Lifelines with Julian Hoffman

In this episode Jason König interviews Julian Hoffman about living in the mountainous region of Prespa in northern Greece, and about his latest project on the Aoos river.

 Julian is the prize-winning author of The Small Heart of Things (2012), Irreplaceable: The Fight to Save our Wild Places(2019), and most recently Lifelines: Searching for Home in the Mountains of Greece (2025), which tells the story of his move to Prespa, where he has lived for the last two decades.

We start by talking about how Julian’s fascination with mountains first developed on a trip to the foothills of the Himalayas in India.

Julian then gives us a sketch of the Prespa region, with its ancient lakes ringed by mountains, stretching across the borders between Greece, Albania and North Macedonia. He describes the hospitality he and his wife received when they moved there from London, the changing relationships between the local population and the mountain landscapes they live close to, and the animals and especially the birds that are such a powerful presence in the experiences he describes in Lifelines.

 In the second half we discuss the Aoos/Vjosa river, the last surviving large, free-flowing river in Europe, which runs through northern Greece and Albania. We talk about the amazing variety and environmental richness of the waterways across the whole Aoos river basin, and Julian describes a visit to the Sarantaporos (a tributary of the Aoos) in January 2026 to see the river in flood.

Finally we discuss the challenges facing the region – including not just depopulation and the effects of climate change, but also the policy of siting wind turbines in mountain landscapes that are ‘largely pristine, biologically alive, and hugely ecologically important’. We also talk about hope for the future, especially Prespa’s character as a place that can transcend borders and national differences. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:02

Welcome to the Mountains of Greece podcast series, part of the broader Mountain Stories, Mountain Futures podcast project. These interviews follow up on our recent Mountains of Greece conference held at the British School at Athens in October 2025. The goal of the project is to explore a wide range of stories from people working on different aspects of mountain heritage in Greece that involves thinking about the past, but also thinking about the future. How can we find new ways of engaging with history, heritage, and conservation in the mountain landscapes of Greece? How can we ensure a sustainable approach to environmental and cultural preservation? I'm Jason Koenig from the University of St. Andrews. It's a great pleasure today to welcome Julian Hoffman. Julian is the prize-winning author of Small Heart of Things, published in 2012, Irreplaceable, The Fight to Save Our Wild Vaces, 2019, and most recently his amazing book published last year, Lifelines, Searching for Home in the Mountains of Greece, which tells, among other things, tells the story of his move to the mountain region of Presbur in the very far north of Greece, where he's lived for the last two decades. He's currently working, among other things, on a book project on the River Aos, which runs through Albania and northern Greece. We'll hear more about all of that. Welcome, Julian. It's great to have the chance to talk to you today.

SPEAKER_00 1:14

Thank you very much, Jason. It's a real, real pleasure to be here with you today.

SPEAKER_01 1:18

So I'm really excited to have the chance to talk to you about Presbur, the Mountains of Greece, more generally today. But before we get onto that, I just wanted to start with a question we've been asking in some form to all of our guests on these podcasts, which is really just to ask what role, if any, mountains, and I suppose the outdoors more generally played in your life before you moved to Presbur?

SPEAKER_00 1:38

Yeah, it's a good question because for me, mountains didn't really enter my life until I was relatively old. I was born on the Northeast English coast, no mountains really anywhere near us. I then grew up in southern Ontario. Again, no real mountains in that part of Canada at all. So I had no real contact whatsoever with mountains. And eventually, even when I finally returned to the UK in my sort of mid-20s, even then when I gradually began developing an interest in walking and being outside, it was really the moorlands and the hills that were of great interest to me. I still didn't really have any contact with mountains themselves. And I think the defining shift in many ways for me was actually later in my 20s, I went to India for about five or six months. And at one point in that trip, near the end of it, I ended up in the foothills of the Himalayas. And it happened to be at a point in my life, looking back now, I can see that I was searching for this path forward. And there was something about those mountains. There was something about, to put it more precisely, I suppose, the extraordinary living world that those mountains supported. Great forests of wild rhododendrons, mongooses and vultures and great barbets and Himalayan whistling thrushes, all these incredible species that I began encountering and began learning their names, then a little bit about their behavior. And I think that was the real foundational point in my life when my path changed, when suddenly I recognized the wonder, the fascination, the extraordinariness of mountains. And so, in that sense, mountains, not right from the beginning of my life, but much later on, fundamentally shaped the life that I live today.

SPEAKER_01 3:27

Fantastic. It's nice to hear about India actually, because one of the really distinctive things about the book, we'll talk mainly about the precipice side of it, but it's I love the way in which you've got those descriptions of India and being in India threaded through your account of Prestopers. It's really lovely to hear about that now, right from the beginning. Okay, let's talk about Pressbo then. I know you've told this story brilliantly already in Lifelines, and anyone who wants the full version can can go and look for it there. I wonder if you could just give us a brief version of how you came to move to Presper. What was it like making that move, especially in those opening days and months as you got used to your new home?

