THE PIRATES OF PANORMO

The Pirate Ship in Panormo

Within one hour, it seems that all the “must haves” and “must do's” on my Jobs To Do List have resolved themselves without any effort on my part. What a relief - as it is too hot to move at the moment.

Last weekend was a busy time away from home visiting the Kalamitsi Arts Group presentation of 'Sandcastles' by Bob Larbey produced by the Toneel Theatre Company and featuring our long time pal, Nigel from Gravesend, in his role as William Patterson. We had our friend Beverley with us and had booked a night in Vamos at our favourite little cottage “Jasmine”. Locals in the village of Vamos had been distressed to see so many tumbledown houses and had fixed up a few in the traditional Cretan way to let out to tourists. We picked up the keys from the charming crew at the picturesque Vamos Tourist Office which has a bougainvillea canopy around the door and sleepy cats on the front steps. K shamelessly chatted up his friend Klio from last year and managed to secure a bargain deal and, remembering our stay of last year, I took a couple of mosquito machines with us and packed a few breakfast essentials!

Stage Set for Sandcastles

The play was close to our hearts because we are long-term enthusiasts of Beach Huts and the play was about the adventures and misadventures of the occupants of three beach huts on the South Coast. Nigel was a bit of a star, in spite of his stage costume of woolly socks and sandals and a thick jumper in red-hot temperatures; the after play party at Vamos's best restaurant was also great fun, but I was put out to discover that I had arrived back home the next day having left a full pot of home-made marmalade behind in Jasmine Cottage's little fridge. After all the massive marmalade production of last year, I am also shocked to find only ONE JAR LEFT … Bother!

"Back Stage"

We had been following the fortunes of British weather via the Internet News and were puzzled to hear about such cold temperatures and heavy rain in the UK. The spectacle of the River Pageant to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee had been so well organised , but we were sad that the weather had not been kinder for such a big day. I kept wishing the Queen could go inside, sit down for an hour or so and have a nice cup of tea. Meanwhile in Crete, the temperatures have crept up and up so that it is now 38-40 C and a bit steamy at night. We are trying not to use the air-con too much but it so good to have a 10 minute blast now and then. K had his first proper swim today, not counting the ducking from the pedalo, and the water was silky smooth and nearly warm! Mount Psiloritis has lost all but a few scrapings of snow while the atmosphere is hazy and hot, hot, hot.

Lunch at the Ocean Office closely monitored by the Pirates

Bev had been to Greece before but never to Crete. She arrived with a suitcase full of goodies (including thermal underwear!) and seemed to enjoy her week and the opportunity to unwind in the sun. We introduced her to our favourite beaches and worked down through a succession of sun protection factor tanning lotions as the week progressed. We visited Anna's newly renovated house in Filaki and lunched out with a lot of our chums under the trees before some of our number had to return to the UK. 

Lunch under the Mulberry Trees at the Bear Sanctuary Garden

We managed to show Beverley a bit of Rethymnon whilst I was on a brief trip to the Dentist for more root canal treatment and I stood my ground at the Dentist who insisted that the treatment was painless and I would not need an injection whilst I said that I wanted one anyway unless he wanted me to screech loud enough to bring the surgery down and frighten everyone in the waiting room! The Pirate Ship seemed to be keeping an eye on Bev as it appeared twice in Rethymnon on Friday and again in Panormo on Monday but we managed to keep her safe from their clutches!

Georgoupoulis

After Bev's return to the UK on Tuesday and a week full of driving, K's eyes were on stalks. I decided it was time to have a bit of a sort out of the dusty bedroom cupboards and I had just said to K that we needed to dispose of the large old TV which had been encroaching on storage space for AGES! We were wondering whether we could just dump it by the village rubbish skip or would have to take it somewhere in particular. After a dusty half hour, we made off for a welcome cooler in the sea. I even had time to do some Greek language study today. At Chapter 5, I have reached the startling progress of being able to introduce myself, say where I live and say that I have a husband and three children. Pathetic really after all this time, but I do understand much more of people's conversations.

