Decade of a Feta way of life . . .

Posted on July 17, 2023 by Marjory

THIS month it’s 10 years since my first Greek travel memoir, Things Can Only Get Feta, was published and I’m thrilled to say the book is still going strong: a best-seller in various Amazon categories, despite a publishing drama early on. However, it has soldiered on with vigour and even found its way recently onto the syllabus of a Greek university course. But more of that later.

If you’ve followed my blog over the past decade, you’ll be familiar with how the book, about living in Greece during the economic crisis, came about. But if you’re just tuning in for the first time, in short: my husband Jim and I, and our famously bonkers Jack Russell terrier Wallace, left a Scottish village in 2010 for a mid-life adventure in southern Greece. It was during a British recession and a downturn in the newspaper industry, in which we both worked as journalists.

**Wallace, above, and again with Jim and Marjory in Koroni**

And what an adventure it turned out to be, settling in a rented stone house in a hillside village in the remote, wild Mani region. It was a working village, raw in places, sometimes well beyond our comfort zone but perfect for our aim of living a Greek kind of life while we freelanced for various publications in Britain and Australia to help fund our odyssey. Greece was on the brink of meltdown due to its devastating economic crisis of 2010. The country, with massive debts, had to accept a bailout from the EU and punishing austerity to go with it. An ideal time for journalists perhaps, but not for a trouble-free stay in beautiful Greece.

However, we went regardless and found ourselves in an ideal location, living amongst big-hearted goat and olive farmers. We made friends with many, particularly the inimitable Foteini, the eccentric goat farmer with her famously endearing taste for thick, clashing layers of clothing and rural mayhem. Ironically, it was my curious friendship with Foteini (pushing my imperfect Greek to its limits) that helped steer our path in the village. She also became an unlikely literary muse – who knew?! Her touching stories and her antics inspired me to start writing Feta, to record a rural way of life in the Mani peninsula (one of the three that hang down from the southern mainland) that I was sure was about to change forever.

**Marjory with the unforgettable Foteini**

**The village of Megali Mantineia, where the author spent the first year of her Greek odyssey**

**Jim (back row, right) with the wonderful villagers and two of its priests at a celebration in Megali Mantineia**

The first year in the village of Megali Mantineia, beneath the Taygetos mountains, exceeded all our expectations. It was challenging, fascinating, often hilarious, and sometimes downright frustrating. We dealt with macabre local customs, a health drama for Wallace, a hospital visit for Jim, critters (scorpions, lots!), eccentric expats, but mostly it was a lesson in surviving Foteini’s ramshackle farm compound, her strong mizithra goat cheese, and a slew of scatty, but endearing animals. At the end of the first year, we decided to stay longer in Greece, which grew to four years in all, living for the final year in the nearby Messinian peninsula, near Koroni. I wrote four best-selling books about our life in Greece, and two romantic suspense novels, also set in the Mani.

**Some of the press coverage for the book in 2013**

I started writing Feta in the freezing winter of 2010/11 in our stone house, my desk wedged up against the loungeroom window with a view of the snow-capped mountains. But I also had a view of the rickety back entrance of Foteini’s old village house, where she spent her evenings. Sometimes, she must have seen me at the window. Or perhaps she just sensed I was writing about our village antics, many of them hers, and she’d phone, particularly if she hadn’t seen us for a while. It was usually with the same humorous lament. “Ach, you’ve forgotten me already, koritsara mou (my girl)!” she’d say. “When are you coming for coffee at the ktima?”

The idea of sitting in Foteini’s draughty farm shack in foul weather beside a dodgy petrogazi (small gas cooker) didn’t always appeal. However, we did go now and then in winter, which I wrote about, including the memorable day Foteini came close to blowing up the shed.

**Foteini on her donkey Riko, taken at her farm compound in Megali Mantineia**

I had plenty of material for a book, from the adventures and mishaps of the first year, and I continued to add to the narrative over the next three years. Things Can Only Get Feta was published in 2013 by a small London publisher, during a long intermission in Scotland before we returned to Greece again. From the beginning, Feta did very well and sparked great interest, particularly in Greece in the summer of 2013. After doing a phone interview with the editor (Sotiris Hadzimanolis) of the Australian Greek newspaper Neos Kosmos, about our life in Greece and the book, Sotiris filed a similar piece to a Greek news outlet and from there, the story of our exploits went slightly viral.

Versions of it turned up in a slew of Greek publications and internet news sites with variations of the headline: “Scottish journalist besotted with Greece”. While there are many authors today, focusing on a much trendier, revitalised Greece post-crisis, 10 years ago the story of a foreigner having a love affair with Greece in turmoil was certainly more unusual. More than that, it struck a chord with long-suffering Greeks who had hitherto heard nothing but negative, often beat-up, reports in the international media. There were harsh criticisms of the country’s fiscal attitudes and work practices, whereas the story about Feta was a good-news story.

We had scores of messages sent to our website with notes of thanks for my Greek ‘ardour’ and my favourite comment of all time is still: “For your information, Greece loves you back.”

However, despite the book’s success, two years later, while Jim and I were now living in Koroni, I had a falling-out with my London publisher when he seriously broke the terms of our contract. (In publishing, be careful what you wish for!) Rather than allow the book’s success to be sabotaged, I legally forced the return of the book rights to me, and republished it myself in a very short time. This was no small feat, working on an old laptop computer from a hillside house with just a mobile phone and poor wi-fi, or often, no wi-fi. But nevertheless, once re-published the book had a fresh gust of wind under its wings and continued to do very well. Not long afterwards, I published the second memoir, Homer’s Where The Heart Is, and there are now four in all (see links below).

But Feta will always be close to my heart and I’m proud to say it was to become (and the sequels too) one of the very few books to be written in English about life in the economic crisis by a non-Greek living in the country during that time. It prompted Greek author Stella Pierides to suggest: “This book might become a future reference source about life in unspoilt Greece.”

It may have been a presentment of sorts and in 2021, I was thrilled to be contacted by a charming Greek girl called Panayiota, who told me that Feta and the following two memoirs had been offered on the syllabus of a literary course she attended in a northern Greek university, under the theme of how foreigner writers viewed Greek life during the crisis. She had written a paper on the subject. When I first started writing Feta in our Greek rural village during a cold winter, I wouldn’t have believed it would end up on a university syllabus. Or that Wallace may even have been the subject of some literary scrutiny. About time!

**Wallace, up to his usual mischief on the first week of our Greek odyssey in 2010**

I’m grateful to all my blog readers on this site (some of you have been following my Greek blogs since the beginning) and others who have read my books and shared my stories and had a laugh over some of our more daring, crazy exploits and those of the famously crazy Wallace. I’m grateful to those who still write to me to offer their feedback. One Facebook friend recently told me she has read Feta 10 times so far. “Feta is my comfort-blanket read.” That’s a first! Many reviews and comments have been humorous. “More than Feta, this book is a whole picnic hamper of delights,” said one Amazon reviewer.

It would be true to say that going to Greece and writing the books changed our lives for ever, and only for the better. The only note of sadness in our otherwise happy life was that dear Wallace, one of the stars of Feta, passed away at the age of 16 in 2017 after we moved back to Britain. We were devastated, as Wallace had been through all our adventures with us and had been a talisman, as well as a welcome distraction at times. Few Greeks we lived amongst will ever forget his antics I’m sure, and neither will the many readers who wrote to me after Wallace died with kind thoughts and wishes.

The main consolation I have in Wallace’s passing is that he had a wonderful life and hopefully his memory will live on in my Greek books.

**The main stadium at Ancient Messene, which was no match for the shenanigans of Jim, Marjory and Wallace**

Feta extract

If you haven’t read Things Can Only Get Feta, here’s a funny extract from the book of one of our crazier exploits, when Jim and I set out to visit the archaeological site of Ancient Messene (10^th century AD), north-west of Kalamata. The only problem was we had Wallace with us and, as we’d discovered on an earlier attempt on Messene, only guide dogs were allowed inside this large gated site, even on a near-deserted January day. While we sat in the car eating chicken sandwiches for lunch, we mulled over how we could blag our way inside with the dog. Jim finally came up with a daring strategy. Inspired by the once-warring Spartans who’d also dreamt up unlikely ways to sneak into Ancient Messene, Jim planned to get inside with Wallace hidden in his rucksack . . . . .

“Okay. But there’s one big problem: how do we get Wallace to stay quiet in the rucksack and not start barking?” I said.

Jim thought for a minute. “It sounds a bit gross but we’ll put him inside with the last chicken sandwich. Then we’ll zip the bag at the top and leave him a little air hole. He’ll be busy eating. You know what he’s like about chicken.”

Wallace always had a thing about chicken because Brigit, his kind but eccentric breeder in Edinburgh, fed all her puppies with roast chicken, which was a disaster for feeding programmes later. It explained why chicken was the only food that the fussy Wallace liked unequivocally. He was so besotted with chicken that we had broken every rule in the dog-rearing manual by using the word ‘chicken’ on occasions where danger loomed and every other command was flatly ignored. I turned and looked at Wallace on the back seat. He was panting. He’d definitely heard the ‘chicken’ word.

I expressed serious doubts about the plan but Jim was more optimistic.

“Don’t worry,” said Jim, soothingly, “He’ll be okay in the rucksack. Remember the time we carried him in it when we were hill walking in Scotland and he hurt his paw and was limping? He was good and quiet then.”

“What would the staff do if they caught us with Wallace?”