SPEAKER_00 3:59

Yeah, what I should probably do to preface even that journey, because some people, perhaps many people, won't even necessarily know where Presba is. So just to move forward with that, and then I'll backtrack a bit because I certainly, when we moved here, had never heard of Prespa. But Prespa is a lake's basin surrounded by mountains that is shared by northern Greece, North Macedonia, and Albania. So these three countries come together around a region that is known in each of those three countries as Prespo. Now, moving backwards in time again, very late 1990s, my wife Julia and I had been living in London for several years at that point. We loved the city, but we'd also grown increasingly tired of our lives there, of not having either the time or the energy, or ultimately even really the desire to do the things that we'd originally loved about being there, going out to the theater, to the films, to restaurants, museums, da-da-da-da. We arrived home, as so many people do at the end of long days at work and just collapsed. And we were ready for an enormous change in our lives. We wanted to find somewhere where we could be in greater contact with the natural world, ideally, somewhere where we can maybe start growing some of our own food. Ideally, live within a different culture and within a different language if we could learn one. And that still hadn't helped us in the sense of knowing where to go, because that's the fundamental, seemingly unresolvable question. When you think, right, we need to leave here, but where is there? But at the time, we happened to be members of the RSPB. And at the time there was a quarterly magazine that was issued to members of the RSPB. And in an issue in 1999, there was a review of a book called Prespa, A Story from Man and Nature. And the book itself had been written by a Greek biologist and conservationist called Jorgos Katsadarakis. Very short review of this book, but it was an extraordinarily glowing review. It talked about these stone villages high in the mountains, these two ancient lakes, believed to be somewhere in the region of three to five million years old, three countries that come together around these bodies of water, brown bears in the beechwoods, pelicans on their nesting islands between these two lakes. And it just sounded to us like a fabulous place to spend a week on holiday. And we could go bird watching around the lakes, walking in those mountains that had started becoming more important in my life at that stage, and enjoying Food and Village Tavernas of an evening. So we decided to order the book. And a week or two later it arrived in the post, and we'd come back from our respective jobs that evening. And we began cooking dinner and we opened a bottle of wine, and then we began reading passages from this extraordinary but also very honest chronicle of a place called Press, but that we'd never heard of until we'd read this review only a week or two earlier. And we began looking at these photos of the mountains, the lakes, the forests, the villages. And at some point we decided to open a second bottle of wine, whether that was wise or not, is for everybody else to decide. But before going to bed that evening, having read a large portion of this book, we decided there's no point just going there for a holiday. We'll simply move there and step. And 25 years later, we're still in the exact same village that we'd chosen from one of the more evocative photos in the book, thinking that's where we'd like to try and put down roots. So that's the story of Frespa, a place we'd never heard of, and the fact that it's been a home for about a quarter of a century.

SPEAKER_01 7:39

Amazing. And so were you welcomed in immediately, or did it take you years and years to feel like you were part of this culture? Or was it a bit of both?

SPEAKER_00 7:47

It was a bit of both. But the first thing I have to say is that we were welcomed in by many people immediately, and not by everybody, of course. It's a village, and like so many villages, wherever they're found throughout the world, there will always be people that you don't necessarily connect with or who are suspicious of why you're there, for example. But our abiding experience and the what set the tenor of our future here in many respects was the extraordinary kindness, the extraordinary generosity of welcome that we received right at the start from people who still couldn't really understand why we were there, but still wanted to help us, if they could, to put down roots and make this place our home. And obviously, we were much, much younger when we arrived here. But that sense of immediate kinship, that reaching out and offering hands, saying, I will help you, has left such an enduring mark on me to this day about how we can all be better neighbors to other people, to other wild species, to the places that we pass through or live in. That what I experienced here, what we both experienced here all those years ago, was really about a kind of kinship. It was about a sort of sense of neighborliness that we all have the capacity to offer at various stages in our lives or even on a day-to-day basis, wherever we happen to be. So we arrived in this place, we had this help, and this is a magical landscape. And suddenly we're surrounded by pelicans and the tracks of bears and eagles filling the mountain skies and wildflowers on the alpine slopes. So all of that, of course, necessarily took us a long time to really gradually come to understand and learn, to really deepen our involvement with this place, its people, its cultures, its languages, of course, and it being shared by three nations. It's incredibly cosmopolitan, despite it being remarkably rural. And I think that's one of the fascinating aspects of Presbora, that it is shared by people with different religions, different languages, different ethnicities, different political and economic histories. So in this tiny place, in a sense, you have this extraordinary cosmopolitanism that exists at the same time.

SPEAKER_01 10:06

So you told us quite a lot there about the topography and the and given us a kind of glimpse of what Presbora is like culturally, I guess, as well. But I'd love to hear a little bit more about those borders actually and how far they shape life in Presbur. Is there a lot of movement across the borders? Is there a sense of pres a strong sense of Presber as a region that is kind of transregional that transcends those borders? How does that work?

SPEAKER_00 10:27

Yeah, I mean, I tend to describe Presber as a crossroads place because you have those three countries, their borders around these two shared lakes. It's really where the Mediterranean world pushes right up into the Balkans. So that's another crossroads point. One half of the basin is completely devoted to limestone, and the other half is completely devoted to granite, which means that you can have this cosmopolitan citizenry of invertebrate species because they prefer to be on one geological underlay or another, living side by side. So it's at a crossroads in so many respects. And those borders, when you see them on the map, they don't really make any sense because this is a place that's almost entirely encircled by mountains. So it's one watershed, it's one unique system of water and mountains together. But of course, political histories has meant that they've been divided over time. In the relatively recent history, in fact, there is movement across those borders, some of it legal, some of it technically illegal, in response to political pressures in one country or another. And unfortunately, between Greece and North Macedonia, that border within the basin has been closed since the 1960s in the time of Tito. However, within the next year or two, that border is meant to reopen. And that could be a game changer because already we can talk about it, I think, perhaps a little bit later, but you know, one of the things that is ongoing within the basin is climate change. And what happens the second you recognize the impact and consequences of climate change is you understand very quickly that these phenomena have no interest in our human borders. They will affect people on either side of a line because we share the same particular watershed or lakes basin, let's say. So, yes, there is movement, but there could be more movement. And I think that that's one of the things we're aiming to do because, of course, the wild species that we share this landscape with, they move through their own much greater, porous homeland. The brown bears that are often in the valley behind my house, they cross the border into the mountains on the Albanian side, and from there they'll cross the borders into the Prespa Mountains on the North Macedonian side. So there is a lot of movement, it just might not be human.

