The widespread use of blue paint emanates from an ancient belief that the colour has the power to keep evil away. It is believed that the radiation of the colour composes a sort of invisible shield, which prevents the approach of bad spirits.
“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
The Feast of Saint Paul’s Shipwreck
Santa Eulalia and the Thirteen Tortures
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.
Posted in backpacking, Beaches, Estonia, Greece, Greek islands, Greek Taverna, Literature, Postcards, Travel
Tagged Agnadi Hotel Skiathos, Culture, Cyclades, Life, Lost Luggage, Skiathos, Sporades Islands Greece, TUI, World Heritage
I mentioned this in a previous post – Bridlington is the lobster capital of Europe, landing over three hundred tonnes of North Sea lobster a year and this staggering amount is more than anywhere else in Europe.
According to the Government’s Marine Management Organisation, lobster fetches the highest average price of all species landed by the UK fleet at over £10 per kilogram, they account for only two per cent of the weight of shellfish landings, but twelve per cent of the value. Which is why Bridlington, which lands almost no actual fish, is Yorkshire’s most lucrative fishing port. The shellfish it lands is worth £7.2m more than all the fish and shellfish landed at Grimsby and Whitby combined £4m of which is accounted for by lobster.
As we completed the beach walk and entered the town via the harbour I thought that I might find a fishmonger and get some lobster to take home.
This proved to be rather more difficult than I imagined. Almost all of the lobster is exported to Europe because in the UK we don’t eat a lot of lobster and they certainly don’t eat a lot of lobster in Bridlington because it is just too expensive for a town teetering on the lower end of the UK deprivation scale – 5 out of 10, so just below average.
I found it difficult to even find a fishmonger and when I did the lobster for sale looked rather pathetic, not like a premier display of sea food that I was hoping for so I quickly abandoned the idea.
Instead I thought that we mind find a seafood restaurant and have some lobster for lunch. We found a likely promising place on the harbour and scanned the menu in the window. Plenty of fish on offer but by the lobster choices was a hand written note – not available today. That was the end of the quest for lobster in Bridlington.
So instead I will have to tell you about my disastrous lobster meal in La Rochelle in France twenty years ago in 2003.
To set the scene I have to go back five years when I was there on a business trip looking at Semat Refuse Collection Vehicles and the company salesman took us out in the evening to a restaurant called Andre’s, a top class sea food restaurant on the harbour.
Back to 2003 now and with the family I was showing off and booked a table at Andre’s with the intention of eating lobster. Everything was going to plan, I ordered, Sally my daughter, selected crab and Jonathan, my son, went for the steak and then the evening fell rapidly part.
The waiter came to the table and introduced me to a live lobster for my approval. I wasn’t expecting that and neither was Sally who immediately burst into tears. This really spoilt the evening, no one wanted the lobster after that and I had to eat the whole thing myself and most of the crab as well. Jonathan carried on as nothing had happened and made his way through his steak dinner.
For a few years after that every time Sally asked for money for this, that or the other and if I said no she would recall the expensive incident and just look me in the eye and blackmail me with the line – “Dad, do you remember – €50 for a lobster!”
On the final day at Skipsea Sands Holiday Park we drove north of Bridlington to Sewerby Hall, a Grade I listed Georgian country house set in fifty acres of landscaped gardens. There is a very good herbaceous garden that Gertrude Jekyll would have been proud of but it was too early in the year to see it at its absolute best.
The Hall itself was interesting with rooms decorated and furnished in keeping with the period, a film show, a dressing up room and some interesting reconstructions and story boards.
When we had finished with the Hall we walked three miles to Bridlington, this time along the North Beach. We planned to stop for a drink but there were some black clouds beginning to form so we walked the three miles back to Sewerby Hall in about half the time that it took to walk the opposite way.
This was our fourth time at Skipsea Sands Holiday Park and we agreed that it could well be our last but never say never again and who knows? It costs less than £10 a night to hire a holiday home (caravan) at this time of year. Maybe we will be back again same time next year.
Posted in Europe, Food, France, History, Portugal, Travel
Tagged Bridlington, Bridlington North Beach, east Yorkshire, La Rochelle, Lobster, Seweby Hall
I begin with a question. What is the longest uninterrupted stretch of beach in the UK? I mean the longest stretch that can be walked end to end without having to leave it at any point to get around estuaries, rivers, cliffs, ports or towns?
