Reflections on Laconia and the island of Kythera

 On 3 September I drove the last of my summer visitors, my younger daughter and three of my grandchildren, to Athens airport; they were booked on a nine o’clock evening flight to Gatwick.  Not being happy about long-distance night driving these days I booked myself into the only hotel at the airport, a ridiculously expensive, horribly over-the-top edifice.  Sparkling clean, spacious, 100% soundproofed, air conditioned, sumptuously comfortable and totally without soul.  Back home the following day I began a week of clearing-up, cleaning, washing, putting-away and generally transforming what had become something of a cross between a dormitory and a playground back into my home.  Thereafter I entered a vacuum which, on a whim, I decided to temporarily fill with a few days away.

The unseen hand on my shoulder gently pushed me towards the far south-east of the Peloponnese, an area I had not been but knew to be the home of Homer’s land of the Lotos eaters; I fancied a spot of Lotos.   Goole Maps inform that Neápolis, the principal town of the area, is a two-hundred kilometre, four hour drive from home.  Shortly after lunch on 13 September I left.  Despite my familiarity with the drive, the road to Sparta still visually stuns.  For the better part of the journey from my home to Kalamata, the road skirts the sea; olive groves and market gardens run up the gentle slopes to its left, an impossibly sea, backed at a distance by the majestic Taygetos Mountains (2,500m) over which I would later be driving, laps at the beaches on the right had side of the road.  Beyond the northern suburbs of Kalamata, through a series of hairpin bends, the road rises steeply before dropping down through more hairpin bends into a chasm along the bottom of which the road runs for several kilometres before rising steeply again to its summit from where the descent onto the Spartan plain begins.  It is a breathtaking serpentine decent on a ledge of a road that follows the path of a river through its deep gorge.   In places the cliff has been cut away leaving tunnels and three sided rock ‘C’s’ to drive through. 

There is little in Sparta to evoke memories of its glorious past, it is a modern city, conveniently laid out as a grid of wide boulevards.  The first kilometres of the road beyond Sparta are flat and tedious but the road soon passes into more interesting landscapes as it heads east toward Momevassia and the East coast before swinging south and following the West coast of the peninsular passing, as it rises and falls with the cliffs, occasional fishing villages; in the westering sun it was a delight of a drive.

Neápolis, Laconia

Velanidia, Laconia

At Neápolis I discovered that the hotel I had booked was not in the town but some 9 kilometres north at Biklafia from where a ferry leaves for the barely offshore island of Elephnaos.  This suited me well.  ‘Hotel Boias’ offered all I needed for a base including a good taverna on its ground floor.  I enjoyed my six nights there and my days exploring the wild, empty south eastern tip of Laconia and, indeed, of the greek mainland.

Neápolis, from the deck of a departing ferry to Kythera

I had planned to leave Biklafia on 19 September but, on another whim, I decided that rather than going home I would take a ferry to the Island of Kythera, Aphrodite’s island; Botticelli put me onto her, I have ever hoped to meet her.

Avlémonas is a small village a fifteen minute drive from the ferry port.  I took for a week an extremely spacious, tastefully decorated, well appointed room there on the edge of the village, a five minute stroll from its centre.

Kythera.  Lanscape near Avlémonas

Kythera is an island of mountains, few inhabitants, relatively few visitors, vast empty rocky landscapes and beautiful, empty coasts.  Roads on the island are excellent, far better than the potholed tracks around my home.  Although very close to the mainland, Kythera has a very different feel about it.  Due no doubt to a long Venetian presence on the island the built environment reminded me as much of the south of Italy as anywhere I know in Greece.  Several romanesque, presently orthodox, churches were obviously originally built for worshipers of a  quite different christian persuasion.

My visits to both Neápolis and Kythera have wetted my appetite for further visits to both.  On these first short visits I left many stones to be turned on subsequent visits.

Kythera: first impressions

As I drove off the ferry and onto Kythera this was the first thing I saw.  An omen?  A portent of further disaster?  A metaphor for Greece and its future?

Fortunately as the road climbed steeply away from the harbour there were better first impressions to savour; vast empty tracts of rocky wilderness edged with mountains between which, here and there, I caught glimpses through gorges of the distant lazuli sea. Kythera is untamed and largely empty.  There is plenty of evidence of the land having been managed in earlier times but the abundance of long abandoned and ruined stone walls, sheepfolds and shelters bear witness to the fact that no agriculture, baring some goat-herding, apiculture and, in wind-sheltered valleys, olive cultivation, has been practiced here for generations.

Architecturally Kythera is as much Italian as Greek; a legacy of hundreds of years of a Venetian presence on the island.  The narrow twisting alleys, vaulted ceilings and arched windows and doorways of Kythera, the town, have more in common with those at Bari, in southern Italy than they do with anywhere I have been on the Greek mainland. 

ελευθερία (Freedom!)