SPEAKER_01 13:00

Fantastic. Okay. Can we talk a little bit more about the mountains as well? And you're seeing the mountains around you all the time. But I'd love to know more about how the mountains, what role they play in the region's identity. Also, how do people talk about the mountains in Presper? Do people go up into the high parts of the mountains? How does that work? How do they fit in?

SPEAKER_00 13:21

Yeah, really good question. Because especially on the Greek side, also on the Albanian side, but even more so on the Greek side, to arrive in the Presba basin, you have to come up and over the mountains. There's no other way of getting here. And as soon as you cross that mountain pass on a winding road or on a dirt track in the past, of course, you are afforded this extraordinary glimpse of the lakes below you, glittering blue or shiny with silver, depending on the weather and the season. And you recognize how they are nested inside this great bowl of mountains. So to arrive here, you have to negotiate the mountains first and foremost. In the past, farmers had to cross the mountains to take their produce to market, and that is still true today. Whether it was in the past and they used mules over the mountains or today pickup truck, you still have to cross the mountains. And what that means in many respects is that historically the mountains on the Greek side, because it's the part that I'm obviously most familiar with, they are places of livelihood, they are places of resources, they are places of passage. Winter firewood is brought out of the mountain forests, the forests were cut to build boats out of juniper trees and beams for houses. The mountains are used for grazing, for foraging. And even prior to the Civil War, when the population of these mountain villages was so much higher. For example, the village I'm speaking to you from today, we have about 140 people here. But prior to the Greek Civil War, there were somewhere in the region of two and a half to three thousand people in this one village. So the mountains, and you can still see the tracery almost all the way to the ridgeline today, were worked into agricultural terraces. You have these sort of eroded, wave-like shapes rippling down the mountain slopes that were once, prior to the 1950s, farmed with cereal crops. They were tilled by mule and stones were mounded up, and it was a place of harvest, the mountains as well. Obviously, much of that is has been lost. But one of my abiding memories in terms of how Prespa is constantly interconnected with its mountains, is the way that different transhuman pastoralist peoples utilize these mountains. So the Sarkitsani, which are transhuman people, who effectively had two homes, a sort of lowland coastal place of grazing in the winter months, and then they would chase spring northwards as spring unfolded higher up the alpine slopes. And they would cross with their herds on foot until relatively recently, passing range after range after range, finding forage as spring sped northwards, and they would arrive in Prespa because, of course, the border was here. So this was as far as they could technically or legally go. And the Sarkitsani, the herders, would make the mountains of Prespa their home for summer season, and they would build these extraordinary beehive-shaped dwellings out of reeds that they'd harvested from around the edges of the lake. They were only seasonal settlements, they wouldn't have stood the winds and snows of winter. But for a whole summer season, they were home. And early on, I think it was our first or second year we were here, I encountered the Sarakatsani in one of their settlements. And that was when I recognized something really, really, really important. Because I think until then I'd understood sort of nomadism as being rootless, as effectively being homeless in a sense. But what the Sarakatsani showed me, because they invited myself and my friend and they had a little wooden table outside the beehive-shaped uh uh reed home. On the table, they brought out a pack of cigarettes and they poured cipro, and it's about 7:30 in the morning, they brought their own uh homemade cheese and fresh cucumbers and tomatoes from the garden right behind them in the mountains, behind their little huts. And that's when I realized that for them, the entire mountain was their hearth, it was their home. That it wasn't a place of passage for them. Because what is so interesting for me about transhumans is that both ends of the journey was home. Whether they were traveling south at the end of the summer, they were heading home, or in the spring they were heading north. They were at the ends of each journey, it was always home. And that's when I realized what an extraordinary cultural history exists, certainly within Greece, but also a few other southern Mediterranean countries as well, where people lived on these mountains. They didn't just utilize them, but they lived in them and they dwelled in them. Today there aren't that many people who still go up into the mountains. Hunters do, hunting wild boar. But even in our time here, people would say to passing tourists, oh, if you want to go to the mountains, ask the crazy English couple. They're the only ones who go up in the mountains because there's a lot of bears up there. And so that's a shift in the narrative about mountains that we've witnessed in the time we've been here. That there is a little bit of walking tourism, for example, but the relationship between local people in the mountains has largely been broken because it's not necessary anymore to the degree it was as a pace of livelihood.

SPEAKER_01 19:02

That's fascinating to hear. It's something we talked quite a lot with about some of our other guests on these podcasts, just trying to move beyond this sense of mountains as wilderness spaces, no man's land. Actually, these are places, ha inhabited places, actually, and economically productive places. It sounds as though actually that may be even more the case for Presper than for some other mountain regions of Greece, perhaps just because of the way the whole region is surrounded by mountains on all on all sides. Yeah, that's amazing. It's something I grapple with quite a lot in working on the history of the mountains of Greece in Castle Antiquity as well, just trying to reconstruct the sense of these mountains as places that were inhabited, they were economically productive. So in the whole of surviving ancient Greek literature, there are only two mentions of transhumans, which is astonishing. Because we know from our other evidence, from archaeological evidence, that this must have been happening on a huge scale, but it's almost completely absent in that elite literature. So that it's we have to make a big effort to tell that story, you drawing on comparative evidence. And um so yeah, really interesting to hear everything you're saying there.

