July 30 – Help, somebody ran off with my phone!

(A fox on Lesvos)

I must admit that since the attack of the camel spider on my terrace, I have not been at peace sitting outside after darkness falls. The monster of the screen door can be death, but barely a week later another camel spider stormed over the terrace, straight towards me and I barely managed to jump aside before the monster disappeared into the dark bushes where the cats, in vain, tried to locate him.

When it’s dark, so many things crawl, run and walk around the bushes around the house. Apart from the cicadas, who are making a deafening sound due to the increasing heat, on the ground amidst the dry grasses and the plants there is a lot of swishing as the cats spend long hours engaging in their nightly hunt.

Not that they hunt everything. Some animals are difficult to catch: like the two hedgehogs which come every evening to look for the cat’s leftovers. Whilst there they also have a little nip from the water trough. They are so cute I just have to stroke them and the cats, who watch carefully what the hedgehogs are up to, keep a clear distance.

My dogs also think hedgehogs are interesting, but they are wary of having a fight with such a prickling ball. The natural enemies of hedgehogs are badgers, fitches, pine martens, lynx (which we do not have on the island), wild boars (which have been reintroduced for the hunt around Ayasos), foxes, hawks, golden eagles and eagle owls.

I have no idea if we have badgers or fitches on Lesvos. What I do know is that under the roof tiles of my house there lives a noisy family of a kind of rats, although I think they could be some other kind of animal. The list of mammals of Greece, offers up an endless number of mice – or ‘rat-alikes’ (under the chapter Rodentia), all with beautiful names. The family living above me have white bellies, as far as I can see; they barely show themselves, except for their tails, which you can see when they flee the house over a tree branch or an electricity line. Sometimes they have a party and yell and scurry, like children playing games, from one side of the roof to the other. If I don’t interfere they might well celebrate long into the night. But when I knock with a broom against the ceiling, they become perplexed and fall silent.

There aren’t many rabbits on Lesvos, although I sometimes spot a hare jumping over the road. Lemnos is the island full of rabbits, often a plague for the agriculture there. Squirrels and moles are plentiful on the island, and one can often see holes in the earth which I guess belong to other animals (which ones I have no idea). Greece also has a long list of bats. Around twilight small batmen fly around my head when I sit outside, but I can’t see the difference between two bats in the darkness.

The biggest mammal here on the island (I don’t count the wild boars, as they have not come in a natural way to the island) is the fox which lives here in great numbers. You not only see them darting in front of your car, but more and more often, you stumble upon them while having a walk.

Last week I went for dinner to some friends in Molyvos and I wondered about the assorted weapons they had next to the dinner table: a bucket of water and a plastic water-gun, a toy normally for children —  although they had none. The story was that their cat had a bad encounter with a fox, which wounded her and since then they began their hunting season for foxes. Not only had he lain the cat low for some days, but shoes also started to mysteriously disappear from the terrace and the house.

A fox is not known for its cheekiness, but rather as a smart animal. Although it is a fact that they more and more go into the village, looking for food, or – who knows – for a drink (my friends have a pool which both the foxes and the cat use as a watering hole). But apparently they also like shoes. Or is it just the little foxes that wander with their mother into town, looking for toys? A neighbour of those friends told me that the foxes ruined one of her handbags and that on another evening when she was working in the garden, with her telephone lying on a table, she saw a little fox running off with her mobile phone! From her landline she phoned her mobile and you can imagine that the little fox got a bit of a fright from the phone jingling in his mouth. He dropped it instantly and the woman, after a search of about an hour, found her mobile, undamaged, deep in the bushes

I like to see foxes, they look cute, but were I to have to buy a new pair of shoes or a mobile phone every day, I too would buy a water pistol. In the same vein, I now have a glue spray ready for when the camel spider dares to show his face again.

Even in ancient times Greeks didn’t know what to do with foxes. The ancient city of Thebe once was being punished by a God with a huge fox (Teumessian Fox) that attacked children and it was known that he could never be caught. The regent had a hard time figuring out what to do; he decided to enlist the help of the mythical dog Laelaps, who was renowned for always catching his prey. Just imagine the sight of those two: the dog endlessly chasing the fox through bushes, along beaches, through woods, over mountains and so on. After a while – or maybe even an eternity – Zeus took pity and changed both animals into a rock and later he put them between the stars, two constellations now known as the Little and the Big Dog.

