In the Greek Garden

It seems like a funny week to talk about democracy. The morning after an election is all sore throats and dry eyes, a squint towards the White House and some of us will worry if the same reverberations will be again felt all across europe. The world awaits. Populist rhetoric has spoken. The oft butchered quote about those who fail to remember history get condemned to repeat it feels apt, but it also begs some questions about democracy.

There is only one Museum of Democracy in the whole world. It is on an island called Agios Efstratios. 

As we boarded the small clunky Aeolis ferry docked at Lemnos, it was abundantly clear this boat that with its plastic seats and piled up shopping bags and freezer boxes was not primarily a tourist boat, but a lifeline for the islanders. I looked around as the young captain asked for our names and birthdates, and just as he started to write them in his notebook. He chuckled nervously and handed over the pen, smiling ‘You write them, please’ 

I wonder why we gave our real names. Who would know? Who would know who we are this far from anywhere? The horizon is a fine line to disappear into.  

It had been a funny summer anyway – a kind of here and there sort-of-time where I’d found myself ricocheting from one situation to another, one country to another. Unsettled and unfocused, I’d suggested madly to go walking in France for a month along the wilds of the Brittany Coast. That was bliss, but we couldn’t walk forever. There were several points I’d thought had there been an unsubscribe button to click that unsubscribed me from my life I would have pushed it and not looked back. But less dramatically of course – what is a life if not fiction, wrapped up in a layer of loose facts?

After a few weeks in England, I’d gone alone to Lesvos at the end of August where under the olive trees and swampy waters of Kalloni my disappointment eventually calmed to nothing more than a little ebb of irritation. I found a renewed sense of purpose, a loose rope of intentions. I might have been restless, but I had plans, things to run away from, things to draw myself toward, and of course, to write. 

So we then went to Lemnos and met its brutal bare hills and odd mix of architecture. Myrina is a flat, blank seafront dotted with taverna’s and cafes – a smattering of English and Dutch holiday makers. On a cloudy day we walked up to its looming castle, met wild deer and even wilder goats. But what struck me about Lemnos is it’s an island that understands how much it seems to be willing to offer to the visitor. With this I mean we found a clear idea of separation ‘here is the tourists’ things; the beach bars, the car hire places and the tavernas where the menu hasn’t changed for 20 years’ and then over here is the local life that goes on regardless – the school, the people who eat late, who shop local, who work at the army outposts; the endless combat trucks that ferry workers to the base. The only island without any discernible bus service at all – I asked and asked, all people said was they ran out of money. It also has a strange number of abandoned hotels – overgrown plants, furniture strewn in pools, concrete ruins, monuments to ambitious 1990s dreams of planes full of international arrivals. It still only has one UK flight a week. There were a few signs that things are changing – houses for sale and a lot of renovations. 

Lemnos was calm and the beaches quiet so we kept on saying to one another, let’s stay a few more days. September started to end and the last plane loads of straggling tourists arrived. All we heard from apartment owners and restaurant waiters was how busy it had been, the busiest summer so far, soon we can all rest! One Sunday we lay on the scrappy beach in the port and felt an earthquake rumble beneath us, time to move on, I said. 

We made arrangements to go to Agios Efstratios ahead of time and were told that a woman named Galina would meet us at the port. I’d read there are very limited accommodation options and who could say if it would be busy or not. The Aeilos ferry to ‘Ai Stratis’ goes once a day and on the port we stood out; with our backpacks instead of Lidl bags and necessary provisions.  The journey was calm, the sky blue shimmering across the sea  – for a few hours it was possible to imagine this was how ferry hopping used to be. An open deck, a clunky slow boat, a ticket for less than a couple of beers. The old days before high-speed lines and monopoly pricing.  It was enchanting – but this island is not stuck in the past. It can’t afford to be.  

On the horizon and a pod of dolphins joined us halfway passing nothing, just open deep sea for two and a half hours from Lemnos. Ai Stratis is the last island on the barren edge of the eastern Aegean, population 312 at the last census.I have always been drawn to the idea of a small remote island as a singular escape. Figuratively. Literally. Physically. Some islands offer this. Others’ are places where escape is impossible. Round and round we go, eventually bumping into ourselves. 