“Call the cops, put us in the cells for the night. Feed us two-month-old mizithra cheese and village bread.”

My teeth started to ping. “Ach, let’s go for it!”

If nothing else, at least we’d have a bit of a laugh. And in a cold January in Greece, you can get like that, wanting a laugh, any laugh.

“Let’s try him out in the rucksack first,” said Jim, unzipping it and taking things out. First, we threw in a couple of Wallace’s dog biscuits and lifted him inside the bag, which was roomy. He didn’t like it at first but when he caught a whiff of the biscuits, he squirmed around inside to retrieve them, thinking it was a new game, better than hiding biscuits in shoes.

I wasn’t totally convinced, but Jim still seemed confident, and I guessed it was just a bit of a boy thing.

“Okay,” he said. “Get ready to leave now. Get all your stuff. As soon as we unwrap the chicken sandwich and drop it in, we’ve only got a few minutes or so to get through the gate and on our way.” He checked his watch at the same time, as if this was a finely tuned military raid.

We got out of the car and locked it. Jim put on the rucksack with Wallace in it and I dropped in the chicken sandwich, torn into several pieces, which was the messiest part of the plan, and zipped up the bag, leaving the air hole. The minute the sandwich hit the bottom, Wallace was down there like a deep-sea diver and the bag was wriggling like mad, then all went quiet. I could almost hear his lip-smacking enjoyment over the chicken. We walked quickly through the main gate, Jim stood to one side while I went to the small cabin window. I remembered the attendant from the first time we came here, but assumed she wouldn’t recognise me after a summer of foreign visitors. I asked her what time the site closed.

“Are you together?” the woman said, pointing to Jim.

“Yes?”

She looked at him with narrowed eyes. “Can I ask what’s in the rucksack the man is carrying?”

“Just lunch things,” I said in a nervous, squeaky voice. I glanced at the rucksack and thought I saw the edge of it was wriggling. Maybe she saw it as well.

Jim sensed the hitch, aware that Wallace was growing restless, eager for another chicken soother, so he started walking down the dirt track that led between broken columns and the outlines of ancient buildings.

“My husband’s impatient…big archaeology fan. Been reading all about Ancient Mess…”

“Okay,” she said, cutting me off. “But you must be back by 3.30 when the site closes.”

I turned and legged it down the track, smiling to myself. When I caught up with Jim I could hear Wallace starting to whine and the zip was coming further apart at the top as he tried to get his snout into the cool air. Jim walked faster. The site sloped down to an old amphitheatre and from there it was a short walk to a cluster of olive trees. Once there we were safe, out of sight of the entrance cabin.”

. . . . . or were we? Find out how the smuggling strategy panned out finally, one of many amusing adventures in Things Can Only Get Feta

Book extract and all photos ©Marjory McGinn

To celebrate 10 years of Things Can Only Get Feta, the ebook will be discounted to 99p UK/US for three days on Amazon stores from Monday July 17. I hope enjoy it.

To buy Feta on Amazon UK or US click this link:

The book is available as an ebook and paperback on all Amazon sites. The other books in the best-selling Peloponnese series of memoirs, Homer’s Where The Heart Is; A Scorpion In The Lemon Tree, and A Donkey On The Catwalk, are also available on all Amazon sites, the paperbacks also through Barnes & Noble, Booktopia in Australia, and independent bookstores.

Marjory’s latest book Wake Me Up For The Elephants is a travel memoir with a broader canvas: Africa, Fiji, Australia, Scotland, Greece, Ireland. It’s a collection of candid and hilarious tales based on real journeys many taken by Marjory as a journalist and described by best-selling author, Peter Kerr, as “Travel writing at its best.” The book is in part a prequel to the Greek series of memoirs on what the author’s adventurous life was like even before she embarked on the Big Greek Odyssey.

The ebook and paperback are available on all Amazon sites. To buy the Kindle version, in either the UK or the US, click on one of the links below:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0C2N788HD
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C2N788HD

For all books by Marjory McGinn visit her Amazon page: https://www.amazon.com/author/marjory-mcginn

Or visit the website: https://www.bigfatgreekodyssey.com

If you have liked Marjory’s books, do consider putting a review on Amazon sites. It helps a book become more visible and is always appreciated by the author.

Thanks for stopping by.

© All rights reserved. All text and photographs copyright of the authors 2010-2023. No content/text or photographs may be copied from the blog without the prior written permission of the authors. This applies to all posts on the blog.

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When the saints go marching in …

Posted on October 22, 2019 by Marjory

THIS Saturday is the feast day of Ayios Dimitrios (Saint Dimitrios), pictured above in his usual guise, a jaunty character in a green cape, riding a sorrel-coloured horse.

It’s a big feast day in Greece (October 26) and the ‘name day’ for anyone with the moniker Dimitris, Dimitrios, or Dimitra for women. There will be a service early at churches named after the saint and then usually a yiorti, a celebration, nearby, especially in rural areas.

I’ve featured a few of these feast days and celebrations in my books as well as the local characters who frequented them. They are one of the best ways for foreigners to get a unique insight into Greek life with some of its pomp but mostly its spontaneity and eccentricity. It’s Greek people in their own world, enjoying the simple pleasures of village and family life with a rural papas, priest, or two in the mix as well. Tables will be spread out under the olive trees, as it was in the hillside village of Megali Mantineia, where we spent our first year in the southern Peloponnese. Locally sourced goat or lamb is often roasted in the village fournos (woodfired oven), or a spit-roast barbecue set up, or food brought from local tavernas. It’s always a nice occasion, unless you’re vegan perhaps!

Villagers, and two local priests, enjoying a yiorti celebration in the southern Peloponnese in front of a mad, smoking fournos

Ayios Dimitrios was a martyr saint who, in the 4^th century AD, was imprisoned and tortured for helping the citizens of Thessaloniki in northern Greece to rise up against the pagan teachings of the Romans. The feast day of Ayios Dimitrios has an added charm because if the weather has turned especially warm in the last two weeks of October, the Greeks call this The Little Summer of Saint Dimitrios. It’s a mellow, euphoric end to the summer season. Traditionally, October us the time for farmers to bring their flocks down from the hills to lower pastures for winter grazing, so the Little Summer is always a welcome occurrence.

The Little Summer of S D featured significantly in my first novel A Saint For The Summer. The Saint in the title has a few different meanings in the narrative but the main allusion is to Saint Dimitrios because his feast day celebration in a Taygetos mountain village is instrumental in the plot, bringing an intriguing World War II mystery to its nail-biting conclusion.

Jim, Marjory and Wallace in the town of Koroni, one of the places featured in Marjory’s Greek trilogy

In my three travel memoirs, I describe other saints’ days because when we first went to the southern Peloponnese on our four-year odyssey we never said ‘no’ to these occasions. St Dimitrios was a favourite because my husband Jim was given the name Dimitris (the Greek equivalent) by villagers, and I was christened early on as Margarita by my goat farmer friend Foteini because she couldn’t pronounce my real name. These names stuck the whole time we were in Greece and seem to fire up again every time we return.

The feast day celebrations were always convivial and Greeks were generous in embracing outsiders in what is essentially a very traditional Greek day. We had good company, great local cuisine and plenty of wine and gossip. More importantly, as foreigners, we learnt a lot from these celebrations.

The tiny chapel of Ayios Yiorgos (above) in the hills behind the village of Megali Mantineia with its flower decked icon. A centuries-old fresco of St George in a Mani monastery (below)

One memorable celebration was for the feast day of Ayios Yiorgos (St George), possibly the biggest of the saints’ celebrations in Greece. St George was another great martyr saint and a tribune living in the first century AD who is always depicted on his white horse, spearing a dragon-like interloper. You can just see the beast above at the bottom of the icon where age and water damage have diluted the colours.

It was at this celebration in 2011 at a small chapel in the hills above Megali Mantineia that we met a businessman called Tassos over lunch who was curious about our odyssey in rural Greece in the midst of the economic crisis.

“Why come to live in Greece now?” he asked. “If weather and the beach is the main reason, there are sunnier and easier places to live than Greece.”

Greece has lovely unspoilt coves like these at Otylo in the Mani but it has many more hidden assets

It was hard to convince him that it was Greece we wanted for this mid-life odyssey and nowhere else. Still puzzled, he then asked: “What do you really seek to find, my friends, in our country that you cannot find in your own?”

It was a very good question. What indeed? And the question remained with me throughout my years in Greece, informing my own search for meaning and fulfilment in this country as well as informing my writing. The scene with Tassos found its way into an early chapter in the second memoir, Homer’s Where The Heart Is, as we took on more adventures in southern Greece and experienced the chaos of an increasingly bitter crisis.

His query is something that many expats ask themselves, if just in the form of ‘What is it about this complex country that I’ve fallen in love with?’ Of course, there’s no simple answer to this. For me, there were many things I sought and found, and loved, about Greece, as you will discover if you read Homer, and the other memoirs of course.

For the feast day of St George, tables spread under the olive trees for villagers, and the priest (left), of Megali Mantineia

It could be that being able to access these unique celebrations on feast days, like the one for Saint Dimitrios, is part of it, an ability to enjoy simple pleasures in beautiful surroundings, embraced by warm, inclusive communities. In our four years in southern Greece, in the Mani and later in the nearby Messinian peninsula, we went to many of these feast days. They were all different in location and intensity, and we enjoyed every one of them.

