Eliot Stein & The Guardians | The Last
Carlos Sánchez, who monitors an active volcano from a treehouse in Ecuador, and Eliot Stein. Photograph by Julyssa Lopez.
Q: noisé; A: Eliot Stein
Q: Where are you living now? How do you like it?
A: I was living in Berlin for about four years and then moved to Brooklyn in 2019. I found Berlin’s live-and-let-live ethos to be addictive. Even as it’s catapulted to the center of European power in recent years, it’s shown how a city can evolve while keeping its soul: it invests heavily in green spaces, funds the arts, welcomes asylum seekers, and has worked hard to cap rents, recognizing that its most valuable asset is its people and legendary climate of creativity.
There are many things I love about New York, though it seems to increasingly be a city for the wealthy. Still, there’s nothing static about Brooklyn. It’s a borough that’s always becoming, never being, and I’ve found that if you let it in, it’ll love you back.
Q: Where did you grow up? How did it shape you?
A: I grew up just outside of Washington, DC in Silver Spring, MD. It’s often described as a progressive, multicultural bubble that looks a lot like what the rest of America will one day become. I was also reared Quaker, a religion that encourages meditation, espouses non-violence, and believes that everyone has a light within and a story to share. I suppose in some way, these two things led me toward a life of listening, empathy, and interest in others.
Q: Do you have an inborn passion of traveling?
A: I think more than an innate passion for traveling, I’m just generally curious about the world and the people who make it so wonderfully diverse. I love talking to strangers, wandering aimlessly in a place I’ve never been, and sitting with my thoughts to turn these sights into insights. I believe that curiosity is a practice and travel is a wonderful exercise in that practice.
Eliot Stein and local residents at the Aranmula Vallasadhya feast in Kerala India. Photograph by Dax Gueizelar.
Q: How did you start your career in travel journalism?
A: The day after I graduated college, I was hired as a tour guide to lead people up and down Italy. I ended up staying, writing for a Roman magazine, authoring and updating some guidebooks to Sardinia, and eventually becoming a full-time travel journalist.
Since 2019, I’ve been the deputy editor at BBC Travel. It’s a hard job, and one that required me to relocate my family across the world, but I sincerely believe that our level of awe-inspiring, immersive, and emotionally engaging travel journalism is unmatched.
Q: What was the first story about after you joined BBC Travel?
A: I started writing for BBC Travel back in 2016, and my first story for the site was about the world’s smallest kingdom. The idea for Custom Made came from the very first travel article I ever wrote as a 22-year-old. It was about meeting one of the last living inheritors of a tightly guarded style of lace-making that had once been among the most coveted items in the Western world. This chance encounter awakened a sympathy and reverence for these final custodians that still guides me today.
Q: What feedback did you receive from your column?
A: The first Custom Made article I wrote was about the world’s rarest pasta and the last women alive who know how to make it. It was BBC Travel’s most-read article of that year, which surprised me, but also terrified me. Ultimately, I write these stories to shine a light on the many unsung and unheralded people doing extraordinary things around the world. My goal is really to remain invisible, so I’m hesitant for my articles – and especially me – to become part of their story. But if something I’ve written either lifts a custodian in a meaningful way or helps preserve a practice that would otherwise be lost, that brings me more joy than any personal acknowledgment ever could.
Q: What do the guardians you meet have in common?
A: I’ve found that every guardian’s identity is inseparable from the thing they’re preserving. While it may be easy for others to look at these once-upon-a-time rites and wonder why its caretakers choose to carry on, for the guardians themselves, it isn’t really a choice – this is what they know, what they love, and who they are.
There’s an inherent purity, honesty, and pride in these people’s work that I find refreshing. And in an ever-connected world where machines are replacing hands, villages and dialects are fading, and localism is giving way to internationalism, these are true individuals, working every day and dedicating their lives to a thing that would otherwise be lost.
Eliot Stein and a 104-year-old Peruvian shaman. Photograph by Edwin Cusi.
