We were sitting in the Kougioumoutsakis corner café at the beach end of the street called Dimokratias the other day, just across the road from the Archeological Museum, and something happened that reminded us of one of the really nice things about the culture here. It wasn’t anything spectacular, just a small ‘event’ that illustrated just how much respect is shown to older people in this society.

We like it in the Kougioumoutsakis, but it isn’t always easy to sit there because it’s a small café that, like most of them, has its regulars, and if they’re all in at the same time, we can’t find a table and so have to move on and go get our coffee somewhere else. It’s not a hard decision; well, actually, it can be, because we have a half a dozen or so favourite cafés now in the town and making the decision can be more difficult than you’d think. We usually manage though.

So, there we were, having arrived when a table was empty, and thus we were able to sit down and pretty soon were in conversation with a few of the regulars. When we first used to sit there the talk was all about where we were from, where we now lived, how we learned the language, whether we live here all year round, who we bought our house from, and so it goes on. In fact, the man we bought our house from was very well known in the area. His name was Giorgos Anifantakis, and he had a nickname ‘Rebetis’ that everyone knew him by. When we were going through the round of making new acquaintances when we first moved here, we only had to tell those who enquired that we’d bought the house from ‘Rebeti’ and they all knew not only him, but the house too. 

In fact, he died rather unexpectedly just last week, as it happens. We attended his funeral here in the village and it was standing room only, there were that many people present. The circumstances surrounding his death were tragic too, as he’d fallen asleep in bed, a cigarette still burning, and his apartment had caught fire. The day he died there were reports in the local media showing a fire truck parked outside his home, but the stories were light on detail, merely stating that a 70 year-old man had died in his bed and how tragic it was, plus warnings about how dangerous it is to smoke in bed, as would be expected. The photo of the fire appliance was taken at night and so it wasn’t immediately apparent as to the location. Only as we spoke to locals at the café the following day did someone tell us whom it was that had died, and it came as a shock. Anyway, I’m going off course a little in mentioning Giorgo’s death, but still it leaves us (and many others) in shock, sadly. 

While we sat enjoying both the company and the coffee, a car pulled up at the kerb and a young man jumped out of the driver’s seat, ran around to the back door, opened it and began helping an evidently frail older gentleman to get out of the vehicle. Instantly the young waiter from the café/bar ran over to offer assistance and the older man was aided to shuffle with some difficulty towards one off the occupied tables on the terrace. Now, this table already had four or five people sitting around it and, on the face of it, it looked like there was no room for an extra person to join them. There occurred a commotion, though, as everyone shifted along a bit, a chair was grabbed from a neighbouring table, after the person grabbing it had enquired from the couple sitting there if that chair was surplus to requirements, and it was inserted in the gap that had been created by the already present group, and the elderly arrival given every assistance needed to get himself installed upon it at the table. Once installed, those around the table, who included a couple of middle aged women, a younger man, and two other guys who may well have been the husbands of the women, all took their turns in getting up (where necessary) embracing the older fellow with warm hugs and double cheek kisses and making him feel a lot like royalty, it seemed to us.

Now, you might be forgiven for thinking, ‘what’s so special about that then?’ But this kind of occurrence is not rare, and it well illustrates how people treat their seniors here in Greece. We see it time and again, how people take great care to show the utmost respect to their old folk and accord them almost VIP treatment wherever they go. It’s no coincidence that there are still very few old folks’ homes in Greece, because it’s anathema to most Greeks to abdicate their responsibility toward them. There are, of course, cases where medical aid is needed on a daily basis for some who’ve become infirm, or maybe suffering from dementia but, by and large, a Greek family surrounds its old folk with round the clock care as a matter of honour. And before anyone reaches for the mouse to send a message slating me for knocking what happens in UK families, I’m not knocking my compatriots, OK? We’re all products of the culture in which we’re nurtured and, as such, that’s why we do the things that we do. The difference in the two cultures is, however, evident in this aspect of society.

A few metres up the lane from our garden gate there lives an old lady called Sofia, I’ve mentioned her now and then on this blog. She’s a tiny frail old thing who always dresses entirely in black and is never to be seen without her babushka, or head scarf (in Greek typically a Tsembéri, or Mantili), tied neatly and firmly with a knot under her leathery chin. She has a daughter and granddaughter both of whom live down in the town, six kilometres from here, yet they never fail to come up every day, driving up the extremely steep slope to Sofia’s front door, and bring her food, clean and tidy her modest home, and sometimes patiently take her for a short walk (which requires in itself a lot of patience, because Sofia can hardly put one foot in front of the other more that once every couple of minutes) around a couple of blocks to help her get out of the house and get some much needed exercise. Sofia’s house has no outdoor area at all. Her front door is also the main light source for her lounge/dining room/ kitchen, the only other being a small window over her kitchen sink. The door opens directly on to the steep street outside, and it’s at this door that she puts down scraps for the local cat population, five or six of which often gather at the same time each day, safe in the knowledge that she’ll emerge and place a crumpled piece of aluminium foil on the ground with some leftovers in it for them to fight over.

In the UK I’d say that the majority of people in Sofia’s situation and state of health (she has mild dementia) would long ago been placed in a ‘home.’ Sofia is adamant that she’s not going anywhere, and her progeny accept this.