With only one settlement, no real paved roads, just dirt tracks that edge up towards a mountain and a line of wind turbines it’s difficult to locate yourself here. There’s no way to get around, no car hire, no bus service. There isn’t even a petrol station, because I imagine there is no need for anyone to go round the island unless you are one of the few remaining farmers with a 4×4 and need to round-up some sheep. The silence surprised me – not even a low hum, or  burst of a moped. But after a few days the small village showed us a recognizable rhythm. The mornings’ on Ai Startis start with church bells, the clatter of the garbage truck, birds singing. The woman next door talks to each person passing by. The island’s tiny town lives in a rhythm, the silence of what went before and won’t again. The same as a poet becoming a God. Slow at first then patterns emerge. The agony of words. The agony of isolation. The agony of being.  

The island has an undeniable history of exile and imprisonment. Named after Agios Efstratios who exiled himself in the mountains. Ever since the 1930s it was a place Greece sent internal political prisoners. First under Venizelos, and later during the Metaxas Regime  and then during the Military Dictatorship of the Junta, right up until 1974. This is why it houses the Museum of Democracy – to help navigate that often forgotten past. But what we discovered was that it was closed that week! 

But what is obvious when you are there is the close presence of the past – the harbour has a whole range of wall paintings of the artists, poets and musicians who were imprisoned there. Yiannis Ritsos, Makis Theodorakis to name a few. A poem stands out: 

I don’t have time to get tired

I don’t have time to cross my arms 

I don’t have time not to love, not to hate, not to want to be killed.

Give me your hand – and from the beginning – another beginning 

At 5, yes at the crossroads. The world is ours.  

It takes power for exiled artists to go on creating and writing thier way through the darkness, because what is art without resilience to claim back that narrative? The island filled me with a sense of hope – even in the ghostly remains. The whole original village of 500 buildings was destroyed by an earthquake in 1968. By 1951 the population of the island was 3,849 – (only 1,170 local inhabitants) over 2/3rds of the island were political exiles. How did that function?  I’ve read some papers and understand that in a way the island functioned normally and certain exiles lived as part of the community eventually – separate at first but then forming bonds over time. There were women and children there too; exiled families that lived in communities while the men lived in sparse camps on the hillsides. They were mainly left to fend for themselves – there were guards and order, but threats of death more likely from starvation than violence, but that’s the thing about a far flung island – there was nowhere to escape to.

 All that remains of the original settlement even now, just marble flagstones and the odd pathway leading upwards to nowhere but dust and rubble. It seems like the earthquake happened yesterday. When it happened, 22 people died and many of the buildings were partly salvageable – but the Junta Dictatorship said it wasn’t worth saving. So history gets rewritten again with the community erased, moved on to flat pastures by the river where people once farmed the land and had enough to survive. It was a political crisis of the Junta – an economic choice to rebuild cheaply and quickly just keep the island functioning as an open prison for exiles. The residents who owned damaged property who weren’t on the island on the day of the earthquake quite literally lost everything. Property size or numbers owned, meant nothing. A Military man decided that these mildly interesting architectural houses were of no use half ruined and commissioned a builder to build a new town over the farming land- now that builder was all about utilitarian functionality and built box-like houses, all with either one or two bedrooms depending on how big the family was I assume but perhaps that’s too generous. 

I am sure houses must have been grand in the older town – two stories, rooms, balconies a plenty and compensation of being given what essentially looked like concrete cube built shoulder to shoulder on a grid formation was little comfort when all was lost. But islanders relied silently, I am sure those who survived chose to stay for reasons and others who could start a new life elsewhere did. As for the exiles, they stayed right to the end in 1974. 

In the silence birdsong is a cacophony – the flap of the crow’s wing audible for the first time away from man’s noises, engines and anger. As night fell on the day we arrived I heard mewling kittens cry a notch louder than the cicadas singing the last of their summer song in the dying September days. The cats sound like babies bundled up in the building site of the old stone church – a chorus of mewing cries rises from the stone. The small brown birds, thrushes so universal, scamper to nest in the gaps of the terracotta tiles in the medical centre’s roof.  

Last year there were three small mini-markets. Now there are two. In th height of summer it there are a number of small bars and eateries – but all had closed up by the end of Septmeber. Over a week eat at the same taverna 4 nights in a row – the younger waiter brings us the same drinks every night. He tells us what has been cooked today – three choices, salads, stews, something grilled. Locals drink coffee in a small cafe area at the side of the taverna. One woman comes in every night and brings her own packet of crisps. They watch TV and chat, read the news on thier phones. Tik Tock videos blare.   