Q: Tell us about your recent trips.
A: In 2022, I embarked on round-the-world journey and true labor of love, traveling to 10 countries on five continents to profile the last people alive preserving a rare cultural wonder on the brink of extinction for my forthcoming book. The experience was humbling, enriching, and – dare I say – life-changing. It took me from the paprika-colored deserts of West Africa to the frigid reaches of Scandinavia to the bamboo forests of Asia. I can only hope readers will enjoy reading these 10 stories as much as I loved reporting them.
Q: When will your book come out? Any memorable moments?
A: The book is scheduled to be released in autumn 2024 and will be published by St. Martin’s Press. In terms of memorable moments, wow… where to start?
I walked 33 kilometers under a sea of stars for one story and was shadowed by a secret government agent for another. I spent four days in a windowless cell in one of the last countries on Earth maintaining a “zero-Covid” policy to report one chapter and came down with malaria while reporting another. And I nearly froze to death on the roof of the world in Peru to profile one guardian and sweat through all my shirts in southern India to profile another.
Q: What’s your takeaway from this journey?
A: I suppose my main takeaways from this journey just underlines what I’ve previously suspected: that people are inherently good, that we all want the same things, and that the world is always so much richer than our ideas of it.
Perhaps I’ll be lucky enough to write another book someday, but for now, I’m happily grounded here, walking with my wife, singing to my son, and watching my vegetables slowly grow.
The Last Sea Silk Seamstress
Chiara Vigo, the world’s last sea silk seamstress.
For several years, I lived in Sardinia, a footprint-shaped island marooned in the Mediterranean – a place DH Lawrence famously characterized as, “outside the circuit of civilization … a land lost between Europe and Africa and belonging to nowhere.” It’s a place that has stood in the very center of Western civilization for millennia, yet just far enough away to remember things the rest of the world has forgotten, and that’s what drew me there.
Residents there still speak Sardo, the closest living form of Latin. In the island’s mountainous interior, men don menacing jet-black masks and dark sheepskin tunics each January, slowly dragging their hunched frames forward through the streets in a ritual harking back to a prehistoric exorcism. And on Sant’Antioco, an island off the island facing Tunisia, there is one woman left on Earth who still knows how to harvest sea silk and make it glisten like gold.
Chiara Vigo is an elusive, almost mystical character. Each spring, under the cover of darkness, she plunges headfirst into the sea, using the moonlight to guide her as she descends 15 meters below to reach a series of secluded coves that women in her family have kept secret for the past 24 generations. She then uses a tiny scalpel to carefully trim the razor-thin fibres growing from the tips of a highly endangered clam known as the pinna nobilis. It takes about 100 dives to harvest 30 grams of usable strands, which form when the mollusk’s secreted saliva comes in contact with salt water and solidifies into keratin. Only then is Vigo ready to begin cleaning, spinning, and weaving the delicate threads. Known as byssus, or sea silk, this ancient material has cloaked pharaohs and kings, is referenced in the Bible, and is one of the rarest and most coveted materials in the world.
I had heard whispers about Vigo when I was living in Sardinia, and eight years later, it took me several months of correspondence with her for her to agree to meet with me. After two flights, a train ride, and a sweltering hike across a causeway where pink flamingoes fed in a lagoon, I met the sea silk seamstress, and proceeded to shadow her for the following week. I followed her as she ventured to a secluded cove to pray to the ocean each dawn and dusk. I listened to her recite the recipes for dozens of natural dye formulas that had been passed down by the women in her family for a millennium. And I held my breath as she drew me close, disclosing things about her practice that she had never before told anyone else outside her family, because, as she said, there was something about me that reminded her of her younger self.
Before leaving, Vigo pulled out a clump of 300-year-old sea silk from a vial, spun a long thread, and tied it around my wrist, making me promise to return when I have a child so she could spin a second bracelet from its threads for him.
