Side Trips: Sorano, Tuscany

 

The freedom of a rental car trip through Tuscany was a welcome breath of fresh air after leaving steamy, crowded places like Venice and Florence.  It also turned be the best part of our trip, offering some spectacular food and lodging at cheaper rates than we'd been paying in Venice and Florence. 

In Sorano, we spent two nights in a medieval stone castle, surrounded by a Renaissance era fortress that is built over an old Etruscan mountaintop settlement.  Our room was located in same living spaces that castle owners, for centuries, had reserved for their own families.  Big casement windows and high ceilings caught the natural breezes, and offered panoramic views of the streets below and the Tuscan landscape beyond.  The archway leading into the castle's courtyard, dates from the First Century AD, but the town's Etruscan roots predate the Roman Era.

Giant bellows once used in an
underground weapons forge.

 

Connecting tunnels carved into the rock beneath the fortress were used for escape routes, stables, storage, the forging of weapons, and the manufacture of gunpowder.  There are several old buildings inside the walled fortress: one has been repurposed as a museum and another is being used as a music conservatory.  Our last night there, after a dinner in the countryside and a hand of cards in the courtyard, we could hear music from an open air concert in the town below.


Complimentary breakfasts with cappuccino, pastries,
prosciutto, croissants, Tuscan bread and cheeses.

Hotel della Fortezza, Sorano

 

Side Trips: Venice

 

Venice is about an hour trip from the airport by water taxi or water bus.  Everything on the island moves by water or on hand carts, there are no cars.  Even cement for construction arrives by barges, with each barge carrying up to a half dozen cement trucks with their cargos rolling.

If you are looking for an overload on fine Art History, or want to earn a black belt in extreme shopping, Venice has some amazing things to offer.  But from mid morning into the early evening, the streets are clogged with tourists who outnumber the residents during the summer months.  The lines of people waiting to see attractions like the inside of St. Mark's Basilica, look like the kind of lines you'd see at Disney World.

Kathy managed to find us lodging in a quaint little B&B housed in a Renaissance era building that's located on a corner where a shop keepers' side street converges with one of Venice's famous canals.  There is small a brass pack on the building and an electronic entrance keyboard near the door, but nothing else to indicate what a gem of quiet elegance lies inside.  It is less than half a block away from Piazza San Marco, St. Mark's Basilica, the Doge's Palace, and dozens of little outdoor cafes.  The bad news is, that it lies even closer to a major upscale shopping district.

 

 

The Prophet Elias



 

A visitor to this island cannot help but notice the many rustic chapels that dot the landscape here.  Some cling to isolated mountain faces, or perch atop prominent hills or mountain tops.  Most of the ones "nearest to heaven" were built and dedicated to the Prophet Elias (Elijah in the Western Church).  Every year, near July 20, each will host a special mass and feast dedicated to the prophet.  Like so many rural festivals dedicated to Orthodox saints, these festivals have unbroken local rituals that predate the Christian era.  The name Elias for instance, is very closely spelled in Greek, like the ancient name Helios, and shares many coincidental traditions associated with the pagan deity.  There are also several other threads that connect Elias' story to Classical references.*

* On his last journey, Odysseus is instructed by Tiresias to take an oar from his ship and to walk inland until he finds a "land that knows nothing of the sea."

To escape the sinful ways of his neighbors, Elias put an oar on his shoulder and walked inland until he reached a place where a stranger mistakes the oar for a 'winnowing fan'.  From that point he ascended to the top a mountain where he drank only water from the mountain's brook and was nourished only by ravens who brought him "flesh and bread" to eat. 



Kathy's icon of the Prophet Elias

For his piety, Elias was whisked, still living, into heaven in a 'whirlwind' or 'chariot of fire,' where he waits to be returned to Earth, and to experience a normal mortal's death there.  In Eastern icons the prophet is often depicted on a craggy mountain face, with a raven bearing food in its mouth.  This is the icon Kathy painted of the prophet (right) and presented to 'Pappa' Kostas, the Orthodox priest who serves the village.

