It strikes me that travelling around the Greek islands is probably like what space travel will be one day. As you steam past in your ferry spaceship they all look like chunks of mineral matter with scrub and sometimes dots of habitation on them but when you land, each one has a made a different choice about how to be. Lesbos, earthy umber roofs and olive dominated. Magical Mykonos, an ethereal white cloud nine and now there’s Santorini to discover.
Mind you getting on and off the mother ship was no joke. Passengers swarming with cars mixed up in the crowd and crew howling the names of the islands we were stopping at in shouts that seemed to warn rather than invite. “Chios,” “ Paros”, “Santorini”, “Heraklion”. The constant yelping of a siren added to the sense of emergency and “Santorini” in particular sounded like a version of “Save yourselves!”
Arrival was pretty much the same story except that the port’s mighty cliff face with its little winding road going up was so spectacular I hardly noticed. Santorini was once a proper little round island (called in fact Round One according to the Lonely Planet) but a massive eruption in around 1630 BC blew out the centre and left it shaped like a backwards C with sheer cliffs on its inside.
Later.
We went to two places today that affected me strongly and in different ways. One was uplifting and the other creepy. One was a defunct tomato canning factory that has become an industrial museum and the other was the excavated Minoan city Akrotiri. You’d expect the tomato factory to be sad and the city to reek of a magnificent old civilization. In fact the opposite was true.
We saw there was discount on the tickets to the Akrotiri Minoan site if you were a senior citizen from the EU. With calculated pathos Grant said “Ah we are old but we are not from the EU” A husky sardonic laugh came from within the ticket booth. “You are lucky” the woman said and charged us the full 12 Euros. What could we say?
The site is big (though only 3 per cent of the whole town) and it is all contained in a thoughtful modern building with steel pillars shooting into the earth to support the roof and walkways which serve for all of us to stroll on and look at the remains. I cannot shake off the feeling of intrusiveness. The place is like a mouth with lots of decayed teeth randomly growing in it, grey, uneven and cracked. The walls are porous and fragile. We are warned by signs PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH THE OLD WALLS. And there are occasional guards, all women, who look bored to the point of pain. I smile at one but she doesn’t respond. I respect the reasons for archaeology but I am very glad I never took that path, poking about in the dust finding little personal things. Absurdly I think of someone inspecting my fridge after I’ve
neglected it for a bit. Shards of petrified camembert. A clump of grotesque mould on the pesto.
Interestingly they found no human remains in the dig and they don’t know why. A theory is that there was some warning of a volcanic eruption and everybody fled to Crete. And indeed they did the right thing judging by the enormous balls of black lava that crashed on to Mytilini after the eruption. You see them everywhere. I hear someone else’s guide say the lava shot so high into the sky that it cooled up there and came down as rocks rather than run in rivers in the conventional way. “Was anyone killed?” asks a follower. The guide, a rather handsome man of a certain age looked bemused at the question but answered firmly “Everyone.”
I am glad to get out of the site and to my surprise Grant seems to be too. It has been a downer somehow, but a brief but successful battle with a water vending machine brightens us up and we decide to visit the oddly named Industrial Tomato Museum. “A change of pace perhaps” I say tactfully so as not to put down the archaeologist métier in any way. After all anthropologists are their cousins and Grant is one of them.
We wind our way down the narrow roads with vineyards on either side following cheerful signs to the tomato place. Our hire car had already taken a few hits before we took it on. “The Chinese” said the car hire person with a sigh. But Grant gamely handles what seem to me to be very narrow squeaks with speeding cars and motorcycles and monstrous buses with their mirrors mounted on what look like tusks. I could never do it, I have to say.
The tomato place in fact turns out to be a fine old stone building. And it has an interesting story. In 1945 Santorini was dirt poor with no industry but lots of tasty tomatoes on account of the rich volcanic soil. A returned soldier had a vision. Tomato paste, triple concentrate and sweet as heaven. He got steam engines from England and imported coal and organized the farmers to bring in their baskets of tomatoes. Each farmer had his paste processed separately and got back his own seeds for the next season as well as the tomato skins for animal feed. They could be paid in money or paste. There’s a lovely blurry bit of film footage of the baskets in the courtyard waiting to be brought in with a child larking about. No donkeys were allowed in for sanitary reasons. The workforce were barefoot local men and women “so poor they couldn’t buy shoes” said our guide. They worked twelve hour shifts. In season they processed the tomatoes in the great band driven boilers and out of season they made the red painted tins out of sheet metal brought from Athens. The metal had ridges in it. “So it’s strong, not like a coca cola can” the guide crunches a phantom one scornfully. There were little cans and big ones that were sealed by someone stamping hard on a black pedal. I thought of the muscle strain of doing one can after another all day.
This museum has been put together with pride and love. As we leave, there are old photos of some of the young people who worked there coupled with photos of the old people they are today, philosophical and pleased to be remembered.
One of the strange things about travelling is the constant updating of memories or invented clichés about what you seek out to look at. Archaeology, necessarily fascinating, a factory perhaps not. It’s often a confronting rethinking process and maybe that’s why travel is a good thing. It is good to be able to change one’s mind.
However there is one holiday item that I am not adaptable about and that is sand. I know Australians have a right to be snooty about beaches. Ours are so nice. Silky silver or at the very least yellow. Here in Greece, so far the sand has been like palid stone breadcrumbs harsh on the feet as or in Santorini an evil black that slithers and clings. I fell exhausted on the bed last night and Grant said aghast “Julia! Your feet!” I could have got away with a few grains of Bondi between the toes but no, it was as though I had strode barefoot through a potato patch. Every black grain fought the shower. And I don’t think the stuff would lend itself to sandcastles either. No-one sells buckets and spades here. Anyhow – nuff for now. It’s ouzo time.
