Often I ascend the stone steps to the flat roof just to look at the fields stretching away in three directions, and the steep limestone hills, empty except for tiny chapels hiding faded frescoes, and the blue of the sea. Sometimes I look up to see eagles circling high overhead. I can walk to a cave where the bones of the last elephants in Europe were found, buried in volcanic ash. This is a wild, rugged and colourful place with few people, where roads don't have names or numbers, beaches aren't cluttered with signs and entertainments. Lacking many of the things that can make life noisy and complicated, it's unlike anywhere else I've found and I love it. Still, I grew up in a village surrounded by hills in the north of England, so in some ways I've come full circle but to a better climate.
The sky is a deep blue, the temperature reaches up towards 40ºC and there's a strong sense that we're tiny specks on a baking hot rock in the Mediterranean. The dominant smell as I walk up the dirt track towards Skafiis of sage burning to a crisp in the sun. Then there's the rich, sweet aroma of a fig tree by Menelaos' farm, which looks at first sight like a junkyard, but every bit of junk is something that is being put to good use, and the space in between is filled with goats and sheep. Menelaos, a strong, sturdily built man with tousled grey hair and a smiling face, is often working in his fields there, digging or planting, and he'll stand up and wave, and ask 'Pou pas?', where are you going? Banio? Swimming?
Another twenty minutes down a footpath takes me to a green valley opening out into a natural stretch of pebbles flashing white against a deep sapphire sea, with patches of sand the pink of the inside of a ripe fig. In late spring, I had it to myself. Now a few hardy summer visitors make it here and build little shelters out of bamboo cane as there are no trees for shade. At the end of the afternoon, it's deserted again, and peaceful. There's a cove to the right, over the rocks, where the sea gets deep quickly. I love to strip off and dive naked into the blue, lie on the shore in the warm sun, then swim back towards the shallower, rockier stretches with my snorkel to watch the fish. When I'm ready to leave, I gather some wood and cane to take home for rigging up nets in the garden.
Occasionally, I'm invited to a gathering at someone's house in the village: a good excuse to swap the dusty shorts and T-shirt for a strappy dress. Several outsiders have bought and restored old homes here, dropping in for a few weeks' holiday a year. These impromptu invitations of summer are a change from quiet evenings at home and an easy way to make new friends. One evening it's the house of an Italian man who has friends and family staying with him; most of the group except me speaks Italian, so I simply soak up the pleasures of eating and drinking in the warm evening air, my body feeling alive from the swimming and walking and summer sun. When I walk home down the dusty track later, I switch off the torch and let my eyes adjust to the darkness so I can see the jagged mountaintops silhouetted around me. The clear sky is full of piercingly bright stars and the pale arc of the Milky Way.
People ask how long I plan to stay here. I don't know. I can't know what life will really be like here over the months and maybe years to come. This is an experiment in an alternative way of living. I walk, climb hills, swim, feel the warm sun on my skin every day and speak the beautiful language, and enjoy life. In some ways, I'm able to enjoy life more because of the strange twist that happened in the journey here. I was with someone, and we were going to move here together, but it didn't work out that way. I think I was always meant to come here alone and to see what life brings.
Chapter 2
You'll Go Crazy
I'm early for the bus so I go to wait on the bench in the shade. An old man comes down the lane and joins me on the bench and we start to talk. He says I speak good Greek.
'I don't think so! I want to say so much and I don't know how.'
'Ah, don't worry, slowly you'll learn. You can't know it automatically!'
Having studied Ancient Greek at school, come to Greece on holiday as a teenager, lived in Greece for a year after university and taken several holiday trips, I have the basics of the language. But I've become lazy about opening the grammar books. No: not lazy, but when I finish my work, I want to relax and make the most of the summer.
'I'm going to Ay'Antoni for a swim,' announces the old man, and I realise he's carrying swimming trunks in a little plastic bag. 'It gets hot up here in the village in the middle of the day. It's a lovely little beach down there.'
