Royal Wedding Fever

The Authentic Royal Wedding Bunting

Royal Wedding fever has spread as far as our small corner of the Aegean, and we even have the bunting to prove it. The Olive Tree café in Chorio is hosting a Royal Wedding Street Party today, in the lane between the Hotel Fiona and the Olive Tree. In keeping with the nature of the event cucumber sandwiches and trifle will be eaten and Symi Visitor Accommodation has donated a basket of fresh locally grown vegetables as a prize for the tombola.

The prize - with the picture book village, Chorio, in the background.

Let us not forget that the British Royal Family has Greek connections, not least of which being that Ex King Constantine of the Hellenes is Prince William’s godfather. Long term visitors and readers of the late Symi Visitor newspaper will remember that we interviewed Constantine when he visited Symi in 2005 for the Aegean Regatta. Celebrity watching is as popular in Greece as it is anywhere else and although Greece is no longer a monarchy, the Greeks are still interested in the activities of their own, now deposed, Royal Family, hence the mass media coverage when Prince Nicholas was married to Tatiana Blatnik on Spetses last year.

Kate Middleton’s hair style is a popular one in Greece where young women traditionally favour long flowing locks and waist length hair is more likely to be natural than the result of extensions so hers is a look that people can relate to. It is unlikely, though, that Symi is the honeymoon destination – we have not seen any security chaps peering into plant pots around the harbour or sealing off restaurants as was the case when George Bush senior paid us a visit in June 2004.

Have a good weekend.  I am off to drink Buck's Fizz and eat cucumber sandwiches...

Regards,
Adriana

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Bright Monday

The churches on the Acropolis, bright in the Easter sunshine.

In Greece Easter Monday is referred to as Bright Monday – indeed the whole week after the Resurrection is known as Bright Week – and bright it certainly is. Symi is enjoying exceptionally fine weather at the moment and those visitors who decided to spend their Easter break here have not regretted it. There may be a few showers later in the week but we are unlikely to have any significant rain now until October.

One of the many churches in the oldest part of Chorio, decorated with flags and bunting for Easter.

An Easter Explosion on the road above Chorio on Easter Saturday.

Anything from old artillery shells and dynamite to fertiliser is used to make the biggests bangs possible.  It becomes virtually a competition between the different parishes.

Easter in Greece is special because it is still primarily a religious festival. Each day is marked by its own specific services and traditions which are taken very seriously, hence the taboo on manual work, particularly carpentry, on Good Friday and Easter Saturday. The one that always takes foreign visitors by surprise, however, is the bangs. During the Maundy Thursday and Good Friday services, making loud noises to keep the devil or evil at bay is part of the liturgy, just as loud celebratory explosions mark the Resurrection at midnight on Saturday night. More loud bangs are a feature of the burning of the effigy of Judas on the evening of Easter Sunday and this year this was followed by a very grand firework display. In previous years the municipality has also laid on a communal lamb spit roast in the town square but this year there was no free feasting in the new austerity Greece. There was, however, a great deal of old fashioned communal pooling of resources as families, friends and neighbours celebrated together in traditional style.

As St George’s Day fell on Easter Saturday this year, all the Georges in Greece are celebrating their name day today, Easter Monday. It is also a bank holiday so most shops and businesses are closed until tomorrow.

Christos Anesti!

Regards,
Adriana

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The Sun is Shining

Lemonitissa Church, a landmark on Symi's acropolis.

The sun is shining and the pre-Easter whitewashing is well under way. Easter is a very busy time for women in Greece as the bulk of the preparations for the celebrations falls upon them. Apart from whitewashing the outsides of the houses, particularly the steps, before the processions of the Epitaphi on Good Friday (biers symbolizing Christ’s funeral), they have kilos of traditional biscuits, cheese pies and cakes to prepare for Sunday’s feast, eggs to dye red and decorate, offal soup to prepare for the breaking of the fast at midnight on Saturday night, mountains of food to prepare for the lamb spit roast on Sunday and still fit in attending all the church services of Holy Week. When I set off for work at 7.30 in the morning the ladies are already emerging from the first church services of the day and are heading home for another day of preparations.

Morning shadows on the Kali Strata

Not all houses on the Kali Strata are mansions.

This narrow sliver of a building is next door to the Old Markets

which are being restored as a boutique hotel.