 

In Vourloites, the Feast of Elias is sponsored by one of the neighbors, and is celebrated at a chapel above the village. An Orthodox mass is sung to commemorate recently departed souls and to bless a specially baked bread and a ritual dish called Yourti.  The recipe for Yourti varies from island to island, but the local dish calls for 3 equal parts of goat (usually whole), wheat grain, and onions.  It cooked in a large open pot, and stirred for hours by the men from the village, with a large wooden (oar like) paddle.

 

 

 (Use the full screen option to best see the video)

Stone Walls

The wooden shutters, windows and doors of our house have all been replaced over years, but beneath decades of plaster and paint, the stones of the thick walls still lie in the same precise order they were stacked in two centuries ago.  I have often wondered about the people who were conceived, born, or died in this house, and wished that their stories could be summoned from the private conversations that the walls of this house have heard.

Two evenings ago there was a knock at the door and two polite Greek men introduced themselves and asked if they could step in and have a brief look around the inside of the house.  With the younger of the two men interpreting, George Tamvalis told us that he had been born in the house in 1945. At that time, the first floor of the house had been a cobbler's shop and his family lived upstairs.  George noted that a door, some windows and the staircase have been relocated.  Then he showed us where the shoe repair benches had been when he'd worked at them as a boy, "Everything seems so much smaller now."

In our upstairs bedroom George looked at the mantle above the fireplace.  "My mother held onto that when I was being born.  She delivered me on the floor in front of that fireplace."  He also pointed out a window and told us that during the first part of the Second World War, Italian soldiers occupied Samos and had ordered Greeks to turn in all of their fire arms.  There had been a search of the house, and a family member was hauled off to prison when an Italian soldier found a rabbit gun hidden behind a window curtain.  Details of the stories were sketchy and a little hard to follow. I wanted more information, but they were anxious to walk up to the Plateia and meet friends for dinner. I'll update the story if we hear more from them later.

 

'Joe' Thymianidis, 'George' Tamvalis, and Kathy

 

 

 

To Kokkari for Pizza

 

Kokkari is beautiful and probably the most popular tourist destination on Samos.  At least once every year we drive down to Kokkari just for pizza.  The entire waterfront is rimmed with small hotels, bars and restaurants.  Our favorite is Moscato, a quiet place at the farthest end of the peninsula, away from the crowds.  The pizza there is crispy thin and the fried calamari appetizer they serve is the best I have ever tasted.

 

 

Moscato is owned and operated by Sylvia, a Kokkari native who spent most of her working life in Australia.  Like so many of the island 'repats,' her English is accented with a Greco-Australian twang.  Sylvia inherited the building that houses Moscato from her mother who was born in Vourliotes.

 

Season 2018 - Samos, Greece

Leaving Athens - photo by Kathy, window seat



Arriving on Samos - photo by Kathy

We just touched down on Samos early yesterday morning.  The flights from Jacksonville to New York and Athens had gone well: no delays, no tight connections, no drama.  To shake the jetlag we spent a night in the Sofitel Hotel at the Athens airport, then caught a 45 minute hop to Samos that departed at first light Wednesday morning.  The carrier is a no-frills airline that has a fleet of stubby propeller driven planes that specialize in getting passengers to the Greek Islands beyond Athens.  The accommodations are a little rustic and can make the trip feel like being in an Indiana Jones movie.  The runways on some islands (like Samos) are often short, and require some hard braking after touchdown, which I suspect, could be a little stressful for white-knuckle flyers.  The smaller airports here are much more passenger friendly than those at the big international hubs, and we are always glad to arrive: the sky is always bright, and the first breath of island air always smells like a sweet mixture of figs, White Sparkle flowers, butterscotch and hay.




White Sparkle flowers, used by the Greek
Orthodox monks here, for making incense.

