Moussaka under the mistletoe . . .

Posted on December 13, 2015 by Marjory

Wallace in a Greek festive mood

“YOU can’t have moussaka for Christmas,” said one of our English expat friends in the Mani just before our second Christmas in the region, as we discussed festive menus.

“Why not? It seems perfectly reasonable for a Greek odyssey.”

“Okay,” he said with a shrug. “But you can get moussaka any time. Christmas calls for turkey, or at least a chicken. It’s tradition.”

Yes it was, but not necessarily here. Of course he thought we were mad opting for moussaka, but madder still was the whole British faff of trying to replicate Christmas in Greece, with turkeys and even Brussels sprouts. One genial expat who lived full-time in the Mani had bemoaned the fact he had not been able to grow a sprout yet in his garden. If there was one thing I didn’t miss about a British Christmas it was the metallic after-taste of a sprout.

It seemed bizarre to even think of a normal Christmas when some years you can swim until the end of the year ̶ in the southern Peloponnese at least. And if had been any hotter that particular December we may have plumped for a day at the beach, like some of my teenage Bondi Beach Christmases, when I was growing up in Sydney.

That was because the traditional Christmas in Australia is bizarre as well. I had plenty of those in my childhood from my Scottish family keen to stick to the rules of the ‘homeland’, with turkey or a fat chook (chicken) in 100-degree heat, watching the tree ignite from overheated festive lights, and all the oldies squabbling and then passing out in front of British Christmas reruns on the TV.

Christmas in Greece is a quiet time and revolves around family and the church

Christmas in Greece is refreshingly and sensibly low-key, no hysterics, no burn-out. It’s more about family, a time of reflection and religious observation. Greeks do buy presents but they are exchanged mainly on New Year’s Day, which is the feast day of Ayios Vassilis, the Greek version of Santa Claus, without the red suit and reindeer mates.

Villages still opt for the old tradition of a decorated boat like this one in the square at Koroni, Messinia

Some younger Greeks, particularly in towns, have slowly adopted elements of the western Christmas, and having a decorated tree is something of a status symbol now, despite the economic crisis. However, the old ways remain, especially in villages. You still see illuminated boats in a village plateia because this symbol is associated with Ayios Nikolaos, whose feast day is earlier in December, and he’s the patron saint of sailors. You will also hear kids shuffling about the streets on Christmas Eve singing the kalanda song, a kind of Greek carol which might earn them a coin or a sweet.

Christmas decorations with a rural Greek flavour

Our first Christmas in the Mani had been in 2010, the year we moved into the hillside village of Megali Mantineia. On Christmas Day there was a morning service, which was hard to ignore as the sound of the chanting rolled out over the entire village. After this, there were quiet preparations for the long family lunch.

In the morning some village friends had brought us gifts of olive oil and kourabiedes (shortbread) with a thick dusting of powdered sugar. We had visited our farming friend Foteini in the morning and took her a small gift. She was having her Christmas lunch with a neighbour Eftihia and her family but, as with most rural Greeks it would be a modest meal, probably roast goat, since everyone here kept goats.

Foteini insisted we come with her to Christmas lunch and it was tempting but we had already accepted lunch with an expat friend further down the Mani. She had recently retired to Greece and perhaps it was an attempt to summon up the familiar, but it was a proper British meal with all the trimmings and plenty of wine. It, too, seemed bizarre and slightly out of place, but at least we could work off the lipid overload by pacing round the nearby olive groves after lunch.

During the second Christmas we were living down the hill from Megali Mantineia in the seaside village of Paleohora. We were renting a house from a genial Greek couple, Andreas and Marina. On Christmas Day, while they stayed at their home in Kalamata for a family gathering, we planned to have a quiet lunch this time, and make the moussaka, for which we had bought all the ingredients. But it was such a gloriously sunny day, despite being cool, that even after all the fuss we had made about the moussaka, we changed our minds.