Back on Rhodes, in the village of Kalathos, where a lot of our Greek friends lived during our fourteen years on that island, there were four siblings of a similar age to Yvonne and I, three brothers and a sister, who cared for their mother in her own home after their father had died in his nineties. Petros, who worked six months a year as a night porter in a hotel in nearby Pefkos, was in his mid sixties when he’d forsake his comfy bed and loyal wife to go up into the village and give his sister some respite by sitting all night (when he wasn’t working) with his mother, who herself by this time was pushing 100 years of age, and resolutely refused to have a foreign live-in helper in the house. A lot of families do employ, for example, Bulgarian women, whose family all still live back in their home country, to live in as 24/7 carers and housekeepers for their aging parents, who can’t be left on their own. Petros’ mother, when they tried this arrangement, made life so miserable for the carers that none of them could stick it, and each time a new one was found they’d never last more than a couple of weeks before handing in their resignation. So, the siblings, despite themselves moving from middle age to the next stage in their lives, took it upon themselves to work shifts around the clock to keep their mother secure in her own home. She needed to get up and go to the toilet five or six times during a night, and Petros had to assist his mother through the process just as his sister did when it was her turn. I never heard either of them complain. Despite the pressure on them, and the hardship of keeping it all together, they considered it their unquestionable duty to provide care for the woman who’d nurtured them throughout their childhood.

It’s still a very family-oriented society here, and it’s born out by the fact that, as I mentioned in another post recently, Greek people generally never lose contact with their roots. They all love and  cherish their home village, and their parents’ or grandparents’ generation have often never moved house in their entire lives. They still live in the house where they were born, and will in all probability die there too. It’s no accident that, as an upshot of this, crime levels in villages such as ours are extremely low, because everyone knows everyone. Kids can play safely out of sight of their parents’ watchful eyes, since everywhere in the village they’re surrounded by neighbours who serve as their extended family.

In short, it’s this kind of society that produces a deep calm and contentment among folk who often have very little materially. It bears out the truth of the old adage, ‘the best things in life are free.’

Photo time…

Above: Two photos taken as we were going into the Chocolicious café near the beach on Sunday morning. The winds continue to be mainly from the south, making any cleanup operation difficult, because what progress they may make can easily be undone within the space of a few hours if the winds get up again.

Photo at the top of this post: Taken during an hour-long walk in the area surrounding the village this past couple of days. The anemones have been late this year, I assume owing to the very dry December, although the rains have certainly made up for that during January, and the reservoir is filling nicely, causing a lot of farmers to repeat the phrase “Doxa to Theo!” frequently. It was during the same walk that I spied this lovely Painted Lady butterfly warming itself in the sunlight…

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I don’t know whether it’s to do with the jet stream, climate change, or that it’s simply one of those winters, but the wind has been in the south far more often than is the norm recently, and when you couple that with the fact that it’s reached gale force a few times, the result has been disaster for a few of the waterfront restaurants down in the town, including our beloved Konaki, run by our good friend Yianni, he of the declining tooth population.

The photo at the top of this post shows just how close to the sea Yianni’s place is, and in the foreground, where you see all that sand, well that’s actually a paved terrace normally. All that sand was deposited there by an angry sea on Thursday, January 22nd. During that day the sea charged right through the restaurant and on to to the road behind it, which subsequently had to be closed for a day or two as a result…

Bear in mind that I took these photos during the following day, Friday January 23rd, as the restaurant and bar owners along the front were attempting a cleanup operation. When we reached the door of the Konaki, this was what we saw…

What you’re looking at there is a pile of sand at least a metre high, and it was all deposited there by the sea. As we stood and gaped at this awful scene, Yiannis approached us from the restaurant building across the road. He looked extremely flustered and very dirty, as he was in the middle of trying to shovel all those tons of sand back on to the beach. What he needed in there was a mini JCB, but he didn’t have one and, anyway, whilst it may have helped with the sand extraction, it would have caused other issues with the structure of the ‘pergola,’ as they call these covered terraces along the back of the beach.

We offered to roll our sleeves up and to help, but he had a team of family members and friends all doing what they could and, although he thanked us for our willing spirit, we weren’t dressed for the kind of work that was involved. We felt so bad for him because his is one of the few restaurants along the back of the beach that stays open all winter, and we and many of our friends go there often on bright sunny days during these off-season months. We asked him if he was used to this kind of problem during the winter months, to which he replied (as we’d expected and suspected):

“No, no. We often have the sea creep under the polythene screens during winter storms, but never in thirty years of running this place have I seen this. Sand a metre deep in the middle of the taverna floor is unheard of.” We were so, so sad to hear him say this, because he was close to tears as he spoke. When you consider that there are also electrical sockets in there powering his fridges, where he keeps drinks and fresh fish, plus a house phone and the cash register, as well as a mini sound system that he uses to play music for his diners, and all that had been swamped by seawater and sand, I dreaded to think of what it was all going to cost him.

Where you see all that sand is usually where there would be the tables and chairs, replete with blue and white check tablecloths. The restaurant floor usually looks like this…

Since it was on the Friday when we had this conversation with Yianni, I thought that maybe he’d have it all cleaned up and be able to open again by Sunday. How wrong I was. He told us that he didn’t think that was likely, and he was right. Just a few days later the sea became just as agitated as it had been on that Thursday, and all the cleanup work that the restaurateurs had done was undone again. In fact, I’m typing this on Thursday January 29th and the southerly winds are again up to gale force. It’s heartbreaking because those who do open at this time of the year are losing a lot of income, plus the cost of the repairs after the cleanup will no doubt be considerable. As of today the forecast is still for the winds to remain in the south for days to come, which is extremely bad news indeed. To have the winds in the south for as long as they have been this past couple of weeks is unprecedented.

Here are the other photos I took after the first storm…

What’s doubly frustrating is the fact that between the storms, the weather has been like this…

OK, so one of the above shots shows the sea creating a spume of spray along the promenade, but that doesn’t cause all that much bother there. The beach where all the damage has been done is a few hundred yards to the right of this area. Spare a thought for the likes of Yianni, and let’s hope that the winds will soon swing around to their prevailing direction, which is north to northwest, soon.

