Few shepherds left watching Cyprus flocks

Shepherds and Christmas go together like crumpets and tea – but they’re mostly NPCs, as the kids say. They do their own thing, watching their flocks by night as the main action unfolds in the manger, only really taking centre-stage when you’re looking for parts to cast in the Nativity play after already having cast the holy parents and the Three Wise Men.

Being a real-life, modern-day shepherd is also quite a low-key, under-the-radar occupation – but it is indeed an occupation, or can be. There are three shepherds (so I’m told) in the village of Mathiatis – defined as farmers who don’t just rear animals, but also take them out in the fields to forage – though only one does it professionally.

That particular farmer has hundreds of sheep, but is said to be quite reclusive and media-shy, as you might expect of someone who spends all day in the fields with only sheep for company. The second farmer is at the other extreme – an elderly man who’s almost retired, and has barely half a dozen animals left.

66-year-old George Kasapis is somewhere in the middle. He worked as a full-time shepherd (actually goatherd) in his youth, making enough to support a wife and three children – but the job was too much for a young man, because “you’re tied to it”. Seven days a week, 365 days a year, whether you’re dealing with a sick baby or a family crisis, you still have to go twice a day to milk and feed the animals, not to mention leading them out for several hours.

George sold his herd and joined the forestry department, still working in Nature – but drawing a salary – for 25 years. Now, however, since his retirement three years ago, he’s gone back to rearing goats as a pastime, operating from an old enclosure that used to belong to his wife’s uncle.

He’s a trim, silver-haired man, moving with the ease of someone who walks in the fields for four hours every day. He clambers over a low fence, agile as a goat himself, despite operating on two hours’ sleep and only one arm; his right arm is almost immobile, following a recent operation for tendonitis. He’s also – unlike that other, famously reclusive shepherd – very chatty, happy to share his adventures in the goat trade. 

A goat actually costs €200-250, but George bought 10 kids at around €40 each – and now has over four times that number, having let nature take its course for three years. Mid-December is actually the time when goats give birth (after five months of pregnancy), though we meet a week earlier, before the patter of tiny hooves – and before the rains, surrounded by a near-barren landscape.

Back when he was doing this full-time, there were farms and enclosures dotted all around this area – some now in ruins, some demolished. “Since we joined the EU, it’s all gone,” he explains, the problem being apparently over-regulation.

The state demands licences, and certain specifications in order to grant them. You need a milking area, sighs George, a big room with tiled walls, “you put in machines, so the animals come in and you’re standing behind them – not kneeling down to milk them by hand”. You need suction cups, and industrial-grade fridges to store the milk. It was all too much for local shepherds – most of whom were already old, even 20 years ago.

George himself used to own 150 goats, back in the day – but his farm was on a nearby hill with nothing around, so he trained his goats to stay in the area and graze by themselves. His current situation doesn’t allow that – so every day, after making fresh halloumi in the morning, he’ll come to the pen around midday, let the animals out, and watch his flock, like those old Biblical shepherds, till about 4pm.

He doesn’t really mind, being retired – and the work isn’t difficult anyway. “When you first let them out, they start being silly, let’s say” – frisky and excited, like a dog on a walk – but they soon settle down, roaming the scrubland and munching on whatever they find. There’s not much to eat, at the moment, and besides they get fed twice a day (free-range farming doesn’t really exist on the island, we don’t have the climate for it; “Everyone feeds them”), but the walk is still good for them.

What are goats like, anyway?

“Very smart,” he replies instantly – though also proud. “If you get mad at them, know that they’ll turn on you,” and start to avoid you. George himself likes to sit and talk to them, hanging out for a while after their daily ramble, only going home to his wife of 46 years when it starts to get dark.

Do they have feelings, though?

They do, he replies. “They love you.” He’ll see it when an animal gives birth, initially skittish and nervous but slowly allowing itself to be helped. “Then, when the baby’s born, you take it and put it [on the teat] to suck milk – and the animal turns around, puts out its tongue and licks your arms, or licks your neck.

“In other words, they have intelligence. They understand that you’re helping them, and they love you.”

It’s a charming image, the goat giving thanks to its helpful human companion. George goes to open the gate of the enclosure, his pockets filled with little bits of carob which he offers to the goats as they swarm around.