On nice evenings you’d better look upwards to the stars, rather than down towards the creeps, and you’ll see a large array of animals such as a dog, a fox, a bear, a horse, a goat, a bull, a hare, a fish, a scorpion and a lobster: they are all placed in the sky for eternity.

(with thanks to Mary Staples)

© Smitaki 2013

July 22 – ‘Price Fighters’ expected

(Lesvos is waiting for tourists)

Last week a friend of mine travelled to Paris, the City of Light. He was horrified by the number of tourists: too many and you had to queue hours for all the attractions. It’s the same story for Venice, where too many large cruise ships bring not only money but also destruction to the city, a canal town already threatened by the water.

They say Amsterdam is in for a same future, although these floating-tourist-paradises are too large to enter the canals. Just imagine a fifteen-storey high flat passing your house! I can see those huge cruise ships crossing the Aegean Sea, although they stay far from our coast. Sometimes a very small exemplar stops outside the port of Molyvos, but normally Lesvos – even though it’s on the route from the South Aegean islands to Instanbul, is not on the average cruise-ship map.

Islands Tourism Development: A Viewpoint of Tourism Stakeholders of Lesvos Island is a report about the opinion of a few people working in tourism on Lesvos who answered some questions, posed by students of the University of the Aegean in 2010, about tourism in Lesvos. The writers, who think that mass tourism will soon be in decline, use two models for tourism. The 4S model: Sun, Sand, Sea, Sex (equal to mass tourism) and the 4E model: Environment and clean nature, Educational Tourism, culture and history, Events and mega events, Entertainment and fun. 20% of the respondents want the 4S model for Lesvos, 52% want it partly and 28% are against it.

Okay, here we go then: Sun, Sand, Sea and Sex. First of all, parts of the coast around Molyvos would be excavated in order to make longer and wider beaches, as the existing ones are not large enough to contain thousands of people and most of them are pebbled, so they’d need to be covered with sand. With extended beaches Eftalou would be an excellent place for a busy boulevard lined with big hotels. And even the Arion Hotel, on the outskirts of Molyvos and abandoned for tens of years, could finally get rebuilt. That site has the most brilliant view of the medieval town of Molyvos.

Doing the same in Petra is a little more difficult. This town already has a beautiful beach along its boulevard, only the small houses would need to be torn down in order to make place for some big resorts.

Anaxos, a place consisting of small pensions and gardens, already seems to be prepared. Its lovely beach is filled up with sun beds and umbrellas. But I bet that there are plenty of Greeks willing to sell their little second houses and gardens for a nice price, so even in Anaxos some big resorts could be built.

Restaurants needn’t worry if their businesses are too small or if they have too few chairs. Most modern hotels will be all-inclusive and will have their own dining rooms. Their guests will just stroll a little around the village, have a drink, buy a souvenir, but spend the bulk of their money in their hotel.

When evening falls, if there’s not enough entertainment in their hotel, the guests might venture out looking for a discotheque. So we should create more of those big dance-palaces, because the one and a half already existing in the north of Lesvos, will barely be enough. And what better than to hear the electronic boom boom boom reverberating through the night air as an alternative to those screaming creepy cicadas that we listen to now.

And of course the airport is too far away from the most popular places on the island. So, wouldn’t it be great if the old plan of making an airport at Kalloni resurges. I suggest that they then also reclaim part of the Gulf of Kalloni because I’m sure that a resort full of people will bring in more money than salt and birds.

Speaking about infrastructure: for years there has been talk about a paved road along the coast from Eftalou to Skala Sykaminia. They should definitely make that road and, better still, a highway so that busses can quickly transport tourists to this little fishing harbour, which would be an excellent place to organise huge Greek evenings. For romantic people, the boat connection should remain, although it would be preferable to use a faster speedboat, otherwise the evening will be over before the boat arrives.