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Well folks, if it makes you feel any better, the weather here’s diabolical at the moment. OK, so we don’t get this kind of weather too often, but when we do, it throws it all at us, and that’s what it’s doing today. The prevailing winds here are north to north west, which means that the western end of the island as well as the north coast in general tend to see more of the bad weather during the winter than we do, but today the wind’s blowing south, south east, so it’s coming straight up the valley and hitting our veranda full on. The sea down on Ierapetra seafront is definitely crashing over the promenade.

Usually, when it rains here in winter, we can still sit out on the veranda to drink our coffee in the mornings, because the rain seldom gets the place wet at all. When the wind’s in this direction though, the veranda gets soaked, and we even have droplets of water on the mosquito nets in front of our French windows…

Nice, eh? It’s one of those days when you simply need to keep the house warm and be sure to have a good book in front of you. Either that or write a blog post. It’s a bit of a stark contrast with this time last year, when we had three weeks of unbroken sunshine in January and temperatures around the 20ºC mark for most of the time. Outside at the moment it’s around 11ºC, which for us is flippin’ freezing.

Still, in general, such weather doesn’t usually last long, and tomorrow the forecast is sunny and 17º, so I guess we can’t complain too much. We heat our hot water using our roof-mounted solar heating system, the kind you see on top of just about every house in Greece. You know the setup, there’s a glass panel (which the Greeks amusingly call the kathrefti, meaning ‘mirror’) and, above that, the horizontally mounted cylinder, which the locals call the ‘boiler,’ and that’s exactly how they pronounce it by the way, as it’s an anglicisation. A lot of people also have an electric immersion heater element fitted inside the cylinder, so that on days like this you can flip a switch in your fuse panel on the wall and heat the water electrically. We opted not to bother with that and, to be honest, most winters (and this is now our seventh in this house) we’ve never experienced more than a handful of days on which we didn’t have any hot water in the taps. I’ve a sneaking suspicion though that todays’ going to be one of those days.

I’ve got to say, too, that the local farmers (and that’s what most people are in this area) are loving it. For the reservoir to fill up to an acceptable level, and one that gives them the chance of having enough water to get them through the coming summer, they often tell us that however much rain we get during the winter months, it’s never enough. In the previous post you’ll have seen the photos I took showing the reservoir below us, and maybe you can’t tell, especially if you’re not from around these parts, but it’s still only a little more than half-full at the moment, having reached its lowest ever level by the time we got to the back end of last year. The current level, though, is at least evidence that this winter’s rains have been giving it a helping hand, and it’s hoped that if we continue to get a little rain every week then it’ll be full by the time the summer hits us with a vengeance. Judging by how much rain we’ve been getting this past few years though, it’s doubtful. 

Mind you, as I sit here typing this and gazing up at the scene outside through the French windows, I could be forgiven for thinking that I ought to consider following Noah’s example when it comes to building projects.

Now, with all this talk about rain, you’re probably (if you’re not comatose by now) wondering why this post is called ‘furry, fluffy floors.’ That has to do with the locals’ quaint habit of covering every available surface with shaggy rugs and throws from December through March every year. We first came across this custom during our 14 years on Rhodes. Friends’ homes, whom we’d frequented often during the summer months, all of which have cool ceramic tiled floors, or maybe that polished crushed marble effect that seems to have gone out of fashion in recent times, seldom sported any floor coverings, since to walk barefoot on such floors during a Greek summer is a way of cooling oneself down a little. Come winter, though, it’s ‘all change.’

It seemed to us that just about everyone had a stash somewhere of really shaggy rugs and blankets and, once the evenings get a bit cooler and the winter months arrive, out of that ‘stash’ they’ll extract all these brightly coloured shaggy whatnots and throw them all over the floors and furniture. The first time we visited Mihali and Soula’s house back on Rhodes during the first winter we were there it came as a bit of a shock. Their normally sparse lounge and dining room was now knee deep in shaggy pile and fluff. Not only that, but the normally subdued colour palette was now visually smashed to smithereens because all their ‘throws’ and rugs were in garish colours, from bright orange, through chocolate brown, to red and pink stripes, aaaargh.

Not many Greek homes don’t have a ‘tzaki,’ or open hearth as we’d call it in the UK, on which they burn copious quantities of wood, the heat from which largely just goes straight up the chimney. In order to get any benefit at all from it you have to sit right on top of it, barely escaping third degree burns on your tootsies. So they’ll happily chuck a very, very shaggy rug on the floor right up to the edge of the hearth, in many cases. Why there aren’t more house fires from stray embers and sparks is beyond me.

A couple of years ago, as the summer was drawing to a close, one of our friends, whom I shall call Despoina, came up to lunch with her hubby Manoli. As they were leaving, she told us that she was going to give us something, because she couldn’t bear to see our house without its share of shagpile for the winter months. Despite our trying our level best to express our desire not to have such a ‘luxury,’ she still rocked up a couple of days later with a huge two metre square rug with pile that must have been at least three inches deep. Had it actually been sheepskin, it would have needed about six sheep, maybe more, to make one of that size. The thing weighed a ton and I’m not exaggerating, and she proceeded to march into our lounge and cast it upon the floor, all the time looking sideways at us with that ‘aren’t you grateful that I’ve saved you from getting frostbite in your toes this winter’ look in her eyes.

