The Monastery of Simonaspetra, Mount Athos

MOUNT ATHOS

After Lemnos....

...Woken from my refrigerated slumber the next morning at six by bells and the tapping of the semandron; outside, it was snowing hard as I watched a steady trail of monks arrive through the gates from all over the Mountain carrying rucsacs, sticks and wearing heavy coats, to celebrate the Liturgy and the Saint’s Day. In the dark recesses of the narthex (cloister immediately outside the catholicon), I sat sharply down on a monk expertly concealed by his robes in the deep embrace of the tall wooden stalls. I am not sure who was the more shocked given the shriek of our mutual embarrassment. Not being Orthodox, I wasn’t allowed to take communion but made up for it by kick starting the day with bread steeped in holy wine – lots of the stuff which was quite out of this world.
Father Martinianos I found outside talking with the Roly Poly Monk, a Father of immense stature both tall and round with a capacity for food that I had observed the night before and of whom I was convinced that that anyone sat next to would probably suffer very real fasting. The old white bearded Abbot was processed out of the church into a large hall with a roaring fire, where we sat on cushioned benches round the walls. Monks arrived bearing trays of coffee, syrup ouzing baklava and glasses of red raki. I take all three and down the raki in one go. Father Chrystostomos looks at me in alarm –“you have finished your raki already?!” “Well, it came in a shot glass Father”, not mentioning that old habits die hard. “You had better have another one then,” he replied summoning a tray of the drinks over. I was tempted to down the lot but discretion got the better of me - Athos time, it was nearly 4 in the afternoon, even though elsewhere it was only 9am. I know plenty of people that would willingly change to Athos time to salve their consciences for an early drink.
With the icon of St Christodoulos at our head we are led by a group of singing monks into the Refectory – newly frescoed the long room is painted throughout with realistic interpretations of the Apolcalypse, the miracles of the Disciples and in the centre of the ceiling, above a large chandelier, watched Christ the Pantocrator – creator of all, arms outstretched in blessing. I was sat a table with some local workmen who, after grace, dived into the bread as if they had inside information on the end of the world. I was happy, God had seen fit to put me next to a radiator. Before me was a bowl of pasta soup and, mixed up in a plate of potatoes, three fingers which on closer inspection turned out to be octopus. Yuk, give that a wide birth I thought. A bell rang and a monk stood up to recite from the Bible. I turned to the monk on my left and said a cheery hello. He looked back in stunned amazement – meals are meant to be eaten in silence, and at speed. A second bell rang and we could drink the water and wine left on the tables in tin jugs. I was quick to learn that all meals were a race against the Holy Scripture, a hurried slurping, scraping and slicing of cutlery on tin plates as come the third bell, finished or not, the meal is over. Pray for a good chunk of the Bible was my motto or a slow reader.
At the third bell, the Abbot, who had presided over the monastery for the last 15 years, made a short speech. It was his name day after all. He seemed a bit choked and tearful as he reminded us that the Refectory had been destroyed by fire, as is so often the case with old buildings on Mount Athos, 21 years ago and this was the first meal in the restored dining hall since the Patriarch of Constantinople had blessed it a few days before. I was told that the room could have been used five years earlier but that until the Patriarch had visited, it had to remain closed. Inconceivable in London or New York, it was a wonderful illustration of the sense of timelessness the Holy Fathers’s world.

