Published in The Passenger
2023
Before me lies a maritime map of the Mediterranean Sea. The predominant currents are shown as arrows flowing in an anticlockwise loop, eastwards along the North African coast and back towards the Atlantic again, navigating the complicated coastline of southern Europe. Looking closer, I can see that this grand circulation is muddled by two smaller gyres in the Ionian and Levantine Basins, and by innumerable local interactions as the water encounters peninsulas, islands, inlets and other obstacles, producing a dizzying mass of arrows that spiral in all directions.
But above the Mediterranean there is another sea: a churning, heaving ocean of gas rather than of liquid. Just as the visible sea below is shaped by the way the water interacts with the land that presses it on all sides, so the invisible sea above is a product of chaotically clashing factors: low pressure over the Atlantic; high pressure over the Sahara; rivers of air pouring through passes in mountains from the High Atlas to the Alps; cold fronts and warm fronts periodically advancing and retreating; and the atmospheric upheaval between oceanic and continental climates. Like the map of currents, the map of wind is a psychedelic panorama of arrows twisting, bending and flowing from north to south, and south to north, in a chaos of fluid dynamics.
It is a map of this second sea that makes me fall in love with wind – and specifically, the named winds of the Mediterranean. These great aeolian powers blow at particular times of year down atmospheric corridors they have followed for millennia, and have profound – and often surprising – effects on landscape, ecology, agriculture, commerce, shipping, industry, tourism, gastronomy, architecture, history, religion and psychology. They are both cursed and celebrated, greeted with elation and fear, loved and hated in equal measure – and sometimes all these things at the same time.
Most people are familiar with everyday, ‘directional’ winds: northerlies, which blow from the north; south-easterlies, which blow from the south-east. Their names, prosaic and matter-of-fact, simply derive from the compass directions from which they blow. But the winds I am interested in speak in poetry, not prose. The fact that they are endowed with names suggests that they have personalities, and certainly they often seem like larger-than-life characters whose mood swings, whims and tempestuous rages have shaped culture throughout history – and still shape it today.
I have been lucky, and unlucky, enough to meet four of these characters, and will introduce each in turn. Meet the Meltemi, the Sirocco, the Bora and the Mistral.
Meltemi: the Bad-Tempered One
We have been on the island for a day when the wind starts blowing. It comes from the north, cold and dry, driving white horses over the sea, and it doesn’t let up for a week. The ferries are all cancelled. My friend and I – aged eighteen, island-hopping around the Cyclades – are sleeping on the beach, and planned to stay for a couple of nights on tiny Koufonisia before heading to one of the larger islands. But the wind has stranded us here. It just keeps on blowing. It whistles over the low stone wall we have built in an attempt to shelter ourselves, covering our belongings in sand, and keeps us awake long into the night with its moans and howls.
Having grown up in rainy Britain, the thing that feels most alien to me is the combination of gale-force wind with the clear blue skies and dazzling sunshine that greets us every morning. In fact the more violently it blows, the lovelier is the weather. It makes me feel slightly mad, as if the wind is tormenting us. I start talking to it, begging it to go away, to release my friend and I from this surreal captivity and let us escape to Athens again, where our homeward flight is waiting.
And then, after five days, it stops. We catch the next morning’s ferry. It isn’t until we reach the mainland, sleep-deprived and weather-scoured, that I learn that the wind has a name. It is called Meltemi.
Some say this name derives from the Italian mal tempo, ‘bad weather’, but the theory I prefer gives it a Turkish origin translating as ‘bad-tempered’. The Meltemi blows mostly in the summer, reaching the peak of its moodiness in July and August – although sometimes it still howls through September and into October – and can reach gale-force strength, up to 8 on the Beaufort scale.
The Meltemi always comes from the north, billowing into the Aegean Sea and the Eastern Mediterranean from the mountainous bulk of the Balkans, squeezed between the opposing landmasses of Greece and Anatolia. As it reaches the sea, it encounters islands – like the one my eighteen-year-old self was temporarily stranded on – which channel its currents this way and that, increasing its speed and making its effects less predictable. The Cyclades bear the brunt of its wrath, especially Naxos, Andros and Tinos, and the party island of Mykonos is often said to be the windiest of all – proof that freezing, gale-force winds do no harm to tourism. In fact, its chill is welcomed for reducing scorching temperatures; without this effect, the Aegean islands might be too hot to visit in summer.