While the women are filling the lanes with the buttery aromas of vanilla and mastic cookies, the men are out in the fields, slaughtering lambs for Sunday. This is a bad time to be a male lamb in Greece as they are the ones destined for culinary greatness! With fine weather forecast until Tuesday all is set for some excellent Easter parties. As the Easter feast is traditionally held out of doors on Symi, with the lamb spit roasted rather than baked in an oven as is the case on some of the other Greek islands, a dry day is definitely an asset. Before the feasting, however, there is still a fair amount of fasting. Many Symiots observe the Lenten Fast most strictly in Holy Week, and restaurants and tavernas advertise that they are serving dishes complying with this. Good Friday, with its solemn night time processions through the streets is not the excuse for retail therapy that it has become in many other parts of the world.

Kids in the Pedi Valley, doing what they enjoy best.

The butcher at the bottom of the Kali Strata. 

That is a carefully made cross from Palm Sunday.

The Minerva, a Hellenic Swan cruise ship, came into Symi yesterday and stayed over night. The majority of the guests seemed to be of mature years and came ashore in small groups with tour guides in the course of the afternoon. While Rhodes is often dwarfed by enormous cruise ships, Symi appeals more to smaller niche market cruises, the sort where the passengers are more interested in the history and culture of the various ports of call than how many night clubs there are on board.

The 'Minerva' of Nassau

I shall next be in the office on Tuesday to post a formal blog but will endeavour to put up some pictures in the course of the weekend, 3G connections permitting.

Happy Easter and Kalo Pasca to you all!



Regards,

Adriana

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Weather for Walkers

Arches were often used to link two halves of a household and some older properties

do actually have lanes running through underneath them.

It is a typical April day on Symi. Low grey clouds tinged pink with the sandstorms off Libya and North Africa, fast moving showers of varying velocity and temperatures that vacillate between sweltering sunshine and chilly drizzle. This spell of unsettled weather seems destined to last right through until Easter. While it doesn’t look like everyone’s picture postcard Greek island idyll, it is actually quite pleasant weather for walkers and exploring the lanes of Chorio. This kind of sand rain is seldom soaking, unlike the deluges of the rainy season when it is in full flow.

The profusion of churches in the older part of Chorio are indicative of just how

 populous this part of Symi once was.

That patch of yellow daisies on the opposite hill has escaped the attentions of grazing goats.

There are quite a few visitors around, mainly regulars and friends of people who have houses here. One spin-off of the British Royal Wedding is that more people are taking breaks in April and early May as they don’t need to take too many days off work to put together 10 days or a fortnight. There are also some day trippers from Rhodes who came in on the Dodecanese Seaways catamaran. Grey days are good for harbour businesses in Symi because they are bad beach days for anyone staying in a resort on Rhodes and a day trip to Symi becomes a welcome diversion. The regular day excursion boats have not started yet. Speaking of excursions, apparently the bureaucracy involved for the day trips from Symi to Datca has become a lot more complicated and so these Saturday shopping trips to the street market may only start in June or July rather than in May while the boats wait for the necessary permits.

A natural hanging garden in the rock face, with some rock formations adapted for use by shepherds.

Toyland - this very old part of Chorio is only slowly being rebuilt from the ruins. 

As it is the least accessible part of Chorio with no vehicle access, 

the cost of rebuilding in this area is very high as everything has to be carried by donkey or, in some cases, man-packed because the lanes are too narrow even for the donkeys.

The back of Yialos from above.  One can see the rooftops of the Opera House Hotel, Iapetos Village and numerous other holiday houses.  Of our own listings The Gate House and the access routes to Villa Iris and Spiti Grande Helene are all in this picture.

I took these photographs on Saturday, from the narrow vehicle road that goes round the Kastro, below the acropolis but above Lemonitissa church. It is quite a good walk for anyone who is new to Symi because one can see the whole harbour spread out below and work out where the different places are. The brave can then carry on down the old Kataraktis footpath to the harbour. This was the route used for centuries, hidden from the sea and therefore confusing to pirates and invaders. The Kali Strata was built with confidence in the late nineteenth century, when the rich sponge merchants built their mansions and needed to be able to see their fishing fleets come in. Earlier Symiots favoured the easily defensible huddle around the castle mound.

Have a good week.

Regards,

Adriana

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April on Symi

That patch of snow is still there, over on the left horizon.

A lone fishing boat slowly passes Pedi, heading south.

Pedi Bay early the following morning, calm and serene.

