Midstream tactics

The doors are locked, again

Greek unemployment is up again  - 27.6% at latest count, an unthinkable figure to non-Europeans. It's unthinkable to Greeks too, I guess, especially young Greeks who are jobless at twice that rate.  How do people manage without income, we wonder. We're often walking back to the boat from the train station at Piraeus close to midnight, and we've seen surprisingly few people sleeping out, though it's the weather for it, so homelessness doesn't seem to be a symptom of poverty here. Few beggars either, and or people rummaging for food in bins.

Good, simple food - fava bean puree with Santorini capers

Last night, after we'd spent too long thinking through the implications of a feebler Australian dollar on our chosen way of living, we sat at pavement table, watching sleeping dogs and young people. We were in Gazi, a neighbourhood that felt very Surry Hills-ish. We'd gone there to see a modern art museum, the monumental Benaki Pireos, but found it closed when it should have been open. Another of those paper notices taped over the opening hours. At 7.30 pm, when we sat down to eat at an empty restaurant by the train tracks, we thought the place was probably struggling. By 10 pm, we were struggling to catch a waiter's attention to pay our bill. Twenty and 30-somethings were arriving on foot, by bicycle, motorbikes (never a helmet) and small shiny cars which they parked with barely a look at where or how. They were looked care-free. Why not? Summer is summer, still.

I thought of how I would describe Greeks and their attitude to what has befallen them - that is, the drying up of money which had flowed so freely. Hard times for year after year, with no let-up in sight.

Heedless. That's what I came up with. It's not a nasty word and I don't mean it nastily. Young people  are typically heedless, that is, they don't seem to worry too much about consequences. It's what makes them so attractive and so infuriating to worrying grown-ups. It's not that life's too short to agonise over what currency or interest rates will do tomorrow or next month, it's more who can control such things anyway?

Hydra harbour, seen from the Koundouriotis mansion 

We were on Hydra the other day, the island made famous in our lifetimes for the young Leonard Cohen having bought a run-down mansion there in the early 60s. Among his creative friends was our cat Po's new mother, Susan, but that's her story - and we can't tell it, but we thought of Susan, and L. Cohen, when we were there.

Ferry in reverse, 25-30 knot northerly blowing straight into Hydra harbour

Donkeys are the main form of transport and carriage on Hydra

Hydra is beautiful still, not spoiled by its popularity, but it's got a crazy small harbour, and friends had advised not to take our boat in there. So we went as day trippers - the fast ferry takes 2 hours each way. Alex took some wonderful pictures of the craziness in the port as we sat in the shade sipping freddo cappucinos.

The person in the water is trying to retrieve the yacht's fouled anchor

Yachts have their engines running to keep off the town quay 

..but the driving gusts are just too fierce

The problem of the anchor not holding

...and then the wind pushes the boat side-on the the quay

The only way out for this guy is backwards

Boats keep arriving, and anchoring on top of each other

The coastguard is only barely interested

...but she does ask the Ukrainians to squeeze in tighter

Catamarans are the least suitable vessels for small harbours but they're out in force

The big guy doesn't worry about any of this nonsense

My finger has almost grown a full covering of new skin over the wound, thanks in large part to Alex's skilful nursing and dressing of it, and the wind and sea are settling down for a day or so in the Aegean. It's time to get moving again, with care.

Athens interlude

Athena's Parthenon gets a little help from her friends

On the stoop, on the grand promenade beneath the acropolis

Athens is....the Acropolis, of course, and it is people. Lots of them. Some stand out. Take George.  George has a chandlery on the periphery of Zea Marina, which has been our address for a week (Zea is in the Pireaus area, but beyond the sleaze of the port). Every day except Sunday when shops, big and small, stay closed, Alex has found a reason to pop up to see George.

George is gregarious, and very knowledgeable -  he told me the one thing he doesn't know is how to make money, but Alex reckons he knows a bit about that too. His turnover has fallen by 33% in the last few years, he told Alex. Is that all? was my response. 

