Temenos 2025

 

 

Why temenos?

Temenos (Greek τέμενος) refers to a piece of land set aside or cut off from everyday use and assigned as a special domain for the veneration of a temporal ruler or a god.

This obscure explanation notwithstanding, what did the psychologist Carl Jung believe by temenos?

Jung described temenos as, “a means of protecting the center of the personality from being drawn out and from being influenced from outside.” He believed that the human need to establish and preserve temenos is indicated by dream images, drawings and mandalas.

 

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My present journey across the Atlantic, passing through several time zones and across a dozen or more countries, is nothing new for me. I first came to Greece in 1973, as a young American in a summer program run by the North American Archdiocese of the Orthodox Church—a program for Greek-American children to discover their heritage: religion, culture, and history. Thankfully the religous part was light-weight and far short of indoctrination.

That first experience was followed by a second—in 1974—in which the young campers lived through the cataclysmic Turkish invasion of Cyprus, a near conscription of the tallest boys into the Greek army, and the subsequent overthrow of the junta. It was an exciting experience during a dangerous time, but I only recognized the former, basking in the “experience” and largely avoiding the danger.

A half dozen years would pass before I returned, as a junior year abroad college student, to study archaeology and classics in Athens. That year, in particular, lit a flame that grew into a passion, one that has never really waned. It was also the year (1979) that I began learning modern Greek in earnest, met my family on Spetses island (maternal) and Crete (paternal). Most of all, it was the year I began enduring friendships with Thanasi (and, later, his wife Koula) and Akis (and, later, his wife, Mania). The four of them and a handful of others attended our wedding on Spetses in 1992.

 

And so the passion, the obsession, the fixation—it took its present form.

 

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Back in the hood

Sixteen or seventeen hours of travel time, hardly a consideration for a twenty year old, becomes an epic struggle for one in the second half of their sixties. But the indignities of modern air travel on an aging body hardly proves an impediment to being here.

I spent two nights in Athens, staying with my friends in the neighborhood called Kaisariani, a cool and leafy area on the foothills of Mount Hymettos, which I ran up the following morning. It is a sort of Shangri-La above the concrete madness that is Athens.

My destination was the eleventh-century monastery  tucked between the seemingly infinite network of paths that pass through the pine and eucalyptus forests, which are famous from antiquity and infamous from the Second World War—the site of unthinkable brutalities: first at the hands of the occupying Germans, then followed by the fratricidal horrors of the Greek Civil War, as the Wehrmach withdrew in 1944, after four years of brutal occupation.

But today it is a place of serenity, populated by a rich and diverse bird life in a profound ecological setting. Groups of school children, runners, mountain cyclists, and nature-goers come and go, but the place is so vast that solitude is easily obtained. On a clear day, you can spy the Acropolis several kilometers away, rising conspicuously above the city center, and beyond the thin ribbon of the vast expanse of wine-blue Mediterranean (to borrow a phrase from Homer).

 

On my second night, we enjoyed a fantastic meal at an outdoor taverna in Kaisariani. And the following morning, I picked up my “buggy,” a small, economical rental car, seemingly powered by lame donkeys. Thankfully, I suffer from hubris, an ancient Greek word, at least in the realm of urban driving, a skill derived from living in Brooklyn, New York. Get out of my way, you!

Leaving the utter anarchy of urban Athens behind, I headed west toward Corinth, then into the eastern Peloponnese, and through the region known as the Argolid, with it namesake city, Argos, centrally located on a plain marked with citrus plantations. Lemon and orange groves extend into the horizon.

 

Spetses

 

My maternal grandmother, the eldest of twelve children, was born on the island of Spetses, in the Saronic Gulf, in 1899. I have visited this pine-clad island more than fifty times since 1979, where I am welcomed by a rich stock of memories, much loved family, and a place that is both quaint and modern, traditional and now techno-sheik.

Here I am the guest of my Uncle Kyriakos, a recent widower of eighty-eight years, a former ship’s captain whom I met as a ten-year-old, when he would visit my grandmother (his aunt) while his freighter was docked in Philadelphia or New York. Kyriakos traveled the world as a first mate then, at age twenty-nine, became one of the youngest masters in the Greek merchant marine. Tall, handsome, multi-lingual, he cut an amazingly romantic figure for a youth with early pretensions of traveling the world. Just like my uncle.

In 1992, Ann and I were married in the monastery basilica of St. Nicholas, the same church where my grandmother was baptized in 1899, a three-hundred-year-old compound perched over the entrance to the Old Harbor. The fact that I was able to tell my γιαγιά about our plans before her death at age 93 was a source of prideful pleasure.

Since that time, we have returned multiple times, traveled this incredible country far and wide, met family, cultivated relationships, and—eventually—consummated a life-long dream of restoring an old house in the rural countryside (2013) of Messenia, in the southwest Peloponnese. In the interim I have become conversant or maybe even carelessly fluent (more or less) in modern Greek, able to get myself into and out of a world trouble with ease.

 

Journey to the Argolid

Leaving Athens behind, I headed along the narrow coastal strip to Corinth, then down the eastern shore of the Peloponnese, on a winding road bereft of guardrails, considered a rally course by those behind the wheels of BMWs, Mercedes, and Porsches. No match for my Citroen C3, a glorified and laconic toaster on wheels.