Relaxing later after an innovative supper whistled up from eggs (gift from Kostas a the shop), grated courgette (gift from Kostas at the cafeneon), onion, carrot, herbs, potatoes – which magically seemed to end up as a frittata, I was just having a quiet coffee on the terrace while K was chatting with the village chaps on a nearby doorstep. Five minutes later, all by co-incidence, he returned with a bag of oranges (from the cafeneon) and a request from newly retired bodyguard Kostas (one of three neighbours all called Kostas) that his TV had blown up and he would be very grateful for our old steam driven one! Yay! It is great to see the benefits of recycling close-up and I have nearly enough oranges to make another supply of Skepasti marmalade.

FUR COATS AND FISH SPAS

Kimon the Chef contemplating Chateau Crozier sometime in the future ..

There are many things that are difficult to comprehend about living in Crete (or anywhere else it seems). At the moment, we are all holding our breath to see what the second round of elections – due to take place on 17 June – will throw up. Nobody knows whether Greece will be maintaining or walking away from the beleaguered Euro. The results will probably be hard either way and I guess everyone, whether politician or not, finds themselves between a rock and a hard place looking madly for a life preserver.

Meanwhile, the growing season carries on much as normal in our village. The gifts of melons, cucumbers, tomatoes and horta (wild greens – a bit like spinach) carry on in their own unchanging order. Mr Raucous fish van with his horrible megaphone even gave K a bag of fish the other night. The cacophony was so deafening, while we were trying to listen to a radio play, that K went down in high dudgeon to ask if he could turn the noise down. Mr R F V had left the megaphone blasting while stopping off for half an hour inside the cafeneon for his coffee.  Meanwhile, we were going crazy. 'Stop and have a coffee', he said 'and have a bag of fish – they won't keep and what am I going to do with them?' As we had eaten already, the last thing we wanted was a bag of fish, but he would not take No for an answer and our neighbours on either side were delighted to have half each (and we returned the favour of the bag of horta from the previous day). Somehow honour had been satisfied without a penny being spent. Oh that the problems with the Euro could be solved so simply! The nice thing about barter is that nothing is wasted, but you end up eating all sorts of meals you never planned for.

Birthday fun included lots of references to fishing and kayaking!

Fishing boat and fisherman from K's wonderful cake

The one meal we had planned for this week was K's birthday and we ate at the weekly barbecue held at Camping Elizabeth. Here is a place of sanity where nothing essential has changed since the 1960s and the grounds have been designated a preservation area of natural beach and sand dunes whilst to the left and the right large concrete hotels have been allowed to swallow up too much of the Rethymnon coast. Thank heavens there is one area of the beach where turtles can safely lay their eggs and peace and quiet prevails among the bamboo and tamarisk canopy. Kind friends had made his day special by baking a brilliant birthday cake (which sadly got eaten before we could take a photo) and coffee and cupcakes at our favourite coffee shop in Panormo.

Vinzi's Coffee Shop high on the Battlements in Panormo

The drive to the campsite took us through a number of resorts with the hideous profusion of crowded souvenir shops, supermarkets and bars. The hapless motorist needs to negotiate clumps of tourists, trucks and bewildering motor bikes and scooters whizzing towards the car from all directions. It is not for the faint-hearted.

Most people we know are mystified by the large number of Russian Fur Coat shops that have sprung up in Crete along the coastal resorts. Nobody would think of Crete as being the first place on earth that anyone would be likely to need a fur coat, so their growing order of importance and opulent modern showroom buildings are a bit of a puzzle. However as there are masses of Russian tourists in our local resorts at the moment, we can only suppose that Russians are now able to buy furs and take them back home with them?? If there are any rich Athenians left, they may make such a purchase as essential holiday shopping ?? Certainly, the Cretans do not have the anti hunting, anti fur lobby which exists in the rest of Europe – so perhaps this is one of the few places where they can be put on sale ?? We are open for comments and any further inspiration on this subject would be welcome.

