My pen pal Donald Sutherland

Posted on August 17, 2024 by Marjory

**Pointer for the digital version of Marjory’s Sunday Times feature**

Back in 2000, when I was living in Scotland and working as a freelance feature writer, I wrote a piece for The Sunday Times about actor Donald Sutherland, mostly about his early years working in repertory at Perth Theatre, which was fascinating. It was a phone interview and the actor was very charming and kind, and even included my mother Mary in the conversation, as you will see below.

He gave me a personal email address to contact him if I had any more questions, and I did some time later, though it had nothing to do with the original feature. However, it inspired a series of emails between us, sometimes touching, sometimes bizarre, and when it ended I kept all the emails. When I heard he’d sadly passed away in June 2024, I re-read those emails again and felt privileged to have had this unusual connection with him over four years.

I felt it was a good time, the week he died, to write a small feature about our correspondence as my own small tribute to this Hollywood legend, and The Scottish Sunday Times published it. It had the internet edition’s social media pointer (see above), which was also delightful.

The feature included a picture of myself and my mother Mary, which, if she were still alive, would have thrilled her to bits. It was the first and only time my mother and I have been together in a newspaper article and I will always treasure it.

Bellow is the text of the article for those of you who don’t subscribe to The Times newspapers but who have asked if they may read the piece. I hope you enjoy it.

The Sunday Times article

By Marjory McGinn

HALFWAY through a phone interview with Hollywood legend Donald Sutherland, for a story on the actor’s early days working at Perth Theatre, he suddenly asked if he could talk to my mother, Mary.

“Okay, if you like,” I said, slightly anxious, wondering how this would go.

I took the phone to the adjacent room in our Stirlingshire home (in Scotland), where my mother was watching TV. I’d pre-warned her that I’d be interviewing Sutherland and asked her to keep the TV low.

“Mum … Donald Sutherland would like to speak to you, from Los Angeles,” I said, handing her the phone.

“Me?” she said, her eyes wide with confusion.

She took the phone, her hands shaking, but said in her sweetest Scottish accent, “Well, hello, Donald!” as if they’d known each other for years.

It was one of the most bizarre episodes of my life. I sat in the corner of the room, listening nervously. The conversation went on and on, my mother giving the actor a guide to Perth streets and landmarks. Mary, 75, knew Perth well, as she’d been born there, as had I. And Sutherland was apparently lapping up her ‘guided tour’ of the city.

It came about because Sutherland and I had just been discussing the nine months he spent in 1960 honing his craft at Perth Theatre. Canadian-born Sutherland would quickly become the most famous member of the theatre’s dazzling alumni, which includes Sir Alec Guinness and Edward Woodward.

Sutherland – who died on Thursday, aged 88 – told me his time in repertory at the theatre had been his first big break in acting and had given him confidence. “It was like being married to a wonderful woman,” he said, descriptively. “It was the first time in my life where the audience actually laughed when I was being funny. That means a lot to an actor.”

Sutherland, who has Scottish roots, had loved Perth, but had little affection for the draughty flat he rented near the theatre. For some inexplicable reason he wanted to know where exactly it was. Did I know? No! And that’s where my mother came in, at my suggestion.

The pair then blethered on and on about everything to do with Perth: streets, shops, pubs, with me checking my watch constantly, wondering if my dear, affable mother hadn’t just hijacked the interview.

In the end I had to tap her gently on the shoulder and lure the phone back. Later, Sutherland told me he’d enjoyed talking with my mother, but whether they had discovered the whereabouts of his miserable flat was doubtful.

The interview with Sutherland was one of the most memorable of my journalistic career. He was an engaging, thoughtful, entertaining character. At the end of it, he gave me his private email address, in case I had other queries.

I emailed him not long afterwards, offering to send him an historic brochure given to me by Perth Theatre, including his repertory years. He was thrilled. He signed off his email: “My best to your mum and to yourself. Donald.”

Curiously, that was to be the start of a four-year, sporadic, email friendship with him. His missives were entertaining: quite formal to start with, sometimes candid, surprisingly tetchy, particularly when I asked him in 2003 if it was possible to interview him again for his upcoming film Cold Mountain, in which he starred with Nicole Kidman, a subject that was to prove contentious.

He replied: “Dear Marjory McGinn. It’s a little premature to start talking about Cold Mountain. The film’s in its first assembly. There’s a lot of work ahead.” In that email I also thanked him again for his kindness while chatting to my mother because she had since passed away. I wrote: “I wanted you to know that right up until she died, she told everyone she met about your conversation with her about Perth. It was one of the most enthralling moments of her life.”

He replied: “I am sorry about the loss of your mother. It was delightful for me to chat with her and I’m thrilled that she enjoyed it too. My best to you, Donald Sutherland.”

**Donald Sutherland and Nicole Kidman in Cold Mountain**

Later in the year I wrote to him again, and among other things, gently nudged him about a possible interview for the upcoming Cold Mountain. Even just a phoner.

“I don’t do phoners,” he replied a little petulantly, but surprisingly candid. “Our conversation on the phone (in 2000) was more a little chat about the far distant past. And I’m not going to be in England… But more than all of that. I’ve kind of pulled back into a shell here in Quebec and I’m not planning to give interviews to anybody. I’m too angry. Way too angry.”

Angry at what? Me for asking about Cold Mountain? It became obvious from some of his emails that he didn’t like his privacy being invaded, even though he’d given me his email address.

“Very few people have it. No print journalists that I know of, other than yourself. I trust you will respect the privacy of that address. I know you will anyway. I don’t know why I even bothered to mention it.” However, he finished off by saying: “My new pup is crying in the kitchen so I have to go look for her well-being. I hope you’re well and happy and I send you my best regards, Donald Sutherland.”

I immediately wrote back and apologised profusely for having, or so I thought, given offence over Cold Mountain.

He replied: “My God, you misunderstood, Ms McGinn. I’m not angry about you. Not at all. If I’d been angry, I would never have returned your email. I’m mad about this wretched government that’s doing its very best to ruin the world we live in. Terribly mad. And I don’t even have a vote. Good heavens no. Your letter was filled with affection. Donald Sutherland.”

The ‘government’ comment was a reference to the government in the US, where he’d been living, and its invasion of Iraq.

In early 2004, after finally seeing Cold Mountain, I told him how much I’d enjoyed it, but that his character, the patriarch, the Reverend Monroe, had died way too early, surrounded by his family.

His reply was self-effacing. It was the first time he’d referred to be by my Christian name.

“Dear Marjory. Thank you for your kind letter. I’m fine, still old and still being filmed dying with a bevy of beautiful daughters or grandsons or whatever! By the way, the pup is brilliant. Much affection. Donald Sutherland.”

I wrote to him in 2005 to tell him how much I enjoyed his latest film, Pride and Prejudice, in which he played Mr Bennet, but heard nothing back, and that was sadly to be the end of our correspondence. Understandable, with his heavy schedule of films. Or perhaps he felt the need to pull back into his ‘shell’ again.

I sensed through my fascinating correspondence with Sutherland that he was a peculiarly shy man, sensitive about his quirky looks. He told me during the 2000 interview: “People have considered my looks to be odd and I don’t think I’ll ever really come to terms with that, but they’ve given me a wonderfully delicious life, so I can’t complain.”

A touching admission, but women certainly were never averse to his looks, including his biggest fan, my dear mother Mary.

Marjory’s books

Marjory writes novels and travel memoirs mostly set in Greece. In her latest memoir, Wake Me Up For The Elephants is now published to great reviews. The book is funny and candid and described by Times best-selling author Peter Kerr as “Travel writing at its best”.

It has stories this time from very different places including Africa, Fiji, Australia, Ireland, Greece and Scotland. The Scottish stories include a comical and poignant Thelma-and- Louise-style account of Marjory’s holiday with her mother Mary. It’s a sentimental return to the homeland but full of funny mishaps and remote destinations including the Outer Hebrides and the far northern highlands.

Here’s a link.

https://mybook.to/WakeMeUpForElephants

For more information about Marjory’s Greek memoirs and novels, based on four years living in Greece, and to make contact with the author, which is always welcome, go to her website: https://www.bigfatgreekodyssey.com

The author also has a new writer’s page on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarjoryMcGinnWrites

Thanks for dropping by.

© All rights reserved. All text and photographs copyright of the authors 2010-2024. 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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Snugs, pugs and Irish craic

Posted on March 27, 2024 by Marjory

**Author Marjory McGinn outside the famous MacCarthy’s Bar in Castletownbere, County Cork**

WE’D just stopped at a tollbooth on the motorway from Dublin to Cork, excited about exploring the city and then the south-west coast of Ireland.

