Spetses

12 June 2015

Spetses—Saronic Gulf, Greece

Having arrived from a heroic journey—an eight-hour drive to Boston-Logan, a seven-hour flight to Munich (with a four-hour layover), and a final three-hour jump to Athens—your hapless traveler finds himself in the warm embrace of family on the Greek island of Spetses. An island justifiably famous in its own right, it is also the subject of John Fowles's The Magus, where it is thinly disguised as "Phraxos."

A meal last night with dear old friends Thanasi and Koula in Athens set the tone for eating well and enjoying great company: fried gavros (small sardine-like fish eaten whole), mithia (steamed mussels in spicy olive oil/butter), horta (wild greens), fresh bread....all eaten outside in the neighborhood square, children playing, gypsies playing lyra and clarinet, motocyles whining on the fringes.

Thanasi pointed to the ten outdoor tavernas, all of them burgeoning with customers on a Thursday night, and commented on the irony: "We have a crisis in Greece. Don't you see?" As the barbarians  approach the city gates, the residents toast to their good health.

The three-hour drive from Athens reinforces the notion that motorists in Boston really are polite, considerate, and especially careful behind the wheel. Hence the magic of “compare and contrast.”

Riding over from the mainland on an old wooden caique, a fellow passenger commented that “Greeks are better drivers because of the crisis.” Jonathan is utterly incapable of wrapping his head around that lofty assertion.

A short nap and then a six-mile run along the island’s hot cobblestones, with an exceptional mid-run swim at a “special” beach (population: 1), and Jonathan became temporarily revived—sufficiently so, at least, to eat a stupendous meal at cousin Yioryios’s restaurant at the plateia below the hotel, with Uncle Kyriakos and Aunt Ritsa.

Now midnight feels curiously like 5 p.m., extending time’s warp to the furthest reaches of the mind, or what remains of it.

This island, which Jonathan’s grandmother left 102 years ago, remains a place of great beauty and modern contradiction: sophisticated, posh, over-developed and yet somehow quintessentially Greek beneath the surface.

And so the journey begins anew.