SPEAKER_00 20:04

Um just to pick up on that point, I mean, this incredible couple that I met many, many years ago now within their Sarkatsani settlement on the mountains, they told me how this was about 2001, but until a few years prior to that, so the late 90s, let's say, they still held their panegira up in the mountains. And so for the listeners who don't know, Panegiria is the traditional Greek celebration based around the Saints' Day, what I never worked out was whether they celebrated the Saints' Day from their lowland villages or what it was attuned to or or timed to, let's say. But they talked to me so evocatively of clarinetus being up in the mountains playing at night while they had a little fire here on these extraordinary alpine slopes beneath a burnished sky of shimmered stars. Uh, and there would have been clarinets wailing out until the wee hours of the night.

SPEAKER_01 21:01

Yeah, okay. So actually, mount mountains as meeting places almost as well. Yes, yes. Yeah. Great. Can we talk about animals and birds a little more? I mean, you've got some you've got some amazing descriptions in lifelines of encounters with animals. I mean, not least an extraordinary description of encountering a bear on the mountains. But in a way, actually, the the stars of the show, I think, are the birds, which you come back to again and again, the wrens, the pelicans you mentioned already, and many, many others. Could you tell us a bit about why the the birds are so important for you and how they've been part of your life in Presbur?

SPEAKER_00 21:35

Yeah, I mean, interestingly, the story of birds in my life actually takes us back yet again because it's been such a fundamental part of my life to India. And it was that same journey that I partially described through encountering mountains in the Himalayas. But India happened to be the place where my wife and I fell in love with each other. But it was also the place on our journey there together that we also fell in love with the bird life around us, extraordinary, vivid. Colorful, magnetic species of birds. When we then returned to London afterwards in the middle of winter, and we were looking around for birds of similar colors, of course, that's when we recognize that the going out to look for birds can be very, very different depending on where in the world you are. And so ever since that journey, birds have they have a home in my heart in many ways. And I think that part of that is about how they fill the sky with such extraordinary, an extraordinary sense of agency and beauty and grace. And, you know, we often talk, for example, of a species like the beaver as an ecosystem engineer, the way that beavers can build a dam and then ponds and lagoons form, and it's enriching for so many other species. It creates its own ecosystem. So there's newts that appear and other aquatic invertebrate species, and it draws in more fish and birds. You've got a whole system engineer because of a single species, like a beaver. And the thing about birds, and especially migratory birds, to think of them as a sort of corollary in a sense, is I think of them as place connectors. They tie up or they thread together the continents, stitch them together in a way that is profoundly powerful but meaningful. And any day now, it's usually around the 26th or 27th, I'll see my first swallow arrive back in the village. And I still have my red and white Martis bracelet on my wrist, which is a wonderful tradition here in Greece, that on the first of March we twine these white and red threads around our wrists, and they remain there until you spot your first swallow of the year. And the name comes from the month of March when most swallows arrive in Greece. And then we will snip this thread off, as I will do any day now, and we leave it in a shrub or a tree for a bird to pick up and use as a nesting material, which is this wonderful custom that involves us in the lives of other species. But those swallows that any day now will arrive back here in my mountain village in Presboro, only a few weeks ago it will have felt the cold above the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro. It might have felt the salt spray over the Cape of Good Hope. It's bringing with it this whole other experience of another place that is so distant to us, and yet it's carried there within its feathers, within the light of the shiny wings that will arrive here any day now. For me, I see this journey. They're the great wanderers, the great journeyers. And what that does is it broadens out into a picture of how we are all interwoven and interconnected within such a complex and webbed world that those species that are about to make their homes beneath our eaves here have also been somewhere else. And in a sense, we can approach that and think of how are we also tied to people in different ways? And beyond that extraordinary beauty and their way of threading together the world itself, the other thing I think about birds, probably more so than any other group of species in the animal kingdom, is I find them to be extraordinary teachers, powerful guides in a way. And I think that that's what I learned from the story of the wrens that I tell in Lifelines itself. Because for three consecutive winters, wrens roosted in what was an old, abandoned mud nest of a swallow that was perched under our front door. And what's fascinating, first of all, is that wrens are typically so isolationist, they don't really like the company of other birds. That's how they sort of map out their days. They don't really like to be parts of flocks as many other birds do, for example. They're loners. And yet, when the temperature in winter begins to drop beneath a certain threshold, wrens will find, well, they don't find, they recognize, this is the important thing. They recognize the potential danger. And what they do in response to that is they convene and they gather together and roost for the safe sake of the warmth generated by each other's bodies in any place that would fit them. And in our case, we were lucky enough for three winters to have as many as 14 wrens roosting for the whole night in a nest that's no bigger than the palm of my hand. It was so fascinating. If the overnight temperature rose by just a degree or two, the wrens wouldn't gather at all. They knew the threshold for danger. And if that temperature dropped by a degree or two, they knew that they needed to convene. And that recognition, what I took from it was that they not only recognized the dangers, but they took heed and they acted. So, for example, in a human sense, we I was about to say we all, but most of us have recognized through the incredibly detailed work of scientists that the climate crisis is upon us. The danger signs are there, the floods, the fires, the droughts, all of those things that are happening in so many different parts of the world. But what we haven't done is take heed, not properly. And the wrens, in my opinion, show us a way forward that it's not sufficient to simply recognize the dangers and then not act, because all of those wrens would probably have ended up dying if they hadn't taken heed. And so there's something, you know, I know that we talk about human exceptionalism, but in so, so, so many ways, there are innumerable species who are far more exceptional than we are. And here, in practice, for me, is this incredible little kernel of truth that unless you respond to the warning signs, ultimately you'll perish. And so the wrens are this great light of hope for me that we can learn from them. Yeah, that's wonderful to hear that story.

