I love a pig as much as the next person. Or so I thought until they did a Conga through our vegetable patch, pausing to do the Hustle in the courgettes and a Merengue around the aubergines. We had finally managed to keep them out of our property by erecting fencing around the perimeter, but huge floods in the area last year have washed a section flanking the riverbed away. And so they are back, making an unholy mess of the garden and scaring the living daylights out of me.
Agriochoiros (αγριόχοιρος) is the Greek name for Eurasian wild boar common across Greece, although many areas including Pelion, where our home is, have large populations of a hybrid wild boar cross-bred with domestic pigs. The causes for this hybridisation are hotly disputed with explanations varying from accidental uncontrolled crossbreeding of free-range domestic pigs to deliberate hybridisation for commercial purposes from businesses which have now closed and released the pigs into the wild. This clearly poses a direct threat to the extinction of the Eurasian wild boar.
Full disclosure here, I am quite scared of the pigs. This is exacerbated by the fact that I have never seen the little blighters properly and so they have become the stuff of nightmares. I hear tales of aggressive boar protecting their young by charging at unsuspecting humans. We hear them around 10.30 pm moving down the dry riverbed about 30 metres from the house. The thrum of cicadas in the night air is disturbed by the clacking of rocks and stones dislodging, grunting and snuffling and the resistant rustle of elephant grass as they head out of the riverbed onto our neighbour’s land. Woody’s ears prick up and he begins whining. They spend about half an hour rootling through our neighbour’s garden which runs along the bottom of our land before they either pop up through a gap where the fence now ends or head up and out of his land and squeeze through a hole in the fence fashioned by our neighbour’s dog, Foxy, who likes to visit and does not appreciate being fenced out. All this time I can hear loud frenzied grunting as they crash around like overenthusiastic teenagers in the mosh pit at their first Reading Festival.
One day soon we will have an indoor bathroom but for now it is tacked onto the back of the house, the previous owners having only used this house as a summer home and seemingly preferring to shower off from the beach before entering the house. I continually promise myself I will never take an indoor bathroom for granted again as I step out onto the back terrace in the middle of the night to use the loo. It is chaos in the pitch dark and I peer tentatively over the wooden railings squinting to try and see them. I can hear hooves ringing off stone, enthusiastic snorting and a grunt so ferocious it sounds like the roar of a bull about to charge a matador. Where the bloody hell are they? Adrian always assures me they will not come onto the terrace. “They can’t walk up steps!” he tells me in the tone of a father talking to a very small child. I point out that they have just walked down a mountain, climbed a four metre deep riverbed and will shortly traverse back up same mountain. I think they can manage three steps. Who is he trying to kid? However, I do concede that they are after water and roots and unlikely to make a trip to the bathroom despite it being a water source. I construct a barrier of clothes horses across the terrace just in case - fundamentally useless in the event of a charging boar but hopefully giving me enough time to cross the two metre distance from the bathroom to the back door and safety. Adrian calls it catastrophising considering the wild pig is fundamentally a shy animal avoidant of humans, I consider it to be taking preventative measures.
We head to the hardware store for some replacement fencing. It is a common predicament here and our plight is greeted with sympathetic eye rolls and exclamations of “F**king pigs! You don’t need a fence, you need a gun!” A fence will have to do. Hunting is prohibited within 800 metres of a dwelling and besides, I have never held a gun in my life and have no intention of starting - I would be rubbish anyway. Hunting season has just begun across Greece and I wonder whether this keeps the numbers under control. A local hunter tells me this is nigh on impossible due to the pigs having three to four litters a year of up to ten piglets. Although the season has officially started, it is still too hot for the hunting dogs. It is illegal to shoot pigs at night but as this is when they are at their most active, frustrated hunters will have to wait until the temperature drops enough for a day hunt. For now, the dogs are restricted to short two or three hour training sessions early in the morning. The hunters track the pig families for weeks before the season begins to establish where they are living and continue to do this whilst they wait for temperatures to lower.
The wild boar has been hunted in Greece since ancient times and Greek mythology is awash with tales of their savagery and destruction. It is most commonly associated with Artemis, the goddess of war, and thought to represent one side of her nature which was capable of unleashing sudden and devastating destruction. The Calydonian Boar Hunt, one of the great heroic adventures in Greek mythology, took place as a result of Artemis unleashing a vicious boar to destroy the region of Calydon in Aetolia to punish their king for failing to honour her in sacrificial rites to the Gods. Many Greek heroes, including many Argonauts (who set sail with Jason in the Argo to find the golden fleece - incidentally just up the road from here in Volos) joined the hunt. In his Metamorphoses, the Roman poet Ovid describes the beast with:
Blood and fire were aglow in his eyes, his neck was stiff with bristles as firm as serried spears or the stakes on a rampart. His massive flanks were flecked with a spray of seething foam from his grunting snorts; his tusks were as long as an Indian elephant's. Lightning flashed from his mouth and his breath- blasts shrivelled the grassland. Ovid, Metamorphoses - Lines 284-289, Translation by David Raeburn
Brought up on a diet of stories from Greek mythology and being prone to exaggeration, this is kind of what I am imagining in our back garden. I could not possibly comment on their breath but our neighbour’s dog Foxy’s breath could shrivel any grassland. I have bought her some Dentasticks. Not a fan of the pigs either, she upsticks from her usual comfy spot in our garden and runs a mile when she hears them coming. Woody starts whining again and Millie the street dog heads back to the village. So much for guard dogs.
The pigs arrive again in the night, this time they seem to have sent an open Facebook invitation to all their friends. It’s a total rave out there but I can only make out the odd shadow flickering amongst squeals, grunts and falling rocks. The sound bounces off the hillsides, disorientating me further and I am once again too cowardly to investigate closely. We set up a camera, although we are limited by the house’s wifi range - they haven’t walked past it once so far. Pigs are clever. I feel like I might be going slightly crazy. They prance and squeal and melt back into the shadows until night falls once more.
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Writing this made me think of these:
The most popular method for cooking wild boar in Greece is marinating in herbs then a slow braise. Akis Petretzikis has a recipe here for Wild Boar Stew.
A friend sent me this weird and strangely mesmerising song and I suppose I should be grateful our Greek pigs are roaming wild and free;