Voyage to Nisyros

The plan to sail to Nisyros – Georges, Mark, the salty dog Lisa and I – was thought up over beers on the rooftop of Mikro Kafe, and decided over a good dinner of tiny shrimp and courgette fritters at Blue Sky.

Georges’ partner Mona, being American, is restricted from travelling to Greece at present, so Frenchman Georges was at a loose end alone on his yacht. Mona gave us her blessing to go to Nisyros without her, as long as we didn’t have too much fun. I’m usually happy travelling by ferry and taking my time, without having to worry about what to do with ropes and sails. But it seemed too good an opportunity to miss – and it’s hard for me to pass up a chance to go to one of my favourite islands.

After a busy morning preparing, we set off just before midday with the sea a glorious clear blue, Georges giving Mark instructions on how to help with the anchor and leaping about to deal with the dinghy and various ropes. It felt exciting to be so close to the sea. A brisk cool wind was against us, so the engine did the work and we crashed through waves in an exhilarating way for a few hours, along the east coast of Tilos and then six miles to the south of Nisyros.

Pachia Ammos beach had a line of tents evenly spaced close to the shore, and shelters were dotted along Liess beach too, Greeks taking advantage of the free camping. We glimpsed Emborio up on the ridge before mooring up in Pali harbour. I’d been there with my dad the year before and seen locals gathering at Aphrodite taverna, so we headed there for lunch and found it already full. We feasted on chick peas baked in the oven in tomato sauce, stuffed vegetables and beetroot and the best chips any of us had ever tasted.

The hillside above Pali looks amazingly green, even in the middle of August when the islands are at their driest. Mike, the owner of Eagle’s Nest Car & Bike Rentals, where we went to find transport, explained it’s because the pumice soaks up moisture in the air.

Mike, a native of Nikia village, is a someone I definitely should have spoken to before writing the Nisyros chapter of my new book. Having lived in the United States for 30 years, he returned in 1999 and not only became involved with the local government but worked hard to protect the island’s eagles. He also raised funds, mostly from Nisyrians who had emigrated to New York, to restore monasteries around the island, the old school and the mayor’s office in Nikia. He raised most of the money to build the chapel high above the caldera where I first started thinking about the abandoned places in these islands, the people who left and those who came back.

At Mike’s suggestion, that’s where we headed first for a panoramic view. I offered to be the driver because I know the roads, though I immediately took us the wrong way, and stalled once or twice while getting used to the gears. As we headed around the rim of the caldera, Georges went quiet when I got distracted by cows browsing from the trees at the roadside, reminding me which one was the brake pedal as we took the precipitous track to the chapel. But it did have an incredible view straight down into the caldera and the craters, and for once there were no tour buses at all.

I’ve never experienced so many vehicles on the roads of Nisyros as I did that afternoon and evening, though – the island was full of Greeks, not least because it was 15 August, the festival of the Panayia, although the nights of dancing have been forbidden this year. We drove to Emborio and stopped at Apiria taverna, where a dozen tables were already set up outside by the ruined buildings for the evening’s celebrations.

We were all wilting in the heat, and in need of a swim, and perhaps Georges needed to forget for a while that we were nonchalantly wandering around an active volcano. We drove down the winding road to the coast again, parked at the entrance to Mandraki, then followed the sea to Hoklaki beach just in time for a sunset swim. Then it was time for an ouzo, the waves sending spray over us as they crashed up on the sea wall.

After a dinner of horta, goat cooked in the oven and veal in lemon sauce, Lisa helping us out to finish it all, we made our way back to the car, full and content. But hark… Music? I told the boys I’d be back in a moment, and followed the sound to a terrace, where I found some people I know sitting around a table, while a man played the laouto and sang. We were invited to join the company – two brothers with their wives and their 90-year-old father, friends celebrating a birthday. We had cake and raki and partisan songs… When we drove back to the boat in the early hours, we stopped to watch a group of young people dancing across the road.