Looking across to Turkey: Mytilene's own Statue of Liberty,

celebrating the end of Ottoman rule in 1912

LESBOS

"Where you from?!" the monotone loud hailer voice barked at me imperiously while I queued patiently at passport control in Ayvalik before boarding the ferry to Lesbos. "London", was the stock answer I gave to the gangly olive skinned youth with bulging eyes, bullet proof glasses and the directness of a German police officer. Everybody knows where London is – saving me delivering a detailed lesson on British geography and the green rolling bit in the south they call Dorset. Frankly, I wasn’t really paying attention, I was more interested in examining the mountains of shopping the Greeks were hauling back to Lesbos than the stranger’s questioning. The Ayvalik run for the Greeks is akin to a day trip to Calais for liquor thirsty Brits. "Many days in London?" the boy shouted. "No, not for a bit." "No, I said are there many gays in London?!" "Excuse me?" I nearly feel over. "Are you gay?" Before things got tricky, a sweet girl with long brown curling hair stepped in and made calming apologies. "I just say what I think" the youth announced unrepentantly.
Tani and Illi were a brother and sister pair, holidaying from Israel. He a stock-broker, she an aroma therapist. Their family, originally Greek Jews from Smyrna, fled to Thessaloniki in the 1922 population exchange with Turkey and in turn fled the Germans in 1942, finally ending up in Israel. They were good company, Illi’s sweet nature nicely complimenting Tani’s blunt but ultimately inoffensive cabaret. I got the feeling that a Tani let loose on his own would be very dangerous. I asked him if he had fought in the recent conflict with Hamaz, to which I received a long list of likes and dislikes: Tani was a non-smoking, non-drinking pacifist with an insatiable appetite for any and every milieu gay and, by his own admission, Asian men. Thailand, he whispered, was his dream home. Illi apologised again.
My passport stamped, I was motioned through, but my new found friends were menacingly held back and pushed threateningly to one side: their passports snatched away for closer scrutiny. Used to this sort of treatment, Illi smiled sweetly at me from the Turkish side of the counter. "You go on, don’t worry about us," she said gently. I wasn’t prepared to stand by and watch this endearing and harmless couple humiliated because of their national politics, affairs over which they had no control. It was wrong. I waited for them, glaring silently at the petty minded official who relented after a few minutes stand-off.
On board the boat was packed and reverberated with the excited chatter of Greek men and women and the subtle crack crack of koboloi worry beads. The bridge doubled up as a VVIP saloon and was no more than a well furnished sitting room with a steering wheel. Squeezed on a bench, Illi studied her Greek guide books while Tani texted friends in Thailand that he was off to a place which they had never heard of. He shoved his phone in my face to type in "Greece is a country in Europe". "Do they have democratic politic in Greece?" I told him that the ancient Greeks were the founders of democracy. "A friend says I should go to Mykonos. Where is Mykonos? Lets go to to Mykonos…!" He stamped petulantly. Illi gave him a withering look and apologised again.
Pleasurable though it had been to experience the ordered efficiency of Izmir and the Turkish coast for three days, as we neared the distant lights of Lesbos it felt good to be returning to the comparable ramshackle of Greece. Stood on deck enjoying a cigarette with Illi, I could feel that warm embrace that envelopes you when you turn that last corner into your road. It is the feint notion of hastily cobbled togetherness and lack of pretension that makes this country so appealing and deeply attractive. I was going home.
Below Tani had wedged himself in the middle of a group of giggling Greek girls. Two decks up his public address system voice could be heard above the chatter, booming away, "where are the gay bars on Lesbos?" Illi raised her eyebrows, by now I was growing inured to his script. No-one, however, was more surprised than I when we returned to the cabin to find Illi in one piece; I was convinced that by the time we reached him a big hairy moustachioed type would have laid the poor boy out flat for flagrantly flaunting his sexuality, a trait the traditionally minded Greeks are yet to come to grips with outside Athens.