Right now it is quiet on the island, too quiet for the high season. Greek tourists especially do not have money for a vacation; so it’s no wonder that lots of Lesvorians dream about busy streets and beaches overcrowded with people. In crisis times it is easy to sell your soul to the devil. But when I ask the island inhabitants if they want Eftalou to become the Faliraki of the North (Faliraki on Rhodes used to be a quiet family beach), they hesitate. So maybe no mass tourism on Lesvos? 63% of the respondents were inclined towards model 4E, a more friendly tourism that also involves nature and environment.

The conclusion of the makers of the report is that tourism on Lesvos needs a bit from each model. I agree because I would have 2 S’s – Sea and Sun – a 2 E’s – Environment and a clean nature and Eductional tourism. I am wondering how they would connect nature and mega events, but I know for sure that all tourists want entertainment and fun for their holidays. And by the way, the biggest beach of the island, Vatera, would be very suitable for big beach parties.

It is said that next year two ‘Price Fighters’ will organise regular flights to the island:

Flights from Ryan Air (from England) and Corendon Dutch Airlines (from Holland) will hopefully bring lower cost flights and bring more people to the island, something that Lesvos really needs. Of course I hope that the nightmare scenario I described above will never happen. Lesvos is so unique because of her wild and sensational nature and that fact that there is no mass tourism. However, when tourism is well organized there is plenty of space for a greater number of holidaymakers. So let the ‘Price Fighters’ discover Lesvos. And if they do not bring big developers, they will be all the more welcome!

(with thanks to Mary Staples)

© Smitaki 2013

July 8: Hop hop hoppa

(Photo: internet)

There’s a new trend in the travel world: social travelling! While cruises remain popular, it seems that people may be tiring of the all-inclusive holidays, which are a disaster for the holiday regions. Now it’s back to holiday roots: booking a room with locals and discovering your holiday destination with a local.

Maybe children have finally listened to their parents’ stories about how, in the Sixties and Seventies, they spent their holidays island hopping in Greece. Then you travelled to Athens by train or plane and from Piraeus you took the ferries out across the Aegean. There was no internet in those times. You just went to the Greek Tourist Office to get a map and started dreaming of all the islands, following the thin red striped line of the ferry routes across the light blue sea on the map. Most likely you would just chose a group of islands or a faraway island as a destination. Little symbols on the maps indicated if there were archaeological treasures to be seen and the number of roads gave an indication of how busy the island could be. You just picked an island and from there you would see what happened.

When the boat anchored in a harbour, half of the village would be waiting on the quay to welcome the visitors: “You want room, nice room at sea!” I bet that no one was ever left alone on the quay. By donkey cart or little old vans you would be transported to a pension, most of the time, just a room in the house of your host. And if you disliked the room, you’d just tell them that you had to travel further on and looked for a better one. When your hostess did not provide the food, there would be a local taverna just around the corner. If that was not social travelling . . .

Nowadays charter flights look more like cattle transports and that’s why taking a boat is so much nicer. It’s pure magic to sail toward mysterious islands that are trying, siren-like, to seduce you, to discover a bunch of dolphins jumping alongside the ship, to enjoy colourful sunsets, or just to listen to the keel of the boat splitting the waves, together with the monotonous humming of the ship’s motor.

Of course it can happen that a boat fails to sail. It happened recently to the neighbouring island Limnos; for weeks they remained without a ferry connection with Thessaloniki, Kavala and Lesvos. Not a nice situation because the island depends on ferries also for the carriage of goods. If you weren’t prepared to take a plane, the only solution was to do some mini-island hopping: from Psara to Chios and Lesvos.

Today in the early morning haze an enormous cruise boat came along. I wondered because it was weeks ago that I last saw a passengers ship passing by, but I was waiting to see the Ionian Sky which was supposed to pick up stranded voyagers from Limnos. Just half an hour later I heard the well known rumbling of an old ferry approaching and there it was, already a day late: the boat that from now on will connect Mytilini with Limnos, Thessaloniki and Kavala.

Another nice aspect of ships is that you can trace their history through the internet. The Ionian Sky started her career in 1974 as the Sapporo Manu in Japan, was rebaptized as the Sun Flower Sapporo, in 1998 was bought by a Greek shipping company and named again, this time as the Ionian Victory and sailed between Venice and Ancona to Corfou. When she again was sold, she moved to the other side of the country and was named Blue Sky and now her name is Ionian Sky.