The raki must have been good because when I woke in the cabin in the morning as it got light, my head wasn’t actually hurting. I went up on deck and slept some more in the cool air until people were up and about, then went off for a swim. Maybe the raki was still having an effect, though, because I felt slightly anxious about being followed and surrounded by a group of large bream… I got out swiftly and found some breakfast at the bakery overlooking the sea.

When we went to check that we had parked the rental car intact outside Eagle’s Nest the previous night, Mike was there and as we chatted, he told me more about the Pantelidis Baths a little down the coast. The reason for the abandonment of the thermal spa was a freak storm in the 1920s, destroying half of the building; in an effort to try to save it, the founder, Hippocrates Pantelidis, got sick and died. His children, not disposed to take over his grand venture, auctioned off the fittings and the land piece by piece. In the 1980s, a grandson spent 10 million euros restoring it, buying everything back, and was in the process of building wave breaks in front to protect the building from any other freak storms when a disgruntled neighbour decided to cause trouble, and the restoration had to be abandoned again.

We left at midday, hoping for just enough of a wind to let us sail swiftly back to Tilos. The sails were unfurled and we went up to five knots, six, seven… We detoured around the south coast to see the cliffs and rock formations, and the wind dropped and picked up, dropped again: five knots, then three, then two... There was manoeuvring of ropes and sails, until at last the engine had to be deployed, and the hoped-for crossing of an hour or so turned into three. I lay down and slept, lulled to sleep by the rocking of the boat… Lisa slept too, sliding around on the deck.

Finally the wind picked up again and Georges decided we should do the final stretch in style, so the sails were unfurled again magnificently and we swept into the bay. Reaching the marina, Georges opted for a narrow space with inches to spare. ‘Oh, I made a mistake,’ he said somewhat unnervingly. But it didn’t matter: he had been a splendid and generous captain, it had been a unique voyage to Nisyros and back. 

From Autonomy to Absolute Dependence

 

A few months ago, I came across a Greek article that fascinated me. It concerned something I've explored in my new book about the deserted places of the Dodecanese: the fact that the islands were once self-sufficient and supported thousands, and the evidence of that way of life can be traced on the empty landscape today.

I took some Greek lessons in June and with my teacher’s help I started translating the article for my own interest. Then I realised the author was the director of Archipelagos, the Aegean-based Institute of Marine Conservation, which I’ve also mentioned briefly in the book.

The organisation agreed to let me post an extract from it here, and when the full piece is published in English I’ll add a link. I’m happy to say that here on Tilos, the situation is not as extreme as that described in the article, but Tsimpidis’ arguments are enlightening.

Wild Abandon: A Journey to the Deserted Places of the Dodecanese is being published in paperback in the UK on 1 September, to be distributed worldwide over the following months. Advance copies are available now on Tilos and by ordering direct from me. Thank you to anyone who’s already ordered it and to those who’ve already read and reviewed it!

 The story of a catastrophe – from autonomy to absolute dependence

Thodoris Tsimpidis

Have we ever asked ourselves how, within a few years, our islands were transformed from exemplary models of management and self-government to utterly dependent places, no longer productive, most without even drinkable water? It’s worth noting that in the old days, often ships did not stop at the islands for many weeks, a fact that had no negative effect on the availability of goods and the daily lives of the islanders.

Those of us who lived on the islands in the decades 1960 to 1970 and earlier, even if we were young at the time, experienced the end of a period of autonomy that for thousands of years had characterised the Aegean.

I remember how in my village, Raches in Ikaria, in every home people took care each season to store what they had produced so that they had something to live on in the following months, therefore giving them a form of self-sufficiency and independence.

The few things that the islanders did not produce, such as sugar, rice, coffee and the indispensable kerosene for lamps, were sourced from the few shops that existed with what little money they had at their disposal, or by means of exchange of goods. The ship from Piraeus would come to the island sporadically, whenever the weather conditions allowed, unloading not only few passengers but also few goods on the island, because the locals had little need for consumer goods.

