Some Final August Postcards from Symi

Zooming down on Pedi from Lieni.  I suppose one day I will have to buy a drone camera for astonishing view photographs but for the moment we will all have to be happy with my Nikon bridge camera.  That boat out in the bay is a grand old two masted gentleman's motor yacht, resplendent with a yellow funnel.  We used to see quite a few of these elegant craft in Symi and Rhodes but as they are high maintenance wood with lots of brass and varnishwork there are ever fewer owners interested in maintaining these beautiful boats.

Monday morning from the bend at the top of the Kali Strata.  

Greek flags flying brightly on the bridge in front of the town square in Yialos.  The hillside behind is called Mavrovouni which literally means Black Mountain.  The buildings at street level are cafes, shops, a pizzeria and so on.  The residential properties are on the higher tiers, connected by a maze of steps, narrow paths and ramps.  There is, however, vehicle access from above as the road from the back of the harbour that goes up to the helipad passes along the top.  Spiti Grand Helene and Villa Iris are on this hill.

The National Bank of Greece, the Ethniki for short, is in the large stone building on the left of the photograph. The ATM is just inside the door from which the man has emerged.  Further along the quay, about half way to the clock tower, there is the Alpha Bank which also has an ATM.  

Another few of Mavrovouni, showing part of the square and the cafe bars in the foreground.

One thing Symi has in abundance, apart from beautiful old buildings, is steps.  As each house was built the owners built their own access steps. Sometimes these converge to form a thoroughfare up to another level but in this part of the amphitheatre harbour they are often a piecemeal collection of narrow domestic steps where two flights may even run parallel but not on the same pattern of treads and risers.

The area outside the nautical museum at the back of the town square in Yialos has become something of an open air market. By the way, the building that now houses the nautical museum was the first building on Symi to have electricity as the owner installed a private generator. This was some time in the 1920s I believe.  The rest of the island did not have a 24 hour electricity system until the late 1970s and even when I came here in 1993 power cuts were frequent and often of long duration, particularly in the winter.  People cooked on gas rings and used blocks of ice from the ice factory at the back of the harbour to keep perishables fresh. The ice factory was still producing large oblong slabs of ice in the late 1990s, mainly for the beach tavernas as they did not have electricity.

Monday morning 7.30 a.m. rush hour on Symi.

After gorging himself on my garden all summer, a locust outgrew his suit and left this ghostly carapace on my steps.  

The grass is golden and the leaves are falling after months of high temperatures and drought.  The first rains should arrive some time in October and we hope that this winter the seasonal rains will be more reliable than the last.

Returning to the back of the harbour, this lush vegetation gives a clue to the presence of ground water in the area.  There used to be a seasonal spring at the back of the town square which fell into disuse as the water became increasingly salty. You can still see part of it embedded in the wall at the road junction where the cars park.  The local housewives used to go there every day to fill cans and jugs of water for domestic use. This is why so few houses at street level in Yialos actually have rain water cisterns.  As all the surrounding cliffs and hillsides drain into this area in the winter the water table is quite high in this part of the harbour.

The Krystallo cat waiting for the shop to open.

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Midsummer Musings

We heard yesterday that the Cote d'Azur is down 40% this August so perhaps we shouldn't feel bad that Symi is similarly empty.

This discreet close of matching mansions at the back of Yialos was once the acme of elegant town living in Symi in the late 19th century.  Symi's neo-classical answer to the concept of the gated community.

A view of the Vigla mountain and one of the remoter parts of Chorio, as seen from the back of the square in Yialos.  The houses you can see on the hillside were once part of the main connurbation of Chorio and would have been accessed via the Kataraktis, the old donkey path that winds up the side of the kastro with a sheer drop to a water course on the other side, hence the name.  With the advent first of the Kali Strata and subsequently of the motor road the popularity of the Kataraktis as a road diminished and when the houses were damaged during the Second World War or fell into disrepair with successive waves of emigration, the focus of the community shifted to more easily accessible areas.

Mother and kittens playing in a ruin at the base of the Kali Strata.

A dream catcher in the window of a holiday let on the Kali Strata.  Instead of the usual swirls of wrought iron to latch the shutters open the carpenter who did this house supplied pieces of wood to wedge them open.  Simple but effective.

An old house is being cleared out on the short cut in Chorio and these old trunks caught my eye. What stories they could tell!  The top one was originally covered with some sort of striped fabric of which only a few scraps remain. These trunks are probably a century or more old.  A modern wheelie suitcase seldom lasts more than a few trips before bits fall off, zips fail and they have to be replaced. Who would ever fantasize about the life of a wheelie suitcase?

Spackling the street door probably wouldn't be my number one priority in restoring a mansion like this one but perhaps whoever is doing it thought they would start with the easy bits!

The haze is back and the opposite coast has vanished completely.  Quite a nice 3 master in the bay though, a reminder of the days when all the boats that anchored in Pedi looked like that!

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Changing Seasons and Making Plans

As the days grow shorter the humidity rises and we are seeing occasional clouds, like this one over Nimos.  Although we aren't seeing actual dew fall it is now quite damp at night and the washing is taking longer to dry.  At first glance the gardens on the island seem pretty frazzled as no one has water to spare for irrigation but on closer examination seemingly dead geraniums are starting to make tiny shoots in anticipation of  autumn which, in this part of the world, is a second spring, particularly if the rains come early while it is still warm.

Taking a break.

Morning mist over Pedi.