Once she’d gone, and we knew that she wouldn’t probably be dropping by again for at least a number of weeks, we immediately took it up again and tried to fold it up and put it away somewhere. That was when another conundrum struck us. Where on earth do you store such a thing? It would have totally consumed one section of our wardrobes, even if we’d had one to spare, which we didn’t. In the end, almost wrecking my hands and sustaining several blisters in the process, I attacked it with some robust dressmaker’s scissors and cut the thing in two. At least then we were able to stuff the two parts into huge heavy-duty polythene bags, the type you get from a dry cleaners. I don’t know where we got them from, but at least we had them. We learned that they all got these rugs and throws dry cleaned every spring before stowing them away for the summer, but exactly where they found to stow all of the dozen or so that most of them kept is still a mystery to us.

We eventually quietly disposed of the one that Despoina had given us by leaving the two parts beside a wheelie bin, the standard way of passing unwanted yet still serviceable household items and clothes on in these parts. We just had to hope that she wouldn’t remember it, or indeed pass by that particular bin before someone had spotted it and rescued it for their own place.

Here’s a nice shot from outside a garden centre in Ierapetra a week or so ago…

Yes, that’s right, they’re all cyclamen.

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I went for a brief power walk last evening, which involved me going just a few hundred metres north of the village and then back again. It was while I was standing very still, gazing at the huge sweeping valley below me, extending all the way around the mountain opposite to the Bramiana Lake just above Gra Ligia, and westwards to the foothills of the Lasithi Plateau and the high villages of Kalamafka and Anatoli, which are often lost in the mists of low cloud at this time of the year, and which are swathed in gloom from around mid afternoon, owing to the fact that they’re on the eastern slopes of snow-peaked mountains, behind which the sun sinks early in its westward track on those shorter winter days, that I heard my first blackbird song of 2026.

Now, I’m no ornithological scholar, but from a few decades ago, when we used to live in the beautiful Vale of Glamorgan in South Wales UK, both Yvonne and I did become keen birdwatchers, albeit amateur ones. We bought a selection of books to identify wild birds and took great delight in counting the number of species we’d spot during our country walks around the area of the village of St. Athan, where we lived during our final five years in the UK before relocating to Greece in August of 2005.

We’d often arrive back at our modest little bungalow having counted well over 20 different bird species. Out would come the books and – over a cup of hot chocolate – we’d thumb through the pages scanning colour illustrations checking on some of the ID’s and reading up on the habits and habitats of those birds that we’d seen through our pocket binoculars. Among the ones that we’d get especially excited about were the bullfinch and the gold crest and, as each spring approached, we’d scan the skies for the early arrivals of the summer swallow population, maybe swifts and martins too. On frosty winter days we’d thrill to see a flock of fieldfare on the frigid, white-coated grass in a meadow glimpsed through a farm gate near St. Mary Church, for example.

It was during those days that we learned something about the blackbird’s song. Firstly, it’s only the males that sing and, secondly, they only sing in the UK from around mid-February until some time in August. The rest of the year the most sound you’d get from a blackbird would be the brief chatter one would make as it took off from a bush in the hedgerow and flew further away when we’d come too close and disturbed it.

When we first arrived in Rhodes, we’d been excited to learn what bird species we’d be likely to see around us, since the house we were living in was on a rural hillside, far from most human habitation. What surprised us the most was just how many of the species that we’d lived amongst in the UK that were also present in the southern Aegean. Of course, there are some that we see both back on Rhodes and here in Lasithi on a regular basis that we’d never seen in the UK, although, in the far south of the British Isles, some of these species do occasionally venture when it’s a hot summer, which is, of course, becoming more often this past few years. 

Actually, in the valley where we lived for fourteen years on Rhodes, we’d usually hear blackbirds, but seldom see any. They were always present, but for some reason not often within a few hundred metres of our garden, even though we’d regularly hear their song. Here though, for whatever reason, we get them very close to the house, even though we’re on the furthest edge of a tiny village. It’s been my experience that blackbirds sing broadly in the same months here as they do in the UK, but, what I heard last evening suggests that, owing to the warmer climate maybe, they may begin singing a month or so earlier. 

I’m only going on about blackbird song because, if you’re familiar with it, you’ll know that seldom does a songbird sing more beautifully than a blackbird perched atop a large shrub or in a modest tree. The song of the blackbird is one of nature’s most evocative and beautiful gifts for your ears in my humble opinion. Plus, when I hear one sing, if I close my eyes, I can imagine myself back in the rolling green British countryside at the best time of the year. If you can hear the blackbird singing in the UK, then you know that the prospect of spring is either near, or that it’s indeed upon us, or that the early part of the summer has still not passed, leading to the inevitable decline in the weather patterns as the year moves deeper into its second half, meaning that the best of the weather for that year is behind you and the shorter days, falling leaves and eventual bare trees are what you now have to look forward to. As long and the blackbird is singing, you have hope.

Here, OK, so the weather’s a lot more reliable than it is in the UK and, even when the blackbird ceases to sing for another year during August, you still have months of cloudless skies and swim opportunities ahead of you. You still have warm evenings when you can sit beside the sea and enjoy a meal at a restaurant in good company and with a starry sky and vivid moon to keep you company. But every time I hear the blackbird, it gives me fond memories of our lives back in our country of origin. Don’t get me wrong, I have zero regrets about the path we’ve chosen to follow in life, but that doesn’t stop me thinking back to good times in rich, green meadows and pints on country pub lawns.

The blackbird is a good companion. Listen out for him. If you live in the UK, then you may yet have a few weeks to wait until he starts to sing, but, if you live anywhere near us, maybe you too have already heard your first blackbird song of 2026, and have found it a joy, as I did last evening, just as the sun was setting.

Above gallery: Taken at around midday yesterday (January 15th), on the road between our village and Meseleri, at the spot where you can gaze down upon the reservoir and out across the villages of Gra Ligia and Stomio to the sea beyond.

Above gallery: A few shots taken in Myrtos on a blustery and showery day last Sunday.

Above: One of a bougainvillea in the village just a few metres up the hill from our home and two of our terrace in the sunshine just after a shower.