For far too long I have been chained to a hedonistic merry-go-round. The cause of this not unpleasant state of affairs has been the summer.  Always long and hot here in Greece, summer this year has seemed to me to have been as consistently exceptionally hot for as long a period as I can remember through the fifteen summers I have been resident here.  Short periods of ‘heat wave’ with temperatures rising for day or two above blood heat are normal but this year temperatures have remained in the high thirties and low forties for weeks, from the end of June through to the beginning of September.  My visitors, my family, revel in  the endless sunshine and round of beaches, cafés, bars, tavernas and nights that go on well into the following mornings.  So to an extent do I,  but there comes a time when enough of a good thing is enough; when the mind of a man craves something greater than a permanent state of addlement and his corpus a rest.  To ease a return to a more interesting, fuller, life I have taken a holiday.

I am spending this week recovering in quiet solitude near Neàpolis on the far south eastern tip of mainland Greece.  I had planned to return home after six nights but am so seduced by the ambience of the area - many believe that hereabouts is Homer’s land of the Lotos-eaters - that, instead of driving home, I have booked a one-way ferry passage to Cythera, Aphrodite’s island!

Carl Larsson

It was Pascaline, owner of a delightfully 'arty' B&B near Chamonix in the French Alps, a now regular port of call of mine on my trips across Europe, who first introduced me to the work of Carl Larsson.  He drew and painted in a style to which I would be ver happy to aspire and, by closely studying his drawings I have learned much about his techniques.  I now have three of his books; 'A Family', 'A Home' and 'A Farm'; all are a delight to browse.

Me with Lowry

Bronze statue of Stretford born artist L.S.Lowry at the junction of Hyde Road and Stalybridge Road, Mottram.

Six months ago I took up art - seriously.  I have been on several courses, bought a lot of self-tuition books, a small fortune’s worth of paint, paper, pencils, pens, brushes and a plethora of other arty goods.  Occasionally I have even practised my latest obsession.

While wandering the uninspiring streets of Mottram near Manchester recently, looking for inspiration, I stumbled upon a fellow sitting sketching on a bench.  Keen to air my new knowledge I settled beside him and made what I believed to be some constructive criticisms of his drawing.  I was rather miffed that he gave me no thanks; furthermore he seemed mildly irritated by my suggestions.

"The Elms" on Stalybridge Road.  Lowry’s home from 1948 until his death (1976).

Last Irish chase of the season

Today my search for places with cultural connections in Ireland led me to ‘The Laurels’ a comparatively recently abandoned house located a short distance to the far side of Glenties from the cottage in which I have been staying this week.  ‘The Laurels’ was the home of playwright Brian Friel’s maternal grandparents where, with his  two sisters, the young Brian spent most of his childhood summer holidays.  As recently as 1998 when, I understand, it was used as one of several locations in the area for the shooting of Pat O'Connor’s excellent film of Friel’s play, “Dancing at Lughnasa”, the house must have been in a better condition than that in which I found it today.  Indeed, although it is but a stone’s throw beyond the village, lost in its overgrown garden the house was far from easy to find.  ‘Ballybeg’, the fictional village in which several of Friel’s plays are set, is based on Glenties.
I also visited Glenties museum, a wonderfully eclectic gathering on three floors, of artifacts, photographs and newspaper clippings telling stories of life and events in and around Glenties through, largely, the past couple of hundred years.  I particularly enjoyed discovering, in a display of genuine items arranged to feign an early twentieth century kitchen, three of the silk stockings Meryl Streep had worn while filming “Dancing at Lughnasa”, hanging from a line above the kitchen range.  The logic of why there should be three stockings rather than a pair or any number of pairs caused me more than a little head scratching!

A fishy tale, the hero of which is a frenchman!

The cottage I have rented here in Donegal is semi- detached to another.  I suspect that originally the building may have been a byre.  Until yesterday morning I had neither seen nor heard my neighbours but knew I had some and believed them to be french because I had seen a french registered car parked beside my own.  Yesterday morning, as I was getting into my car to go out for the day, my neighbours, an early middle-aged couple, were also leaving their cottage.  In my best french I bade them ‘Bonjour!’ which must have led them to believe I had a fluency of their language.  Confronted with french people speaking french, such facility of speaking it as I pretend to have abandons me.  They neither speak, nor make any pretence of being able to speak, english.  Nonetheless we managed to communicate enough for me to learn that they have been coming to this same cottage each year for several years for him to fish; he is a keen fly fisherman.  Nothing was said about how madame spends her day while monsieur is spending his, rod and line in hand, up to his waist in river water.

Yesterday evening there was a tap on my door.  I opened it to monsieur who held in his hand a sheet of tin foil on which lay three glistening very fresh trout, gutted and ready to cook.  ‘Pour vous’, I think he said.  I thanked him in my best italian then, realising my mistake, in my best greek.  Fortunately Lisi and Linda, who were in the cottage with me, were able to step in and take over thanking monsieur for his kindness.

The trout were eaten this evening and were as tasty as I had anticipated they might be.  Shortly after eating them I again answered a rather nervous tap at the door.  Monsieur stood before me, as incapable of utterance as I, offering me six further beautiful fresh trout.  ‘Thank you’, I said, ‘Thank you so much!’.  He seemed to understand.

Oh!  How I am coming to love the french!