Ionian Sea to Aegean Sea

Into the Aquarmarine

Father and daughter have up kept a fairly frenetic pace during their first sixteen days in Greece. The routine includes staying up late—rarely returning home from the village much before 2 a.m.—and trying to start their day by 7 or 8 a.m., before the summer heat has made its mark. Daily watering of the recent plantings is essential and this is best left to the early morning or early evening.

Welcome to Our (Other) Village

Now, as Jonathan and Lucia approach the halfway point of their time together in Greece, a minor hiatus from southern Messinia is in order. Lucia traveled with her nouna (godmother) and cousin to ancient Olympia for a single night, and then on to Nauplion (Greece’s first capital), and finally to the island of Spetses, the birthplace (1899) of Jonathan’s grandmother Efstathia. Jonathan met the three of them there on Monday, following a long ride that took him from the extreme southwest tip of the Peloponnese to the peninsula's extreme northeast arm, an area known as the Argolid of which the dusty city of Argos is the region’s namesake.

 

The blog would be remiss in neglecting to mention a unique achievement: in the morning Jonathan swam in the Ionian Sea and in the late afternoon he swam in the Aegean Sea—two of the world’s great seas in just one day.

More than a century after yiayia's departure from this small, pine-clad island that is located in the Saronic Gulf, family ties remain strong. Such ties were cemented  by Jonathan in the late 1970s and early 1980s when he was a student of the classics living in Athens and then later an editorial apprentice for a small, English-language publisher. Weekend sojourns to Spetses were a much-valued hiatus from the heat and bustle of his Athens aparatment. He remembers a quieter, more traditional island. Today’s Spetses is part Riviera, part Paris.

Even the Kitchen Sink

Before leaving the village of Akritohori, Jonathan finished the business of fencing off the new citrus trees and other plantings (the neighbor’s goats have been eyeing this oasis of green); paid the masons for their fine construction of a new stone wall; returned garden tools to a friend; and took a morning swim at the big beach.

The Greek airforce, based locally in Kalamata, buzzed the house with their training jets in the morning, instilling an enormous sense of security among the new homeowner. These vintage fighter jets spiraled along the coastline, performing their acrobatics in the early morning.

Jonathan stopped at the Praktiker store (a do-it-yourself German chain with a presence in Kalamata) where he picked up a new kitchen sink and all of the associated plumbing supplies. On the return trip, passing back through Kalamata, he and Lucia will stop there for a few buckets of house paint; and then at the plant market for a half dozen olive trees, which will get stuffed into their pint-sized Fiat for ride home.

The Argolid

The journey from Messinia north through the Peloponnese has been utterly transformed by the construction and extension of the new highway, an engineering feat that includes several long tunnels through high mountains that were once circumvented by the old, narrow, and circuitous old road. No longer does a driver endure the endless turns, the dizzying heights, and the cracked pavement. On the other hand, toll booths greet travelers with alarming frequency—the journey from Kalamata costs about 18 euros in tolls, but the payoff is that the new highway cuts nearly two hours off the trip to Corinth/Athens.

From Kalamata, to Tripoli, and then on to Nauplion. The Argive Plain is a sight to behold: wide, deep, and fertile, it is home to literally hundreds of thousands of orange and lemon trees, eucalyptus trees, and well-watered agricultural land. Leaving the highway and entering the local roads, one is again cast into the realm of Fate and Fortune. Stop signs, those “dangerous” emblems of modernity, are mere theoretical signposts—one stops at one’s own risk, lest one gets rear-ended.

The Argolid is a special place with a storied history. Readers of the Iliad and the Odyssey, those classic tales of the Greek heroic age (c. 1600 bce) that are the fulcrum of all Western literature, cannot but notice the many important place names from the pre-classical period: Argos, Tiryns, Mycenae to name but a few.

Historians continue to debate the how and why of the demise of the Mycenaean palaces which figure so prominently in the history of the Trojan War and endured for half a millennium. How did the palace culture end so suddenly and dramatically? Did massive earthquakes strike the first blow, followed by famine, and then invasion by those mysterious hordes from the north, the Dorians, who ushered in Greece’s Dark Age?

Nearly three thousand years after the Doric invasion, a Doric dialect is still spoken in remote villages, as is Alvanaiko, the language of the medieval Alabanians, “modern” invaders of the twelfth century ce. Many of the local people are curiously blond-haired and blue-eyed, some say descendants of the ancient Dorians themselves and later invaders from the north. Place names are decidedly non-Greek in derivation: Traxeia, Adami, Didyma.

Traveling east from Nauplion, the terrain becomes barren, rocky and arid—there is a stark beauty to this region, and the roads twist and turn gracefully. Great attention is required in driving.

Jonathan’s Spetses family originated in the region of Argos, which is home to one of the great Mycenean citadels. The Mycenaeans (Agammenon’s forces from Mycenae, Nestor’s army from Pylos, the Spartans, Cretans, and many other of the great cities of the ancient world) joined forces and sailed east in their thousand ships and fought for ten long years to avenge the “rape of Helen”---the Spartan queen of King Menelaus, who himself gathered the Achaeans in their quest to topple ancient Troy, the ruins of which are located along the Mediterranean coast of modern Turkey. The “red-haired” Menelaus with his “beautiful feet” (Homer never spared the minor details of this great epic) ultimately vanquished the Trojans—and then seveal generations later this great European civilization ceased to exist.

Jonathan cannot help but wonder: Did some ancient relative travel to Troy with the armies of the Acheans? Such romantic ponderings are unavoidable.

A Quick Tour of Spetses

Even by Greek standards, Spetses is a tiny island, a postage stamp amid the wider Mediterranean. About eight miles longer and five miles wide, the island nevertheless features prominently in Greek history, both ancient and modern. In the fifth century, a Spartan fleet was decimated by the Athenian navy somewhere between the island’s western shores and the Peloponnese; and more recently, in the 1820s, in the rallying cry against the long occupation of the Ottoman empire, Spetses launched a naval armada, defeating the Turkish fleet on the high seas.

Today Spetses is a wealthy weekend retreat for well-heeled Athenians, several of whom are known to arrive at seaside villas in private helicopters—not in diminutive Italian compact cars.

Jonathan and Lucia rented a scooter on their first morning, as did Dyan and Zoe, and the four followed the coastal road, stopping at Anagiri Beach—located on the quiet, pine-clad side of the island, home to the best beaches—where they had the good fortune of bumping into Jonathan’s second cousin Olga and her lovely family. All enjoyed a long and festive lunch, but not before exploring the cave of Bekaris, which is accessible by sea or by crawling through an impossibly small crevice the leads to a large (60 foot by 80 foot) chamber where an eerie translucent blue light makes ones entire body glow iridescent blue.

As he promised, Jonathan took Lucia swimming on eight different remote beaches, all accessible by gravel path, the cacaphony of cicadas providing the musical backdrop.


In the evening, they ate his cousin's restaurant under the hotel, a few tables away from the NBA star Kobe Bryant