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Today was one of those days that my dear old dad would have described as ‘glorious.’ A cloudless sky, very little wind, and a temperature of around 19-20ºC made it the kind of day that makes us truly love the winter months here on Crete. Not every day’s like this, of course but, to our delight, plenty enough are, because it’s the kind of weather that means you can get out and about without worrying about getting so, so hot and sweaty that you want to hide from the fierceness of the burning sun, as is the case in the summer months. No, today was perfect outdoor weather. So out we went.

I’d recently seen a photo that intrigued me on one of the local Facebook groups for this area. It showed a gorge that was truly spectacular and I was very excited to read that it was less than half an hour away from our front door. All we needed was the right day to go and explore it, and today was that day.

The gorge is called Sarakinas, and it’s situated up in the hills not far above the village of Myrtos, on the coast west of Ierapetra. Head up the road towards Viannou and only a few hundred metres up you’ll see a sign on the right for the village of Mythi. Follow the twisty-turny road to the village, then, once you reach it, there is a sign telling you which way to the gorge, or ‘canyon’ as the sign says. That’s only part of the story though, because you’ll soon arrive at a crossroads where, guess what, there is no sign telling you which way to go now.

As it happened, right beside the road on your left at that junction there’s a modest little café/bar, and emerging from among the few tables was a wizened old guy who looked like a werewolf who’d been drawing his pension for about a century or so. He was about to cross the narrow road in front of us with his walking frame (his ‘pi’ as the Greeks call them), so I opened my door and called out to him, asking him if he knew the right road to take in order to reach the canyon, the Greek word for which is ‘ferangi.’

He seemed delighted that I’d chosen to ask him, and enthusiastically pointed, precariously taking one hand off his frame, to indicate that we were to turn right, and it was only about another kilometre or so to the gorge, where there is a modest parking area. Off we went.

Mythi village, by the way, seemed to us to be quite well kept, with a couple of bars and a taverna or two. Many of the houses looked far too smart to be owned by locals, and so we got the impression that there was possibly a high percentage of foreigners who either lived there, or owned properties that were in all probability rented out via AirBnB or the like. Since it’s only five minutes by road from Myrtos, that figured. I’d imagine that it’s a much less sleepy community in the summertime.

Anyway, it’s easy enough to get to the gorge’s southernmost entry point, which isn’t all that attractive since there’s a large concrete installation right beside the car park, where the sound of water pumps humming is pretty loud. Don’t let that put you off though. Take the walking path that ascends to the left of the pumping station and you’ll soon pass a pretty little taverna above and to the left where the owner was chainsawing logs as we passed and confirmed that we were heading in the right direction for the gorge. In very short order, this is what you’re confronted with…

As you can see from the third of those photos, the path soon peters out and you have to set off on a stony slope (photo 4) down to the dried riverbed, where, as long as you persevere, you’ll soon be rewarded with this…

The ones in the above gallery where Yvonne is in shot give you an idea of the scale of what you’re walking through. Oh yes, it’s impressive all right. We eventually reach the point where, in order to negotiate your way to the upper part of the gorge, you need to become a mountaineer, so we called it a halt there, as those last two photos show above.

Heading back, we were soon descending the path beside the little taverna, just metres above the car park again…

And, not many minutes later, we were strolling along Myrtos seafront, which is very different at this time of the year from how it appears to the tourist during the summer…

If you do find yourselves in our neck of the woods this coming summer, I’d highly recommend a visit to the Sarakinas Gorge, although it’s not for anyone who’s not too steady on their feet, or hasn’t got a sturdy pair of walking boots with them. It would be the height of folly to attempt it in flip flops, OK? You have been warned.

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Firstly, to put your mind at rest here, there will be no mention of native American headdresses, fireman’s outfits or helmeted highway patrol officers prancing around and singing about a young mens’ youth hostel chain; no. We’ve been talking a lot lately about how much more rooted the Greeks are to their place of origin than British people appear to be these days. Everyone in Greece, it seems, is strongly attached to their home village, or even suburb, and – if due to whatever reason they’ve had to move away – they always head back there whenever the opportunity arises; which would, of course, include bank holidays and celebrations, not to mention retirement.

In the UK, it seems to us that people no longer have an attachment to where they were born and raised. Even the fact that properties are referred to as ‘starter homes’ indicates clearly that a house is considered an asset that will be bought and sold as people move through their working lives. People dream of retiring to the coast, or maybe too, of course, somewhere abroad. In Greece, when people reach retirement, if they have moved away, they’ll more often than not want to go home to the village where they were raised, where they still have lots of surviving family and, no doubt too, they’ll still have a property that’s waiting for them to move back in.

If you watch the TV and listen to the conversation on a quiz show between the show’s host and a contestant, invariably they’ll ask the question, ‘Where are you from?’ The reply will always be either the actual place where the person was born and raised and still lives, or, if they’ve moved away, they’ll always be sure to make the point that, although they now live in, say, downtown Athens, they’re actually from – and here they’ll name their home village – with a great degree of pride too, I might add.

Still in Greece, by and large, people are very reluctant to sell a house. Here, that building is their heritage, it’s what keeps them grounded, it goes a long way towards helping them keep mentally and emotionally stable, content. I’ve read articles by psychologists who suggest that people who move home often (and that’s far more common in the UK than it is here in Greece) actually do harm to their sense of wellbeing and emotional stability. It seems that identifying with your place of origin is important for the soul, bringing a stability that is lost to those who simply view a house as an asset to be bought and sold. In short, if you sever your roots, you suffer emotionally, and often end up being much more susceptible to stress and anxiety.

