Walking Through the Mastic Plantations
Today is Sunday and as there isn’t a bus service running today, we plan to stay close to Pyrgi. After another spectacular breakfast prepared by Toula, we head out of Pyrgi village into the mastic plantations close by. We exit this medieval fortified town by the gate on the Western edge of the village. After crossing the main road we take a side ride that is signposted to the monastery. We don’t know much about the monastery, but we head out to see what we can see.
After following a narrow road past a row of small stone houses, we are now into open countryside. It isn’t long before we reach the Holy Monastery of Agios Giorgios. There isn’t much information about the monastery on the net and we aren’t entirely sure if it is currently in operation. The gate is locked, there is nobody around and the grounds look a little overgrown. However, that in itself doesn’t give much away. We walk around the perimeter to see if there are any signs of life – which there isn’t. We decide not to go any further into the grounds as it feels a little intrusive to amble into someone else’s property whether it looks abandoned or not. We settle for the view we have.
Continuing along the gravel track we are now amongst the mastic plantations where orderly rows of mastic trees stand proud. Below the gnarly trunks of the elderly mastic trees, spring poppies are in abundance, sprouting up randomly amongst the stony ground forming a carpet of red.
As we progress further into the plantation we see the process of propagation in operation. A number of trees are covered in balls of plastic. Upon closer inspection, I can see that the bags are filled with soil. It took me a minute or two to realise what purpose the bags served. I hadn’t seen this before nor do I recall reading about it in the mastic museum but after studying it for a minute or two it all made sense. This is the process of ‘rooting’ sections of the mastic tree (schinos) to propagate new plants.
When I tried to research this later and whilst writing up the blog I came across an article by the very informative Steven Tagle who writes very authoritatively on many subjects. His articles on Chios and Oinousses first caught my attention several years ago. https://www.icwa.org/mastic-harvest-climate-change/
Steven explains in his article that this form of propagation is known as air layering. This technique involves stripping away a small piece of bark and painting the bare stem with hormone-rooting powder. The exposed strip is next covered with a plastic bag that is filled with soil. 6-8 months later the roots should have developed and the section of the tree can be cut from the parent and planted out. As a keen gardener, I find this absolutely fascinating.
In a nearby patch of land, we can see the next stage where the young rooted plants have been planted out.
Incredibly many of the mature trees are still weeping mastic tears even in April. What a thing of beauty this is. There is something so poetic about the process of cutting the trees to make them weep this magical resin which we then harvest for its medicinal properties (and more).
In his article on mastic production, Steven mentions the 1986 film, The Tree We Hurt which is available to view on Youtube. It is well worth the watch!
This landscape is scattered with medieval watchtowers built by the Genoese in the 15th and 16th centuries. They were built as part of the fortification process of Chios and in particular the precious mastic villages. We also stumble across a couple of wells, a vital resource for the cultivation of mastic.
There are several gravel paths that criss-cross through the plantations so we manage to do an almost circular walk. This has been a lovely way to spend the morning in complete solitude – just us and the mastic trees!