SPEAKER_01 27:46

I don't think I've ever seen two wrens together now that you've mentioned that everywhere. But that's an amazing image of all of them clustering together in that tiny space. Fantastic. So I wonder if we could move on now to talk about another kind of connector, which is the river. And perhaps I could ask you a little about your current project or one of your current projects, which is on the Aurost River, the Vyosa in Albania. How did that project take shape? How did you start working on it?

SPEAKER_00 28:11

That's a good question because often, of course, it's funny, you know, the wrens were right there in front of me in their nest, and I recognized this was important, and I wanted to write about them immediately. Sometimes stories we can't see them, or we can't hear them, or we're not listening carefully enough, even though they're also there right before us. Because the Aos and Viosa River, they rise in the Pindus Mountains, which isn't that far south of me where I live in Fresno. And for years and years, I'd followed the international campaign to try and protect the Viosa River in Albania from the threat of several large hydropower projects and even larger number of small hydropower projects. And I followed the updates and the campaign work being carried out really closely. And then one afternoon, on a walk just up into the mountains behind my house, I just stopped in the middle of the track and I thought, dear lord, that's the next book. It's been sat there in front of me and unfolding for years now. But at least I got to that point because it's been such a life-changing and affirmative project to take up. Because what's so amazing, you're right, the Aos River is the Greek name, as it crosses the border. Journey is effectively 270 kilometers before it empties into the Adriatic Sea in Albania. It's regarded by quite a large number of conservationists and scientists to be the last remaining large, wild or free-flowing river still in existence in Europe outside of Russia. And so what that means is that there's very little in the way of barriers or dams that so often have impeded most large European waterways. But what's even more important about the Aus Vyosa is that there are several incredible tributary rivers that feed into this system that are also free-flowing. So in fact, you have this entire network of water that covers an enormous basin that is largely free from impediments. And what this means is that you have this network, a system, a living system, that ties together both the mountains of Greece with the coastline of Albania. And so I began this journey because what I decided to do, rather than write a book simply about one river, which has been done by many people and done incredibly well by many people, I wanted to set myself the challenge of trying to write about a river basin, a whole system of water and the connections between them, but particularly about wild or free-flowing rivers. And on one of my very, very first research days, I ended up in a small village in the Greek mountains above one of the great tributaries on the Greek side called the Sarindaporos River. And that evening I went to visit the relatives of a river ecologist that I'd met. And this elderly couple, we were talking about their memories of the mountain streams and torrents. And then the woman said, There's something that you have to hear, Julian. And I said, Okay. So her husband went off and he found this sort of old style music player. His wife went off and found a C D and eventually we got it all working, and they pressed play. And the room suddenly filled with this most extraordinary and astonishing and raw and poignant polyphonic music. And it was the voices of women from that village who had maintained this incredible singing tradition. And as I sat listening to it, and the woman who'd found the CD was it was her voice, her voice was one of the voices of the women on this disc. I immediately realized that this whole journey that I'd set out on in search of the story behind a whole river system was so similar to polyphonic music in the sense that all of the women's voices that coalesced and converged in this great confluence of a song was no different from all the many incredible tributaries and streams blending and coalescing into the great confluence of the Aos Viosa River. So ultimately, what I'm seeking is a song in a sense. And that polyphony, its voice comes from the wild species, the human cultures, the traditions, the landscapes, the mountains that it generate the life of this river. And a polyphonic singer that I later met in my travel said that polyphonic music, which spreads across this basin, is found in both Greece and Albania. It's a traditional of singing that is found around the river systems. And this singer said to me, polyphonic music isn't about the mountains and rivers, it's of the mountains and rivers. So this style of singing is born of this landscape itself. It's born of those mountains. The rivers don't give birth just to a course, but they also give rise to songs. That's a wonderful metaphor.

SPEAKER_01 33:18

If it's even a metaphor, I don't know. Maybe the connection is almost more organic than you should expect from a metaphorical representation. That's fantastic. So how close is the river to you now, Julian? I'm a bit hazy about the geography of the Aos. Does it run through Presboro very close to Presboro? How far away are you?

SPEAKER_00 33:34

Yeah, that river system, let's say it's about three hours' drive from us south to the Pindos Mountains. So roughly where Konica is. And there's three great rivers on the Greek side, the Voivomatis, the Aos, and the Sarandaparos. And they merge at the border and then they become the Biosa. But then there's all these tributaries on the Galbanian side as well. And what I've realized in the course of these journeys is, of course, is that within a basin, it's so diverse. Because there are these turquoise cold, freezing cold mountain springs, there are wide braids of curving blue water, there are gravel islands, there are canyons that are threaded by churning water, there are waterfalls in places, there are big sweeping meanders. All of this system necessarily includes this incredible diversity of flows and currents and courses, because it's not just a river moving downstream, slowing as it goes, as it reaches the sea, but at any given point you've got this remarkable dynamism and sense of aliveness and process and constant becoming.

SPEAKER_01 34:43

Yeah, I was going to ask you what it's like to be beside the river, but actually, in a sense, you're suggesting it's impossible to give a single answer to that.

SPEAKER_00 34:49

Yeah, it really is because it varies so much. And often by just a short distance, you can suddenly encounter a completely different aspect of the river. And it changes color. You know, that's one of the things that I've recognized about rivers. They don't hoard colours at all, they shed them very quickly. And so, depending on weather and storms, you can watch this extraordinary spectrum shift from greys to greens to turquoise to deep blues to sort of violent browns carrying all the sediment and you know from the mountains themselves. So, yes, it's a constantly evolving state of flux. And this, of course, is what we've largely lost, especially in Western Europe, where most large rivers have been tamed by dams, by canalization, by straightening. All of those things ultimately affect the agency and lifeline of a river. And so, what's so important about the Aosviosa that by and large it still tells its own story, that it's not a story that's been told by us and how we've shaped or molded the river itself, but it's still engaging in these processes that have been a part of its life course since the beginning.

