On a speck of an island just off the south coast of Turkey an old shepherdess used to raise the Greek flag every morning, and now two Vietnamese brothers are the only bakers, attesting to the endurance of Hellenism and its genius for absorption
Panayiotis Patouras, the only potter left on Rhodes and, he insists, the last in Greece who works in the classical way, is bringing to a close a ceramic craft dating back to the neolithic period.
Four hours away from Rhodes by boat, it is today what that island was 30 years ago – a ‘real’, unspoiled Aegean delight
A geothermal energy project on a small Dodecanese island is arousing antagonism among the otherwise friendly and hospitable inhabitants.
Mihalis Mavrikos’ private collection of Dodecanesian memorabilia
of the 19th and early 20th centuries tells the story of a lost, but still valued, way of life.
The village of Lindos was still a quiet, primitive place when we first encountered it eighteen years ago. We were immediately won, even though our initial impression of it was all wrong. Seen from the heights of the approach, Lindos was undoubtedly beautiful, but on the “picturesque” side.
Everything we had heard or read about the firedancers of Greece turned out to be wrong. We had been led to believe that the men and women who take part in the annual ceremony were a strange, even satanic lot, that the ceremony had its roots in pagan, Dionysian rites, that the dancers drank heavily for days and worked themselves into a frenzy in order to walk barefoot on the red-hot coals. Yet another source insisted that the whole thing was a fraud, a carnival show put on for money, a piece of flimflammery.
THE CAIQUE could have been any sponge-diving boat out of Kalymnos. Its deck was heaped with gunnysacks of sponges, boxes of provisions, drums of diesel fuel; its shrouds were a ragtag of patched dive suits, drying laundry, faded bandanas: a typical Aegean working boat.
Fishing has always been a tough way to make a living in Greece but from time immemorial Greeks have loved, feared and fished the sea, praying first to the god Poseidon and later to Saint Nicholas, the patron of seafarers.
FOR SOME time now Rhodes has been the Majorca of the Aegean. Practically every cruise ship plying the eastern Mediterranean touches down there. In recent years as many as 150 charter and regularly scheduled flights arrived weekly from northern Europe and elsewhere.
