Fair Weather February

Two unusual things about the view from the Symi Visitor Accommodation office this morning. The first is the water boat which seldom comes in during the winter as in theory the town's reservoirs should be full of free rainwater.  The second is the Dodecanese Seaways catamaran heading for the 'wrong' side of the harbour.  The road around the harbour, from the bridge to the clock tower, has been closed since Saturday while the roadworks and paving project proceed.  As vehicles can't get round and the catamaran brings in fresh produce for the island, she is coming in by the bus stop for the moment.

Another view of the water ship.  Symi has no natural fresh water supply.  What we don't harvest from our roofs into cisterns during the winter rains has to be produced by a small desalination plant on the Pedi road or shipped in by boats such as this one.  This is why Symi is one of the few Greek islands where you won't find 'villas with pools' on the accommodation listings.  Fortunately Symi's pretty beaches are sheltered and calm for summer-time swimming.

Lemonitissa church peering down at Yialos from the Kastro, the old castle mound.

Oranges and cabbages, ladders and ropes.  One can buy most necessities on Symi - as long as you are realistic about your definition of 'necessity' and can adapt your plans according to what is available. There is no point in pining for peaches in February when oranges are in abundance!

The paving project between the town square and the bridge.

Roadworks outside the National Bank.

Artisanal cheeses and an interested feline audience.  Foodies look out for the cheese man who comes round about twice a month on the Blue Star.

The oranges that grow on Symi are usually very bitter, like Seville oranges, hence the hawker with his truck of oranges.  It is a curious thing that when growing citrus in drought conditions, oranges become bitter whereas the Symi lemons are surprisingly mild and sweet, regardless of the variety.

The Kali Strata is fast becoming a mossy landscape with weeds and grass popping up wherever there is soil.  Regulars to this page will know that at some point in April, May or some years even as late as June, some brave soul from the municipality weeds the whole flight of 360 or so steps and then whitewashes the step fronts for the summer.

Off street parking on the Kali Strata.

Free range Fred playing chicken on the road out of town this morning.

A rare glimpse of Profiti Ilias monastery through the trees.  In the summer the oak tree has leaves and the monastery disappears from view.  Profiti Ilias is one of the many ancient sites on Symi and fragments of  pre-Christian masonry hint at the possibility of a temple to Apollo on the site.

Wild cyclamens.  One of Symi's seasonal secrets.

The work on the new commercial harbour continues at a steady pace. They have laid out the harbour front with concrete blocks and are now back-filling while at the same time cutting away the hillside to create a large level area for trucks and vehicles coming off the car ferry to turn and park.  It is not much fun for the houses in the immediate vicinity of the construction work but once the project is completed, they will probably get a new lease of life as commercial properties close to the port.  

After a fairly wet and humid week the wind is once again blowing from the north, bringing clear skies and low temperatures.  Midday highs will be around 13 degrees or so this week, dropping to around 6 degrees at night.  The two main projects on the island, the paving around the town square and the construction of the new commercial harbour, are proceeding well. So far this February has been very mild with none of the storms and floods usually characteristic of February in the Aegean so if the rest of the month continues like this, with no extreme weather, they should all be on schedule. Fingers crossed!

Have a good week.

Regards,
Adriana

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From Yialos to the Heights of Chorio

Yialos, Symi's famous natural amphitheatre harbour is lined with tiers of beautiful 19th century neo-classical houses.  Most have now been restored by private owners.  These houses were built during the island's most prosperous period, in the late 19th century, when sponge diving and ship building brought wealth to the island and there were estimated to be around 20 000 inhabitants.  

Symi's old town is Chorio, the upper town.  Although the first settlement on the island, back in Homeric times, was believed to be at Nimborio, a bay where the flat-bottomed boats of the time could be dragged up the beaches to safety in the winter, the inhabitants of Symi soon sought out the defensibility of the high ground and the main settlement was formed around the Kastro where the castle was subsequently built.  The white building with the green doors at the end of the lane in this photograph is the museum which has been undergoing renovation and restoration courtesy of an EU grant for a number of years.  Now all we need is funding to pay staff to keep it open so that visitors can enjoy the  many artifacts housed there.  By the way, the museum building was donated to the town by the Farmakides family and was apparently the Austro-Hungarian embassy on Symi in the nineteenth century.  That gives you an idea of just how important Symi was then.  There is a story that the popular Austrian Empress, Sissi, was entertained there on her travels in the Aegean. The terracotta building on the right is a privately owned village house that was restored with great care a few years ago.

Much of the old town was damaged when the castle blew up in the Second World War, leaving behind some intriguing ruins. There are many such tunnels as on such steep terrain level ground for building was in short supply and houses often straddled the narrow lanes.

Bathrooms are a recent innovation and as Symi houses are small they are built wherever space can be found, which may not necessarily be indoors. In the case of this house, they have gone one further and built it in their garden across the lane.  It is not very clear in this photograph but this bathroom was built with a shallow brick cistern on the roof.  Water could be pumped up to this, providing gravity feed for a shower below so no electricity was needed to shower.  If you stand in a basin when you shower the water can then be used to flush the lavatory.  Symi doesn't have a proper sewage treatment plant and most houses still have vothras - basic stone soak pits, not unlike septic tanks but built out of unplastered stone so that the liquid can seep away and feed nearby trees. This is one of the reasons why one never ever puts paper - or anything else - down a Symi loo - the paper blocks up the spaces between the stones and prevents the drainage essential for the vothra to function, causing problems you don't even want to think about here!

