OTHER ANIMALS

Summer brings a new parade of bizzing, buzzing, humming creatures.  Four legged, many legged, some peaceful, some come to disturb the peace

The cicada  or tzitziki.  We'll be hearing their shrill high pitched screeching from sun-up till sun-down soon and know that summer has truly begun.  When the heat is unbearable the saying goes

'the cicada is exploding'

Did you know, 

if a cicada was singing right beside your ear it's song is  loud enough to cause permanent hearing loss?

At the top is the discarded casing of the cicada which it leaves behind as it climbs out to adulthood.

The bottom insect is called a 'chrisomiga' or golden fly in Greek.  Their english name appears to be June Bug.  The bug is a bright shiny green and black.  In days gone by small boys would tie a string around one its legs and swing it around over their heads.  I think nowadays a game like this would be frowned on by grown-ups who are more aware of suffering and sensitive to the environment

How would you like to see this as you stepped into the shower?  I kept my cool and took a photo before quishing it.

One of the frogs which spend the summer hiding behind our pot plants in the garden

A lizard, or maybe a salamander.  In Greek it is a 'samyamithi'.

We see loads of these in the evening and the cool of the night.  They come out to hunt mosquitoes and moths and make high pitched squeaky noises

A praying mantis, or maybe a grasshopper.  One of those harmless green jumpy, flying things.  In Greek they are called 'alogakia' or 'little horses'.

An 'Alexander beetle'.  One of my favourite AA Milne poems

I found a little beetle; so that beetle was his name

And I called him Alexander and he answered just the same

I put him in a matchbox and I kept him all the day..

And Nanny let my beetle out - 

yes Nanny let my beetle out -

She went and let my beetle out -

And beetle ran away

One of the many tortoises that roam slowly over field and by-way.

Villa Galini

An interim post while I enjoy family visitors from downunder. I will be seeing this mansion and much more from the sea tomorrow as we take a 'cruise' around the harbour by water taxi. 

Villa Galini, a neoclassical mansion built in 1892 by a wealthy  greek family.   It sits on a slight slope just above the sea.  Many great personalities have stayed here, authors and artistes.

Galini translates as peace or tranquility.

Every guide book, tourist site on Poros, notes the building and the people who have stayed there in years gone by but it is essentially abandoned.  The building has been closed up for as long as I remember except for a short period during the nineties when it was opened up and the rooms let out.






Just another beautiful mansion.  What makes it stand out is the mellow colour of the red brick, the tangle of bright bouganvillia cascading down the front and around the terrace and its imposing position right above the sea. 




What a place to write or paint!  Imagine being on one of those high terraces where Marc Chagall, Henry Miller, Greta Garbo, Lawrence Durrell and Greek poet and Nobel Prize winner Georgios Seferis drank cocktails and possibly found inspiration, or distraction.



.

The view from its terraces must take in all of Poros harbour, the procession of boats, yachts and fishing tratas, the tiers of  village houses and clock tower.   Most impressive would be the radiant oranges and reds of the evening sun slowly disappearing behind the mountains on the mainland Peloponese, the mountains that climb  up from the seaside village of Galatas to the remains of the german fortifications on its summit.

A trip to New Zealand ..... and back

All this time I had been back to New Zealand once after eleven years.
We couldn't afford the tickets  but the family in NZ very generously got together and paid for all the Greek family to spend Xmas together at my parents beach house at Pukehina in the Bay of Plenty (North Island of New Zealand)

For the first few days New Zealand was  totally foreign.  Green was the dominant colour. Endless fields, trees and grass. The houses were made of wood with real lawn around them. There were blue houses and yellow houses and brick houses, with jacaranda and hibiscus.  None of the fat round bushy basil the greeks planted in an empty olive oil can.  The cars were Japanese or Korean, no longer european and mostly automatic. 

There was a distinct smell of cooking oil covering my old home town.  Fish and chips in some sort of vegetable oil.  The bookshop smelled of unopened, pristine books, and they were all in English!  And there were english magazines.  The radio played music I knew with voices I could understand.  The newspaper was another wonder.  I stared in fascination at the ads  on TV, loving them all while the rest of the family just wanted to turn the sound off.