A hawker, all packed up and ready to go down for the Blue Star.  This one sells cheap baggy shorts, jeans, polyester print frocks, cheerful Chinese T-shirts with incomprehensible slogans on them and a miscellany of cheap shoes and sandals.  In the 20 years I have seen the truck come and go his stock has made little concession to the vagaries of fashion and only varies slightly according to the season.  When he comes in the winter he sells camo pants, hunting boots, sweat shirts and sensible slippers - the sort with non-slip rubber soles as they are often worn out of doors.  

Saturday midday view of Pedi.  This is supposed to be the busiest weekend of the year but there wasn't much activity down in Pedi.  Closer to home, do you see the goat sheltering under the fig?  After an absence of a few years the goats are back as more Symiots are going back to the land to tide their families through the hungry gap between ever shorter tourist seasons.

The dimples on this wall are actually tiny fragments of pottery which were embedded in the original plaster when it was still wet.  When I first came here the pottery was still visible - bits of everything from willow pattern to ancient potsherds from the terraces.  It has been painted over several times since then so only the little dents from the pottery remain visible.

Grapes ripening in old courtyards in Chorio. The one on the left has green grapes, the one on the right purple so not quite so visible in the photograph.  I rather like the shadows they make on the wall.

Pedi Bay 15 August 2016 - not much going on down here.

Yialos 15 August 2016 - the view from the Symi Visitor Accommodation balcony is pretty empty too.

The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin is usually the busiest holiday weekend in the year and normally every corner of Yialos, Nimborio and Pedi where one might be able to anchor or berth is full of boats of all sizes.  Not this year, alas, and most of the boats that are here have come from no further afield than Datca and Rhodes.  There will be the usually late night bouzouki party with live music and dancing at the Alethini on the Pedi road so the hills really will be alive with music tonight.

With only a few weeks left of 2016 to go, Wendy and I are turning out thoughts to 2017, Symi Visitor's 20th birthday.  It seems like only yesterday that we were organising the 10th anniversary edition of the Symi Visitor newspaper and the big clean up day. The newspaper is long gone, victim of the recession and changing technology, but Wendy and I are still here, matching Symi visitors up with their ideal holiday home so we hope to have some surprises for our regular visitors who have supported us over the years as well as new Symi visitors who will be discovering Symi for the first time.

Have a good week.

Regards,
Adriana

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Cats, Balconies and Summertime Musings

Symi remains exceptionally quiet for August and as you can see from this photograph taken early on Thursday morning there are very few yachts in Harani and the out anchorage.  Regular visitors to Symi and this blog will remember views packed with yachts of all sizes, types and nationalities at this time of the year.

There's a flotilla visiting Yialos which adds a bit of welcome colour and glamour.  The maroon and cream ketch in the foreground never goes anywhere.  It was impounded a couple of years ago after the German owners were caught people trafficking. They might have got away with it if they hadn't been overheard bragging about their exploits in a taverna. The moral of the story is never assume that just because you don't understand the language of the country you are visiting does not mean that they don't understand yours!

Bunting at the Vapori bar in Yialos.  If you haven't been to Symi before and are looking for the Kali Strata, look out for the bunting and you will find the start of the steps nearby.

A balcony with a view.  Presumably from those two chairs they can see the harbour just off to the left, above the blue and ochre pediment on the bottom left of the photograph. The entrance courtyard to St John's church, Symi's cathedral, in itself creates a pleasant open space to view from above.

This balcony is at the bend in the Kali Strata, just above the point where I stopped to take the photograph of the yachts, or lack of them, lying off Harani.

Symi Festival posters from the Symi Women's Association.  I like the scrapbook style but haven't found out yet who is responsible for these cheerful and effective designs. The red building is one of the two butchers in Yialos and this one is just around the corner from the bunting photograph above.

The carpenter's cat, taking a nap waiting for the pet shop to open.  Yes, that door is a pet shop that sells pet requisites as well as fish.  Symi has definitely moved on from the days when one could only buy pet food in the summer and it was only stocked by one supermarket as the only people buying it were foreign tourists.  Now not only do we have a dedicated pet shop but every grocer and supermarket sells a range of cat and dog foods.

If he gets any fatter he'll fall through the bamboo!

Taverna cats posing sleepily in Chorio.

Ruins and restorations.

The first two weeks of August are historically the busiest weeks in the whole tourist season but not this year.  Symi remains unusually quiet, particularly in the evenings when the absence of yachts has had a real impact in the tavernas, bars and restaurants.  One thing that has remained the same as previous years, however, is the weather. The best way to beat the heat and humidity is still to take a water taxi out to one of Symi's picturesque beaches - Agia Marina, St Nicholas, St George, Nanou, Marathounda, Nimborio or Toli bay - or take a round the island trip on the Poseidon or Diagoras. Thanks to the efforts of the Symi Women's Association and the Diakogiannis Organisation in Support of Symi in conjunction with Symi town hall there are still free open air events most evenings, either in the town square in Yialos or up in Chorio. The Symi Gallery Cinema Club also has free film shows on Sunday nights at Mandeio.  Posters appear on lamp posts, bus shelters and social media

The resort hotels in Rhodes are quite full, as we are seeing with the number of day trippers. This is mainly a spin off of the reallocation of all inclusive package holiday tourists from Turkish and Tunisian resorts to Rhodes.  Unfortunately they don't benefit Symi much as they tend to arrive with packed lunches from the hotels and don't have much in the way of spending money to support Symi's economy but perhaps they will fall in love with Symi's charms and come back for a longer stay next time.

Have a good weekend.

Regards,
Adriana

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