Earlier this morning George and I had our daily Skype chat, in between sending each other several text messages throughout the day.
‘I’m really glad you’ve made this trip, and I want you to keep having a good time. But we miss you a lot,’ he said.
‘I miss you too, darling. I’m having a great time, but it’s because I know I’m coming home in ten days.’ I feel as if I have been in Greece for months, yet the past few weeks have passed so quickly.
‘We need to travel more, even if it’s just locally,’ George mused. ‘We get too caught up here. I can’t believe how much it takes to run the house. It’s never-ending. You finish with something, and there’s always something else.’
I spoke to Dolores too and she told me how her team lost in basketball, that she’d enjoyed watching the school production a few nights back, and that she is doing her homework. She told me she misses me.
‘I miss you too, darling,’ I’d replied. ‘I keep seeing things that I think you would love, that I want to share with you. I don’t think I want to go away without the family for this long again.’
‘You’ve done it now, Mum – and you can do it again if you need to. But that doesn’t mean we don’t miss you.’
‘You’re a wise young woman, Dolores.’
‘Yes, that very true!’ she’d said, laughing.
Emmanuel had then got on the phone and said he missed me too, and I should just come home ‘right now!’
‘I’m going to give you a hug!’ he’d added, squishing the phone to his chest.
Isa’s children have also been providing her with regular updates, including a tale about chasing a mouse around the house, and having to set up ever-more complicated traps for it. Niki’s daughter has spent time at her father’s house, has eaten too much souvlaki, and is now back home, safe and sound, with a neighbour looking in on her. All is well. Everyone is surviving without us.
We make our way inside the Inn, and Thea brings us some of her husband’s homemade wine. It’s strong, tasting of berries and earth. We ask Thea to join us and she orders tsipouro, a strong spirit made from the residue of the grape press. When the waitress brings her a generously filled glass, Thea balks at the size. The waitress laughs and says that it’s mostly ice.
Thea tells us that she came to Ikaria several times as a child and teenager to visit family. When she met Ilias, now her husband, on the island, her mother refused to let her return to Ikaria – she’d wanted Thea to marry and live in the US. Watching Ilias move around the place – assured, relaxed – I can’t imagine him living anywhere else. These days, Thea travels regularly to the US to visit her ageing mother.
Her children, who are in their twenties, help in the family business, work their father’s farm, and hang around the island with their friends. Thea says her oldest son – whose tsipouro she is drinking – is an Ikarian ‘body and soul’, and doesn’t ever want to leave the island. I’ve seen Thea’s eldest around the place, a tall bearded young man who caught the attention of the young hospitality students. I could hear them giggling under my window each night as they flirted with him and several of the other local boys. The morning the students were leaving, I heard them ask him to stay in touch through Facebook. He politely declined, telling them he didn’t much do Facebook.
Thea says that her youngest son recently visited the US, stayed with family, and worked for a stint. After initial resistance, he came to like it there. She would like him to go back to expand his horizons.
‘The young people here are too relaxed. It’s like “What will be, will be”,’ says Thea. ‘But I want my sons to travel, keep their options open, open their eyes a bit.’
‘To be so sure of what you want at his age, to know that you are part of a place, isn’t that a good thing?’ I ask Thea. It feels rare to meet young people who know exactly what they want, who aren’t dissatisfied with what they have.
‘It’s good on one hand,’ she replies, ‘but on the other I want my sons to have some sort of focus, maybe study abroad and think about their future.’ She talks about how the options for work are limited on the island: mostly some tourism in the summer months, and working the land. Though Thea has a strong American accent, I sense she’s become very much Ikarian in her years here. She has a fierce mother spirit, a need to do the best for her offspring.
The conversation prompts Niki to talk about her dilemma – should she come back to the island and try to make a go of a life here, or set up a new life in Australia, where her parents had once migrated?
‘I know what I would do. Go to Australia,’ says Thea.
Niki looks doubtful. Returning to the island after a three-year absence has reminded her how much she loves it. In the last few days, I’ve watched her pick flowers by the side of the road, cherries from a mountain top, herbs by cliff faces. She’s reconnected with her mother, with neighbours and with family friends. She’s driven the winding roads confidently, told an errant driver off passionately and quickly established connections with everyone she’s met. If there is something distinct about being Ikarian, Niki personifies it: fierce, generous, passionate and proud.
While her mother lives on the mainland most of the year, her family still owns some land here. Over coffee, Thodoris planted the seed of an idea in her mind to set up a small canteen overlooking a spectacular cliff that plunges into the sea. But it’s risky. She is a single mother with no capital. What would she do during the winter months when half the island moves back to Athens and there are hardly any tourists?
And then there’s her fourteen-year-old daughter to consider.
‘I would love to live on the island, but what would my daughter do?’ says Niki. ‘There are a few schools here, but I couldn’t offer her the drumming lessons she loves, nor tutoring. I wouldn’t be able to give her the type of thing I offered my son.’ Niki’s son is now studying robotics and Japanese in Crete. The opportunities in his line of work internationally are good, whereas in Greece they are limited. Like many thousands of the country’s young people, he will be compelled to look for work elsewhere.
