John Campbell, Obituary

Richard Clogg's obituary of John Campbell was published in The Guardian on 21 September, 2009:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/sep/21/john-campbell-obituary

The Daily Telegraph also carried an obituary:
www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/books-obituaries/6220080/John-Campbell.html

J. K. Campbell was the author of "Honour, Family and Patronage, A Study of Institutions and Moral Values in a Greek Mountain Community" (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1964).

He is still fondly remembered by Sarakatsan families in this area of the Zagori, although he was living amongst them as long ago as 1954 and 1955, and even though the anthropological information he published about their customs and strict moral values and codes may not always have been welcome.

In "The Sarakatsani: A People in Transition" (The Anglo-Hellenic Review, No. 6, Autumn 1992), he writes:

"Inevitably, since 1954 when we first joined them, the impact of social and economic change on the Sarakatsan shepherd communities has been profound. Few now live in traditional huts. In mountain villages, stone houses abandoned by villagers migrating to the towns have been bought by shepherds...Flocks have been reduced in size and many Sarakatsani no longer make seasonal journeys alternately to the mountains and the plains...In the 1950s one could still occasionally find an old Saraktsan shepherd playing a flute while he watched his sheep. But the significance of other aspects of his heritage was certainly neither Arcadian nor romantic."

Socio-economic change has moved on apace since 1992. Some former shepherds have settled down in the villages, in Igoumenitsa or Ioannina; others have sold their stone houses to newcomers who've restored them with the the assistance of EU grants, to make them into second homes, small hotels or guest-houses. Others have been left as abandoned ruins. Every year one hears fewer sheep-bells. I miss the sound.

John Campbell's book reminds us what life was like in the Zagori little more than fifty years ago.

See also, The Sarakatsani and the Klephtic Tradition in Minorities in Greece: Aspects of a Plural Society, edited by Richard Clogg