Jim leaned towards the female toll collector, holding out his two euros. She didn’t take it.

“There’s no charge, sir, the woman in the car ahead paid for you,” she said in a lovely lilting accent.

Jim gave me a shocked look, then turned back to the collector. “What? It’s paid? Why would the woman do that?”

“How would I know?” She shrugged.

“Do you think she knows me?” said Jim to the toll woman, as if thinking out loud, trying to make sense of this peculiar gesture.

“I wouldn’t know anything about that,” she said with a wry smile, enjoying this peculiarity herself, or so it seemed. Then she waved us onward.

“Did you hear what the toll woman just said?”

“Yep. What’s it all about? Free tolls for incomers, do you think? Or maybe she liked your smiley face, Jim.”

He laughed. “Hope it’s going to be like this everywhere: free car travel, lashings of Guinness. I’m loving this place already.”

Lush hillsides on the west coast of the Beara peninsula (top) and a high, narrow road on the Wild Atlantic Way

There really is something about Ireland, not just the fabulous scenery, the emerald green fields and far-flung villages. It’s the people mostly. Their minds tick over to a different beat. Their logic doesn’t seem to conform to ours, mostly. They’ve taken left-field thinking to an Olympic level. And it’s all rather grand, until you need directions somewhere, then the logic bedevils you. The instructions never make sense, comical though they are. Driving in Ireland often reminds me of driving in Greece, where directions and rules are bendy things.

But otherwise, I love the wickedly funny way the Irish pull the rug out from under any po-faced inquisitor, blagger, or visiting foreign anorak stressing over bucket lists. I love the craic, the way the Irish make ordinary things fabulously interesting and fun. We listened to the radio a lot while driving in Ireland and I was struck by the banter on phone-in shows. I liked the fact they could talk about ordinary things we’d never touch on in UK for a dozen dismal reasons.

On one radio show there were two or three youngish presenters in the studio, talking about nothing much, but you just had to listen. A girl asked one of the guys what he’d done on the weekend. He said he went to his niece’s (Catholic) church confirmation service. “You should’ve seen her white confirmation dress, it was just gorgeous! Sure, she looked peeerfect!” It was said without the least bit of irony.

On what radio show in Britain, even on a quasi-religious offering, would confirmation dresses be a thing, in such a way you couldn’t help but listen? The Irish could read a shopping list on air and it would sound like James Joyce. The accent helps, of course.

**Colourful houses of Allihies on the Beara peninsula (top). View from the Healy Pass in the Caha mountains and signposts near Hungry Hill**

We were in Ireland, mainly travelling around the south west, the Beara peninsula in west Cork and up through county Kerry on part of what is known as the romantically named Wild Atlantic Way. This starts near Cork city and winds up the coast all the way to County Donegal, one of the most memorable routes in the world.

The views were glorious, as you’d expect: hillsides with 50 shades of green; village houses in vivid Liquorice Allsorts colours, as in Eyeries and Allihies on Beara. There are also rugged beaches and tiny Dursey Island off the tip of the peninsula, which you can only reach by boat or the cable car on a long line suspended over a narrow but choppy channel. The cable car, on the windy day we visited which was just shy of a proper Atlantic gale, wasn’t operating. Just well; it looked skittery small, hoiked up and stationary on the mainland side.

The drive along the north of the peninsula to Kenmare was also memorable, with turquoise coves and sheep dallying around their edges, dreaming of skinny dipping. After a day on the peninsula we took the winding, sometimes hairy, road back through the Caha mountains, over the Healy Pass to Adrigole, as a shortcut on the way home to our rental cottage.

**Not much has changed in the famous MacCarthy’s bar and the craic’s still on ta**p.

We stayed for four days outside Castletownbere, the main town on the southern stretch of the peninsula, under the famously brooding Hungry Hill which inspired Daphne du Maurier’s book of the same name. The cottage was in the shadow of the hill but with a bedroom window looking straight onto to the ever changing Bantry Bay, and a good reason not to get out of bed in the morning. But to contemplate a lie-in while in Ireland is to miss all the doolally stuff.

The town is unfussy, with a nice harbour, a famous stone circle on its periphery, supposedly haunted by Iron Age ghouls. But the most famous landmark is still MacCarthy’s Bar, featured in the best-selling memoir by English travel writer, the late Pete McCarthy. It’s a brilliant book, and mostly hilarious, as he travels from Cork to Donegal in the 1990s, looking for the real Ireland beneath the tourist cliches, though his main theme was to visit all the MacCarthy’s bars along his route and sample their wares, all of which compounded his outlandish travel larks significantly.

His other preoccupation was to question whether his Irish roots on his mother’s side made him feel more Irish than English. By the end of the book he still hasn’t quite worked it out. But his search is achingly funny and candid, including a hellish three-day pilgrimage to St Patrick’s Purgatory on a tiny island on Loch Derg, Donegal, which McCarthy described as a mix of “Catholic flagellation and Celtic New Age whimsy”. Despite Purgatory’s deprivations, and there were many, he survived with a redemptive shimmer, sober and serious. Luckily for the reader, it didn’t last long.

As a side issue to plundering Irish roots, he also tries to unpick what makes the Irish different and much loved around the world. To him, it comes down to their sociability and warmth, the human touch, he says, and the fact that other people are drawn to the Irish because they’re also (or were in the 1990s) seen as charming underdogs, and romantically rebellious. Or maybe it’s because Irish people are just bloody good drinkers and purveyors of the best kind of craic (Celtic blethering) in the world.

**MacCarthy’s bar in Castletownbere with it’s writer’s den ambience, its snugs and pugs**

McCarthy spent weeks in Castletownbere, frequenting MacCarthy’s Bar and even had its name changed for the cover photo of his book, by the same name, contracting the ‘Mac’ to Mc. The pub probably should have adopted the writer’s cheeky alteration because inside, the place is like a relic of the 1990s when he was there (frequently). It has a shabby chic, writer’s den appeal with lots of mahogany wood panelling and snugs, and in its way is a lasting memorial to the man who helped put the bar and Castletownbere on the map.

One wall is adorned with yellowing newspaper clippings about the book and the author, and according to the manager, people still come here just to see what all the fuss had been about. It’s not likely the bar will ever be the same as when McCarthy arrived and hugged a snug with a few pints of Guinness before joining in the infamous “all-night hooley” celebrating the landlady’s birthday.

The place still has lashings of appeal, eccentricity and blethery characters. The wall behind the bar is a muddle of mismatched wares: boxes of teabags, coffee, toothpaste … and mouthwash?! A nod perhaps to the days when the place doubled as a serious grocery, selling just about everything. And lastly there was also an ancient manual typewriter hunched against the back wall below football shirts and trendy book bags.

**The storyboard to the life of MacCarthy’s bar**

Was this clapped-out typewriter actually used by McCarthy? I asked the pub manager. He scratched his head and kept his options open. “Now that I don’t rightly know …. but it could be.” So, it could but I doubted McCarthy would have had the time and patience to batter out even a bit of manuscript on those ancient keys, distracted as he always seemed to be by drinkers, fiddlers, singers and storytellers, and plenty of malarkey going down.

The pub, when McCarthy visited, had a mascot-like pug dog and there’s a similar little guy in evidence, another nod to the place’s most famous drinker/scribbler. McCarthy would have approved, I’m sure, and the visit there turned out to be one of the highlights of our whole Irish trip.

**A bit of Dublin romance with rain clouds over the timeless Liffey River**

**The other, louder side of modern Dublin life with one of its famous pubs, The Temple Bar**

The other top occurrence was stopping in Cork for three nights after we left Dublin. The city is small and traditional and feels more human-sized compared with teeming, modern Dublin which I first visited in the 1990s and did fabulous things like join literary walkabouts to pubs that had been typically the daily haunts of the country’s famous writers like James Joyce. I can’t think how the great scribes would handle places like the Temple Bar now, hoaching with tourists, where ceilidh nights or literary soirees seem harder to come by. But the pub is nevertheless still wonderful in its way.

**Sin E, one of the pubs in Cork, famous for Irish music nights, hunched up next to O’Connor’s funeral home**

**A ceilidh band at the Sin E pub in Cork and below, a thoughtful musician strumming over a pint of Guinness**

But Cork was a gem with older style pubs, some featuring ceilidh bands and energetic nights of Irish music, like in the Sin É (meaning ‘That’s It’ in Gaelic because the pub hunches up against a funeral home) on Coburg Street. The place was dead lively when we visited, the band going full throttle, the bar four people deep. The place had the kind of Irish vibrancy you hope to find there on just a brief trip but rarely do, so it was a huge achievement just lobbing by.