Mind you getting on and off the mother ship was no joke. Passengers swarming with cars mixed up in the crowd and crew howling the names of the islands we were stopping at in shouts that seemed to warn rather than invite. “Chios,” “ Paros”, “Santorini”, “Heraklion”. The constant yelping of a siren added to the sense of emergency and “Santorini” in particular sounded like a version of “Save yourselves!”
Arrival was pretty much the same story except that the port’s mighty cliff face with its little winding road going up was so spectacular I hardly noticed. Santorini was once a proper little round island (called in fact Round One according to the Lonely Planet) but a massive eruption in around 1630 BC blew out the centre and left it shaped like a backwards C with sheer cliffs on its inside.
Later.
We went to two places today that affected me strongly and in different ways. One was uplifting and the other creepy. One was a defunct tomato canning factory that has become an industrial museum and the other was the excavated Minoan city Akrotiri. You’d expect the tomato factory to be sad and the city to reek of a magnificent old civilization. In fact the opposite was true.
We saw there was discount on the tickets to the Akrotiri Minoan site if you were a senior citizen from the EU. With calculated pathos Grant said “Ah we are old but we are not from the EU” A husky sardonic laugh came from within the ticket booth. “You are lucky” the woman said and charged us the full 12 Euros. What could we say?
The site is big (though only 3 per cent of the whole town) and it is all contained in a thoughtful modern building with steel pillars shooting into the earth to support the roof and walkways which serve for all of us to stroll on and look at the remains. I cannot shake off the feeling of intrusiveness. The place is like a mouth with lots of decayed teeth randomly growing in it, grey, uneven and cracked. The walls are porous and fragile. We are warned by signs PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH THE OLD WALLS. And there are occasional guards, all women, who look bored to the point of pain. I smile at one but she doesn’t respond. I respect the reasons for archaeology but I am very glad I never took that path, poking about in the dust finding little personal things. Absurdly I think of someone inspecting my fridge after I’ve
neglected it for a bit. Shards of petrified camembert. A clump of grotesque mould on the pesto.
Interestingly they found no human remains in the dig and they don’t know why. A theory is that there was some warning of a volcanic eruption and everybody fled to Crete. And indeed they did the right thing judging by the enormous balls of black lava that crashed on to Mytilini after the eruption. You see them everywhere. I hear someone else’s guide say the lava shot so high into the sky that it cooled up there and came down as rocks rather than run in rivers in the conventional way. “Was anyone killed?” asks a follower. The guide, a rather handsome man of a certain age looked bemused at the question but answered firmly “Everyone.”
I am glad to get out of the site and to my surprise Grant seems to be too. It has been a downer somehow, but a brief but successful battle with a water vending machine brightens us up and we decide to visit the oddly named Industrial Tomato Museum. “A change of pace perhaps” I say tactfully so as not to put down the archaeologist métier in any way. After all anthropologists are their cousins and Grant is one of them.
We wind our way down the narrow roads with vineyards on either side following cheerful signs to the tomato place. Our hire car had already taken a few hits before we took it on. “The Chinese” said the car hire person with a sigh. But Grant gamely handles what seem to me to be very narrow squeaks with speeding cars and motorcycles and monstrous buses with their mirrors mounted on what look like tusks. I could never do it, I have to say.
The tomato place in fact turns out to be a fine old stone building. And it has an interesting story. In 1945 Santorini was dirt poor with no industry but lots of tasty tomatoes on account of the rich volcanic soil. A returned soldier had a vision. Tomato paste, triple concentrate and sweet as heaven. He got steam engines from England and imported coal and organized the farmers to bring in their baskets of tomatoes. Each farmer had his paste processed separately and got back his own seeds for the next season as well as the tomato skins for animal feed. They could be paid in money or paste. There’s a lovely blurry bit of film footage of the baskets in the courtyard waiting to be brought in with a child larking about. No donkeys were allowed in for sanitary reasons. The workforce were barefoot local men and women “so poor they couldn’t buy shoes” said our guide. They worked twelve hour shifts. In season they processed the tomatoes in the great band driven boilers and out of season they made the red painted tins out of sheet metal brought from Athens. The metal had ridges in it. “So it’s strong, not like a coca cola can” the guide crunches a phantom one scornfully. There were little cans and big ones that were sealed by someone stamping hard on a black pedal. I thought of the muscle strain of doing one can after another all day.
This museum has been put together with pride and love. As we leave, there are old photos of some of the young people who worked there coupled with photos of the old people they are today, philosophical and pleased to be remembered.
One of the strange things about travelling is the constant updating of memories or invented clichés about what you seek out to look at. Archaeology, necessarily fascinating, a factory perhaps not. It’s often a confronting rethinking process and maybe that’s why travel is a good thing. It is good to be able to change one’s mind.
However there is one holiday item that I am not adaptable about and that is sand. I know Australians have a right to be snooty about beaches. Ours are so nice. Silky silver or at the very least yellow. Here in Greece, so far the sand has been like palid stone breadcrumbs harsh on the feet as or in Santorini an evil black that slithers and clings. I fell exhausted on the bed last night and Grant said aghast “Julia! Your feet!” I could have got away with a few grains of Bondi between the toes but no, it was as though I had strode barefoot through a potato patch. Every black grain fought the shower. And I don’t think the stuff would lend itself to sandcastles either. No-one sells buckets and spades here. Anyhow – nuff for now. It’s ouzo time.
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