If you’re in Greece and you get the chance to attend a feast day, or indeed any of the other larger celebrations of Easter and August, do go, and also to the church services preceding them. You don’t have to be especially religious to attend because the services offer unique insights into much more than just the Orthodox faith. It is here that you gain insight into Greek traditions and social life, and rituals that are gloriously diverting and rooted in the Byzantine world. These are rituals that have changed little in the past 500 years. You won’t be disappointed. And Greek people, I promise you, will admire your interest and curiosity.

Χρονια Πολλα!

Happy Name Day/Feast Day!

For more information about Marjory’s books including the novel A Saint For The Summer and the Peloponnese trilogy, above, please visit Marjory’s Amazon page or the books page on our website www.bigfatgreekodyssey.com

Or visit Marjory’s books page on Facebook

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© All rights reserved. All text and photographs copyright of the authors 2010-2019. No content/text or photographs may be copied from the blog without the prior written permission of the authors. This applies to all posts on the blog.

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Secrets of life in a Greek village

Posted on May 6, 2019 by Marjory

Part of the lovely plateia in Makrinitsa village, Pelion

NOT all Greek villages are created equally. Two villages can be several miles apart, with roughly the same background and geographical aspect, yet one will be thriving, with a plateia rimmed by busy cafes and tavernas, while the other is on the slide. Sometimes there’s no explanation apart from something that’s now lost in the natural twists of history.

When I was in the mainland region of Pelion last year I was strongly reminded of this fact and also how fiercely loyal and competitive Greeks are about their own village, no matter what shape it’s in. Jim and I had rented a villa in the south of the Pelion peninsula for a month. It was on the edge of a small village, which was quiet, with not many inhabitants apparently, but with gorgeous views down to the Pagasitikos gulf and well placed to access both this side of the peninsula and the other, on the Aegean. As people who don’t like touristy locations in Greece, we thought we’d done pretty well to find a comfortable house in this location.

View from the village of Metochi towards the gulf

Yet, while browsing in an old-fashioned souvenir shop in the coastal village of Milina, the black-clad owner of a venerable age asked us where we were staying. I told her Metochi, in the foothills behind. She pulled a great lemony face. “Metochi! Why would you want to stay there? There’s nothing there. Nothing but old houses. Pah! Here is better,” she said, waving towards the vista of crowded tavernas and sun loungers along the beachfront.

I laughed at her put-down of Metochi for being the poor relation to the buzzy, thriving Milina. In her mind Metochi fell into the second category of villages dwindling into oblivion. There are a number of run-down and abandoned houses in the centre of Metochi, that’s true, and it wasn’t hoaching with people, in September anyway. On the surface it was just a village on the way to somewhere else as it’s on the ‘main’ road from the popular town of Argalasti to the bigger village of Lafkos and then to the south of the peninsula. Lafkos is elegant with a large church and wide plateia (square) with classical houses and busy tavernas and cafes.

The elegant plateia in Lafkos village

Makrinitsa in the Pelion mountains is one of the most picturesque in Greece

The plateia is usually the hub of a Greek village and always a good indication as to whether the place is thriving or not, and it’s worth flagging this up when you’re in the market to buy a house in Greece. Some of the more remarkable villages in the Pelion mountains further north have sumptuous plateias, like Makrinitsa, set under huge plane trees and with a view down to the city of Volos. But Makrinitsa is well established with a stronger foothold in the region’s history. It has old churches with frescos and an impressive museum. This village has been the haunt of artists, writers and revolutionaries. Milies and Tsagarada are smaller mountain villages yet they too have obvious treasures. Milies has a public library with one of the largest collections of Greek and foreign books in Greece, with some of them dating to the 14^th century. Its church of the Taxiarchon is also world famous for its acoustics. Tsagarada has a 1,000 year old plane tree in its beautiful plateia.

The surviving kafeneio in Metochi has rustic charm and doubles as a shop

A slightly forlorn sign on the plane tree in Metochi says: “Our village square.”

Metochi’s plateia was a ghost plateia during the day at least. It was large enough and well situated, high above the road under plane trees with incredible gulf views, and perfect to catch a cool afternoon breeze in summer. It must have been lovely once, with a traditional kafeneio on the far side, now closed, and a smaller one beside it, still operating for limited hours and serving also as a general store. The only time we saw people in the plateia was at night, men mostly, drinking beer and playing the board game, tavli.

At the top of the steps was a sign fixed to a plane tree saying: “Our village plateia”, which was a touching and yet forlorn message. Such as it was, many people obviously still took great pride in their plateia. But its semi-abandonment speaks of a village having lost its way somewhat, apart from some modern, yet discreet, holiday villas at its outskirts, surrounded by olive groves, where we were staying.

The deserted grill house in the village that is a quiet reminder of more convivial days in Metochi

The village had obviously had a different life once. At one end of it there’s a natural spring, spouting cool sweet water, where people still stop to fill up bottles. Across the road from the spring, there’s an abandoned psistaria (grill house) with its huge barbecue still visible at the front, for spit-roasting meat. The broad terrace here would once have been packed, especially on important feast days, but is now just an empty space where fallen leaves twirl in the wind and people park to fill up their bottles across the way.

This is a reflection of what’s happening everywhere in rural Greece, in hillside locations. In the Mani we found many villages that were beautifully sited with once-lovely stone houses that now seemed dead. In one village we found an abandoned kafeneio, its door hanging open and a collection of old junk and furniture piled up inside and old bottles and dusty glasses still on the wooden counter. It was as if the owners had hurriedly disappeared and left everything as it was. In another village we found a group of old people sitting around the front door of a crumbling stone house. There were five of them, most of the current full-time population, they told us rather mournfully.

The village of Metochi is not in such bad shape, not as long as an essential road cuts through it. It wasn’t vibrant and yet we liked its wound-down appeal, its solitude, the view, and no-one bothered us at all, apart from one village gossip. She regularly passed by on the road and one day stopped to ask a slew of personal questions, as Greeks often do, including how much we were renting the villa for because her daughter also had one to rent nearby if we were interested. Cheeky!

Greek rural villages at least are a world apart, whether they buzz or not. When you plan to live in one for any length of time you have to navigated them thoughtfully and choose wisely. Too quiet, too noisy, too parochial, or too steeped in difficult history, and you might be in peril.

A view of Megali Mantineia under the northern slopes of the Taygetos mountains in the Mani

The small sign on the main road to Megali Mantineia. It’s all you get. Blink and you’ll miss it!

When we settled in the Mani, southern Peloponnese, in 2010, for our long Greek odyssey, we picked a hillside village that felt remote, with the Taygetos mountains as its backdrop, but in fact was only a 15-minute drive to the outskirts of Kalamata at the head of the Gulf of Messinia. As it turned out, Megali Mantineia was perfect for us and our crazy Jack Russell Wallace, a type of dog that none of the villagers had seen before and thought resembled a small goat – and he often acted like one!

Megali Mantineia is a successful working village where locals still cultivate their vast olive groves and herd goats. We decided the best way to live there was to befriend Greek villagers rather than cultivate the British expats because we didn’t want to live an expat life. Not that trying to fit into any village as a foreigner is easy. It’s not. Had I not spoken reasonable Greek from a long association with the country and endless Greek language classes, I would have found it more difficult, as few of the villagers spoke much English. I quickly learnt the secret of fitting in was simple: go well beyond your comfort zone and leave all your preconceptions about life, up to a point, behind you.

Foteini, thrilled to have a copy of my first memoir which features her, and donkey Riko, on the cover

Riko grazing outside Foteini’s farm compound

When we first met the goat farmer Foteini – who features in my three Greek memoirs – she was riding into the village on her donkey. Conversing was a challenge as she spoke a heavy mountain dialect and things could easily have gone nowhere. But there was something so unique about her that Jim and I instantly took to her and when she invited us back to her farm compound (a place of rural junk and manic disorder) we never thought twice about it really. And so a strange and unusual friendship flourished, particularly between myself and Foteini. She certainly trounced all my personal preconceptions and, in her way, became a very unlikely muse. Our regular, generally very funny, interactions sparked my journalistic curiosity and inspired me to write the memoirs. How could I not? Fate had cast her on my path, on the very first day in the village.

Some of the villagers and priests from Megali Mantineia on a special feast day. Jim standing in back row, right

Since my first memoir, Things Can Only Get Feta, was published in 2013, readers have contacted me to confess they want their own Greek odyssey, which is lovely, and have asked for advice. I don’t have much really except for this: learn some Greek, talk to everyone. Go beyond what’s comfortable and take part in all the village celebrations (there are many during the year), and church services too because this is the best way to see Greeks as they really are. It’s a window into their society and shows villagers that you respect this, and their culture, and you’re not in the village just to have a remote, parallel life to them.

Before we finally returned to Britain, for personal reasons, we invited many of the villagers from Megali Mantineia to a farewell meal at one of the local tavernas. It was a bitter/sweet night and very sad to say goodbye at last. Everyone lined up to kiss us farewell, some bringing small gifts. One of the women, Voula, whom I’d also become fond of, hugged me and announced: “You’re one of us now Margarita (the name Foteini had given me). You’re a Maniatissa.” Maniatissa is the Greek word for a woman of the Mani. It was humbling to get the title; far better than a Queen’s honour.

Navigating the cultural terrain of a Greek village isn’t easy. It requires more of you than you sometimes want to give. But in the end, it offers you life experiences and insights you will struggle to find elsewhere.

