Friday morning February 23rd. Went for a walk in the mountains above the village this morning, it was a simply wonderful day. Across the vast valley from us you could clearly see the snow on the peaks that surround the Lasithi Plateau, but where we were walking it was t-shirt weather. The hills were alive, not with the sound of music, but with birdsong everywhere, including warblers, blackbirds and chiffchaffs. Plus, high above, and even not so high at one point, griffons soared, their beady eyes searching hundreds of feet below for their next meal, no doubt. Their wingspan is truly awesome, and would easily outdo the width of our car’s windscreen by a considerable margin. So, here are the photos from that walk. Hope you like them:

In those last two in the gallery above, you can play ‘spot the wife‘ if you like, because she’s in each of them somewhere. You’ll probably have to click on them to open them in a new window though.

This next one (below) shows the mighty crag that is the sentinel standing above where we live. I have prescribed a faint circle near the top that you’ll see if you look closely, and that’s where a griffon vulture swooped in and landed on its nest a moment before I snapped the shot. I hadn’t taken the camera with me, so I snapped this with my phone, which was why I couldn’t attempt a better zoom shot I’m afraid. The vulture is just about discernible if you look closely enough. I don’t think it’s all that likely that any humans are going to be disturbing their nests on that cliff somehow.

Friday afternoon (late) February 23rd. The next series of shots were taken at around 4.30pm in our garden, and that of our neighbour. This time I took them with the camera, which was why I could zoom in and get some quality close-ups. Hope you like these too…

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The old saying, as I remember, is ‘a new broom sweeps clean.’ The new ‘mayor’ of the village, Manolis (forget his surname TBH) is certainly making his presence felt. Lots of overgrown trees that had overhung the narrow walkways of the village, plus some along the roadside too, have now been heavily pruned to facilitate ease of passage. Great piles of tree clippings that were at first left beside the road have now been taken away and the place looks clean and tidy, one has to admit. Although we were aware of him over the past couple of years (we first met him at his mother Poppi’s place when he came home on his tractor one day while we were having a drink with her in her patio room) we’ve only exchanged the occasional hello, nothing more really.

That all changed this week. Since he was elected he’s swept past on his motor scooter once or twice whilst we’ve been passing the time of day with Maria, our neighbour, and on those occasions we’ve exchanged polite greetings and he’s gone on his way. The day before yesterday, however, we were graced with a personal visit. We both recall that we thought him a little brusque on earlier occasions, and wondered whether he resented us foreigners moving in. Angla’i’a is his aunty, since Poppi is her sister, and yet she’s not all that enamoured with him for some reason. Of course, to have her nephew beat her in the village election and take her place as the village ‘proedros’ can’t have been easy for her, but apparently they’ve not talked much to each other for a couple of decades. Families, eh?

Anyway, we like to speak as we find, and try not to adopt viewpoints about people based purely on the opinion of another. There we were pottering around outside the house when we became aware of a motorcycle zipping up our driveway. No one ever comes up there unless we’ve invited them, as a rule. He swept up to the turning area beside our front door, flipped his stand down and dismounted. Then he came over to us and gave us both a warm handshake. Must admit, at first we were both thinking, ‘what does he want from us then?’

I felt quite ashamed to have thought that way when he told us that he just came to check in with us and explain that he was always there for us if we had any issues needing to be addressed in the village. He’s evidently been made aware of the frequency with which Yvonne cleans up the leaves and street debris on the steep lane outside our garden. He also knew that, at our own expense, we’d bought some ready-to-use pitch and filled in a couple of potholes in our little lane a while back. It seems to have made him quite positive about us, a fact that we were grateful for. 

‘Are you sure there’s nothing you’d like me to get done, or at least look into then?’ He asked, which did prompt me to ask one question. 5 km up the road is the village of Meseleri, and they have no less that three blue dumpster bins, the ones specifically for recycling, whereas our village doesn’t even have one. Why was that, I wanted to know.

“I’m already on it,” he replied, “I’ve asked the council and they say that there are no more blue bins, but they do have some on order. When we get one I’m going to have both it and the green one (for general rubbish disposal) placed in a new ‘bay’ that we’ll have built beside the road, so that they can be parked tidily and be less likely to be blown over when it’s windy.”

Can’t say fairer than that, I suppose, always assuming that it does arrive one day. He’s already put our lane on his ‘to do’ list as regards the few potholes there as well. Things are looking up. Mind you, Angla’i’a, during her years as village mayor, accomplished a lot too, and was always down the council offices getting on their case about something or other.

