Greece

Across The Gulf ~ Mirage Or Mountains?

I’m still not sure if the Taygetus mountains of the Mani Peninsula are fact or figment, and I stared at this view for an entire week – at daybreak, at twilight, in sun and in storm. Real or not, these mountains beckoned. And I was entranced. Still am, when I look at the photos. They were taken from Harakopio (Peroulia Beach) in Kalamata, Greece, overlooking the Gulf of Messenia.

I’ve read my Patrick Leigh Fermor (Mani: Travel in the Southern Peloponnese) which sets off most beguilingly, penetrating on foot this all but impenetrable mountain peninsula (that until recent times scarcely had a road into the interior), but then, after some stunning episodes, the account digresses into convoluted regional history that this reader found more uphill-going than the near-vertical terrain. Still, it’s a book worth tackling for the magical inside-Mani experiences. It truly is.

But if the mountains have long kept people out, then it’s a different story for the coastal foothills. Some settlements along the shore, accessible only by sea, have been occupied since Mycenaean times, i.e. the Ancient Greek Bronze Age (c1750-1000 BCE). If you squint, you can see signs of humanity in the first photo.

But that’s enough of the prosaic. These scenes are just for dreaming.

Lens-Artists: the mountains are calling This week Amy sets the challenge.

Once In Kalamata

A few Septembers ago we had a family trip to Kalamata on the Peloponnese. I had not been to Greece before, and it was love at first sight – from the moment we left the airport. There had been a fierce summer that year with no rain and the earth looked parched. I don’t know what it was that spoke to me most – the rugged stony uplands, the everywhere-colonies of feathery phragmites reeds, the wild cyclamen, household clutter around the homesteads and olive groves, the olive groves themselves, the country lanes and then the views of the Taygetos Mountains across the Messinian Gulf. The only downside for us, though quite the opposite for the locals, we brought the rain on our heels, so there are stormy skies as well as china blue ones. It anyway seems like a dream now.

Past Squares #13

Life in Colour: Orange

After The Storm ~ Silver Sky Over Taygetos

And a touch of white: small sailing boat plying the Messenian Gulf between Koroni and Kalamata; a glimpse of white walls on the shoreline; leaves of well-drenched olive trees glinting silver-grey in the afternoon light. Sometimes less is more.

Taygetos dawn, Southern Peloponnese

Life in Colour: white/silver

The Path To Harakopio Revisited ~ Life In Colour

Summer left on our first day in Greece. We might have woken to hot and dazzling sunshine, but by lunchtime the storm clouds were building over the strait. And then came the deluge, torrenting off the pantiles on our cottage roof. Maria, the cottage owner, said it was the first rain in months and after the broiling summer (that we’d only just missed) the olive groves and vineyards were desperate for a good watering. So it was hard to feel too hard-done-by as, before our eyes, the parched Kalamata land sucked up the downpour.

The thunder racketed around for a couple of hours, and finally rumbled off in late afternoon, leaving us with still threatening clouds but, by then, a pressing need to stock up on provisions. We had been told that the nearest supermarket in Harakopio village was an easy two-mile walk. And so it was: a tranquil path between small farms and ancient olive groves; no traffic; only the scent of damp leaf litter and sometimes the delicate fragrance of tiny cyclamen along the verges. There was farm clutter of course along the way, but that goes with the territory. Hens scrattled about under the trees and handsome dogs kept watch over their people’s domains. There was a rather nice horse. Now and then the sun almost shone and I fell in love with gnarly olive trees that looked at least as old as Odysseus.

Life in Colour: green

Out Of The Blue Messenian Blue…

…a view to watch for ever.

July Squares #6 There is some optical fun over at Becky’s

Six Word Saturday And Ninjas at Debbie’s

Seeing Pink In The Peloponnese

The first morning in Greece the sun was so astoundingly bright I panicked. Why had I not brought better sunglasses? How would I get around if I couldn’t see for the dazzle? It took me a while to realize that the effect was caused by the glassy stillness of the Messenian Gulf. It did not last. Nor did that morning’s terrific heat.

We Farrells have a habit of taking our holidays just as summer is ending, and our trip to the southern Peloponnese was no exception. On that morning, the last of high summer departed. By noon a storm had rolled in, cascades of rain pouring down our cottage pantiles. When the rain cleared three hours later, it was a different climate. The sky was grey. I could see where I was going, and I was no longer melting.

Of course we had some sunshine in that last week of September, and the temperature was perfect for exploring Koroni and Pylos. But the season was pretty much over; the beach empty of locals who thought it too cold to be there; fish soup off the menu at the taverna due to lack of mass demand. But if the season was done, there was still much magic – the softer shades of Taygetos Mountain pink at sunrise and sunset. And each day, looking over the Gulf at the wild fortress lands of the Mani, I thought I probably was in heaven.

In the Pink #12

On the Path To Harakopio ~ The Putative Roof

I’ve had a passion for pantiles since childhood when they appeared in a storybook I was reading. The story was set in Spain, and I have absolutely no memory of what it was about. Only the pantiles stuck. Once I had discovered what they were, and that they were made of terracotta, and so were red like clay flower pots, and nothing like the boring, dun-coloured slates on my own house, they gave me my first magical sense of ‘the foreign’ – of lands and peoples beyond my island. But perhaps more than that, they suggested new horizons, and new possibilities; only in my imagination though. My family was not one that ‘went abroad’.

And so this pile of tiles simply had to be recorded on our walk to the supermarket in Harakopio. It is hard to say whether they are leftovers from a past project and thus spares for an existing roof, or if they are a roof in-waiting. Or being Greece, if they are simply there, stacked up under an olive tree.

Here’s an actual Harakopio village roof: interesting compilation of new and old.

And a roof with a very nice datura, the spitting image of the one I once planted in my front garden in Nairobi, bought from a roadside nurseryman.

For more of the walk in words and pix see On the path to Harakopio

Roof Squares #3 Now over to Becky

Of Greek Dogs

During our late summer stay in the hills near Harakopio in the Messinian Peloponnese, I was impressed by the dogs we passed on the lanes. Most were loose, yet they were clearly on duty. No malice was involved, but they barked to let us know that the olive grove we were passing through was under their jurisdiction. As soon as we reached the boundary, the barking ceased only to be taken up by the next property’s guardian.

Back at home some weeks later, I caught the ‘tail end’ of a programme on the BBC World Service, whose content I meant to follow up, but forgot to. Somewhere in the world where the exact location of rural land boundaries had been forgotten by humans, researchers found that they could pretty much identify them from monitoring their dogs’ barking zones.

The thing that struck me about all the dogs in the photos was, while they might be faithful comrades to humans, they still retained a sense of their own canine dignity. They were what I call good dogs.

Variations on a theme

Thoughts Of Sailing A Candyfloss Sea

The weather in Shropshire has taken a frigid turn – flurries of sleet and bone-chilling winds, the need to wear too many vests and socks and feeling that I’m far too nesh to venture out in it. For any reason whatsoever. (Allotment? What allotment?) Which also has me thinking of a warm sea and Peroulia Beach and the rosy displays laid on there each dawn and dusk, and walking through silent olive groves that come down to the shore, the days’ warmth stored in the many seasons’ leaf layers beneath our feet. At sunset we find we have the beach to ourselves. The sea barely lapping the sand, and somewhere across the Gulf, above the Mani’s fortress scarps, a raptor mews. There are no other sounds.

Silence

Tish Farrell

Writer on the Edge