Skiathos, Greece – No Improvement, Getting Worse

“It takes a lifetime for someone to discover Greece, but it only takes an instant to fall in love with her” – Henry Miller

Next morning without essentials we took a walk to the nearest supermarket which was rather like climbing Mount Everest, to purchase tea bags.  Back at the room – no electricity so no cup of tea.

At least the sun was shining.

After climbing Mount Everest for a second time we took the local bus into the town to purchase more essentials.  Tee shirts, swimming gear and a dress for Kim, luckily all over in thirty minutes or so.

As we stopped for breakfast, a cup of tea and a Greek cheese pie I read about some of the legends of the island of Skiathos.

Before I get to that however, I return to the matter of tea.  Based on official statistics one third of all visitors to the island are from the UK where we drink lots of tea so, you would think wouldn’t you, that the island cafés and restaurants would be aware of this and have it on their menus.  Not so, you can get all sorts of rubbish teas – camomile, green, mint and then almost every variety of fruit in the World but black tea is curiously missing.  We had the foresight to bring our own tea bags so we just paid for a cup of hot water each.

Back to the legends now…

Every Greek Island has its own ancient Diety, they are shared out among them in a sort of, appropriate for Greece, democratic process  Skiathos has Dionysus, the god of wine and pleasure, which once again is quite appropriate for what is mostly a Summer party island for young people.

These folk don’t seem to be having a lot of fun.  Maybe they have lost their luggage as well, they don’t look happy…

But now I come to Saints and as some of you will know I do like an unlikely Saint story.

According to legend, one night in 1650 a monk called Symeon, who led a disciplined and  ascetic life was intrigued to see a twinkling light in the forest.  Upon approaching it, the light receded, only to reappear and disappear again several times so that he was unable to see exactly what it was.

Intrigued by this he stuck around to investigate and after fasting and meditating for several days (fasting always helps it seems) he finally saw that it was a small icon of the Virgin Mary swaying away in the top of a tall pine tree.  As they do.

Convinced that he had witnessed a miracle he rushed back to report the incident to the priest in his village.   The next day, the excited villagers followed Symeon back to where the mysterious light had been shining. Legend has it that the light grew brighter and brighter, the closer the people got.

When they all saw the icon hanging from the tree a young priest climbed up to retrieve it, placing it in the chapel where Symeon served.  It would later be placed in the Three Hierarches church of Skiathos town for safe keeping.

Here it is…

The Holy Monastery of Evangelistria was built in honour of this miraculous event, and dedicated to the Virgin Mary as the island’s patron Saint and protector.

Once every year the icon is removed from the Cathedral in Skiathos and paraded through the streets and taken on a ten mile pilgrimage to the monastery.

It was possible to take a bus to visit the monastery but with the sun shining, the temperature rising and without suitable holiday attire we chose instead to return to the hotel for lunch.

There is another legend/story about the The Holy Monastery of Evangelistria which concerns the flag of Greece.   Leading Greek fighters of the 1821 Revolution against Ottoman rule in the Greek War of Independence met at the monastery in Skiathos to discuss tactics and over a glass of ouzo or two designed, adopted and raised the flag as a symbol of Greek nationalism.

Originally it was blue with a white diagonal cross which was symbolic of the Christian faith but the cross has now been moved to the upper left corner to make way for the horizontal stripes.  Being a seafaring nation, the blue of the flag represents the colour of the sea.  White is the colour of freedom, which is something that is very important to the Greeks after years of enslavement under foreign domination.  The nine stripes of the flag each symbolise a syllable in the Greek motto of freedom – E-LEY-THE-RI-A-I-THA-NA-TOS, which translates literally into ‘Freedom or Death’.

After lunch we simply let the day slip away as we sat on the terrace in our underwear.  The electricity supply was restored late afternoon and we occasionally checked our phones for any updates on the missing luggage.  It came through late in the evening.  The bags would be arriving in Skiathos the following day but it would take the airport another day to sort it all out and deliver them to us but as recompense compensation was now increased to £250 per suitcase.

“There is always a flip side to a dud penny” – John Corden

Kim made plans for a second day of shopping and I wasn’t going to get away with just thirty minutes this time that was for certain..  Oh Joy.

Other Unlikely Saint Stories…

St Edmund, the Patron Saint of Pandemics

Saint James and Santiago de Compostella

Saint Patrick and Ireland

Saint Spiridon and Corfu

The Feast of Saint Paul’s Shipwreck

Saint John of Bridlington

Santa Eulalia and the Thirteen Tortures

Saint Lucy of Syracuse

 

 

Skiathos, Greek Islands – Not a Great Start

The hardest crusts always fall to the toothless” – Cypriot proverb

Last year we went to Portugal with holiday company TUI and they inconvenienced us by making several changes to the flight schedules which resulted in the loss of a complete day of the trip. We said that we would never go on holiday with TUI again.

