Skopelos - 1986

SKOPELOS

The six of us were in the last of three weeks in Greece, where we had seen an astonishing number of archaelogical sites and museums—Minoan, Mycenean, Greek, and Roman—not to mention little towns, wonderful beaches, and scenic mountain rides. We were stuffed with ancient history and a brand-new culture. Now we were prepared to do absolutely nothing for five days. Down time, to rest up before the journey back to Athens and home.

A five-hour trip on a tiny ferryboat took us from Volos to Skopelos, one of the Sporades Islands in the northern Aegean. We all sat in the bow, leaning against the uncomfortable wood of the bulkheads, stretching our legs as the sun warmed them. We stopped at several small fishing villages on the bay—one at the entrance with the charming name of Trickeri—and then headed for the island of Skiathos. It was a sizable place, very touristy , the dock crowded with ferries much larger than ours, taking on cars and trucks as well as passengers. We watched the activity from our vantage point in the bow before we headed out to sea again.

Skopelos was the next island, but we had to land at the town of Glossa first, then circle all the way around the island to the harbor and town of Skopelos. It was spectacular—not dry and baked like Crete  and Santorini, but green and lush with forests and farms. The town rose like an amphitheater from the waterfront, white houses piled up and up, with crosses rising from the hundred or more little churches. Now we could see why Dick and Kathy had kept saying during the whole trip, “Wait till you see Skopelos.”

We chugged into the tiny harbor and climbed onto the dock, heaving luggage with us. Don and I had only one small suitcase each; Dick and Kathy were equally unencumbered. But Mike and Laurie had innocently brought along their heavy scuba gear, not knowing that Greece, as a preventive to looting of underwater archaeological sites, allows you to bring in the gear but will not sell you oxygen tanks. The pair of them had been swearing at themselves and at Greece during the whole trip as they lugged the extra bags around.

We hauled the bags up the street to one of the dozens of nearby waterfront outdoor restaurants. Starvation was imminent, after a sparse continental breakfast at dawn. Dropping luggage just off the street—something that would not be possible in a country more given to thievery than Greece—we started the serious business of lunch.

An hour later, refreshed, we took stock. We had already decided that we would prefer to stay in rented rooms, abundant on the island, rather than a hotel. These rooms are not reservable, so Mike and I remained at the restaurant table to watch the bags while the others set off through the town in a well-tested but odd way of getting rooms. Up and down the streets they went, shouting “domatio me toualéta!” Out came the housewives, beckoning them in to inspect available rooms. Two hours later they returned, triumphant. Mike and Laurie had a palatial room with a roof deck overlooking the harbor—as it was practically their honeymoon they were the winners. Dick and Kathy had a room up the hill with a small balcony; the shower was a cubicle on the balcony.

Don and I had a room just up the pedestrian road from them, in a house being renovated into rental spaces by Angelica and her husband, who lived ten feet away across the “street.” Neither Angelica nor her husband spoke any English, and we no Greek, but Dick negotiated well in Greek and their grown daughter had some English—when she was there. The space was still under construction, which added to the adventure. Each day something new was added. The room itself was plain and bright, with a little kitchen off it actually housng a refrigerator. (Unfortunately, one look into the refrigerator revealed a huge piece of meat, inadequately wrapped, beginning to make its presence felt. We closed the door on it; three days later it vanished, but left its memory behind.)

We were on the second floor; the bathroom was on the landing. This might later be a worry, but for now the third floor was unfinished and unrented. The bathroom had no door, but on day two a door appeared with a hole in it. On day three the hole was filled with frosted glass and a mirror appeared over the sink. The bedroom closet had no rod, hangers, or hooks of any sort. After a day or so we tried to communicate in sign language to Angelica—holding garments to the wall and letting them drop while pointing to the lack of hooks. That afternoon she led us triumphantly to the roof and showed us a newly hung clothesline. Yes, we could hang clothes there, but it wasn’t quite what we meant. We thanked her and did some laundry to show our appreciation.

The town was a joy. We descended the steep hill each morning to the first terrace above the waterfront, where we could breakfast under the shade of a giant London plane tree. After nearly three weeks of Melba toast, packaged cheese, and “Nes,” as instant coffee is universally known in Greece, we gloried in real breakfast—Don had delicious omelets, I had a huge goblet of yogurt stuffed with fresh fruit.