Kayaking on Tuesday

Similarly, we are agog to see dozens and dozens of Fish Spa premises in the big towns and wonder if the world has gone a bit crazy. With a beautiful clear, turquoise sea right on hand for paddling and swimming, who in their right mind would want to pay good money to dunk their feet in tanks of water previously occupied by other hot, sweaty feet belonging to souvlaki-eating tourists and a handful of unfortunate fish while crowds amble past gawping (or similarly mystified)? Every time we visit Rethymnon another couple of establishments have opened and we cannot believe that anyone can make a living this way. Full marks for trying though and having a go.

Keeping up with the news we read or see on line is like being swept up in a bizarre dream about The Emperor’s New Clothes where none of the arithmetic adds up. There are so many questions such as Bankers' Bonuses, the value of Advertising budgets, Football Players' Pay, Television programmes, Nations living on endless credit which is based on … yes, well nothing, that I can get a grasp of … and now Fur Coat Showrooms in Crete and wall-to-wall Fish Spas... Is it just me or has the world in general lost the plot?

Ever a fan of the Goons, Kimon quotes Spike Milligan when it comes to plotting the future ..., 

Spike said: “If nothing is planned, nothing can go wrong.”

As few things 'go' without Faith and Trust; my viewpoint is a bit different, but that is another discussion entirely.

KALOMINA!

SMUGGLERS COVE

Camping Elizabeth for peace and quiet ...

I'm not doing nearly enough walking and this was brought home to me when our son arrived for a week's holiday and said that he had not been down to the little cove – which is about a 4 minute drive but a 15 minute walk from our house. We decided to set off early before the sun got too hot and took our swimming things with us. We trudged along farm tracks and past hidden gardens, the odd newbuild house that hadn't been finished (there are LOADS of these in Crete) and small farmsteads high up in the hills and cliff tops on the way. We talked to a herd of goats who were inquisitively looking over the fence and avoided loud barking dogs who, although were just doing their job, sounded too ferocious to be on talking terms with. We also found the donkey who I had heard for two or three months hee-hawing in the distance, but could not work out his location. Eventually after a fair trudge which was uphill nearly all the way we hit the path down from the cliff and took a look over the edge, way down to the cove. The surround-sounds of the sea and the birdsong among the long, dry herbs and grasses made us stop for quite a while, just to enjoy the atmosphere. About 20 or 30 multi-coloured butterflies danced over the bushes and it was like being transported to a different world. Sadly I did not take my camera, so we had to take a memory snap-shot and make do.

Sketch of the Cove from January 2012

At the corner of the bend, I nearly turned tail because there had been large rockfalls all the way down the steep zigzagging path to the foaming sea, but Leo was made of sterner stuff and set off down hill clambering over the huge rocks which had been loosened by the heavy rains of last winter and I gingerly followed him. The beach was a geologist or fossil hunter's paradise. The combinations of tortured volcanic rocks turned up the most amazing piles of stones, some of which looked like liquorice all-sorts. I was fossiking around glumly looking at flotsam and jetsam and wondering if I could pair up all the sad collection of shoes, trainers and flip-flops amongst the driftwood, seaweed and sponges. I am sure that simply taking young people beach-combing early in the year would give them some idea of all the horrible pollution we are causing to our world. It is hard to resist doing a litter pick on many of the small beaches on the coast. After the winter storms, the biggest beach at Panormo is a dump of plastic bowls, water bottles, oil and paint drums, old lilos, shoes and plastic bags before the season starts and the beach is cleaned. Seeing all that debris in such a beauty spot would be a lesson to anyone.

Sunday's visit to Panormo for kayaking!  The beach is now clean and tidy!