In talking it through with us, and after days of indecision, I think Niki has finally found the bottom line – she is a mother, and she will sacrifice what she wants to give her daughter a better future, just as her parents did before her.
Thea brings another carafe of wine – on the house – and we drink and talk into the small hours of the night. My book will have to wait.
The next day we head off to stay with Niki’s mother, Stella. She has just arrived from Athens to spend the summer months in her native village of Ploumari. Without yet having met me, she lets me stay in her home, along with Niki and Isa. I come to call her Kyria Stella – Mrs Stella. She is stout, practical, warm.
On our first day in the village, we walk down to the local cemetery to light a candle for Niki’s dead father. We see a middle-aged family friend of Niki’s drinking tsipouro at his son’s grave; his young son died in a car accident on the island. There is another man there building a fiddly monument to his mother. Later that night, when a black inkiness has settled around the village, we hear voices coming from the cemetery as more people join the mourners to chat and drink.
I can’t help but think about how sudden, random acts can take life from us. Everyone I have met on the island seems to know someone who has drowned, had a car accident on the roads, or come to a tragic end through a freak mishap. Death seems closer here. It’s more personal. There’s an almost daily reminder that we might be robbed of life suddenly. Perhaps this knowledge helps the locals enjoy each moment, each day.
Over the next few days, Stella cooks meals for us while we tour the island like irresponsible teenagers. When we get home, she presents us with steaming plates of dolmathakia made from the vine leaves we picked from nearby fields; string bean and goat stew; pasticcio.
At the dinner table, I listen as Niki exchanges gossip and news with her mother – which uncle has passed on, which woman has gone a little mad, which
child is running wild. The names and descriptions wash over me, making me think of the smallness of the village – everyone knows everyone. Niki points out once again that no one is ever lost in Ikaria. While this means that the islanders look after each other, it also means that it’s hard to keep a secret.
During the day, neighbours and relatives drop in sporadically, bringing something from their gardens – eggs, lettuce, vine leaves. An elderly neighbour – wild hair akimbo and voice booming – reads our coffee cups for us. After she leaves, we hear her screaming to her grandson down the street to come in and eat something. In the evenings, we watch the Greeks compete against the Turks in a friendship round of Survivor on television, a show that Kiria Stella confesses she is addicted to.
We watch the news, hear about new taxes being introduced, Syrian refugees still streaming in from the Turkish coast onto islands near Ikaria: Kos, Chios, Lesbos and Samos; most moving through, others choosing to try their luck in Greece.
I think about the conversations I’ve had with young Greeks, about how hard it is to leave your home unless you have few other choices. I imagine how difficult it must have been for my parents to leave their scenic villages, their passports stamped ‘labourer’, then try to make a living from working in factories in a new country, all so that their children might have a better future. And I think about how lucky I am to have a place I can call home.
Thanking
Today, Isa, Niki and I set off for the main port town of Agios Kirikos, where we go into the tourist office and ask for Urania’s father, Nikos. While Urania runs the branch of the family tourist business in Armenistis, Nikos still helps run the Agios Kirikos branch.
It’s been eighteen years since Isa last saw Captain Nikos – her former boss – and I watch as he hugs her warmly, clearly very fond of her, and exclaims that it’s been too long. ‘Isa mou, my Isa, you haven’t changed a bit,’ he says, pulling up a few seats for us, and sitting down at his desk, facing Isa.
‘I never did thank you properly, Isa mou. Your “Wild West” program went so well. Remember how we never thought it would take off? Well, it made us a lot of money and that’s all due to you.’
Isa looks pleased at the compliment; she had not realised she’d left a legacy on the island. She had doubted that Urania or her father would even remember her.
Meanwhile, Niki and I are confused about what on earth the Wild West program was. Nikos explains that it was a tour that involved a convoy of jeeps careening down the rough western side of the island. At the time, the roads were unsealed. We drove the very same route yesterday, and the spectacular plunging cliffs, isolated stone houses barely clinging to barren rock faces, and dogs tied to the side of the road to keep the goats under control had scared me. The small whitewashed church-shaped tributes at the side the of road attested to the many road accidents that had happened. And despite the mild weather, the wind battered the waves wildly against the cliffs. In the winter, it would have been bitterly cold here. Niki told me that electricity only came to the area a few decades ago. The children travelled to school by boat. And yet the villagers who lived here survived and even prospered.
‘Allow me the honour of taking you out for a coffee,’ says Nikos.
We make our way a few doors down to a café overlooking the harbour. Isa and Nikos talk about the changes to the town, the new eateries and houses that have been built higher up the hill, the appearance of a graded path along the harbour.
Like many Greeks I have met, Nikos is something of an orator. He speaks passionately of the long history of the island, the Ionian roots of its residents, of a proud history of education and philosophy. Standing up, he recites the national anthem for us, and a few excerpts from Sophocles’ Antigone for good measure, “Tomorrow is tomorrow/Future cares have future cures/And we must mind today.” This is one of the key principles that guides his life.