Greek book offer

If you want to read more about life, drama and romance in Greek villages, my first novel A Saint For The Summer is currently on an Amazon ebook promo, 99p/99c (UK/US) from August 16 to 23. It’s a tale or heroism, faith and love with a narrative thread back to WW2 and set in the wild Mani region of Greece. One reviewer described it as: “An excellent read. I was hooked from the first page.” Another said: “The story made me laugh, made me think and made me cry a little.”

Link: https://bookgoodies.com/a/B07B4K34TV

If you have read any of my books and liked them, please think of leaving a small review on Amazon. It will be gratefully received. Thanks.

For more information about all the books please visit the books page on our website www.bigfatgreekodyssey.com

Or visit Marjory’s books page on Facebook

Thanks for dropping by. All comments are gratefully received. Just click on the ‘chat’ bubble at the top of this page.

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Compelling new novel set in southern Greece

Posted on March 1, 2018 by Marjory

I am thrilled to announce that my latest book, a novel called A Saint For The Summer, will shortly be published (March 19), and is currently on pre-order at Amazon.

This contemporary story, set in the Mani region of southern Greece, combines family drama, romance and a World War II mystery, with a cast of intriguing and memorable characters.

Here’s the blurb of the book to whet your appetite:

JOURNALIST Bronte McKnight is summoned to a hillside village in the wild and beautiful Mani region of Greece by her estranged, expat father Angus to help him with a medical problem. But she soon discovers that Angus, whom she has barely seen in 10 years, has lured her there with a trickier challenge in mind – solving a mystery from the Second World War when a family member disappeared in Greece during the disastrous Battle of Kalamata, ‘Greece’s Dunkirk’.

With the country gripped by economic crisis in 2012, and the clock ticking against them, their near-impossible quest takes Angus and Bronte from Kalamata to a remote mountain village where its few remaining inhabitants are bound by old traditions and secrecy. As the pair try to reconcile their own fractured relationship, they are helped in their search for Kieran by a cast of intriguing Greek characters, especially charismatic doctor, Leonidas Papachristou. He has a pivotal role, not least in challenging Bronte’s assumption that she hasn’t the time nor the courage to fall in love in Greece.

The secrets unearthed by Angus and Bronte will be painful and astonishing. This is a compelling tale of heroism, faith, and love – with a heart-warming conclusion.

Part of the coastline of the Mani where the story is set under the northern edge of the Taygetos mountains

The idea for this book began to take shape in my mind during my four years in southern Greece from 2010 with my partner Jim and our mischievous terrier Wallace. While the narrative is based on real events, the characters are fictitious, but there is a gentle nod to some of the more memorable people we met while in Greece, with their eccentric and charming personalities, and lifestyle.

Kalamata city not far from the seafront and with a view of the northern Taygetos mountains whose villages feature in the new novel

One of the snowy peaks of the Taygetos from the settlement that inspired Marathousa village

A pivotal part of the narrative, however, revolves around what happened to Angus’s relative serving in the Royal Army Service Corp in Greece in 1941 and ending up at the Battle of Kalamata. I had heard something about this infamous battle while in Greece and the brave rear-guard action of the allies, particularly on the part of the ANZAC soldiers, against the Germans. I was always surprised that so little had been written about it.

Old photo of allied troops arriving in Kalamata in 1941

In 1941, when the Germans invaded Greece, the British and other allied soldiers were forced to retreat south from northern and central Greece, with a huge evacuation underway, called Operation Demon. Around 50,000 troops were evacuated from the Peloponnese, mainly under difficult circumstances, but many ended up in the southern port of Kalamata, the capital of this region, which was effectively the end of the road.

Here the allies, despite heavy Luftwaffe attack, fought on against the Germans who arrived in force in Kalamata on April 28. After the British surrendered on the 29^th, the evacuation came to an end and the remaining Royal Navy ships returned to Crete. Around 8,000 soldiers were left behind on Kalamata beach and were told by their British commanding officer that they were now on their own and free to make their own escape.

Marjory with historian and writer Nikos Zervis at the Popular Library of Kalamata while they exchanged copies of their books

I became interested in the Battle of Kalamata through many of the people I met, both Greek and British expats. It still exercises a huge hold over the imagination of most Greeks in this region – who also fought bravely against the Germans – though it has not been documented to any serious degree, apart from a book of allies’ stories in Tell Them We Were Here by the late Edwin Horlington, and in Greek by the distinguished Kalamatan historian Nikos Zervis, whom I had the honour to meet there several times, when he talked at length about the battle.

Nikos is a delightful man and a great character, who has written a series of history books over several decades (in Greek) about Kalamatan history as well as an enchanting book about English author Lawrence Durrell who, though it’s not widely known, spent six months in the city. He went there in 1940 to establish a school of English studies, before the Germans invaded. Nikos and I talked at the Popular Library of Kalamata in the Pnevmatiko Kentro and also exchanged books. It was one of the highlights of a recent trip back to Greece.

The village of Megali Mantineia in the Mani which inspired to some extend one of the villages in A Saint For The Summer

A Saint For The Summer is not a war book as such, but it is still a gripping tale, and a certain Greek saint may just hold one of the keys to solving the book’s central mystery – hence the title. You’ll have to read the book to discover why that’s the case. And readers of my other books will once again be transported I hope to a sunny, familiar landscape in this wild and beautiful region of Greece, with its inimitable characters. It is also a compelling love story between the protagonist, Bronte McKnight, and the charming, enigmatic doctor, Leonidas Papachristou, with a heart-warming conclusion.

If you enjoy this book please let me know and remember that a review on Amazon is always welcome and helps to raise the profile of an author’s book. Here’s a short video about the book.

https://youtu.be/Xlu490u6nbo

The book is on pre-order for two weeks until March 19 from Amazon UK http://amzn.eu/aj5bkc8 and US http://a.co/36iumko as an ebook with a special introductory price of £1.99/$2.99 and on other Amazon sites, and the paperback will follow. So hurry and order a copy before the price goes up after publication. The cover artwork has been produced again by the very talented London artist Anthony Hannaford www.anthonyhannaford.co.uk

You might also like to read my other books:

For more information about Marjory’s three travel memoirs about living in Greece during the crisis, go to the books page on the website www.bigfatgreekodyssey.com/greek-books www.bigfatgreekodyssey.com or the book page on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/ThingsCanOnlyGetFeta

Comments on the blog are very welcome. Thanks for calling by.

© All rights reserved. All text and photographs copyright of the authors 2010-2018. No content/text or photographs may be copied from the blog without the prior written permission of the authors. This applies to all posts on the blog.

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Will the crisis kill off unique Greek monasteries?

Posted on February 13, 2016 by Marjory

Dimiova women’s monastery high up in the Taygetos mountains in the southern Peloponnese

IT was sad to hear of the death of one of the last two nuns at the unique Dimiova monastery, east of Kalamata, in the southern Peloponnese. Sister Christina, in her seventies, died last December after a long illness. I had met her and the Abbess of Dimiova, Sister Kiriaki, during a retreat at the monastery in 2012 and wrote a blog piece about my memorable experiences there.

With only the Abbess remaining now at this remote place high in the Taygetos Mountains, the future of this outstanding monastery, which houses one of the most revered, and mysterious, icons in this part of the Peloponnese, will now be in doubt. There are only a handful of working monasteries left in this region, particularly for women.

During lunch that day at the monastery, it was Sister Kiriaki who remarked that the economic crisis had impacted drastically on the monastery, on its much-needed repair and renovations and its ability to support more nuns. The two remaining nuns had been leading very humble, restricted lives even before the crisis began, but now the situation was much bleaker, as it has been for most priests as well in the Orthodox Church, and the churches themselves.

In a few short years, the lack of funds throughout Greece will mean that many old monasteries will have to close their doors, apart from the highly visible and protected monasteries of Mount Athos. Already in the southern Peloponnese many have closed, due to lack of staff or because they are becoming derelict.

In a modern world where religion has less significance for many people, a common complaint (even from younger Greeks as well) is: “Why do we need monasteries?”

The Orthodox religion is an integral part of the vibrant Greek culture, but the issue goes beyond religion, I think. These Greek monasteries, and many churches, are unique historic buildings and contain a wealth of outstanding Byzantine frescos that are surely as important to European art tradition as any Italian Renaissance masterpiece. Painted on the interiors of churches, often open to the elements, the frescos are fading and in need of regular upkeep, now mostly impossible in the crisis. If you are lucky, you might see inside one of these establishments once or twice a year on certain saints’ days.

The monasteries are also an enduring part of the communities that surround them and have, during difficult periods of Greek history, protected communities, hidden Greek freedom fighters and promoted the Greek language and its culture. If these great institutions close, and finally crumble into ruins, it will become near impossible to revive them in future decades.

One day in the future, Greeks will surely climb out of the economic crisis, but without these splendid historic and religious monuments the country they inherit will not be the one we know today. And that would be a tragedy.

To give an idea of how special Dimiova is, I am posting here a slightly shortened version of the blog I wrote in 2012. If you feel strongly about the subject, do please leave a comment on the post.

* * * * *

WHEN my friend Gillian Bouras and I hit on the idea of going on a short retreat to the monastery of Dimiova, in the Taygetos mountains (southern Peloponnese), the plan had great appeal. Friends said we were crazy, but undeterred we went ahead with our strategy for a trip in early August in the lead-up to one of the holiest dates in the Orthodox calendar, the 15^th of that month, which is the feast day of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary.