As if to prove my earlier point, Mytilene the capital of Lesbos, when we arrived was in the grip of election fever as the mayoral campaigns that had been absorbing the country for the last few weeks were drawing to a climactic close. Every few yards, the waterfront was blocked by small brightly lit stages upon which local government hopefuls passionately addressed huddled bands of adoring supporters; it was like competition day at Speaker’s Corner.
My hotel looked out across the harbour crowded at one end with small cruise ships and yachts and at the other, large trawlers that endlessly came and went providing a rolling display on repair and maintenance as big yellow nets were jumbled up on the quayside. The bathroom, seemingly installed in its original box, had the tiniest of lavatories pushed up against the door that could only be ridden side-saddle; looking in the mirror afterwards I noticed I had, as a consequence of its use, the imprint of tile grouting on my face.
Lesbos’s great expanse lies stretched out near the top of the Aegean like a lazing blancmange that has been allowed to run. After Crete and Evvia, it is the third largest island in the Aegean; a fabulous place of powerful mountains and intimate coasts and bays with excellent restaurants, the best olives in Greece and a micro-climate that produces some of the best anise - the principal flavouring of ouzo. Lesbos produces over 40% of the national drink and consumes 10% of the stuff – despite this predilection for the very more-ish aniseed flavoured hooch, the Lesbians I met appeared remarkably upright.
It was only the next morning, standing at the far end of the port that I could really appreciate Mytilene’s grandeur: a magnificent Italianate vista of 19th century merchant’s mansions and neo-classical civic buildings presided over by the enormous baroque domed magnificence of Agios Therapon – dedicated to the 3rd century Cypriot monk who was martyred for his beliefs.
Like Chios, Lesbos was for some time a Genoese possession, falling into the hands of the Gateluzzi family. Francesco Gateluzzi, who played a significant role in restoring John Paleologus to the Byzantine throne was given the island by the Emperor in 1354 as a dowry for his sister Maria’s marriage. Under the Gateluzzi the great fortress overlooking Mytilene was built and the island prospered as an important centre of trade. In 1462 however, Lesbos fell to the Turks and despite many attempts to regain it, the island remained part of the Ottoman Empire until 1912; an event the Greeks celbrated by erecting their own "Statue of Liberty" which faces the Turkish coast in a sort of "two fingers to you" attitude.
Lesbos was not only the birthplace of Kheir ed Din Barbarossa, the Sultan’s High Admiral and scourge of the 16th century Venetian Aegean but also of a number of prominent figures of the 20th century Greek culture: the poet and Nobel Prize Winner, Odysseus Elytis was of Lesbian parentage: he settled in Paris after the Second World War and became a close friend of the art critic, patron and publisher Stratis Eleftheriades, better known as Tériade, who likewise came from Lesbos. Tériade played a significant role in exhibiting the work of Theophilos Hatzimichalis, a habitually penniless artist who lived just outside Mytilene, who preferred to dress more like an Evzone (the Presidential Guard in Athens) and wandered the countryside in a fustanella (pleated white skirt) and sometimes a helmet. The Evzones being well over six foot tall are a striking sight, but Theophilos was described as being "short, pale, sickly," but "with a passionate desire for the heroic stature that God had denied him." His paintings are immensely characterful, charged with colour, they have an Indian simplicity to them and great expression like the characters from a Karaghiozi puppet show. Theophilos was not fussy, he painted just about anything that didn’t move – walls, doors, kafeneia and shops would all get liberal attention with vibrant scenes from mythology, hunting and the Greek War of Independence. He worked as a shepherd for a period of time and rarely demanded anything more for his work than a plate of food and his materials. It was Tériade who encouraged him ad supplied him with canvas to work on. Theophilos died of food poisoning in 1934; a lot of his works, which now fetch record sums, were painted over by shopkeepers and restaurateurs who didn’t realise the import of what was adorning their walls.

