In 2003, a team of Greek mountaineers were determined to finally – for the first time in history – organise the first successful Hellenic expedition that would summit Mt Everest. Three previous attempts by Greek climbers had failed.
The same year, supported by Greek Canadian businessman and the sponsor of the expedition, Pavlos Aggelatos, the team embarked on a trip to Tibet, to summit Cho Oyu, 8201m, as part of preparations to climb Everest, the highest summit of the world.
On the last day of the expedition, after reaching the summit of Cho Oyu, the leader of the expedition Christos Barouchas took his last breath.
Shocked at their friend’s death, the team was close to falling apart. It took a lot of strength and willpower for the team to reunite in 2004.
After 55 days of climbing the sacred Nepalese mountain, they became the first ever Hellenic expedition to climb Everest.
Unbeknownst to me, I scheduled the interview with Spiros Soulis – the only Greek Australian member of the team – for 16 May – the day that the Greek team summited Everest, 10 years to the very day.
“It’s 10 years today; a decade,” he begins.
“Every year we think about this date, we have it in our calendar, we remind each other. But 10 years, my God, I can’t believe 10 years have passed,” he says emotionally.
It took Greece three unsuccessful attempts before the Hellas Everest 2004 made it to the top.
Spiros tells Neos Kosmos a number of factors played their role in this, leaving Greece – alongside Albania – as the only two European countries who never climbed Everest until then.
“Team dynamics was an issue in some of the expeditions, as well as resources. It was never a factor of not having the climbers or the ability. Greeks should have climbed Everest not 10 but 20 years ago. The capacity and the skill set of the climbers was always there, but it takes more than that to climb a mountain like Everest as a team.
“You need to be well-prepared, organised and have adequate resources. You also need some luck with the weather and conditions on the mountain, and importantly, the team has to be cohesive and work as a team. I suppose everything came together in 2004.”
Australian born and raised, while living in Greece for 12 years, Spiros picked up a bit of climbing and mountaineering, “nothing too serious”.
For all Greek climbers, Everest was more often than not a topic of discussions. Money was usually the issue that would stop teams from going, but it was also a large amount of time they needed to go away from responsibilities and their day jobs.
Back in 1992, while serving the army in Kalamata, Spiros met Pavlos Aggelatos. A strong friendship with the Greek Canadian businessman kept going over the years.
It took only one curious question – why didn’t the Greeks climb Everest – for Aggelatos to offer his support.
“I told him there were two factors – one is resources as in money, and the other was it needed to be well planned. Pavlos said ‘OK, I’ll put the money if you organise it’.”
And the expedition took off.
In autumn 2003, the team embarked on Cho Oyu as the first pre-expedition. It was preparation, to check the chemistry amongst team members, to test the climbing and filming equipment, telecommunications, to see how they would perform over 8,000m.
“Everest is 8,848m, so if you are going to be serious about it you have to climb another 8,000m peak, and there are only 14 in the world. And they are all in Himalaya and Karakoram, so we chose Cho Oyu, at 8,201m. We were going to attempt it without oxygen. We had three guys summit.
“That’s where we lost Chris (Barouchas). The big mountains have those dangers, it’s the nature of them, and decisions you make there are critical.”
There is a black hole of trauma associated with death at the mountain. Losing your friend, and seeing his lifeless body carried down the mountain. The team dispensed, the members shut themselves off.
“I didn’t want anything to do with it. How we worked at Cho Oyu was not like a team. When climbing a big mountain you need team cohesiveness and a team approach. That’s critical,” Spiros says.
It was when the team was enhanced by the well-known Greek-American mountaineer Pete Athans who summited Everest seven times, that its members were strong enough to give it one more chance.
“It was good for the team. We came back together as a team – for Chris and for the fact we had to do this, for Greece.
“The weather worked for us, the equipment worked for us, the gods were with us, we got voted the best team on the mountain out of all the teams. You pick yourself up from failure.”
There is a big difference that separates climbing from other sports and hobbies. It is not professional sport, the money is not involved in it. You do it because you love it, climbing consumes you like no other sport.
“It is one of very few sports – if you can call it a sport – that allows you to be so close to the elements, nature, be one with the environment, and at the same time to have that dangerous element involved.
“If you get tired in soccer, the coach will put you on the bench. If you get tired at 8,000m you have to look deeper into yourself to get off the mountain and survive. Climbing is a spiritual thing, it’s part of your life if you do it.”
During the Everest expedition, Spiros was responsible for making sure that everyone came back alive, especially after Cho Oyu; to ensure that a worthy team of climbers summited and returned safely.