I was astonished at the variety in the supermarket.  Back then Greece had only just started selling milk in bottles (instead of cans).  European goods were slowly coming into the shops.   A greek mini market had canned tomatoes, milk, tuna and sardines and dried beans and lentils in huge open sacks.  In a NZ supermarket there were aisles of canned goods, freezers full of packaged food.  Shelves full of everything, except octopus, feta and salted fish.  Nowdays Greek supermarkets have freezers full of NZ lamb and NZ supermarkets have shelves of Greek yoghurt and even octopus.

My parent's house was just yards from a white sandy beach and across the road was an estuary where at low tide we could dig for cockles and oysters and my sister in law, Rainy, found us a huge net which we put out one night to catch flounder, with little success but lots of fun.

Ocean beach on one side, estuary on the other

Xmas day was cold ham and trifle and swims in the sea, but only between the flags where the lifeguards could see us.  There was a bad rip out there which often took unwary swimmers out far beyond the waves and into danger.  When the tide was out we dived in the gentler waves and dug for pipis and tuatuas.

The whole family got together, coming from further south in NZ and even from far away Perth in Australia.  My mother and father were thrilled but ensured their peace of mind by moving out into the little guest house off the garage!

The stars seemed so low in the sky, like a twinkling blanket above our heads. Haley's Comet was somewhere up there and we searched the night skies to catch this once in a lifetime appearance.

The little greek-girls could understand english. I had made damn sure of that.  They rebelled a bit against the sterner discipline of kiwi grandparents but generally I think enjoyed the experience, if not that longest of long haul flights from the northern to the southern hemisphere.  

If you've got to go cattle-class at least go Singapore Airlines.  One thing which I will always remember is the way they looked after my two little girls 4 and 5 years old.

Back in Greece I hated the sight of the dusty dirty streets of Athens.  Our flat in Piraeus seemed tiny and it was months before I settled down and got used to the routine of cooking greek food, shopping at the outdoor market and walking everywhere instead of driving.

My Greek Story Part Three Salamina

So we moved from the island of Crete up to the island of Salamina, just out of Athens, which is where the main Naval Base is located.  There we stayed for two years.  New schools for the girls.  Fortunately we found a few friends from Crete  who had also been transferred.  But new schools, new pupils, lots of anxiety.  One of the girls ran away from school while the other began lessons, cut off, in a small room in the churchyard next door.  There were not enough classrooms in the school to accomodate all the students. 

I liked Salamina.  It is very close to Athens, either a twenty minute car ferry ride or an hour by small boat putt-putting into the port of Piraeus.  At weekends the island would be buzzing as hundreds of Athenians with holiday homes filled the streets, beaches and tavernas.  

Once again we lived in a funny little two bedrooms house.  Both bedrooms had no windows and no light but it was cheap and clean and there was parking next door for our car and an empty lot where we dug a pit and spit roasted our lamb at Easter. 

It was back at the end of the eighties.  I remember watching the fall of the Berlin wall on TV there and it was there that we watched the first private run Greek TV channel and the american soap opera, Santa Barbara and the Young and the Restless in english with greek subtitles.  A new era in entertainment.

We made the best of it.  K was home most days and together we explored all the out lying beaches.  We bought a small blow-up boat, loaded it up with our picnic, put on flippers and swam it across to a small island for a day of swimming and snorkelling.  K and the girls dived for mussels on the other side of the island in the polluted waters just off the big Navy Base.  It's lucky we survived the contamination.  The girls learnt to hunt octopus, we saw cuttlefish mating, swam in a thunderstorm.

Salamina

We spent a lot of time with friends, eating out at small tavernas where there were just a few tables and one or two items on the menu, mussels and oysters, pork chops or salt cod.  The girls had a lot of concerns though after their third change of school and we all knew we would be up and moving again soon.

The first summer we spent two weeks at a Navy camp.  A real holiday.  We had a small one bedroomed cabin, cooked simple meals or ate at the cheap restaurant on base.  The sea once again was not the cleanest being just across from the main fleet but there was an Olympic swimming pool where we dived dangerously from a 3 metre board, hanging out there almost every day at the beginning of another sweltering summer.  K went to work during the week but was back each evening so it was a family holiday.