Six months later we broke that vow and booked a holiday to the Greek island of Skiathos in the TUI January sale.   A noisy fun island which attracts young high spirited people in high Summer but we gambled that it would be less frantic in early May.

After breezing through the check in and the security processes we settled in to wait for the call to the departure desk.  Once on board we waited in eager anticipation for the pilot to confirm take off.  Suddenly there was a crackle of intercom and the introduction from the pilot and then some unwelcome news.

It was raining in Skiathos, the short runway, which is apparently notoriously difficult, was wet and the plane was too heavy to land safely.  The TUI solution was to offload half of the suitcases from the hold and promise that they would follow on tomorrow.  I had some medication in my bag ( a couple of epi-pens in case of an allergy emergency) and was allowed off the plane to retrieve them so grabbed a few items that I thought might be useful such as phone chargers and sun lotion and returned to my seat in the certain knowledge that mine was one of the one hundred.  We hoped that Kim’s might still be on board.

Half way into the flight more news and an apology and a caveat to the earlier promise, this time the pilot said that they would do all they could to get our luggage to us as soon as possible and later still this was watered down again to the company hopes to get our bags to us some time next week.

This has happened to us before when we flew to Reykjavik with British Airways and Kim’s luggage went missing for five days so our optimism was beginning to sink to our boots. 

The aircraft landed at Alexandros Papadiamantis Airport, named after one of the most famous writers in all of Greece who was born and lived on the island of Skiathos.  Later in the week I visited his house, a museum now and purchased a translation of one of his short story novels.

At the baggage reclaim we optimistically watched the conveyor belt complete about five full cycles, maybe six, maybe seven, and a forlorn pink suitcase go round at least four times, when it slowly began to dawn on us that the bag probably wasn’t going to come through the little hole in the wall where the luggage came from. I had a last look through the heavy plastic flaps to see if maybe it had fallen off the belt before coming through but it was hopeless.  We had to concede the inevitability of our predicament that we were completely without luggage except for my epi-pens and the phone chargers.

It was nine o’clock in the evening, the supermarkets were shut so we were forced to take a taxi (I hate taking taxis) and ask the driver to find us somewhere where we might be able to purchase essentials.  He took us to a mini-market where Kim concentrated on shampoo, deodorant and soap and I looked for a couple of bottles of wine.  We continued to the hotel in stunned silence.

At the Agnadi hotel and studios there was happily something to smile about, the location was excellent, the rooms were very good in that very simple Greek style and after we had settled in (quite a short process of course with no luggage to unpack) we returned to the hotel bar and small restaurant and enjoyed a really rather fine Greek meal.  We looked forward to a confirmation e-mail that the luggage would be delivered the following day.  I confess that I didn’t go to bed in an especially optimistic mood.

Sometime during the night I received an e-mail apologising for the problem with the luggage and explaining that due to logistical issues the bags wouldn’t be arriving today after all. Apparently they were being taken from East Midlands airport to Birmingham.  I wasn’t especially surprised about that I have to say.  It thanked me for my understanding and patience which I thought was rather presumptuous because I was neither.  It was a no-reply email so I was unable to tell them that.  On the positive side it offered financial compensation 0f £50 for each bag on production of receipts for essential items.  As far as I was concerned everything in my bag was essential so £50 wasn’t going to adequately cover it.

My heart sank for a moment but it lifted immediately when I opened the door of the room and I was rewarded with a most wonderful view.

Entrance Tickets – Archaelogical Sites of Bodrum

I decided to take the opportunity to seek out more ruins and set off to find the site of the Mausoleum of Mausolus, the origin of the word mausoleum and one of the original Wonders of the Ancient World.  This was once a magnificent forty-five metre high marble tomb, decorated with statues and friezes and built in the third century BC as a burial chamber for King Mausolus of Caria.

Read the full story Here…

How the Tulip got its Name

In my previous post I talked about the Spalding Tulip Festival and it reminded me of one of my favourite Tulip stories…

… This is not a botanical story but one of linguistic misunderstanding…

The name Tulip was first applied to the plant by a man called Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq who was a Dutch ambassador in Turkey in the sixteenth century and was also a great floral enthusiast.  One day he was talking to a sultan and he noticed that he was wearing an attractive flower in his head wear.