Gillian is an Australian-born writer who has lived in the southern Peloponnese for over 30 years and has written extensively about it. We both had slightly different expectations for this jaunt but what we did have in common as writers was being able to gain access to this traditional and rarified way of life, still shrouded in centuries of Orthodox mystery, before it disappears altogether in Greece. At Dimiova, in the remote northern western slopes of the Taygetos, sadly there are now only two elderly nuns left.

Sister Christina, who died last December, was one of only two remaining nuns at Dimiova monastery

The church of the Dormition inside the monastery walls

The preparation for this short trip was more protracted than I would have guessed. I had to enlist the help of a Greek friend who had contacts within the Greek Orthodox Church. Because monasteries are highly respected and guarded here, we needed authorisation from the head of the church for the Messinian region, Bishop Chrisostomos. And after many weeks of waiting, we were gratefully given the go-ahead.

Two weeks before the visit we were also required to meet Papa Sotiris in the hill village of Elaiohori. He was co-ordinating our trip and also takes the Sunday services at Dimiova and oversees its ecclesiastical well-being.

Papa Sotiris is a genial young priest with a modern outlook. Having worked previously as a businessman in Kalamata city, he gave up his career to join the priesthood, despite the fiscal sacrifice that entailed, and has not had one moment of regret. He was delighted (and a little intrigued) by the request to visit Dimiova, but there were certain conditions.

We had to be at the monastery 7am sharp. The clothing rules were strict: sensible dark/black clothing – long skirts, no bare arms or legs, sensible shoes, no bling of any kind. We were told the nuns led a simple and somewhat severe life, that they would be adhering to a semi-fast on the lead-up to August 15. The most vexatious rule was saved for last. There would be no talking at the monastery. No talking?

Although talking is not strictly forbidden, Papa Sotiris told us the nuns don’t like to talk unless they have to, especially at this devout time of the year. But since we wanted to write about monastery life, the no-talking rule was awkward.

“How will we be able to glean anything about the nuns’ lives if we can’t talk to them?” asked Gillian.

We were simply to find that out for ourselves, Papa Sotiris seemed to indicate rather mysteriously.

Sister Kiriaki (left), Papa Sotiris and Sister Christina

IT’S Friday morning at 6am when set off on our pilgrimage and it promises to be another scorching August (38C) day. The drive up the winding road with hairpin bends, occasionally with a scattering of rocks, from a recent unseasonable downpour, sets the right kind of reflective tone and we are both secretly wondering if we aren’t crazy after all with this monastery expedition.

The last few hill villages are left behind as we drive further into the Taygetos, having passed no other vehicle along the road, or seen another soul. But Dimiova, when it comes into view, tucked into a mountain slope, surrounded by fir and pine trees, is bigger than expected. The outer walls and monastery buildings are white and the tiled, domed roof of the church is poking up from the inner courtyard like a jaunty hat. I am now anxious to get there as I bump the small Fiat car painfully up the last steep, boulder-strewn metres of dirt road to the front gates.

A morning service has just started in the monastery church, dedicated to the Dormition of the Panayia (Virgin Mary). A bell tolls and the sound of the liturgy is sonorous and spine-tingling in this lonely mountain location. At the door of the church we are met by Sister Kiriaki, who is also the Abbess of the monastery, whom we are relieved to find does talk (though not volubly).

But she has rather charmingly forgotten why we are here or what they are to do with us. She looks a little weary but at least the modest bags of cold drinks and fruit we offer as gifts for our stay are met with a smile. The large watermelon is given an especially warm appraisal.

She ushers us into the church beside the other remaining nun, Sister Christina, who is wearing a similar long black robe, her head wrapped in thick long black scarf. Kiriaki returns with offerings of her own, prayer ropes called komboskini, comprised of thick knotted wool interspersed with small beads (rather like a Catholic rosary). We are to hold these during the service, taken by Papa Sotiris.

The church is a lovely example of early 17^th century design, with frescos painted in 1663 by the monk Damaskinos. The main focus of this church however is the old and much revered icon of the Virgin Mary (Panayia Dimiovitissa), and Child, which is claimed to have miraculous powers, as are many icons dedicated to the Panayia, though this particular icon attracts many pilgrims from all over Greece at this time of year.

The icon of the Panayia Dimiovitissa shows the blood stain down one cheek. Above, Papa Sotiris lights the votive lamp that hangs above the icon

The icon is best known for the curious mark on the Panayia’s right cheek, which is said to be a blood stain, and there are many theories as to how it came to be there.

Papa Sotiris at the end of the service explains a little of the history of the icon and tells us it is the general belief that the icon was damaged by a sharp blow with a knife or axe during the struggles of the Iconoclastic period of Greek history (8^th to 9^th centuries AD), when many icons in Greece were defaced or even burnt.

The icon, he says, had been brought here for safe keeping some time in the 8^th century, when the first monastery building was erected, and during a violent skirmish between the defenders of the icon and interlopers, the image of the Panayia was struck and blood sprang from her face. The signs of it remain today, hence its miraculous powers.

The monastery of Dimiova has always been one of the most important of the Messinian region and has a gripping history. During the 15^th century it was set on fire by the Turks during a local skirmish and rebuilt a century later, only to be attacked again by the Turks in 1770.

However, it survived and became a meeting place for some of the great revolutionary leaders in the Greek War of Independence against the Turks in 1821. It is said that some of these leaders, like the heroic Theodoros Kolokotronis, plotted the opening shots of the war, started in Kalamata on March 23, from within these hallowed walls.

The monastery is best known in Messinia for its annual procession (started in 1843), and the carrying of the icon from the monastery down to a church of Giannitsanika on the edge of Kalamata, a journey of over 13km, which takes around five hours.

After the service, Papa Sotiris offers us Greek coffee with several other parishioners in one of the lovely old dining rooms in the monastery. Despite the no-talking rule, Kiriaki, at least, is in good conversational form, perhaps enjoying a respite from their solitary life. Kiriaki is in her mid-sixties yet looks much younger with a fresh, unlined face.

Kiriaki’s story is not an unusual one in Kalamata. After the Second World War, along with many other war orphans, she was left, aged two, under a certain plane tree near Kalamata Cathedral. The convention was that youngsters were left here to be taken in by kind Kalamatans, but in Kiriaki’s case she was taken to Dimiova.

She has known no other life but this. It’s a fairly regimented existence, with a 5.30am start for prayers, a simple breakfast (they only eat twice a day) and then work in the fields and gardens, tending the monastery’s flocks of sheep and goats, cooking, and then retiring at eight or nine o’clock, depending on the season.

The winters here, says Papa Sotiris, are long, cold and dark, with very simple accommodation and heating. They have no TV, no computers and only one radio tuned into an Orthodox religious station.

“The nuns are allowed to speak if they want to,” explains Papa Sotiris, “But most of the time they choose not to. They find it peaceful not to talk.”

“They are like two canaries in a cage,” he explains with an ingenuous flourish, “It’s a lovely cage though, a lovely environment and they don’t want to fly out into the outside world.”

To us it seems a bit lonely and yet once it would have been otherwise. When Kiriaki was a child there were a few dozen nuns in residence, and earlier in its history, as a monastery for monks only, it was capable of housing up to 100 people. Over the years, though, as the older nuns have died, the numbers have not been replaced.

Many people come to Dimiova primarily to see the miraculous icon and it is kept under lock and key for most of the time. In this region there are many stories also about its miraculous powers.

Papa Sotiris says: “There have been many, many stories in the nearby villages of people experiencing miracles. Everyone has their own special story.”

The miracle that needs to befall the monastery at the moment, sadly, is funding. The monastery buildings and the church, which were partially damaged in the earthquake of 1986, are in constant need of maintenance and restoration. The monastery is always grateful for public donations, however small, to help this cause as one of the few working/occupied monasteries, for women in particular, in the Messinian region.

Over a simple but tasty lunch that day of black lentils with onion and sturdy village bread, Kiriaki tells us the monastery is suffering in general from lack of funds, like other church institutions here, because of the economic cutbacks in Greece.

With restoration work on some Byzantine churches, particularly in rural areas, already being scaled back, the future of monasteries like Dimiova and the gentle souls who inhabit them is more in doubt than ever.

Sister Kiriaki hitting the traditional wooden talado, which is used to call the faithful to prayers or for meals

When we finally take our leave much later after the lovely esperinos, the evening service, for the long nerve-pinching drive back down the mountain, we are told to come back soon and are given more gifts of filakta, small embroidered pouches smelling of lavender, which, whispers Kiriaki in my ear, are to be worn near the heart “for protection”.

The inside of the church with its ornate iconostasis and some of the frescos on the interior columns

All the way down the mountain road in the fading light I feel sleepy with the heat but I have to keep my eye out for more scree over the road, but luckily it’s all clear. Neither of us feel inclined to talk, lost in our own thoughts.

Apart from the heavenly mountain setting and the history of the place that you feel in every well-worn corner of Dimiova, for me it is the two lovely nuns who are the spirit of the place. And unexpectedly inspiring.

At a time when Greece is rocked by harsh austerity measures, job losses, rising suicide rates, and loss of confidence, here are two people uncomplaining about a life pared down to the bone. Their simple life and their serenity has a way of cutting through all our modern worries like that church bell tolling down a deserted mountainside at seven in the morning.