My Greek was reasonable by then .  I could understand everything and communicate well but keeping up with conversation was fraught with problems.  By the time I had understood the subject and wanted to dive in with my own opinion they were off on another topic.  I just tuned out and the long evenings of loud harsh music and tiring chat bored me stiff.  I thanked the lord that I had two small children and could use them as a reason to retreat early.

Salamina was a sort of interlude.  Next we go to Poros.

This is turning into a life story.  One, maybe two chapters, I think and that's it.  But it has got me writing and remembering.  I have promised my two girls that I shall write more.  The bits I've missed out.  But not for this blog.

A kiwi in flight

My Greek story Part two

Part two of my greek story. 

I have been in Greece since 1976.  That is a very long time.  We lived ten years in Piraeus. The last five years in a two bedroomed  flat on the first floor .   Underneath lived a woman without children and the noisy pitter patter of our feet above her head gave vent to much banging on the radiator pipes.  Fortunately we were well liked by the rest of the occupants and never had any other trouble.  

K was away on Navy business a lot of the time and I was on my own.  I used to put both children, around 2 and 3 years old then, in a pushchair, and haul them onto the green bus which took us an hour away to Syntagma Square in Athens.  From there we would walk up to the British Library where at least I could find English books to read.  They saved my sanity.  Not much else in english was available then.  Or we would go for a walk through the National Gardens, feed the ducks and stare for a while at the pitiful 'zoo' of two mangy wolves, a couple of monkeys and a peacock.  Often I would push them up to the top of the Acropolis.  Because I had Greek citizenship I had an official ID card and we were allowed in for free.  Now the Greeks pay just as much as the tourists if they want to see their national monuments.  At least my girls can boast that they have seen all the ancient ruins and not only once or twice.  We would picnic in the ruins around the old Agora (market place) at the foot of the Acropolis and in the temple to Hephaestos (the God of metal working and fire).  It is cordoned off now but then we could go inside and the girls would play around the columns. 

National Gardens

All our entertainments had to be cheap.  We lived on very little and I remember once towards the end of month going to the bank to withdraw our last 500 drachmas.  That is about 3 euros now.  I bought macaroni, sugar and custard powder to give us a few more meals.  The children didn't mind at all. 

I had a network of foreign friends and we met at different houses (apartments) for coffee mornings.  I had to take my unsociable children with me and they did tend to scream a bit in company.  I met a South African couple, Margo a doctor and Jimmy a bank manager now retired, who lived on a yacht in Piraeus marina and they would walk the girls till they calmed down.  We often visited them on their boat.  I valued their friendship tremendously.  Understanding, common language, book swapping, wine drinking.  Manouvering two small children on and off a small yacht was a little complicated but they just took it in their stride even when one of the girls threw their shoes overboard.

 Then my husband, a Naval Officer was transferred to the Navy base at Souda in Crete.  I loved Crete.  We lived in a small village, Mournies, in an 80 year old house for the first year which had great cracks in the floorboards, a leaky bathroom where you sometimes needed an umbrella to go to the loo and watercuts which meant carrying buckets of water from a tap across the road. Great fun.  I even ran the washing machine by pouring in buckets of water at what I deemed to be the right time, water often left in buckets on the balcony to be warmed by the sun. The youngest started schooling at a school where the first two classes were taught by one teacher.  I learnt to read and write with her.  

 Two little Greek girls with haircuts done -at- home and hand-me-downs from their (boy) cousins

  The village people just took us in as their own.  On the first day we moved in we found a big bag of grapes on the doorstep and the villagers just continued to give and give.  We were overwhelmed with oil and tomatoes, and whatever was in season in their gardens.  They gave us advice, looked out for our children who ran free in the fields, invited us into their homes and would take nothing in return.

A village street in Mournies

We would walk for miles through the narrow lanes visiting the other villages, often late at night, singing nursery rhymes in Greek and English at the tops of our voices.  Or just after payday we would visit the local taverna and eat grilled chicken washed down with a very rough strong, dark red wine.  
Coming home we would always be freaked a little by the hooting of the owls.  Time to sing even louder, me in English, the rest in Greek.  I did english animal noises and they would reply in unison with  Greek animal caterwauls.

There was only one store then and two cafenions (where the men went to drink coffee and raki) but down the road was a pitta bakery. OMG those delicious pittas still hot and moist from the oven.  It was lucky we walked a lot.