Scaffolding around the bell tower of Agios Thanassis, one of the many parish churches in upper Chorio.

This old shop in the top of Chorio has always intrigued me with its carved lintel and enigmatic carved faces.  Whatever it was, it must have been quite posh for so much expense to have gone into the  dressed stone facade.

The approach to Stavros church, another one of the upper Chorio churches. This was once one of the busiest neighbourhoods of the old town and there are the remnants of many old shops and cafes up there.  There was even a tannery and a dairy.

Looking across from Stavros church towards the Kastro.  If you look carefully you can see the bulges of remnants of the old castle walls. This neighbourhood is about 10 minutes walk in any direction to the nearest vehicle access so very quiet - if you exclude all the bells!

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Merry May Day, Everyone!

The view from the office balcony just after 8 this morning - the Blue Star Diagoras gliding into Symi. She was not affected by today's strike as she left Piraeus before the strike began and will only return tomorrow, after the strike is over.  

An hour later, enter our old friend, the water ship. When I first came, before the present desalination plant was built, the water ship from Rhodes was a regular sight in both Yialos and Pedi. These days she comes in when the desalination plant cannot cope with demand.  We have not had any rain for a month now and the summer drought has begun. The cisterns and reservoirs are running empty. At the same time the hotels are starting to open and need to be able to fill their cisterns and there is increasing pressure on the island's water supplies, hence the water ship.

Touching up the paintwork in the back streets of Yialos.

The elegant entrance to the churchyard of St John's at the back of Yialos.  There is a junior school, the Petrideon, at the back of the church and that is where the little girls are heading.

Cleaning awnings, Symi-style.  The blue steps in the corner mark the start of the Kali Strata, the famous steps connecting Yialos with Chorio, the old upper town.

One of my neighbours is experimenting with rigging his boat to save fuel.  As he cannot afford proper sailcloth, this is made of plastic tablecloth fabric.  The pattern is a mixture of geometrics and tulips reminiscent of the 1960s so it may well come from a trunk or attic. The sad thing is that under Greek tax legislation he will pay as much per annum for his much-loved and largely homemade little boat, with its plastic table cloth sail, as someone with an equivalent size Sunseeker or Riva as the only criterion looked at is length over all.

Nobody talks about olive blossom.  It doesn't get the same attention as the more showy almond and cherry blossom and no one enthuses over it like apple blossom.  It doesn't feature on postcards and Instagram.  Poets don't write about it and no one names things after it.  The truth of the matter is that olive trees blossom copiously and all the olive trees on Symi are covered in a haze of tiny creamy-greenish flowers.  

The cyclamens are long gone but the pink bindweed is taking over, tumbling out of rock faces and up fences in an early morning show of cheerful pink.  The flowers burn off in the heat of the day and a new flush opens each morning.

Making the most of the last of the daisies on the Kali Strata.

The poppies are feeling the heat and it is only a leaky pipe that is keeping this clump going.

Growing in a gutter in Lieni, watered by the outflow of the washing machine from the house above.  It is amazing what can survive on a diet of grey water when the rain is over.

The gypsy hawkers do the rounds of the islands, selling their wares. This wonderful display of garden plants arrived on Wednesday and will no doubt leave on the Blue Star tonight.

May Day, Protomai, the first of May, is a holiday in Greece.  It marks the beginning of summer and is celebrated with flowers and wreaths.  As I was walking down to work early this morning many of the local housewives and their daughters were heading into the valley and up the mountain to see what they could find to make the traditional May Day posies and wreaths for the their doors.

This evening there is the annual Koukoumas celebration. This is a traditional event that takes place at Agios Thannasis church in Chorio every year in early May and is organised by the Symi Women's Association.  The local girls perform a ritual dance in traditional costume that is supposed to enable them to foresee their future husbands.  It is a joyful event with a lot of dancing and music and goes on for about an hour. The music can usually be heard all round Chorio and the Pedi valley so if you are on the island and unsure of the way, just follow the music!

Tomorrow evening there is more dancing in the form of the annual concert of the Rhiannon Wheeler Dance School at the Opera House Hotel conference centre in Yialos.  Rhiannon teaches local children (and enthusiastic adults) everything from ballet and tap to jazz through the winter months and then they have a concert before the season starts to show off what they have learned.  Once the tourist season starts everyone is too busy for personal stuff and dance classes become something to look forward to again in the autumn.

The first cruise ship of the season came through for a few hours on Wednesday evening.  As it was of modest size it was able to come alongside at the clock tower.  When bigger ones, the sort that dock in Rhodes, come to Symi they have to lie to anchor off Nimborio and bring guests ashore in small boats. It is rare for cruise ships to spend the night on Symi. They just stop off for 2-3 hours so that passengers can have a stroll around the waterfront and investigate Symi's many small shops and boutiques. Sometimes people who have seen Symi from a cruise ship come back for a longer stay so it is a good way of promoting the island.

Have a good weekend.

Regards,
Adriana

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