However, I digress. Getting down to the village beach was much, much easier than climbing back up. The sea on Tuesday was much too rough to risk swimming and having to walk back in wet clothes. It was the sort of place where you pick up a sense of history – not only for 19^th century yarns like Jamaica Inn, but back in the mists of time when all these rock formations and layers of different lava had flowed, hardened and been twisted and turned by deep, primeval movement of the earth. Taking all this in, Leo kept a few unusual pebbles with circular markings. On a more practical train of thought, I found two pieces of driftwood which I thought could be treated to make a pair of rustic shelves and busied my brain wondering what on earth could be croziered from piles and piles of sea-washed shoes, but without inspiration. Thus burdened, we scrambled back over the fallen rocks and I really puffed like Thomas the Tank Engine getting to the top of the cliff. Leo was in much better shape, thanks to lots of walking and golf but we were relieved to be walking downhill back to the village as the sun got really hot and I began to turn a nasty shade of lobster.

Walking around Margaritas

We have done a lot of tourist trail things with Leo so that he has had the chance to visit places he has not seen before so I will not ramble on again about the pottery village or Camping Elizabeth because Croziers blog has been there before. However, K was bursting with Greek enthusiasm for Zorba dancing and found a Dutch twin at the campsite who shared his razzamatazz!  So much for peace and quiet!

E-viva!

Whoppers and Weightwatchers

It was a noisy start to the day as the “I have whoppers straight from the thalassa” fish van obviously had a good catch on the morning tide and roared round to the village at 7.00 am to sell his wares. It was far too early for us and we do wish he would turn his loudspeaker down! One day I will go out and investigate what whoppers actually are … but in the meantime, we live in amused ignorance of the “I have Whoppers and a very Loud Megaphone Fish Truck Ltd”.

Last week, we had friends staying with us which was fun – also slightly alarming as Croziers Aloft is not really geared up for a proper B & B clientèle being one floor short of a bathroom and our friends running an English Tourist Board approved … proper B & B in the UK. However, they were very adaptable, it was a good week and we explored all that our local coastline had to offer in Panormo and Bali. On Tuesday we drove up to Margerites to look at the ceramics and see the potters at work but it was a little quieter than usual. Eleni, our favourite restaurateur, raki maker, post mistress and general good egg treated us to a lovely home-cooked lunch … (I would really like her yemistes - stuffed tomato recipe) … and we wandered around looking for small items which could be packed easily. On Wednesday, we set off for Spilli with a bucket full of empty water bottles to fill up at the lion's head fountains in the centre of the town. The water was deliciously cool and we enjoyed a surreptitious ice cream when no one else was looking! The traders in the town had lots of hand crafted and embroidered items for sale and having lived through the worst winter in Crete for 50 years, I could fully understand why the Cretan folk would need to have such skills and crafts to keep them occupied while holed up away from the winter rains.

Spilli for Icecream.  The bucket was a bit of a giveaway!

On Thursday, we revisited Bali and spent the morning snorkelling around the rocky beach. Half way through the day K disappeared and we kept looking along the beach wondering where he had got to. Eventually, looking the picture of insouciance, he arrived by sea chugging along on a pedalo – fully clothed – and we all had a turn around the bay making a complete hash of steering, all shouting instructions at once and laughing like complete teenagers. If we thought getting ON the pedalo was difficult, this proved nothing like as difficult as GETTING OFF. Needless to say K's shirt and trousers got a good soaking and he had to spend another half an hour buying a dry T shirt before lunch. Still it gave a full morning's amusement to the other people on the beach who assured us they would give us a very wide berth and swim as far away in the opposite direction as possible. This was not easy to achieve either with our erratic efforts at steering! Meanwhile, out to sea, another couple had overturned their kayak and we watched them – slightly alarmed – trying to turn it over and get back in. Discretion being the better part of valour, I ran as fast as I could to the boat hire hut and persuaded the young man to take out a motor boat and rescue them as they were just out of his sight line. Thankfully, we all emerged unscathed from our nautical episodes on Thursday!

Pedalo-ing in Bali

Realising that we were running out of time before our friends had to get their flight home, we squeezed a trip to Camping Elizabeth where we met up with K's sister and made a quick visit to Rethymno in the evening. We just managed to have a quick wander through the old Venetian part of the town and walk around the harbour. We could not believe the week went so quickly and it was all too soon before the hire car had to be returned and K drove our pals back to Heraklion. They had never had as much red wine before and we had never eaten so much ice cream!