K brought lots of recruits and fellow officers back to the house and we would have BBQs in the back garden where the pig sty used to be and eat meat from the Navy storehouse, meat which had been in the freezer sometimes for a couple of years and could be as tough as an old shoe.

 The next two years we spent in Navy housing with the girls going to a Navy school.  Life was cheap there.  Everything was subsidised and we managed to buy a small car and start exploring the island.  Crete has everything.  Mountains, cities, lakes, long empty beaches, crowded tourist resorts, small villages and ancient ruins everywhere, most of them unknown back then and unvisited, except by us with a picnic. We went searching for snails when it rained and kept them on the balcony till we cooked and ate them, we saw a goat being born.  We spent the summer on the Navy beach and exploring the island.  We ate for next to nothing at the NATO base.

This is the site of Aptera.  It must have been excavated since we were there.  We used to picinic on some of the huge stones enjoying a panoramic view of the gulf below.  It was overgrown back then and hard to see it's dimensions.

My parents and one of my brothers visited us while we were there and we did more exploring, taking our car to the ruins of Phaestos, Frankocastello, Gortyrs, Mallia, Zakros, Paleokastro.  Knossos, the best known ruins just outside Heraklion I think I visited four times, once on a school trip.

Knossos, partly restored by Arthur Evans

 I loved the life there and actually cried as I saw it disappear into the clouds when we left.  But being in the Navy then meant that every 2 years would mean a transfer.

I'm sorry I haven't scanned any more photos.  When I learn to re-use the scanner  I'll post some more.  This story was just three paragraphs but it seems to have grown as I rewrote.  And this is only part of the memories.  The good memories

The family today (well two years ago).  I took the photo

My Greek story. Part One

It is rather long so I'll break it up into two or three posts.

Born and bred in far away New Zealand I had to get out and see the rest of the world and all the relatives in the northern hemisphere.  Nowadays this is called the OE (overseas experience, I think) and almost every young person downunder has that same urge to get up and go.  Youth.

  I just did not go back.  Not for 11 years.  Seems incredible now but after 3 years in London and 2 trips around the Continent (Europe) I found Greece and my greek.   I came out on holiday from London with a friend and found a job for the summer in a hotel on the island, working with my husband's cousin.  We visited Marthitsa on her name day. Word went round the neighbourhood in an instant that there were some foreign girls (think 'aliens') at her house and in another instant the funny little cave like house was filled with eager 'sightseers' peering in at us, including all the male cousins.  And that's how I met K.

 At the time he was already in the Navy working on a destroyer and had a tiny roof top 'apartment' (think store cupboard with a bathroom) in Piraeus.  We married without his parent's blessing but for me it didn't matter, we lived in the city, a long way away.  With the first child came acceptance, even though it was not a boy.  My mother in law told me she would not have objected if I had a dowry, a house of course, which my brothers should have provided, unbeknown to them, when we married.

  We married, had two girls and now we have five grandchildren.  Doesn't matter how long I'm here I'll always be a foreigner.  It's not just my accent, it is my whole way of thinking. 

On children.  Back then every good greek wife was supposed to provide half a dozen sons and a couple of girls to look after their parents in old age.  In some places when asked how many children they had a mother or father would answer 'two children and a daughter' instead of 'three children'.

  Just a note on the accent.  I always prided myself on my wonderful grasp of the Greek language and the masterly way I spoke.  Prick that bubble!   I heard myself on tape one day and couldn't believe the way I spoke, with harsh New Zealand vowel sounds and the way I tortured the pronunciation was excruciating.   No wonder my grandchildren laugh at my mistakes and my neighbour screws up her brows trying to understand. 

It was, and I believe still is, difficult for a kiwi to stay here for any length of time.  I had to apply for a visa or leave the country every 3 months and re-enter to get permission to stay for another 3 months.  Twice I left the country taking the overnight ferry from Patras to Brindisi, getting an exit stamp and coming back on the next boat to receive another 3 month stamp in my passport.

Yes, that really is us.  Love sick pigeons.