* Information about Dimiova through the Metropolis of Messenia www.mmess.gr

A longer version of this blog post formed the basis for the Chapter, Touching Heaven, in my second travel memoir Homer’s Where the Heart Is. For more information about this book and the first memoir Things Can Only Get Feta, about my three years living in the southern Peloponnese, go to the books page on the website www.bigfatgreekodyssey.com or order through www.amazon.co.uk or www.amazon.com

Thanks for calling by.

© All rights reserved. All text and photographs copyright of the authors 2017. No content/text or photographs may be copied from the blog without the prior written permission of the authors. This applies to all posts on the blog.

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An Odyssey in Homer’s stomping ground . . .

Posted on October 23, 2015 by Marjory

Small cove in Paleohora with the Taygetos behind and Kalamata at the head of the Messinian gulf.

THERE was a reason I put Homer into the title of my latest Greek travel memoir, Homer’s Where The Heart Is. And it has nothing to do with Homer and Marge Simpson, let’s clear that up right away, much as I love their goofball antics and Marge’s towering blue hairdo.

Homer, the slightly more venerable, and ancient Greek poet of the Iliad and the Odyssey (who lived in the 8th century BC), had a significant influence on the north Mani region of the southern Peloponnese, where we spent three years from 2010.

I’m not sure that Homer physically spent any time in the Mani – the middle peninsula of the southern Peloponnese. There’s no evidence of that, or Homer Simpson for that matter, despite the fact that the third episode of the first TV series in 1990 was called Homer’s Odyssey, when he became a citizens’ safety crusader. But as far as I know he hasn’t trudged the sylvan hills of the Mani.

As for Homer the venerable Greek, he named the area around the present day village of Paleohora, Iri (Ιρή), which is situated on the coastal strip just south of Kalamata and it is mentioned in the Iliad as one of the seven cities (including Kardamili further south) that Agamemnon offered to the angry Achilles to appease him. In its time, Iri had serious historic cachet.

One of the coves at Paleohora with the Portella and a view towards the Messinian peninsula opposite.

Paleohora is certainly historic, settled from the Mycenean age, and in the Homeric years it had the important temple dedicated to Asclepios (the ancient god of healing) built on the high clifftop overlooking the gulf. Ancient relics have been found from this time and it was said that people came from all over southern Greece to be healed at this temple.

On the escarpment over a small pebbled cove is what was known as the Portella, a natural opening in the rock, where the sick could be lowered down to the sea below for treatment, and which later in the 17th and 18th centuries became an escape hatch for those fleeing from Turkish interlopers.

A local papas about to throw the cross in the cold waters at Paleohora in January.

One of the three tiny coves at Paleohora that locals call Koukino with the church of Ayios Yiorgos behind.

A castle was built here in the 15th century by the Venetians, though only the north wall remains. The Orthodox Church of the Dormition was built here in 1775 and it is from here that the Epiphany (Epifania) service in January is conducted down on the beach below where young boys race to retrieve the cross thrown into the freezing waters. Whoever brings it back to shore will have good luck for the whole year.

The title of my travel memoir is of course a pun, and for those not familiar with the English expression, it’s a play on the saying, “home is where the heart is”. It seemed a fitting title for me because this spectacular Homeric land, including the hill village of Megali Mantineia – where I, my partner Jim and our mad Jack Russell Wallace – spent our first year, is a place that stole our hearts for the time we lived there, and still does. It’s a place of great natural beauty beneath the towering Taygetos mountains, but is also quite remote and not high yet on the tourist’s bucket list. Not as high as it should be.

Megali Mantineia was the focus of my first memoir Things Can Only Feta and I wrote a lot about it subsequently in media articles and on the blog, but I haven’t written much so far about the coastal area where Paleohora is situated and where we spent our next two years in the Mani.

Modern Paleohora is a small village with a few churches and a cluster of tavernas and kafeneia close to three small pebbly coves, which are unspoilt, with the remnants of the Portella still visible above one of them.

Jim and Wallace at Koukino with the cove and village of Archontiko in the distance.

Another quiet cove in Paleohora with an old house on the beach.

A tiny lane leads to the hidden beach of Koukino – a secret Greek retreat.

The coves here, like those of nearby Archontiko, Mikra Mantineia and Akroyiali, are close to the main road but some are so splendidly hidden from view that it is mostly Greeks who frequent them in summer. Mikra (Small) Mantineia was once a thriving village but its residents fled during the pirate raids of earlier centuries and moved up to the sister village of (Big) Megali Mantineia in the shadow of the Taygetos mountains. After Greece won the War of Independence against the Turks in the early 19th century, many of the hillside villagers moved back to the coast. Sometimes the migration was quite dramatic.

A narrow road from Mikra Mantineia will take you past a small olive press to Palia (Old) Mikra Mantineia, where a village on the saddle of a hill once sat and which was destroyed by an earthquake in the 1940s, after which most villagers fled to the coast. Most of the lovely old houses here, with courtyards and intricate balconies and doorways, lie in ruins. We found one house up there in 2011 that still had old family photos on the wall in a crumbling sitting room, and a kitchen with old utensils as if the place had been abandoned in an instant and had never been returned to, sadly. While there was a plan for a developer to totally renovate the village a few years back, it seems this has now been shelved due to Greece’s economic crisis.

Paleohora, however, is the place that seems to have the most history on this coastal strip, and many of the archaeological finds are now on display in the Archaeological Museum in Kalamata.

Scenes and characters that inspired Homer’s Where The Heart Is

The family we spent much of our time with at the Paleohora property.

We owe a great deal to the lovely family from whom we rented our house at Paleohora, with its olive groves and fruit trees and spectacular views of the gulf and the mountains. The couple I wrote about in Homer’s Where the Heart Is, Andreas and Marina, lived in Kalamata but spent a great deal of their spare time fixing up an old spitaki (little house) in the corner of the property which was the original house here and owned by Marina’s grandfather. We spent a great deal of time with this generous family.

The old vine-covered spitaki with its big wooden table in the yard below was the focal point of life on the property.

Andreas in the soap-making episode described in my second travel memoir.

It was in the yard of the house at the big wooden table, in front of the spitaki, that we shared many celebrations with the family, including Easter Sunday lunch, which became a chapter in the book. It was also where we watched the family making olive oil soap one year in an ancient kazani (cauldron), to an old village recipe, and where Marina would fire up the ancient fournos (oven) and cook various festive biscuits, like kourabiedes.

Jim with a fire extinguisher ready to deal with one of Marina’s famous fournos fires.

Most of the time Marina used dried olive branches and several times she slightly overdid things and created a fireball, with black smoke belching out of the front of the fournos.

Wallace and his new friend, the ‘she-wolf’ Zina, who lived at the Paleohora house and was mentioned in the book.

Andreas and a friend trimming the olive trees.

In the winter the family harvested their 80 olive trees with the help of local harvesters from outlying villages.

Despite the fact that while we lived in Paleohora as the crisis intensified to a heartbreaking level, particularly during 2011 and 2012, our stay was nothing short of inspiring and we owe much to this wonderful area and its people for giving us some of the best years of our lives.

Lastly, I couldn’t end a story without mentioning the inimitable goat farmer and friend Foteini, from the village of Megali Mantineia. While she was one of the star’s of the first book Things Can Only Get Feta, she makes several appearances in the second book, when I go to visit her at her ktima (farm compound), most memorably when I watch her crazy outdoor washing routine one hot summer.

Foteini and her beautiful outdoor laundrette.

Homer’s Where The Heart Is

TO read more about living in Greece during the crisis in the southern Peloponnese, read my second travel memoir Homer’s Where The Heart Is.

To help you along, Homer will be available to buy this week on a Kindle Countdown Deal from November 5 to 7 at 99p in the UK and 99c in the US. See links below.

This book is the sequel to the first, Things Can Only Get Feta (published in 2013) about the start of our long odyssey in the rural Mani.

To those who have already read the latest book, thanks for your kind comments and Amazon reviews, which are always appreciated.

Both books are available on all Amazon’s international sites and also on the Book Depository www.bookdepository.com (with free overseas postage).

On the website www.bigfatgreekodyssey.com you will also find a ‘books’ page with other information about the books.

To buy either of my books please click on the Amazon links below:

Things Can Only Get Feta

Homer’s Where The Heart Is

You can also find me on Twitter @fatgreekodyssey

And Facebook www.facebook.com/ThingsCanOnlyGetFeta

www.facebook.com/HomersWhereTheHeartIs

Last word: This blog has kindly been shared by American writer Amelia Dellos on the Women Who Write blog site. Thanks https://womenwhowriteblog.wordpress.com/2015/11/03/an-odyssey-in-homers-stomping-ground/

Thanks for calling by.

© All rights reserved. All text and photographs copyright of the authors 2015. No content/text or photographs may be copied from the blog without the prior written permission of the authors. This applies to all posts on the blog.

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Don’t drive yourself mad in Greece …

Posted on March 1, 2015 by Marjory

Driving in Greece can really get your goat

I HAVE come to the conclusion that the only way to deal with the nervy business of driving in Greece, with poor roads and maverick drivers, is to treat it as a metaphor for life itself.

Focus on the scary, I’m-about-to-die moments as they come up and don’t obsess over the whole, long journey, or you’ll never set out.

Take it all one deep, crumbling pothole at a time.

Koroni harbour with the Taygetos mountains in the background

I thought of this the other day when I had a long 50km drive from Koroni, at the tip of the Messinian peninsula to Kalamata, for a few early appointments. The road from picturesque Koroni is long and narrow, twisty in parts and used by tractors, pick-up trucks, buses, and all kinds of crazy drivers. It has poor edges in places, where the road sheers off on to deep drops, with no guard rails.