Cork also has some fine restaurants and shops and it was here that we found Pete McCarthy’s kind of Ireland, and people, with the human touch when I limped into a pharmacy on my first day, my heel peeling away after walking two days around Dublin in ill-fitting boots. The heel blister was huge, weepy, red raw and agony to walk on.

I told my sorry tale to the pharmacist, an older lady with a kindly face. When she asked how messy the blister was, I told her rather proudly: “Oh, not too bad now. I’ve tidied it up by cutting off the useless flappy bit of skin over it.”

She went pale. “Oh, tell me you didn’t really do that!!”

I nodded.

“Well … I’ll need to be looking at it now you’ve said that.”

I was ushered into a small examination room. Once I’d removed the sticky sock, she made a series of comical faces, and then gave the raw heel a blast of antiseptic and plied it with a series of different padded plasters, putting them on, taking them off, getting me up to walk on them, until she found the right one, thick and snug, and then bandaged the whole area. My heel was so padded and trussed up now I could have done a spot of River Dancing round the pharmacy, no trouble.

However, Mrs Nightingale added: “Don’t you be going about now walking on it. You need to rest that foot for a few days.”

“But I’m on holiday. Got to see Cork city. I’ll just hirple around on one foot, kind of.”

She had hands on hips now, a bit severe, but there was a gremlin sparkle in her eyes.

“It’ll take you longer … Cork on one leg. But we’ve all done it sometimes …”

Whatever that really meant, she gave me a cheery smile, and I left in a good mood and could even walk gingerly along with the great job she’d done on the heel. But it was the woman’s ministrations, the time she took, the bit of banter that offered the good outcome you rarely get these days in Britain when you have to stagger into a pharmacy half-dead, begging for help because at the medical centre your doctor is hiding under his desk and won’t come out.

Ireland has changed out of sight over the past few decades but I hope it never loses it sociability, as McCarthy would say, its sense of humour, its eccentricities. Quite apart from having my own Irish roots in the north, and the south (in Cork of all places, but that’s another story), I can’t wait to explore more of this wonderful country. And if I’m back in the south-west I hope MacCarthy’s bar will look just the same, with the typewriter still behind the bar and a pug for a bouncer. And the Cork pharmacist still dispensing care and banter to all the blister sisters who stagger into her shop.

McCarthy’s Bar: A Journey of Discovery in Ireland by Pete McCarthy, Hodder and Stoughton

Marjory McGinn’s latest travel memoir, Wake Me Up For The Elephants is now published to great reviews. You can pick up the ebook on Amazon for a few days (from March 27) at just 99p UK store or 99c US. The book is funny and candid and described by Times best-selling author Peter Kerr as “Travel writing at its best”.

It has stories this time from very different places including Ireland, a tale about staying in a Galway castle owned by a charismatic American couple plundering Irish roots big time. And there’s a hectic horse ride out to Omey Island at low tide with a lobster fisherman. Well, it’s Ireland afterall.

There are also stories from Africa, Fiji, Australia, Scotland, and one from Paxos, Greece.

Here’s a link.

https://mybook.to/WakeMeUpForElephants

For more information about Marjory’s memoirs and novels, based on four years living in Greece, and to make contact with the author, which is always welcome, go to her website: https://www.bigfatgreekodyssey.com

The author also has a new writer’s page on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarjoryMcGinnWrites

Thanks for dropping by.

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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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Wild, wonderful tales in new book

Posted on April 24, 2023 by Marjory

AFTER a few months of silence on the blog, I’m pleased to tell you all that I have in fact been scribbling away and my latest travel memoir is now published.

Wake Me Up For The Elephants: Comic tales of a restless traveller, is a collection of eight adventure stories with the same humour and flavour of my best-selling Greek memoirs but with a bigger canvas this time.

**Elephants strolling the grasslands of Kenya**.

While I will continue to be inspired by Greece (and there’s one story from Greece in this new collection), and set my books there, I also wanted to entertain readers with stories from some of my other favourite locations: Africa, Australia, Fiji, Ireland, Scotland.

**Jim and Marjory riding in Connemara, led by a lobster fisherman!**

They are romantic, exotic locations based on real journeys and they introduce the reader to some eccentric and wild fellow travellers and to some hilarious and scary scenarios: dodging wild animals on safari, and one male ‘stalker’ in Mombasa, Kenya; dance torment in tropical Fiji; a supernatural mystery in the Australian bush; a beach gallop in Ireland led by a lobster fisherman; and a funny boating mash-up on gorgeous Paxos island, Greece, where the recent hit Greek drama series Maestro in Blue was filmed.

**The harbour of Loggos, Paxos island, Greece.**

The stories span the period from 1992 to 2006, with the narrative moving from Australia to Scotland (where I was born) to reflect my own huge move ‘home’ with my husband Jim and where we lived and worked for 10 years. And one story will include dear Wallace, our Jack Russell terrier, not long after he was born. In its way, this book is also a prequel to the Greek memoirs, revealing what unforgettable adventures and huge life changes I’d experienced even before the four-year odyssey to Greece kicked off in 2010, which I’ve written about at length in my four Greek memoirs.

**A comical sign on Qamea island in tropical Fiji.**

Some of the trips in this collection, including Kenya and Fiji, were inspired by media travel trips I’d undertaken, particularly as a feature writer on a Sydney Sunday newspaper. I travelled with groups of other Australian writers – usually outspoken, eccentric, game for anything – with hilarious outcomes. On the Kenyan trip, it had curiously been an all-women group, but a very disparate bunch of females, and one male ‘stalker’, who tagged along with unexpected results. The trip was high on adventure, with several safaris at wildlife parks, including the inimitable Masai Mara. There were stays in historic hotels like the famous Treetops, where Princess Elizabeth in the 1950s became Queen on the sudden death of her father George VI.

**Fiji, a place where you feel you’re deliciously trapped in the old Hollywood musical South Pacific**

In Fiji, with another group, I visited some exotic tiny islands in the Pacific and trekked to a remote village on a river, where the chief and elders had organised our ‘entertainment’, though it wasn’t quite what we expected and where we were given the infamous brew of kava. Although it’s not alcoholic, kava has various disturbing side-effects but is popular throughout the South Pacific. (Read my amusing extract of this scenario, below).

**The settlement of Milovaig in the west of the Isle of Skye, where boats float in fields and waterfalls spin backwards.**

However, this collection of stories is not all fun and frolics. In one of the stories from Scotland (Hysterics in the Heather), I take my mother, Mary, on a sentimental journey back to the wilder parts of our homeland, including the remote Outer Hebrides islands and while it has amusing shades of Thelma and Louise (with electric bagpipes!), it is also undercut with nostalgia. I grapple with the notion of where a restless traveller really belongs when the wandering, and the laughter, stops. In another story, I spend an unforgettable day with one of the last great (and very entertaining), lairds of Scotland, Ninian Brodie, at his ancestral home in Morayshire.

Best-selling author Peter Kerr (Snowball Oranges) has described Wake Me Up For The Elephants as “travel writing at its best”.

Extract from the chapter, Going Troppo in the South Pacific:

(In a traditional village on the Navua River on Fiji’s main island, our media group has been invited to meet villagers and take part in a meke (local song and dance), but not before we are offered a bowl of fiendish kava, with outlandish consequences.)

“Two young men fetched guitars and strummed tunes that seemed to be Fijian mixed with early western pop classics, which was strange and oddly unnerving. We were embarrassed at first, so the chief got up and elbowed some of the young men and women to partner us on the dance floor, which they did timidly, like teenagers at a school dance.

It was hot and airless in the hall and the kava had really kicked in now in weird ways. We started dancing around, improvising, while the locals did a peculiar version of sixties’ dance moves: the pony, the jerk, their grass skirts flailing, their chests sweating. My partner was young and eager and the frantic swish of his grass skirt at least provided something of a cooling breeze. But in no other way was this enjoyable.

Other villagers, at loose ends, piled into the back of the hall to watch and I realised finally that this crazy performance in a sleepy village, upriver, so far from the modern delights of Fijian towns, was probably fashioned for their entertainment entirely, rather than ours, but in a benign way, surely, not an Evelyn Waugh, hell-in-the jungle kind of way.