Landlubbing tourists might welcome the wind, but sensible seafarers certainly don’t; a powerful Meltemi can be perilous for sailors, arriving in clear weather and blowing up without warning. As I experienced on Koufonisia, the blue skies and sunshine do not change, there are no dark clouds or thunderstorms, but suddenly the air is moving at 60 kilometres per hour. In a matter of minutes the sea can transform from a gentle swell into four-metre-high waves, dashing moored boats against the quays and scattering ships across the sea; experienced sailors will head for harbour or anchor in the lee of an island, and wait for the fury to abate. Sometimes this can take days.
There is another, more ancient name for this bad-tempered wind: the Etesian wind, from the Greek etos, meaning ‘annual’. It has been a dependable presence since at least the third century BC, when Philip II of Macedon – father of Alexander the Great – used it as an aeolian force-field to prevent hostile Persian fleets from pursuing him home in the summer. For thousands of years, the Etesian/Meltemi has determined life and fate across the Eastern Mediterranean, but its meteorological origins lie much further afield: this local Greek wind can trace its roots to annual depressions over South Asia and the summer monsoon of the Indian subcontinent. The iconic windmills of Mykonos and Santorini, the quintessential postcard image of Greece, ultimately owe their existence to rainclouds over Calcutta and Delhi. The Meltemi is a reminder that nothing is ‘local’ in the world of weather, that climates are intimately connected, that nowhere is separate from anywhere else.
And leaving the Greek islands behind, no wind better illustrates the connections between distant continents than the many-named wind that blows from the other direction.
Sirocco: the African Wind
Halfway up a Slovenian mountain, I turn back to admire the view and see only a grubby blanket. To the south, the land and sea have been covered in a pall, a pinkish-greyish haze that masks and muddies everything. From this altitude, I can see that the sky has been cut in two, divided into neat halves: clarity in the north and darkness in the south, opposing weather fronts clashing like armies over the Adriatic.
The sight takes my breath away, in more ways than one. During the next couple of days the murk advances from the coast, stifling the atmosphere and pressing uncomfortably on my lungs. In some regions, cars on the street are covered in a layer of sediment – I am told it is red sand from the Sahara carried over the Mediterranean, a phenomenon that was historically known as ‘blood rain’. Despite the unhealthy conditions, it feels miraculous to me that this spot on the Balkan coast is connected by a current of air to the sweltering deserts of Africa.
Again, I learn that the wind has a name. Locally it is nicknamed the Jugo, from the Slavic word for ‘south’, but it also goes by the Ghibli, the Marin and the Xaloc. In most of the Mediterranean, though, it is simply the Sirocco.
In a region swept by dry northerlies – rivers of cold continental air squeezed through the Alps and the Balkan mountains – the Sirocco is the foetid breath of the sweltering south. Connecting North Africa and southern Europe, it is a wind of contradictions: a dust-dry desert wind that brings damp and humidity. On its long journey from the Sahara it picks up volumes of sand, and when it reaches the rolling waves it becomes swollen with moisture – combining the desert and the sea, it erupts onto Europe’s coastline. Its multivarious local names are an indicator of its range, affecting the climates of Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily, Malta, the Balkans, Greece, Turkey and the Levant. In Venice, combined with a rising tide, the Sirocco is a contributing factor to the acqua alta phenomenon, exacerbating the drowning of one of Europe’s most treasured cities.
Most commonly blowing in autumn and spring, this so-called ‘African wind’ can reach up to 100 kilometres per hour, disrupting shipping the length and breadth of the Mediterranean. Due to its humidity, it is associated with less-than-salubrious health effects, including lethargy, breathlessness, insomnia, headaches, irritation, anxiety and even asthma attacks. This might sound like superstition – ‘an ill wind that blows nobody any good’ – but science suggests that certain winds have deleterious effects on physiology and psychology, ranging from bodily stress reactions to fluctuating serotonin levels. Certainly the people I met in Slovenia and Croatia, during the week-long Sirocco that started blowing as I climbed that mountain, were in little doubt that the southern wind made them sick.
