The Isles of Greece

The isles of Greece, the isles of Greece! Where burning Sappho loved and sung ...

-- Byron: Don Juan

Burning Sappho certainly wasn't the only one who loved and sung among those stubby, romantic isles that pepper the Aegean. The good Lord Byron had a whopping hot passion for the golden archipelago, spent several wild years there, fought fiercely for Greece's independence, and eventually gasped out his last breath on a battlefield at the tender age of 36. His heart is still buried at Missolonghi.

We get a little steamed up about the isles of Greece ourselves, and are constantly amazed by the fact that the (continued on next page) Aegean area today is virtually tourist free: out of some 4,000 islands, only Rhodes and Crete are occasional ports of call for cruise ships.

And yet there is so much to see: Santorin and Milo (where they discovered that statue); Naxos, where Theseus abandoned Ariadne and Dionysos consoled her; marbled Paros; sacred Delos, Lesbos and Kos; Tilos and Mykonos. Their names alone recall scarlet bougainvillea on frescoed fragments of white marble, black sponges on a silvery wharf, green grapes against ancient battlements, the cool silence of submarine reefs and the incredible fragrance of hillside lemon groves.

You can sail to any of these islands on trading vessels from Piraeus on the Greek mainland. Or, with a group of six or eight, do as we did and charter a 60-foot caïque. Then you're your own master, to sail whenever, stay wherever you choose. And the freedom is not costly. Cruises on a small liner, organized by the Greek Government, run around $25 a day each. We enjoyed fair luxury and complete freedom on our own boat for $15 a day, and that covered boat, crew of five, port expenses--everything except liquor and shore trips.

You can do it still more cheaply by buying and cooking your own food (which cuts steward and cook from the payroll) and by sailing most of the way to save on engine fuel. Some friends got their costs below $10 a day that way. But this is no trip for dime counting. Count rather the days of nosing into hidden inlets, singing the old Greek mariners' songs in a shadowed taverna, scrambling over the remnants of fabled civilizations on a desolate mountainside.

Where to go? We remember running northward along the island of Samos and cutting through a foamy, wine-dark sea. On deck, the wind whipped through our hair, made us feel we were soaring like the golden Greek gods themselves. To starboard, Mount Cercis' wooded crags rose for 5,000 feet to a bald white summit. Around us, not another island or rock could be seen. Here--for one singing instant--was all of Homer's world.

We came about and hove to, just a cable's length off a sloping, sandy beach, then scrambled ashore and followed a brook inland through a gorge aromatic with tangled brushwood. We dove into the clear, cool water, came out to dry in the glowing sun, to race naked like the athletes of ancient Greece (though we did it at an extremely slow trot). And like the heroes of those early days, we shouted in the ageless silence, feasted on cold roast woodcock, brown bread and black salt olives big as plums, goat cheese and plump tomatoes, great purple figs and hefty libations of retsina wine and anise-flavored ouzo brandy watered a pale white.

One of the members of our party laughingly commented that Pan was probably lurking in the dark groves behind us, trumpeting goatlike the words of Sainte-Beuve: "Art thou dead, immortal paganism? So would they say! But the Siren laughs--and Pan cries nay!"

The waning sun brought chill shadows and a sharpened breeze drove the surf more heavily against the sides of the cove. The crew of our caïque had some trouble beaching the dinghy to take us off and by the time we were all aboard, with sail furled and auxiliaries chugging toward the sheltered harbor of Vathy, the sea had worked up a sharp cross-chop.

Off to starboard, the moon's whiteness stopped at the edge of a dark coastal forest and in the silence we listened for the reedy flutings of a shepherd's pipe, coaxing the Dryads from the trees to dance again on the black tiers of Mount Cercis. We didn't hear a damned thing except the crash of breakers against the lonely shore and the slicing of our bow through the rising swells of the sea.

We've always had a good time in Rhodes as well; the walled city where you can stroll cobbled, winding streets and flowered-daubed ramparts of the old city, among Turkish minarets, Byzantine domes and shadowed arcade bazaars stocking rich silken embroidery and heady perfume. We especially like to arrive during the pre-Lenten season when carnival time includes gigantic papier-mâché masks and dancing in the streets. Best spot to observe it all is the white marble terrace of the deluxe Hotel des Roses.