It is only a week to Easter and Symi is suddenly humming with activity. There might not be as much money to spend on painting and decorating this year but a frenzy of spring-cleaning has gripped Chorio. The rugs and carpets of winter are dripping over railings or subject to vigorous beating before being put away for the summer and walking through the lanes this morning I could hear a chorus of vacuum cleaners.

Wild grape hyacinth, Muscari, in my garden.

We went to Rhodes yesterday on the last scheduled Symi-Rhodes-Symi day trip on the Proteus for who knows how long. The boat was packed for the return trip, mainly with young Symiots returning from university and college for the Easter holidays. Rhodes is home to one of the campuses of the University of the Aegean but many young people are sent further afield, to Crete, Athens or Thessalonica, and only get to see their families at holiday times. Greece is one of the few countries in the EU to still have conscription so between tertiary studies and 18 months in the army, young men often leave the islands as teenagers and don’t really return until they are in their mid twenties. It is not surprising that many of them settle in other places instead. There are several well known Symiots who actually come from other parts of Greece but came here to do their national service, married local girls and stayed on in Symi.

Not all pimpernels are scarlet...

Even the stoniest places can sustain a clump of hardy chamomile.

Weather wise, April on Symi is as variable as it is elsewhere in the world. Spring and autumn are always unpredictable. Showers, sunshine, thunderstorms, chilly squalls and the sudden realisation while walking home from the shops that one is wearing way too many clothes. We had 12 mm of rain on Thursday afternoon and there is the possibility of more wet stuff in the next few days. As northern Greece is actually expecting snow on high ground we cannot really complain about a few puddles in our corner.

Have a good weekend.

Regards,

Adriana

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Idyllic Surroundings

The crumbling pediment of Villa Roussas above the Kali Strata.

Many of the old mansions on Symi have their date of construction marked,

 either in the pediment or somewhere in the decorative wrought iron work.

Costas, the taxi driver, contemplating the new crazy paving outside Pachos. 

The harbour is filling up slowly with yachts and small local boats.

It is a breezy day on Symi with a cool northerly wind plucking at the flags and a parade of raggedy clouds marching across the sky. The date palms outside my window are waving fronds at well-wrapped motorcyclists and we are all rather wishing we had put on more clothes this morning. The day trippers who came over on the Spanos (local shorthand for the Dodecanese Seaways catamaran) are sipping their steaming Greek coffee behind the plastic drop-cloths at Pachos rather than licking ice creams in the sun.

The motor road that connects Yialos with Chorio. 

 It has become a favourite walk for locals wanting a cardio-vascular work out. 

One can either walk up the motor road and come down the Kali Strata steps

or do the circuit the other way round. A lot depends on the state of ones knees!

With Easter only a fortnight away the Great Greek Baking Marathon is underway and Symiot housewives are laying in huge supplies of flour, oil, eggs and cheese. Unsuspecting lambs continue to munch their way to the Easter Sunday spit roast; their lives may be short but at least they are happy ones spent in idyllic surroundings and their end is usually swift, in a green field rather than in some brutal abattoir of terrified animals. There is no sentiment attached to such things here and Greek islanders do not divorce themselves from the realities of where their food comes from as, until recently, virtually all of it was produced by the family one way or another. Centuries of eking out a livelihood on what is a picturesque but largely inhospitable lump of rock breeds realists.

Wild gladioli share space with a stack of old Symi doors.

Have a good week.

Regards,
Adriana

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Glorious Out in the Sunshine

April showers are still lingering over our corner of the Aegean and Symi had a few useful millimeters yesterday evening. The wild flower display continues unabated and early season visitors to the island are enjoying the show. Although temperatures in Rhodes are still below 20 degrees, Symi, sheltered from the northerly winds by the protective coast of Asia Minor is a bit of a suntrap and it is glorious out in the sunshine.

In all the years I have lived here I don't think I have ever seen

the upstairs shutters on this Kali Strata building open.

Note the flag pole for national holidays and celebrations.

Territorial markings in whitewash.

The Dodecanese Seaways catamaran is doing a daytrip from Rhodes today so there are quite a few people about, sunning themselves on the waterfront benches. The kiosks have set up their ice cream fridges for the summer although many of the kiosk holders are still passing the time playing tavli (backgammon) with friends or chatting on Facebook. Social networking sites have really taken off in Greece. With trade slack in a land of small businesses, bored shopkeepers pass the time on line in what amounts to a virtual kafeneion while waiting for the next customer to appear. The laptop has taken over from the television or radio as a means of keeping abreast of current affairs, with the added advantage that one can easily – and cheaply – keep in touch with diaspora relatives in Sydney or London. Speaking of kafeneions, the doors to my balcony are open and I can hear American, Russian, Italian and French voices rising from Pachos kafeneion downstairs, in addition to the usual Greek ones. The first foreign visitors of the season.