SPEAKER_01 36:01

I presume this is a river that's still very rich in its wildlife, in its bird life in particular.

SPEAKER_00 36:06

Incredibly rich. It's so rich, in fact, that recent studies on some of even the tributaries, leaving aside the Viosa River itself, have discovered species not only new to Albania, but completely new to science. So even only in 2022, 23, I can't remember the exact year, one of the remarkable tributaries, several species were discovered that are completely new, aquatic invertebrate species, small species. But the richness, the wealth of these rivers, the gravel beds, the river that flows beneath the sands and the stones, of course, is home to species that we didn't even know existed anywhere in the world. Which gives you some idea of just how important these rivers are, and this is the key point, in their wild state. And just to give you one example of that, is until a few years ago, Albanian ornithologists believed that there were probably around about 5,000 pairs sand martens in existence in all of Albania. Until a group of ornithologists discovered that in one of the Beosa's sandbanks, there was a colony of four and a half thousand pairs right there, almost literally doubling the entire country's population overnight. So this is the kind of wealth we're talking about. But that wealth can only continue, of course, if the river remains free to flow as it chooses.

SPEAKER_01 37:35

Could you say a little bit more about the threats to the river? I mean, you talked a little bit about we talked about climate change generally, also about the upriver damming, I suppose, the hydro stations. There's a presumably a risk there for the future. How does that look?

SPEAKER_00 37:50

Going back very, very briefly to climate change, many of these rivers are snow fed. And what we're witnessing in the mountains of Greece in recent decades is a colossal reduction in snowfall. And so what that means, of course, is that the sources, let's say, of some of these mountain rivers are increasingly threatened, which therefore makes the implementation of hydropower projects even more problematic. For a start, a couple of the tributaries that I've seen in recent years that had been proposed as sites for hydroelectric, I've seen them with not a drop of water in them for several months at a time. And so, yes, hydropower is one of the threats that is particular to the Greek side, particularly small hydropower projects, which actually don't produce a great deal of energy, but they necessarily interrupt the life flow and jeopardize all kinds of aquatic communities. That's the real key here. Downstream in Albania, there is an airport being built in the Viosa Delta, which is problematic. The Viosa on the Albanian side was declared the world's first Wild River National Park in the year 2023, exactly three years ago, as of as of uh a week or so ago was the anniversary. But that statement hasn't as yet ensured its protection and its safeguarding. There is water abstraction plans from one of the other really important tributaries, development plans in the lagoons. So there are all kinds of threats, and I think this is why it's really important to act as advocates uh for these river systems and these mountains, because what we stand to lose is enormous. And since 2012, because really the Balkans is the last large part of Europe that remains threaded with an extraordinary abundance of river flows without dams and other impediments. But we're beginning to lose what is known as the blue heart of Europe here in the Balkans. Since 2012, about two and a half thousand kilometers of previously pristine river have been lost, and 700 kilometers of that was in Albania alone. So, on one hand, we've got these great efforts going into protecting the Aos, the Biosa, um from NGOs, uh even at governmental level, sometime, but there are bigger and bigger and bigger threats. And of course, Western Europe, Northern Europe, they lost most of their wild rivers a very long time ago. And it's when you see the difference between what a free-flowing river can, how it moves outwards and beyond its banks to enliven and vivify entire habitats, whole communities, whole landscapes, that you recognize the vital importance of wild rivers, that they're not just some channel of water, they move beyond that channel to encompass everything within this huge area, into their floodplains, into the riparian forests that move upstream, to the annals that come down to drink. So all of these things are dependent on that vital artery of water.

SPEAKER_01 41:14

I was going to ask you also about how far it matters that this is a mountain river, or at least partly so. And it may be that you asked answered that question already, Julian. But do you want to say any more about that? So the question would be how far do the surrounding mountains help to shape the character of the Aos?

SPEAKER_00 41:31

Yeah, no, and no, I'd love to add a little bit more there because um, as they say, the uh on the Greek side, some of the Albanian tributaries rise in the mountains and well, but the whole river system begins in the mountains of Greece. And there's two things that I'd like to add there, if that's okay, because um the Serendaporos, one of these extraordinary tributaries, uh, it has an enormous, enormous bed. This riverbed is so vast, so vast that older people in the villages I've been to used to say, oh, we're going down to the sea when they would go down from their village down to the river. But in the three years that I've been working on this project, I've only ever really seen these slender but beautiful braids of water, one over there, one curving this way. And I've yet to see what happens when the river fills. And in January, we had some extraordinary uh amounts of precipitation throughout northern Greece and in Albania. The Viosa near the sea burst its bank, several villages had to be evacuated. So I went down to the Sarendaporos in order to hopefully see it uh rising, and I did, nowhere near filling its bed, but suddenly I was watching entire fallen trees being lifted like boats off the dry river banks as the water filled and gathered and boiled and bubbled. And they were these tall trees were being shot downstream on the river's flow, brown, muddy water. And in order to get there, I had to cross Gramos Mountain. And that's when I realized that Gramos Mountain, for all that it is a mountain, it's also just water. Because everywhere I walked or drove or stopped, there was water everywhere. So it gathers. The mountains are what really gathers all of this precipitation. Everywhere I looked, the mosses were just sponging up water, torrents and courses were spilling through little gullies and through rocks, the rivers, the streams were rising. There was water everywhere. I even saw entire cliff faces in the mountains that had become vertical rivers. Literally like lightning, white lightning has just moving from the sky right down to the valley far below, because just sudden waterfalls that had never been there in all of the years I'd been researching there had suddenly appeared. Carrying water. So what happens is that these mountains that shed during heavy rains so much silt and soil and sediment that end up in the flow of the river, vegetative debris, trees, all kinds of uh matter that is sent downstream. And what that material does is it energizes other habitats and ecosystems downstream. And eventually some of that material arrives at the Viosa Delta. And it then builds up this extraordinary ecosystem at the mouth of the river, right on the Adriatic Sea, where I've spent quite a lot of time looking at how the dune system exists, how there's all of this the lagoons are full of plants and you know different species happening here and there and everywhere. A lot of that matter has come from the mountains of Greece. So yet again, the mountains not far south of my home are intricately connected to the coastline of Albania in the same way that the swallows that will come back and nest under our village roofs in the next few days also connect us to southern Africa, for example. So the mountains are vitally important. It's their material that then makes the delta such a rich place and so many other parts of the whole river system as it journeys through two countries.