Traditions

 

Photo taken in the village square of Vourliotes, 1917

Emmanuel Lagos

The photograph at the top of this page was taken in the town square of Vourliotes, 1917.  It is difficult to see, but directly behind the flag of Greece in that picture, there is a building that has been owned by the Lagos Family for 4 generations (since 1886).  There has also been a family operated café at that same location since about 1912.  It is a place where Kathy and I always enjoy having dinner.

As authentic Old World charm gets harder to find in urban settings or at busy tourist destinations, many Europeans have made Samos Island their favorite holiday spot to relax and reconnect with their Old World roots.  We are lucky to encounter in it at every turn here, from the hand forged hinges and hasps on the shutters and doors, to the families that have been living and working in this village for generations.  The food here is another part of that living tradition.  Much of it is grown and picked within walking distance of the restaurants it is served in.  Some of the restaurants here serve food that is grown in their family owned fields or gardens.

 

Eleni and Diamantis Café, in Vourliotes Square, 2017
(taken from the same spot 100-yr. later)



Eleni and Diamantis Lagos' Café is about 50 steps from our door.  There is are printed menus for the table and chalkboard menu out front with specials dishes that change as different vegetables come into season.  While the ingredients are fresh, some of the dishes are prepared from recipes have been in the family for generations.  There is a simple and delicious elegance about the food at Eleni & Diamantis Café that is as rich and unpretentious as the local soil from which it is harvested.  Eleni also makes great special desserts that change with the season.

 

Diamantis and Eleni

For a video with more background and old pictures see:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyfDdmpwqbw

Longevity
 

 

 

 

 

The cemetery in Vourliotes is very small.  I think I counted only about 50 marked graves in it last year.  The custom here is to bury the dead under a small marble crypt.  After 5 years the body is exhumed by the family, the bones are carefully washed and transferred to a small box then stored in an ossuary for as long as there are family members around to care for them.

 

I started looking at the dates on those crypts and noticed that there were 3 women in the cemetery whose average age  was 100.  If half the people in the cemetery were women, then 3 in 25 of the women in the cemetery, or 12% of the women buried in that cemetery in the past five years, lived to be 100.  My math skills aren't the best, but that is an astonishing number.



Touching Down on Samos June 1, 2017
 




Kathy surprised Giannis with a few of these patches

  she'd made for him on her new sewing machine, just

 a day or two before leaving the States for Samos.

Landing on Samos this year was sweet indeed after more than 24 hours of travel time since leaving Mayport.  Giannis was waiting at the airport for us with a rental car, and all was right with the world again.

  

I've become more eager to get back to Samos every year, but have also come to dread the process of getting there.  This year we flew Delta.  They had oversold several seats on the flight from Jacksonville to Kennedy flight, and had oversold the flight from Kennedy to Athens by 6 seats.  Travelers can forget their manners in boarding lines, even with sequenced boarding sections, but waiting in the boarding line for Athens, felt like waiting to board the last American helicopter to leave Saigon.

One year we got back to find that the water had been shut off.  This year the electricity was off, but the thick stone walls had insulated the house which felt like an air conditioner had been on while we'd been gone.  A couple of cold showers, a change into a clean set of clothes, and we walked up to the Blue Chairs Restaurant for a Greek salad and a couple bottles of cold beer.

Coffee with Neighbors

 

For past five seasons, we have been having evening conversations with a couple in the neighborhood who speak no English.  Whenever we are out in the alley grilling, eating or playing cards, they always stop and make polite chit-chat about food, the weather, or invite us to upcoming religious celebrations and events in the neighborhood.  They will often drop off a plastic bag full of produce from their garden, or sometimes they bring by a bottle of their homemade wine.  I have also encountered them further up the mountain gathering fresh herbs for making tea or cooking.  Until today we didn't even know their names.
 

The couple invited us to their house for coffee this morning, and to help with the language, Susan Trovas (a seasonal neighbor) came along as an interpreter.  In the shade of an orange tree above their stone grotto, we were treated to traditional small cups of dense Greek coffee, bakery cookies, and small cheese pastries our hostess had just baked.