Perhaps the most vivid illustration of the Sirocco’s baleful aspect is that phenomenon of blood rain – red sand from North African deserts periodically dumped over Europe, sometimes as far north as Scotland and Norway – which has appalled and horrified communities throughout history. Understandably, this ghoulish occurrence was seen as a portent of disaster, announcing everything from Viking invasion to the untimely death of kings; when blood rain fell over Paris in the year 582, it was written that people were ‘so stained and spotted that they stripped themselves of their clothing in horror.’
Sailors fear the Sirocco not for its sanguine side-effects but for the simpler, deadlier reason that it can capsize ships. But after that barrage of negative press, it’s important to note that the southerly wind has significant positives. Without its regular warming breath, the climate of much of southern Europe would be less conducive to olives and grapes, which have been grown in the region since before Roman times; and Adriatic fishermen would go without their anchovies, which can only be caught in the warmer seas brought about by Sirocco conditions. A vision of Mediterranean cooking without anchovies, olives or wine hints at how this Saharan wind shapes European identity – a force that is not ‘bad’ or ‘good’, but part of the complex tapestry of meteorological factors that make the Mediterranean and its culture what it is.
Winds often work in opposites: against this hot, wet southerly blows another cold, dry northerly. And to encounter this one is to meet an ancient god.
Bora: the God of Winter
I am in the city of Split, on the Croatian coast, when I hear the call: ‘Crna Bura!’ ‘Black Bora!’ The woman who owns the guesthouse I’m staying in is shouting in the street, gesturing towards the sky, which has turned ominously dark. Within minutes, freezing rain is pouring horizontally and I am almost knocked flat when I venture into the street, forced to shield my face from debris whizzing past like shrapnel.
Within the hour, the Black Bora – characterised by dark skies and rain – has swept the moisture from the sky and transformed into the White Bora: clean and dry rather than wet, but every bit as violent. The sun is bright and the sun is blue but the temperature has plummeted, and the north-east-facing side of every object in sight has been covered in a crystalline layer of ice. The air is so cold it hurts, and so strong it frightens me. From the quayside white-capped waves are being driven furiously offshore – the Bora blows from inland, through passes in the Dinaric Alps – and I hope that any sailors have heeded the words of the local saying:
‘When Bora sails, you don’t.’
The Adriatic – that long, skinny inlet of the Mediterranean that separates Italy from the Balkans, and the Latin from the Slavic worlds – is the natural playground of the Bora, which rages from Trieste in the north as far south as Montenegro. It occurs when dry, frigid air builds up on the continental side of the Dinaric Alps that run parallel to the coast; as the atmospheric pressure equalises, this air is sucked, with enormous violence, through a number of mountain passes (locally known as ‘mouths’) into the warmer, lower-pressure area over the sea.
The Bora can often reach hurricane strength, and every year it inflicts tremendous damage on the coast, leaving a trail of destruction that includes trees ripped up their roots, roofs torn off houses, capsized ships, trucks overturned on motorways, and bridges and other infrastructure destroyed. A powerful Bora can fell tens of thousands of trees on the Karst – the exposed limestone plateau shared between Italy and Slovenia – and in summer 2022 it combined with record-breaking temperatures to spread devastating wildfires, burning 350,000 hectares of forest. Conversely, in February 2012 – during the Eastern European Cold Wave which saw temperatures in the Balkans plummet to minus 15 degrees Celsius – the Bora had the opposite effect, creating fantastical wind-formed ice sculptures up and down the coast. In that same year, on the island of Pag, in truly apocalyptic scenes, thousands of fish were blown out of the sea to litter the frozen shoreline.
