Mining the Diaries 77: Greece
Stone House, Kardamyli, Wednesday 9th June 2010
Morning. Still, silent. Sun breasting the Taygetos woke dormant cicadas.
Today we planned to walk to the church at Agia Sophia, which we can see high up overlooking the town. We set out from the Plateia up to old Kardamili, Pano Kardamili, the evocative remains of a Maniot clan stronghold. Parts of it date from the early 19th Century, yet it has echoes of an English medieval castle. Restoration work is progressing, including the creation of new apartments. The visual and spiritual focus is the church Agios Spiridon, built during the period of the Second Venetian occupation (1685-1715). Its pyramid-topped tower is decorated with flowers and six-pointed stars that give it a faintly Mayan feel. Inside, faded and dusty icons hang under a simple blue ceiling. Beyond the stronghold’s walls, giant eucalyptus trees by the Venetian cistern murmured with the hum of foraging bees.
Leaving the fortress, we climbed the kalderimi, past the tombs of the Dioscouri and through banks of scented wild sage with velvety pale green leaves. Brimstones and cleopatras fluttered ahead accompanied by the soft songs of hidden birds. Ants carrying grass seeds in their mandibles crisscrossed the path; those pushing their loads ahead of them struggled over obstacles, these walking backwards and pulling the seeds had an easier time of it (a lesson in physics). They were all doing better than us: the heat became too much and we turned back before we got to Agia Sophia, which always seemed to retreat in the distance.
We bought postcards and wrote home under the trees on the Plateia before swimming off Ritsa Beach. Dried off by the sun, we dressed and walked across to Elias restaurant and took a table under the olives, grateful for the shade. Over cold beers, we ordered lamb with lemon and oregano cooked in the oven – a favourite Greek dish – with chips and a mixed green salad. The lamb was meltingly tender, the fries crisp and the salad refreshing with a tangy oil and lemon dressing. There was a big wedge of crusty rustic bread too.
I’m reading The Wilder Shores of Love by Lesley Blanch, a colourful account of four 19th century women travellers, Isabel Burton, Jane Digby, Aimée du Buc de Rivéry and Isabelle Eberhardt,. She quotes evocative lines from Richard Burton’s the ‘Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi’
The light of man had grown to noon,
Has paled forever, and now farewell!
Go, vanish from my life as dies
The tinkling of the camel’s bell. …
An other life is living death, a world where none but phantoms dwell;
A breath, a wind, a sound, a voice, a tinkling of the camel-bell.