Where the Horses Are Still Running

I hadn’t expected to go to Greece. Least of all to be invited to meet a man whose life seemed to belong to another era—a life that moved so easily between diplomacy, danger, and odyssey.

The invitation came almost by accident, during an exchange with an old American friend—the same man whose family theatre had staged a play of mine in New York many years ago. We were catching up, trading personal travel fragments, mostly his, when he mentioned his latest visit to Greece and an extraordinary friend of his there.

This man, he said, had spent much of his time in the world’s most troubled regions. A senior figure in a major humanitarian organization, he had worked across conflict zones for decades and had even been asked to return from retirement to help oversee operations in Afghanistan after the Western withdrawal.

There was, my friend suggested, a project he and I might work on together.

I replied, of course, that it would be fascinating to meet this man, though I probably said this more out of respect than expectation. But my friend did not see it that way. On the contrary, he suggested I should come out to Greece and meet him.

Then came the detail that lingered. Long before Afghanistan became synonymous with war, this man had first travelled there in the days of the king, before the Soviet invasion of 1979. At one point, my friend said, he had even brought two Afghan stallions back from there, eventually to Greece.

It was the sort of story that might easily have remained just that—a tale, half-absorbed, then set aside. Instead, within a matter of days, it had become something else entirely.

And so, before I had quite understood how or why, I was preparing to go.

The next thing I knew, I was at Athens airport, then on a railway line, its whitewashed walls loosened by graffiti—brash color against the pale.

Above, two-dimensional bird silhouettes clung to the glass, warding off birds, while trucks drove parallel, marked with the unfamiliar characters of the Greek alphabet.

Nothing changed at Metamorphosis station. Beyond, the landscape began to open up—mist gathering along the mountains to one side, the sea holding its line to the other.

Then through Theodori—its name arriving only after the place itself had already passed. And then Korinthos, followed by a long drive into open countryside.

As Constantine P. Cavafy once wrote, “Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey,” though it was not the destination holding me then, but the sense—faint, but insistent—that something was already unfolding simply in the act of going.

Now that I am here, I spend most of my time listening to my host as he tells his inimitable stories, seated near a terrace, with the hills folding away beyond it.

We are a few miles inland. Dirt roads. Lonely tracks. Judas trees aching to bloom, buds just beginning to show against the grey branches. Jackals at night, the silence broken only by a few barks from the dog. I haven’t seen the wild boars yet, but some of their damage is evident, I am told.

Neither creature had been seen here until ten or so years ago, prompting some locals to believe their presence was the work of environmentalists, though no one seems entirely sure.

Anyway, I am now here to discuss a project that may—or may not—occupy me for at least six months. Regardless of the outcome, it is clarifying to be in the company of someone who has lived not just widely, but deeply—across borders, across conflicts, across ways of seeing the world that rarely emerge except under pressure.

My host, who speaks quietly and without affectation, has worked in many of the world’s most difficult places, and he speaks of them not with dread, but with an unpretentious affection at times for the people. After a highly adventurous and free-spirited early life, he settled, almost unexpectedly, into the rhythm of helping others, often as part of larger teams. There is not a vainglorious bone in his body.

We also speak at length beside a wide and open fire, the wood cracking softly, the smoke occasionally turning back into the room when the wind shifts. At the weekend, we are to celebrate his birthday.

For the occasion, he invites ten guests—English speakers, mostly, at one end of the long table; Greek speakers at the other. Lamb has been slow-roasted for over seven hours, the meat falling apart at the touch of a fork.

It is still winter here, but without the severity of the north. After London, it feels like a fast track into spring. I drink chilled water from the well, kept in the fridge in recycled Captain Morgan dark rum bottles, the glass no longer carrying even a trace of molasses.

At one point, thinking of my host’s adventurous younger days, I am reminded once again of that famous Hannah Arendt quote: “The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.” There is something similar to that in my host—not conservatism, but a long view, shaped by seeing too much to mistake noise for change.

At the same time, the war in the Middle East flickers on in the background, a constant presence, though increasingly distant in my attention.

Not out of indifference, but because of someone else’s proximity—because there, here, right in front of me, is a life that has moved through conflicts not as abstraction, but as lived reality. This person’s stories do not compete with the news. Far from it. They displace it.

As Thucydides observed long ago, “War is a violent teacher.” A log shifts in the fire beside us as my host speaks. What stays with those taught by it is rarely the violence. It is something quieter. A calibration. A stripping away. Even if the result is sometimes more akin to a large bare tree.

Later that night, after the others have gone, the fire falls in on itself. Outside, the land is almost entirely still, the cold beginning to settle into the ground.

Somewhere beyond the reach of the house, the horses move—descendants, perhaps, of another country my host had known well. Not visible, but present all the same.

It occurs to me that stories like his do not end so much as recede.

Perhaps the same is true of what we gather along the way—what we learn, often without meaning to. We take in more than we realize: ways of speaking, understanding, being—things that begin elsewhere and only slowly come to rest within us. There is no clear point at which they become ours. Only that they do.

I think again of the journey that brought me here, how lightly it began, how easily it might not have happened. And how, even now, it does not feel finished. Not quite. As if somewhere, just beyond the edge of what I can yet see or say, the horses have not yet stopped running.

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