Pantelis, father of Pavlos, joins us at the bus stop, swiftly followed by Irini, who has the tiny mini-market with the pretty, hand-painted sign up the narrow alleyway opposite. Just below the village kafeneion, or traditional cafe, Irini's shop has unfathomable opening hours that fit around her goat-tending duties. Irini is a bulky and warm-hearted lady, often leaning on a tall stick, and you would have to work hard to remain a stranger to her. The shop doesn't sell much that I need but I try to visit from time to time and find something to buy because otherwise Irini asks me, as she does now:
'Pou eiseh?'
This is a tricky one to answer, as it literally means 'Where are you?', which seems an odd question to ask someone standing in front of you. I think it really means 'Where've you been?'
'At home,' I say, and hedge my bets by adding, 'But now I'm heading to Livadia to take the Diagoras to Rhodes.'
'Oh, the Diagoras is late! Still in Kalymnos.' The big ferry, the Blue Star Diagoras, comes from Athens and stops at several islands before Tilos. Irini must have been on the phone to someone, maybe waiting for a shipment to arrive.
'Oh no! So I'll have to wait a couple of hours in Livadia?'
The village of Megalo Horio is seen as pano, 'upstairs' as local people sometimes translate it. It has its feet in the fertile Eristos valley, and around the other side of the mountain is the northern harbour of Ayios Antonis. Livadia, built on the edge of the large bay to the south of the island where the ferries come and go, is Kahto, 'downstairs'. Being by the sea, it has hotels and rooms to rent, and several shops and cafes in the square – though most of them close in the middle of the day, siesta time.
'Longer,' says the young woman with a little son who's joined us at the bench also. 'How long does it take from Kalymnos?' she asks the old man, who isn't sure, but they all offer an opinion. Suffice to say, it will be a while.
'I could take the other boat at four,' I say – unusually today, there are two ferries – 'but it costs more, pio poli…'
'Pio polla,' corrects the old man with a smile. 'See, I've taught you one thing today!'
It's true; little conversations like this will gradually improve my Greek, as well as bringing me closer to the community, something that's important to me as an outsider who'd like to stay. I probably spend too much time alone at my house.
Down the hill comes Nikos, the retired, somewhat rotund travelling barber with thick round glasses. When I stayed in Livadia for a month two years ago, trying to determine if I could live here, I watched him zipping around the island on his scooter, and one day I looked down from the terrace of my apartment to see the baker sitting on a chair in the alleyway wearing a cape while Nikos leaned over him with his scissors. He's the husband of Vicky, long-time curator of the diminutive museum in the village. Carrying a shoulder bag and looking frazzled, Nikos launches into a speech to Irini so rapid that I've no idea what he's talking about, though I think he mentions music and lots of people.
Eventually the bus comes and I'm wished kalo taxithi, a good journey, and some of us leave and some stay. The bus winds its route to Ayios Andonis, where the little harbour and shady beach look lovely and I think I must go there for lunch or dinner this summer sometime. Someone from the taverna meets the bus and takes their delivery of sacks of bread from the bakery. As we set off again and loop around to Eristos beach, the driver drops Nikos as close as possible to En Plo, where he is going to pick up his michanaki – it seems he left his scooter there last night after going to hear the live music at the taverna.
If I had a car, it would be so much more convenient, but I'd miss all
of this. And I wouldn't want to miss it for the world.
When you live in a place with a permanent population of roughly five hundred, every now and then you have to go to a bigger place to visit a doctor or a dentist, or to buy hardware or underwear, or to get to an airport. For Tilos residents, that bigger place is usually the island of Rhodes, and on Friday when the ferry schedule allows for a trip there and back in one day, islanders will often be seen around Mandraki, the old port area in Rhodes town, running their city errands. This time, I'm leaving for a quick trip to England in early July, but spending a couple of days in Rhodes first.
