By Nikos Konstandaras

The murder of five hunters in a meadow inspires awe, clears away the mist and reveals a deep and haunted chasm under our feet.

The number of the dead is such that the crime takes on almost mythical dimensions. It is one of those that will remain engraved on our collective memory.

We may bow our heads in the face of so much pain, but we cannot claim that we do not understand what happened that Saturday evening in the field of clover near the village of Kalyvia, in the Agrinion region of western Greece – how a seemingly peaceful man became a machine of death, how a shepherd fell upon a group of men like a wolf upon a fold.

The Greek countryside has never ceased to be dangerous. Whoever has had any real contact with a village will have felt the primordial tensions that develop between neighbors over a few meters of land or watering rights, between villagers and hunters who cross their land or frighten their animals, between the “strangers” from town and the people who spend all their lives in their fields. Violence is always just a heartbeat away.

Good fences make for good neighbors. This has always been a wise principle. But it used to be a lot more attainable when the villages were living organisms.

Today there are few peasants and so the fabric that bound everything together has frayed. Social crisis-solving mechanisms have weakened. There have always been crimes motivated by differences over property or honor crimes, but in the past people were used to the problems caused by everyday frictions.

Usually, in moments of crisis, someone would step in to help ease the tension. Exceptions were parts of the country where the vendetta prevailed, such as Crete and the Mani.

These modes of behavior were like fossils from a time in which people had no faith in institutions beyond the family, the result of centuries of slavery and arbitrary rule.

The murders at Kalyvia just over two weeks ago burst through the veneer of our daily routine like rust and showed how close we still are to primitive society, which is based on the simple but effective principle that we trust only our own people. This means that we help our friends and harm our enemies.

There are no superior problem-solving institutions. The unbridled passions of the countryside are similar to those of the Homeric age. Except that today our easily angered warriors are armed with modern weapons.

Dionysis Foukas, the 37-year-old shepherd who has confessed to the five murders, appears to have lived in this ancient world, where a man has faith only in his family and his weapon.

Without being anti-social (he would watch soccer at the kafeneio) he kept pretty much to himself.

“He lived with his parents and attended church,” a fellow villager noted.

But this solitary man was also an enthusiastic hunter. He knew how to handle a weapon, how to shoot straight. He knew the pleasure of putting the victim in his sights and finishing it off, destroying it, imposing himself on it. Hunting has always been a game of war.

When all these players and all these passions are on the stage, as they were that Saturday afternoon, one spark is enough for catastrophe.

One ill-judged move, perhaps an insult uttered at the landowner, is enough for blood to rush to the head and blind everyone to the danger.

When the first drop of blood is shed, more violence follows, until the end. When someone runs amok, when blood is sprayed across the ground, there is no logic nor inhibition, neither fear nor mercy.

There is only the weapon and the enemy. The dance of death begins.