We know of so many cases where Greeks have lived and worked abroad, in such faraway places as the USA, Canada or Australia, yet when they reach retirement they pack up and move back to their place of origin here in Greece. It’s like they have a ‘homing’ instinct that kicks in as soon as circumstances allow for it. We also have a few friends who live in the US, for example, who are almost unbearably torn because they’ve had children in Baltimore, for example, who’ve now grown up and have kids of their own and view themselves as Americans first and Greeks second (if it factors in their thinking at all), and the parents (who’ve now become grandparents) feel an unsolvable heartache, owing to the fact that they’ve retired and want to go back to their little village on the Greek island where they were born, yet fear that doing so will mean not seeing their kids and grandkids from one year to the next. We knew one couple to whom we became quite close during our years on Rhodes who hailed from Kattavia, a tiny village right in the south of the island, and because they couldn’t bear not to see their kids and grandkids, would fly over to Rhodes for maybe four or five months each year, but went back to America every time so that they wouldn’t lose that close contact with their family. The journey was a long one, with a couple of changes of plane, and they did this well into their late seventies, but still couldn’t move back for good, even though that was what their hearts yearned to do.

I’ve lost count, actually, of the number of older couples that we’ve met during our 20 years here in Greece who’ve come back to their ‘katagogi’ as the Greeks call it, which means literally their place of ‘origin’ to live out their golden years among friends and family around whom they grew up. 

A Greek’s attachment to his or her place of origin is all consuming, truly it is. Here still, even though things are slowly changing, there are villages like ours (I say ‘ours’, but you know what I mean, it’s ‘ours’ in the sense that we’ve adopted it as our forever home, but we’re still basically interlopers) whose inhabitants consist of many folk in their seventies through nineties who’ve hardly ever travelled as far as the nearest town, leave alone to another country. Our near neighbours across the lane include Kyria Evangelia, who’s now touching 90, and has never been anywhere more than about 20 kilometres away from the house where she was born, raised, married, brought up three kids, widowed and now potters around in her twilight years. She still lives in the same house, which has never been brought into the 21st century. She still goes outdoors to get from her kitchen to her ‘saloni’ (lounge) and also to her bathroom. The tiny street in which she lives also serves as her hallway.

Yvonne and I have moved house more often during our fifty years of marriage than we’d originally have anticipated. It’s not always been through choice, though and, oddly enough, the longest period of time that we’ve lived anywhere in one place was the 14 years we spent on Rhodes. We’ve never moved simply as a means of climbing the ‘property ladder’ though, or indeed as a means of making more money. In the six years since we arrived here in the village, it’s been a therapeutic experience for us. That stability which we’ve witnessed among our Greek neighbours, that joy that they derive from moving amongst the same close friends, neighbours and family throughout their lives, has rubbed off on us, and we love it.

I don’t think we’ll be putting our house on the market for the foreseeable future.

Photo time...

Above gallery (click on them to get a better view): These were taken just the other day, when we took a walk to the mouth of the steep gorge that sits just south of Meseleri. It’s very dramatic and, owing to the density of the undergrowth, impossible to navigate on foot from one end to the other. The best one can do is to walk down to the southern mouth and gaze upwards in awe. It’s well worth the effort though, because you can look at the Griffon vulture colony there and marvel at these majestic birds as they either sit way above you, staring down with disdain, or soar on the thermals right over your head. The two photos with the red circles indicate where a Griffon was sitting sunning itself the whole time we were there. Sadly I don’t have a zoom on my phone’s camera (well, apart from the digital one that ends up blurring the shot) and so you have to look carefully to see that bird, but he or she’s there, trust me.

Above gallery: These were taken last Sunday, when we took a walk on the sea front and fishing harbour, then went to lunch at the Konaki restaurant.

And, finally, one from the archive. This is my sister-in-law Christina with uncle Theodoraki, taken some years ago, not long before he died. Theodoraki was an accomplished accordion player, and I have fond memories of one night at a taverna on the waterfront at Kalamos, where he whipped out his instrument (they can’t touch you for it) after we’d eaten and serenaded us under a clear view of the Milky Way, with the waters of the Aegean lapping just feet away. He used to grow gardenias for a living and, if you visited his nursery, the aroma was overwhelming and quite heavenly. The nursery was slap bang in the middle of the Kato Patissia area of Athens, which back then was a very nice area. Sadly, it’s a bit run down these days.

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It’s 21ºC outside, and it’s around 1.00pm. There’s not a single cloud in the sky and there’s no wind. Way down the valley, between the two hills that frame our view of it, the sea glistens like a thousand diamonds, in that particular way it does only at this time of the year, when the sun’s just that bit lower in the sky than it is during the high summer. It’s December 18th, and we’ve just spent a very pleasant half an hour on our sun beds on the terrace drinking our coffee, both of us gushing with appreciative comments about how our little life together had turned out.

More and more often, as we gradually get older, I find myself musing over quite what my life would have been had we not taken the plunge and relocated here to Greece in August of 2005. What would my life have been like back there in the UK? Of course, it’s an impossible task to speculate, but it’s interesting to do so all the same. I’m sure we’d have done OK, but the winters there, when we contemplate them now after twenty years here in the southern Aegean, would, I’m sure, have been really getting on my nerves by now. This past couple of years it’s been unavoidable to conclude that climate change is taking place, and that it’s affecting some places more than others.

On a daily basis, when you watch the international news, there is yet another place either ravaged by the strongest hurricane or typhoon ever recorded, or flooded, as rivers burst their banks after the region has received a month’s rainfall in just a few hours. It’s devastation on a scale we’ve definitely never seen before. Here in South East Crete, the only effect we seem to be experiencing is a distinct lack of the usual rainfall during the early winter months. OK, so it makes for a wonderful opportunity to sip iced coffee on the seafront, or eat a lunchtime meal al fresco but, like it or not, we need the rain. Here in our area it’s mainly agriculture that sustains the economy, and up until recently the inhabitants of the Ierapetra area have been doing very nicely thank you very much. That may be about to change though.