... a perfect evening at sea - passage from Samos to Chios.

FROM SAMOS TO CHIOS

The sun slowly melted in the western sky, burning like a glowing ember, firing the clouds in a vivid display of psychedelic reds, oranges, yellows and mauves. Tiny Venus rose in the dusk to herald darkness’s arrival as we came into Chios under a the bright cream of new moon, the light of which caught in the giggling rippling bow wave that The Penelope silently pushed before her on the glutinous black sea.
Chios was busy when I arrived that Friday night; throngs of animated students from the Aegean University were bedding in to celebrate the week’s end. The drive down the waterfront took sometime, my taxi being caught in the cavalcade of chromed and polished cars, bikes and trucks that laboriously cruised up and down the harbour road every night. We were stuck behind a pizza delivery scooter, also trapped in the trafficked spider’s web. Like the rest of Chios’ new town, the waterfront was not an instantly attractive place – it was lined with crowded brash American style bars that pumped out rap music and big glass-fronted fast food restaurants. But Chios Town has always been a business like place - for centuries and centuries, the island has been one of the most sought after possessions in the Aegean and all because of a bush.
The bush in question is the mastic plant and for some reason, the southern half of the island has the best growing conditions for the shrub in the world. It was mastic that put Chios on the map, creating enormous wealth, shipping dynasties, a maritime tradition and one of the most cosmopolitan and cultured societies in the Mediterranean; in turn such a prize would result in some of the worst scenes of horror, death and destruction witnessed by mankind before the term holocaust became synonymous with the twentieth century.
Mastic has many uses; since the earliest of times it has been used to clean teeth, heal colds and cure stomach problems. Before the advent of synthetic resins, mastic was an important ingredient in making varnishes, paint stick to walls and cosmetics. It was also widely used in pastries, sweets, drinks and was the original chewing gum. I bought some of the crystally stuff in an attractive tobacco sized tin with a pretty picture of the harbour on it. Opening the tin there is a distinct woody aroma like old school desks and as I write I am chewing a couple of the pear drop sized sweets. Crunchy at first, there is little to recommend the taste of mastic unless the sensation of old varnish is your thing. It’s definitely not mine and I can only say “God bless America” for inventing real thing – however much of the stuff ends up on our streets and the soles of my shoe. Nice box though.
I checked in to a large decaying mansion of a hotel with flamboyant sweeping balconies that looked as if they had been stolen off the stern of a 1950s liner. The old cracked building had a held-together look as if it had survived a Beirut bombing. An ageing silent Grandmother was living out her final years in reception and the landlord appeared from behind a pile of dusty papers that concealed a desk cluttered with ageing electrical apparati that patiently awaited the attentions of his repairing hand. On the wall were maps of Greek troop dispositions outside Smyrna in 1922 before Ataturk bit back and disaster ensued. My room, up a grand marble staircase, with views across the sea to nearby Turkey, was, like the rest of the hotel, a tribute to the lasting qualities of 1970s furniture. Everything however seemed to have been repaired at some stage in its life and anything that required a human to sit or lie on it seemed to list and groan to port, including the lino covered floor which was about the only item whish wasn’t held together by string or tape. The bath, vast, had an ocean-going capacity serviced by a tepid trickle which issued feebly from the bowels of the building fives storeys below. The telephone was one model up from Bakelite and had a cord long enough to reach the mainland without dialling long distance, but I did have ten channels of Turkish TV which as chaotic and confusing as Greek TV except everybody wears a fez.
The landlord, a bit of a connoisseur it turned out, recommended dinner in a nearby mezedropoleios where getting into the Friday night swing of things, on my own, I drank large quantities of red wine soaked up with plates after plate of pork in lemon, beef in tomato and gouvlas, appropriately named drunkard’s bits. I felt better for that and returned to my creaking bed, ten channels of fez adorned gobbledygook falling asleep with the light on and dreaming that I was at sea on a sinking ship.
Reveille the next morning, which is precisely what it was, sounded at 0745 hours. A series of severe repeated hammerings and the loud protesting grumble of sheet metal on the move ensured that the whole hotel was wide awake. It sounded as if Zeus himself was not having much success in his bid to join the space race down in the basement. Whoever, whatever it was evidently didn’t want to go wherever whoever intended it and was putting up a good fight in the process. In the dining room we were treated to the melodic whines of metal grinders and a display of golden sparks arcing into the bright blue sky while long lengths of piping made their way unaided mysteriously to and fro past the windows. There was no hot water.