The Taverna at Panormo

The 13 May was the Red Cross Coffee and Cake Morning at our friends' Bob and Evvie's house at Maroulas. It is always a fixture of the CIC and about 100 people both Cretan and other English speakers turned up to this fundraiser. I nervously turned up with Apricot Muffins cooked with Cretan flour which never does what I expect it to do – but they all seemed to go!! The financial constraints are beginning to bite in Greece and people do not have so much ready cash, but we still raised over 1000 euros to support the Red Cross medical volunteers with much needed supplies, a portable defibrillator had been located from an English charity and there was still enough to make up food parcels for people in the big cities who had no means of support. It was LOADS of work for Bob and Ev but a wonderful opportunity to meet up and ... MOUNTAINS OF CAKE!!!!!

 There are a lot of people on strict diets this week as a result of everything we had last week!
 A-DI-OS for now.

A Crozier by any other name is Crazier.

Lots of people have asked about our Croziers title theme since it is not a family name at all and has little, if any relationship with the dictionary definition. Hereby hangs a bit of a tale which started on family camping holidays at least 20 years ago. Our three children were always a bit scathing about camping at all, the girls all too willing to complain about holidays taken without mod cons. On top of this, their mother embarrassed them completely by recalling all the woodcraft skills learned in the Girl Guides and making tripod stands and washing up racks and successions of awnings on every camping holiday with whatever was available nearby (usually sticks and string). It was too uncool for words. Our children's parents were dinosaurs of the first order.

One memorable holiday we remembered to take good books to read but forgot to take a fly swat and – as the book of choice at the time was about the Battle of Hastings where the combatants went into the fray armed only with their crosiers – this humble option for the front line stuck in my mind. With this in the back of my mind, I had tried to fashion a fly swat out of sticks and string which after a few hours of baffling construction still resembled a prehistoric tennis racket. It was of course completely useless as a fly swat;  the top flew off the handle at each swipe and would have killed a man at a hundred paces. For some weird reason the useless article earned the errant title of “my crozier”. Ever after this, the silly name stuck and was applied to ad hoc, make do and mend, somewhat pragmatic, often Heath Robinson solutions for day to day needs. Such is the stuff of family tradition in the making and since then, all of us try to find new ways to outdo one another by neatly solving problems and thinking outside the box. To constitute the definition of a true Crozier, it has to be creative, fun, cost nothing ... and its usually naff!

As time went on and many items around the family home were mended, redesigned or given a quick, cheap fix for the time being, the children would say – looking skywards - “Hmmmm another Crozier!” Eventually, as they grew old enough to take holidays on their own, we received post cards addressed to the 'Croziers', soon T-shirts were designed with a Crozier trademark and one Christmas after K and I had just moved house, by co-incidence, two of the three children separately had “Croziers” house name plates made for us as memorable and hilarious Christmas gifts. Thus Croziering had become completely detached from its original meaning and had taken on a new life of its own.

Little did we know that in the passage of time my work would bring me into contact with one or two important personages who carried proper Croziers (a large shepherd's crook) as a symbol of office. When the children realised the real meaning of a Crozier, we were a little worried that colleagues would think that I was harbouring ideas above my station with ambitions as a Woman Bishop! Help, Nothing could have been further from the truth!

I had one earnest discussion several years ago with a Clergyman who had previously served as a Royal Naval Chaplain and, as a born raconteur, was interested to hear the background to our Crozier history. He responded that he never did know why Bishops still carried such an anachronistic item around with them until he was standing talking to a Bishop in a cemetery one day while his small son who had accompanied him wandered round the grounds quite happily. Suddenly, the child accidentally fell into an open grave which was deep, wet and very muddy. Quick as a flash, the Bishop lowered his trusty crozier into the grave and hooked out the unhappy child restoring it to his red-faced Dad.

