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Blood Trails of Greece

IN WOODY ALLEN’S film Bananas, he is shocked to find himself wounded. ‘Blood!’ he cries. ‘That should be on the inside!’ I had cause to reflect on this revelation when I tried to climb a mountain in Greece.

After an incident-packed hitch-hike across Europe in the late 1960s, I fetched up in Saloniki (Thessalonica) in northern Greece. Penniless and undernourished from days on the road, I was in no position to reach any of the mountains further south, or to climb them even if I could reach them.

There was a convenient solution to the problem, as I learned when I checked in at the local youth hostel: sell my blood. As in many other countries, blood donation in Greece was (and still is) insufficient to cover transfusion needs. To make up the difference, some has to be imported, but for an emergency transfusion it may be left to the friends and relatives of the patient to locate donors. Where to look for willing subjects in need of cash? By chance, I was staying in donor central.

Those lucky enough to posses rare A or B blood types could barter for considerable sums. Even a common-or-garden O+ like myself, given a simple diet, could live for a week off the going rate for a half-litre. In the corridors of the hostel I passed pale, zombie-like creatures, with arms like pin cushions, who existed by selling two half-litres a week. In the UK, the minimum donation interval for a male is 12 weeks.

Larger sums of blood money were available in Istanbul further east, but the Saloniki grapevine advised caution. There were horror stories, hopefully apocryphal, about having to put your arm through a hole in the wall so that you couldn’t see how much blood was being taken, and of bodies being found drained in the Bosphorus. It was perhaps fortunate for me that Turkey lay off-route.

The donation procedure at the local Saloniki hospital was as straightforward as in the UK, except that instead of a cup of tea in exchange for a half-litre of the life-giving red plasma, you received a sum of cash. In pre-euro days, this amounted to several hundred drachma. I’ve never earned money so quickly and easily.

After re-emerging into the cauldron of a Greek summer afternoon, I took what I thought would be an easy stroll up to the ancient walls that surround the city, only to discover that even a climb of a few hundred feet defeated me. Weak and dizzy, I blew a good proportion of my earnings on salty snacks and iced drinks.

Days later, I’d made it down to Athens and another hostel. In the middle of the night, the dorm was woken by cries of ‘O positive’. Sleepily, as though commanded, those of us with the requisite blood type filed out to be ferried down to the hospital. Another poor accident victim might need us and, in truth, I was more than willing to go. The money would again be welcome and, after long days on the road, at the beck and call of indifferent motorists, it felt good to be wanted, if only for my blood.

After another half-litre had been siphoned from my body, for the second time in a week, I rose to my feet and collapsed in a heap. I awoke on a hospital bed to find a swarthy man advancing towards me. With unconcealed disdain, he tossed a wad of drachma in my general direction. I may have been saving the life of his relative, but we donors were still viewed as mercenary scum. My blood-selling days were over.

The Greek mainland is a chunky peninsula that runs southeast from Albania between the Adriatic Sea and the Aegean Sea. Its spine is a continuous range of mountains that includes numerous 2,000m peaks and five 2,500m peaks, the highest of which is 2,917m Mount Olympus. Although not high by world standards, they are more than twice the height of UK mountains, while great gorges and inadequate roads hinder access. Add to that a lack of guidebooks and maps, and climbing any Greek mountain was going to be an ambitious endeavour. I hoped to make use of local knowledge.

My objective was one of the 2,500m peaks, of which the easiest to reach was Mount Parnassus (2,547m). A good road ran from Athens to Delphi at its foot and, from there, a 2,000m climb would put me at the summit. It would be a long day out, but no more so than several I’d done in the Highlands.

In the event, none of that mattered. By the time I’d reached Delphi, I was as pale as the living dead I’d met in Saloniki. Taking a day out to see the archaeological sights, I could barely make it up the short path to the Temple of Apollo, just above town. In those days access to the temple was still permitted, so I sat down in the shade of one of the five remaining pillars, my back against the cool stone, and barely moved all day. As the sun crossed the sky, I merely shifted position to remain in the pillar’s shadow.

Delphi is the site of Greece’s most famous oracle, where the god Apollo spoke through a sibyl (priestess) to supplicants. I had no need to consult her. Her most famous maxim, carved into the temple, was insight enough. Know Thyself. I had learned that there were limits to what I could put my body through. It was a salutary lesson.

Mount Parnassus remained out of reach.

I have still to climb any mountain on the Greek mainland.