Guidebook writing is competitive. Ideally, this should cause every edition of a guidebook to be vastly improved over the previous edition, resulting in increasingly better guidebooks, which in turn benefit the climbers who use them and the communities that these guidebooks serve. This is especially important in a place like Greece, where the vast majority of climbers are international and a guidebook helps them navigate not only the cliffs, but also the country, its people, its way of life.
When we announced the publication of our new Leonidio & Kyparissi guidebook last week, individuals connected to two previous editions of a Leonidio guidebook could have reacted in a number of constructive ways. Instead, some of them chose hatred, intimidation, threats, name-calling, slander, and shameless character assassination. For these individuals, it was never about who makes a better guidebook. Immediately after we announced its publication but before our guidebook even went to print, they began targeted personal attacks, with a special focus on destroying the professional and personal standing of our main author, Aris Theodoropoulos.
Here’s some background and a few facts to set the record straight.
Who is Aris Theodoropoulos?
Aris is a Greek mountain guide, mountaineering and climbing instructor, route equipper, and guidebook author. He has a 40-year track record here in Greece, and is widely credited for making climbing in Greece better, introducing thousands of new climbers to the sport, and helping to put Greece on the international climbing map. He has done all of this in the public eye, and has documented his activities and shared his knowledge generously, whether online or privately to climbers who reach out. Aris has devoted his entire adult life to Greek climbing. Best known, perhaps, for making Kalymnos—overwhelmingly viewed as a model climbing destination—accessible to the global climbing community through his guidebooks and active involvement since the late ‘90s, Aris has worked to make Greece, as a whole, accessible to climbers.
Leonidio was first introduced as a climbing destination in his 2014 guidebook “Greece Sport Climbing: The Best Of.” The second edition of “Greece,” in 2017, once again included the majority of Leonidio crags. The first route ever known to have been climbed in Leonidio, “Pillar of Fire,” was opened and climbed by Aris in 1987 when he was 23 years old. In September 1987, in an effort to develop more climbing in the area at a time when climbing in Greece was virtually unknown, Aris organized a climbing meet in Leonidio. That early effort didn’t lead to much, and climbing in Leonidio went into hibernation for about twenty years.
In 2012, a few years after the first sport routes were bolted at Élona by Greek climbers, Aris became actively involved with Leonidio again. In open communication with the local authorities, he was tasked with helping to develop the area’s climbing in a sound manner. In this context, he introduced the Remy brothers to Leonidio in 2013, which helped lay the foundation for further climbing development.
Who are the Remy brothers?
They are climbers and equippers from Switzerland with an even longer track record than Aris’s (50 years of experience in opening routes all over the world). In Greece, the Remys have a twenty-year history of bolting excellent routes and entire sectors, not just on Kalymnos and Leonidio, but also in Kyparissi, Nafplio, Zobolo, Varasova, and Ikaria. Importantly, their routes have a significant, if under-appreciated, quality: they are popular in the literal sense of the word. They are made for the people, as they cater to the vast majority of climbers—the critical mass of climbers whose hardest sends are in the lower and moderate grades. Climbing is an economic force with the potential to improve the quality of life in small communities thanks to this quiet majority of climbers: young, old, families, new climbers, and everyone in between, whose support of local communities is impactful by sheer power of their numbers alone. Being the first to bolt routes in the easy and mid-grades (as well as some excellent harder routes and fully bolted multi-pitches) with dense bolting, the Remy brothers can be credited for doing the groundwork to establish Leonidio as a destination for all climbers—not just hardcore climbers. And they have bolted hundreds of routes in Leonidio.
Who bolted what in Leonidio?
Here’s a breakdown of who has bolted what in Leonidio:
1. Remy brothers: Approximately 550 routes.
2. AOS Project: Approximately 320 routes. (The AOS project was an EU-funded collaboration between the municipality, the Management Body of Mt Parnon, and the AOS Mountaineering Club from Athens.)
3. Other visiting climbers: More than 500 routes. Some of these climbers are internationally renowned, such as Angela Eiter and Bernie Ruech (sector Nifada) or James Pearson and Caroline Ciavaldini (sector La Maison des Chèvres), others are locally known equippers such as Yiannis Torelli (routes at Saint Nicholas Sintza, Élona).