There's constant dancing at the hotel and even outdoor movies at the Kafeneion Aegean, to be watched with a bottle of fairly dry white Santa Elena clutched in your paw. We have dined well there, too, starting perhaps with fried squid or taramosalata, a concoction of mullet roe mashed with onions and oil (we like big dips of the stuff on crusty bread) or psarossoupa, an egg-thickened, lemon-flavored fish soup that's surprisingly good.

Then some vine leaves stuffed with saffron rice and pine kernels and currants, buried in a sort of super-Hollandaise known as avgolemono sauce. Main course might be a stifado stew of beef and tiny onions flavored with garlic and cinnamon, or caccavia, a stew of many nameless fish, rich with tomatoes and onions and wild herbs.

What so-called night clubs there are on Rhodes have developed strictly for the tourist trade and, frankly, we skip them. Ditto on the more fashionable resort island of Mykonos (where we stay at the fine Hotel Lito, eat at the Apollo Restaurant down by the wharves). Instead, we prefer to seek out some little fishermen's tavern--to recapture something of the ancient, haunting music of these islands.

Our nicest taverna memory was off the beaten track--on an island called Syros. We'd watched the fishermen rowing toward shore in their ancient trata--narrow, shallow boats with many oars and a tiny sail. As they came home across the water, they sang of their heavy-laden nets. And they sang again that night as they strolled by twos and threes through darkening village lanes to the ill-lit tavern.

Tiny squid were frying, wine glasses filling, fragrant smoke from rich tobacco curling up. And in a corner local musicians were tuning zithers and fiddles, mandolins and lutes. The murmur of voices stopped to the cry of the bearded fiddler: "Now let Death die!" And soon the gay folk song swept the room, picked up by a score of voices.

Then, in a lull, a young man comes forward from some dark corner, stands barefoot in tattered shirt and pants, sketching a simple dance movement. The musicians pick up the rhythm, a thread of melody weaves into it; the dancer's steps liven, grow more complicated. Soon another man gets up, takes the first by the shoulders. And together they work out the pattern of the dance--perhaps a true zeibekikos, a survival from the ancient Greek nature worship.

That evening was broken at another point by strolling karagiozis performers, acting out their shadow play with cardboard figures behind a white screen. Long-nosed, hunch-backed Karagiozis, a sort of punchinello, always gets the worst of it at first. And by some cunning, witty twist ends up getting the better of his tormentors. The plays date back to the time of the Turkish domination, when the little puppet symbolized Greek resistance to the invader.

It was on the drive to Lindos, halfway down the east coast, that we first ran across the delightful Greek welcoming tradition of offering water and a sweet. We'd driven along country roads lined with wild roses, red poppies, yellow coreopsis, weighing the air with fragrance. We stopped at a farm to ask our way and the bearded elder sitting in the shade called out a welcome, then invited us to sit awhile with him. Thereupon his granddaughter came from the house with glasses of clear water and tiny bowls of sweet cherry jam--to bid us welcome in a way unchanged for 3,000 years.

Water, as a matter of fact, is prized above all other drinks in this parched land (maybe because a lot of the resinated wine tastes at first like furniture polish). On Kos, our overnight host did us a signal honor by walking four miles to a special spring and four miles back with a pitcher of its water for our delectation. And in Athens, a companionable bibber at a nearby cafe table informed us that proprietors of the better cafes keep three or four different waters to suit various tastes. He added that no cafe can serve the best for, like young wine, spring water does not "travel" well. For full savor, it must be drunk at the source.

Crete is distinguished in our minds for a couple of the worst hotels we've yet met (only DDT saved the day). But no one can beat Crete when it comes to antiquities.

At Heraklion, we wandered through the museum that houses the relics of Crete's fabulous civilization, so far ahead of its time that it ran to marble baths, indoor plumbing with running water and state socialism--at a time when Abraham was living with the Children of Israel in skin tents. No relics of the 5,000-year-old Minoan culture have ever been allowed out of Crete. So the (continued on page 70) Isles of Greece (continued from page 50) museum is rich in vivid murals, painted vases, iron weapons, gold jewelry, figurines of priestesses and goddesses, delicately beautiful work dating back two and three thousand years before Christ.