We drove instead up to Megali Mantineia to have lunch in one of our favourite tavernas, the Iliovasilema (Sunset taverna). The place was open though the whole family was gathered at one long table to eat their lunch of succulent oven-roasted goat and lemony potatoes. There were several other people dining, a few expats and Greek couple from Athens with a house in the village, but somehow we were all annexed to the family proceedings and it turned out to be one of our loveliest Christmases: traditional, with plenty of parea (company) and no fuss.

Our lovely Greek landlords in Paleohora, making Christmas wreaths

During our second Christmas in Paleohora, however, we did discover one surprising thing about our landlord Marina. She had a secret obsession for some of the rituals of Christmas and it all started way ahead of the festive season. It became one of the chapters in my sequel Homer’s Where The Heart Is, which, to end my Christmas blog, I would like to share in a small excerpt:

“One Saturday there was a knock at the front door. It was Marina and Andreas. Marina was loaded up with things in baskets and myriad plastic bags hooked over her wrist. I was very afraid though when I saw the big pointed red hat of what appeared to be a papier maché Santa Claus.

“Good morning, I’ve brought some Christmas things. I will just sort them out, yes?” she said.

With her usual proprietorial charm that we had fully accepted now, she barged passed us. I assumed she was taking them to the apothiki (store room) to leave until Christmas. Andreas stayed on the doorstep because his feet were muddy and handed us a bag of sweet oranges from his trees. We stood outside, talking and leaning on the wrought-iron railing on the top steps.

While we chatted outside we forgot all about Marina. Suddenly I became aware of furious scurrying and hammering going on behind us.

“What’s happening inside, Andreas?”

He rolled his eyes. “Marina has just decorated your place for Christmas.”

“What?”

We turned around and the living room, which had looked atmospheric and Greek, now resembled Santa’s Grotto at a John Lewis store. The big red Santa was on the dining table and tinsel was strung up over the fireplace, with Christmas lights, candle stands and a dozen statues of Santa Claus striking various festive poses.

“Here,” said Marina, pushing two festive woollen socks towards me. “For Christmas Day.”

“But Marina, it’s only November. Too early for Christmas, surely?” I pleaded.

Andreas shook his head. “I agree, Margarita, but Marina loves Christmas, you have no idea.”

Oh yes I did! The living room − lit up and pulsating, lacking only a sound system for Christmas carols − told me so.

“This old place looks better now, don’t you think?” said Marina, hands on hips like the presenter of a TV home makeover show.

One of the things we liked about being in Greece at Christmas was the lack of commercialism and houses lit up like Blackpool seafront. It was a quiet, reflective time instead. But now we had the whole Christmas fizz inside the house. We laughed over it all later and slowly began to dismantle the effects, leaving some of Marina’s festive tat in place and hiding the rest in the apothiki, hoping she wouldn’t notice….”

Wallace the lovable Jack Russell sends love and licks for Christmas

Well that’s it for the year. To all readers, I would like to thank you for your continuing interest and support of the blog and my Greek books. I wish you a very happy Christmas and a prosperous New Year. If you happen to find yourself in Greece at Christmas, go for the roast goat every time, or have an Aussie beach Christmas instead.

(Text: © Marjory McGinn)

See you all next year.

Χρονια Πολλα. X

Homer’s Where The Heart Is

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

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

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

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

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

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

Things Can Only Get Feta

Homer’s Where The Heart Is

You can also find me on Twitter @fatgreekodyssey

And Facebook www.facebook.com/ThingsCanOnlyGetFeta

www.facebook.com/HomersWhereTheHeartIs

Thanks for calling by.

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

Please share this post

An Odyssey in Homer’s stomping ground . . .

Posted on October 23, 2015 by Marjory

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Andreas and a friend trimming the olive trees.

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

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

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

Foteini and her beautiful outdoor laundrette.

Homer’s Where The Heart Is

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Things Can Only Get Feta

Homer’s Where The Heart Is

You can also find me on Twitter @fatgreekodyssey

And Facebook www.facebook.com/ThingsCanOnlyGetFeta

www.facebook.com/HomersWhereTheHeartIs

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

Thanks for calling by.

