Volodia

Volodia was the bravest, the most intelligent, and the wisest among our cats. The most human, I would say—the one closest to our own way of understanding.

Exactly 24 nights ago, he was out and about, as he was sometimes in the habit of doing. Having once been a stray—a cat without a master—and acting as the true lord of the manor, he had welcomed us to the village when we first moved in, and he stayed with us ever since.

When we travelled, we would sometimes take him along to Thessaly, to our other village near Trikala, completing a trio—or perhaps, in our own local parlance, a “Holy Trinity”: Volodia, Hermes, and young Sotiroula. He would endure the car journey—nearly 500 kilometers—without a single complaint; the sound of our voices and our explanations were all he needed.

Every morning, he would keep me company while I had my first two cups of coffee; he was also by my side as I wrote countless articles, as well as the book I based on the notes I took as a young ethnologist on Lesbos.

He had, however, held onto some of his old habits. Since I sometimes equipped him with a GPS tracker, I knew he had a wide roaming range—occasionally retreating alone for hours to the foot of our volcanic mountain. I would surprise him there, and he would meow with a mix of astonishment and delight, before following me for nearly a kilometer—much like a dog—all the way back home.

Afterward, we would play ball together—or rather, we would play with little crumpled-up paper balls, fashioned from the drafts and corrected proofs of my last two books.

And yet… an unexpected, and—at first—cruelly unfair turn of events came from elsewhere. As I opened the door to let our Volodia out, I gave him his usual pat, watching as he ventured off into the night. It was, alas, his final outing.

We searched for him the next day, called out to him, waited… all in vain. And when, the following night, I dreamt of his return, I realized that if he were to come back, it could only be in some other form…

Recalling the spot beneath the mountain—where he was likely born nearly ten years ago—I went there. Sure enough, I found his shredded collar, along with his small, soft plastic tag, equally damaged. And nothing else…

Clearly, he had been devoured by jackals—creatures that have proliferated ever since the countryside was systematically abandoned and left to die, effectively extinguishing the “real” Greece. It is a settled fact: no more inhabitants, no more sheepfolds, no more sheepdogs.

Others living in the area shared their own experiences with us. The jackals have even begun attacking our cats; they now descend at night all the way to the harbor at the foot of the village.

Since our Volodia disappeared, Hermès’s behavior has changed: he no longer comes into our bedroom, he rarely purrs, and he seldom goes outside. Volodia was his brother—just as he was a brother to us, too.

We think of him, much as we think of other cats who kept company with poets and writers—cats like Touti, who belonged to the poet Yórgos Séferis, or Maïa—the most beautiful and intelligent of them all—who accompanied our friend, the writer and historian Olivier Delorme, on the Greek island of Nísyros. She, too, has crossed over to the other side… just a few days after our Volodia.

Volodia was, without a doubt, the bravest, the most intelligent, and the wisest of all our cats. Our friends—the readers of our blog—will likely not see any more photos of him.

* Cover photo: Volodia, the bravest of our tomcats. Peloponnese, 2026