SPEAKER_01 45:30

I love that image. So the tilt and the dunes is partly from the mountains, the mountains are there, or even there down at the right at the mouth of the river. Fantastic. I wonder whether we could finish with a question about future challenges, possibilities, or opportunities perhaps for the place that is home for you now. What would you say are the challenges facing Presburn indeed mountain communities in Greece more broadly? What kind of future would you like to see for Fresno, the people in Fresbur? And I suppose also is is tourism a part of that? And what does it look like to have a kind of sustainable form of tourism that is going to help towards a positive vision for the future? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 46:09

I think there are three primary challenges that Presper uh faces, but that are challenges common to pretty much all mountain communities in in Greece and probably elsewhere as well. But let's stick with Greece because it is my homeland these days. And many of these challenges that I'll mention in a second were, you know, I recognize them on my river journeys as well, because as you pointed out, these rivers begin in the mountains of Greece, and so they they thread together these other mountain communities that I hadn't been familiar with until fairly recently. The first of those challenges is definitely depopulation. We are watching in real time a kind of hollowing out of communities from the mountain landscapes of Greece. And that's a nationwide problem. But in my part of Greece, Western Macedonia, as it's called, in the last decade we've lost 10% of our population. What that means is it can be almost a sort of self-producing cycle because what happens when communities begin to lose numbers is that there's no longer enough children to keep a school open. And once there's no longer a school, the remaining families with kids either move or send their kids elsewhere. It means there's not enough to support medical facilities or even a simple clinic or pharmacy. All of these things then spiral or combine together in a sense to make a place unviable. And I'll always remember, actually, on the note of mountain communities and rivers and demographics, that it was a young woman that I met in one of the Greek villages above the Sarendaparos River who said to me that it was Albanian migrant families who'd come over the border in the 90s and early 2000s that saved her village school because the Greek government was about to close that school because there were an insufficient number of pupils until these families came over the border. And she said it's Albanians that kept my Greek school open. And that was a really, really interesting tape, particularly in light of how borders and the narratives around people on the move are so often presented and projected in the press and elsewhere. So depopulation is definitely one of them. The second one I would say is climate change. We already know that the Mediterranean is suffering far more than many parts of the world in terms of climate change impacts and the degree of change in temperature. And northern Greece, interestingly, has suffered even more than southern Greece in terms of the differential between winter temperatures on a year-to-year basis. It's almost double in terms of the difference than southern Greece at the moment, in terms of differentials between those winter temperatures. And what climate change does is that it impacts farmers' livelihoods, first and foremost. Here in Greek Pressby, it's beans that are the primary crop. But for several years now, that production has dropped markedly because of high summer temperatures, very high summer temperatures, hail, storms at harvest time, all kinds of different things that are combining to threaten the livelihoods of farmers. And these two ancient lakes that we live around have been receding dramatically in the last few decades. I mentioned earlier that they've been around for somewhere between three and five million years, but in the last 30 to 40 years, they've dropped by about nine meters, the Great Lake, and it's shed over half of its volume, again, putting further pressure on communities thinking, should we stay here? Crops are looking poor. So all of these things, yet again, they combine to sort of add further problems. And then the third thing that I would that I would add, and I think it's important to add this one, and that is extractivism in the mountains. And what I mean about that is there is mining in Greek mountains. There is mining for bauxite just south of us, just beyond uh the Prespa Basin. But I don't mean that specifically. What I really mean is that in response to the climate crisis, the Greek government has chosen a particular path, a path that I personally think is wrong, because they have chosen to combat climate change by raising a large number of wind turbines, but almost all of them are in largely pristine, biologically alive, and hugely ecologically important mountains. So, for example, the land take for turbine placement in Greece is 3.5 times greater than the global average, because putting turbines along the ridge of a Greek mountain that has never had a road on it means bulldozing enormous roads in a zigzag ascent all the way up to the top. And the reason I think this one is important is twofold, because there is a climate crisis, but there's also a biodiversity crisis, and we can't ignore one and somehow assume that the other that will be okay if we just tackle the other. And there's been a lot of studies carried out by biologists here to suggest that there are places where we can put wind turbines to reduce our reliance on lignite, which is still Greece's predominant form of energy production, but without compromising these incredible refuges of biodiversity. There are already plans to encircle Prespa with wind turbines. It's a national park. It was the first tri-boundary national park in all of the Balkans. I don't say this lightly because I recognize that I could sound hypocritical, because I recognize the duty we have to shift at pace from fossil fuels. But if we keep telling the same story, we're only going to keep getting the same answer and or the same ending, anyways, because what the Greek government has decided to do is to effectively industrialize a large number of our mountains. And I think part of the reason that that is possible goes back to depopulation, because there aren't the people there, sufficient numbers of people to argue, to act as the voices of the mountains and the rivers that are under threat. And so it makes it an easy way for a government to say, you know what, there's nobody there. It's common land, it's government-owned. We don't have to buy farmers out. Let's put them there. And I think this is a huge and costly enterprise that ultimately will make some of Greece's most majestic mountains far, far poorer in the