No driving through on market day at Petalidi

It also winds through two large villages with bottlenecks at intersections and is a nightmare on the laiki, market, days, and in summer, where the narrow roads are log-jammed with tour buses, camper vans, tractors and gypsy hawkers in pick-up trucks crammed with fruit and veg, the watermelons regularly bouncing off and splattering on the road.

A typical sight from the road that winds along the coast from Koroni to Petalidi in the Messinian peninsula

Of course, it isn’t always hell. There are a few calm days, and if you can ever relax for a moment, the views along this road are gorgeous, looking across the Messinian gulf towards the Mani and the Taygetos mountains, with Kalamata city spread along the head of the Messinian gulf. There are moments when you glance at this beautiful region and remember why you’re in Greece to start with, but you can never take your eyes off the road for more than a second. Around every corner is the outrageously unexpected, and the close shave, of which we’ve had many.

This is what I saw on that one morning driving to Kalamata: drivers overtaking on blind bends and coming straight for you (very normal); pick-up trucks loaded with goats in the back (normal, though sometimes its donkeys and horses); one driver hogging a whole busy stretch of road while a police car desperately needed to overtake. The driver wouldn’t budge (Greek rebel, very normal). Luckily for him, he wasn’t later pulled over by the cops. I’ve seen similar with ambulances trying to overtake on life-saving missions.

That morning I also saw a motorbike rider with no helmet (very normal) weaving about and awkwardly carrying a large wrapped package under one arm; a couple on another motorbike with two children sandwiched on the seat between them (no helmets) and at least one farmer walking along the road trailing four skittery goats on ropes. There are animal hazards aplenty on Greek roads, including runaway chickens, and once I had to dodge a horse cantering down the road with no rider or escort.

Spectacular view from the road down to Kardamili

For British drivers, the roads here can be terrifying. I know expats who refuse to drive, or will only drive around their own village. I sympathise with their anxieties, especially in the Mani, where the roads through the Taygetos mountains are full of hairpin bends and sheer drops.

So when I set off on a long journey alone, I psyche myself up and say, “I’ll just take it one hazard at a time”. If you think of the whole journey, you’re doomed. It’s all you can do.

It’s also while driving that the mystifying nature of Greeks always occurs to me. I mean no offence, of course, to the Greeks because as a race I think they are wonderful, generous, unique, and I love them. But why oh why do they go bonkers on the road, breaking every rule in the book, playing with the equivalent of a loaded gun? Ordinarily, I love the maverick, non-conformist attitude of Greeks. I love the way they can think for themselves and not rely on the nannying attitude we suffer in Britain, for example, but behind the wheel of a car, this attitude goes to a lethal extreme.

In the rural Mani villagers prefer donkeys to tractors

Sometimes it is comical, too, like the guy I once saw in Kalamata, driving with his knees while he rolled up a cigarette. A guy on a motorbike with a trombone in his lap. A motorbike rider on a busy city street ferrying a tray in one hand with frappes on top. A motorbike pulling a small, two-wheel trailer, in which a man sat – holding a ladder. And the parking is also crazy: cars parked at the head of one-way streets, across corners, on pavements. Sometimes you laugh at all this eccentric behaviour. But other times you live in fear.

If you were expecting any advice about driving in Greece, I haven’t got any, other than the one I stick resolutely to. Give way to everything, always, even when you have the right of way. And get a good insurance broker because if, God forbid, you do have an accident, sorting it out in Greece can be complicated, with so many drivers uninsured, driving old wrecks with no MOT, bald tyres and dodgy brakes.

Wallace trying out his advanced driving techniques

Our Kalamatan broker Panayiotis is a star, who will let you speed-dial his number any time, if you have any incident on the road.

When we first came to live in the Mani in 2010 we went to see him to get comprehensive insurance for our Greek car. Initially there was a setback, which was typically Greek and amusing. I included the anecdote in my book Things Can Only Get Feta and I quote it here:

“We had to wait about 10 days for the paperwork to arrive, during which time we only had third-party cover, and drove the car around as if it were a Ming vase on wheels.

“When we returned to pick up the paperwork, the broker told us there was a hitch. We had been knocked back by the preferred insurance company and another would have to be arranged. When we asked why we had been rejected he told us the first company was no longer insuring foreign drivers in Greece as they were a high risk.

“Do you mean they think we are poor drivers?” I asked.

“No. The company says foreigners don’t know how Greeks drive,” he told us. When we burst out laughing, he offered a wry smile. By then we knew exactly how Greeks drive – at high speed, on the wrong side of the road, while rolling up cigarettes, eating souvlaki, slurping coffee, talking loudly on the mobile. Doing anything, in fact, but driving.”

On the way home that particular day at the quiet siesta time, the nicest time to drive, I had to smile when I saw the nonchalant farmer again leading his goats along the road, going home this time. Happily, we had all survived another day on Greek roads.

Book news – Things Can Only Get Feta

AFTER being out of print for several months, the paperback edition of Things Can Only Get Feta: Two journalists and their crazy dog living through the Greek crisis has been republished and is now available on Amazon sites:

Amazon UK

Amazon US

It is also available on Kindle as well.

The book explores our first year of living in the Mani, in southern Greece, with our dog Wallace, trying to live as authentic a life as possible with sad and funny consequences. The sequel to this book, covering our last two years in the Mani, will be available in the summer.

For more information on Things Can Only Get Feta, visit the book page on this site www.bigfatgreekodyssey.com

Thanks for stopping by.

© All rights reserved. Text and photographs copyright of the authors 2015. No content/text or photographs may be copied from the blog without the prior written permission of the authors. This applies to all posts on the blog.

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What’s Greece in winter really like?

Posted on December 30, 2014 by Marjory

Fishing caiques in Koroni harbour at the start of winter

MY work desk is currently a blue metal kafeneion-style table parked in front of the balcony windows. The view from here is always glorious, across the olive orchards to the Messinian Gulf, but now it’s a winter scene. Dark clouds scud over the vast expanse of water. There are snowcaps on the Taygetos mountains opposite. In the olive groves some stoical harvesters have spread their nets and are working in the rain and cold. We were swimming just a few days ago – but there will be little chance of that now as winter deepens.

The view across the Messinian gulf towards the Taygetos mountains in the Mani peninsula

Everyone adores Greece in summer – the endless hot days, the warm clear sea, the tavernas brimming with happy holidaymakers – but what’s it really like living in Greece in the winter? Well, it’s very different, of course. And while it’s hard to imagine in the punishing heat of August, it does get pretty cold in winter, especially in January and February, when an icy wind blows down from the mountains, or here in Koroni (at the tip of the Messinian peninsula), across from the Ionian Sea.

Snow-capped peaks of the Taygetos mountains in December

It can rain for days on end, powerful, heavy rain. A few weeks ago we had something like a mini-hurricane in Koroni, with heavy winds and hailstones. There were mudslides on the hillside where we live and stone walls collapsed along the narrow road between the olive groves. On the Mani peninsula, opposite, there was a twister one day and then a storm that caused havoc to the small villages along the coast. But by the spring, the damage will be sorted, the beachside terraces renewed and tourists will never know we even had a winter.

lazy fat wally caption here for the old pupster

Wallace our cheeky Jack Russell keeping himself warm during the winter

Some days in December there were flashes of hot weather, with the temperature around 18 to 20 degrees C, and we’ve been seized by the crazy desire to grab our swimming gear and pile down to the beach for a bracing swim. We’ve usually been the only ones there but the experience has been worth it, even swimming with the snow- capped Taygetos mountains mocking us from across the gulf.

Now it seems property winter with cooler temperatures and days of rain and even Wallace our Jack Russell has been reluctant to get out of his bed in the morning. But there are compensations too: no summer pests … mosquitoes, hornets, snakes or scorpions now, apart from the huge beige one we found one morning sitting by the front door. It put us all into a tailspin, especially Wallace, who, true to his crazy breed, wanted to bark the critter into a swift retreat, as if it were a pesky Jehovah’s Witness with a pitch fork. He gave up eventually and scarpered – Wallace that is, not the scorpion, which Jim despatched with a sweepy brush.

Koroni is a popular harbour town. In summer, the narrow streets by the harbour are thronging with holidaymakers, the waterside tavernas buzzing with life. Now the road along the paralia is almost deserted. The outside terraces have their scuffed plastic sides rolled up, the tables and chairs have gone and cars park in the spaces now – at least when it isn’t stormy and huge waves roll across the road. It’s hard to remember now what it was all like in summer. For some people, this side of Greece is much less appealing, but if you love Greece, as we do, you won’t ever be bored.

In a working town like Koroni, there are always Greeks about and they have more time to talk now. There are only one or two tavernas still open, a few old-fashioned ouzeries and several cafes, as well as regular shops. When the sun’s out, the harbour still bustles but it’s different. The locals have reclaimed their town and the atmosphere is most definitely Greek. It’s now about everyday life and having a gossip over a Greek coffee and for many of the taverna owners who have survived their seven-day working week, all summer, it’s a blessed relief to have a normal life again. But with most of our favourite haunts now shut, we’re already missing the tables set by the waterside, the plates of sizzling kalamari, slabs of moussaka and the familiar bowls of Greek salad with a doorstopper wedge of Feta on top.