Rupert Brooke's Grave

THE SPORADES

ON SKYROS...

On the second evening I drove to Tris Boukes Bay to find Rupert Brooke’s grave. The tale of the poet’s death, at the age of 27, is one of the great tragedies of the First World War. By 1915 Brooke was achieving fame and notoriety as one of Britain’s leading aesthetes. Through friends like W B Yeats, who described him as “the most handsome man in Britain”, Bernard Shaw, and Violet Asquith – daughter of the Prime Minister, Brooke was well connected. Following his return from the South Seas in the summer of 1914, Churchill offered him a commission in the Royal Naval Division, sensing that he may “prove of value to the empire”. Brooke was joined by his close school friend, the composer Dennis Browne. He wrote “I’ve joined the Navy, a more English thing to do, I think…So here I am, a Sub-Lieutenant RNVR, if you please for land service…I rather despise the Army. Britannia rules the waves.”
In October that year, Brooke saw action briefly in the evacuation of Antwerp before returning to England where he joined “A” Company, of the Hood Battalion, in Blandford Camp, commanded by Bernard Freyberg who went on to win a Victoria Cross and defend Crete in 1941. Among other officers in the Company was one of the Prime Minister’s sons, Arthur “Oc” Asquith. Following a visit by the King, escorted by the Churchills, Violet Asquith and her mother, the Battalion marched to Shillingstone Station on 27th February 1915 and embarked on the Union Castle line ship “Grantully Castle” for Gallipoli, as part of the British Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, the following day. The battalion spent ten days in Cairo, four weeks later, where Brooke suffered sunstroke and contracted dysentery before steaming on towards the Aegean and Lemnos, the forward base for the landings. On 17th April, the ships carrying the Royal Naval Division anchored in the silvery expanse of Tris Boukes Bay, surrounded by bare low-lying hills whose approaches are guarded by two islets. Brooke, already weak from the illnesses he had contracted in Egypt, was bitten by a mosquito on the lip and succumbed to septicaemia, soon falling desperately ill. He was transferred to the French hospital ship Douguay Trouin on 22nd April where his friend, Dennis Browne watched over him and on St George’s Day 1915, wrote,
“…I sat with Rupert. At 4 o’clock he became weaker, and at 4.46 he died, with the sun shining all round his cabin, and the cool sea breeze blowing through the door and the shaded windows. No one could have wished for a quieter or a calmer end than in that lovely bay, shielded by the mountains and fragrant with sage and thyme.”
The landings were due to take place two days later, the Battalion must have been in a high state of readiness. The Company officers chose to bury Brooke where he had rested a few days earlier in the shade of an olive tree, remarked upon by Browne as “weeping above his head”. It took two hours for the burial party to make their way up the dry river bed to the grave and at 11 o’clock that night Rupert Brooke was laid to rest in a grave lined with sprigs of olive and sage. The Commanding Officer, Lieutenant Colonel Quilter, threw a wreath of olive branches in over the coffin, three volleys were fired and the party made their way back to ship and on to Gallipoli.
The tragic circumstances of Brooke’s death touched a national chord – as it still does to this day. It was felt at the very highest levels, “he was all that one would wish England’s noblest sons to be” wrote Churchill in The Times of 26th April. Brooke, and his poetry, embodied a national fervour that was buoyed with optimism and hope of victory: the war was young - the failings of Gallipoli and the horror of trench warfare all lay ahead.
I found the “corner of a foreign field that is for ever England” after some time, off the track to a small naval base at the bottom of the valley. It sits brilliant, white and alone in the olive grove; beautifully tended with freshly painted deep green railings and a simple marble cross laid over it with a Tudor rose, for England, carved at its centre. Goats and sheep grazed contentedly and lay quietly round about. In the still evening, I paused for a moment, to inhale the tranquillity and sounds of the island around me. It was hard not to be moved, on my own in this special spot which all those years earlier must have been the scene of enormous grief for a young life so full of hope eradicated in so meaningless a way at such a poignant time. Dennis Browne was killed in action six weeks later. His body was never recovered.

