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Whistled languages are one of my favorite things. Sfyria is one of the most endangered:

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.

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.

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Remarkably, sfyria was only discovered by the outside world in 1969, when an aeroplane crashed in the mountains behind Antia. As the search crew went out to look for the missing pilot, they heard shepherds volleying a series of trilled scales back and forth across the canyons and became enchanted by their cryptic code.

Magical Realism Paintings from Alex Alemany

Painting in self-defence

We are living in a cultural structure, whose complexity is greater than our personal capacity to understand it. We have built it, but we do no longer have the resources, knowledge and the necessary ability to organize, legislate and manage these liberal-democratic societies and all their cultural problems. Neither to understand what is happening and what can be done to solve it. The human being cannot understand the world that has created. In regard to art, we meekly support continuous victory of promotion and marketing on knowledge and values. Due to market alchemy, the poverty of artistic preparation has become a powerful tool for the best “artistic expression” of time, in consumerist terms. Facebook

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