Enki's new awning deflects direct sun off the aft deck

Since the chandlery, aka Nautilus Yacht Equipment, is usually busy and the wait for his attention lengthy, George's customers tend to fall into conversation with each other.  George's shop is a kind of international boating salon, apparently. Today Alex talked taxis with an Israeli. Yesterday he talked to a well-armed Frenchman about guns. The Frenchman is fitting out an 80 metre yacht to make the high-risk voyage to Australia via the Suez Canal. Needless to say. George is the Frenchman's operations manager in Athens. Alex ended up having a coffee with the Frenchman who showed him a video on his iPad of a hijacked merchant navy ship being sunk by "authorities" with 27 Somali pirates shackled to the railings. The Frenchman said this was the most effective way to deter piracy. 

View of the new Acropolis museum from the acropolis

The top floor of the museum is a stupendous display case for the Parthenon marbles

On the street (and below)

There seem to be such big holes in the infrastructure here, both physical and social, that you wonder how people like George hold their businesses together. A week or so ago,  the Greek government undertook to sack another 15,000 public servants in exchange for the next bail-out instalment of nearly 3 billion euros. This time it's teachers and health workers who are for the chop, amongst others. I don't know if there are any public transport inspectors left on the payroll. We've travelled into the city by train and bus every day (except Sunday) and never seen an inspector and rarely seen a commuter validate his or her ticket, an offence which the notices warn attracts a fine 60 times the value of the ticket. No-one looks worried or furtive so either they are all scrupulously honest or they know the system is broken and travel is free.

On the acropolis

The best ever frozen lemonade

I wasn't looking forward to a week in Athens in early August. But we've done the jobs we came to do, taken delivery of spare parts (so hard to be sure of receiving what you order when you are in Turkey), given my injured finger a break from sea life and rubbed fenders with New Zealanders and Italians. Even better I've found myself acclimatising to the heat (mid 30s) and the cacophony, and forgiving all in any case because the city is so rich in the things I crave.

Bronze bust, circa 1st cent BC

Ornate marble vase found at Mycenae

Cycladic figure circa 3rd millenium BC

Reconstructed Roman theatre under the acropolis

Athens is the culmination for us, and for me in particular, of this past year's exploration of ancient ruins, beginning in Lycia where the spark caught and roaring through the once prosperous Greek cities of Asia Minor, tripping quite by chance over the important Bronze Age site of Poliochni on Limnos and then finding so much to like in Thasos and Eritrea....and now, here in Athens where there is so much more of everything that civilisation has left us, precious finery and elegant domestic utensils, monumental marbles and intricately worked weaponry, more than I could ever have imagined, belonging to staggeringly well-endowed private museums like the Benaki and to the Greek state.

In Athens, mind-blowing wealth co-habits with dereliction and desperation; age holds itself with dignity, whether she be a woman riding the trolley bus with a bulging bag of empty plastic bottles or a retired marine engineer in neatly pressed slacks pleading with you to see beyond his "lovely country's few problems"; and beauty is everywhere, riding pillion behind her boyfriend or squashed beside you on the train, a phone pressed to her ear, her profile as lovely as the marbles you've been gazing upon in the museums.

19th century porcelain, portrait of a Greek beauty

Aphrodite fending off the lecherous Pan with her sandal

There is no time left now to go to Mycenae, whose splendour I saw for the first time yesterday in the National Archeological Museum. So we say to ourselves, next year on the way west, on the way to Gibraltar. We also look like skipping the Cyclades again this year. The meltemi is raging through the islands and the combination of that, my dysfunctional right hand and the press of summer crowds persuades us that next May is a better time to drop anchor in Naxos and Santorini and Amorgos, the islands of which charterers' dreams are made. 

Gold death mask found at Mycenae, called Agememnon's mask

Grave treasure, Mycenae

Fibre optic cables monitor columns of the Parthenon

Settling on Limnos

A calm sea and no wind on a night passage from Lesvos to Limnos

A year ago, I hardly knew one side of the Aegean sea from the other. I couldn't have told you which group of islands were the Dodecanese, which the Cyclades and which the Sporades. Now I know a bit more. I know that a Greek island's position, and the strength of winds and currents in its vicinity, pretty much speak for the course of its history.

Much of Limnos is barren and rocky

The ferry is in and out again within the hour

For thousands of years Limnos was an important stepping stone in the middle of the north Aegean for seafarers (traders and warmongers). It's the closest Greek island to the Dardenelles peninsula which guards the entrance from the Mediterranean into the Black Sea. We Australians and New Zealanders know Limnos (if we do) for Moudros harbour where the Allied fleet launched its disastrous 1915 campaign to take the Dardanelles from the Turks.