The Monastery of Profit Ilias, Hydra

THE ARGO-SARONIC ISLANDS

Whichever of the two islands of Hydra and Spetses you first talk of will never permit you to do justice to the latter. Their history is joint, in many ways so similar that you risk inadvertently raising one up on a pedestal, at the same time shuffling the other into a darkened corner. The story of 19th century Spetses and Hydra is a great opera of enormous wealth, dashing seafarers, courageous women and revolution. A story that weaves itself deep into the fabric of the birth robes of modern Greece. In the early 1800s, the merchants of Hydra and Spetses had grown wealthy and their fleets accordingly as the islanders became expert at running the Royal Naval blockade of Napoleonic France. It was the fleets of Hydra, Spetses, Psara and Kassos that provided the backbone of the Greek Navy in the revolution against the Ottoman Empire. As Wellington observed, control of the sea in the revolt was a crucial factor. The Ottoman fleet though large and well gunned was outdated and not as agile as the Greek fleet which, made up of smaller faster cargo vessels many of whom sailed under the Russian flag, took advantage of their size to harry and attack the ottoman fleet by night. The ships had been legitimately armed for many years with up to twenty cannon to repel Algerian and Tunisian pirates. An irony is that a lot of the Ottoman fleet was manned by Greek sailors pressed into service from the islands, a practise the Ottomans, and Venetians before them, had maintained for centuries. While not condoning, it may perhaps be easier to understand the subsequent destruction of the fleets of Kassos and Psara by the Ottomans in 1824 as a means of reducing a significant thorn in their side.
The Greek Navy was an assorted gathering of ships, as you would expect of a commercial fleet that had been brought together under such circumstances. It was largely supplied by private individuals donating their own vessel or vessels to the cause and organised into island squadrons. Its first commander was a Hydriot from Evvia called Andreas Miaoulis, a corn trader who was arrested by the British and brought before Nelson in 1805 while running corn to France and Spain. Miaoulis, one of the greatest naval heroes of the War of Independence, successfully relieved the siege at Missolonghi, led the fleet against the Ottomans following the massacres of Chios, curtailed the further progress of the Sultan’s fleet after the devastation of Psara and continually harassed the Egyptian fleet. He eventually handed over command to Admiral Thomas Cochrane, 10th Earl Dundonald in 1827 when the Great Powers of Britain, France and Russia overtly intervened in the uprising.
One such individual to donate ships was a Spetsiot woman of Hydriot descent, Laskarina Bouboulina, probably one of the most inspiring and colourful figures of the entire war. Born inside a prison in Constantinople where her father languished following the unsuccessful 1769 Orloff-led uprising against the Ottomans, revolution ran in Bouboulina’s blood. With a large pistol tucked in her waist band, Bouboulina was a striking woman with a classically handsome face. She married twice, on both occasions to sea captains who lost their lives, courageously, to North African pirates. By 1811 she was a considerably wealthy widow and mother of seven children; a sharp businesswoman, she sought partnerships in many Spetsiot vessels and grew here wealth considerably. In 1816, the Ottomans tried to confiscate her assets and riches stating that they were the ill-gotten gains of her second husband, Bouboulis, who held the honorary rank of captain in the Russian Navy during the Russo-Turkish war of the 1770s. A short period of exile in the Crimea, a personal plea and audience with the mother of Sultan Mahmud II, Valide-Sultana, saved Bouboulina’s assets and she was able to return to Spetses where preparations for the forthcoming revolution were getting under way through the growing underground movement of the Filiki Etairia (Friendly Societies). Bouboulina personally financed a lot of the preparations: smuggling arms, training and equipping soldiers – her “brave lads” as she referred to them, and commissioning a flagship, The Agamemnon, a fine looking 100ft corvette armed with 18 cannon. The Ottoman license for The Agamemnon’s construction can be seen in Bouboulina’s house today. Construction of the ship was completed under the Ottomans’ noses after Bouboulina successfully bribed the inspecting officials and forced informers into exile.
The official date the War of Independence was declared was 25th March 1821 when Bishop Germanos raised the blue and white of the Greek flag in Old Patras; the Kalamatans lay claim that they raised their flag in February of that year and the Spetsiots maintain that Bouboulina raised her flag, an eagle holding an anchor in one claw and a phoenix rising from the flames in the other, to the Agamemnon’s masthead on 13th March of that year. She sailed her fleet of eight ships, five of her own (commanded by her sons), to take part in the blockade of Nafplion, at the head of the Argolic Gulf. From the outset, the fearless Bouboulina led from the front, courageous in the face of the heavy and sustained Ottoman defence, cajoling her “brave lads” on with the famous cry, “Are you women then and not men? Forward!” Bouboulina was involved in many sieges and naval actions of the war; a figurehead and source of inspiration for many, earning the title of Kapetanissa, Lady-Captain and Magali Kyria or Great Lady. She developed a rapport with another great character of the conflict, General Theodoros Kolokotronis. Kolokotronis was a Blucheran figure who led the klephts (wild men of the mountains), often pictured with large white whiskers in a flamboyant plumed helmet. By 1823 Bouboulina was virtually bankrupt and two years later, through her association with Koloktronis who had been imprisoned on Hydra, she found herself discredited and under house arrest as the Greek factions fought amongst themselves. The swashbuckling heroine was shot dead during a heated inter-family feud on Spetses in 1825; Ottoman fortunes were beginning to lift as the oppressor took advantage of the Greek’s in-fighting and the Peloponnese was re-invaded by disciplined Egyptian troops.