Talking of Angla’i’a, it was high time we dropped in for coffee anyway, since the last time was way back last year. We’re both conscious of the fact that she probably has a lot less to do now, since she’s handed over the ‘mayoral’ reins as of February 1st to her nephew. So yesterday we strolled down there at around 11.30am, and found George outside using a blunt axe to split some kindling wood for their tzaki. As always, the kitchen door was open and Angla’i’a bade us come inside for an Elliniko. Needless to say she also placed some loukoumades and a few koulourakia on the table too. You never leave their house hungry. She has, it seems, already adjusted to not being mayor any more and seems to be just as busy as ever. Both she and George had been down with Covid a couple of weeks ago, and were laid low for five days or so. Nothing worse than a cold though, she told us. Just as well we hadn’t thought about dropping by sooner though, we thought. 

Her granddaughter ‘Gogo’ is now working as a chef in the hospital in Agios Nikolaos, which explains why we hadn’t seen her around for a while. In fact, what village news there was we were soon apprised of, while we sipped her excellent coffee. Her daughter Maria (you can never have too many Marias, eh?), Gogo’s mum, popped her head in the door to greet us too. She’s warmed immeasurably towards us of late and I was particularly touched when, a couple of weeks ago, after I’d posted a couple of photos of us two on the sea front, she’d replied to my comment, using the expression, “Γειά σας χωριανάκια να’στε καλά!” Which means, ‘Hi there villagers, all the best.’ For her to have called us ‘villagers’ is a compliment indeed, as we’ve only been in the village around four and a half years and, by usual standards, could be considered outsiders, or newcomers, for another couple of decades if we weren’t being accepted. 

Our visit drawing to close, we were given a bag of freshly laid eggs, which Angla’i’a placed on the table for us to pick up, remarking with a grin on the fact that she still wouldn’t run the risk of actually handing them to us (see this post)! She also gave us a bag of fresh oranges, which she said would be excellent ‘juicers.’ I can confirm that they were indeed too.

So, that’s the ‘two visits’ dealt with, but what about this ‘crisis’ then? Well, it’s a very long story, but it appears there’s a major crunch coming to the seafront in Ierapetra, because all of the cafés and restaurants along the waterside apparently have illegal structures out the front, in which the majority of their business is done. Many of these structures are built elaborately using expensive folding glass doors, roofs and awnings, not to mention having electricity installed and some even have bars inside them too. They’ve been there for decades, but the council in its wisdom has decided that they all have to be bulldozed, which will, with no doubt whatsoever, not only wreck the sea front for a couple of years while it’s being re-developed, but also bankrupt most of the restaurants and bars that will be affected. Tomorrow there’s a huge demonstration planned since the bulldozers are apparently poised to begin the destruction any day now. I’ll say more about this in due course. But it’s all rather unsettling, and seems rather self-destructive on the part of the Dimos. We’ll see what develops.

Above: No, it’s not me. I’m afraid I don’t feel like braving the water at this time of year, but you can see that some do. We know a few regulars who swim every day through the winter months. Good for them!

Above: You see all those structures on the right, those with tables and chairs inside and out? Well, if the Dimos has its way they’ll all be bulldozed imminently.

Above: Sadly it looks nothing in the photo, but that moon, being partly obscured by a nighttime cloud, it looked wonderful at the time when we were in the town the other evening.

Above: That little beauty is standing outside Angla’i’a’s front door, and there’s a Poinsettia beside her!

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After more years than I can remember, we’ve recently been back in touch with one of my cousins, and it’s been a pleasure catching up. My mother, born in Bath, UK, was one of ten surviving children. Her mother actually gave birth to thirteen, but three were either stillborn or died shortly after birth. It was like that back in the 1920’s. Of the surviving ten, in which my mother was somewhere around the fifth or sixth to be born, only three now remain, and they are the three youngest, all of which are brothers. One, my uncle Bob, lives in Cyprus and has done so for many decades now. The next one up age-wise is the now-widowed Michael, and he still lives in Keynsham, near Bristol, but is in the early stages of dementia, which has led to one of his two daughters, Sarah, moving in to live with him, along with her husband Stephen. The other is my uncle Pete, who still lives in Bath.

An occasion that both Yvonne and I remember well was back in the late nineties, when we took a couple or three holidays on Skiathos, and – talk about coincidences – we were waiting at a bus stop at the back of the town to catch the bus down the coast to the idyllic beach (well, it still was back then) Vromolimnos when, who should be waiting at the same stop but my uncle Mike, his wife Aileen, and Helen, one of their two daughters. Even back then we only saw my mum’s siblings rarely, so it was an amazing coincidence to bump into them out there on a Greek island. Getting into conversation, we soon learned that Mike and Aileen were addicts of Greece and it was their favourite holiday destination. Sadly we weren’t able to spend a lot of time together as it was their last day before flying back to the UK. It was such a shame that we hadn’t bumped into them earlier.