It should not be surprising that such awesome power was once worshipped as a god. Depicted on the Tower of the Winds – an ancient marble horologion at the base of the Acropolis in Athens – are the eight wind deities known as the Anemoi. Each is winged, with a billowing cloak, facing his respective compass point, and chief among them is Boreas, the god of the north: scowling, with ice in his beard, bearing a conch shell that represents the howling of his voice. Unlike Zephyrus to the west – bringer of spring, holding fruits and flowers – Boreas is the harbinger of winter and destruction. This ominous character is where the Bora gets its name from.
But Boreas was two-faced, linked with life as well as death. In the form of a raging stallion he would fertilise horses in spring – it was believed that a mare would fall pregnant if placed rump-first to the north – and, just like the Etesian wind, he was a force for protection too: responsible for wrecking an invading Persian fleet in 480 BC. Centuries later the Bora is said to have changed the course of history again. In AD 394, in the Vipava Valley in what is now Slovenia, two armies battled for the future of the Roman Empire: the Christian emperor Theodosius I and his pagan challenger Eugenius. During the Battle of the Frigid River (also known as the Battle of the Bora), legend says that a powerful northerly blew the arrows of Eugenius’ troops back into his own ranks, causing panicked retreat. The Christian army won the day, and the new religion went on to spread rapidly throughout Europe.
Whatever the truth, or untruth, of that tale, the Bora’s influence on its surroundings can be seen everywhere. A common clue to its presence is the crazy angle of the trees: in wind-prone regions, cypresses and pines are bent at 45-degree angles, permanently shaped and stunted by the prevailing gusts. Across the Slovenian Karst, farmhouses are built like fortresses, and villages on the Croatian coast are constructed like labyrinths to deflect or ‘baffle’ the wind as it hurtles through the streets. In the Italian city of Trieste, specially designed ‘Bora ropes’ are slung along roads and intersections for people to cling to during high winds, and the roofs of houses are often adorned with heavy rocks – known locally as ‘little doves’ – to stop their tiles being ripped away when the Bora blows. Trieste even has a Bora Museum full of wind-related artefacts, including a display of ‘bottled winds’ sent from all around the world.
Like the Sirocco, the Bora leaves a distinctive mark on gastronomy. In winter, when the wind is at its coldest, Karst peasants would traditionally hang their hams in an open window, allowing the frigid air to naturally cure the meat. This technique is still followed to produce the delicious prosciutto (pršut in Slovenian) for which carloads of Italian foodies arrive in the spring and summer; the cold wind is also essential for the production of wine from Teran grapes, requiring no pesticides. Further south, Croatian island sheep’s cheese has a distinctive saline taste, as the grass on which the animals graze has been salted by the wind.
Now grapes and cheese lead us to France for an encounter with one last wind – perhaps the most famous, or infamous, in the Mediterranean.
Mistral: the Wind of Madness
I meet my fourth and final wind on the bank of the River Rhone. I am walking south towards the sea, past vineyards, pylons and lavender fields, when I feel a powerful hand pushing at my back. At first it is like a helpful friend, then an insistent personal trainer; soon I am flying along the path, stumbling with the speed.
The sky, which has been overcast, clears, and a pure blue corridor opens up above the Rhone, a sunlit pathway pointing south; most striking of all is the magical clarity of the golden light. The rooftops and steeples of distant villages are suddenly brought into perfect focus, and I can see for miles. But my ears ring with the cold.
I am following the Chemin de Saint-Jacques, an ancient pilgrims’ path, and for days the wind steers me south – a truly miraculous presence. It is only after the third day when it starts to turn diabolical, a malicious, nagging presence that I cannot seem to escape, howling and whistling, relentless in its intensity. As with the Meltemi years ago, I beg my tormentor to leave me alone even as my eye is struck by the dazzling clarity it brings.
When it finally stops, I have glimpsed its two faces: beauty and madness.