The military cemetery in east Moudros glorifies the criminal waste of young boys' lives

We made our way up to Limnos from Oinoussa in one huge step. and have been tied up at the quay in Myrina, the only town of any size on the island, for a few days now, waiting to go north again.

Myrina harbour from the south

View of the town from the fortress

Enki is the biggest yacht on the dock in this shot

Myrina in late June is full of holidaying Greek families, and a sprinkling of others like ourselves - many Australians, as it turns out. People come here to slow down. There are a few good beaches right in town with clean sand and well-secured umbrellas planted evenly along it. There's no doof-doof music, the blight of the Mediterranean along with weed on the seabed (more of that later). At night, the pace is easy.

Enki is moored mid-town

The townspeople come out to play at about 9 pm, when the sun goes down. They push babystrollers, sit in tavernas drinking ouzo or beer, or on benches chatting and laughing. No-one is rowdy, except maybe the older children fooling around on their bikes. It's not until midnight when everyone seems to go home to bed. A floodlit fortress circles the rocky headland which protects the harbour from the prevailing northerlies. It gives the town's nightlife a kind of anchor.

The town is in the lee of the northerlies - and the fortress

North of the harbour, the fortress overlooks beach cafes

Platy beach, about 2 km from town

Aside from low-key tourism and low-key military activity (the Greek airforce command is based on Limnos), there are some vineyards on the island, brick-making, a bit of animal husbandry and of course fishing, but the rest is a mystery to us. How do people make ends meet here? How do people make ends meet anywhere in Greece in 2013?

Main street Myrina

Mary and Andrew Dervidis

We've had dinner tonight with Mary Dervidis and her husband Andrew (left). They kindly took delivery of our spare part - Cathy and Ian of Sea Cloud met them first, and passed us along to them. Mary was born on Limnos, and emigrated with her family to Sydney in the mid '50s, along with half the island, as she tells it. Some people went to South Africa, some to America, and Germany, but most people emigrated to Australia, hoping for a better life. People's faces light up when they learn where we are from. Australia is a kind of satellite suburb of Limnos. Limnos is a satellite suburb of Athens. And Athens is what now? The capital of a down-graded developed country, I read in today's news.

Standard issue fishing boat

Throw yourself back a few thousand years though, and Limnos was at the leading edge of early Bronze Age civilisation.  It's probably not easy for latter-day Limneans to accept that their island's influence peaked between 3000 and 2000 BC, but the evidence is there on the east coast where what's left of retaining walls, paved roads, drains, wells, mansions, public buildings, squares and smaller private houses of the large urban settlement of ancient Poliochni attests to its importance. In its heyday (which lasted for 1000 years) Poliochni was as sophisticated as Troy, which it faced, 40 miles across the water on the west coast of Asia Minor (now Turkey).

Poliochni, early Bronze Age town

A deep well in Poliochni

See this oblong space (at right)? Notice the terraces along the edge of it? Well, the Italian archeologists who excavated the site from the 1930s to the 1950s have decided that this is the earliest example of a municipal debating chamber in European history. Poliochni, they say, was the first "city" in Europe with a basic social and civic structure. You might see a pile of stones, and we did too, after driving across Limnos's barren landscape, but when you let your imagination go wild, those drystone walls start to look quite exciting.

Bronze Age terracotta colander

Poliochni pottery

The next day we popped by the museum in Myrina. It's a gem, housed in an old Ottoman building with large windows looking straight out to the sparkling sea. Inside the cases are objects which simply cannot be, and are never, exhibited in small town museums in the new world - terracotta pots circa 4000 BC,  exquisite marble carvings circa 500 BC, ancient Greek mortgage documents carved into stone tablets, rows of metal tools (Limnos was famous for its metalworkers) and jewellery, the kinds of things we modern humans still keep around the house to make our lives more productive, more comfortable and more pleasurable. 

I have some sailing stories too. Perhaps I should give these more play, but once we're tied up in port suddenly the sea retreats and the land and its clamour blots out what happens on the water. I'll save them for the next post.

That's Mt Athos in the distance