The Greek island people all know the boats by heart and name them when talking about them. This is quite different from the world of airplanes: not all planes have names and only very few are known by them, for example when they became famous because of history, like the Enola Gay, a bomber who dropped the first atom bomb above Hiroshima in 1945.

But let’s keep to the story. Times have passed when, in summer, you’d see an equal number of tourists and travelling island people on a ferry. Greece as a holiday country has become a lot more expensive and tourists are not as adventurous anymore. You’d think social travelling will make island hopping popular again?

227 islands of Greece are habited, and most can be reached by boat. How many more destinations you want? The islands are divided in groups: Crete, Cyclads, Dodecanese, Sporades, Iionian islands, Saronic  islands and the Northern Aegean islands which consist, alongside Samos, Chios and Lesvos, of smaller islands like Psara, Ikaria (where lots of people reach the age of a hundred years), Oinousses (small island group of wealthy shipping tycoons), Ai Stratis and Lemnos (known for its excellent wine) with their sand dunes, and the green pearls Thassos and Samothrace (although these last two islands officially belong to East-Macedonia and Thrace).

You might think that charter travels to Lesvos (and many other small islands where there is no mass tourism) are a bit of social travelling because most hotels and restaurants belong to locals, just as the excursion guides are mostly local. I admit that island hopping is more social travelling, because then just like the locals you share the ups and downs of the ferries and you can visit the small islands which are not on charter maps.

So who wants to go island hopping? Just as in times past, ferries continue to sail, beaches still glitter under a hot sun, the sea is still sky blue and most Greeks are as hospitable as they used to be. The Northern Aegean Islands, still undisturbed by mass tourism, are an ideal area to start island hopping. And even if the ferry doesn’t sail because of a storm or another cause, who is afraid of being stranded on a beautiful Greek island?

(with thanks to Mary Staples)

© Smitaki 2013

June 28 – Put away that winter feeling: eat Greek food!

(A camelspider: to eat or not to eat)

Just to make the readers in the rest of Europe jealous: here on Lesvos (and in the rest of Greece) we are fully enjoying the sun, the warmth, the sea and the food. Sometimes I wonder whether life here on the island in the summer, when high temperatures make it difficult to concentrate on work, consists of anything other than swimming and eating.

But the warm months not only bring fun. You have to learn to live with spiders, mosquitos and many other flying and creeping insect-like objects: brrrrrr. I just read that this year on the neighbouring islands of Lemnos and Ai Stratis there are many more grasshoppers as usual. I have also seen here on Lesvos many of these jumping fellows not only outside, but also inside my house. Even if you expend lots of effort to get your house insect free, grasshoppers know how to get in and can give you a hard time.

I can live with some grasshoppers in the house, so the place was not hermetically sealed. This changed yesterday when a huge wind scorpion or camel spider tried to find his way in my house through the screen door. Now all cracks and screen doors and windows are glued so that no nook or crannie offers the possibility for the miscreants to sneak in.

Even just writing about this creature gives me the creeps and I constantly look at the screen door afraid his partner may show up to take revenge. A friend (I was too afraid even to get close) killed this pseudo spider with flea spray (for dogs) and, really, what a creep it was. My friend put the creep in a box, saying that this was a very rare animal. Well, I no longer believe one word of it, because during ten years here on Lesvos I have only once seen one and this was the third camel spider I have seen in two months! You think we have a camel spider plague? Read about my first encounter with this horror spider in: Creepy!

In more than one country it is common to eat grasshoppers. As there are so many around now maybe I should experiment with frying them. And why not, maybe this camel spider is also a delicacy. However, as I can barely look at this horror, I don’t think I will be able to throw him into the cooking pan. And I have to admit that I’m not reading-up on frying grasshoppers. I prefer to grill watermelon.

The culinary challenge I have taken up was to make flour from chickpeas. This pulse here is mainly grown around Lisvori (Lesvos). In Greece chickpeas are eaten cooked with or without a spicy tomato sauce. But there are many more possibilities for this legume, like falafel or hummus . . . and plenty of recipes with chickpea flour.