At sunset we lie on the warm concrete of the basketball court and name the first lit stars as they pop into the violet sky. All week we are the only ones who go there. There is an outdoor gym that we don’t see anyone use. We count the people we see and can’t fathom that there’s 300 people here at all. At the port there is a large sign for a Green Island and E-Bike charger Initiative funded by some american eco company that talks about sustainability in the language of boardrooms and policy. People shrug when we ask them if they have enough supply from the wind turbine. I search online and it seems to be in press releases that in 2010 the island was announced as a Green Island and by Winter 2014 this year it will be running entirely off grid – all the locals’ houses will get heating powered by solar and wind.  

Some people have electric bikes, we see them use the shiny new electric charge point for bikes and vehicles. There is no petrol station but people still drive the 300m across the whole of the town ferrying older people to the shops. The only vehicles that leave the town are 4×4’s or farmers trucks. One of the men who sit outside the port station all day, doubling up as firemen, policemen and port authority workers – one walks all day, back and forth, along the harbour and back and back, sometimes on his phone talking, chatting away. Other times he listens to music headphones on, in another world. 

There was a small child running around with her mum and grandma. She say YA YA at us and we all smile and its impossible not to wonder how she will fare as the only child in her year at school. The kids are taught at one school at the back of the village, which also has a big basketball court. If there’s 30 kids here in total that would surprise me. A girl in her late teens pedals a mountain bike around the streets, right up to the port. At night she and her friend jog haphazardly across the same route, staring back at the men who stare at them. Each night the taverna has an array of men in groups, we play guessing games, engineers from the solar electric plant, workers posted here for a week or two. I realise they are not locals because the locals do not greet them as they do the others.  

On our last night a big yacht docked into the harbour causing a fuss with disco music blaring from speakers. It brought American voices echoing across the ink black water. They walked around and talk to one another like people who are shipwrecked pointing at buildings and wondering out loud who lives there. The locals carried on their evening volta, greeting one another in the streets – kids on bikes chasing their long shadows under the acidic orange street lights, the girls jogging again. Once the boat people have walked the perimeter of the town and the sun has dipped they go back on board, maintaining a distance from the island – our exile in the embers of summer. In the morning I hear the man from the shop tell them off for wandering on the paths. He gently tells them it’s not safe and asks them if they know about the earthquake. The woman answers ‘Yes, we know all about that’  backing away, stopping to pet a kitten in the churchyard. In the gaps between all the worlds so much is unsaid. 

The Museum of Democracy ended up being closed all week – so we walked up hills and looked at the monuments to the dead prisoners at Agios Minas. We read names of the Greeks and the lone German pilot who crashed onto the island. We hiked through oak trees where dry leaves were starting to turn a rust colour and wondered if the cows still roamed free (as the sign said, not a warming, just a fact.)

I looked up the Aelios boat just to see where it was. It’s moored up in another harbour. No connection to the mainland for anyone this winter. The Mayor of Agios Efstratios has been on the news talking about it. A decade ago EU funding of 19 million euros expanded the port so large ships can dock, but none do. The island with all that green power and no connection. 

I’d go back in a heartbeat not just because I never got to see the Museum of Democracy, but it’s a place that feels like hope. That’s what we all need right now.

Meet me at the basketball court as the sun fades into a line.

On the last day of February, cracked clay pots were thrown from balconies in our neighbourhood, an old custom to curse the head of March to end the bad weather.  Yellow daisies dance on green hillsides and wrists are adorned with the red and white threads of the Martiou bracelets. These are the in between days; not quite Spring, not quite Winter.

Last night the main street Ano Syros was packed with revellers kicking off the big three day weekend for Apokries (Carnival). It starts here with a dance group performing a Zebekia about the abduction of the bride (Archihanumissa) who is the wife of the Captain.  To contemporary eyes, there is much to dislike. Not only the comical big-man-dressed-as-woman trope but add in the dark painted faces of both the Captain and his ‘wife’ – it’s uncomfortable viewing. I’ll leave the discussion of that for later.  I understand its origins as a Turkish custom brought to Syros by Greek refugees from Asia Minor after the Greek Revolution of 1821. However, what I am interested in, is how the dance continues as a tradition specifically in Ano Syros at Apokries. Apparently the same dance was performed by troops in all the towns’ neighbourhoods on various days running up to carnival. Men, and only men, in this particular world of the tavern and the bouzoukia, and the card games, is the place where the Zembekia comes from . The dance groups would pay an outlay for the costumes and spend winter evenings practising. It’s an interesting piece of social history and I did find a video filmed in Ano Syros. Watch here and you’ll see an 85 year old man named Antonis Halavazi talking about the ritual of the dance and witness a little slice of history, (I think) filmed in the space underneath Lily’s Taverna judging by the barrels and scale of the space. Antonis, who talks in the film lived near Agia Trianda and I’d like to imagine may also be related to Nikos Halavazi (b.1901) the man who owned our house. Perhaps. They’d be around the same age and share a surname. What is a joy to see in the streets of the piatsa unadorned by the ever increasing plethora of commercial signs. I get nostalgic for a world I’ve only ever seen in photos and imagined only the good. A street lined with useful shops; a baker, a butcher. Of course, no-one can stand in the way of change. Not even my wild imagination.