Conversely, when the ship travelled towards Piraeus, usually they despatched many different types of local produce, either for sale or for relatives who lived in Athens and Piraeus.

For centuries, all the islands lived from what they produced themselves, not only for local consumption but also for export. The bigger islands, such as Lesbos, Chios and Samos, were for centuries important regions of production and export for all type of agricultural and animal products, with important small industrial units (e.g. tanneries and soap-makers).

Ikaria exported raisins, the famous kaisi (a type of apricot), almonds and many other agricultural products. Kythnos even up to the end of the 1970s produced the equally famous ‘Therma’ barley, which covered the entire production of the beer FIX, occupying through contract farming the majority of the island’s residents. Paros exported large quantities of wheat and Naxos exported potatoes, fruit and vegetables. Many islands exported also primary materials (e.g. charcoal, lime or mineral kaolite – the basic ingredient of porcelain).

There was equivalent production and export of different products on all the inhabited islands, while small trading boats travelled between the islands throughout the year to sell or to exchange products. The last trading boats remaining in the Aegean stopped their voyages around fifteen years ago.

In previous decades even the small islands had a plentiful supply of water. They made use of the springs and the groundwater, while there was also a system for collecting rainwater.

The question, then, is this: How in the space of 40-50 years we managed to go from complete autonomy to complete dependence, disdaining a wise system of management which should have become a teaching model in all the environmental schools on the planet?

Many times we search for the causes in financial interests, but I fear that in this case the cause of this loss is not only financial interest. The state of the islands today reflects not only the policies of the previous years but also the displacement of the political persons who were chosen to manage that unique place. And in doing so they devalued the culture of management. The only thing which they had to recommend and apply was to transform the islands into a monoculture of tourism, which gave the final blow to the culture of self-sufficiency and wise management of the natural resources.

Most of the cultivated lands were deserted and replaced by small and large tourist units. The systems for preventing erosion on the islands were abandoned, increasing the incidence of erosion on most of the islands. Thus, along with the fertile soil of the islands, the groundwater is also lost.

The traditional method of raising animals was also destroyed, which incorporated through experience the understanding and knowledge of how many cattle should graze in an area, in which seasons and when they should transfer the animals elsewhere to avoid the negative consequences of over-grazing.

These were not ecological practices but based on common sense, the knowledge and experience of many years (which today we place no value on) and naturally on the necessity of survival. They did not exhaust nature because they knew that they would be harming themselves in the end. The remains of this traditional method of raising animals we see even today on all the islands, with the dry-stone walls and the stone pathways which they used to divide up the grazing areas.

 

Wild Abandon

In this weekend’s newspaper, my attention was drawn to the name St Kilda in a tiny almost-hidden paragraph. It was ninety years ago today, in 1930, that the last 36 residents of St Kilda, a Scottish archipelago 100 miles west of the mainland, ‘asked to leave because life was not sustainable’. The islands are now a World Heritage Site, home to the world’s largest colony of Atlantic puffins.

Abandoned homes, villages and ways of life in the Dodecanese islands of Greece are the subject of my new book, Wild Abandon, so I’d been interested to find a book on Mark’s shelves about St Kilda. I read a lot of books about wild, semi-abandoned Scottish islands during the writing of mine, from Sea Room by Adam Nicolson about the Shiants, to The Outrun by Amy Liptrot about Orkney. There are many similarities with the Dodecanese, which are also remote from the Greek mainland and whose populations were reduced during the twentieth century, often from several thousands to next to nothing; and those deserted places, slowly reverting to the wild, also provide safe havens for wildlife.

One thing that struck me about the people of St Kilda was that, according to the book, the people who left didn’t do well on the mainland. The people of the Dodecanese, from what I’ve discovered, thrived when they left, many of those from Kalymnos and Nisyros, Karpathos and Rhodes becoming successful businesspeople in America and Australia and Africa. And some who left have fulfilled their longing to return. I was fascinated by the variety of stories I discovered, and I loved talking to those who stayed, who lived through the times when – as one man on Kastellorizo said – ‘there wasn’t even earth to bury us!’