I promised a friend who is on a gluten free diet to cook for him and that is how I got the idea because chickpeas suit this diet. Although I nearly gave up trying to make the flour because when I poured chickpeas into my food processor and I pushed the button for grinding, such an incredible hard noise arose that I was afraid the food processor would explode. So this is a warning for anybody grinding chickpeas: put on earmuffs for the first minutes!

Grinding dried chick peas will produce a fine flour you can use to make spinach-egg-omelettes or pancakes. I was inspired by the Italian panella, Sicilian fried cookies spiced with parsley. I followed the recipe for the batter but used Greek spices: a recipe that would suit my cooking book Almost Greek.

Because of the wet winter the summer vegetables are only now being displayed in large numbers in the shops: courgettes, aubergines, cucumbers and tomatoes. They are not my favourites but I think it a challenge to find as many recipes for them as possible — like an eggplant curry or a salad of half-dried tomatoes. Will this be a first step to a second cookbook, a companion to Almost Greek? I am not sure. But the good news is that the illustrator Sylvia Weve won a highly regarded price in Holland (De Zilveren Penseel) for her drawings in a Dutch children’s book Aan de kant, ik ben je oma niet! (writer: Bette Westera).

For those of you who do not know the cookbook Almost Greek: it is full of stories about Greek food and recipes using Greek ingredients, which, I am sure, will bring sunshine to your table. There are easy recipes and some special ones like the tomato sorbet or the grilled watermelon. And of course it contains lots of entertaining drawings of prize-winning Sylvia Weve. You can order the book via internet (or in some local stores on Lesvos and in Holland; see Smitaki on Facebook): http://www.smitaki.nl/?lang=en

Recipe: Greek panella

200 gr chick pea flour

600 cl water

1 tsp coriander

1 tsp cumin

1 tbsp fresh mint leaves (crushed)

3 tbsp lemon juice

½ hot pepper (sliced in small pieces)

salt & pepper

olive oil to fry

Grind about 250 gr chick peas into a flour: just grind for a few minutes, sieve out the fine flour and repeat the process with the remaining pieces of chickpeas (the pieces will get smaller and smaller and the noise lesser). Continue until you obtain about 200 gr fine flour.

Put the flour in a pan on a low heat and slowly pour the water in, stir until you get a thick smooth mass. Add the spices, lemon juice and salt & pepper according to your taste.

Spread the batter onto baking paper (to a thickness of about 2 cm). Put away to cool and thicken (2 – 3 hours).

Cut the thickened batter in small cubes (5 by 2 cm or what ever form you fancy) and fry them in the oil until they are golden. Good as mezès or as a side dish for a Mediterranean dinner.

(with thanks to Mary Staples)

© Smitaki 2013

June 18 – A magic garden

(An apricot or peach)

After he killed his children in a moment of frenzy, Heracles’ punishment was to undertake twelve deeds. One if his last tasks, was to steal the golden apples from the garden of the Hesperides. This was a kind of paradise that surrounded the tree with the golden apples, (a wedding gift from Gaia to Zeus and Hera). When you ate a golden apple you became immortal; so they were much sought after and protected by seven nymphs, called the Hesperides. However Hera did not much trust these beauties and reinforced the team with Ladon, the dragon with a hundred heads. How Heracles managed to get the golden apples, you can read about in Apples from Lesvos.

People now wonder what these golden apples were exactly, because many kinds of fruit in ancient times were called apples. More than once, tracing the history of a fruit, I have been amused to read that the fruit was supposed to have hung in the tree in the garden of the Hesperides. Oranges, apricots, quinces, pomegranates and peaches, they are all candidates for the golden apple. Maybe this famous tree was a magical one and bore all different kind of fruit.