We wandered up and down the tiny streets, sketching and taking pictures. Every turn brought a new view and new delight: a stark white wall, with a blue-shuttered window closed against the sun, on the sill a big pot of red geraniums. A church behind its wall at the top of the hill, the tree shading it reaching every twig in the same direction away from the strong winds. A group of three old women in black sitting like little pyramids on the stepped street between the rows of white houses as they talked.

“Everybody knows everybody else on Skopelos,” Dick said. It was true. One day, high up in the village sketching, we needed to go back to our little apartment to get money for lunch. But the only way we knew to get there through the labyrinth of streets was from the waterfront—a long hike down and a long climb back up. I stopped an old black-clad lady. “Parakaló—poú íne Angelica?” She puzzled over my pidgin Greek for a minute and then light dawned. “Ah, Angelichi!” Her gutterals made me wonder if it was really Mr. and Mrs. Angelichi, not Angelica the wife. Smiling, she pointed up a little alley and gestured to the right. We thanked her profusely and followed directions. Not sixty feet away we found our “house.”

Our sketching drew admirers. Sitting on a step drawing a church one day, Don felt a presence over his shoulder. A “yaya”—grandmother in black—was watching him, smiling happily. “Agios Nikolaos,” she beamed, pointing at her church. He turned his pages back to show others; she was very excited and identified them all. Reaching into her bag, she produced a handful of the island’s tart plums and pressed them on him. My sketch of a hillside seen between two houses was “Ahhhh”d over by a younger woman, who pointed to the building on the hill and said something I didn’t understand. When I looked uncomprehending she smiled, crossed herself, and pointed again. Oh—it was the name of the church, Agios Giorgos.

Mostly we ate lunch and dinner on the waterfront, where dozens of outdoor restaurants stretched fifty feet from the row of buildings to the sidewalk and street on the water. Each was differentiated from the next only by chair cushions or awnings or tablecloths. One served only drinks and desserts—you had to move next door to eat a meal. This, we had learned early in the trip, is standard in Greece: restaurants don’t serve dessert and coffee. Separate establishments exist to top off a meal.

One day at lunch we discovered Greca’s creperie, on a little street a block from the water. In her tiny hole-in-the wall she presided in stately dignity over an enormous crepe maker just inside the door. The white walls of the restaurant were hung with intricate and whimsical folk art in bright colors: a carved and painted half-boat flattened to the wall with sailors hanging off it, paintings like Pennsylvania Dutch frakturs. Greca had done  all the art work, including the brightly decorated swinging doors to the kitchen  She was an educated woman, who spoke English and a number of other languages fluently. And her food was superb, which is not that often the case in Greece. We admired that, too, and she said with quiet conviction, “My cooking is also my art, like my painting.” She let us sign her guest book on our second visit, a signal honor, we learned.

One of the chief modes of transportation in this town where most of the streets were stepped was the donkey. Every construction site had a train of donkeys heading for it, panniers filled with sand, or loaded with bags of cement. At the site, the bottom of the pannier was unfastened and out came the sand. Handlers led three or four donkeys hitched in a row. One morning I woke up very early to hear the clip-clop of a donkey pausing below our window and got up to look out. It was the city trash collection. Housewives were rushing out with their tiny bags of disposables and dumping them into the garbage bags hung on each side of the donkey. I grabbed the camera and got a birds-eye-view picture.

As we headed for breakfast one morning we passed Dick’s and Kathy’s apartment and saw Dick hauling a bucket of water along the balcony. “Kathy got in the shower and got all soaped up and the water went off,” he explained. A lathery hand waved at us from over the shower door. They showed up a bit late for breakfast.

One day Dick gathered us all to go to the neighboring island of Alonyssos. We traveled on a small boat manned by two of the most gorgeous young men I’d ever seen, whose sole occupation, it seemed, was to chug the boat from Skopelos to Alonyssos in the morning and back again in the evening. Greece’s boast of full employment may be taken with a certain grain of salt.

Alonyssos was hard hit by an earthquake in the 50s or 60s. The old town on the hill was rocked badly, and instead of rebuilding it the inhabitants all moved to the harbor town at the bottom. Now, the deserted village has become something of a remote tourist attraction, which negates itself because people are moving back into it to open tourist restaurants and shops, so it won’t be deserted very long. I read recently that it was only because of corrupt politics that the abandonment took place instead of rebuilding. But the deserted village is a pretty place, with incredible views at every turn. We took the bus up, but walked back down a donkey track to the waterfront. I stumbled down the rocky path behind Kathy, dripping with sweat, unable to decide whether to keep my sun hat on to shade myself or take it off to let the sweat evaporate from my face and hair. Kathy, 20 years younger, tripped along in her strappy sandals, looking cool as a cucumber, never slipping and sliding as I was doing in rubber-soled shoes.

Never has a cold beer tasted so good. We sat for two hours over lunch, looking longingly at the little beach in the cove next to us. We had bathing suits, but Alonyssos doesn’t run to bathhouses. Finally, we settled on a couple of large boulders on the beach. Don and I dressed behind one, Dick and Kathy behind the other. Then Mike and Laurie used them. We had a wonderful swim and reversed the procedure to dress.

On the boat ride back I thought “It doesn’t get any better than this.” It was getting toward dusk, and we were sailing into the sunset. Islands looked like silhouetted stage flats in shades of blue fading into the mist. Dolphins played tag with the boat, racing along on either side of the bow. The gorgeous young men stopped the boat for a moment to get a better view of them and the dolphins swam away—we were no fun any more if we weren’t moving. When we started again they were back, leaping for sheer joy.

One night Dick took us to a bar high above the town, where his good friend Costas, who owned a boutique on the waterfront, played the guitar and sang with a small folk band. We drank beer and watched the dancing. This was not a place where tourists stood up and tried to learn how; these people had been born dancing. We saw a solo “drunk” dance, all rigid and stiff-legged, the rhythmic dances with groups who all knew the intricate footwork, and an incredibly erotic dance—that was at the same time innocent—between two men, dating from an era when women couldn’t dance in public. The older ones still don’t—only a few daring young ones.

Costas joined us at the tiny table. Things became crowded. The Greek method of keeping tabs is to leave all the bottles on the table until the evening’s end and then count them up for the check. With five people over a long evening at a small table this doesn’t work well. The waiter finally had to give up and write down a midpoint. (They also never write down restaurant orders: they remember long enough to get to the kitchen and bring stuff back, and then they come around when you are finished and ask you what you had. This they write down with a flourish and present to you as your check.)

We closed the place down and started back down the hill—to a problem. Skopelos doesn’t have any street lights, and everyone else was in bed asleep. We blundered down one dark street, then another. Even Dick, who has summered in Skopelos for years, was lost. Of course it was funny, too, and our very slight alarm was mixed with giggles. Finally, after about an hour of wandering, we found our apartment, and Dick and Kathy knew theirs was just a bit down the hill. Rest at last.

Every night at dinner we met Granny. An old friend of Dick’s from his first visits to Skopelos, Granny Henderson was a Scotswoman who had spent her working life at “Aunty Beeb”—the BBC. She had come to Skopelos on holiday after retiring and never left. Granny had a pair of broken glasses scotchtaped together right across the lens, and one lone tooth—an eye tooth much elongated by receding gums. But she happily gummed her way through all of the dinners Dick bought her, regaling us with stories of life at the BBC and in Skopelos.

(One Skopelos story, possibly apocryphal, was about an elderly widow who lived near the top of the town in her little house. Her stiffened joints no longer allowed her to climb the hill, so she had not left her house and immediate neighbors for many years. But during a violent winter storm she ventured to her doorstep to sweep away the water that was beginning to flow over the sill; the wind caught her voluminous skirts and swept her down the street on a tide of water. Down and down she went, all the way to the waterfront, and would have been blown right across the esplanade but that a group of men riding out the storm in a coffeehouse saw her and ran to grab her. They dried her out and wined and dined her before carrying her home. She hadn’t had so much fun in years!)

Granny knew everyone on the island and never stopped talking—in English. “They can speak it perfectly well if they only try,” she insisted, and she was usually right. How beloved she had become, despite her eccentricities, was made clear to us when we arrived at the dessert place one night to be met by the waiter with a shrug. They were full; he could not accommodate us. We shifted position slightly to confer, and he suddenly spotted Granny with us. “Grrrranny!” he cried happily. Patrons were unceremoniously shifted from larger tables to smaller ones, some were even moved to sit with perfect strangers, but a table was found for us—and Granny.

Our last night on Skopelos was an all-nighter. Our ferry was leaving at six a.m.; by the time we finished partying at three or after there was no point in bed. We walked back from the bar across the bay from the little town, getting lost in the dark once again, and found the lone all-night restaurant. An omelet was essential, then back up the hill to Angelica’s one last time to pack. Bleary-eyed, we stumbled onto the big ferry, and as it pulled away we watched the sun rise.