If there isn’t sufficient rain before the summer arrives next year, then we’re in serious poo. The authorities have, in the view of many, been dragging their feet about preparing for this scenario and, whereas other islands have already constructed desalination plants in quiet areas along their coastlines, nothing of the sort has yet been done here. But I didn’t want to talk about that. I wanted this post to remain upbeat.

For quite a few months now, each time I’ve logged into my Greek bank’s internet banking site, once I’ve reached the home page (after having tapped my phone’s screen while using the bank’s app in response to the security check that makes one’s logging in process more secure, hopefully), there has been an orange box showing up telling me to update my personal details. There’s a direct link there to the government portal, where you can log in with you own password and PIN and, once in, you can download your tax return, or your vehicle road tax certificate (and a bunch of other stuff) and also update your user profile. The only thing is, each time I’ve clicked that link and logged into my account with the Greek Government, even though I could access my profile, it wouldn’t let me make any changes. The relevant buttons were greyed out for some reason. We were in the accountant’s office a few months back, and I asked him about it.

You know what he said? “Forget it, we all see that. I should ignore it if I were you.”

So, for a few more months I did. Then Yvonne had an email from the bank just the other day, suggesting that she may want to make an appointment with our local bank manager in order to be sure that they have all her details correct. Although we still thought that there wasn’t much point, since we were convinced that nothing had changed, we complied. It was a flaming good job we did.

Here in Greece your bank needs to know a great deal more about you than your UK one does. It can seem a little intrusive, to tell you the truth, but then they’re only doing their job by complying with the government regulations, after all. We dreaded going back into the bank because, here in Greece, our experience of stepping inside that building has always been horrendous. For starters you’d be best advised to take a flask of coffee and a picnic with you, maybe even your shaving gear (and that’s only the ladies! – Sorry, couldn’t resist that one, even though it’s a bit hackneyed by now). You know what, though? Things have changed, and we were very pleasantly surprised.

In our branch of Alpha Bank here in Ierapetra, the desk staff are all situated in a kind of open plan arrangement around the periphery of the banking hall. OK, so yes, the cash desk is still woefully undermanned, but we saw that the Manager’s desk was free and so I popped my head around his glass partition and asked if we could enquire about something. He immediately bade us sit down and asked what it was he could do for us. When we explained, he enquired after our tax numbers and called our details up on screen. Oops. Last spring we renewed our passports, for the second time since moving to Greece in fact, since we’ve now passed our twenty year anniversary of living here. He was quick to point out that ‘Your passports have expired,’ and that without a hint of accusation or condescension, but we did need to be reminded that the bank needs our passport details on file, after all.

One thing I learned a long time ago now was that any time you need to visit an office, be it the Tax Office, the KEP, the hospital or the bank, you’d best have every single piece of documentation you possess with you. You can bet your very last dollar that the one piece of paper that you don’t bring along will be the one they need. I was well pleased with myself for having brought along colour photocopies of our new passports, as well as the originals. Belt and braces, folks, belt and braces.

To cut a long story short, it amazed us how many odd details were out of date and needed updating. What was even more astounding though, was how affable our bank manager turned out to be. He asked about where in the UK we came from and confessed that he’d actually spent his honeymoon there, partly in Scotland and partly in London. He’d gone to university in Swansea, would you believe. Plus, he turned out to be quite the expert on both Scottish and Irish Whiskey (He’s been to Ireland too and knows about Jameson’s and Bush Mills, for starters), and Guinness. He asked if there was anything we missed about life in the UK and my reply was, “Not much really, although I could kill for a pint of ale from the pump now and again in a traditional pub.”

“Hmm, not a fan, but when you talk about Guinness, now there’s a different story!” And he proceeded to reveal just how much he knows about how to draw the perfect pint of Guinness, letting it stand and all the works. We left there with warm glow, having passed an extremely agreeable half an hour chatting with him. It was like he had all the time in the world.

I already mentioned in a previous post about how the government here has streamlined the process of renewing one’s driving licence. All in all, things are looking up. Bureaucracy in Greece is still a deal more involved that it is in the UK, but it’s become an entirely different ball game to wade through than it was just a few years back. So, returning to my opening comments about the wonderful December weather we’re having today; not a day passes without us expressing to each other how contented we are with our own little home, our own little car, and a simply amazing place to live. If you’re thinking about a major change in your life, I’d never say don’t do your homework, but all the same, taking the plunge may be the best thing you ever did.

Yes, to express gratitude is good for your mental and physical health, so I’ve read somewhere. Well, mine comes with a capital ‘G’ and no mistake.

Above (& the photo at the top): Ierapetra fishing harbour in December.

Above: This Red Admiral settled on our fence to sun itself as we were sipping our coffee.

Above: The tiny church right opposite the fortress at the entrance to the fishing harbour.

Above: Some of the hibiscus that we keep in pots on our terrace, nice eh?

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Well, winter has arrived for sure. We’re experiencing our first cool air mass since the summer and it’s brought the daytime temperatures down into the teens. In fact, today we’ve just been for an hour’s walk up towards Meseleri and the temperature on the veranda when we left the house was only reading 15ºC at around 3.30pm, which is generally as cold as it ever gets during the day at any time in the winter. We’re not complaining though, because we still had our coffee out on the sun-loungers on the terrace this morning as the clouds scudded sedately around above us, occasionally granting some warm sunshine and other times obscuring the sun so that it instantly felt colder.