Although I wonder if it was apricots or peaches that hung in that tree, because historians agree that these fruits originated in China, a country far from the garden of the Hesperides and the Greek Gods. From Persia (from where the name peach comes) Alexander the Great brought the fruit to Greece and later on the Romans distributed it further into Europe. Of course, Alexander did not personally bring the fruit to Greece. He died in 323 BC in Babylon, the mystical city in today’s Iraq, after eleven years of conquering half of the world without ever again seeing his homeland of Macedonia. His conquest of so many countries enabled the mingling of many a Greek tradition with foreign ones and I am sure that neither he nor his soldiers sat down to a Greek dinner, but were served the dishes of the conquered countries. The returning soldiers of Alexander’s army brought home the most strange things, like the seeds for apricot and peach trees.

Peaches are a little bigger than apricots, their flesh is white to light yellow; the flesh of apricots is darker yellow or plain orange. Both have a peachy skin, opposed to nectarines, which are peach-like with a smooth skin. These small differences confuse me. In my garden there is an apricot tree producing large apricots, which while ripening change in colour from light green to yellow, then to orange with a fancy bright red blush. My neighbour also has an apricot tree, but hers produces much smaller fruit. She also has another tree with fruit as large as mine, but the flesh is light yellow, like that of a peach. And there’s another tree with fruit that has orange flesh, which would appear to be apricot, although it tastes more like a peach than like my apricots. Are you still following me? Well, it looks like the apricot-peach-trees here in the neighbourhood each have different fruit. My neighbour also has a tree with fruit, which seems to be a mix of an apple and a pear. It is a very special fruit, also tasting a little odd. I have a pear tree surrounded by only wild apple trees, will my neighbours’ tree be a mix? You could easily believe that the Hesperides have again taken up gardening and are creating crazy fruit, so that future historians will be confused whether we have grown apricot or peach or apple or pear trees.

With the prune trees it’s the same story. I have a tree with fruit, which ripens into a dark blue colour and tastes soft and very juicy. My neighbour’s tree produces dark red prunes, which is less juicy and soft. Cherries here also come in two different tastes: the morellos (acid ones) and the sweet cherries, the last nearly impossible to harvest because the birds are always faster than me. But we only have one kind of mulberry: the white ones.

So I don’t know what to call the marmalade I have made from the seven kilos of fruit gathered from the various trees: is it an apricot or peach marmalade or should I just call it a marmalade from golden apples?

Anyway we are in the midst of the time of the golden fruit: prunes, cherries, apricots, peaches and mulberries all are ripe at the same time. Because of the wet weather in April, I neglected the strawberries a little resulting in a very meagre harvest. When in May I recognized my failing I did my best to pamper them and now they have rewarded me with a second harvest, meaning that whilst picking the fruit from the trees, I also have to roam through the strawberry fields to find the thick red and belated Summer Kings (a Dutch nickname for strawberries).

It is hard to get all the ripe fruit, just like it’s hard to catch all the thieving butterflies, wasps and birds who are all feasting upon my fruit and only satisfied after their bellies are well filled. No wonder we have those incredibly huge wasps: they do not produce royal jelly, but apricot and prune jelly (or is it only the bees who make royal jelly?)!

Each year it’s a great joy to taste the first ripe fruit from the trees. Even after a second and third day you are still being regaled with them. But when bowls have to be replaced with buckets to collect them, you start to panic about where you will find the time to collect and preserve. Now the harvest is nearly done, and only a few boxes are waiting to be preserved, but I am sure that by next week when I look up at the green but empty branches, I will again be longing for that juicy fruit. Tell me, Hesperides, why can you not make all the fruit ripen at different times?

(with thanks to Mary Staples)

© Smitaki 2013

June 11 – 100 Coffee Houses and a Travel Agency

(Pandora Travel, Lisvori)

Quite a few people coming to Mytilini in this time of crisis will be wondering why all cafes are so crowded. Night and day the catering establishments around the harbour are bursting with young people. I guess you could say that it’s Greek culture: business deals are concluded and friendships are sealed in cafes. Their only difference from their fathers and grandfathers is that the young people have swapped the old dusty kafenions for bigger and more modern places. No crisis can keep a Greek from having his coffee or another drink in the café.

To whichever village on Lesvos you go, you’ll be surprised by the number of kafenions in their centre. A few of them will have been closed for years, as the Lesvorian villages have slowly emptied. The closed kafenions are a poignant reminder of a time in which the agora was the lively centre of the village. Whilst those village squares and main streets are no longer busy with people, they remain the beating heart of the village and many a tourist will have a faint heart driving through such a village, weaving around the tables of the still-open kafenions, afraid of driving over the big toe of one of the customers.