To be honest I don’t have the answer, I have Googled it and there is no help but I am willing to wager that it is the Holderness coast in East Yorkshire. It stretches all the way from Bridlington harbour to Spun Head at the mouth of the Humber estuary and it is possible to walk the entire distance without ever leaving the sand. Few people know this because it isn’t in Cornwall or on the South coast and celebrities don’t make TV programmes about it. Is it just me but does anyone else get fed up with programmes about bloody Cornwall.
It stretches for a distance of thirty-seven miles.
I am more than happy to consider alternative suggestions of course.
I couldn’t manage the full thirty-seven miles in one day but today we planned to walk a seven mile stretch from the caravan park at Brampton Sands to Bridlington, a distance of about seven miles or so, give or take a yard or so.
We set off just after high tide. The weather was wild but not cold, big seas, a blustery wind that tugged at our shirt buttons and the occasional threat from a rogue wave that was in apparent denial that the tide was going out and not coming in as it swept in and rearranged the pebbles with a clattering sound like the percussion section of an orchestra.
For a mile or so there was no one else sharing our beach, deserted sands, pill-box remains fallen into the sea, a splendid lonely isolation as we walked on between the rapidly eroding cliffs on one side and the wild angry sea on the other.
Along the way we came across a colony of Swifts who had build nests in the cliff face. I say cliffs but this is soft mud not solid rock. Anyway they were going and coming at great speed and you will have to take my word for this because they are so fast that I was quite unable to catch a single picture of just one of them. They are the fastest land bird of all, flying at a speed of seventy miles an hour in level flight.
After leaving the nest a young bird spends up to four years in the air without coming down, they eat and sleep on the wing, they fly five hundred miles a day and most impressive of all they also mate in the air. To put that into perspective the only way a human can get a shag while flying is to join the mile high club on a Boeing 737.
A little further on we chanced upon some Oyster Catchers busy dining among the pebbles, they let us approach but not get too close before taking to flight but thankfully they were not as quick as the Swifts.
And then there was a problem. We came to a field drainage outfall that due to the recent heavy rains was in full flow, maybe two or three inches deep and about five yards wide. Maybe this was a turning back point? No, surely not!
I ventured forth and attempted to jump the fast flowing watery streams, I made the first and the second but then got carried away and quite forgot that what I could manage forty years ago I cannot manage now and took one optimistic jump too many and landed ankle deep in ice cold water with a resulting wet boot.
Kim was a lot more sensible and took time to collect rocks to make a stepping stone path and fifteen minutes later when she was eventually satisfied with her construction efforts daintily crossed over and we carried on. I manfully kept quiet about my wet foot and soggy sock.
After an hour or so we arrived at Bridlington South Beach, as good as any beach in England in my opinion, a fabulous stretch of golden sand, busy I guess in the Summer months but quite deserted today. Just a few dog walkers. I really liked it. I didn’t like the dog walkers.
From there we passed to the harbour, I was hoping to buy some Bridlington Bay lobster. I told you about that in a previous post.
Ten years ago today we were staying in the delightful town of Santillana del Mar in Northern Spain.
There is apparently an old saying that Santillana del Mar is The Town of Three Lies, since it is neither a Saint (Santo), nor flat (llana) and has no sea (Mar) as implied by the town’s name. However, the name actually derives from Santa Juliana (or Santa Illana) whose remains are in the kept in the Colegiata, a Romanesque church and former Benedictine monastery.
Posted in Cantabria, El Cid, Food, History, Natural Environment, Spain, Travel, World Heritage
Tagged Cantabria, Cantabrian Mountains, Culture, Jean Paul Satre, Life, Santillana del Mar, Spain Festival
The market was about one hundred yards long and we made it to the top with only a couple of purchases but then of course we had to turn around and walk all of the way back and run the gauntlet of the stallholders for a second time. Sally seemed to pick up the knack of bartering much easier than I did and I think we bought some tee shirts and a couple of bracelets but to be honest I can’t be absolutely sure.
Posted in Arts and Crafts, Childhood, Europe, Food, Hotels, Morocco, Travel, Turkey, World Heritage
Tagged Culture, Efes Beer, Life, Market bartering, Market Shopping, Markets, Sarigerme, Suntopia Tropical Hotel
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.
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 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.
Posted in Arts and Crafts, Europe, History, Holland, Literature, Natural Environment, Postcards, Travel, World Heritage
Tagged Amsterdam, Life, Photography, Spalding, Spalding Flower Parade, Travel, Tulip Fields, Tulip Summit.
Have Bag, Will Travel 