When I feel tired, I take a nap. When I have a headache, I take aspirin,” Jerry tells me, matter-of-factly. We’re in his car, returning from a night on the town in Rio, just outside of Patras in the Peloponnese region of Greece. “But these two,” he says, motioning toward his friends, Dmitri in the passenger sear, his brother Stavros beside me in the rear, “run to their mummy.”

The brothers have good reason to run to their mother when they’re afflicted by lethargy and headache, and they tell me so in spite of Jerry’s snickering. It doesn’t take much to get the matiasma, or the evil eye.