We’ve actually now had some real rain too, and that’s good because the drought was getting rather serious. A few nights ago Storm Byron swept across the whole country, bringing fast-flowing muddy torrents even to the streets on the tiny island of Kastelorizo. We saw this on the TV news report and decided that we’d got off very lightly here. All we had was a rather wild night, and the worst of the rain only lasted about an hour. There were, however, a few major wind gusts, one of which managed to knock a couple of plant pots over and rearrange the patio chairs a little. We didn’t lose power either, apart from one very brief millisecond when it went off and immediately came back on again. It did annoy me anyway though, as I was watching a music documentary on YouTube at the time and had to wait a few minutes while the router reset itself.

That’s nothing though. In Myrtos, just 15k to the west of us, some friends of ours said that they’d lost power in the night and it was off for most of the next day. 

Passing by the mailboxes in the main street on Friday, I opened ours to find it empty (it usually is), although it did grate slightly because Yvonne’s been waiting for a new debit card to arrive from our UK bank, and you just never know how long mail is going to take from the UK ever since it left the EU (grrr). The boxes are only a couple of minutes walk from the house, but we usually pull up beside them in the car as we’re returning home from town. I was just about to get back into the car when a voice called out, “Hang on there Gianni!”

I looked up to see that Angla’i’a was trotting towards me, a bunch of letters and a package or two in her hands. She came right up to me and asked if I’d help her sort it all, and thrust them all into my hands while she fumbled with the master key to open the front panel of the village mailboxes. 

“How come you’ve got it all then?” I asked her, “and the master key too?”

‘The latest postman’s too lazy to hang about long enough to make sure that all the mail goes into the correct boxes,” she replied, “so I told him to give it all to me and I’d do it.”

That figured. At least she knows that she’ll do a good job, especially when she’s got the likes of me happening by to lend a hand. Sifting through what was in my hands, I soon discovered that half of it was either for us or our next door neighbours, so I was able to take that off her hands. There was a package from Healthspan, the UK Channel Island-based company from which we order all our herb supplements and vitamins, and there was also a letter for Yvonne with a stiff section in it and, when we opened it, it proved to be that which we’d theorised. Her new card had arrived safely, phew. The mail only comes to the village once a week, and the recent TV news report about the Greek Government’s decision to close around 200 post offices nationwide set alarm bells ringing loudly. We’d seen a newspaper report that the ELTA Courier office in Ierapetra was closing without delay, so not a few people around here also concluded that we were in danger of losing our main post office too, which would truly be a disaster for this area.

Just last Tuesday we’d had to go into town to see if we could get Yvonne’s new driving licence sorted. I’m not about to tell you how old she is, but both of us need to renew our licenses every three years now. Sigh. Still, we knew what to do because we’d already done it a couple of times anyway, the last time having been when I renewed mine last winter. In case you’re not aware, in order to get your new driving license ordered correctly, you need to fulfil a number of criteria.

1. You have to get a ‘paraboli’ from the local KEP office. That’s essentially a form that you take to either your bank or the local Post Office where you pay a fee of €105.

2. You need to get two identical photos done and they need to fulfil the right requirements size-wise and content-wise.

3. You have to get a doctor/cardiologist to check your heart over and sign that you’re not likely to keel over while at the wheel.

4. You need to visit an optician where the eye test isn’t as rigorous as it would be for a new pair of glasses, but you need to be able to read numbers and letters from a specific distance. He or she too has to issue a certificate declaring that you can see OK to drive. Both the cardiologist and the optician levy a fixed fee of €20. It’s gone up a bit over recent years, but not a great deal. I have heard some horror stories from ex-pats living here, though, who tell me that they were charged well over the odds, like for example €50 a pop, or even more. It’s a lottery depending on where in the country you live, it seems, but if you speak the language well enough, you’re OK, they’ll treat you as a local and you’re less likely to be ripped off.

Once you’ve got all that done you have to go back to the KEP office where they’ll process the application. This time around we were well impressed at how much progress the government has made in digitalising the whole process. When you go to the KEP office for the paraboli it now has a four digit PIN on it. That PIN is then used by both the optician and the cardiologist to process their certificates, and it’s all done via the government’s computerised system. Wow, eh? Greece is well and truly getting adapted to the 21st century and no mistake. The photo too, isn’t printed out like it used to be, the photographer merely emails it to the KEP office, and from there it’s added to the online application, and bob’s your uncle, all done. Say goodbye to reams of A4 photocopies with rubber stamps all over them. Ooh, I could get quite nostalgic, but I won’t, don’t you worry.

With only a couple of slight hiccups we got it all done in the one morning and went for a coffee on the seafront to celebrate. Oh, and since we were in the Post Office to pay the paraboli, I was able to ask the lady behind the counter if ours was going to close under the Government’s sweeping reforms. “No,” she replied, “it’s not.” Boy was I relieved to hear that, as no doubt would 26,000 other local residents be too, I reckon.

Here is the usual selection of recent photos (and maybe a nostalgic one or two, we’ll see):

Above: Coffee at the Plaz on November 14th, around 1.00pm.

Above: At last, with the weather cooling down we can go back to taking walks in the olive groves and mountainsides, a truly joyous winter pastime.

Above: the view through our French Windows on November 28th at 8.25am.

Both of the above: The north beach at Ierapetra, November 30th at around 11.25am

Above: We’re giving our olive trees a serious prune, but that doesn’t mean we can’t stop for coffee.

Above gallery: Just after dawn last Thursday, as Storm Byron retreats into the distance.

And, finally, one from the archive…

Above: Believe it or not, the above is a colour photo. It was taken Friday 9th March 2012 from our garden in Kiotari on Rhodes, and I still marvel at the beauty of those cloud formations. The photo is not retouched in any way.

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