Taking its name from the Latin magistralis, which means ‘masterly’, the Mistral plunges towards the Mediterranean’s heart like an arrow. Rising around the town of Valence – where the South of France begins – it blows due south down the natural corridor of the Rhone Valley, which channels and intensifies the force of the wind as it narrows, past the medieval walls of Avignon and the cafe-bars of Arles, through the wetlands of the Camargue and into the Gulf of Lion. Once at sea it wrecks havoc on shipping, in extreme conditions reaching up to 180 kilometres per hour and producing seven-metre-high waves; experienced sailors know to watch for dark lenticular clouds at sunset, which are said to provide advance warning of an approaching blast. Another intensely dry, frigid wind, the Mistral is sometimes nicknamed mange-fange, ‘mud-eater’, for its desiccating effects. An old saying goes that it is strong enough to blow the tail of a donkey.
Many people know the Mistral from the Tour de France cycling race, the route of which leads up Mont Ventoux – ‘Windy Mountain’ – the highest point in Provence. Wind speeds at its summit can reach hurricane strength, knocking competitors off their bikes and causing the race to be rerouted. In the summer, regular cyclists know to plan their tours southwards, not northwards, for fear of meeting the Mistral en route – mirroring the migration of birds to the Bouches-du-Rhone wetlands and beyond.
As with the Bora, clues in the landscape announce when you’re in Mistral territory – all you need to look for are windowless northern walls. Traditional mas farmhouses are built with blank walls facing north to shield their inhabitants from the Mistral, with windows, gardens and family life sheltered in the building’s lee. This follows a very ancient pattern: at an archaeological site near Nice, excavations have revealed 400,000-year-old firepits surrounded by the butchered bones of aurochs, rhinoceroses and elephants, constructed – just like those farmhouses – with high walls to the north. A truly ancient presence here, the Mistral has been blowing in these lands for a long time.
Another clue can be seen in church steeples with iron gantries in place of bell towers, allowing the northerly wind to whistle through unimpeded. Or in the traditional santons of local Nativity scenes, figurines representing stock characters from Provencal life, one of which depicts an old man holding down his hat to prevent the Mistral from blowing it away. But perhaps the most striking landscape feature is the rows of cypresses planted along an east-west axis – perpendicular to the wind’s path – which act as living windbreaks to shelter the vineyards and orchards behind.
The Mistral’s greatest gift to Provence – and to the history of Western art – is surely the clear golden light for which the region is famed. By sweeping moisture and pollution from the air, the wind creates the clarity and dazzling luminosity that – along with easy living, balmy temperatures and cheap wine – drew generations of artists to live and work in the South of France. Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Claude Monet and Henri Matisse all set up their easels here, but no painter was more associated with the wind than Vincent Van Gogh.
After moving to Arles in 1888, Van Gogh painted some of his greatest works in Provence, attracted by the light produced by the Mistral. The disturbing effect of the wind is ever present in his canvases, where nothing is ever still – every brushstroke twists and roils with furious energy. But at the same time as inspiring his art, the Mistral provided a soundtrack to his increasing depression and madness; his letters frequently complain about being tormented by the wind that can rage for weeks on end, never letting him rest. In two short years of Mistral exposure Van Gogh painted over 200 canvases, but the intensity proved too much: after cutting off his ear and spending time in an asylum, he tragically took his own life in 1890.
Perhaps it should come as no surprise that the Mistral has another name: it is commonly known as ‘the wind of madness’ (and in the ancient Occitan tongue it is called le vent du fada, or ‘the idiot wind’). Superstitiously thought to blow for three, six or nine days, it produces an incessant howling that is said to drive people crazy, and every year this tormenting presence is blamed for depression, insomnia, irrational behaviour, anxiety and even murders and suicides. Historically, the wind of madness was considered a mitigating factor in cases of crimes passionnel: if you could prove that the Mistral made you do it, a sympathetic Provencal judge might reduce your sentence.
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There are many more named Mediterranean winds – from the Levanter of Gibraltar to the Khamsin of the Holy Land, from the Gregale of Malta to the Leveche of Spain – each with its personality and its good and evil aspects. But the Meltemi of the Aegean, the Sirocco of North Africa, the Bora of the Adriatic and the Mistral of Provence are a world of weather in themselves, full of beauty, madness, joy, destruction and contradictions. I’ve been privileged to meet them all, and look forward to (and slightly dread) feeling their powerful breath again.
As they say in Italy: buon vento, ‘good wind!’