4. Cooperative members: Approximately 420 routes.
The first three groupings of equippers taken together account for nearly 1500 routes, and this clearly indicates the important role that the municipality of South Kynouria plays in local climbing development, since it has facilitated the creation of most of these routes. The fourth group, the cooperative members, have worked independently.
The list above does not include 300 routes bolted in Kyparissi by Aris & team, nor 100 routes bolted in 2020 in the wider area of Leonidio by Aris & team (Geraki Wave, Arcadia, Agios Andreas).
Some individuals in Leonidio have made a lot of noise, accompanied by claims that they are exclusively responsible for climbing in the area, by virtue of having “invested countless hours in equipping lines, cleaning and improving route and pathes [sic] as well as communicating with vistors [sic] and locals about climbing development in Leonidio.” Their confidence is overblown, inaccurate, and misleading. Yet they have no qualms when taking credit for everything that’s good in Leonidio, while trying to harm and destroy everyone they disagree with, including us, by publicly calling them liars, thieves, cheaters, “blinded by climbing tourism money promises” and accusing them of receiving “all public money for bolting.”
Public money; climbing tourism money promises. Let’s unpack some of it.
What is the local cooperative?
The cooperative is small group of mostly climbers. Only a few of its members are local; the rest are mainly climbers from Germany and Austria who moved to Leonidio around 2014/2015. These individuals created a Limited Liability Civil Cooperative in 2015, which received € 32,064.98 from government funds, or public money, according to public records from the Ministry of Rural Development and Food. Then, they started three different climbing-related businesses in Leonidio: a climbers’ cafe/bar selling food and beverages; a shop selling climbing gear; and two editions of a guidebook that is sold locally and internationally.
The first edition of their guidebook was published in 2016, i.e. two years after Leonidio had already been featured in our “Greece” guidebook. The second edition of their guidebook was published in 2018, and it also included Kyparissi, which they had zero involvement in. (Since day one, the climbing in Kyparissi has been developed, promoted, and documented almost entirely by us here at Climb Greece, except for a very small number of more recent hard routes at Babála, an excellent sector established through the Climb Kyparissi project. Furthermore, Kyparissi climbing was funded entirely by Kyparissi locals and not, as it is stated misleadingly in their guidebook, through EU funding.)
The routes they have bolted (mostly routes in the higher grades) are funded by money generated from their three businesses, which are all related to climbing tourism.
What is the role of the Leonidio municipality?
The local authorities, which are also targeted by some individual climbers as “liars” and “thiefs” [sic] who conduct “dirty business,” have tried to be proactive about climbing development since 2012 by communicating with equippers and asking them to comply with certain standards. When it became obvious early on that the number of routes in Leonidio was increasing with little, if any, coordination, the municipality intervened to ensure that certain maintenance was performed: further cleaning of routes and paths, corrective re-bolting (for example, in many routes where improper placement of the first three bolts increased the risk of a ground fall), anchor corrections (some anchors were on loose blocks), and replacement with proper and/or certified materials. This intervention took the shape of an official collaboration between the Municipality of South Kynouria and Aris Theodoropoulos in 2016. As a Greek mountain guide with decades of experience, Aris was fully qualified to form and coordinate a working group of climbers to check, clean, and correct the safety issues, as well as to communicate and share the climbing developments with the global community via three festivals and other activities. The partnership between the municipality and Aris is ongoing, and this guidebook is the most recent expression of it.
What other maintenance or crag-related work has been done?
Since 2016, maintenance has been done in the following crags: Élona, La Maison des Chèvres, Adrspach Wall, Liméri, H.A.D.A., Saint Nicholas Sintza, Twin Caves, Balcony, Panagia/Mad Wall, Mars, Órama, Skiadianiko, Pomegranate, Nifada, Montanejos Climbing Garden, Kamáres, Miti, Theós, Hot Rock, Jupiter. Approach paths have either been opened anew or improved and marked for sectors Theós (Love Ledge), Aresos and Pounta, El Perpati, Yellow Eyes, Theatro and Loupas. Via ferrata steps have been placed at H.A.D.A. and Órama, a fixed rope at Balcony, and so on. Maintenance work at the crags has been performed by George Kopalides, Yiannis Torelli, Simon Montmory, Michael Schreiber, and Kostas Grafanakis, in collaboration with Aris. Work on the approach paths has been done by Yiannis Metaxotos, Tiia Porri, and Fred Leconte. (It should be noted that all work by Yiannis Metaxotos was done on a volunteer basis, i.e. unpaid.)