Rhodes is one of the larger Greek islands and in the summer is busy with people and cars, a different world from Tilos. The waterfront is lined with boats offering excursions, and stands selling fresh orange juice and corn on the cob cooked on the griddle; beyond the car park is Elli Beach, covered with bodies on sunbeds, but sometimes I like to sit in one of the trendy cafes there and listen to music.
Walking around the flamboyant dome of the New Market in the early evening, my eye is caught by some shoes in the window of a shop and I decide to go inside. I am deliberating if I can justify acquiring them – living, as I do, up a dusty dirt track in the middle of nowhere – when one of the men in the shop who have been talking amongst themselves asks:
'Eiseh Italitha?' Are you Italian?
I smile. I love being asked if I'm Italian; even if it is just a very slick sales pitch. It seems surprising at first that so many Italians visit these islands when there is plenty of sunshine in Italy, but the country's connections with the Dodecanese go back a long way. The wide boulevard that stretches from the New Market to the old casino at the tip of the island, passing the gates of the old harbour which the Colossus once bestrode, according to legend, is lined with grand edifices from when the Italians ruled the island from 1912 until World War Two, as well as some from the earlier Ottoman rule.
I reply in Greek that, no, I'm from England (not bothering to mention the blend of Hungarian and Scots blood on my father's side).
'What? No! Impossible! You don't look English. Look at your colour. Father Greek? Mother Greek?' I suppose many of the English they see at this time of year are lobster-red from lying on sunbeds for two weeks in blistering heat.
'No! But thank you. I live on Tilos.'
There is general hilarity. 'What?! You can't live on Tilos! You'll go crazy! No, it's just… it's very small. I know people from Tilos, my wife's family. Katse, re…' Sit down, he says, using the 're' word, often tagged on to a phrase among friends, suggesting matey familiarity. 'Sit down, it's a family shop, this!'
And so I do. We chat, and I leave buying shoes for another time.
The next day, my friend Hari drives us down the coast to Kalathos for an afternoon at the beach. I met him one evening here in late spring, when I was reading a newspaper at a bar and he started reading over my shoulder. He's a heavy-built Greek man who was born in Alexandria, Egypt; he has a deep, husky voice, a subtle smile and twinkling eyes. He's kind and funny and extravagant in his public persona; can tell the same joke a hundred times without flinching; yet is shy and reserved in private, and a creature of habit. When he can afford to stop work, he'll escape to his little house on the small island of Leros and go fishing, or maybe set up a taverna. But for now, with the Greek economy in crisis, he spends his days chasing payments from restaurants he supplies with food. And when I come to Rhodes, he looks after me very well, buying me little treats and teaching me to cook Greek dishes. I am actually smitten with him, though everyone says he's too old for me.
We stop to pick up frappé coffees for the road, a frozen bottle of water for the beach, and as we continue south past the monastery of Zambika high on its pointed hill above the sea, he puts his hand out of the window and declares it is burning. He knows the road very well and drives with purpose, continually overtaking. As we descend towards the beautiful plain of Malona, a goat runs out in front of the car and he brakes fast. 'Reflexes!' he says, smiling and shaking his head.
When we get to the beach, the sand is like hot coals, and Hari stands in the sea and declares he's not getting out.
He later tells me off quite seriously for swimming after eating because I could get stomach cramp; when I protest that it was only a sandwich, he says, 'I'm not going to rescue you if you're drowning, then.' Not swimming for hours after lunch is another piece of received wisdom I'm somewhat sceptical about. Greeks swear by it, but the Greek summer habit is to eat a heavy lunch, then sleep during the heat of the day. The rest of us may survive because we eat lighter meals. Driving back to town, he puts on his reading glasses to compose a text to his son while speeding through the traffic. We clearly have different ideas about what is dangerous behaviour.
In the evening, we dress up and go to a restaurant with live music. I drink wine and Hari drinks clear liquor called tsipouro, loading our glasses with masses of ice, and we eat sea urchin roe and salt-cured anchovies and marinated octopus.