When I say talking what I mean is that they were communicating with each other in the way that people do when they can’t speak each other’s language with lots of funny faces and wild gesticulations and misunderstandings.

I digress here and give an example from my own experience…

Now, I know that like most English people my grasp of foreign languages is not that good but this experience in the Spanish city of Palencia was quite bizarre.

“Catedral?” I enquired and the poor man (victim) that I had selected just stared back at me with an expressionless face as though I was a visitor from another planet.   So I tried again but this time, remembering that upside down question mark thing at the beginning of the sentence I tried to sound a bit more Spanish, “¿Catedral?” but his face went so blank that I though rigor mortis had set in.  I have to say that Catedral sounds a bit like Cathedral to me so I don’t know why this was so difficult but his solution was to call someone else over who was an obviously educated man who spoke excellent English and with optimism I tried again “¿Catedral?”

To my astonishment he immediately adopted exactly the same blank face as the first man so I tried again in various different accents and voice inflections. “¿Catedral?”  “¿Catedral?”  “¿Catedral?”  Nothing, Nothing, Nothing.  I really cannot understand why this should be so difficult.  If a Spanish man came up to me in Lincoln and asked for directions to the Cathedral – however he might pronounce it, I am fairly sure that I could make out what he was asking for.   Eventually I gave up, added the h sound and just asked in English for directions to the Cathedral and amazingly I immediately made myself understood and the man smiled and said “Ah, Catedral!” which, I am fairly certain is exactly what I said in the first place.

To continue…

Busbecq was curious about the flower and pointed to it and enquired its name.  In Turkey the name of the flower was a Lale (prounced lalay) but the Sultan thought he meant what is the name of his hat so he told him it was a Tulipan or turban and Busbeqc, who completely misunderstood, acquired some bulbs and sent them back to Europe with the information that they were called Tulipa.

A good job that he wasn’t wearing a pork pie hat or tulips would be porkies!

Now, this is important information in case we have another vegetable supply crisis.

All parts of tulips are edible and the bulb can be substituted for onions (although they are a little more expensive and less flavourful). The Dutch ate tulip bulbs in the hard times of World War Two even though the petals have little taste but could be used to garnish a dish, chop a few petals and throw them in a salad, sugar them to decorate a cake or use the entire flower for a fruit bowl, pinching out the pistil and stamen in the middle.

Incidentally the tulip is the national flower of Iran and Turkey where it is still called the Lale.

The Spalding Flower Parade

The history of the Spalding Flower Parade stretches back to the 1920s when the sheer number and variety of tulip bulbs grown throughout the area surrounding the market town became an annual feast of colour.

The crowds that came in created many problems for the town and coaches and cars caused chaos on the narrow lanes around the fields and this continued to happen until in 1948, the Growers’ Association became involved in organising a Tulip Week.  With the help of the Royal Automobile Club, a twenty-five mile tour through villages and country lanes was planned to show the best fields.

Read the full story Here…

Greek A to Ω – Π (Pi) is for Πειραιάς or Piraeus

A bus ride to Piraeus is a truly unique experience.

The roads were busy but the driver of the blue Solaris flexibus seemed totally oblivious to other vehicles as he charged along at high speed, switching lanes, clattering over tram lines and tossing the passengers about like the Saturday night lottery balls on hard unyielding plastic seats.  Luggage flew out of the overhead racks and passengers not gripping on tightly were thrown from their seats.  Suitcases were scattered along the floor and little children were thrown into the air.

Read the full story Here…

Entrance Tickets – Córdoba and the Mezquita

I began this series of posts about Entrance Tickets in April 2014 and this was one of the early ones.  I cannot really explain why but I have always kept my Entrance Tickets and they remain safely stored in a travel memory box.

The series of posts cannot go on much longer however.  I am running out of material, not because I no longer visit places when I am travelling but because so many places no longer issue paper tickets.  Booking is done on line and instead of a ticket there is a QR code on a mobile phone to swipe through a scanner.

I like the feel of a ticket, I like told it between my fingers and judge the quality, this one at Cordoba was especially fine and then I like to carefully put it in between the pages of my guide book to make sure that it doesn’t get creased.

I think that this is rather a shame.  Places generally need to be booked in advance with an allocated time slot.  It is no longer possible to wander up to a entrance booth, hand over cash and  receive a nice shiny Entrance Ticket in exchange.  Somehow it takes the spontaneity out of city break travel, everything has to be done according to a timetable.