Fast forward to this past few weeks, and the other daughter, Sarah has been exchanging loads of WhatsApp messages with me, during which I discovered that her mum and dad had decided that their favourite island was Crete, would you believe. She also says that hubby Stephen maintains that he even prefers the laid-back life on Crete to his experience of travelling across California when he was a younger man.

Now, when someone tells me that they love Crete, it’s no exaggeration to say that they usually then go on about Chania, Rethymnon, or those rather frenetic resorts on the north coast just east of Heraklion. OK, so there are those too who centre their Cretan experience around Agios Nikolaos and Elounda, but mostly, they’ve never heard of Ierapetra, or, if they have, they still haven’t been down this way (not a few think it begins with an ‘L’ too!). Mike and his family, however, have indeed been here, and Sarah even told me something about this area that I didn’t yet know, and it’s that there is a butterfly gorge up near Orino, a remote village that we’ve visited on a couple of occasions, because we have friends whose roots are there. Our Greek friends haven’t even mentioned it to us. Orino is an amazingly remote place. It’s not all that far from the coast road between Ierapetra and Makry Gialos, but the climb is twisty-turny in the extreme, and the road passes through some pretty spectacular scenery during the ascent. Orino is so high that the climate is totally different from that of the coastal strip only about ten km below. Anyway, suffice it to say that we now have added an excursion to our list of things to do, and that’s to investigate Butterfly Gorge before the hotter months of the summer are upon us.

Sarah told me a rather amusing, if not altogether unsurprising, experience that she and her family had while dining out with a couple of Cretans whom they’d met while staying on the island when the girls were both teenagers. She still remembers their names, which were Nikos and Stelios. The latter was actually the mayor of the village where they were staying, and it seems that they’d passed a rather boozy lunch (well, boozy as regards her dad and the two Greeks I assume, since she and Helen were as yet still in their mid-teens at the time, and mum Aileen probably abstained in the hope of keeping a mental note of how to get them all back to their accommodation). As the meal came toward its ending and the only thing left to do was to finish off the Retsina and Ouzo (probably Metaxa too I’d imagine), Mayor Stelios took quite a shine to Sarah and offered to take her off of her parents’ hands, since he was in need of a wife at the time. 

Sarah says he put a fairly serious proposal of marriage to her father, and that, owing to his rather woozy mental condition at the time, she thought he might even take the man up on it. Fortunately (or otherwise, she says the jury’s still out on that one) Michael declined and she eventually flew home with her mum and dad at the end of the holiday.

Now, you may be thinking, ‘Oh yes, we’ve all been there. They don’t mean these things to be taken seriously, they’re just mucking about.’ Well, I hear where you’re coming from but, if you have any knowledge of Greek rural and island customs from ancient times, this was often how men found their wives in local communities. The match was very often made between families, with little input from the couple themselves, and the first discussions frequently took place over a shared lunch. You may be surprised to hear that we have many friends both here and on Rhodes, who were married back in the sixties, seventies and eighties, and their marriages were made with just such an arrangement, the bride very often still being in her mid-teens. More often than not the bridegroom is quite a lot older than the bride, and he’s been around a bit, done his military service, maybe travelled the world in the merchant navy, before coming back to his home village and wanting to marry a nice fecund young filly, fact. So I’d not be at all surprised if Stelios were deadly serious. Probably thought it was worth a try in the very least. I explored this scenario in my novel ‘Eve of Deconstruction,’ by the way.

Cousin Sarah closed her WhatsApp message to me with the words, “Dad, who was nevertheless rather inebriated, found the good sense to politely decline, otherwise I may well have been a neighbour of yours.”

Photo time… No, wait, just one more little ‘aside’ first. We were supping coffee in Likoudies with my long-time ‘coffee friend’ Taki today, when the discussion came around to the farmers and their ‘tractor’ protests. You’ve probably seen that the French farmers are protesting by blocking the motorways (again) with their farm machinery, and, guess what, the Greek farmers are at it too. Takis mentioned that he’d also watched a TV news report where tomato growers threw tons of fresh tomatoes all over the road, making a mess too thick for ordinary cars to pass through. Apparently, pepper farmers took a leaf from the tomato growers’ book and did the same. Takis said, face as straight as he could keep it, “Let me know when the Banks’ employees do something similar, and I’ll be there to help with the clean-up.”

OK, now to this post’s batch of photos…

Above: Just a few ‘moody’ shots from around the village, both in daylight and after dark.

Above: A few more from walks around the hills near home.