I don't think our children really did “get” the make do and mend thing until the time came for them to have children of their own … and would you guess it … they are beginning to devise a whole new generation of croziered items to deal with the mechanics of household make-do management.

Meanwhile, for K's 60^th birthday last year, his birthday present from me could not have been anything else than a sort of crozier – in Crete called a katsouna – carried by all the shepherds hereabouts and walkers in the mountains.

The top floor of our house in Crete is an open loft and was full of swallows and other birds when we first bought it. After installing windows and having a proper stone staircase built to replace the wooden ladder, we could not decide how to divide it up into separate rooms and needed to live in the house for a while before making any big or expensive decisions about it – therefore, the title for the blog was easy – Croziers – A Loft!   

RAMBLING AND SCRAMBLING

Panormo to Skepasti

We made the most of the beautiful spring weather by planning a walk along what would be called the coastal path in the UK except that here along the North Coast of Crete there is not what you would call a footpath – as such. Still, Brod the Guide for this excursion had done the walk before and we met at Base Camp (the Cafeneon in Panormo outside the Bakers) at 0900 hours on Thursday. After a long glass of water and a metrio (small, semi-sweet Greek coffee in a tiny cup) we set off with our Archeology hats and fibre glass walking poles. I was a bit self-conscious carrying this hikers equipment but we soon found out that we would need them.

We trudged up the path past the cemetery and around the cliff amongst a large flock of goats – all with bells donging and clunking. The path was good at this point – well rutted with tracks of 4 x 4 vehicles until we turned into a dip between the coast cliff where the lighthouse is and another lower hill. The terrain was easy with herbs, wild flowers and small rocks on either side. Eventually though we reached the point of no return and planning our assault on bandit country, we telephoned HQ (Brod and Carolynn's house) in case a search party needed to find us!

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At this point the ramble turned into a bit of a scramble and we hair-pinned up amongst rocks and gorse bushes on a very steep slope with a fence along the top. I was using my walking pole to lever me over difficult jumps and puffing slightly, as we reached the fence and tried to decide how to tackle the next field which was entirely enclosed with wire fencing. Unhitching the wires of the fence and slipping through (this was much more of a struggle than it sounds and we were grateful for our walking poles to keep our balance) we mended all the fences as we went and crossed two or three enclosures until we reached a large radio/telephone antennae on the top of the hill. At this point, we sat down on large rocks amongst the butterflies, sipped from our water bottles and soaked up the vista of the mountain ranges, hill farms and patchwork carpets of olive and orange groves before us. The national road looked minuscule and we worked out the various towns and villages in the living map in front of us. The birdsong was uplifting and all around our feet, little crickets jumped in all directions to avoid our boots. If my hands had not been full, I would have been tempted to pick some of the wild oregano growing amongst the rocks. As it was, I took a few photos and slowed down to pull grass seeds, thistle and gorse prickles out of my trainers at regular intervals.

There was only one more gateway to negotiate after this but it was padlocked so another fence unhitching and hitching was required and after this the tracks were easy to follow from here on – all down hill. The height of the cliffs (all volcanic rock) were very high and the little coves over the edge remote, but it was much too high and steep to investigate too closely. We met an Albanian shepherd who asked if all the fences were OK and we assured him that all the fences were sound in our wake!

It was very hot – nearly mid day as we trudged down the back lanes into the village, but the walk (4 miles or so) had been well worth the initial scramble. After a cooling drink in Skepasti, we drove back to HQ in Panormo where Carolynn had made one of her famous soups. I think we will have to collaborate and produce a recipe book entitled Carolynn's Cretan Soupbowl Recipes; it is either the fresh produce, herbs or seasonings, (or C's secret ingredient) that makes them such a winner. Deeee-licious!

DOUBLE 'YOKED' EASTER

CHRISTOS ANESTI! It has been a peculiar sort of week with two Easters a week apart. Our Easter (“Catholic” Easter) was a busy time with a visit to an archaeological site on the Friday and Saturday, staying overnight at a Hotel at Agios Nikolaos. We studied maps and plans via a slide presentation from the Curator at Knossos from the British School of Athens on the Friday night in preparation for a full morning looking at the Minoan Site of Gournia (approx 1450-1500 BC) on Saturday.