All the same, we were dying on the dance floor, apart from Cheryl, whose arms were flailing everywhere but whose legs, in her droopy wide trousers, were moving heavily, like a weightlifter’s. It was bizarre. And we all looked the same, dancing with arms possessed, but dragging our feet. It was as if kava made you ‘drunk’ from the legs up, and your head would likely be the last thing to shut down, unless you got lucky and just fell on the floor catatonic, and didn’t have to dance any more — or live, more likely. I’d never seen anything quite like it — and I don’t want to, ever again.

After some 15 minutes of this, while Cheryl’s arms were still jittering and angsty, Corinne, whose partner had finally taken refuge with a few other warriors at the back of the hall, was now beginning to buckle.

‘I’ve seen tipsy goannas look saner than we do,’ she groaned.

…. Through the madness I could see the chief was still smiling, totally oblivious to the state we were in. When will this dance torture end? I thought. But I kept going, coaxing my legs about the room, dripping flop sweat, and feeling queasy in the stomach. Corrine and Joe began to slow dance, which in this frenetic set-up seemed radical.” ….

(Extract from Wake Me Up For The Elephants: © Copyright of the author, Marjory McGinn)

To read the rest of the chapter, and the book, it’s available as an ebook on all Amazon sites (currently for £1.99) and the paperback will follow in a week or so.

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

Do let me know how you like the book and have fun reading it. And if you do, please 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.

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

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

All photos in this blog are copyright of the author, Marjory McGinn.

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Greeks dance to a different tune

Posted on October 27, 2022 by Marjory

**Zakynthos Town and harbour viewed from the upper district of Bochali**

IN church, in the middle of a solemn liturgy, a mobile phone rings from inside a black Karl Lagerfeld bag parked on its own chair in front of me. The nearby owner of the handbag, an elegant woman standing for this particular part of the service, hasn’t heard the mobile. On and on it goes, a modern ringtone that clashes with the austere chanting and the Byzantine saints looking down, weary-eyed, from the surrounding frescos. When the woman finally hears it after we’ve all been jolted by the noise, including I’m sure the papas, she quickly swoops on the bag and turns off the phone. Peace at last.

During our years of living in southern Greece, we got used to phones ringing in church services with hilarious silly ringtones like the William Tell Overture once in Kalamata’s cathedral. If I could have picked the right tone for the Lagerfeld woman it would have been Never On Sunday, popularised in the Greek film of the same name. But deep down, it’s one of the things I do love about Greece, that eccentric behaviour is tolerated, even in church, and the country isn’t hampered by the raft of po-faced restrictions that we have in Britain.

**Marjory at the village kafeneio in Katastari**

This is a country that admires individuality and doesn’t much like rules of any kind, which was in evidence during the Greek economic crisis when fiscal spreadsheets and EU directives caused more than a little pain to these exuberant people. Strangely though, British people are catching up and ditching rules, especially in politics: environmental laws, labour laws and parliamentary procedure, but in a much less charming way.

We were having a September break on the Ionian island of Zakynthos, which we’d never visited before, staying in the village of Katastari. Despite being the largest village on the island, it’s rural and laid-back and a short drive from the popular, some might say slightly touristy, Alykes beach area, and yet it felt like a world away. It was a typical village, slightly ramshackle round the edges with olive groves, dogs chained in fields, and as usual in rural villages, there were old, rundown buildings too. Sad to see a few old tavernas and kafeneia now closed, though the newer kafeneio Bakaliko by the main square was rather pleasant, recently opened by a local woman offering a shiny version of the trad kafeneia with their typical scuffed rush-bottom chairs and battered metal tables.

It was a nice place to sit on a Sunday near the church of the Panayia (Virgin Mary) and watch people passing by, and meet a few of our neighbours. The house we rented was an interesting one, built over the site of an old stone property which once belonged to the owner’s grandmother. The original dwelling was flattened during the 1953 earthquake that ruined much of the island. The new house has a traditional feel with stone walls and a smattering of rural mementos. It has a small garden at the back filled with trees and flowering shrubs but there’s no escaping the rural vibe with the nearby roosters crowing well before sun-up, turkeys gobbling at intervals, and dogs barking when the mood took them, reminding us of life in the Mani, in the southern Peloponnese, where we once lived.

Noisy at times but, really, we wouldn’t have had it any other way. This is real Greece with all its joys and imperfections. It was surrounded by a few other houses and what the neighbours thought of foreigners staying in their midst I couldn’t be sure, well not until the end of our stay anyway. More of that later.

To see the village house, Villa Gioia, in Katastari, visit www.villagioia.gr

**Iconic Greek image in eastern Zakynthos with Kefalonia in the distance**

Zakynthos is a small compact island and its beauty spots are already well known and written about, mainly the Shipwreck Cove with its spectacular cliffs and the rusting, stranded ship. Sadly, we couldn’t go there as they’d had a landslip on one of the cliffs in previous days, but we toured the north-east coast up to the small harbour of Ayios Nikolaos, where boats leave for the famous blue caves. For a different side to Zakynthos, however, we took the road west across the island to the hillside villages of Maries, with its typical Greek square and a slew of attractive old buildings with a shabby chic aura, like the one below.

The village of Exo Hora, further south, was also traditional in parts, with a lovely view to the sea. And if derelict old village buildings attract you, there was a small settlement on the west of this village with an abandoned mill and some crumbling stone houses, as you see in many hillside villages in Greece. One two-storey wreck appeared to have ancient-looking columns in the back garden, either a fanciful addition or an indicator of a much older structure that had survived the 1953 earthquake, whereas the house hadn’t. It was curious.

**Ruins of an old house and mill in the village of Exo Hora**

The town of Zakynthos, in the south-east, with a coastal setting and a thriving harbour, turned out to be the biggest draw for us, even though in September it was still hoaching with tourists and it was difficult to find a parking space. However, even that turned out to be a bonus. We had to park in a back street at the edge of the city and it meant walking quite a way through the backstreets, which were fascinating and teeming with urban life, to get to the centre. Here you find the imposing squares of St Markos, lined with tavernas, and the lovely Solomos Square, named after the island’s acclaimed poet Dionysios Solomos, whose rousing poem Hymn to Freedom became the national anthem of Greece.

As the famous church of Ayios Dionysios (the patron saint of the island) was also on our route, we called in for a visit. It has outstanding frescos and a side chapel containing some of the relics of Saint Dionysios, though mercifully they weren’t on show. If you want to know how church relics have brought me out in panic attacks in Greece, you might like to read my chapter on the subject in my fourth memoir A Donkey On the Catwalk.

But it wasn’t the famous frescos here that really caught my attention on that very hot sunny day so much as an old papas sitting regally on a padded chair by an open side door, his eyes closed and his long white candy-floss hair blowing in a cool breeze from the nearby harbour. I chanced my luck to get a few photos, hoping I wouldn’t disturb him and get a telling off for my efforts. But the papas seemed to be surfing a different celestial plane from the rest of us, or was sound asleep, and didn’t budge.

**The meditating papas at Ayios Dionysios**

The town is full of treasures like the Byzantine Museum on Solomos Square that houses a fabulous collection of frescos, icons and whole altar panels taken out of the many churches, some dating from the early 16^th century, that were tragically destroyed during the devastating earthquake of 1953.

**Ayios Giorgos from a Byzantine church destroyed in 1953**

One of the most unique sites in the city is at 4A Tertseti Street, where the city’s Jewish synagogue was once situated but destroyed during the 1953 earthquake. The private garden site is now a memorial to the two brave men who helped to save 275 local Jews during 1943, when Nazi invaders controlled the island. Bishop Chrisostomos Dimitriou and the mayor Loukas Karrer were instructed by the German commander to draw up a list of the island’s Jewish population so they could be deported to death camps. On an island where Jews had lived for centuries and had always been accepted, the two men tacitly refused to hand them over to the Germans and boldly put their own names on the list instead, telling the commander that all the Jews had left the island already, which many later did, or were hidden by the islanders. The entire Jewish population was thereby saved. For more information visit www.jewishmuseum.gr

**The site of the town’s 16th century synagogue**

**Imposing sign over the front gate in Greek and Hebrew about the synagogue’s fate in 1953**

While there are plenty of tavernas in the town centre, many geared to tourists, it’s worth sleuthing out some of the more authentic places, like the Stathmos, which was recommended by Nikos, the helpful owner of Villa Gioia. Stathmos means bus station, which is what the old building was until recently. It still has a slight utilitarian feel about it, with its wide metal awning at the front and dark green shutters, but the caged canaries were a lively addition and the waiters were chirpy as well. While we waited for our meal to arrive, I kept anticipating a city bus pulling up out front for a take-away though it never happened of course. The Stathmos is an old-style place, reminiscent of tavernas you might have encountered decades ago with similar dishes and a no-nonsense approach. We had giant stuffed peppers and a moussaka, all very tasty and filling.