But I do find it impossible to live here and not think about loss. The swift erasure of things long unnoticed and then gone, before anyone could remember what they were. Of changes we yet don’t understand, in ourselves and the role we play. The mediaeval neighbourhood is modernising and becoming something else. The dust blows with grit and the paths are splattered with green growth and nature at this time. Sometimes the rocks the houses are built on are so soft they feel like skin worn with wrinkles, gulleys in stone like veins. Those things don’t change, nor do the names carved upon the rock as witnesses.  But the present always feels like a knife-edge.

Someone I know described Ano Syros as melancholic. I don’t disagree. There is a poetic beauty in its veneer of abandon. But has the balance shifted? There is an infuriating sense that our neighbourhood is seen by the powers that be as a secondary place. Caught between the idea of being ‘a historical traditional settlement’ and ‘an opportunity for development’ in the same breath. So you can admire the architecture while it lasts and wander it’s peaceful alleyways – but please, stop by the gift shop on your way out after sipping an overpriced cocktail and toking a shisha pipe. Because that’s what the neighbourhood’s famous for, right?

But I cannot complain. In the toll bells and dead ends, the sound of footsteps in alleyways and low whispers, they sound out the words. I am part of the problem. I am the outsider. Even if lots of people live here all year round, they might not for much longer if the neighbourhood is focussed only on the desires of tourists, over the needs of locals. Many houses have been renovated, more are occupied, and like every other town betting on the tourist game, more are rented out as short-term, nightly lets. I am not a fortune teller, but each summer on every Greek island, the sun umbrellas multiply and more bars open, each more blandly mainstream than the last. Welcome to watered-down-Greekness. So whitewashed you could be anywhere from Malaga to Manchester. A lone beach covered in concrete and plastic bags. A place where the only Rembetiko music rings out from the speakers at the Vamvakaris Museum on rotation. Greatest Hits. Nostalgia packaged neatly sized for instagrammable moments. #liveyourmyth  

This weekend marks the in between days. The days when weekend rituals of feasting that call us away from Winter and into Spring. Bells ring out and confetti settles in the cracks in the pavement. The air is laden with meat smoke.  When I take a walk I am on the hill of Alithini meeting dusk’s cooler air with a scarf at my throat. Despite the building work ringing across the valley all day, by now the men have gone home and again the joyful chorus of birds almost nesting rises. The kid goats bleat with a vigueur reserved for endless green hills, never imagining the dry scorn of summer. These days we live in the space between belonging and not. Always caught between the twin follies of desire and compromise, like the cockerel confused at the hour of day, calling out again and again, and never understanding why he never gets an answer.

I did not think Marianne Ihlen would be so young. Her bobbed white blonde hair glimmers in the sunshine and the masculine white shirt she wears billows in the breeze, rolled up below her elbows. She looks ready to fetch the water from the wells with a bucket in hand before she turns in her cropped trousers she takes a cursory look at the crowd and peels her dark sunglasses down to the bridge of her nose to reveal gold patches under her eyes. They look a bit like those stick on eye patches that beauty-influencers use to ward off ageing as if it were a curse. Even then I blink back doubt watching this child-faced, small and swift Marianne move towards a group of fishermen with beards and flat caps who nod at her before going back to untangling their nets. A boy rolls a barrel which seems weightless as it bounces off the cobbles. Who am I to know what’s going on, after all I’m half witted in this withdrawal from petrol fumes. I can smell the mule poo and my own sweat now I’m on a car-free island. The braying horses and hooves have replaced the whirr of mopeds – my ears are only just recovering from the shock of Hydra, never mind my lungs, which have not inhaled such clean air for years. 

They say there is something about the air and the light here in Hydra – clear and golden, perfect for painting or conjuring words. That kind of expectation is long evident in inspiring all those marvellous creative folks to make pilgrimages here. I don’t trust myself. I’m no artist – I crave realism and all I am being offered this morning is abstraction. 

