… And be sure to read An Aegean Odyssey, by Kathryn Gauci. 

Here’s my personal review:

I’ve just finished Kathryn Gauci’s very personal memoir, and I’m slightly annoyed with her because it’s not longer. I’ve been so immersed in her self-awakening solo trip back to Greece after many years away that I didn’t want it to end so soon. I suppose that you’ll probably get more out of this book if, like me, you’re a hopeless Grecophile, but if you like travel writing in general, you’d better not pass this one up anyway.

Kathryn wasn’t sure she wanted to make this trip alone, since she had a perfectly good marriage, but, owing to circumstances, she went ahead anyway. Right at the very end of the book she makes a really valid point about travelling solo that I’ve often thought too, although never been able to put it into words. When you experience something on your own, it’s an entirely different thing from how it would be if accompanied by someone else, in this case, her husband. You meet people, experience feelings and emotions, see places in ways that wouldn’t be the same with someone beside you. It’s not better, it’s not worse, it’s simply different, but in such a way that you realise how much it enriches your life. If you can do it, then it’s 100% worthwhile.

Kathryn goes to places (islands, mainly) many of which I know well myself, so maybe that too made her writings resonate more deeply with me. But if you’ve any experience at all of Greek people and culture, then surely you’ll also find this work totally absorbing. She has a wonderful gift for evoking in you mental pictures of the places she’s describing, the people she’s interacting with.

Kathryn Gauci is a living treasure that all avid book readers would do well to appreciate. I’ve already gushed about this book on previous posts, but, now I’ve finished it, here are a few more quotes that especially resonated with me:

“Tactility, expressions of love and friendship that are not all sexual.” Here she talks about the tendency of the Greeks, especially of close friends, even of the same sex, to walk along the street with arms around each other. It’s affection, pure and simple, and it’s indicative of a warmth that we Brits as a rule do not possess and has nothing to do with their sexual orientation.

“‘Unfortunately,’ Sotiris said, ‘many of the package tourists are not encouraged to come to the theatre. There is now a growing number of hotels who try to keep their guests entertained at the hotel in order to make them spend their money there. All-you-can-eat buffets, happy hours, and live entertainment by mediocre pop musicians have all added to the decline in audiences experiencing the real Greece.” This comment by Sotiris, a struggling Greek businessman, well expresses the locals’ view of the awful and meteoric increase in ‘all inclusive’ resorts these past few years. And this is from twenty years ago too, when ‘all Inclusive’ was still in its infancy. If you want to experience the ‘Real Greece,’ then you’re never going to find it in these altars to mass tourism that only benefit rich tour operators, hotel chains and owners.

“The moonlight has soothed my soul and energised my body. It is a moment when I truly understand that there is so much more to life than material gain. Nature in all its glory will always be with us, everywhere and for everyone, and we can all have a ringside seat if only we bother to look.” Kathryn’s on the tiny island of Karpathos when she writes this. How we humans so often fail to understand what truly brings contentment and peace of mind. If you’re in a small village on a hillside in Greece, and you actually take a moment to pause and imbibe the environment around you, then you may just crack it.

“The sea is already a deep blue-green, the surrounding mountains are bathed in a soft haze, and the air is humid. The perspiration is already dripping from my body. This is not typical Greek weather, which is normally a dry heat.” I so identified with this. Although the moment she describes took place twenty years ago, it’s indicative of a change in climate that’s affecting Greece, just like everywhere else, more and more with the passing years. I’ve been coming to this country since 1977, and most of my visits before we moved here in 2005 were made in either June or September/October. The depth of blue in the sky at that time of the year (and she writes this comment about the month of October) is impossibly vivid. You’d see a blue that we never ever saw in the UK. The reason for this has been the dry atmosphere, pure and simple. You could be very, very hot here, yet not perspire too much. In actuality, heat makes us perspire commensurately, but a dry heat means that our sweat evaporates and thus we don’t feel sticky. If the atmosphere’s humid then the sweat remains on our skin and doesn’t evaporate so easily, thus making us feel uncomfortably ‘damp.’ A humid atmosphere also makes the sky’s blue more milky. This past two decades there has been much more weather like this. So-called experts have been warning us for a long time about the possibility of rising sea levels owing to melting polar ice caps. We haven’t seen the sea level rise anything like to the extent that some had predicted, so where has all the extra water gone? In my humble opinion, it’s all around us, it’s in the atmosphere, making it more humid more often.

“The mental paralysis that creeps upon us in the modern industrial world is like a cancer. Achievement is measured by material possessions and commercial success. Like the tide that slowly ebbs away, a more spiritual and meaningful life has taken its place during these last weeks.”  Here Kathryn expresses a view about the healing nature of her Aegean Odyssey. If you immerse yourself in the ‘Real Greece,’ that is to say the little out-of-the-way tavernas and kafeneia that are frequented more by locals than by the tourist hordes, if you go up into the mountains and forests and allow the environment to seep into your psyche, if you engage in conversation with a little old lady all dressed in black, who’ll proffer you a sprig of basil, or maybe a Greek coffee if you’ll sit with her awhile, then your appreciation for what truly matters gradually and imperceptibly changes for the better. 

If you take the time to read Kathryn’s deeply personal solo odyssey, then even through its pages you’ll probably become more mellow, more able to appreciate what’s truly important in this life. So much has been said and written about why Greece is unique. If you want to understand why, reading this wonderful book will go a long way towards helping you find the answer.

Now for a few of my own photos…

Above: My late and much missed mother-in-law, Lela, on an Athens doorstep not long after the Second World War.

Above: A moody shot in the village of Meseleri, the next one about 5km up the road from us.

Above gallery: ‘Filling the hole in the bole’ of one of two ancient olive trees in the lower garden. That tree’s trunk is split so completely that it almost looks like two trees beside each other, although it is one rootstock. The gap between the two trunks has long looked a bit bereft to us, so when we split the canas in one of our pots beside the house recently, we first filled the ‘hole in the bole’ with a large sack of compost, then replanted the cana that we’d taken out of the overcrowded pot there. It’s already settled in well and is producing new flowers. A result!

Above gallery: After a wonderful couple of hours on the town beach on Sunday, we repaired to the Konaki taverna for lunch. It has to be said that at this time of the year the climate difference between Crete and the UK is especially noticeable!

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