On the bridge of High Speed 1

Passage from Syros to Siphnos

The last time I had been in Piraeus at 5 am was in August, ten years previously on my first trip to Siphnos; then the café I was sat in had been piled high with backpackers rucsacs and I chatted with a 23-year old Australian guy called Jonesy who was on his way to Ios and complained vociferously about the state of Greek roads, before the Athens Olympics changed everything. 5 am is the devil’s hour and that September morning the port was uninvitingly cold, grey and empty - save a little dog that would have given its right paw to cock its leg on my bag. I had to arrive early as, thanks to Ioanna, I had been invited to join Captain Nikolas Katradis on the bridge of High Speed 1. The High Speeds are the summer work horses of the Aegean and each ship roughly clocks up 120,000 miles in an eight month season, transporting millions of happy passengers, cars, lorries and holidaymakers smoothly across the Aegean at an average speed of 33 knots; that is the equivalent of sailing 5 ½ times round the world in 3,600 hours, the four 16 cylinder 30,000 horsepower engines turning at 1000 revolutions a minute and burning about 16 million litres of marine gas in the process. Incredibly, these enormous bright red-liveried twin-hulled ships which can carry over 700 passengers and more than 50 vehicles, only weigh about 780 tons a piece.
High Speed 1’s bridge was a measured haven of order, with a large brass chronometer, crucifix and icon of St Nicholas, the patron saint of sailors, screwed to the bulkhead and a basil bush in one corner. Sat in his high chair with a dazzling array of electronics laid before him, Captain Nikolas swivelled round to greet me; surrounded by all the technology that is required to drive the latest in marine design, he looked remarkably like Captain Kirk off the Starship Enterprise. The sea was in his blood he told me and after graduating from the Nautical Academy in Piraeus had been an officer for many years on bulk carriers bulk carriers working the Latin America routes. I asked him about the crucifix, icon and basil.
“This is our tradition, all Greek ships have these. You have to believe in God to do this job,” he told me. “There are three things you cant fight: fire, sea and a woman. You have to learn to control them and sometimes, many times, you need God’s help. If a seaman does not believe in God then, Mr Harry Potter, he is not a seaman. Twenty years ago I was on a ship and we got caught in a Force 9 gale. My God, I have never seen anything like it in all my life. We had a good Captain, he was old, 65 years old but he had been a Captain for more than twenty years. He knew the sea. For one whole week this storm raged. He said to me, Nik, you have the con, I cannot take this any more and he went to his cabin. After a week and we were still afloat, he came back onto the bridge and all he said was ‘thanks God’ for the luck that we had passed through this terrible time. God gave me the courage that week, you need to believe.” I was introduced to the First Officer, Harris, who sat alongside Captain Nikolas throughout the journey. The 75 mile trip, he explained, would take three hours and the weather for the passage, Piraeus Traffic had informed him, was good, Force 1 – 2 at maximum. “You are lucky”, Harris said, “this time of year we can get high winds and like any woman, she gets difficult to handle with the wind up her backside.”
Of the 32 crew, there were 5 engineers and Vassilis, the chief engineer, sat behind the Captain monitoring the ships engines. He looked the part in blue overalls and despite the fact they were immaculately pressed, Vasssilis had the smell of the grease gun about him. I searched in vain for a pile of old rags and a dripping oil can, the badges of his office, but in this hi-tech environment found none. The 29-year old Harris had served as an officer on Greek Naval destroyers before running coal from Columbia to the UK; he preferred the routine that ferries gave him, “I like to know how I can plan my time,” he added.
At 7.30 on the dot, we quietly slipped our moorings and with an indelicate belch of black smoke glided away from the quay, following in the wake of High Speed 3 out into the Great Harbour pushing past clutches of diminutive fishing boats already busy at work. The sun forced powerful shafts of burning golden light through the cloud in a spectacular kaleidoscopic display which framed the jagged silhouette of the dramatic distant Athenian mountains. There was no ship’s wheel, Captain Nikolas guided the ship expertly from a tiny console in the arm of his chair: he could have been playing a computer game he made it look so simple. Clear of the breakwater, the throttles were opened up, Vassilis monitored his engines, and we set course for Seriphos, the first port of call. The autopilot was switched on and a steward was called for the first coffee of the morning.
Stopping at Seriphos, Captain Nikolas turned his ship into the harbour on a pin head. “If the weather is against me and I get it wrong, we will be driven into the harbour wall,” but there was not a breath of wind. Watching form the bridge wing he told me, “ we have only ten minutes maximum to offload all the passengers and fifty cars and lorries before we start to load the same again. We have to be fast and good, huh? There is no room for mistakes on these routes. It’s a busy time for us.” The crew had been at sea solidly for seven months now, they were all looked grey and tired. Captain Nikolas told me he was looking forward to a holiday with his family in the mountains, “salt may run in my veins but you can have too much of a good thing,” he laughed.

The Naxian Lions on Delos

DELOS

To mark the importance of this visit perhaps I should have chartered a magnificently gilded regal launch to convey me to Delos, but being habitually short of the odd Euro, I ended up making the 30 minute crossing on the “Orca”, a utilitarian square box of an excursion boat, built for practicality rather than elegance. From the moment I set foot on Delos, I could tell my pilgrimage was going to be anything other than spiritual: it was like arriving at Victoria Station on a Monday morning. There were people everywhere and I watched in slight amazement as tour groups criss-crossed the little island like planes in a stack at Heathrow. We joined a tour led by a rather grand lady who told us she preferred Florida to Greece but that for three months this helped her pay the bills and could we please hurry along as she had another group at midday. “What do you mean you have lost your ticket, Madame?!” she snarled at an old American lady from Arkansas.
We were rushed through market places, past temples, along Naxian lioned terraces, stood in lavatories, marvelled briefly at mosaic floor exhibits, glanced at houses, poked into shops and addressed in the amphitheatre. It all happened at such speed that I figured you could enter a site on the English tour, listen to the French and leave with the Italians.
When we were told that the French had drained the Sacred Lake, the group tutted disapprovingly as the guide intended her laconic comments be received. This was ignorance. By the time the French arrived on Delos, the lake was nothing more than a disease-ridden marsh breeding malaria mosquitoes: the lake had to be drained. Conditions on Delos were not easy for the archaeologists, prompting Gustave Larroumet to write, “Delos is horrific”. Without the French initiative and investment, often private contribution, Delos would be nothing more than a few tussocks of burnt grass as the archaeologists laboured away with a workforce of 160 men, aided by engineers, the military, four railway tracks and 50 trucks disposing of up to 800 metres cubed of rubble a day. The excavation of Delos was a considerable undertaking and because there was not so much as a crumb of food or an inhabitant on the island, the excavation of Delos was also the making of Mykonos.