After a hearty breakfast, the Group travelled by coach from Ag. Nik. along the coast to Gournia, well supplied with bottles of water and a sizeable crop of “Archaeologist” hats and sunshades because the weather was at last very hot. Turning our plans and maps round and about to fit the puzzles together we tripped up the steep cobbled pavements between the solid looking walls and traced out store rooms, staircases, window ledges and door steps. We could just make out the remains of columns in wider courts, ledges for pots in tiny downstairs rooms, carved out stones and small corners for some kind of divine ritual, the full explanation of which is now lost in the mists of time. However, it was a beautiful place and amongst all the dried up stone walls and porticos, wild flowers blazed, peeped and spread in carpets creating vistas which kept us snapping with our cameras. The explanations about different sorts of graves and burials in caves and house graves was a fitting reminder that it was Easter Weekend and the examples reminded me of photographs I had seen about tombs, caves and burial practices in Jerusalem later in history.

Kimon drove me to the Anglican Church on Easter Sunday and it was lovely to meet up with friends from previous visits and to talk to the Chaplain there who has been in Crete for about the same time as K and I have. He gamely offered to pay a visit to our end of the island later in the year when I can gather all the interested people from hereabout to meet up with him and find out whether there are enough of us to form a small group hereabouts.

Emerging from church with joyous Easter hymns, it was hard to remember that all the folk in the village were still in their Holy Week leading up to their Orthodox Easter celebration a week later. Their Holy Week is extremely austere, with no meat eaten at all and the fish van calling every day with its raucous tanoy to persuade one and all to come and buy! The Church bells rang at odd times without rhyme or reason to us. By Friday, the weather was grim and the village church bell tolled non-stop from 7.00 in the morning until 11.00 at night and as I had moved on from Good Friday, I felt curiously disabled by having a foot in two camps simultaneously! However, we joined the procession following a funeral byre made of flowers and candles and walked amongst about 100 people around Panormo, our nearest town, on Friday night. The weather was so wet and windy, all our candles blew out and we lost Kimon very early in the proceedings finding him miraculously by the car once it was all over!!!

After all this gloom on Friday, we expected lots of fireworks at midnight on Saturday night and joyful noise as people returned from church, but sadly, we fell asleep early and missed all the fun (if there was any). I discovered later that the long wait in all the churches is because the Easter light is brought to Greece from Jerusalem by plane and carried around the country by police cars and further light carriers to complete the journey. It is amazing to think that candles are then lit from the church locally and the light of Christ is taken back to every little home to make the sign of the cross with candle smoke under the door lintel after the midnight service. It is a lovely symbol.  The Olympic torch should have no problems - Greeks have obviously been solving the logistics for aeons!

No bells could be heard on Sunday morning as we closed the house and loaded things into the car. Everything was deadly quiet as we left for the South Coast where a large group of us were meeting at a family restaurant with a clay oven for Easter Sunday Lunch (Orthodox style). We ate Easter pastries, cracked our Easter eggs dyed red (Kimon had a 35-er and was declared champion), were presented with ¼ of a lamb to eat each which tumbled out of the clay oven once the door was chipped open. After all the austerity of the very long Orthodox Lent, Greeks are very glad to have a large meat feast on Easter Sunday which is always spent with their family. So our group was a convivial gathering with good friends and we enjoyed it immensely.

The next morning we took a gentle walk around the harbour, the beach path and the local camp site before slogging up the steep cliff path back to the hotel to pack our bags and drive home. We stopped off at Spilli – one of our favourite watering holes where streams tumble down from the mountains through waterfalls and fountains – and sat under the shade of the cool plane trees for elevenses before completing the second half of the journey. The icy cold water melting from the mountain tops was as refreshing as ever and we soaked up the atmosphere glad to enjoy the warm weather and arrival of tourists after the winter.

ALITHOS ANESTI!