to the limits of the fir–beech zone, they were mainly employed as productive units of land in the western and central part of Zagori, since, in the largest part of eastern Zagori bordering the area of Metsovo and Grevena, the vegetation consists largely of conifers.

In reality, each family had more than one kladero under its jurisdiction, which, as a rule, were not all in the same area of the community space. Τhis did, on the one hand, stem from the territorial restrictions within Zagori, where lowland, cultivable plots are small and non-continuous, interspersed with hills, rocks and other mountain terrain formations between them. On the other, it also forced farmers to change the use of their kladera year by year, so that the soil of both their farmable part and their forested sides was renewed.

The pre-modern economy developed by recognizing the limits of its interference in the natural habitat, not through a moralistic lens, but in the context of the prospect of true survival, one which took into account not only the then present social and economic conditions, but also the long-term ramifications for future generations. This constitutes a type of “lived-in sustainability” towards a “natural, conciliatory ecosystem” (Smyris 2012: 14), which not only manifested itself through institutional or religious prohibitions, but also largely concerned the family itself as the nucleus of the community.

It is true that claiming that “private property” can safeguard the balance of such an ecosystem today might sound rather incongruous. However, we will have to point out that forest “private property” of this type presents some particular characteristics which set it apart from the meaning the term has gained in the context of capitalist modernity.

First of all, this doesn’t constitute “private property” in the narrow sense of the term, but family property: in their essence, the kladera were one of the basic [living resources] of an extended family in Zagori from which financially active men were systematically absent due to their migration (Dalkavoukis 1999). As a result, the kladera were the preferential space of activity for women, the elderly and children, in the context of a family that worked as a full productive unit. Secondly, they were “private property” controlled collectively, in the context of the community: each family processed about the same number of kladera –to be precise, of equal yield– so as to guarantee its survival through this particular form of management. Finally, they constituted a property that couldn’t be capitalized in any other way other than through specific sustainable management, in the context of this type of mountainous own-consumption agricultural economy.

This particular model of an egalitarian, redistributive communitarianism, based also to an extent on forest “private ownership”, appears to have worked for more than two centuries in Zagori, before being disrupted by the area’s incorporation into the Greek state. The designation of kladera but also of the rest of the plots of this form as “public forests” began to gradually affect the lives of the people of Zagori as early as the 1930s. However, the institutional side of the subject is only one aspect. Another, equally substantive issue concerns the population decline of Zagori during the 1940s and the 1950s, and the serious consequences it had in the management of these particular forest plots. The demographic slump brought about an incomplete usage of the kladera or even their abandonment during the first post-war decades, resulting in a large part of them becoming forested (Saratsi 2005). However, the residents’ primary reaction was the continuation of the usage of the kladera mainly for logging, without the necessary care for their renewal as previously decribed. In this way, the double breakthrough that occurred with modernity in managing them, brought about a kind of lack of laws and rules, the consequences of which were not noteworthy, the reason being that applying the practices of the past concerned no one but a scant number of permanent residents in the villages of Zagori at that time.

In the decades following the fall of the Greek Junta (the period after 1974), touristic development and the abandonment of biomass as fuel pushed the kladera and the discussion about them into the background. Tourism discourse often appears to need to appropriate “nature” in a one-dimensional, consumerist manner in which it is perceived by what Urry (2022) characterized as the “tourist gaze”; this was also imposed on notions of the “forest” as the entire non-built-up, communal area –excluding certain clearly farmable or grazable patches, practically unseen by the tourist–, which stopped being used through the older economic and social logic of communitarianism. It has only been in the last few years, when the economic crisis rendered the use of petrol for facing the nearly nine-month-long winter in Zagori essentially prohibitive, that the discussion surrounding the kladera came back to the forefront. Younger generations are now rediscovering the abandoned family properties of the past and simultaneously reinstating the use of an “emic” -meaning a traditional, local and preserved in the memory of the older generations- cadaster. However, the management of those plots does not presently exhibit the traits it had in its pre-modern context up until the 1950s. On the one hand, they are used almost exclusively for acquiring biomass; on the other hand, the increased needs for fuel, especially in villages with inns and hostels, permanently destroy the balance between the new social usage and the sustainable management of old kladera.

The re-examination of the effective institutional framework, therefore, is more than necessary, especially if a rational social usage of the “forest” is supported, and if the (another word for conceptualization) of “nature” remains of concern to us.

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