GREECE’S DISAPPEARING WHISTLED LANGUAGE
For some 2,500 years, residents of this mountainous village have used an astonishing language that only they understand. But there are only six people left who can ‘speak’ it.
Hidden deep in the south-east corner of the Greek island of Evia, above a twisting maze of ravines that tumbles toward the Aegean Sea, the tiny village of Antia clings to the slopes of Mount Ochi. There are no hotels or restaurants within 40km, and the hamlet is so remote that it doesn’t exist on Google Maps.
But as you travel here along a dizzying road from Karystos, through a mythical landscape of megalithic ‘dragon house’ stone tombs and giant Cyclopic boulders, you’ll hear an ancient siren song reverberating against the mountain walls. That’s because for thousands of years, the inhabitants of Antia have used a remarkable whistled language that resembles the sounds of birds to communicate across the distant valleys.
Known as sfyria, it’s one of the rarest and most endangered languages in the world – a mysterious form of long-distance communication in which entire conversations, no matter how complex, can be whistled. For the last two millennia, the only people who have been able to sound and understand sfyria’s secret notes are the shepherds and farmers from this hillside hamlet, each of whom has proudly passed down the tightly guarded tradition to their children.Known as sfyria, it’s one of the rarest and most endangered languages in the world – a mysterious form of long-distance communication in which entire conversations, no matter how complex, can be whistled. For the last two millennia, the only people who have been able to sound and understand sfyria’s secret notes are the shepherds and farmers from this hillside hamlet, each of whom has proudly passed down the tightly guarded tradition to their children.
But in the last few decades, Antia’s population has dwindled from 250 to 37, and as older whistlers lose their teeth, many can no longer sound sfyria’s sharp notes. Today, there are only six people left on the planet who can still ‘speak’ this unspoken language – and one of them recently invited me to Antia so I could meet the last whistlers of Greece.
When I arrived, a 45-year-old farmer named Yiannis Apostolou was waiting for me outside the village’s lone store. After greeting me in Greek, he gazed out onto the rolling chasm below the village, tucked his tongue under his bottom teeth and fired a fluted melody into the abyss.
“Koula? Tsipas? We have company!” he said, by way of a translator.
Soon, Koula, a slight 76-year-old woman emerged from a stone dwelling high on the mountainside, popped in her dentures and whistled back, turning this jaunty solo into a duet. “Well, what are you waiting for?” she responded over a clanging chorus of goat bells. “Come on up here!”
As two other villagers descended from the hills to join us, Apostolou asked each of us if we’d like something to drink and then whistled a string of chirps toward the store’s open door. Moments later, owner Maria Kefalas came out with a bottle of water, two cups of tea and a glass of sour cherry vissinada juice – arranging each perfectly on the table in front of us.
No-one can recall exactly how or when the villagers here began using sfyria – which comes from the Greek word sfyrizo, meaning ‘whistle’ – to communicate. Some residents speculate that it came from Persian soldiers who sought refuge in the mountains some 2,500 years ago. Others claim the language developed during Byzantine times as a secret way to warn against danger from rival villages and invading pirates. There’s even a belief that in ancient Athens, they’d post whistlers from Antia on the mountaintops as sentries so they could signal an imminent attack on the empire.