Kali Strata ruins to inspire dreams.

A typical wrought iron balcony on the Kali Strata.  The circles would have held clay pots.

Have a good weekend.

Regards,
Adriana

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Rain-Swept and Deserted

The Katerinettes is getting a new coat of paint and

Kokkona's house nearby is have a complete facelift with new plaster.

Yes, he is using a mobile phone and no, he is not wearing a crash helmet.

After a very wet weekend the sun is out once more.  With a chilly breeze blowing from the north any patch of sunshine is worth seeking out and many of the foreign property owners who have arrived on the island for the Easter holidays are holding court on the pavement outside Pachos.  The island has filled up a bit today as many French and Italian expats arrived on the island on the Dodecanese Seaways catamaran this morning.  On Saturday Yialos, Symi’s main port, was rain-swept and deserted, today it is humming with many voices.

The rain clouds roll down, masking the Vigla and Kokkimides

The cheerful sound of 1960s Greek pop songs rings out across the bay as Costas, one of the island’s six taxi drivers, likes to liven things up when he is at the rank by playing old favourites on his car stereo and singing along with them.  The chaps on ladders fitting the awnings on the coffee shop next door often join in the choruses.  A school of dolphins cavorted off Harani in the rain on Saturday afternoon. Although dolphins are fairly common in these waters it is rare to see them so close in shore.

In a few months Symi town square will be the home of the Symi Festival but today it is deserted.

The weather is expected to remain unsettled for the next 10 days with more showers expected later this week and again at the weekend.  April showers are as common here as they are in more temperate climes but in the case of Greece, this is often the last rain we have until October and it is crucial for helping trees and shrubs make it through the long drought of summer.

Nasturtiums putting on a brave show.

Lemons in the rain

Have a good week.

Regards,

Adriana

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Old Town Walls and Battlements

The Cottage, one of Symi Visitor Accommodation's popular Chorio rentals, in a sea of daisies.

Athena smiles down from a rooftop in Yialos.  She could tell a few tales.



Symi is in a pink haze of Saharan sand as a dust storm is curling up from Africa, bringing with it the threat of red rain and muddy thunder showers. This is a common phenomenon at this time of the year and invariably coincides with the spring whitewashing. As I have observed before in these pages, there is a very good reason why the traditional colours for Symi houses are shades of ochre, cream and terracotta. The next few days will be very unsettled as this weather system passes over us. With the high pollen count as well as all the fine dust in the air it is advisable for anyone with respiratory problems to stay indoors until we have at least had sufficient rain to clear the air once more.

Poppies, wild mustard and an improvised football pitch in the moat of Rhodes Old Town.

Akandia Harbour, from which the Proteus and various other ferries and freighters depart.

Rhodes Old Town Walls, fringed with poppies. 

That is the Blue Star Ferry from Pireaus just visible over the edge.

There are flowers literally everywhere at the moment. I went to Rhodes on Wednesday as there was that rare thing, a day return trip from Symi on the Proteus car ferry with sufficient time to actually get things done. Rather too much time, as it happens, because the boat was so full it was very late doing the Kastellorizon trip and we did not get back home to Symi until eleven at night. However, while Nicholas was doing the rounds of the agricultural suppliers I went for a walk through Rhodes Old Town. There was a Cypriot cruise ship in so a few tourist shops had opened, selling the remnants of last year’s souvenirs. What was more inspiring, however, was the sight of poppies growing wherever they can find a little earth and some moisture. There were poppies along the tops of the town walls and battlements and poppies in the moat. Everywhere I looked there seemed to be bright red blooms nodding gently in the spring breeze.

The ferry saga continues with the Proteus now doing a few tourist day trips from Rhodes in April and the Symi II still in mothballs in Mandraki. The new schedule means that while there is only one day a week, Friday, when it is possible for the people of Symi to go over to Rhodes with a vehicle, get things done and get back to Symi the same day, there are more frequent opportunities for goods and freight to be sent over unaccompanied. Who knows what May will bring but at least we have a reasonable schedule to get through April for the Easter visitors.

Have a good weekend.

Regards,

Adriana

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