The mainly male customers (you will find the women seated on the front steps of their houses) enjoy seeing tourists carefully winding their way through the narrow streets of their villages. They are there to comment on whatever is happening and every event leads to discussion. In the coffee shops friendships are made, life is discussed, thanks are offered for a job welldone or sorrows are expressed.

In many villages modern cafes have not make an appearance because the young people have moved to the big cities. That is why the elder men have to hang around in kafenions that, who knows for how long, have not changed a bit. In a few villages trendy bars have been established, just to please the tourists. For example in Molyvos there is no old traditional kafenion anymore. Here the men have to retreat to restaurants such as Alonia or Angelos where they still are welcome to sip their coffee for hours and to comment on the world.

In Molyvos virtually all the old kafenions have been lost: mostly all buildings have been renewed and all vestiges gone forever. This is different in most other villages, where you can still peep through dusty windows and discover the interior of an old kafenion that should be put into a museum. I feel that they all should be classified as monuments because of their historic interiors with old pictures and artifacts hanging on the walls once freshly painted in awful colours (I say awful, but I guess that once these poo-beige and turquoise-green colours must have been à la mode).

Together with the old kafenions, the national beverage ouzo ­– with coffee the most consumed drink in a café - seem to be neglected: young people prefer to sip a frappé (cold coffee) or to nurse a colourful cocktail all night long. In an attempt to make it more fashionable an ouzo-festival has been organized in three different locations on the island: in the ouzo-strongholds of Plomari (July 6 & 7) and Mytilini (July 13 & 14) and in the faraway port of Sigri (July 10). Music, an exhibition of ouzo labels and snacks (ouzo should never be drunken without food) are some of the fixtures of this travelling ‘happening’, along with a slideshow of photos of the old kafenions of Lesvos, made by Tzeli Hatzidimitriou, known for her beautiful book 39 Coffee Houses & a Barber’s Shop, a book that has secured at least the images of a lot of these disappearing kafenions.

People may ask what is the best ouzo, but there is only one answer: Lesvos ouzo. The question of which of the many ouzos Lesvos produces is the best, I will not answer, because that is according to your own taste. I can only refer to an ouzo tasting, of which the criterion was personal taste: ouziotary. The cherry-ouzo that will be presented during the ouzo festival, was not on that menu but I am very curious about this odd combination.

There are very few old kafenions that are lucky enough to get a new life. In Lisvori (close to Polichnitos) one of the many kafenions (the coffee house from the cover of 39 Coffee Houses & a Barber’s Shop) has been taken over to use as a travel agency. A friend of mine has rented the shop, installed her computer on the counter (kylikio), replaced the bottles of booze on the shelves (teziakia) with books about Lesvos and hung some attractive pictures between the old tools that should be in a museum: and now the office was ready.

Not only is the office special, so too is her concept: she organizes tailor-made excursions and works with people on the island who mainly offer independent activities, like kayaking, hiking, boat trips, horse riding or coaching with horses, herb and orchid hikes and her own speciality: safaris. So if are you fed up with the more commonly offered excursions, or you want to do something that nobody else offers or you need special excursions for a group, you can ask Pandora Travel. When you visit Pandora Travel, settling some business or participate in an excursion close to Lisvori, you will not escape the tradition of the kafenion and will be received in a beautiful old coffee house conveying all the authenticity and hospitality of the island of Lesvos.  

(With thanks to Mary Staples)

© Smitaki 2013

May 30 – Harvest time

(a harvestman, photo: http://www.animalsunited.nl)  

Driving around the island these days you’ll see freshly mown yellow fields sparkling brightly in the sunlight, as well as trucks stacked high with hay bales. I don’t remember ever having seen so many of these ‘hay wagens’ on the island.  I guess this is due to the crisis: the price of cattle food has risen incredibly so it’s back to using the grasslands to produce natural cattle food. I am okay with that, the land is now better used and I really enjoy those amazing yellow cornfields, which form a nice contrast to the fields with green crops.