Rena and Zephonos are a retired couple from Athens.  Zephonos grew up in Vourliotes, and Rena is from near Corfu.  They are seasonal residents of the village now, with a large garden/orchard behind their small stone home, and a vineyard up by the monastery from which Rena makes her wine.  Zephonos was an actor and chorus singer in outdoor theater productions, and owned a magic shop in Athens.  During coffee, Zephonos entertained us with an impromptu magic show and gave us a tour of the house and garden.  The house faces the village but the garden is a big agricultural plot with airy and unobstructed view of the Aegean Sea, below.  What an unexpectedly great morning!



Zephanos, Kathy, Susan, and Rena

*I just found this post, in draft form, as scheduled to have been posted exactly a year ago today (5/15/2016).  So better late than never, here it is.

Festival of St. John of the Fire, 2016

Fire jumping - photo by Newell

photo by Newell

There are villages on Samos like Vourliotes, were ancient pagan folk customs are still a recognizable part of the Festival of St. John of the Fire.  The festival is usually held on a Sunday night in late June and features music, food, wine, folk dancing, and the curious ritual of village children jumping over bonfires made from the dried floral wreaths that have been decorating local doorways since May Day (the first day of Summer). The festival is also called the Feast St. John's Eve and is usually followed by a Greek national holiday on Monday.  The Village festival and the official state holiday seem to be connected, but both events go by several different names, and even the Greeks seem a little vague about origin and meaning of the two events.



photo by Newell

photo by Newell

St. John's Nativity Day is celebrated near the Summer Solstice.  It celebrates the birthday of Christ's cousin, John the Baptist.  In Greece he is called St. John the Forerunner, who foretold the coming of Christ the Messiah.  The historic dates for John and Christ's birthdays have been lost, but by the 4th Century, a proto Christ Mass was being celebrated near the Winter Solstice to compete with the pagan Yule festivities.  According to the Gospel of Luke, John the Baptist was born six months earlier than Christ. which made St. John's Nativity Day a perfect fit to co-opt the pagan festival of Midsummer's Eve.  In Vourliotes, the Feast of St. John of the Fire has retained the pre Christian, pagan traditions of feasting, drinking, folk dancing, and leaping over bonfires made from the dried May Day wreathes.  A lawyer in Karlovassi offered that the St. John of the Fire Festival may have also once had a connection to classical times when Prometheus was honored for stealing fire from the gods and giving it to Man.  But that's another research project, and I know what Prometheus got for his trouble.

photo by Newell

For different earlier postings on the same event (2012 and 2013) see:
http://mysamoshome.blogspot.gr/2013/06/folk-dancing.html
http://mysamoshome.blogspot.gr/2012/06/village-festival.html  

Hike to Kokkari

 

With the Euro value down and gas prices low, you would expect this to be a good year for travel; but news of the refugees flooding into the Greek islands near Turkey last year has resulted in a 45 percent drop in tourism for those islands.  With Greek pensions cut in half and with taxes to double this year, the result has been devastating, especially for coastal towns like Kokkari who live or die by the tourist trade.  The irony is that the refugees are now being routed into Western Europe through Italy.  The nightly invasions of the beaches here have stopped and the holding camps are empty, but this year Western news is all about the election.

From the eastern rim of the village you can look down the mountain and see the coastal outline of Kokkari.  In seasons past, we were used to seeing Dutch tourists, or the flinty German hikers eating lunch in the Plataea.  They'd often drive or hike up the mountain from Kokkari in the morning, stop in Vourliotes for lunch, then hike on to Manolates, or walk back down the mountain for a swim in the Aegean.  This year Kathy wanted to hike down the mountain, have lunch and a drink in Kokkari, then catch the bus back to Vourliotes.  Down the mountain sounded easy enough, so I agreed.



Crossing a brook

When Kathy retired last year, she joined a gym and went almost daily to walk on their treadmills and swim in their pool.  When I retired it meant that the dog and I had more time to spend together in the golf cart or the recliner.  The scenery on today's hike was beautiful, but the soreness in my back and legs has been a painful reminder that the recliner and the channel changer have not been my friends.