The olive harvest is a familiar and comforting scene all over the southern Peloponnese, famed for its oil

In this part of Greece, for now, all life revolves around the olive harvest, particularly with the bumper crop this year and with the higher price of oil. It has lifted morale in rural areas and brought hope where there has been little for the past five years. The roads outside the town are full of trucks stacked high with bulging sacks of olives, heading to the local presses. If you want to see how Greeks really live, winter’s the best time to be here.

There’s plenty of winter seating for the strip of road outside the castle with its gulf view. But you might need to form an orderly queue in summer

If you look hard enough there’s still plenty to do. Even if you’re not particularly religious you can also take part in one of the many Orthodox services at this time of year, just out of sheer curiosity for its history and Byzantine ritual. A few days before Christmas we went to an intriguing service called the Iero Evhelaio, in Koroni’s main church of Ayios Dimitrios. It involved a blessing with holy oil. It was a small congregation and a long service, for which we were all given lighted candles to hold, which seemed to mark the duration of this service because by the time the candles had burnt down to waxy stubs in our fingers, it was close to the end.

It was a rather solemn service, apart from the moment when one of the chanters collapsed in a chair in a coughing fit with a case of incense overdose. Yet it felt rather Christmassy at the end when we all lined up in front of a small table, a bowl of warmed oil in the centre, and the Papas blessed each of us in turn, marking our faces and hands with small oily crosses. With good wishes from friends and neighbours, we left and wandered out into the cold night.

One of the old-style ouzeries in Koroni

Some nights it’s pleasant just to go into Koroni and sit in one of the zaharoplasteia (pastry shops) and share a slab of rich, custardy galaktoboureko, for which this town is apparently famous. One Saturday night we discovered a small ouzerie by the harbour, where we had a simple meal of souvlaki, Greek salad and local wine. It’s an old building, with rickety chairs and tables, where mementoes on the walls remind you of an older, probably happier era in Greece.

The tables slowly filled up with locals, mostly drinking ouzo. One man called Andreas told us that in the past there would probably have been a few bouzouki players here and a singer or two for an impromptu night of music, but this is rarer now. But the next best thing for many Greeks on a Saturday night is the live TV music show called Cheers, Friends (Stin Iyeia Mas). Watching it is almost mandatory and in the ouzerie, a TV propped up on one wall was tuned into the show with its popular songs and vivacious bouzouki riffs, obviously delighting this assembled audience. Had we stayed to the very end I felt sure someone would eventually have got up and danced unselfconsciously around the tables. As we left, Andreas told us he played the bouzouki and he’d bring it there one night for a music session. What night, we asked? He shrugged. “When the mood takes me.” Okay, this is Greece. No rules. Take it or leave it!

caption for jim and his juicy pair here pls

Jim is jealously guarding his crop of grapefruits, a mere fraction of what we have gathered already this winter

Winter in Greece is what you want to make it. If you don’t live here permanently, and we don’t, then you want every day to count, whatever the season. When the weather is fine we go out and explore the countryside or fuss over our new vegetable plot, with its crop of cabbages and broccoli and pick sweet winter oranges and grapefruits from the abundance of fruit trees we have around the house.

With fewer distractions in autumn and winter we have been lucky to have time to spend on projects. I have had plenty of time for writing and have finished a second book on our adventures in Greece, a task eased by an inspiring view and peaceful surroundings.

My partner Jim has been working hard on his new ebook editing and formatting business (www.ebooklover.co.uk) and twice a week he is attending government-run Greek classes in Koroni, aimed at beginners, and held in a local primary school. He’s finding it challenging since, as Greek is a hard language, but the class has not been without humour.

One night the charming teacher Panayiotis was explaining the possessive case with the sentence “to panteloni mas”, (our trousers) but one of the more advanced students was quick to correct him. “Surely it should be ta pantelonia (trousers, plural) rather than one pair?” which is what the teacher had written on the board, illustrating the fact that even Greeks can slip up sometimes.

Panayiotis covered his mistake quickly by saying: “No, this is Greece in crisis. We all have to share one pair of trousers now.” The class erupted in laughter, and even Panayiotis joined in. I doubt that anyone there will ever forget the plural for trousers at least, or the word for crisis, a Greek word after all.

Marjory wishes you all Happy New Year after her last blissful swim of the year

Happy New Year, Kali Xronia

WE’VE had a wonderful 2014, with quite a lot of it spent in southern Greece. It hasn’t all gone to plan because, in crisis-ridden Greece, things never do. We have had our adventures, frustrations and our moments of anxiety. But every day has been blessed with new experiences and we hope that next year will be as good. Wishing all our loyal blog readers a very happy New Year and a joyous 2015. I hope many of you will spend some of your holidays at least in Greece – even in winter!

Things Can Only Get Feta

For details about my book, recounting our adventures in the Mani, and for reviews and articles, please visit our Big Fat Greek Odyssey website, book page

Visit Amazon to buy the book (Kindle version – new edition). A new edition of the paperback will also be available shortly.

If you like the book please think about leaving a review on Amazon. It will be very much appreciated.

Thanks for stopping by.

© All rights reserved. Text and photographs copyright of the authors 2016. No content/text or photographs may be copied from the blog without the prior written permission of the authors. This applies to all posts on the blog.

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Will the crisis kill off unique Greek monasteries?

Posted on September 6, 2012 by Marjory

Dimiova women’s monastery high up in the Taygetos mountains in the southern Peloponnese

IT was sad indeed to hear of the death of one of the last two nuns at the unique Dimiova monastery, east of Kalamata, in the southern Peloponnese. Sister Christina, in her seventies, died last December after a long illness. I had met her and the Abbess of Dimiova, Sister Kiriaki, during a day-long ‘retreat’ at the monastery in 2012 and subsequently wrote a blog piece about my memorable experiences there.

With only the Abbess remaining now at this remote place high in the Taygetos Mountains, the future of this outstanding monastery, which houses one of the most revered icons in this part of the Peloponnese, will now be in doubt. There are only a handful of working monasteries left in this region, particularly for women.

During lunch that day at the monastery, it was Sister Kiriaki who remarked that the economic crisis had impacted drastically on the monastery, on its much needed repair and renovations and its ability to support more nuns. The two remaining nuns had been leading very humble, restricted lives even before the crisis began, but now the situation was much bleaker, as it has been for most priests as well in the Orthodox church, and the churches themselves.

In a modern world where religion has less significance for many people, a common complaint (even from younger Greeks as well) is: “Why do we need monasteries?”

The Orthodox religion is an integral part of the vibrant Greek culture, but the issue goes beyond religion I think. These Greek monasteries, and many churches, are unique historic buildings and contain a wealth of outstanding Byzantine frescos that are surely as important to European art tradition as any Italian Renaissance masterpiece. Painted on the interiors of churches, often open to the elements, the frescos are fading and in need of regular upkeep, now mostly impossible in the crisis. If you are lucky, you might see inside one of these establishments once or twice a year on certain saints’ days.

The monasteries are also an enduring part of the communities that surround them and have, during difficult periods of Greek history protected communities, hidden Greek freedom fighters and have promoted the Greek language and its culture. If these great institutions close, and finally crumble into ruins, it will become near impossible to revive them in future decades.

One day in the future, Greeks will surely climb out of the economic crisis, but without these splendid historic and religious monuments, the country they inherit will not be the one we know today. And that would be a tragedy.

To give an idea of how special Dimiova is, I am posting here a slightly shortened version of the blog I wrote in 2012. If you feel strongly about the subject, do please leave a comment on the post.

The church dedicated to the Dormition of the Panayia at Dimiova was built in the 17th century

“How will we be able to glean anything about the nuns’ lives if we can’t talk to them?” asked Gillian.

We were simply to find that out for ourselves, Papa Sotiris seemed to indicate rather mysteriously.

****

The Abbess Sister Kiriaki, left, Papa Sotiris, the priest at Dimiova, and Sister Christina

Papa Sotiris, top, lighting the votive lamp in front of the icon of the Panayia Dimiovitissa. Above: the icon showing the bloodstain on the Virgin Mary’s face

The icon is best known for the curious mark on the Panayia’s right cheek, which is said to be a blood stain, and there are many theories as to how it came to be there.

The winters here, says Papa Sotiris, are long, cold and dark, with very simple accommodation and heating. They have no TV, no computers and only one radio tuned into an Orthodox religious station.

“The nuns are allowed to speak if they want to,” explains Papa Sotiris, “But most of the time they choose not to. They find it peaceful not to talk.”

“They are like two canaries in a cage,” he explains with an ingenuous flourish, “It’s a lovely cage though, a lovely environment and they don’t want to fly out into the outside world.”

Many people come to Dimiova primarily to see the miraculous icon and it is kept under lock and key for most of the time. In this region there are many stories also about its miraculous powers.

Papa Sotiris says: “There have been many, many stories in the nearby villages of people experiencing miracles. Everyone has their own special story.”

Sister Kiriaki, top, hitting the traditional wooden talado, which is used to call the faithful to prayers or for meals. Above: Sister Christina in reflective mood

The flower garden in the monastery grounds is a place of gentle reflection

* Donations for the church are gratefully received. Information about Dimiova through the Metropolis of Messenia www.mmess.gr

A longer version of this blog post formed the basis for the Chapter, Touching Heaven, in my second travel memoir Homer’s Where the Heart Is. For more information about this book and the first memoir Things Can Only Get Feta about my three years living in the southern Peloponnese, go to www.bigfatgreekodyssey.com/blog or order through www.amazon.co.uk

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