 

Both Spetses and nearby Hydra (the 1960s home of Leonard Cohen) attract a well-heeled clientele. It is no longer the poor, dry island of my grandmother’s chidhood, about which she spoke often when I was growing up. Many people own conspicuously grand homes on this small island, with their own heliports for ease of access from Athens and Pireaus (the port of Athens). The local Spetsiotes are losing their heritage to a smattering of super-wealthy Athenians with little regard for local sensibilities.

 

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Further along, continuing past the turn toward Ancient Epidauros, the approaching Saronic Gulf lightens the spirit. The signs of late Spring are everywhere: fields of poppies, olive groves in bloom, newborn lambs and goats on the craggy hillsides.

This region of Greece endured the Dorian invasion more than 3,500 years ago, the advance of a mysterious peoples who (a point much debated by historians) brought the Bronze age kingdoms to their knees: ancient Mycenae, Tiryns, Argos, and some lesser states fell in short order. The locals are still pissed off about it…o.k. that’s just a bad joke.

The demise of these great civilizations is the subject of legend, song, poetry, and a rich archaeological history. As a student of archaeology in the late 1970s, the attraction was then  and still is today undeniable, and my own curiosity about these events still runs hot.

Before reaching Corinth and taking a sharp turn south, I passed two important sites from the ancient world: Elefsina (ancient Eleusis, home of the Mysteries) and Megara, an ancient city-state whose fate was never pretty.

Megara, exposed from both land and sea, was caught between a rock (Sparta) and a hard place (Athens) during the Peloponnesian war of the mid-fifth century bce: periodically savaged by both warring superpowers, depending on the Megarans’ then-current shifting loyalties. The result, regardless of the perpetrator, was always the same: wholesale destruction of the city, the burning of the crop fields, enslavement of the women and children, and execution of all the able-bodied males.

In short, the Megarans rarely had a good day.

 

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An hour or so along the eastern coast of the Peloponnese, you pass through a verdant valley village called Traxeia, with its Doric name and fifty or so residents, and—count them—seven bakeries. It should come as no surprise that this place is famous for growing wheat. And, apparently, baking bread.

The road then winds up through a series of hairpin turns onto a plateau festooned with dozens of those “evil windmills” and solar arrays, sufficient to power a half dozen nearby villages that were once entirely dependent on fossil fuel for electricity. Obviously part of Greece’s “New Green Deal ‘scam’” to borrow from the current parlance.

Descending toward the coast, I passed the turn for the Frankthi Cave, one of the oldest Neolithic sites in Europe. As a young, prospective archaeologist I visited this place with a professor and a half dozen students back in 1979, crawling on all fours with headlamps, bats overhead, dripping stalactites.

And still I wonder: were my ancestors living deep inside this cave 25,000 years ago, picking lice off of one another while fashioning stone implements during their spare time on weekends?

 

The girl from Adami

Traveling through the village of Adami in 1980, I met a girl at the local bakery. Over the years (before meeting Ann) I was fixated on this lovely blue-eyed maiden, stopping for bread whenever I passed. I remember once commenting to her about  how beautiful her village was and how nice it must be to live there.

She sighed. “There is nothing here. No people, nothing to do, no future. Lots of goats and old people.”

Today Katerina is a slightly plump, widowed grandmother dressed in black, still behind the counter of her parents’ bakery. She still has beautiful eyes.

Time waits for no one.

 

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I parked the rental car and hoofed it to the ferry landing in the mainland village of Kosta. I waited and waited as the sea built up, crashing foam on the rocks. It seemed as though the ferry would never come. So I had a beer. Still no ferry. Then another beer and a grilled cheese sandwich. I could see the Spetses ferry landing just across the channel, five kilometers distant. I ordered yet another beer—and then the ferry arrived, listing slightly to port and pitching violently fore and aft, bouncing off the rubber mats of the quay. The man collecting fare on the open top level nearly flew overboard in a surge of sea. I grabbed his belt from behind and held him steady. He said thank you.

 

It was only a twenty minute ride on the vomit comet and I was at my destination.

 

Spetses

 

This lovely Saronic Gulf island, the subject of John Fowles Magus—a brilliant read in magical realism--is a place of mystery, beauty, and now…sadly, over-tourism. This weekend the island is hosting a triathalon, so the population of about 2,000 souls has tripled.

 

Occupied since the Neolithic period, the island has had several names over the past 3,000 years: Pittiousa (ancient Greek, “pine clad”), Spezziota (the Italian name during the Middle Ages), and now Spetses—birthplace of my grandmother (b. 1899).

 

Over a mere thirty-six hours I have endured a phenomenal amount of Greek soul food, fed continuously by eager family. 

 

Tomorrow I set off to my final destination—the village of Akritohori in the southwesternmost corner of the Peloponnese, where I closed up a little pint-sized house for the year last July. There is a surreal to closing the door one day and the opening it again a year later. I pinch myself again and again.

Job one: sweep out the scorpions and search everywhere for snakes and other creepy-crawling creatures that appreciate the cool ceramic tile floor.

 

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