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8–10 March 2009
(Sunday–Tuesday)
The unrelentingly bad weather persisted through Sunday—downpours, hail, high winds, relatively cool temperatures for March in the southern Peloponnese. Everyone is ready for a change for the better. The forecasts looked promising for the coming week.
We attended liturgy at the village church on Sunday morning. Absent from the congregation were any young people, which makes our family’s presence something of a novelty. It was the second Sunday of Orthodox Lent, known as the Sunday of Orthodoxy. After the liturgy concluded, Papa Giorgi led the congregation outside (during a fortunate break in the rain) to circle the church. The parishioners brought icons from their homes and carried them in procession around the church perimeter.
We spoke with Yiayia (“grandmother”) by phone on Saturday and again on Sunday afternoon. She was still in some pain but in her usual good spirits, and the prognosis for recovery appeared good. In an unfortunate coincidence, our landlady, whose mother is the same age as Yiayia (and to whose home we brought wheelbarrows of firewood just a week ago), fell and broke her leg, was rushed to Athens, and had emergency surgery. Jonathan and Keria Irini now have a topic of commiseration.
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The week began with blue sky but still-cool temperatures. The girls set off early for school. On Monday, Lucia was given her first book in Greek—a childen’s version of the Nutcracker story. The story begins, predictably, “Once up a time, a long time ago…”
Hike to the Vigli
Manny and Jonathan set out for a hike to the vigli, armed with better directions from our friend Dimitri the butcher. The vigli can be seen from the village harbor, on a ridge about two miles distant, but there does not appear to be any roads leading to it.
As mentioned previously, a vigli is a stone watch tower that dates from the Venetian period, from the middle to late Middle Ages. Such structures served as a type of early warning system against piracy, a way to signal the next vigli, perhaps many miles away, which in turn sent the signal of approaching trouble down the coast. The residents were then prepared to defend their homes or flee into the hills.
We chose a perfect day for our hike—crisp, clear, a bit breezy—and passed by the village demotiko school where Lucia and Nia had been dropped off fifteeen minutes earlier. With a backward glance at Finikounda in order to establish some bearings, we set off on the main road, bound for the hills.
8–10 March 2009
(Sunday–Tuesday)
The unrelentingly bad weather persisted through Sunday—downpours, hail, high winds, relatively cool temperatures for March in the southern Peloponnese. Everyone is ready for a change for the better. The forecasts looked promising for the coming week.
We attended liturgy at the village church on Sunday morning. Absent from the congregation were any young people, which makes our family’s presence something of a novelty. It was the second Sunday of Orthodox Lent, known as the Sunday of Orthodoxy. After the liturgy concluded, Papa Giorgi led the congregation outside (during a fortunate break in the rain) to circle the church. The parishioners brought icons from their homes and carried them in procession around the church perimeter.
We spoke with Yiayia (“grandmother”) by phone on Saturday and again on Sunday afternoon. She was still in some pain but in her usual good spirits, and the prognosis for recovery appeared good. In an unfortunate coincidence, our landlady, whose mother is the same age as Yiayia (and to whose home we brought wheelbarrows of firewood just a week ago), fell and broke her leg, was rushed to Athens, and had emergency surgery. Jonathan and Keria Irini now have a topic of commiseration.
**********************
The week began with blue sky but still-cool temperatures. The girls set off early for school. On Monday, Lucia was given her first book in Greek—a childen’s version of the Nutcracker story. The story begins, predictably, “Once up a time, a long time ago…”
Hike to the Vigli
Manny and Jonathan set out for a hike to the vigli, armed with better directions from our friend Dimitri the butcher. The vigli can be seen from the village harbor, on a ridge about two miles distant, but there does not appear to be any roads leading to it.
As mentioned previously, a vigli is a stone watch tower that dates from the Venetian period, from the middle to late Middle Ages. Such structures served as a type of early warning system against piracy, a way to signal the next vigli, perhaps many miles away, which in turn sent the signal of approaching trouble down the coast. The residents were then prepared to defend their homes or flee into the hills.
We chose a perfect day for our hike—crisp, clear, a bit breezy—and passed by the village demotiko school where Lucia and Nia had been dropped off fifteeen minutes earlier. With a backward glance at Finikounda in order to establish some bearings, we set off on the main road, bound for the hills.
Along the main road, we passed several newborn goats that pranced about the paddock, a large field of recently pruned grape vines, and colorful pastures awash in spring wildflowers.
After turning off the main road into an olive grove, we met an elderly couple carrying bags of just-harvested wild greens. They confirmed Dimitri’s general directions: “Just follow the shoreline and it will lead you to the vigli.” They offered toothless smiles and the standard wish: Na pate sto kalo (“may your travels go well”). We walked along a crescent of white sand that soon turned to boulders. Dimitri hinted that it might be rough going, but this way seemed more arduous than either of us had anticipated. Each turn in the shoreline revealed longer jumps between boulders, the ocean crashing just beneath our feet. In a momentary miscalculation Manny landed with one foot in the ocean and let out a litany of Greek expletives. “Oh, come on, it’s just water. Let me lead for a while.” Jonathan turned another corner and stopped. The distance between the house-sized boulders had become untenable—and now there was an eight or ten foot gap between them, and we calculated a 15 percent chance of reaching the mark with a good running start. Hardly worth the risk…even for boys. Now we were twenty-five feet above the water and there was a litter of submerged rocks beneath—the consequences of missing our mark would be worse than a mere soaking. Baba said: “Something’s not right here, buddy.” And the kid answered with a standard reply: “Well duuuh!”
Perhaps we could climb the headland, we thought. A fifty-foot overhead cliff composed of loose rock dissuaded us, so we retraced our steps and followed the rock outcroppings back to the sandy beach—and by accident stumbled across the n
arrow, vegetation-choked trail that paralleled the shoreline. “Aha, this is what was meant by ‘follow the shoreline’! It is parallel to but one hundred feet above the shoreline.” 
Now we walked single file along a narrow path, negotiating patches of sharp thorns and thistle that grazed our legs and arms. Mercifully, the path soon opened into a clear, elevated path commanding a tremendous view of Schiza island and Finikounda harbor, now several miles distant, and the open ocean, decorated with whitecaps. The steep hillsides were matted with blooming wild sage, oregano, and lavender—and the aroma, along with the long views of cyrstalline ocean, was positively narcotic.
We lost sight of the vigli but the castaway beach, a three-hundred meter stretch of white sand cut off my headland cliffs, came into view. We recalled it from looking out to sea from the town harbor, and remembered that the vigli was located on a high cliff more or less directly above the beach. But the allure of the beach itself was irresistible. We carefully descended on a very narrow path to the beach—and agreed that in the near future we would carry in our tent and supplies for some “wilderness camping.”
We walked the beach, skipped some stones, and marvelled at the isolation of this special place. There 
were canine tracks on the beach but not human tracks—the elusive jackals? we wondered. We left our “mark” inscribed on the beach.
We retraced our steps to the trail, then triangulated our approach to the vigli, which came into view in another five minutes of steep incline.
Given its eight hundred years of existence, the structure was largely intact. We crawled through a narrow opening in the masonry and wiggled our way inside. We could see the notches in the stonework where floor beams once provided supports for three or four floors of storage, plus the remnants of a parapet at the top—fifty feet from the ground. We tried to imagine being beseiged by the Ottoman Turks for several weeks and developed a better appreciation of the present time.
The pictures that follow are views down toward the isolated beach--a three-hundred foot vertical drop. Our decision not to attempt a vertical climb on loose stone seemed like the right one in restrospect.
Leaning against the stone tower, we called Ann from our mobile phone—we knew she was sitting on the veranda of a cafeneion back in Finikounda—and then waved Jonathan’s windbreaker, tied to a long piece of bamboo. Alas should could not see our “victory flag.”
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The return trip to the village (mostly downhill) took a scant half hour. On the way we met a man named Dimitri, who offered to make us coffee. “If you are ever hiking out here and you’re tired, just come on in and find a chair and take a nap. Even if I’m not here. The door is always open.” He added: “It’s a good idea to carry a stick. The snakes are coming out now. The really big ones will slither away. Just don’t step on the small ones. Very dangerous.” We briefly rethought the idea of camping.
