Tell me, Muse, of the cats of Lefkada, the crafty ferals who banished snakes to the crags…

At first it seems as if there are scores of feral cats wandering the lanes of Nikiana, lurking around the industrial-sized rubbish bins near restaurants and blocks of flats, shading themselves under parked cars, sitting on empty plots of land with thousand-yard stares in their eyes, drifting in and out of a half-built villa. They are seemingly everywhere.

After a few days of regular contact with them you begin to recognise individuals, and the apparently ubiquitous feline community is smaller than at first it seems; maybe a couple of dozen or so, which is a strong presence in a small village. There are certainly enough cats here that if this were England, say, and not the island of Lefkada in Greece, something would Have To Be Done.

Here they are a natural component of village life, and to a cat lover at least, they are wonderful citizens alongside the incredibly friendly local people.

Some of these cats are battered and scarred from the wild lives they lead, while others look pristine, as if they’d managed to dodge every existential fight that had come their way. A charity does a bit of neutering from time to time when there is enough money, and locals and visitors put out food here and there. There is even a big wooden box-like structure on one pavement, with the words “Kat-Cat Hotel” painted on it.

I never saw any rats here. It’d be a foolish rodent to try.

I was thinking about this when a shopkeeper told me about snakes. “The snakes come down from the mountains to swim in the sea,” she said. Er, OK; but she’s the local, so fine. “Yes, they come here to swim, but if we didn’t have the cats, the village would be full of snakes.” Her eyes fill with impassioned light as she paints a picture of these cats fighting off hordes of snakes, and even mentions scorpions a few times.

There are indeed snakes and scorpions in Greece, but it’s hard to imagine such epic animal battles in this peaceful village, and even harder to fact-check, but my partner suggests that maybe the shopkeeper’s story is not meant to be taken literally, that perhaps this is some kind of allegory. I like this.

I’m not sure whether any of these creatures were involved in keeping mountain snakes out of the Ionian waters in which I swam, but here are some of the cats I crossed paths with in the past fortnight (mainly in Nikiana, but a few at a handful of other places on Lefkada)…