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

 

 

The Garden in Late May

It is a busy time in the garden right now as the May weather has provided perfect growing conditions.

Kim is busy looking after the perennial and shrub beds and preparing summer bedding for later displays…

My job is the vegetable plot where I am growing potatoes, beans and peas, tomatoes, onions and courgettes.  All coming along very nicely indeed.

After a couple of hours labour each day, it is time to sit back and enjoy…

East Yorkshire and the Thirty-Seven Mile Holderness Coast

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 – Northern Spain

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.

Read the full story Here…

Ten Years Ago – A Street Market in Turkey

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.

Read the full story Here…

 

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 – P (Rho) is for Ρόδος or Rhodes

The island of Rhodes is one of the most interesting and has been inhabited for six thousand years and due to its geographical position on the major Mediterranean Sea trade routes is situated at a natural crossroads between Europe, the Middle East, and Africa and this has given the city and the island many different identities, cultures, architectures, and languages over its long and varied history.

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…