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Ann waited for her boys at the fisherman’s pier and the three of us went out for an early lunch—we had built up a good appetite during our hike. Niko served us a plate of wild mountain greens with fresh lemon and olive oil; a shredded lettuce salad with olive oil, local olives, and minced red onion; and then we shared several plates of fried kalamari and fried potatos. The entire bill was 18 euros; Jonathan apologized for not having any bills smaller than a 50 euro note. “Oh, listen, you just pay me next time. Or next year, if you return to Finikounda. Or if I come to America some day, you can fix me lunch.” He encouraged us to return for Easter. “Come after midnight on Saturday [following the Resurrection vigil] and we’ll have magaritsa [the first meat dish after forty days of fasting, it is a rich soup made from the rendering of the lamb that is cooked on Sunday] and then come on Easter Sunday. We will roast lambs and goats on the beach and dance all day.” We didn’t argue with his offer.
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We made an arrangement with Alexandros, the man with the horses in nearby Methoni, for Lucia to go horseback riding tomorrow afternoon. At 6 foot 5 inches and about 220 pounds, Alexandros is known by locals as “the Great”—a nickname that none of us is about dispute.
While there (or in nearby Pylos) we will try again to start the application process for our extended visa. We have the support of our lawyer-friend Akis in Athens, who has offered to help us negotiate the living, breathing quagmire that constitutes the Greek bureaucracy.
On a bright note, Jonathan’s siblings back in the States stumbled across another essential document in his quest to obtain a Greek passport—a copy of his father’s birth certificate. (The great irony is that it was easier to locate his grandfather’s birth certificate from a Cretan mountaintop village (papou was born in 1892) than that of his own father, who was born in Harlem, NYC, in 1917.) Along with several other documents being mailed to us in Greece, this might provide the “ticket” for our objective—avoiding the penalties and heartache of overstaying our visa, and expediting future visits, enabling property ownership, and a legal work status.
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The return trip to the village (mostly downhill) took a scant half hour. On the way we met a man named Dimitri, who offered to make us coffee. “If you are ever hiking out here and you’re tired, just come on in and find a chair and take a nap. Even if I’m not here. The door is always open.” He added: “It’s a good idea to carry a stick. The snakes are coming out now. The really big ones will slither away. Just don’t step on the small ones. Very dangerous.” We briefly rethought the idea of camping.
****************
Ann waited for her boys at the fisherman’s pier and the three of us went out for an early lunch—we had built up a good appetite during our hike. Niko served us a plate of wild mountain greens with fresh lemon and olive oil; a shredded lettuce salad with olive oil, local olives, and minced red onion; and then we shared several plates of fried kalamari and fried potatos. The entire bill was 18 euros; Jonathan apologized for not having any bills smaller than a 50 euro note. “Oh, listen, you just pay me next time. Or next year, if you return to Finikounda. Or if I come to America some day, you can fix me lunch.” He encouraged us to return for Easter. “Come after midnight on Saturday [following the Resurrection vigil] and we’ll have magaritsa [the first meat dish after forty days of fasting, it is a rich soup made from the rendering of the lamb that is cooked on Sunday] and then come on Easter Sunday. We will roast lambs and goats on the beach and dance all day.” We didn’t argue with his offer.
**********************
We made an arrangement with Alexandros, the man with the horses in nearby Methoni, for Lucia to go horseback riding tomorrow afternoon. At 6 foot 5 inches and about 220 pounds, Alexandros is known by locals as “the Great”—a nickname that none of us is about dispute.
While there (or in nearby Pylos) we will try again to start the application process for our extended visa. We have the support of our lawyer-friend Akis in Athens, who has offered to help us negotiate the living, breathing quagmire that constitutes the Greek bureaucracy.
On a bright note, Jonathan’s siblings back in the States stumbled across another essential document in his quest to obtain a Greek passport—a copy of his father’s birth certificate. (The great irony is that it was easier to locate his grandfather’s birth certificate from a Cretan mountaintop village (papou was born in 1892) than that of his own father, who was born in Harlem, NYC, in 1917.) Along with several other documents being mailed to us in Greece, this might provide the “ticket” for our objective—avoiding the penalties and heartache of overstaying our visa, and expediting future visits, enabling property ownership, and a legal work status.
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And a touch of video from today--of Manny on our castaway beach:
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