Another, smaller pen – not too small, maybe four by three metres – houses the culprits behind these 40 pregnant ladies: three truculent-looking rams, who unfortunately have to stay in this cage for a few months, otherwise they’d interfere with the nursing and rearing. They spend their days eyeing each other and butting heads (a.k.a. being rams), stuck in prison – albeit well-fed – till the next bout of mating.

Goats appear to be wary, jittery creatures, keeping a distance and fixing me with hooded, inscrutable eyes. Go across the village and down a dirt road, however, and you’ll find the ultra-modern, EU-funded sheep farm owned by Marios Michael.

Goats and sheep apparently get on well together – yet they’re quite different animals, just as Marios’ operation is worlds away from George’s small enclosure.

George, who accompanies me to the farm, tells a chilling tale of having once taken a load of sheep to a slaughterhouse as a young man. The sheep were led to a wide ditch, with an incline so the blood would run down – and the man in charge simply lined them up in the ditch, then went down the line slitting their throats. None of the sheep panicked or protested when the one in front got killed, all just stood obediently like proverbial lambs to the slaughter.

Times have changed, of course – but the story still seems fitting, given how passive the animals are on this streamlined, spacious, deeply impressive farm.

There are 500 sheep, but 40-year-old Marios – a hearty man with a booming voice and firm handshake – and a burly Sri Lankan are the only personnel, and all that’s needed. Machines convey the feed and water, milk the sheep, even provide plastic teats for suckling the baby lambs. It’s a technocrat’s dream.      

The only difference, of course, is that Marios isn’t a shepherd per se.

“I don’t take them out,” he admits. “The quality of the milk is better when they do go out, but it takes up a lot of time – because, once they get used to going out, they want it every day.”

The main reason, though, is because “it’s not always green”. The grass might shrivel in the heat, or dry altogether, which affects production. Better – more efficient, certainly – to keep the animals indoors, in mechanised comfort.

Not that the old way is ‘right’ and the EU-funded, state-approved method is ‘wrong’, of course. Marios may be unsentimental about his animals (and probably doesn’t talk to them), but they’re well taken care of – and a modern farm also ensures higher standards of food safety and consumer protection. Still, it’s a shame that only one kind of animal husbandry seems to be permitted in the current system. We need more shepherds like George – if only for the shepherds’ own sake.

It’s not like he makes a lot of money. At the moment he’s not even milking – he stops for a couple of months, when the goats are in late pregnancy – but even when he does, he’s not allowed to sell the milk and can only sell his halloumi privately, not to supermarkets. Besides, he shrugs, even if he made 10 kilos of halloumi a day, “in a village of 800 people, who am I going to sell to?”.

Financially, the work makes no sense. The price of feed has shot up. He cultivates a small patch of land, to produce hay – but it’s not enough, especially during our worst drought in decades. He makes a little profit selling ‘rifi’ (baby lamb) at Easter – but it’s fair to say his labour is mostly unpaid.

So why does he do it?

“The first reason,” he replies, “is because I love animals. The second reason is because” – he gives an eloquent shrug – “I live in a village. Where am I going to go?”

The coffee shop, yes – and he’ll go for a coffee, and a chat with fellow villagers, but he’s not the type to sit there all day playing cards or backgammon, let alone watch TV or idle over a newspaper.

George is a man who’s spent his whole life in Nature – and walking in the fields for hours on end, especially accompanied by the four-legged friends whose babies he’s helped deliver, serves as a kind of therapy. It connects him with higher things, not just the natural world but an animal’s place in that world, the sublime simplicity of its quest for food, the unthinking love of which it’s capable. It keeps him alive.

And of course it’s just something to do. “I remember my late father was 82 years old, and he’d get up and go outside – he could barely walk – and cut little branches from the trees,” which he’d subsequently clean and sell as switches.

George gently tried to dissuade him. Dad, he used to say, you’re 82. What if you fall? Isn’t your pension enough for you? “And he’d say to me: ‘Son, what should I do? Sit at home waiting for Death to come for me?’.”

We don’t need shepherds anymore; then again, maybe we do. They’re a link – probably among our purest links – to the ancestral life, the life of the land, man and beast trudging through the fields with a common purpose. It’s almost midday. I get back on the highway, leaving the shepherd of Mathiatis to do what shepherds have been doing since before the birth of Christ.