If the museum hoards the greatness of Minoan art, the Palace at Knossos spreads the glory of Minoan life. We walked there from Heraklion--just an hour's easy strolling through vineyards and olive groves where locusts saw in the sun, a countryside virtually unchanged from the days when the outer black and red pillared portico of the three-tiered city-palace of Minos was thronged with courtiers. One senses all the richness of that early, gracious life amid the huge court rooms of the Palace, the barracks, private homes, theatres, shops and great storage rooms.

The Minoans worshipped Woman in the person of Gaea, the great Earth Mother. She was their chief goddess, sometimes warlike with double-headed axe, sometimes fertile with flowers and overflowing breasts. Her symbols were the snake and the dove. Her handmaidens were all the women of Crete, small, pearly skinned, wearing light robes slashed open at the bosom to bare both breasts.

We met just such a woman--unfortunately more fully dressed--on our walk back that evening to Heraklion under a spangled sky glowing red in the west. We stopped at a tavern for a simple meal and the girl who served us--wavy dark hair, enormous eyes, pert breasts--might have stepped right off a mural at Knossos.

Certainly no cruise through the Aegean should miss the tawny hills of Milo and its catacombs cut from the living rock; the snow effect of the white-washed houses and white-washed cobbled streets of Mykonos under a dark blue sky, where there's natural beauty and fashionable resort life centering along the golden beach; Delos, just an hour from Mykonos, and the sacred lake where Apollo was born. Below this area, down by the shore, are temples and slave markets, palaces and hippodromes that arose when Delos became the treasury of the Athenian confederacy. The brilliant mosaics are preserved almost as well as those of Pompeii--though the disaster that ended life in Delos was its sack by Mithridates.

Then, too, there is Symi, whose houses overhang the sea like swallows' nests and Karpathos, whose women still wear the classical embroidered costumes, draw water in jars from community wells, vividly recalling the ancient days.

But perhaps our favorite is Santorin. Known originally as Kalliste, "the beautiful," the entire middle of the island sank into the sea about 2,000 B.C. Today this black gulf is known as the Kaldeira.

Donkeys offer transportation along the zig-zag path up the almost vertical sides to the little town of Thyra hanging at the rim of the 1,000-foot cliffs. At the top, there is an an unforgettable vista, between the town's white church cupolas and barrel-vaulted rooftops, over the Kaldeira's black expanse and the mighty twistings of the crater coast, with neighboring villages perched above the abyss.

Right out in the middle of the Kaldeira is the tiny island of Kaimeni, pushed out of the sea by a recent eruption some 30 years ago. In some places, the ground is still so hot that we managed to light a cigarette by holding it against a rock. Hot springs are still bubbling into the sea off Kaimeni, and in one place a swim from the boat was like taking a warm bath. Swimming nearer the cliffs of Santorin, however, provided us with one experience we shall not soon repeat.

We had donned skindiving mask and flippers. Slipping overboard into the depths, we looked down and for a moment were overcome with a terrifying dizzyness as if we were flying over fantastic heights. For the water is so clear that objects can easily be seen 150 feet down. But beyond--into ghastly fathomless depths--a weed-grown precipice stretched horribly bottomless. Shoals of fish hovered at various levels beside the rock and on a projection a little to one side, an Italian destroyer rusted in dreadful (concluded overleaf) mimicry of life, its guns still pointing up, its bow looking down into the dark depths.

Someone once said (and we endorse the thought) that no one should ever go to the Aegean Islands, one should always go back. For only on a second visit will you ever learn completely that the Greek word for foreigner or stranger --xenos-- is also the word for an honored guest.

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For more detail on Aegean cruising, check with the Greek-American Tourist Office, 505 Fifth Ave., N. Y. 17. For cruises and charters, write Hermes en Grece, 4 Stadiou Street, Athens, and Compagnia Italiana Turismo, 68 Piazza della Republica, Rome. Organized tours with Aegean calls are operated from the U.S. by the Bureau of University Travel, 11 Boyd St., Newton, Mass., and Odyssey Cruises, Inc., Hotel Delmonico, New York, among others. You can get there on your own for $350 up by sea (Greek Line, 8-10 Bridge St., New York) and for $624 by air (Trans World Airlines, 380 Madison Avenue, New York) or check with your own travel agent for details.