Mykonos - like no other island in Greece!

MYKONOS

Mykonos is like no other island in Greece. There is no island in the entire Archipelago which has a shop dedicated to the sale of every brand and flavour of condom known to man and no island in the entire Archipelago where drag queens wander the streets freely by night, or day; except Mykonos, of course. The only Starbucks coffee shop outside Athens is on Mykonos. That is how different Mykonos is from the rest of Greece. Mykonos is like that peculiar relative every family has who insists on appearing at weddings and dresses in a particularly alternative style; except that everyone loves Mykonos!
Mykonos is gay, it’s straight, it’s early, it’s late: it’s whatever you want it to be, but whatever that is, there is one thing Mykonos certainly is not and never will be: dull. Arriving in Mykonos’s charmless new port, High Speed 4 was shaded by the ten-deck toppled skyscrapered stern of a mammoth cruise liner. Cruise liners are nothing new to Mykonos, they have been coming for over a century, the first cruises being organised by the French Tour du Monde and the Revue Générale des Sciences. Disembarking, I immediately felt wanted as I, along with my fellow passengers, was forced to run the familiar gauntlet of pushing and shoving placard waving hoteliers desperate to fill every last bed on the island. Mykonos is a fifth the size of Zakinthos with, at 10,000 inhabitants, a quarter of the population and yet still it receives a million visitors a year. But Mykonos with its beautiful people, designer boutiques and chic eateries, unlike its bigger Ionian counterpart, has somehow retained the charm and style of its narrow lanes and blinding white houses and churches, pushing its unseemly tourist venues out to its extremities in the south. Property prices on Mykonos are some of the most expensive in Greece.
I however wasn’t in need of the bed pushing touts as I was staying in a family run bolt-hole owned by an old friend, Christina, who, when I arrived, was at sorts because Patrick, her African grey parrot, had discovered the freedom of the skies and done a Ronnie Biggs from Wandsworth Prison.
It was the French who inadvertently instigated the phenomenon of Mykonos at the end of the 19th century. The French School of Archaeology in Athens, after signing an agreement with the Greek Government in 1873, arrived in moustachioed, solar-topied and waist-coated splendour to begin the excavations on the neighbouring deserted island of Delos that would reveal the sanctuary of Apollo and other rich discoveries that people now take for granted. In antiquity, Delos was the most important of all the islands and Mykonos lay inconsequentially in its shadows. How the tables have turned. Just as the French archaeologists used Mykonos as a start point to visit Delos, so too does everybody else to this day. Not long after the archaeologists started to make their discoveries on Delos and the cruise ships began to arrive loaded with educationally minded tourists, followed by rich Athenians keen to escape the city, artists, poets and writers in search of seclusion and finally, the rest of us succumbed to Mykonos’s undeniable charms. In the old days, I suspect the island was more of a pleasant retreat gathering to its bosom an eclectic and varied bunch but now it has become a sophisticated mecca of pleasure and still it attracts an even more diverse assortment of characters to its laissez-faire shores. Mykonos, for that reason is so “un-Greek”; it is so tolerant of behaviour and people that would not be accepted anywhere else in Greece. Contrary to popular perception, the Greeks are a very conservative society. I am not saying that Mykonos is spoilt, Lawrence Durrell believed thirty years earlier that it was already “finished, crowded out”, but it was with a slight sadness that I noted it seemed to have changed and matured. The place had become more business-like and in a few years it will be possible to imagine the island’s capital, Hora, stretching the entire length of the west coast from Korfos Bay in the south to Tourlos Bay in the north. The saddest sign of this march of time was the demise of the Yacht Club.
The Yacht Club was nothing more than a neglected old concrete garage with no doors, a record player that could survive a nuclear blast, a blocked bog and a few battered lights swinging above a well-stocked bar on the edge of the old port. It catered for the hardened party-goer who genuinely believed that the night may never end. It only shut when the final glass was emptied and the last drunk staggered out and fell heavily asleep against a bollard. I never saw so much as a rigging line or a commodore’s burgee in the place, but its doors were now firmly shut, no doubt to re-open as a sparkling leather-trimmed money-spinning chill-zone for the rich and beautiful. But Durrell also noted that “however many tourists come with their chatter and their litter, little Mykonos will not let the stranger down.” How splendid that things don’t change much.