The Last Speakers of an Unspoken Language
Language is such a fascinating look into how the natural world affects human expression. Thousands of years ago, in remote pockets of the world separated by broad valleys, humans discovered that whistling messages can travel up to 10 times farther than shouting. As a result, a remarkable form of long-distance communication emerged in which entire conversations, no matter how complex, could be whistled across the mountains. Today, some 70 whistled languages remain around the world, yet none is believed to be older and more critically endangered than sfyria, a 2,500-year-old language that resembles the sounds of birdsong.
There are only six speakers of this unspoken language left, and they all live in the 37-person village of Antia, which sits above a twisting maze of ravines overlooking the Aegean Sea on the Greek island of Evia. After slaloming through a mythical landscape of megalithic “dragon house” stone tombs and Cyclopic boulders, a farmer named Yiannis Apostolou was waiting for me outside Antia’s lone store. He greeted me in Greek and then gazed out onto the rolling chasm below, tucked his tongue under his bottom teeth and fired a fluted melody into the abyss, telling the other villagers, “We have company!”
It didn’t take long to meet the last whistlers of Greece, each of whom learned the tightly guarded tradition from their parents and grandparents. One shared how her parents had courted by coyly whistling love notes across the hills to each other. A 70-year-old woman held back tears as she explained that she was once the greatest whistler in the valley, but now could barely trill a tune, as she’d lost several of her teeth. A 50-year-old goat herder named Yiannis Tsipas told me that he hoped to teach his son to whistle syfria before his lung cancer eventually takes his voice.
There’s an unwavering dignity in these voices and these dying traditions and documenting them is my humble attempt to somehow amplify them. I’m not sure if Tsipas ever succeeded in teaching his son the language, but I was heartened to hear that my story inspired the Greek government to inscribe sfyria to the Greek Intangible Cultural Heritage list.
One of the last whistlers of Antia’s unspoken language.
The Last Resident of Monowi
Elsie Eiler, the mayor, bartender, and last resident of Monowi, Nebraska.
Five miles from the South Dakota border in northern Nebraska, a long dirt road cuts through rolling prairie grasslands and golden wheat fields toward downtown Monowi, a place you can see in its entirety by climbing any of its hay bales.
An abandoned church, whose empty pews are now filled with tractor tires, stands opposite the decaying skeleton of a grain elevator. Weeds and brome grass twist around the rotting remnants of homes that are collapsing in on themselves. And inside a white, squat building with paint peeling off its frame, I met 84-year-old Elsie Eiler, who was flipping pork fritters and cracking open beer bottles under a sign reading:
“Welcome To The World Famous Monowi Tavern. Coldest Beer In Town!”
When Eiler’s husband passed away in 2004, he didn’t just leave her to run the tavern, but the whole town. Today, Monowi is the only incorporated place in the US with just one resident, and Eiler is the mayor, clerk, treasurer, librarian, bartender and last person left in America’s tiniest town.
Eiler’s life as the only resident of a ghost town is truly singular. Each year, she hangs up a notice in Monowi’s only business (her bar) advertising mayoral elections, and then votes for herself. She’s required to produce a municipal road plan every year to secure state funding, and then raises about $500 worth of taxes from herself annually to keep the town’s three lampposts flickering and its water flowing.
I felt compelled to meet Eiler and temporarily double Monowi’s population to see why she lingers on in a place like this. But after two days in her wood-framed bar and humble home, I discovered that she may live alone, but she’s far from lonely. Each morning, she shuffles a few steps from her trailer to open the tavern, and regulars soon blow in from across the Heartland to check up on her – some from 20 miles away, others 200. “It’s like one big family,” she said.
Eiler told me about growing up on a farm a short walk from her bar, meeting her late husband in Monowi’s one-room schoolhouse as a young girl, and then working for an airline with the dream of becoming a stewardess. “I didn’t much care for the city,” she told me. “Monowi had always been home.” And so, Eiler returned.
Over the years, she’s watched her children move away, buried friends, and outlived her partner – but she’s never thought of going anywhere else. Sometimes when the din of the city gets deafening, I think of her, a lone woman keeping the lights on in the only place she’s ever loved.