Only towards midnight is it reasonable to head into the Old Town. Of course, the narrow, winding, cobbled, ancient streets are pedestrian-only but, 'We Greeks like to be unlegal,' says Hari, so we drive, careering around corners and frightening tourists heading back to their rooms. Every five minutes he gets a call with some work problem. In a loud music bar, we watch the weekend fashion show, and dance to silly, sexy, summer party pop. I don't want to go to England tomorrow.
'Eh, is nothing. Four, five days we will sit here again. Don't you worry about nothing. The life is too short,' says Hari. 'You must enjoy while you can! Because who knows what is around the corner? We could leave here and get hit by a train. OK, we don't have trains here in Rhodos, but anyway…'
Arriving in England, I stand on the train station platform and look up. Where is the sun? What is that strange white stuff entirely covering the sky?
England looks very green and flat and a little strange to me, having grown accustomed to a South Aegean summer. There's a drizzly sort of rain, something I haven't seen in months, and the ground of the train station is dotted with the ugly black spots of old chewing gum. On the train, nobody's talking.
There are some sunny days, and I go out without an umbrella then get drenched when it suddenly turns to rainstorms. I've already forgotten what an English summer is like, and the world of commuting and traffic feels equally odd.
The main reason for the trip is for work and it's fun to see colleagues; in between work meetings, it's also good to spend time with family and friends. People want to know I'm doing OK on my own; my plans for moving to Greece changed quite dramatically at the eleventh hour, and I had no time to see people to reassure them I was fine. In fact, I am full of energy and beaming with happiness after these first few months of Mediterranean life, and this new adventure has given me confidence in myself. Nothing can shake the euphoria.
Chapter 3
Finding My Island Feet
As a child, coming to Greece on family holidays, I was spellbound by the traditional dancing: the dramatic men's dances, shows of strength and agility and passion. Living on the island for a few months has given me the opportunity to learn my first steps of traditional dance, a long-held ambition, at the weekly class in Livadia, which – appropriately enough for me – takes place in the primary school. Although I could catch the bus, during my first week back in Tilos I decide to enjoy the hour-long walk there across one of the emptier sections of the island.
Turning on to the road, I pass the helipad. On the occasions when a helicopter thunders in, the throbbing power that beats the air as it touches down just a little way from my house gives me a thrill; yet unless it's a military helicopter, it's usually arriving for a medical emergency, to take someone to hospital in Rhodes. It stops just long enough to pick someone up then pulls away, leaving peace behind, just the birds crying out and the gentle sound of crickets. There's a path from there up the mountain to the Italian observatory, dating from the time of the occupation.
To
the right is Harkadio Cave, where the elephant bones were found, and above it are the ruins of another castle of the Knights of St John. As the road gains height and reaches a disused quarry, goats lounge nonchalantly at the roadside on mounds of gravel or in the shade of an old piece of machinery, or sometimes across the road, struggling to their feet awkwardly if a car needs to pass. The route sweeps downhill again to 'porselanes', where building materials are extracted by the islanders for making houses, and ochre and white cliffs of a porous stone provide little caves for goats to shelter from the midday sun. Falcons usually circle high above here at the end of the afternoon. Running parallel to the road is the old footpath that used to join the settlements of Megalo Horio and Mikro Horio.
At the crest of the hill is a chapel, then the venzinadiko or petrol station, where Nikos Ikonomou sits outside on a couch until 2 p.m. when he closes up for the day. Mikro Horio can be seen on the slopes above: once a thriving village of about two and a half thousand people, now deserted, its stone houses blending into the hillside. After occupation by the German army during World War Two, when the livestock was plundered and curfews prevented people from tending their farms, many residents of Mikro Horio emigrated to find a living elsewhere; the rest moved to the coast at Livadia, abandoning the old village in the 1960s. I first learned about this from Vangelis, who became my neighbour and friend during my month in Livadia, and who wrote an account of his experiences growing up there.
An Octopus in My Ouzo Page 2