But we did get married and I got dual citizenship.  Citizenship and the marriage meant a lot of work.  So much red tape, so many papers to gather, from the embassy, the police, the department of immigration and references from the community.  A paper to say I had not been married before, translated offically by a women in  a grotty office up 5 flights of stairs in the middle of Athens.  Another paper from the church in NZ to say I had been baptised Church of England and could thus be married in an Orthdox Church without being re-baptised.  My mother just happened to be working as a secretary for some Church of England Bishop and arranged it quite easily.  I had a paper from our local Orthodox Priest to say..what?  I was a nice Christian girl?  I can't remember.   And finally I had to swear before a Notary and sign in triplicate that I would let my children be brought up as Greek Orthodox.

Meanwhile my mother in law, through some educated neighbour, had written a letter to my parents telling them to come and take their daughter back home.  They would find a nice Greek girl for their son.  On the wedding day the Priest almost backed out because someone had phoned and threatened him a with a lawsuit if he carried out the ceremony.  Back then Naval officers were not supposed to marry without the permission of a senior officer.

Kyria Eleni, my mother in law.  We eventually got to almost like each other.  It took a few years but I did come to realise that I really was an alien as far as she was concerned and I turned her known world upside down.

Reading all that I am gobsmacked that I am still here, legally married, 40 years later, with a Greek family!

  Now with civil marriages between foreigners in places such as Santorini and our own 'Daskalio', the little heart shaped island as you enter Poros harbour, it has to be so much easier.

  It is many years since NZ had an embassy here.  There is a phone number you can ring and a man in some small office will advise if you're lucky.

Democracy, Women and some ramblings

'Democracy' began in the city state of ancient Athens.  Adult males who had completed their military training got the vote, about 20% of the total population. 

Both  Plato and Aristotle saw democracy as an unjust system.  They complained that equal rights meant that the far more numerous poor were able to tyranise the rich.  Somehow modern man has been able to turn the tables so now the minority rich manipulate and tyranise the poor.

Women could not vote because they were not citizens of Athens.  They could not vote, inherit or own land.  Except in the State of Sparta they could not drink wine.  

  Good old 'philosopher' Aristotle believed that women were not intelligent enough to make important decisions.. 
Modern Greek men felt the same.  The general consensus was that a woman voter would be dangerous.   

...women were hysterical, illogical and unpredictable when they had their period and since the menstrual cycle of all Greek women did not coincide, 'when would the election vote be?

At the time, for many women of higher social class it was considered unladylike to vote.  Prominent actress Marika Kotopoulo did not want to vote because 'voting was only for ugly women and those that did not want to bear children'.
Thank you 'greekreporter.com'

I didn't really want to get into all that but reading up on women's rights in Greece found  these 'fascinating' notions and thought I might share them .


28th May 1952 
is the anniversary of the day all Greek women got the right to vote and be elected to Parliament .

In 1930 they were given the right to vote but only if they were over 30 and had finished grade school (primary school I assume).  Very few girls finished school back then. My mother in law went for three years but never completed her schooling. Her two sisters did one year at school and then went out to reap and sow, pick olives, make cheese and tend the livestock. Neighbour Vaso left school  after two years. Mother in law was sent out to shepherd the family goats.  Vaso was a child labourer in the fields and at age 10 was bringing in cash to help her family survive.  She often survived she said by eating mandarins during the day and eating a bowl of beans or artichokes at home in the evening, whatever her mother had managed to put together for their family of 11.

In 1953 the first female deputy was elected to the Greek Parliament

68 women were elected in 2015

In this parliament there are 54 women. Not many out of 300.

No woman has ever been elected PM but we did have an interim female Prime Minister in 2015. She was head of a caretaker government for one month.

Greek women have come a long way.  My two daughters could have grown-up to become a captain in the merchant navy, university professor, bus driver or  electrician.  Men and women get the same education, have the same opportunities and are mostly treated as equals.

As I have mentioned before, Vaso made sure all her children were well educated and had steady jobs. One of her daughters became a chief of police and the other a school teacher. Her granddaughters are university educated and one is now doing her doctorate at Oxford university in england. A huge change for women in two generations.

My mother in law was not so enlightened and would not let her daughter (my sister in law) continue on for high school education although the teachers tried their best to persuade  her that her daughter was bright and capable of  getting a good job and salary.  My sister in law was sent to a seamstress so she could learn to sew and mend for the family.

No longer, as my mother-in-law believed, is a woman born only to marry, bear male children and look after the men in the family. She has her own dreams and ambitions.  She is free.