Other interventions: rescue and first aid training
In 2018/2019 two first aid seminars for training the Leonidio Fire Department and the staff of the Leonidio Health Center took place in Leonidio. These seminars were funded by the municipality and organized in collaboration with Aris. The seminars were open to any community member interested in attending, including members of the cooperative, who were invited specifically (and some did attend). Earlier this year (2020), Aris together with Claude Idoux organized equipment for the Leonidio Fire Department and trained the firemen in the rescue and transport of injured climbers from the crag.
Any other recent developments?
Earlier this year (2020), about 100 new routes were added to the wider Leonidio area (Geraki Wave, Arcadia, and Agios Andreas) by Aris, Claude Idoux, Dimitris Titopoulos, Kostas Grafanakis and team. These new routes came to fill the growing need for good climbing on high-quality rock in the shade. They’re a bit further to drive to, but worth it.
Which brings us to the guidebook
The people of the municipality have expressed the desire to have an official, complete guidebook for years. Not being climbers themselves, though, they reached out a few times to various individuals involved in the area’s climbing development, including some of the climbers based in Leonidio and ourselves. These outreach efforts are documented.
As mentioned above, we had already featured Leonidio and Kyparissi in both editions of our “Greece” guidebook. As the climbing grew, so did our relationship with Leonidio. We made friends who either live in Leonidio or spend extended amounts of time climbing there. A solid working team started to form, and the possibility of—and calls for—another Leonidio guidebook became clearer. The municipality doubled down on its commitment to create an official guidebook of high quality that would include all crags of Leonidio (even though, personally, we would have preferred to exclude some new, unclean, or poorly bolted routes) and showcase the climbing of Leonidio domestically and abroad. This guidebook would also contribute to climbing-related development and maintenance: the municipality has pledged to use all profits from the sales of the guidebook to support climbing-related development and maintenance.
We may not officially belong to any group or collective, but cooperation is at the core of everything we do. This guidebook, in particular, relied on cooperation more than any of our previous books. Our team of highly skilled, passionate climbing friends helped us immensely with fieldwork, climbing beta, and all the first-hand information needed to put together a guidebook of quality. We have named each and every one of them in the book, because we believe in giving credit where credit is due.
What now?
Leonidio will have two guidebooks for climbers to choose from, therefore two guidebooks generating proceeds for local climbing. If our guidebook inspires new climbers to visit the area and support local businesses, everybody in the area will benefit, including the individuals who claim to eschew money and climbing tourism. If they truly cared about the wellbeing of Leonidio, they would stop vilifying climbing tourism come to terms with the fact that competition creates positive change: it motivates authors to make better guidebooks and it forces stakeholders to be accountable.
For its part, the municipality has already planned to start a log on its website detailing where the guidebook profits are used. And yes, the municipality welcomes climbing tourism with open arms: much like in Kalymnos, climbing tourism is what helped Leonidio thrive, not just survive, as Greece endured one of the worst financial crises of its modern history. In a country like Greece–the third most mountainous country in Europe where tourism accounts for 18% of the GDP–hoping that climbing tourism will just go away is a fantasy. Working hard to attract this particular type of tourism, i.e. one of the least invasive, most respectful forms of tourism out there, is good practice. Lastly, the municipality and all of us involved in the creation of this guidebook agree that climbing should be approached in much the same way that we Greeks approach all good things in life: with openness, hospitality, and a desire to share the good things–not hoard them for ourselves and our friends.
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We stand firmly behind our work and trust the quality of our guidebook to speak for itself. Sadly, others have chosen to speak with long rants that reek of poison, delusion, threats, and slander both online and in person. The attacks on Aris’s professional and personal integrity and the accusations against him and his collaborators are grounds for legal action and will no longer be tolerated.
Thanks for reading.