Read the full story Here…

Entrance Tickets – The Talylynn Railway

The Talyllyn Railway is a narrow-gauge preserved railway in Wales that runs for nearly sixteen miles from the town of Tywyn on the Mid-Wales coast to Nant Gwernol near the village of Abergynolwyn. The line was opened in 1866 to carry slate from the quarries at Bryn Eglwys to Tywyn, and was the first narrow gauge railway in Britain authorised by Act of Parliament to carry passengers using steam haulage.

Read the full story Here…

Return to Skipsea, Big Changes

The first time that I went there in 2019, I fell in love with Skipsea almost immediately.  I liked the caravan, I liked the holiday park, I liked the countryside and I liked the beach and the sea.  The exceptionally fine weather helped of course.

I returned again post covid in August 2021 and then again just nine months ago in July 2022.  As the time approached to book a cheap Spring deal again earlier this year (2023) nothing would have stopped me going there again.

 Let me explain about caravan holiday deals.

In the UK there is a very cheap and nasty daily newspaper (I use that description newspaper very loosely) called T’he Sun’ and several years ago they launched a voucher scheme that once collected allowed readers to book cheap caravan holidays in the UK. 

The Sun newspaper is a curious conundrum, it supports the right wing Tory government and its extreme political views which cares nothing for the middle and working class and the middle and working class read the Sun and vote Tory.  It is absolutely unbelievable.

I would never buy the Sun toilet tissue so I never got to benefit from the offer but a few years ago the voucher codes began to be published on-line so it was possible to get the offer without buying the rag.

So, I booked a caravan in my favourite resort of Skipsea for four nights for just £60, everything included.  An absolute bargain.

On arrival, too early to book in, we took a walk to the seafront and were in for a nasty shock.  Only nine months ago there were cliff top chalets which although being in danger of falling into the sea had a sort of seaside charm with friendly owners and there were steps down to the beach.  All had changed. 

A severe winter and a succession of storms had eroded the cliffs to danger levels, the local Council had negotiated a property exchange and compensation and  after the no doubt relieved owners had moved out the gypsies had moved in and now there were caravans, ponies, big dogs, piles of rubbish, bonfires and the acrid smell of burning tyres.  I felt immediately uneasy.

Where had they come from I wondered? Where had they come from I worried?

The village of Skipsea and the adjacent caravan site  Skipsea Sands sits precariously on Yorkshire’s East Riding coast which is said to be the fastest eroding coastline in Europe. Since the Doomsday Book was completed in 1086 twenty-six villages along this stretch of coast have been lost to the sea. Cutting new steps to the beach is an annual job.

The advance of the sea is relentless.  Every year along the Holderness coast nearly two metres of coastline is swept away, an estimated average of two million tonnes which is moved south on the tides towards the Humber estuary and builds new unwanted land there whilst it takes it away here where they would very much like to keep it.

Sea defences are just not financially viable (after all, it isn’t in the south of England), the area is officially designated as a zone of ‘no active intervention’ and it is inevitable that another twenty houses and a fish and chip shop will soon be lost to the waves.  The Local Council is like King Canute and cannot control the sea.

These are houses that were built as recently as 1985 and at that time had long gardens and a road running  along the front but that all seems rather foolish now. There were once houses on the other side of the road too but they had already gone which should perhaps have acted as a warning to the people who bought these properties as holiday homes.  An especially violent storm in the winter of 2008 took the road away and the waves have gnawed away at the soft clay cliffs every year since.

The gypsy community is clearly prepared to take the risk, if the houses and all their rubbish fall into the sea they don’t really care, they will just move on.  The Environment Agency should deal with it but I doubt the balls to do so.  Gypsies can be tough people to deal with.

This was all rather disappointing, they had even blocked off access to the very fine beach.  I try not to be judgemental but I don’t trust gypsies, I had several incidents with them in my working life, they live by a different set of social rules from normal folk.

Anyway, we weren’t going to let this setback spoil our holiday.  Tonight we were staying in a caravan just five hundred yards away so I took the precaution of putting my wallet and car keys under the mattress before I went to sleep that night.

Gypsies are not known for their hospitality…

Ten Years Ago – Siguenza in Spain

Leaving the market it occurred to us that we had practically done everything there was to do in Sigüenza and it was only just past lunch time so we walked to the railway station to see if there was any possibility of catching a train to another city on our ‘to visit’ list, Zaragoza.

The station was curiously quiet, there were no staff on duty and the main hall was being used by a group of small boys playing indoor football.  We found a timetable but it revealed a train service so infrequent that it was practically useless so we abandoned that idea and decided to drive to nearby Atienza instead.

Read the full story Here…