15–18 May
Taverna Night with Friends
On Friday night we met up with our friends Tom and Kim in the leafy northern suburb of Merousi. They had just arrived from New Hampshire, via Boston and Madrid, in the early afternoon. Tom and Jonathan not only attended Bates College together (back in the age of the dinosaurs) but also spent their junior year abroad in Athens in 1979–1980. Both date their “Greek passion” to those long ago youthful experiences—and each have returned to their patrida (fatherland) many times over the past thirty years. Soon Tom and Kim will build a house in Finikounda, the souther Messian village where the Aretakis-Cannizzaro clan spent the past three months.
We joined Tom and Kim and their friends Yianni and Lena for a dinner of baked goat (with potato in lemon sauce), a veritable delicacy that we enjoyed with several other specialties, including kokoretsi, the grilled entrails of goat and lamb. By the time Manny and Jonathan caught the electric train for the return to Athens it was well past midnight. The two returned to their Pangrati apartment sometime after 2 a.m.—needless to say, the 7 a.m. alarm was not a particularly welcome sound, especially for Manny.
We dragged ourselves and our bags out to Eratosthenes St., in front of our apartment, and flagged down a taxi for the ride to Piraeus. We arrived at the port of Athens with plenty of time to spare. We walked through the Pireaus fish market, admiring the unindentifiable Mediterranean species of fish, found a corne cafeneion, and became sufficiently caffeinated for the voyage ahead.
Our vessel was a swift moving “Flying Cat”—a high-speed catamaran that took us through the Saronic Gulf to our final destination, the island of Spetses. At an earlier stop (the port of Hydra—a treeless rock floating on the Aegean--devoid of any automobiles, renowned for it’s harborside stone mansions, and notable for its long-time resident, the Canadian songwriter Leonard Cohen) Manny and both noticed a familiar face on the quay: Papa Giorgi, “our” priest from Finikounda! We are the first to acknowledge that it is, indeed, a small world—but Hydra is just one of nearly a thousand Greek islands, and a small one at that, so our disbelief was not unreasonable. We waited by the gangway to great Papa Giorgi, a portly and kindly man who lumbered aboard in his cossack, carrying a briefcase. He was as surprised as we, and we spent the next half hour chatting about old times (i.e., last week). He had just completed an all-night vigil at Hydra’s monastery, located on the mountain top, a memorial for two monks who had passed away.
We bid goodbye to Papa Giorgi at the mainland port of Ermione (where he had left his car; he was planning to drive back to Finikounda, a five-hour journey) and finished the last leg to Spetses, the final stop for the Flying Cat.
Spetses
Spetses, the smallest and last of the islands in Saronic Gulf, is located several miles off the eastern Peloponnese, the area called the Argolid. It is a relatively small island, just eight miles long and three or four miles at it widest. Along with nearby Hydra, it led the naval campaign against the Ottoman Turks in the 1820s, and has a hallowed history in the Greek War of Independence. Its heroice, Bouboulina Laskaris, is still revered: after her husband’s death in an early naval campaign, she single-handedly rallied and led the Greek fleet to victory, besieging the island garrison at nearby Nauplion.
In modern times, Spetses was made famous by the British author John Fowles in his novel The Magus, in which the island is thinly disguised as “Phraxos.” Fowles himself taught at the prestigious Anagiri School, a boarding school for Greek boys, ages twelve to eighteen. Jonathan’s uncle Kyriakos was a school-boy student of Fowles in the 1950s, when the young author taught for a period and was inspired to write this early novel.
Jonathan’s maternal grandmother, Efstathia Argitis e Yamaris, was born on Spetses in 1899, the eldest of eight children. After the death of her mother in 1912, she was sent to America with an aunt with the promise of a return to her island home a year later. World War I and the U-boat danger prevented her return. She ended up marrying a Greek from the “Greek alps” (above Navpaktos) and staying in America until her death in 1992.