Please share this post

New book – Homer’s Where The Heart Is

Posted on April 20, 2015 by Marjory

FOR all blog readers who have read and enjoyed my Greek travel memoir, Things Can Only Get Feta, I am very pleased to announce that the sequel is now available as a Kindle and paperback on Amazon worldwide.

Called Homer’s Where the Heart Is, the story takes up where Feta left off, as we decide to stay longer in the Mani in southern Greece after our first amazing year, despite the economic crisis becoming more severe.

Caption here for the local cove near Paleohora

A quiet cove near Paleohora with Mount Kalathio in the distance.

We rent a house in a slightly different location, but nearby the first village of Megali Mantineia. In Paleohora, we share an olive grove with our Greek landlords and their crazy collection of animals, including a she-wolf with a shady past.

It’s a fabulous new chapter in our odyssey but, typically for Greece, not everything goes to plan, although there’s plenty of entertainment as we deal with Greeks on the edge, gun-toting farmers and Wallace, our much loved Jack Russell dog, is up to a few of his tricks as usual. But he also faces one of his most challenging problems yet.

Caption here for Wallace surfboard riding

Wallace our Jack Russell can’t help getting up to a bit of mischief in the sequel.

I hope readers of the first book will be pleased to find that some of the original Greek characters from the hillside village of Megali Mantineia are very much part of this book, as we keep in close contact with them and take part in more of their village activities. Foteini the goat farmer, who charmed readers in Feta, is still one of the stars of this book, with her endearing and eccentric rural ways and her sense of fun.

We also explore more of the southern Peloponnese, and visit new locations, including ‘Little Australia’, the charming island of Kythera, and the wonderful house of the late Patrick Leigh Fermor in Kardamili, while researching a feature article on the famous travel writer’s home.

The famous stone arcade in the late Patrick Leigh Fermor’s Greek home.

There is also a grittier side to this book as the economic crisis intensifies and Greece edges closer to bankruptcy. Interwoven with the narrative of the book is my own back story from another troubling era in Greece’s history, which provides an interesting parallel to current events.

In the early 1970s, as a young woman fresh from high school, I travelled to Greece and spent a year in Athens during the military dictatorship. This was an edgy and fascinating time that I have never written about before. It will reveal as much about Greece as it does about my own personal journey and my continuing love affair with this country.

I hope you enjoy this book, and in the coming months I will share with blog readers some pictures and stories from behind the scenes that might help you to get a broader idea of what life has been like in Greece during the crisis.

Lastly, I must thank the very talented English artist Tony Hannaford for his absolutely gorgeous illustration for this book. Tony has a great love of Greece and has the ability to capture the vibrancy and beauty of this country to perfection, as he also did with the cover of Things Can Only Get Feta. To see more of his work on Greece and the Mediterranean in general, please visit his website www.anthonyhannaford.co.uk

The editing and formatting for the Kindle was done by ex-journalist Jim Bruce and I can’t praise his work enough. For more information on his service please visit www.ebooklover.co.uk

Please let me know how you like the book, and if you do, please think about leaving a review on Amazon. Writers are always very appreciative of this. And comments to the blog are also very welcome.

As always, I thank you for your ongoing interest in our Greek odyssey and for support of Things Can Only Get Feta and all your very kind messages to the blog.

* To buy the new book Homer’s Where The Heart Is in Kindle or paperback in Britain or the US, please click on one of these links: amazon.co.uk or amazon.com The book is also available on European and most other international sites as well.

For more information about the books and about our time living, firstly in the Mani and currently in Koroni in Messinia, visit our website www.bigfatgreekodyssey.com

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

Please share this post

Big fat Greek blog

Life in the southern Peloponnese with two journalists and a crazy dog

Tag Archives: Paleohora

Moussaka under the mistletoe . . .

Like this:

An Odyssey in Homer’s stomping ground . . .

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

Like this:

New book – Homer’s Where The Heart Is

Like this: