Ghosting it forward ...

The charming lady Ewa of Ewa in the Garden has tagged me for a game of Ghosting It Forward in which the rules are:

1) Have a Ghostly Image to pass along.
2) Tag three people on your blog, with links to their blogs. Tell about what great folks they are, or offer to send them a Ghostly Treat.
3) Include a link to Ghosting It Forward in your blog.

The Spirits are about to speak!

Now, if you have read my previous meme outbursts, you would have read that Lady Greenthumb is not a particularly religious person in terms of Church not being an institution of God for me. Nevertheless, I know my deity/ies are somewhere up there, and I rather prefer to find them in Nature and any living being that shares this planet with me. I also know my own deities do not require me to cherish them with lavish cash donations towards their new BMW with personalized license plates reading ' Don Angelo ' (a true story from Croatia's very finest clergy), in order to demonstrate just how orderly devout I am. I don't have a firm opinion about ghosts or anything 'ghostly' but will believe whatever I find 'goosefleshy' enough. And speaking of the Unexplained and Supernatural, you've got my attention! So since the lovely Ewa has given me an opportunity to ghost it forward, here goes another story from my most favourite mythical destination - Kefalonia. I'll try to make it short this time...

So here is my ghostly shot:



Location: Agia Thekli, an old, atmospheric,eerie but beautiful little mountainous village famous for it's extraordinary water sources and the homonymous church.

I never enjoyed the worn-out tourist routes, but rather took pleasure in forgotten old village roads and dirt tracks. Taking the road less traveled by was always my cup of tea. It included getting lost in pitch dark, losing both the orientation and the road underneath which unexpectedly turned out to be one of many dead ends overlooking a deep chasm. But somehow we'd always find a way to one of these old villages. You couldn't drive through the picturesque Agia Thekli and not notice the strange looking statue in the churchyard. More for its disproportional figure than its exceptional beauty. And the fact that it had magnetic powers. There wasn't a person who traveled along with me that didn't want at least one memorial photo of the statue. So I would stop the car, people would take out their photo-capturing gadgets and try to take it from the car, but suddenly none of the devices worked. A camcorder got stuck, someone's camera batteries died and my camera went 'wicked'. So I though this lady out there obviously wants some serious attention. So the slothful crowd decided to step out of the car, walk over to the churchyard and pay some respect to both the statue and all the fallen local heroes she so proudly gave publicity to. That's when this shot originates from. I wondered through many photo shops and forums, but none of the experts could confidently say what the little circles represented and neither did they fit the definition of orbs. The strange thing is that they showed up on all of our cameras, so we have quite a few of these, taken with different camera models but with same ghostly circles. I always loved to speculate that it was the souls of the fallen heroes and in my head, it will forever represent those poor agonizing souls.

The history reveals that during the 1940’s (World War II) many were those who participated and dropped dead in the battlefield. During the Resistance period the village hosted EAM's headquarters and that resulted in many executions by the Germans. In the yard of St.Nicolas Church there is a memorial with the names of all the executed
heroes.

The village has remained a favorite stop during our further wanderings, especially after discovering its beautifying water spring. So much about Agia Thekli and another of my many fits of Kefalonia reminiscence. But to end this in style, I just have to share this poem with you. It opens the book 'Captain Corelli's Mandolin' by Louis de Bernieres, and could have easily been encrypted underneath my ghostly statue, or any other whatsoever...

THE SOLDIER
by Humbert Wolfe (1916)

Down some cold field in a world outspoken
the young men are walking together,
slim and tall,
and though they laugh to one another,
silence is not broken;
there is no sound however clear they call.

They are speaking together
of what they loved in vain here,
but the air is too thin
to carry the things they say.
They were young and golden,
but they came on pain here,
and their youth is age now, their gold is grey.

Yet their hearts are not changed,
and they cry to one another,
'What have they done with the lives we laid aside?
Are they young with our youth,
gold with our gold, my brother?
Do they smile in the face of death, because we died?'

Down some cold field in a world uncharted
the young seek each other with questioning eyes.
They question each other,
the young, the golden hearted,
of the world that they were robbed of in their quiet paradise.

I find myself privileged to have encountered a pile of people who write fascinating blogs that I enjoy reading, and when meditating about eerie stuff, the following 'crackpots' spring to mind:

1) Shauna of the GardenBrae - a Scottish lass whose writing guarantees a great time and an abundance of laughs; before you start thinking she's another geezer like me, well no; more of a true artist, a lady full of intrigue and an overwhelming photographer; roaming the lovely braes somewhere in BC
2) Joy of the GardenJoy4Me - need I introduce Joy who is probably an expert on Halloween and who would tell a better story than her very self so I can't wait to see what she has for this tag
3) HundeHaus for being a fabulous person who always gets me thinking and has made my day on more than one occasion. With her groovy sense of humor, and a kindred soul, that is simply inevitable.

Dear friends, you have all been adoringly ghosted!