Jonathan renewed contact with the Spetses family in 1979 while a student in Athens. His mother has two first cousins who live on Spetses with their extended families. (Manny was in disbelief at the prospect of having sixteen Spetses third cousins, all blood relatives, on an island just eight miles long.) Jonathan further cemented the trans-Atlantic relationship when he asked the daughter of one his own cousins—his second cousin Evyenia—to baptize his younger daughter, who is also named Evyenia (like her grandmother and her great-great grandmother). Hence the relationship is sealed, the family has come full circle, and we now enjoy an enduring family connection—a Spetses connection.
Spetses has evolved into one of the most chic (and expensive) of the Greek islands. Jonathan’s grandmother would be astounded that this once-impoverished pine-clad rock could now enjoy such weath. The millionaires (largely Greek) who lived here in the 1970s have been displaced in recent years by the billionaires—and our hearts go out to them. It is not at all unusual to see traditional Mediterranean villas, washed by the sea, and straddled by heliports. The yachts in the town’s old harbor defy anyone’s imagination. Their counterparts in Miami or Key West or Nanctucket pale by comparison.
Yes, we are little out of our element--except that this island is part of our shared heritage, the beaches are pristine, and we always ready to explore.
So Manny and Jonathan, the scruffy Americans with the backpacks and torn jeans, are just a bit out of sorts here. Lucky for us, our family owns one of the oldest hotels on the island, and we have always been treated royally as their guests. This time was no different. Our greatest regret, however, was that Ann and the girls could not be with us. As my uncles said, “there is always next year.”
Uncles Kyriakos and Yianni are gracious hosts. Our room room has a balcony with a tremendous view of the ocean, facing east toward Hydra, and the refridgerator was chock full of treats—cheese, meats, drinks, fresh bread.
Our first order of business was to rent bicycles--the motorcycle(s) will come later in the week. Manny and Jonathan oriented themselves, took a swim, and then headed up to Thea (Aunt) Elftheria for a visit. At age 92 she is sharp as a nail, full of laughter, and unapologetic about loving life, family, and God. Jonathan was amused at her efforts to feed Manny and was remined of times past: cookies, then juice, then three bananas, a pear, and almost a fourth banana. Manny quickly learned to say “thank you, but I’m full!” She gave him a fourth banana for his bike basket.
In the evening we careened through the maze of narrow streets on mountain bikes, finally settling at a table at an outdoor taverna called “Lazarus,” where we ate bifteki, tzatziki, fried potatos, and a large hunk of saganaki (fried cheese with fresh lemon)—washed down with the forbidden elixirs: coca cola and local wine from the vareli (barrel). No worse for the wear, we road through the old harbor in the dark until Jonathan meet an unexpected staircase. Rattled by the experience we limped home and watched the “Eurovision” final on TV—the European version of “American Idol,” which is as every bit banal as its American counterpart, just with infinitely more talent and cultural variation. Greece finished eighth, just ahead of Azairbaijan and hair behind Romania. Norway won.
On Sunday we were invited to Kyriakos’s house for baked chicken and hilopitas (square noodles) for the afternoon meal. Jonathan dragged sleeping beauty from bed at 10 a.m.—“promise me, one hundred percent, to get me up at 8 a.m.!”—so the two could circumnavigate the island on their mountain bikes, a 28-kilometer loop with many steep uphills and harrowing downhills—with hairpin turns the entire way, not to mention assorted “hazards” such as skirting lizards and snakes, goat dung, and gravel.
Now Jonathan is bracing (and planning) for Manny’s fourteenth birthday on May 19th.
They say it's your birthday...
Summer has arrived in the eastern Mediterranean and with it all of its unique and endearing elements: an indescribable quality of light, a sensible and relaxed pace of life, the sights, the smells, the sounds, a multitude of joys that come with living in such a special place.
Lena and Laura arrived in twilight of Lena’s twenty-ninth birthday, which we all anticipated and had planned for. We set off (early) for dinner…at around 11 p.m. and ended the night at 3 a.m. Lena and Laura each had a marriage proposal—from the same man that brought to our cafeneion table a very rich caramel cake, ablaze with candles and sparklers —who promised to each of them, on separate occasions, that “your friend can always come visit us here Finikounda.”
Mistra fell to the Turks in the 1560s but was briefly recaptured by the Venetians in 1