This light has been playing tricks on me from the moment I arrived yesterday, Yorgos met me from the boat and escorted me up the steep incline to the apartment, weaving through the mules and tourists. I spotted the old ‘Katsikas’ sign on a green-painted store we passed. Bah, I thought that’s been closed for decades. Once an infamous Kafenion-  bar – post office that served as gathering spot for the island’s international scene; the place writers Charmian Clift and George Johnson ran up a debt so high over the 5 or more years they lived here it wasn’t paid off until he finally sold the novel, My Brother Jack.  And anyway wasn’t Katsikas further down the harbour towards the clocktower, I thought. 

I ventured out at my first chance exploring the meandering stone streets, stopping to admire the Kala Pigadia, Good Wells which was referenced so often in Rope of Vines by Brenda Chamberlain. Once the gathering place for village women, a place to trade gossip and news. Despite its beauty and solace of the old crumbling mansions surrounding the square, the wells are sadly all locked up after being contaminated. I wandered back to the harbour, following a siren call. And there Katsikas old store was right on the harbour mocking my doubts. Doors closed, a layer of dust on the windows but as I peeked in cupping my hands over the glass it was like a window to another era. There was the long lean bar stacked with the green glass bottles, the baskets piled up and kewpies jugs waiting to be filled with water or wine.  Traditional taverna tables to the side, some scattered with squat wine glasses and old beer bottles. A pile of red and white chequered tablecloths neatly folded; aluminium buckets strung from the ceiling. It was as if someone locked up Katsikas in 1969 when Leonard Cohen left and threw away the key. Baffled – wondering how such a thing of beauty was closed, I walked away, telling myself I’d ask Yorgos later. He’d know. 

Then this morning I was up early, wandering and Marianne surprised me. Only minutes before I’d seen Leonard looking dishevelled wearing baggy trousers held up with an ill fitting belt, extra holes clumsily punched into the leather, pulling up a chair outside Katsikas. His frizzy mop of adolescent dark curls bouncing as he spoke. Others had sat down to join him, sharing the same wild eyes of wanderers in search of something yet unnamable.  The men with Leonard turned as a pair of Greek girls in headscarves walked by carrying large old-fashioned suitcases and baskets as their knee length cotton dresses bounced around their knees. An old widow in black prodded at the cabbages stacked up in boxes.  

It was only when the woman in the tracksuit marched past having a heated conversation on her mobile phone that the frenzy began. 

‘Cut. CUT…CUUUUUTTT’ 

The director shouted and the extras moved and laughed – warm smiles replacing their stiff faces. Film cameras swivelled – a rabble of women and men in combat shorts with headsets appeared, shouting instructions in English and Greek. The horse harnessed to the water tank was relieved of its duty and led into the shade.

‘Action’ 

Of course I should have known this was the biggest trick of all. I asked the handsome chap dressed as a fisherman and he beamed, ‘Yeah it’s for the Cohen series, it’ll be on Netflix.’ 

I stifle a laugh, a cringe – a little too self-referencial smile for the meta-ness of this moment unfurling on this island’s myriad trajectory of literary and musical history. 

I swear I can hear Brenda Chamberlain whispering about horror of the other foreigners who treated the port like a playground and in that throaty Welsh rasp telling the crowd, here, ‘It is possible to live a lie until it is a kind of truth, until beauty comes out of even so timid a pretence’.

I watch the scene replay again; Leonard standing up and walking to the bar, the old lady poking at the cabbage, the horse parading past in its island finery, I can imagine Charmian Clift at the table listening in and writing in her note pad while a child clings to her dress. In Peel Me A Lotus, Clift describes her feelings about Hydra’s change when Hollywood came to the island to film Boy on Dolphin in 1956 with Sofia Loren. She captures a conversation overheard on the film set: 

“Oh, it makes me sick, Al!’ cries the ferocious young woman. 

‘Ruin, ruin, ruin! God when I see a sweet little place like this, and think what will happen to it after we’ve gone!’ 

And later as the summer crowds depart, Clift foretells them leaving the island. 

“I have a feeling this might be the last winter for idylls. You wait and see what next summer brings!” It will bring’..says George, ‘all the futility boys like homing bloody swallows. It will bring an enhanced tourist trade, in three dimensions, in full radient colour, and on the wide screen.” 

How right they were. Even 60+ years later those words ring true and each year, more and more ‘futilty boys’ come to worship at the alter of Cohen.  So too come the day-trippers, the fleets of yachts, the five-star pleasure seekers festooned on their private beaches. All looking for their slice of the Hydra light and air.