These summer patterns in the landscape should inspire weavers to make beautiful carpets. Once there was a weaver who learned her skills from Athena. Her name was Arachne: a girl from a poor family chosen by Athena to learn how to weave. Once she perfected her skill she made the most beautiful carpets. People came to admire her talent and to ask who taught her to weave. Arachne was so pleased with her success that she took all credit to herself and did not mention Athena, claiming her talent came to her naturally. That offended Athena who visited her disguised as an old woman. Arachne didn’t want to listen to this old grandma who told her that she should be more thankful to the Gods for her skill. When finally Arachne discovered that the old woman was Athena she challenged her to see who could make the most beautiful cloth. Athena wove a story about how she had won the contest with Apollo for the most beautiful present to the Greek capital and about how people had been changed into awful animals, for not showing respects to the gods. Arachne wove stories about deranged gods and gods in compromising situations. However offensive Arachne’s work was, Athena could not find fault with the weaving. She was angered nonetheless and she touched Arachne with her weaving stick. Suddenly Arachne realized how unthankful she had been. She became so desperate that she hung herself. Displeased with her death, Athena decided that Arachne should continue weaving evermore and turned her into a spider (arachne in Greek).

Spiders are weavers of excellence and, especially in autumn, when the moisture in the air decorates their webs with fine crystal tears, spiderwebs can compete with the wondrous works of Arachne. Most spiders are harmless, at least for human beings. All they catch in their webs are other insects like flies. To hear about my meeting with a dangerous spider, read: creepy!.

Most spiders are creepy to look at. I prefer to keep my distance, which is easy in the winter because  – yes, they seem to hide during the cold months. Do they hibernate? They’re certainly not around. Come summertime though, all kinds of crawling and flying creatures come out again, including the spiders.

Yesterday I stumbled upon the biggest spider that I have ever seen my life. It had a thick yellowish body of at least 7 cm long! The creature was dead, but I was still too scared to approach, afraid he would rise from his death and jump up at me. I was so scared that the photos I took were blurred.

What strikes me is that each year there is a plague of some animal or another. Last autumn it was crickets (see: Cricket rush), in past summers there were ant invasions (see: A beastly mess) or I could not enter my house without bringing a hundred or so moths in with me. This summer seems to becoming the summer of the spiders. But thank God not of those ‘monster ones’ I described above.

I am nearly used to the rather smaller beige spiders (probably wolf spiders) that use my terrace as a racetrack and my house for hide-and-seek, but I have never seen so many spiders fleeing my feet as in the past few weeks. They don’t look too threatening and I have even dared to have a close look at them: a small black body on very long and thin legs. If they only had an elephant trunk they would be like those high legged elephants of Salvador Dali. 

The ‘creepy’ work starts just by opening the internet and looking for what kind of spiders they are. Ai, ai, ai, what a lot of creepy spiders there are! With a pounding heart I whizzed through lots of photographs, in my head knowing already what kind of spider it was: a Harvestman. Which actually is not a spider, but ‘spider–like’ in the order of arachnids.

There are as many as about 6000 kinds of Harvestmen (opiliones), but the exact one flooding the island I have not determined. I think Harvestman is nice enough as a name for this creature. Harvestmen differ from spiders because they have a single oval shaped body and they do not weave webs. So you don’t have to worry about one day stepping out of your house and finding it encapsulated in a huge cobweb.

And I have to admit, Harvestmen look friendly and as soon as they hear your foot swishing through the air, they flee. So they don’t really bother you; it’s only this year’s appearance of such large numbers that is striking. They even look cute when they waddle away, trying to keep dry when I water my plants, hence giving me plenty of time to study them. Although there is not so much to say about them.

So this year there are no large or abnormal numbers of wolf spiders, crickets, ants (yes, indeed, those tiny tiny ants) and even the number of moths was acceptable this spring. But the month of May on Lesvos clearly was the Month of the Harvestmen and the hay wagens (in Dutch the name for the spiders and the cars transporting the hay is the same: hooiwagens): in the grass – the spider-ones, on the roads – the high-stacked trucks with bales of hay.

(with thanks to Mary Staples)

© Smitaki 2013