Stathmos, near the Strada Marina, Filita 42. +03 2695 024040

A trip to town wouldn’t be the same without a drive up the hill behind the town to the upper district called Bochali, with its church, castle and cafes. The view down to the city and harbour is one of the most photographed in Greece and is stunning (see top photo).

Some of Zakynthos is criticised for being overdeveloped and the south coast, with the infamous clubby Laganas, comes into that category and while popular Alykes on the east coast seemed touristy as well with its fair share of more commercial restaurants, and bars with names like Piccadilly Bar etc, it has one big redeeming feature: the beach. It’s a long shallow beach, with warm and clear water, and if it’s peace you’re craving without sunbeds and tourist tat, the northern end of the beach, where fewer tourists seemed to venture, is quite divine.

**One of the best beaches in north Alykes**

There are plenty of tavernas in Alykes, though nothing stood out for us. The place we found the most peaceful and authentic was a family-run restaurant on a hill above the popular tiny beach north of Katastari, called Xigia, which has sulphur springs bubbling up into the water, reported to be therapeutic. The restaurant on the hill above is called the Nireas, run by a charming family with good wholesome Greek dishes and an awesome view right down the coast and across to the nearby island of Kefalonia.

Nireas taverna, mobile: 697 3988483.

**Busy Xigia beach with its sulphur springs**

For me, Greece is all about the people and Zakynthos proved to be a friendly place. In a couple of weeks we had got to know some of the villagers in Katastari well enough to be sorry we had no time to find out more, like the brothers who run the supermarket next to the church, one of whom had spent a few years in Chicago but had always dreamt of coming back to his birth village to live in the house his family have owned for generations. The woman who runs the local bakery was also very entertaining and convivial and if you want to improve your Greek on an island holiday, she’s your go-to woman. She makes a pretty good spanakopita (spinach and feta) pie as well.

On the day we left the house, I looked around and thought I’d probably miss the olive groves and the rural eccentricity and that satisfying sense of living in a real slice of Greece, especially with the nearby church tolling the hour – though not beyond 11pm – and the crazy ding-dong of bells on a Sunday morning. I’d miss the roosters, maybe, and the dogs. Here’s the thing about the dogs. The nearby owner had them no doubt to protect her chickens etc and the first few nights they seemed to bark a lot.

One night I had a cough and every time I started up, one dog in particular barked. It went on a while. Cough, bark, cough, bark, as if we were having some odd nocturnal conversation over our respective yards. In the following days, the dogs barked less. It suddenly occurred to me that each new set of foreigners who moved in probably made the animals edgy, understandably, because of the way noise travels in rural Greece. But once they got used to you, they gave up. But dogs and Greece is another story entirely and one that I did touch on in one of the chapters of my book A Donkey On The Catwalk.

On the last day, when we walked to the car with our bags, I couldn’t see any of the nearby Greek neighbours. Just as we were ready to drive off, an older woman, the shy owner of the chickens and whom I’d spoken to only briefly one day, appeared at the car window. Yet, she’d run up the path, wanting to say goodbye, and thrust a large jar of what looked like herbs through the window. “Rigani, from my garden.”

I thanked her, wondering where we could stuff a big jar into our luggage, especially as we’d bought a jar of rigani from the supermarket and we’d already had to make room for a litre bottle of last season’s bright green fruity olive oil from the owner’s trees. We’ve never come back from Greece without food generously pressed on us by Greek friends and acquaintances, and I don’t suppose we ever will. Ah! That’s Greece!

Greek books

To buy a copy of Marjory’s latest travel memoir, A Donkey On The Catwalk, and the 4^th in the Peloponnese Series, click on Marjory’s Amazon author page link, below. The book is candid and funny and continues the story of Marjory, Jim and Wallace’s adventures in the Mani but it also covers their journeys to other parts of Greece and some of Marjory’s earlier trips to this country as well. Available in ebook and paperback on all international sites.

Marjory’s other best-selling memoirs in the series cover the years they spent in the Mani from the start of the Greek crisis in 2010, living in a hillside village with an unforgettable cast of characters. She has also written two novels set in the same region, A Saint For The Summer and How Greek Is Your Love? You can find them also on her Amazon page.

For more information, or to buy the books, you can also visit the Books page on Marjory’s website www.bigfatgreekodyssey.com/greek-books

You can also follow her on FB www.facebook.com/marjory.mcginn

And Twitter: www.twitter.com/@fatgreekodyssey and Instagram www.instagram.com/marjorywrites

Thanks for dropping by. All comments are gratefully received. Just click on the ‘chat’ bubble at the top of this page. However, it may take a little while for a comment box to appear at the bottom of the blog and longer if you’re accessing via a mobile. I am currently in the process of sorting the comments function. If you want to get in touch otherwise you can via the contact icon on the home page of the website or via social media. Thanks.

© All rights reserved. All text and photographs copyright of the authors 2010-2022. 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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On donkeys, books and pandemics

Posted on May 6, 2021 by Marjory

IT’S been a while since I’ve written a blog piece. Like many of you, I suspect, the last 12 months has felt like being thrown a curved ball – or more of a demolition ball really. The pandemic experience has been troubling and strange, and downright frightening at times, locked in our domestic prisons, experiencing strictures none of us have ever come across before. I have heard my family talk about living through wartime Britain, and although the pandemic is not quite that bad, I could understand for the first time how terrifying and restricted their lives must have been.

Despite having plenty of time to write regular pieces, such as blog posts, I failed at the beginning of the lockdown last March to gather up the motivation when other issues seemed much more important. And the future looked uncertain.

I’m sure the past year has tested everyone’s resolve, our faith in government, in religion, our small place in this terrifying world. If anything good can possibly come of this pandemic, it must surely be to appreciate the simple, true things of life more. If we once complained about our lot: not having the perfect life; enough money; a big enough house; or any of the dozens of things we obsess over in the western world, perhaps we won’t – any more.

Beautiful Kynance Cove in Cornwall, on the far edge of care

Now we know how happy and well-off we really were, all this time, and just didn’t know it. Many of us have gone back to basics, spending more time being quiet, watching instead of talking, thinking instead of acting, appreciating nature, cherishing health and love above other things. I don’t know about you, but I have found how easy it is to live with less, as long as you have health and love. I’m sure we’ve all realised this now. And I do hope you have all survived the pandemic without too much loss or sadness.

For my part, I know that what made the past year easier to bear was the fact I now live in Cornwall, near the sea, a beautiful part of the world and a place where you can really feel the power of nature. With its wonderful coves and big skies, it has felt like the best possible place to be in lockdown.

And I have not been completely idle these past 12 months. After a bumpy start, I did start another book last summer and once it picked up speed, I found it was a superb way to shut out the world and its cares a while. That’s the beauty of writing. It’s your own world for as long as you’re doing it. Yours, and no-one else need see your efforts, or interfere, or take it away from you for that period of time. It’s between you and the page or computer screen. And that’s magical, to have some control after all, to have a refuge. There is nothing else like quite like it!

Foteini with her donkey Riko and a copy of Things Can Only Get Feta

Wallace looking cool in Greece

So, finally the book has just been published, on May 5. A Donkey On The Catwalk: Tales of life in Greece, is the 4^th in the Peloponnese series. For those of you who have read my Greek memoirs, starting with the Amazon bestseller Things Can Only Get Feta, this book will seem a little different because it’s separate tales and travel narratives rather than one long narrative. However, the theme is still Greece and most of the tales are set in the wild Mani region of the Peloponnese again, with a return of some of the characters you have loved, like Foteini the inimitable goat farmer with her eccentric take on life. And Wallace, our Jack Russell companion, is still creating mayhem. How could he not? For those of you, however, who haven’t read my memoirs, you can read this one as a standalone, as with all the memoirs really.

As well as tales from the Peloponnese, there are stories from other Greek locations my husband Jim and I have visited, including Pelion and the islands of Santorini and Corfu. This book also offers tales from some of my own earlier trips to Greece, which I have not published before, including a year in Athens during a dangerous time of political upheaval, and a sabbatical in Crete, with a touch of romance in an idyllic setting.

To counteract the times in which I was writing this book, I’ve blended a lot of humour and lightness into these stories because, as psychotherapist Sigmund Freud once said, “Humour is a mature response to human suffering”, or words to that effect. Or rather, there’s nothing like having a laugh when life’s going pear-shaped.

Marjory outside the Ayia Playia taverna in Falanthi, near Koroni

There’s more fun and craziness with Foteini and a strange shoe creation; a comical interface with a religious relic in Corfu, a house minding stint in southern Greece above a taverna with escapades we didn’t expect. But there are other stories too that are thought-provoking and chip away a bit more at the Greek psyche and lifestyle.

I hope you enjoy this book and if you do, please let me know. I always love to hear from readers. And do post a review of the book on Amazon if you care to. It always helps to introduce an author’s work to new readers.

Thanks for dropping by. Stay safe. x

The Greek books

To buy the new ebook (paperback to follow soon) on all Amazon stores, click on this universal link: https://mybook.to/DonkeyOnCatwalk

Marjory’s other best-selling memoirs deal with her time in Greece with her husband Jim and Wallace the terrier, living in the wild southern Peloponnese. She has also written two novels set in southern Greece. You can find them on her Amazon page.

Or visit the Books page on her website www.bigfatgreekodyssey.com/greek-books

You can also follow her on FB www.facebook.com/marjory.mcginn

And Twitter: www.twitter.com/@fatgreekodyssey

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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10 years after the big Greek odyssey

Posted on May 11, 2020 by Marjory

WHEN we decided 10 years ago to leave Scotland and have a year’s odyssey in Greece at the start of its economic crisis, people said this was madness. Yet now, with the Corona virus causing misery around the world with ‘lockdown’ restrictions on lifestyle and travel, we would have been madder still not to have gone for the odyssey while we had the chance.

Marjory, Jim and Wallace in Scotland weeks before they left on their Greek odyssey

As we look back to that spring of 2010, when my husband Jim and I and our fizzy Jack Russell terrier Wallace set off, we know that despite the economic risks, it turned out to be one of the best decisions we’ve ever made. And as one year stretched to four, it changed our lives completely.

We left with Britain during a harsh recession and our village in central Scotland, near Stirling, during a blast of Arctic weather. We had the added uncertainty of leaving regular employment in Scottish journalism to cast ourselves adrift with modest savings, but with the hope of future freelancing. But Greece, despite its massive bailout from the EU and ensuing austerity measures, still seemed like a safer option, to our way of thinking anyway.

Piles of luggage, and Wallace the dog, ready to be shoehorned into the Ford car to be driven to Greece

Even now, I recall vividly the excitement of planning the trip which was no small undertaking. Months beforehand we had a bullet list of things to do filling four A4 pages: renting out our Scottish apartment and putting personal items in storage; all the endless bureaucracy involved in cutting loose from Britain; having to limit our travel luggage to what would fit in a small Ford Fiesta. Amazingly, everything in the picture above was shoehorned in finally on a grey dreich Scottish morning, threatening rain.

Wallace taking his first look at Calais from our pet-friendly ferry cabin

And because we were taking our much loved terrier with us, there was a long list of necessities for him as well: microchip, pet passport, vaccinations. And hotels had to be booked along the way that were pet friendly, no easy task back then. While Wallace had a fabulous personality and was hugely entertaining, he did have the crazy Jack Russell gene: boisterous and often unpredictable. So it ramped up the uncertainty as well. A comical Scottish friend commented: “You’re not taking Wallace to Greece? Haven’t they got enough problems there already?” Indeed they did!

Marjory and Wallace in the car, outside a hotel in Battenheim, near the Swiss border

We drove south to Dover and took the car ferry to Calais and then made our way through France, Switzerland and Italy, to Ancona, for the crossing to Patras in Greece with a pet-friendly cabin. It was a great trip and Wallace was fine most of the time, apart from barking at every motorway toll booth attendant and having one or two angsty moments in hotels, the most memorable being in Italy. While we waited at the front desk in a large hotel in central Italy, Wallace took a dislike to two rowdy teenagers skittering about the foyer and launched into his characteristic slightly hysterical bark. The manager checking us in had a massive strop, which set Wallace off again. We were forbidden from leaving him in the room alone while we went out to dinner, so we had to take him with us. But that’s another nervy story.

Jim, Marjory and Wallace near Koroni, on the Messinian Peninsula, 2014

A view of Kalamata city on the Messenian Gulf from olive groves near the village of Megali Mantineia

Once we’d arrived in Greece, staying in a 4-week holiday let, and had our first taverna meal and swum in a warm sea, everything clicked into place. I’ve travelled to Greece many times during my life and worked in Athens in the 1970s for a year, and in those first few weeks in 2010, I couldn’t detect any sense of angst in the country. Life seemed sweet in the southern mainland least. It was a warm April, people seemed happy, tavernas and cafes had brisk trade. What we didn’t know then was that Greece was right on a tipping point, still with a lot of the ‘siga siga’ laid-back quality we all love about the country. But that was about to swing over as 2010 progressed, with unimaginable changes and hardships on the cards for Greek people.

The small stone house where we stayed for the first year with our Greek car out front

We had decided to live in the Mani peninsula of the southern Peloponnese, a wild and authentic region. We rented a small stone house in the hillside village of Megali Mantineia, just south of the city of Kalamata. We stayed in the village a year, which became the basis of my first Greek memoir, Things Can Only Get Feta (2013) and which I’ve written about in various publications as well as on this blog. The rest of our adventures in other locations in southern Greece are recounted in the sequels, Homer’s Where The Heart Is and A Scorpion In The Lemon Tree.

Jim and Wallace in the first few weeks of the Greek odyssey touring around the Mani peninsula

In our four years in Greece, we managed to cram a great deal into our lives out of sheer delight at being able to have a mid-life adventure at all, in those crisis-ridden days. We travelled regularly around the three peninsulas of this region and to the north Peloponnese and saw most of famed sites like Olympia, Mystras, Arcadian villages, and the island of Kythera. Occasionally there was some difficulty, travelling with a dog, in a country that regarded them more as working animals, like the day we had to smuggle Wallace into the Ancient Messene archaeological site because dogs were banned. Because of Wallace, there were mishaps galore (mostly comical). Yet conversely, some of the decisions we made just to accommodate Wallace on our trip, ironically turned out to be wise decisions which I describe in my memoirs.

The wonderful Byzantine church of Ayia Sophia at the top of the fortified rock fortress that is Monemvasia, a World Heritage site

We had a huge challenge on the gorgeous World Heritage Byzantine rock island of Monemvasia, on the east of the Peloponnese, when Wallace got the jitters in the historic 12^th century house we rented for a few days. Situated in the heart of the fortified settlement, where the owner told us some devilish times had been suffered by the householders during an Ottoman-Turkish siege, Wallace seemed to picked up grisly vibes. It was all brought to a head in a storm, when he howled like a banshee and then accidentally wrecked a piece of ancestral furnishing. If you’ve read my first memoir, you’ll know what I refer to.

In all, throughout our odyssey, we made a point of not sinking into the familiarity of expat communities, entertaining though they were, but sought out a more authentic Greek life. We went out of our way to meet neighbouring rural Greeks for which I had to brush up fast on my rusty Greek language skills. We went to festivals, endless church services, at least one funeral but no weddings, olive harvests, coffee mornings in hornet-infested, ramshackle farmyards, and dubious cheese tasting events.

The lovable farmer Foteini clutching an early edition of Things Can Only Get Feta with its cover showing her riding Riko the donkey

This turned out to be another good decision. It is the friendships and the kindness of Greek people even in dire circumstances that will stay in my memory forever; people like Foteini the goat farmer, who turned out to be an unlikely literary muse for me and who appears in all three memoirs.

A tough Maniot farmer and a charming but eccentric woman, she became a friend and provided me with many hilarious encounters that seemed skewed from other eras of old Greece. I well remember us sitting in her dilapidated village house one winter in front of a roaring fire while wind whistled through the cracks in her kitchen walls. We drank Coca-Cola and roasted chunks of goat cheese (which we hated, sadly, but pretended otherwise) on skewers over the flames. Other times we also observed and smiled over her many comical rituals: peeling bananas at a sink and then washing the fruit, or indulging in riskier pursuits like almost blowing up her farming shed while making Greek coffee.

But these were also challenging years. While Jim and I were freelancing for overseas publications and were able to live frugally without being affected directly by the crisis, we had involved ourselves in Greek communities and witnessed the impact of the crisis on locals. This was particularly so in 2012, when social unrest and poverty began to climb and Greeks became uncharacteristically depressed and nervous. It was the first time we questioned whether we had any right to continue our Greek odyssey.

The Greek car packed and ready to leave in 2015 with Wallace’s head just visible over the back seat, to the left

I have visited Greece during other difficult times in its history and these crisis years were no less frightening, especially with the rise of a particular extreme and violent right-wing party that had gained seats in the Greek parliament. I even began to hear Greeks anticipate the sight of tanks rumbling down the streets again, as they had during the infamous military dictatorship of the 1960s and 70s. Fortunately it never came to that. In the end, in 2015, we did finally leave but only because an illness in Jim’s family had made a return to the UK the right thing to do at that time.

Lovable and unpredictable Wallace was always up for a bit of fun and always a perfect photographic model. Occasionally a dab hand at book editing as well! Taken in Koroni, 2014

Although we’ve only been able to return to Greece for long holidays since 2015 and not an extended return, our former odyssey lives vividly in our minds and sustains us in so many ways. It is never forgotten, is always a source of lively discussion between Jim and me and has inspired us during happy and sad times, including August 2017, when dear Wallace passed away in England, aged 16 years. We could rightly say that he’d had an amazing life, and an odyssey that few dogs ever get a crack at, and which he took to with verve and stoicism especially during a serious illness that I touched on in Homer’s Where The Heart Is. And few of the Greeks we came in contact with will ever forget some of Wallace’s more diverting antics.

The Greek ‘journey’ for me still continues because after finishing my three memoirs, I wrote two novels in a series (A Saint For The Summer, and recently, How Greek Is Your Love?) both set in the Mani region, and more may be planned. And especially in these worrying times in lockdown, due to the Corona virus, Jim and I find ourselves thinking more and more of those Greek years, grateful we were able to have an amazing, long adventure that neither of us had anticipated in that freezing winter when we left Scotland.

If I’ve learnt nothing else from the Greek odyssey it’s been that when the opportunity to (safely) change your life comes your way, take it and don’t let fear cloud your vision. And at the very least, don’t worry over the awkward, nagging details, because “you never know what the next sunrise will bring you”, to quote a Greek saying. That applies more now than ever before as our world turns upside down with health worries. And let’s pray the ‘new normal’ will one day allow a few restless souls to still cut loose on foreign shores for their own big, fat odyssey.

* All Marjory’s books are available from Amazon stores worldwide, Barnes & Noble, and in Greece can be ordered through the Public stores, www.public.gr or ordered anywhere through independent bookstores.

The Peloponnese series of memoirs:

Things Can Only Get Feta

Homer’s Where The Heart Is

A Scorpion In The Lemon Tree

Bronte In Greece series of novels:

A Saint For The Summer

How Greek Is Your Love?

For more information about Marjory’s books, please visit her Amazon page or the Greek books page on our website www.bigfatgreekodyssey.com

If you like the books, please consider putting a small review/comment on Amazon. It all helps to raise the profile of a book. And is always welcome. Thank you.

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

© All rights reserved. All text and photographs copyright of the authors 2010-2020. 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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A stranger in paradise . . .

Posted on March 13, 2020 by Marjory

I’m thrilled to announce that my new novel How Greek Is Your Love? has just been published.

Based again in the wild Mani region of the southern Peloponnese, it’s a sequel to my first novel A Saint For The Summer. The new novel features the same main characters (Bronte, Angus, Leonidas, Myrto) and a few exciting new ones, with some gripping contemporary storylines. One of these reflects the social upheaval of the economic crisis in 2013 with a rise in extreme far-right political parties based on my own observations of living in Greece during this tumultuous period. The book is laced with plenty of suspense, but also unforgettable romance and humour. It can be read equally as a standalone, or as a sequel.

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

Bronte’s in love but she’s a stranger in paradise

In this page-turning drama, expat Bronte McKnight is in the early days of her love affair with charismatic doctor Leonidas Papachristou. But as Bronte tries to live and love like a Greek, the economic crisis spawns an unlikely, and dangerous, predator in the village. While Bronte begins to question her sunny existence in Greece, an old love from Leonidas’s past also makes a troubling appearance.

Now working as a freelance journalist, when Bronte is offered an interview with a famous actress/novelist, and part-time expat, it seems serendipitous. But the encounter has a puzzling outcome that will take her south to the ‘Deep Mani’ region for which she will enlist the help of her maverick father Angus, and the newest love of her life, Zeffy, the heroic rescue dog.

The challenges Bronte faces will bring high drama as well as great humour as she tries to find a foothold in her Greek paradise. But can she succeed?

“A captivating book that grabs the reader’s attention and holds it right to the end. This book confirms Marjory McGinn as an author of popular fiction to be reckoned with.” ̶ Peter Kerr, best-selling author of the Mallorcan series of memoirs.

**A fortified stone tower of the Deep Mani**

**Iconic Vathia with its mostly deserted stone towers one the strongholds of warring clans in the Mani, but now a dramatic ghost village**

This second novel, like the first, is set mainly in the hillside village of Marathousa, with the same breathtaking scenery, but it also takes the readers to untouched and unforgettable places deeper in the Mani peninsula as dramatic as the storyline, including the ghostly, deserted village of Vathia, where tough, warring Maniot clans built high fortified towers as they fought for dominance; the dramatic Porto Kayio cove; and the fabled cave of Hades (portal to the Underworld) near Cape Tainaron, at the southern-most tip of mainland Greece.

**The ancient Temple of Poseidon at Cape Tainaron, close to the mythic Cave of Hades, once believed to be the doorway to the Underworld**

**Porto Kayio, one of the remote coves of the Deep Mani region**

One of the newest characters in the book is the lovable dog, Zeffy, whom Bronte rescues from his homeless existence in the village and who will make you laugh and cry with some of his capers. He will, however, repay Bronte’s love for him in many unexpected ways.

The prequel, A Saint For The Summer, is a contemporary novel but with a narrative thread back to the Second World War to the infamous Battle of Kalamata of 1941 (“the Greek Dunkirk”) and the mystery of what became of Angus’s Scottish father Kieran. He was serving in the region with the Royal Army Service Corps during this time and disappeared in the battle.

Although Bronte had initially gone to Greece to help Angus with a health problem it is this difficult search to uncover the last days of Kieran McKnight’s life that inspires Bronte to stay longer in Greece. And it is this that will bring charismatic Dr Leonidas Papachristou into her life.

I had heard something about this infamous Battle of Kalamata while we were living for four years in Greece and the brave rear-guard action of the allies, who retreated to southern Greece after the Germans invaded in 1941.

The WW2 backstory is only a minor aspect of How Greek Is Your Love?, but if you want to know more about the battle and how Angus and Bronte solved the compelling mystery of what happened to Kieran McKnight, you might also want to read A Saint For The Summer. It has been described by readers as “an excellent storyline”, “a cracking read”, “spectacular writing”, “an exciting novel”.

Here’s a link to an earlier post about A Saint For The Summer.

Compelling new novel set in southern Greece

How Greek Is Your Love? is available on all Amazon sites for £1.99/$2.99 at present. The paperback will be available very soon as well.

How Greek Is Your Love?

A Saint For The Summer

If you like both books, please consider putting a small review/comment on Amazon. It all helps to raise the profile of a book. And is always welcome. Thank you.

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

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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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!

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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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Why it’s time to liberate the Elgin marbles

Posted on August 20, 2019 by Marjory

Horse’s head from the chariot of the moon goddess Selene is a copy of the original sculpture now in the British Museum

IN a corner of one of the rooms in the British Museum displaying the Parthenon Sculptures (popularly known as the Elgin Marbles), I could see beyond a darkened alcove a half-open door strung with some tape that read: “Gallery closed to the public.” But plainly visible through the door was the haunting image of a Caryatid statue, which once held up the porch of the Erechtheion (temple) on the Acropolis in Athens, with her five identical sisters. It’s an iconic image of Ancient Greece that everyone recognises. However, the other Famous Five reside at home, in the New Acropolis Museum in Athens. Only this one is in confinement in the BM, and has been since Lord Elgin sold his collection of looted antiquities to the museum in 1816.

Statue of the lone Caryatid in the British Museum in London

The famous five Caryatid statues before removal to the New Acropolis Museum

While I was admiring the lady from afar, I could hear a young Greek couple chattering beside me about the off-limits statue. One was urging the other to take a picture. In the end the woman ducked under the tape and took a quick snap from the door, poring over it sheepishly on the back of her digital camera. Then the pair hurried away. What they were planning to do with it I don’t know. Perhaps to make an angry statement back in Greece to their friends about the Caryatid sister imprisoned in a dreary ‘closed’ room of the BM. I hope they do because despite pleas to bring this wondrous statue home to Athens, which happens on a fairly regular basis from Greeks and Grecophiles all over the world, this is where she’s fated to stay, it seems, along with the rest of the Elgin marbles.

The British Museum built ironically in the image of the Parthenon in Athens

Marjory with the motley crew of sculptures in the BM’s Elgin collection

The British Museum, its design ironically imitating the Parthenon with columns and an ornamental pediment at the front, continues to ignore countless requests to have the collection of sculptures returned to Athens and the debate about it rages on and on. Many celebrities and modern cultural ‘icons’ have added their tuppence worth to the debate, such as actor Stephen Fry and George and Amal Clooney, but to no avail. Why the BM won’t budge on the issue is unfathomable. It grips fearlessly to its role of guardian of the world’s cultural wealth. To be fair, while there is some altruism and vision in what it does, the assumption that it can look after other people’s cultural inheritance better than they can is outdated.

The Parthenon today without its ornamental sculptures

Carved metope of a centaur and lapith wrestling, in the BM

The Elgin exhibits include half the surviving items from the Parthenon, which was created in the 5th century BC during the “Golden Age” of Greek civilisation. Created as a temple to the goddess Athena, it was designed by some of the city’s great architects and built of Pentelic marble. The sculptures were entrusted to the revered artist Pheidias. They included the life-sized figures on the pediments (gable ends) of the building depicting the Olympian gods and goddesses and their struggles. The BM holds 17 of the best of these, including Helios, Dionysus, Artemis, Hestia and Aphrodite. The other sculptures are carved metopes, which sat above the columns and the frieze from the inner colonnade of the Parthenon. The BM holds 115 parts (247ft) of the frieze depicting the important Panathenaia procession with horses and riders, which took place in the city every four years.

Even Lord Byron decried the plundering of the Parthenon and its artefacts

Processional horsemen from the north frieze of the Parthenon in the BM

The BM in its display notes for the sculptures explains its position and Elgin’s with these words: “The Parthenon sculptures have always been a matter for discussion but one thing is certain: his (Lord Elgin’s) actions spared them further damage by vandalism, weathering and pollution.”

This is an old chestnut and it’s partly true as the Parthenon had been damaged by earthquakes as well as during the occupation by Ottoman Turks in the 19th century, when soldiers used it for target practice and much else besides. When Elgin was given the go-ahead to remove the sculptures, in the process many were dropped and smashed. And when the BM bought them they were overzealously cleaned with bleach and other harsh substances that would have done them no favours.

Lord Elgin and an Italian translation of the Ottoman authorisation, the ‘firman’

In the late 18th century, Lord Elgin was British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, which ruled Greece at the time, where he got permission to remove items from the Parthenon by way of what is now considered by many historians to be a dodgy ‘firman’, official authorisation. In the end Lord Elgin took as much as he could, amounting to half the sculptures and other items, around 220 tonnes. He also took a large number of objects from ancient Athenian burial sites, including steles, grave markers, and the funerary urns of prestigious Athenians. Why did he want it all? Not for the money initially, although he had to sell much of the collection to the BM in 1816 because he came back to Britain broke and in dire health. He got £35,000 for the collection, half what he initially wanted. But the main reason for taking the artefacts was a piece of aristocratic folly and hubris. He wanted them to decorate the ancestral pile he was building in Fife, Scotland to share with his wealthy Scottish heiress wife, Mary Nisbet.

Broomhall House in Scotland is still home to the Elgin family

Broomhall House today, in its vast grounds in Fife, is a grand pile occupied by the 11th Earl of Elgin, Andrew Bruce, now in his 90s. It’s a notable country seat but not a very illustrious repository for a significant collection of Greek artefacts. The Parthenon it isn’t, and neither is it Downton Abbey! In no-one’s imagination could the house be worth the desecration of ancient Greek culture. But the current family did manage to salvage something of Lord Elgin’s plunder. Not everything was bought by the BM and what remained – the inferior or very damaged pieces, and smaller items from other locations, were taken to Broomhall House and have apparently remained there.

I attempted to visit the house in 2014 for a newspaper feature on the current Earl’s collection. The house is off-limits to the public and I was barred from speaking to any of the family. It was a maid, over the phone, who finally told me that the Elgin family never discuss the marbles. No surprise there! One local Scottish journalist I spoke to however told me he’d been lucky to see inside the house and had reported there were quite a few Greek artefacts inside and in the grounds.

“They’re scattered around the house informally like bits of furniture,” he said. (To read my full account click on my earlier blog post from 2014 titled Scotland’s role in the Elgin Marbles mystery. www.bigfatgreekodyssey.com/blog/?p=1430

One of the galleries for the Elgin collection, BM

So Elgin’s grand folly has perhaps become the BM’s in some people’s mind. To be fair, the sculptures are prized by the BM and adequately displayed in several large airy galleries, but unimaginably so. There’s a despondent drabness about their surroundings. There were plenty of visitors the day I went, mostly Japanese, it seemed.

For them, the collection will have been fascinating, but for anyone who has seen the other half of the original collection in the fabulous New Acropolis Museum in Athens, this forlorn exhibition cannot compare in any way with what the Greeks have done. The Athens museum, opened in 2010 in the midst of the country’s economic crisis, was planned to house all the treasures of the Acropolis but mostly the Parthenon sculptures. For this it has a state of the art, purpose-built top gallery to restore and display all the surviving sculptures in the correct order, as they would have appeared on the Parthenon in the 5th century BC. The museum is built on the southern slope of the Acropolis and the Parthenon is within view through massive glass windows, giving the collection its true context.

The original chariot horse in the BM for which a copy has been made (above) to sit on one of the Parthenon pediments

Where some of the sculptures are missing – because they mostly are in the BM – they’ve been replaced with (obvious) copies. The most significant argument for the sculptures being returned and housed in the Athens museum is that this vast sequence of sculptures (and in particular the carved metopes and the frieze) have a narrative. They tell particular mythological stories of Greek gods, their triumphs and struggles, or they depict, as in the frieze, a grand procession including scores of men and riders, which is unique to Athens.

To see these items in bits and pieces in the BM makes no sense at all. The narrative is splintered, the meaning gone. To keep the two halves of the sculptural narrative separate is cultural vandalism that benefits no-one, especially the visitors.

When Lord Elgin returned to Britain with all this loot in the 19th century he was at least condemned by many of his detractors for his heist, including poet and Greek defender, Lord Bryon, who said: “The antiquities have been defac’d by British hands.”

The BM has its own take on the validity of ownership and its aims, as it explains at the Elgin display: “In London and Athens the sculptures tell different and complementary stories. In Athens they are part of a museum that focuses upon the ancient history of the city and Acropolis. The British Museum sees them as part of a world museum where they can be connected with other civilisations such as Egypt, Assyria and Persia.”

“World museum” sounds lofty but just how these antiquities might connect with the other bits and pieces of world culture also displayed out of meaningful context is left to your imagination. It would now be magnanimous if the BM gave the sculptures back to Greece so that we can all finally see them in their own historic context.

Actress and politician Melina Mercouri at the Parthenon

Actress and former Minister of Culture in the Greek government, Melina Mercouri, speaking at a UNESCO conference in 1982, said the sculptures “must be reintegrated into the place and space where they were conceived and created. They constitute our historical and religious heritage.” She also said: “The English have taken from us the works of our ancestors. Look after them well, because the day will come when the Greeks will ask for them back.”

The Greeks have been asking, and asking again, but sadly the British just aren’t listening. To my mind the most poignant symbol of this cultural intransigence is the lonely Caryatid statue I saw in that corner of the British Museum. She’s not holding up anything with her head as splendid as the Erechtheion temple she once graced but at least she’s still holding up – for now.

For information about the Parthenon Sculptures and some of the debate about them, click on the very informative The Acropolis of Athens site run by Greek research scientist Dr Nikolaos Chatziandreou. He also has some interesting theories on how the Scots in particular could help in the drive to get the sculptures returned to Athens.

www.acropolisofAthens.gr

Also: www.theacropolismuseum.gr

www.britishmuseum.org

Books about Greece

To read my travel memoirs of life in Greece during the economic crisis visit www.bigfatgreekodyssey.com/greek-books

My first novel set in Greece, A Saint For The Summer, is a contemporary tale of romance and adventure but with an exciting WW2 thread. If follows the disappearance of the protagonist, Bronte’s grandfather serving in the Royal Army Service Corps during the infamous Battle of Kalamata, often called the ‘Greek Dunkirk’. It’s a mystery that once solved will change the lives of everyone involved.

Here’s what one reader recently wrote in an Amazon review: “Spectacular descriptions of Greece, a love affair, snippets of history, plus an intriguing storyline make this an exciting novel. I thoroughly enjoyed it.”

https://bookgoodies.com/a/B07B4K34TV

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

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