As he moves on to other subjects, Nikos says, ‘On several occasions, while I was commandeering a ship, I would hear my father’s voice warning me. I can’t explain it, but he saved me on several occasions from crashing into cliffs, woke me when we were at risk of colliding into another boat. Saint Nicholas was the patron saint of sailors. That’s why so many of us are called Nicholas on the island. We knew that the sea posed a danger to our lives, and so we didn’t idolise wealth and material things. Instead, we valued life, lived for the moment.
‘But really our wives were the heroes, the ones who were both mothers and fathers back at home. They knew the dangers of the sea, and most loved and adored their husbands. They looked us in the eyes when we came home.’
As if on cue, he is interrupted by a phone call from his wife, who he talks with warmly. When he hangs up, he says that marriage is about connection, not about a piece of paper.
He tells me proudly that as a captain of a ship, he has travelled the world and been to Australia twenty-eight times. ‘But my favourite place was New Zealand,’ he adds. ‘What impressed me is that they support their farmers, give them tax breaks. That’s a sign of a healthy society, a country that rewards the people who grow the food. And it’s so beautiful – whoever wrote about paradise, they were definitely thinking about New Zealand.’
At eighty-one, Nikos still has his own desk at the tourist office, keeps his own hours and loves what he does.
‘What would I do at home? To give something to your work, you need to love it. I didn’t call myself a captain, I called myself a traveller. Even now I still travel.
‘When I came back to the island after I finished with the ships, I was very stressed because I had become used to the rigorous systems of ship life. In the tourist office, I would organise transfers, but my drivers simply wouldn’t rock up. Most of the time, they would have gone for a swim, or drunk themselves into oblivion, or they had simply forgotten. Once, one of my drivers left a group of tourists sweltering in the August sun while he was eating baklava at a local café around the corner. The laidback attitude of the islanders drove me crazy. I was so stressed I had a heart attack.’ He laughs, hits his chest. ‘Now I’m used to it.’
He admits he made some mistakes and expresses regret that his children grew up largely without him. He first met his son when he was eighteen months old. When Urania was born, he received a telegram at some isolated overseas port where he was stationed, saying that he was the father of a girl. He thought it was a joke and ignored it because he had wanted a son. He tells us he met Urania when she was three months old, and didn’t want much to do with her. Then, one day, his mother brought her into the room and put her on his belly, and Urania started laughing. Nikos says that was the day the ice thawed, the day he fell in love with his daughter.
While Nikos admits pushing Urania into studying economics, he says proudly that she also completed a degree in fine arts – and that her painting of Icarus hangs at the University of Minnesota.
We talk about the Ikarian phenomenon of longevity, and how inexplicable it is. He tells us about a 106-year-old man who died only last year. Nikos says the man’s mind was so much sharper than his own, even if his body was starting to fail him.
‘I’m a realist. I know the cycle of life, even if I have a small angst about dying. The secret to living a full life is to have a good time, and to see your children do well in their lives. If we feel love inside us, we can send it out and get it back. And we are obliged to offer something to ourselves, to look after ourselves.’
We embrace Captain Nikos, thank him for the coffee and step out into the spring sunshine.
‘I have a strange question,’ I tell Thea the next morning.
She braces herself a little. I don’t think she knows what to make of me.
‘You know of Stamatis Moraitis, from the New York Times article?’
She nods.
‘Do you know where he is buried?’ I ask.
She looks at me quizzically and says that she doesn’t. I explain that I want to find his grave before I leave Ikaria, light a candle to keep his memory alive, and
say thanks for inspiring this journey.
‘No one has ever done that before, Spiri. It’s a nice gesture. I don’t doubt you will find it.’
I am not so sure. I’ve seen many gravesides dotted on isolated hills and rocky outcrops along the island. Many hold not more than a few dozen graves, and are off tracks that aren’t easily accessed. Stamatis’s grave could be anywhere.
Captain Nikos had not been sure where Stamatis’s resting place was either – he’d waved somewhere in the distance, thought it might be in the hills out of town.
I’ve had a wonderful time with Niki and Isa, so I’m sad they are leaving this afternoon. Going back to Kiria Stella’s to say goodbye, I discover she has been quietly working on my problem. She has made several phone calls and has found out that Stamatis is buried not more than a kilometre away from where she lives. Niki knows the cemetery, and says that we have time to go there before she and Isa must leave for their flight.
Before she farewells us, Kiria Stella packs me a bottle of oil, some wicks to light the vigil lamp, some jars of honey and a tub of pasticcio. She refuses to accept my gifts for her hospitality, and makes me promise to drop by before I leave Ikaria.
I am touched once again by how willing everyone is to help me out.
We turn off the main road, and head down an unsealed road that winds down to the sea. We nearly miss the turn-off to the cemetery, but a small sign alerts us that we are at the right place: ‘Do not litter, this is a sacred site,’ says a sign leaning against a rusted car that has been dumped along the road.
My Ikaria Page 18