Above: Oranges that are still not quite ready to pick. But don’t they look inviting? Plus, an aeonium in our upper garden is flowering, isn’t it grand? Finally, some shots below taken by my young friend Giannis Tzavas in Kato Horio last Sunday…

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Friday Feb 2nd, 3.30am.

Another of those nights when I don’t sleep so good, so I get up, throw on some rough old togs, and set out to do a circuit of the village. I don’t like not sleeping but, having said that, I rather like having the whole village to myself at such an hour. Usually, the only other creatures I encounter on my power-walk circuit are cats and bats. I may occasionally hear dogs barking, but never see them. Tonight, however, with a very bright waning moon bathing everything in a silvery light, I don’t have too much use for my little pocket LED torch. 

As I reach the last few minutes of the circuit, I climb the lane from the road, pass the house to my right where Dimitri lives with his mother Maria and, when I get almost directly opposite the blind lane to my left leading past Evangelia’s front door (and also, in the interests of accuracy, her lounge and bathroom doors, since the layout of her ancient village house necessitates going outside in order to pass from one room to another), I turn right up the even steeper access drive up to our house. It’s now when I need the torch, because all of our veranda lights are switched off after we retire to bed, and there’s a fairly substantial olive tree keeping the moonlight at bay at the lower end of the thirty metres or so of the drive.

As I almost reach the top of the drive, and next door’s trellis, bordering on their front patio and French Windows, is directly ahead, with a gap of around 30 inches between the panels where one day they intend to fit a so-far non-existent gate, I see two small glowing circles. It’s a creature staring at me, and its eyes are reflecting the torchlight, exactly as cat’s eyes on the road are designed to do. So I decide at first that it’s one of the neighbourhood cats, but I’m wrong. As I get closer, all the while ascending the steep drive, but now at a very slow pace in the hope of not startling the animal too much, I see that the eyes are a little too large for a cat and not the right shape anyway. I can also begin to make out a white area around the face, with a distinctive patch of black, somewhat like a pair of sunglasses, as it covers the area of the eyes and between. 

It’s a polecat, an adult, and it’s still allowing me to approach it. In my excitement I completely forget that I have my phone in my jacket pocket, and it takes pretty good nighttime shots. I get to within eight feet of the animal before it decides to turn around and face the other way, affording me a good look at its body, thus confirming my verdict that it’s an adult polecat. It turns its head back to give me one last dismissing glance, then trots off along the terrace, not hurrying at all, and is lost to my sight. ‘Flippin’ Heneroonies,’ I think to myself, ‘have we seen some wildlife lately!’ Twice I’ve encountered a badger at close quarters, and now a polecat strolls through ours and next door’s verandas. We’ve also seen hares, hedgehogs and voles, not to mention the colony of Griffon Vultures that inhabits the impressive crag that stands sentinel behind the village, frequently protecting us from the North winds and enabling us to sit outside for our morning coffee even on cold winter days, if the sun’s out.

Friday February 2nd. 10.30am

It’s the first truly beautiful day in almost a week. From Sunday 28th January through to Thursday 1st Feb, we’ve experience arguably the coldest, wettest spell of weather that we’ve seen in well over 18 years in the southern Aegean. Walking around the village, when the rains permitted it that is, there were no possibilities of chats or invitations to sit for an Elliniko simply because everyone’s doors have been tightly closed against the cold and the wet. For four or five days our daytime temperatures struggled to reach double figures, plus it’s either been raining steadily or showering unpredictably, thus making any idea of a country walk an extremely risky business too. Every flue has been belching smoke from the fires or stoves within, and the idea of keeping a window open for more than a few minutes has not been a good one.

Usually, here in this part of Greece during the winter months (and I’d include Rhodes and the southern Dodecanese in this summation) you get average temperatures in the upper teens most days. When the sun shines without interruption, you can often see the thermometer creeping over 20 by a degree or two. It’s lovely, and ideal for gardening or taking long country walks. If it rains it usually follows a three-day cycle: Day 1: clouds build up, Day 2: it rains, or showers several times and then, Day 3: the clouds clear. For four or five days this time though, it stayed very cold and the rains just kept coming. Today, true to the TV forecasts, a warm air mass has finally reached us and the weather’s returning to what we’d call ‘normal.’ We’re strapping on our hiking boots and heading for the hills that we can see from our veranda. The summit where we’re planning to sup coffee from our flasks and eat a little dark chocolate to go with it is somewhere we realise that we haven’t reached on foot for three years, yikes! From there, looking east-north east, we can see the peaks surrounding the Lasithi Plateau, and they’re all snowcapped. They remind us very much of the views we had when visiting friends in Snowmass, near Aspen Colorado a couple of decades ago. Hope you like the photos…

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