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!