The Named Winds
A wind gets a name when enough people have had to plan the week around it.
In the Roman Agora in Athens, below the Acropolis, stands an octagonal marble tower about forty feet high. Carved around the top are eight winds, one to a face. A bronze Triton once turned on the roof and pointed at whichever one was blowing.
The ancient writers credit an astronomer, Andronikos of Kyrrhos. Varro mentions the tower around 37 BC, so it stood by then. Some historians read the architecture as older. That is where the trail stops.
Eight was thought to cover it. Provence alone counts more than thirty. If you swim, the name of the day's wind tells you which shore is flat, whether the sea will be warm on top or turned over and cold, and whether today is a day for going out at all.
THE MISTRAL
The one that runs the region is the mistral. The name is Occitan, from the Latin magistralis, masterly. Cold, dry air pours down the Rhône valley between the Alps and the Massif Central and gathers speed in the narrows. It can pass fifty-five miles an hour before it reaches the sea at the Gulf of Lion, the wide bay that runs west from Marseille to Spain.
Bell towers in the hill villages are open iron cages, so the wind passes straight through. Farmhouses turn their backs to it, few windows or none on the north side, the door facing south. Flat stones sit on the roof tiles. Rows of trees stand across the fields to break it.
Vincent van Gogh moved to Arles in February 1888 and spent that year trying to paint outdoors in it. Around June 19 he wrote to Émile Bernard with his fix: push the easel's feet into the ground, drive a twenty-inch iron peg beside each one and rope it all together. Six weeks later he wrote to his sister Willemien with no fix at all. He called the mistral a very nasty, nagging wind, and when the easel would not stand he laid the canvas flat on the ground and worked on his knees.
The mistral scrubs the sky. The hard blue of Provence is largely its work. Locally you will be told it blows in threes: three days, or six, or nine. The forecasters have been through the records and found no such contract.
The photographer Rachel Cobb spent two decades on it and published the pictures in 2018. Mostly she photographed its evidence. Stone worn down in layers. A wall hung with icicles that froze sideways. A bride's veil lifting straight up.
West of the Rhône the same cold air takes a different door, between the Pyrenees and the Massif Central and out over Roussillon, the flat vine country that runs from the mountains to the sea. There it is the tramontane, from trans montanus, across the mountains. When the two blow together, the whole gulf goes white.
THE SOUTH AND EAST
The Aegean keeps a calendar. Its summer wind is the meltemi. The ancients called it etesian, from their word for year, because it comes back every one. It sets in around May, blows out of the north on and off until September, builds through the afternoon and often drops at night. The Cyclades, the ring of islands in the middle of the Aegean, are built for it: thick whitewashed walls, small windows, harbors on the sheltered side. Glass water on one coast and a white mess on the other, the same afternoon.
The sirocco comes the other way, off North Africa. Its name is Arabic, from the word for east. It arrives hot and loaded with Saharan dust. In southern Italy the rain that comes with it can fall red with sand, and locals call it blood rain. It dries in a film on the cars and the boats.
You do not get to pick which one shows up. Ask what it is called, look at where the fishing boats are tied this morning, and swim on the other coast.