Another news story caught my attention in the previous weekend’s Times (the newspapers have become something of a weekend treat during lockdown in the UK, especially for the crosswords). In Italy, the semi-abandoned rustic villages, emptying for years, are being seen in the wake of the Covid-19 crisis as the country’s future as Italians flee the crowded cities to work from home. As in Greece, the half-deserted villages have attracted only foreigners in recent years, but now urban Italians are beginning to see the appeal.

Here’s an excerpt from Wild Abandon, talking about the village on Tilos that was well populated and full of life until the mid-twentieth century, a place some of you will know well if you’ve been following my blog for a while:

After my first couple of years on Tilos, I moved into the heart of Megalo Horio (‘Big Village’) when a house with a lemon tree and views of mountains and sea was offered for a small rent. To one side was a home owned by a potter from Crete, who had bought a ruin and restored it but visited only a few weeks a year. The neighbour on the other side had died years ago and the house was slowly disintegrating, the garden overgrown and the shutters hanging askew. 

These days every third or fourth house, many with a Christian cross carved into the stone lintel, sports a handwritten ‘For Sale’ sign; for every one that’s inhabited, there’s a ruin with gaping walls and roof, wooden cupboards still intact, trees still dropping fruit in the courtyard. The village with its narrow, twisting alleys is half-empty, more than half-empty in winter, shutters closed. Many people don’t have the money to fix up the hundred-year-old house built by their forebears. The edges of Megalo Horio are scattered with abandoned dwellings built long and low into the gently descending terraces, earth packed into double-skinned stone walls and roofs of rough-cut logs, now covered with grass and flowers. 

My village house had rusty metal railings and broken door handles, and a frequently blocked kitchen drain that couldn’t be fixed without breaking a stone wall half a metre thick. There were occasionally cockroaches, and slugs at night from the disused well, but I loved the space, the empty rooms, the rambling, ramshackle building with additions from different eras: a heavy old wooden trapdoor divided upstairs from downstairs; outside, modern concrete steps leading to the terrace were haphazardly built over the stone archway of the original front door, which had ‘1868’ carved into it – a century before my birth. In the summer I slept on the terrace, rigging up a shelter to block the streetlight so I could see the stars. Scops owls made their high-pitched calls in the evening.

 

The low rent allowed me a different kind of life, less dominated by regular work, yet I marvelled every morning that I could sit in my office overlooking the arched roof of a tiny medieval chapel, and across the valley to Harkadio Cave, where the last elephants in Europe died four thousand years ago. To the left on top of the mountain stood the observatory, dating from the Italian occupation, the shell of a building with no roof and gaping windows. The sun gradually lit and defined the terraces on the hill below it, where people once grew everything they needed, when the island was yellow with wheat fields, perhaps when the house was built for a newly married couple.

In the 1880s, the British couple Theodore and Mabel Bent came to Megalo Horio – albeit on a very brief visit – and their diaries record what they saw. They were on a longer trip around the Dodecanese, aiming to excavate and remove items of archaeological interest, usually without permission or with Ottoman officials turning a blind eye in return for baksheesh. In Tilos they stayed with the priest, who also cured hides for making shoes. The houses were dark, they wrote, and women sat spinning on their roofs. Tilos was ‘thinly populated, and as remote a spot as well could be found from any centre of civilisation’, rarely visited by steamer or even sailing boats. Women wore coats of homespun material, white shirts edged with embroidery, and pointed leather shoes; they had wild, gypsy looks and wore earrings so big they deformed their ears. There was no doctor; the local people would ‘live and die as birds of the air’.

If you’re interested in reading more about my journey around the deserted places of the Dodecanese islands, it’s now available in e-book from Amazon and various other sellers. Thanks for your support! And if you do read it and want to support me even more, please post a review online to help others to find it.

And here’s the link to what others have written about the book so far, and some photos from the deserted places: https://wild-abandon-dodecanese.blogspot.com/ 

Hope you’re well!