short term, let alone the long term. But having said that, because those are some of the challenges, I also have a lot of hope as well. And to come back specifically to Pressbo, this is potentially a model because we have three countries that have often had acrimonious histories, politically, divergent, economic histories, that are finding ways of working together. When I say that, I should point out that most of the cooperation doesn't really happen at state level, although organs do exist, but they're much slower. Most of the work on the ground aimed at cooperation, aimed at exchange, aimed at solidarity, is actually happening between communities and local municipalities. So only last week there was a second of three people's forums for Prespa. That one was in a county in North Macedonia. The first one was in Albania, and the final one will be in Greece. And that brought together local people from all three sides to talk about shared concerns, shared challenges, possible cooperative futures. And this is really key because with the opening of the border between Greece and North Macedonia, which hopefully will happen in the next year or two, that will ideally act as another bridge between peoples. Because I think a lot of what I tried to explore in Lifelines was that through this place that's divided by lines on a map, divided by politics, divided by states, that's only one way of approaching borders. That we could just as easily think about them as meeting places, where differences can come together. Choosing to see them as sites of division is a political choice. There are many, many other ways we can approach borders, whether that's where two geologies like limestone and granite meet, or where people that are living with the shared challenge of climate change can come together and offer different perspectives and possibilities for how we might move beyond that and find common ways of acting. How I would like to see Prespa, I would like to see Prespa truly become a trans boundary place. And in terms of tourism, I think tourism will be important to the future of this landscape. I would hope that we can retain some of the primary sector, the fishing and the farming, because I think those are important aspects at the cultural and economic level. And I would hate to see Prespa become a place solely reliant on tourism, especially given the sensitivity of its ecological importance. But I think there are forms of low impact. I don't like using the word sustainable because I think it's become very problematic and used a little too much. But there are ways of utilizing or perhaps approaching low-impact tourism that can ensure livelihoods for local people without harming the natural values or the cultural values of a region, uh, but while also bringing people to this place in order to share in this kind of extraordinary common heritage that is spread between these mountains and lakes. And I remember there was that chap called Soterius at the end of the mountain conference in Athens last year. And I learned so much from him because myself and others, we've we've been talking at great length over the years. How do we revitalize mountain villages? How do we retain people? And I think the mistake that I'd make that was then corrected, not by Soterius, but through his engaging talk, is I've been thinking, how do we keep the primary sector alive in places like Presb when climate change is making it more and more problematic? And what I learned is that maybe I've been getting that wrong. Maybe the key isn't to go all out to try and protect the primary sector, though I would love for it to still have a very, very important central presence here. But what he talked about deurbanization, that there are people who would love to come to communities like this and to build new lives if, and this is the really, really key point, there is some kind of network of infrastructure, social uh and cultural infrastructure in place that can support new arrivals, whether that's schools, whether that is a small medical facility, if there's ways of exchanging skills and work practices between people in some kind of a cooperative manner. But I learned through him that there maybe is a different way to think outside the box, because I think that what's increasingly important is that we've made the world another shape entirely through the climate crisis, the biodiversity crisis, and the time has come to think not just outside the box, but to think really in a completely different way in order to fit this new shape of the world. And so he taught me something really important and really vital about how we can approach this with new sets of stories. Rivers of the Aosviosa system are teaching me so much about how different rivers can be. I think there are also different ways to approach these extraordinary, rich, culturally vital landscapes in the mountains of Greece and elsewhere, and to keep them flourishing into the future.

SPEAKER_01 58:19

Fantastic. I should say this is so Tieris from the High Mountains Cooperative, who are doing amazing work not too far south from Eugene.

SPEAKER_00 58:28

One small note, because I know we're talking about mountains, and it's something I often reflect upon how mountains shape places, is that prior to the last ice age here in Presbur, there was only one lake in this uh lake's basin. But over thousands of years since the last ice age, day by day and grain by grain, silt and soil and sediment from the high mountains behind my village, right here, were all swept and sluice down the river valley by those waters, those flows, those generative energies that we were talking about earlier. And they slowly gathered at the mouth of the river, and over time, over long periods of time, they gradually accumulated and gathered until they finally reached out to the other side of the lake. And they split what was only one lake into the two lakes that we have today. And I often tell visitors that when we're down on the isthmus between those two lakes, that we're actually standing on the lowest and flattest part of the entire transboundary Prespa Basin, but we're also standing on the top of mountains because every last grain there was brought down from these high peaks. Amazing. Thank you. You're very welcome.

SPEAKER_01 59:47

Thanks to Julian, thanks to Zophia Girton for editing. We've got more episodes coming up exploring mountain heritage in Greece from a whole range of other perspectives. If you've enjoyed this episode, please do share our podcast with others and have a look at our other episodes. You can follow us on social media or get in touch directly via the Mountains of Greece project website. You might like also to have a look at the separate website for the broader mountain stories, mountain features project that this series is a part of. You can follow the links to both of those in the episode notes. Thank you for listening.