Tonight I’m contemplating heading to Loulou’s or Douskos for dinner – both old-time places tucked away. Places that those infamous 60s set used to hang out, my only worry is that on this island I might be walking right into a film set.

Winter keeps score. It serves as a kind of truth telling; a way of washing away the last embers – a time for revision, remaking, reminding. If an island Summer is all bluster and body – a non-stop pirouette of colour and noise, then it’s gift when Autumn arrives to fold away that brightness with a mellow kind of laughter – a gathering of fruits under lengthening shadows as the days shorten. But I’ve noticed that what happens often here is that Autumn ends up being the star of the show – an encore of mild weather that lasts almost to Christmas; encouraging green growth with scattered showers and glorious blue days. Tonight I listen to the wind howl and the hailstones scatter on the roof, snow is forecast. But will it reach us on Syros?

Here we are in the first-kind-of-normal-post-lockdown winter since Covid. Everything open and events on across the island; from bands to theatre, to cinema to art shows and book readings. The sort-of-quiet December brought a twinkle of shopping displays and the syrupy charm of cinnamon, then January laid a muted calm over the island; we’ve had clear blue days where the sun felt warm enough to shed clothes and dive into the chilly sea. Glorious afternoons of empty hillside walks. For many that live here, Winter is when people seem to have more time. So night classes start up again, and often when I walk down the hill all manner of music and singing pours out into the quiet streets. A lone flute player rehearses at the music school and each time I hear it it brightens up an otherwise dark street. Each week I return to Greek lessons and attempt to get my head round ways of being heard in a language that evades my understanding. Slowly, Slowly – they say and I try out conversations with neighbours. Explaining who I am, asking questions. It’s like a half-pantomime filling in the blanks of my vocabulary. But it’s enough, enough that I don’t do too much damage with my clumsy words and it means that the kind Kyria fills my pockets with homemade pies ‘for the journey’. 

Last year I started Greek dancing lessons – joining a class with all Greek speakers , bravely being introduced to it by a friend. At first I found it overwhelming – just being in a crowded room where everyone else had such a better understanding of not just the instructions, but the music, the steps – all part of Greek traditions they’d all grown up with. Here I am Xeno, the outsider, trying to join in. But I persisted, despite the gulf in my Greek and my gratitude for all the kindness of translations and explanations. I enjoy it not just because the music is beautiful, always unexpected, but the way each dance is introduced by the teacher Anna with a little tale about where it is from. Each week we practice new dances and slowly the steps become familiar and known. Sometimes it’s just the small and understated steps, the way we all stand shoulder to shoulder and move as one, the way we change from right foot to left, the little hop steps and turns, small and fragile. Back straight, head up and together all holding hands or shoulders and mostly always in a circle. It has been so surprising to learn to dance like this in a way that looks so easy as an outsider watching. But the reality is so difficult and so different from the ones I have often seen being performed at festivals. Some from the mainland, like the kalamatianos (from Kalamata)- performed at weddings and parties, to the Syrto style in a circle to the wild but tricky Ikariatiko (from Ikaria). Each week it’s like a little glimpse into a place and its dance traditions. Sometimes it’s a dance for the mother-in-law, sometimes a dance for Carnival with a song with rude lyrics that are totally lost on me. Others with sweet little details of rituals and waving of scarves, leg slapping tricks.  Its a diverse group all ages – even a few men, who I have to say sometimes the men get to have special moves; stepping away and twirling. All that bravado. The class for me is like a peek into mystical moments of a world that is both enthralling and steeped in tradition, that doesn’t exist in my own culture. For what its worth, I’m not quite there with the steps, like they, say art is long and life is short. Slowly slowly. 

As I walk home after dancing, my face warm and pink hitting the cold air of the evening. My shadow is swift past the the shuttered up houses, hearing only the soft footsteps of other people like me walking, going out to a warm bar or returning home. The buzz of mopeds dashing across slick streets. As I climb the marble steps I notice how they’ve grown green with weeds and the sound of water rushes in channels and drips down walls, rendering the thought of summer drought and parched earth unimaginable. Like the lights shining from the harbour, the island holds on for the coming storm tonight and what it might bring.  

When the storms come the leaves fall and the prettiest birds fly away. Those who stay they get the honour of really knowing this place in winter – when it’s showing some elemental truth underneath the surface of summer. The same way we really only know ourselves and our friends when they are not on top form, when life gets messy and stripped back, uncertain and challenging. The darkness of just being. That is what it takes to know a place.

And learning the words, the steps….and persisting.