Sunday, April 7, 2013

Santorini - Chic and Greek


After my last night in Kalavasos of drinking too much local Cyprus wine and zivania, the very alcoholic Cypriot spirits, with Kyri and Pana at Retro Taverna, I got up at 5 am to fly to Santorini via Athens, a very short morning’s hop compared to my other stretches of flying around the world. I met Pat at the gate to Santorini – she had been waiting in the airport since 3:30 am after flying all day from Boston via Heathrow, so my indulgent exhaustion was nothing compared to hers.

So Santorini – much smaller than I expected, maybe because there is soooo much hype and it seems like half the people I know have been there, or maybe because it really is small. From our little hotel with a view of the sea on the east side, it is a less than 5 minute walk to the stunning Mediterranean views from the west side. A tiny embraceable island at this time of year, when most places are not open and you can walk through an entire village and not find an open café to stop in for a glass of wine. It is the beginning of the tourist season and today many people were out whitewashing their buildings (because everything in Santorini is white). Apparently the day before we arrived there was a red rain, it literally rained red – something to do with that same Saharan mist that turned the sky white in Cyprus, which I still don’t understand. Glad we missed that.


We never feel prepared for the weather – in the sun it is pleasantly warm, in the shade it is always cold and along the west side for sunset the wind is wicked enough to pile on all one’s jackets. You see some people wearing down coats and boots and others who were unrealistically optimistic about their visit to Santorini wearing cutoff shorts, tank tops and flip flops, freezing their idealistic butts off. I am wishing I had squeezed that cashmere sweater in with the sundresses and miss my beret… I think this, like Cyprus, is the place where you can get sunburned without a clue that it is happening. In the evening we put the heat on in our room, which is really a setting on the air-conditioner so the heat stays up by the ceiling – what do these Mediterraneans know about heat anyway – and pile on the extra fleece blankets (at least there are plenty of blankets, unlike the Sri Lankan mountains!).

The food is good and Greek, but not cheap since this is a tourist place. Tonight we had cooked fava beans in tomato sauce (on Cyprus they called them “cuchas”) and a great arugula salad with sundried tomatoes and parmesan cheese and a big plate of deep fried whole anchovies – you just ate the whole thing except for the tail and they were surprisingly delicious and not at all like anchovies on pizza.
Our hotel is ideally located just out of Fira on the edge of Firastefani and we walk behind the building onto a stone walkway that winds its way right into the heart of town with lots of shops and restaurants and breathtaking views of the Caldera (the port) below down a very steep hillside.
At first it is hard to see the local lifestyle but I realize now that we walk past the school and many homes along this pathway – if we take it the opposite direction, in just a few minutes time you come to the small, quiet village of Firastefani which is probably not quiet at all in the summer but right now it is like a ghost town with white apparitions of tourist accommodations hovering on the cliffs over the sea, silent and shuttered against the wind.
Angeliki, the woman who runs Hotel Aphrodete is young and very kind and accommodating, and always wears black jeans and turtleneck sweaters or black gym clothes. I thought this was just chic Greek style but it turns out this is modern mourning attire – her mother died this past year and it is Greek tradition to wear black for some endless amount of time after someone dies (hence all the old women who are always wearing black because someone in their enormous family is always dying). She says her mother wouldn’t mind if she wore colors but she wants to honor her mother’s memory for a while. We were the first guests of the season and there have just been a few others during our stay here.

Pat wanted to visit the antiquities – excavations and museums and so we took the bus to Akrotiki, where there is an extensive archaelogical excavation site of a village from 1500BC and then walked through the countryside to the Red Beach which is a very disappointing small stretchy of rocky shore line that is a deep reddish color. In fact all the beaches on Santorini are a disappointment, as many Mediterranean beaches are to beach-o-philes, because they are not sand or white. But we are not here for the beaches, Santorini is about the amazing landscape and stunning and improbable architecture of the white-washed buildings perched precariously over the sea.
We get lost several times a day on the winding cobblestoned walkways through Fira, which one morning became clogged by visitors from a single small cruise ship and made me realize how intense this place would be in high season when 6 or 7 large cruise ships at a time might dock for the day and when all the hotels and apartments are open. Santorini was devastated by an earthquake in 1956 and nearly everything we see has been rebuilt to some extent. As always, I wonder where the local people live and finally we wandered down below the shopping district and found a street lined with big old plane trees like you see in many Mediterranean cities but which are a rare oddity on Santorini because there are almost no trees and certainly no large ones (in fact they import wood from the mainland to burn in their stoves). Anyway this was clearly an old main street and yes, we were in a regular neighborhood of house and stores that had no view of the Caldera, just the basic beautiful sea view looking east.

From our hotel we can walk the opposite direction north on the walkway along the coast and end up in Firestefani (where almost nothing is open) and then continue on to Imerovigli (where absolutely nothing is open). In between these two extraordinarily beautiful villages in a stunning monastery built in the fashion of the numerous Greek Orthodox churches on the island, with a large blue dome and a smaller blue dome and a flat steeple with three bells. Amazingly we have gotten lost in Firestefani half a dozen times because there are 5 paths that come together in front of another of these clones churches and we rarely pick the right one home.
One of the most interesting things we have done is an excursion to Oia (pronounce Ee-ya) on the very northern tip of the volcanic curve which is Santorini. Although you can see Oia across the sea no more than a mile away, the local bus ride takes 20 minutes on an incredibly winding mountain road with dozens of switchbacks overhanging a very fertile plain to the east and against a steep cliff on the west.
Thirty or forty years ago, breathtakingly beautiful Oia was a quiet and hip retreat for artists…and you can probably guess the rest of the story. Today it has an abundance of gorgeous and expensive places to rent and lots of picturesque paved paths lined with artsy studios and high-end shops. There was one studio where Greek religious icons were sold and because Pat has been studying those, we went in. It was an odd sensation of falling back through several decades - the artist resembled an aged Johnny Winter with long white blond hair and ancient cowboy boots and was playing hard rock music of late 60’s vintage while he painted gilded saints on ancient wooden doors.


 Pat was, of course, attracted to going to the Maritime Museum – having already visited the Museum of Prehistoric Thira in the morning, I opted out and went to the Lotza Café with a terrace overlooking the sea for wine and food. By the time she joined me I was in a lively conversation with Yanni, a Greek-American, Harley-riding, world-traveling entrepreneur who owns jewelry stores around the world in places from Moscow to Santorini. Yanni entertained us for several hours with his proud ex-hippiness and his knowledge of the old days of Santorini and his great self-image. His line “I used to be young and beautiful – now I am just beautiful”) is one of the best things we carried away from that night besides the memory of a good time.
We have eaten a few great brunches at Mama’s House – Mama being the quintessential Greek mama except with a wonderfully brash personality that she picked up living in San Jose, California during her youth.
This morning we woke up to the blustery sounds of wind and the sight of trees bending over in the gales blowing across the landscape. We worried that our ferry to Naxos would be canceled due to the weather but oddly by afternoon it has settled down and is sunny and fairly pleasant so we are off in a few minutes to catch the boat to our next destination.



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