That was one of the reasons he decided not to summit. It was a tough decision, but he chose his role – to support his teammates. While there will always be that awkwardness when someone asks him ‘Did you get to the top?’, he says his summit was in the journey itself, in being an integral part of the first successful Greek expedition to Everest.
“I wish I had an opportunity – but my opportunity I took differently, I took more from putting it together and organising it, and the satisfaction from it is far greater than the actual summit for me. I took away a year of my life to organise this expedition and every single detail of it – from how many litres of oil to take to solar panels, to choosing the sherpas, to the logistics – everything went through my hands.
“Buffering the team from that and just letting them do what they did best – just climb the mountain. It was nice for them to know that I was there, at Camp Two, in case of emergency.”
Now back in Australia and employed at RMIT, Spiros says no project is a big one when you set a benchmark as high as Everest.
“When people say ‘Oh, that’s a big project,’ here at Uni, I say – no it isn’t. Everest was a big project and nothing will come close to that. Maybe raising my daughter and my son only,” he says with a laugh.
Nature can’t be tamed
For 55 days on the mountain, the Greek team had it all. Satellite phones, computers and telecommunications setup, equipped kitchen, sherpas to help them carry the baggage.
For Spiros Soulis and the rest of the team, the commercial side of mountaineering takes away the purity of climbing. But in the instance of the 2004 Hellas Everest expedition, the aim was only one – to finally place Greece amongst all other countries who climbed it.
“It s high tech now, it’s not Edmund Hillary days when you threw on a pair of leather boots and woolly socks and off you went. They were the real mountaineers. That’s why Everest has become so commercialised. That’s why anyone can climb it now.
“If the sherpas have everything ready for you, a cup of tea and your tent set up, it takes all that pureness away, the love of adventure.
“On Everest we had everything because we wanted to be successful. At that point it was only us and Albania – the only two countries in Europe that haven’t summited,” Spiros explains.
With hundreds of people climbing Everest every year, the highest peak on Earth is overpopulated. In April this year, 16 sherpas lost their lives on the dreadful icefall, one of the most dangerous stages on the route to Everest’s summit. Spiros says the mountain needs a rest.
“There are hundreds of people summiting every year; over the years 4000 people have summited until now. And that whole philosophy of going to conquer – you don’t conquer a mountain. Mountains can’t be conquered. If conditions on a mountain change, it can be life threatening, and people die. That’s the reality. I hate this attitude of being on the top and conquering it. That’s not what mountaineering is about. It is the journey that is the summit, not only the summit itself,” Spiros tells passionately.
And that journey is best reflected in documentary From Olympus to Everest, that was filmed during the Hellenic Everest expedition. One of the team members, Pavlos Tsiantos, spent 55 days climbing the mountain, and put in extraordinary efforts to carry his filming gear and to capture the moments.
“If the rest of the team climbed the mountain three times, Pavlos climbed it six. He was phenomenal,” says Spiros.
After the completion of the expedition, in June 2004, around 70 hours of footage were stored on the shelves waiting to be edited into a movie. The movie was released in 2012.
Everest perspective
There are two things in the life of Spiros Soulis that have significantly changed him and his view on world. The first one was his battle with cancer at a young age, and the second one – climbing Everest.
“One was life threatening. Everest – the intensity, losing Chris, and then being part of something so successful and so big – it shapes your character and you view things very differently. Nothing else is difficult or a reason to worry about, compared to it.
“Mountaineering – that’s what it does. There, you meet people who think, who put things in perspective. There is a spiritual element, they understand they are on this planet for a very short time. When you look up at Everest, you see your own mortality.”
For centuries, before Western people first climbed Everest, local Sherpa people never even thought of climbing it. The western drive to be on top, to be first, still remains a foreign notion to them.
“Nature and environment is far greater than us. And that’s how Nepalese people view their mountain, as sacred; there are gods on each side of the mountain. Before Western climbers went to these mountains they never thought of climbing them. Why would you be so stupid, and go and climb a mountain? Their philosophy now has changed, as they make their living out of it. But they still can’t understand that western drive of ‘I have to be first, on the top, number one’.”
Everest isn’t the only summit. We climb our own summits on a daily basis, Spiros says. For him, the next one will definitely be raising of his children. The common denominator is, Spiros says, “you got to dream big”.
“Because in the end, you won’t remember the time you spent working in the office or mowing your lawn. Climb that goddamn mountain,” he quotes Jack Kerouac on the 10th anniversary of climbing Everest.
“And that’s it – if you got one – go and climb it.”
As part of GOCMV Seminars, Spiros Soulis will give a lecture at the Ithacan Philanthropic Society, on Thursday 5 June, at 7.00 pm. For more information about 2004 Hellenic Everest expedition, and to purchase a movie, visit www.fromolympustoeverest.com