Downtown Monowi, Nebraska.
Eiler’s license plate fittingly displays her singular status.
The Last Lighthouse Keeper of Capri
Every day, Carlo D’Oriano climbs 136 steps to the top of the Punta Carena lighthouse where he watches the sea.
Every evening in a modest apartment in Capri, Italy’s remote southwestern tip, a 64-year-old sailor named Carlo D’Oriano slowly climbs 136 steps up a spiral staircase to the lonely lookout tower of the Punta Carena lighthouse and peers through a pair of binoculars across the ocean. When the sun sinks into the Tyrrhenian Sea, D’Oriano logs his handwritten findings in a diary, just as the island’s lighthouse keeper has done each day here for the last 151 years.
Built in 1867, Punta Carena is one of the last lighthouses in the world to employ a full-time operator. But after being manned by a continuous line of 88 keepers before him, D’Oriano was its last guardian, and I visited him during his final months on duty. Months earlier, D’Oriano had received word from Italy’s Ministry of Defense that his lighthouse, like most every other on Earth, was set to become fully automated. When it did, D’Oriano wouldn’t just lose his job, – he’d lose his home.
“Think about how many keepers have lived inside these walls, always keeping the light on to guide others,” D’Oriano told me, gazing out from the lantern room towards the twilight, a portrait from a different time. “This work is beautiful, but it’s dying.”
After a full year of correspondence, I finally received special permission from the Italian military to shadow D’Oriano, and I spent four days watching the lone sentinel watch others from his perch. When he wasn’t peering across the sea, he listened to classical music and played guitar on the cots in the empty rooms where other keepers once lived. By the end of my stay, he trusted me enough to show me the poems he’d written about the ocean, its fishermen, and the constellations.
As I said goodbye to D’Oriano on my last night, I asked him when he thought he’d start to pack up his things. “My heart is here,” he said, watching the bright beams streak across the night sky. “When I can no longer keep the light, I think part of me will turn off too.”
D’Oriano often reads novels in the lighthouse keeper’s room.
D’Oriano writes his findings in his journal daily.
The Last Sento Master
For more than 1,200 years, public bathhouses, known as sentō, have held an important cultural role in Japanese society. Traditionally, these temple-shaped structures were the only place where many Japanese families could bathe, and people gathered there every day to soak under tranquil murals of sun-soaked islands, bright blue skies, and snow-capped mountains designed to transport them into Zen-like oblivion.
But in the last 50 years, the number of sentō has plummeted from more than 18,000 to fewer than 3,000. And while there used to be dozens of sentō mural painters, today only two specialists in Japan continue this ancient artform. One is 77 and nearing retirement. The other is 39-year-old Mizuki Tanaka, who isn’t just the youngest; she’s also Japan’s only female sentō master, and she’s made it her mission to restore these beloved bathhouses to their former glory.
For the last six years, Tanaka had been driving up and down Japan in her old white truck, scraping off the peeling paint of faded bathhouse murals of yesteryear and refreshing the tiles in an effort to preserve this age-old art for future generations. As I watched Tanaka transform a bare wall into a soothing dreamscape over an 11-hour period, I realized this vanishing tradition was unlike any other I’d ever encountered.
With sea silk or sfyria, their wonder lies in its sheer rarity and uniqueness. Yet, sentō murals are designed to evoke the familiar – a feeling of comfort that allows bathers to let their minds drift off so they can lose themselves in their own thoughts, Tanaka explained softly. As a Westerner, I had been trained to view art by searching for meanings and messages within the work. This was the opposite, and it reminded me of the beautiful truth that we travel to shed what we know and see things with new eyes.
Mizuki Tanaka puts the finishing touches on a sento mural in Japan.
Public bathhouses have been an integral part of Japanese culture for more than 1,200 years.
Words and photography by Eliot Stein. Interview by Murphy Guo.
*This story was published in noisé 03 The Last Unicorn, 2023.