Spetses, part 4: Wisdom, arise!

Jonathan freely admits that he suffers from an exuberant pride of place and an unabashed appreciation of the richness of his Hellenic heritage. Add to that an enduring embrace of family, near and far. What else can a person ask for?

A lack of sleep renders literary precision slightly suspect. After a whopping 4 hours of sleep, he completed a rendezvous with his cousin Taki, who drove him up the mountain on the back of his mihanaki to the nunnery called Agios Panton. It was a favorite place of Jonathan's grandmother, one hundred years ago, and one that he has visited dozens of times over the past 35 years. The nuns' chanting is exceptionally beautiful and the monastery itself commands an unparalleled view of the Saronic Gulf and the desolate islands to the east.

 Today's liturgy began at 8 a.m. and lasted about 2 hours. The congregants were then treated to cups of thick, sweet Turkish coffee, loukoumia (Turkish delight), and paximadia.

In the late morning, he rented a mountain bike and bore the full effects of the noonday sun in a ride to Kouzono, a spit of land that was once owned by his grandmother but was sadly lost in one fell swoop, as she lay dying, through the machinations of attorneys compounded by her own disinterest in a land of distant memory.

Swimming amid the aquamarine in his birthday suit, drawing in the last full day on Spetses, the thick air fragrant with wild oregano, lemon, and freshly cut straw--these are the memories of youth now reinforced in mid-life.

Tomorrow he will take the slow ferry across the channel to the sleepy village of Kosta, where the "buggy" (a Fiat Punto) is parked in the relentless summer sun. The bottle of Maker's Mark, a gift for a friend in the southern Peloponnese, may well have exploded in the last four days.

At sunset, a liturgy was held at the tiny chapel of Agios Mamas, perhaps the only church with that name in Greece. The saint was called upon one hundred years ago by a captain in a foundering vessel, in the same gulf, during a tempest. The crew's cargo consisted of barrels of wine. The captain pledged that were the ship to survive the storm, the wine would be sold and a chapel would be built to honor the saint in whose name these fervent prayers were made.

The event is memorialized by the children on the island, who make hundreds of little vessels and launch them off the pier with candles inside (some include fireworks alongside the candles, to good effect). The image of hundreds of candles floating off into the channel was extraordinarily surreal. Hundreds of onlookers cheered as the priest blessed the little boats, the horses and carriage drivers, and the participants with holy water.

Next week Spetses will celebrate the Armada. A life-size (literally) Turkish galley (pictured below) is being built of plywood and will be launched off the same jetty, only to be pulverized with cannons on the open sea--commemorating a very real event, the destruction of several dozen Turkish frigates and galleys in the 1820s. Here in Greece, history is alive. There is no shortage of both secular and religious events that life meaning, zest...and yet another reason to eat, drink, and be merry.