Into the Aquamarine

Still getting along in a small house

Catch it if you can

Got the beach to ourselves--house on the distant mountain

The landscapes from our house are unreal in nearly every direction

Spyros the shopkeeper in Koroni, speaking metaphorically, offered the following analogy about Greeks through the ages.

He said that three things are symbols of this country: the fish, the olive tree, and the pomegranate.

The fish, he said, leaves us and swims away—like so many Greeks have done through the ages. The olive tree puts down roots, also indicative of the Greek ethnos. And, finally, the pomegranate. With its 365 seeds within, it represents the good fortune of every day of the year, and how Greeks over the millennia have populated the earth.

 

"Don't throw your garbage here, you knucklehead" (more or less)

Our view down to Finikounda

Καλο Μήνα—Good Month

On the first of the month—every month—Greeks will offer one another the greeting kalo mena, which means “may you have a good month.” It is an affirmation of the possible. And there are an infinite number of such sayings in the Greek language, some of which date back to antiquity and are part of the continuum of Greek culture and language through the ages.

It is no secret that as we age, time seems to accelerate. At age nineteen (our daughter Nia) there is a certain infinity attached to time. At age sixty-two, not so much infinity: not only do the days, months, and years pass more quickly, but one becomes increasing aware of the “expiration date”—like that vat of farmer’s sheep-milk yogurt.

The conclusion? Eat it now before it spoils.

Niko spoke with us about time last night, commenting on Nia’s observation that we don’t seem to sleep to much when we are here in Greece.

“Remember, Evyenia, at some point we will all be able to sleep forever.” The observation is so quintessentially, so fatalistically Greek. At age sixty-two, the truth of it seems a bit more profound that at nineteen.

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Each night the swallows gather in large flocks, skirting the horizon, preparing for their long annual flight across the Mediterranean to Africa. The swallow is a symbol of good fortune in rural Greek culture. Having swallows builds nests in the eaves of your house is a compliment from nature itself, because it means you will be blessed with good fortune.

And so, we check our eaves each day in the hope that one year these lovely creatures of the dawn and the dusk will settle on our little home on the mountain.

Every sunset is a 10

 

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A local farmer/shepherd name Dimitri startled me with a statement the other day.

“Yianni, when you die you will go straight to hell.”

Chairmwoman of the board

“But wait, Dimitri, you know me—I’m a decent bloke. How can you say such a thing?”

“Because today, Yianni, you are living in paradise.”

The traditional Greek ethic, the pathos, becomes exuberant in the oddest ways.

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The Spetses Mini Marathon

In a few days, Nia and I will set off for the long drive to the Argolid, the northeast corner of the Peloponnese. We will park the little red buggy in a village called Kosta, and take a 15-minute ferry ride to the island of Spetses, the birthplace (in 1899) of my grandmother, Evstathia nee Argyitis Carayiannis.

Yiayia (“grandmother”) left her island home in 1912 at the behest of her father, whose first wife had died shortly after the birth of the twelfth child. He remarried and by all accounts Yiayia and his new bride did not, let us say, hit off brilliantly. And so, she traveled alone with another young girl to New York—from Patras, Greece, to Spain, and then across the Atlantic to Ellis Island, where she was met by a severe, recently widowed aunt named Angeliki. (Apparently, her stern demeanor hardly matched here name—“angelic.”)

A few years later she met my maternal Papou (“grandfather”) and the two were married. She returned to Greece, as a newlywed, in 1922, briefly visited her family in Spetses, and then joined her husband on a mule train into the mountains above Nafpaktos, to meet his family. She loved to tell me the story of that journey—carrying her newborn child on the back of a mule, traveling with a few dozen others, sleeping in the fields at night, armed sentries guarding against bandits, while they ascended the mountains to his village.

Initially, she was treated like an outsider. But, as she described it, one day she meet other villages at a river bank, where everyone was beating their clothes against rocks (early “washing machines”) and singing folksongs. She sang the songs of her own island, and was suddently accepted as “one of them.”

I first traveled to Spetses in 1979, at the start of my junior year abroad, when I studied archaeology and began to learn modern Greek—beyond the food names I had learned as a child.

On the weekends, I would take the ferry to Spetses and was treated like royalty by the family there. Especially by her youngest brother, my uncle Panayioti, with whom I rode each day on a donkey to their summer house on the ocean, far from the village center. The memories of those times are golden.

Since 1979, I have been Spetses more than thirty times.

In 2018, I competed in my first Spetses Mini Marathon, a 25-kilometer circumnavigation of the island, which has grown to be a significant international event. (I skip the related event: a 5,000-meter open ocean swim to the mainland village of Kosta and back again. I’m a runner, hardly a swimmer.)

In 2019, just before Covid upended the world as we know it, I won my age group in this international event.

I aspire to “defend” my title next Sunday and to share the beauties of this special place with Nia.

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Our friend's traditional caique

From our house, Lykovounos (the "wolf mountain")

Becoming legal—again

Today we met with a civil engineer in nearby Pylos in order to “legalize” our house.

A wreck surrounded by weeds--a real bargain!

Tearing it down and building it up

Small is beautiful--a tiny house on the Mediterranean

When I purchased this crumbling wreck in 2013 and began to renovate it into its present state, I paid good euros to “legalize” what had been an illegal construction, and also paid good eurors in order to do the actual renovation—a process that has continued each year since. As money allowed, which mean s-l-o-w-l-y...

Food glorious food

In 2015, the summer I spent here with Lucia, our middle child, I arranged to have a porch roof constructed—without obtaining the necessary permits.

In Greece, doing such things makes a property illegal. I learned that this was the case when I applied to get electricity. (Although I have now decided to set up a solar array, in order to avoid monthly bills.) So now, I am faced the prospect of re-legalizing the house, as it were. This is important in order to be able to transfer the house—someday—to my children, so they can avoid the bureaucratic nightmare and heartache of accomplishing this process on their own—without Greek language skills or the knowledge of how to navigate the process.

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Greek Football Match: Finikounda 4, Kallithea 3

Yesterday we drove to the soccer (aka “football”) pitch in nearby Methoni to watch the Finikounda team—true underdogs—play against powerhouse Kallithea.

The local heroes defied everything and won 4-3.

Our local team, veritable undogs

Amid the cursing, brawls, and heat exhaustion--we won!

One of our English friends, who has lived here for a dozen years, commented: “For the first few years, I thought all the players were named malaka [which means something a bit worse than “a—hole”],” which made me laugh. One of the coaches called a referee a poutana (“whore”), but it was all in good fun. Mostly.

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Escaped from the sheering pen

Day trip to Stemnitsa, Dimitsana, and other places

Tomorrow Nia and I will take a day trip to the prefecture just north of here, called Arkadia, a mountainous region with a few famous monasteries that hang off of cliffs. There is also an enormous gorge there. And one of Greece’s best winter ski areas,

We will follow a dizzying track from Tripoli, a place famous for horrendous rainstorms and significant winter snow.

More to come...