THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, June 16, 1996 TAG: 9606140073
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY JUNE ARNEY, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 287 lines
NOTHING ABOUT the trip seemed real until I got in line at the Olympic Airways ticket counter at Kennedy Airport in New York.
That's when it hit me.
These were familiar faces. Dark eyes, olive skin. Speaking Greek - a language that had been in the background all my life, although I never learned to speak it myself.
More primal yet was a familiar smell that cut across the years. It came back to me from childhood visits to my Greek grandmother's house in Connecticut - the scent of incense, some ancient resin turned perfume. Pleasant, soothing, mysterious.
The people around me, laden with suitcases, trunks, crates and cardboard boxes, were going home.
In a different way, so was I.
My father, after many phone calls, had persuaded me to take the trip. It would be his third visit to Greece, the country where his parents were born and lived until they came to America, met and married. This time, he was bringing his girlfriend to see it, and he wanted me to come, too. To see the Aegean, walk on our land, know our roots.
I hedged at first. Told him I couldn't afford it. Too much going on at work. I shouldn't take the time off. I didn't have anyone to care for my 3-year-old. But my 68-year-old father was unmoved. He would pay for my meals, he said. Work will be there when you get back, he said. Find a baby sitter.
He knew I had dreamed of seeing Greece all my life. Majoring in philosophy as an undergraduate had only made the longing worse. In 1983, I bought a Fodor's guide to Greece, willing it to come true. Now, 13 years later, here was my chance. Maybe my only chance. None of my excuses were insurmountable. And what the hell. You only live once.
I caved. On April 18, the 13-day odyssey began.
After a nine-hour flight, we landed in Athens.
We checked into the Ledra Marriott, located downtown with a view of the Acropolis. The taxi driver offered to pick us up later to see the city. And my father arranged the time.
About 3:30 p.m. we climbed in the taxi feeling the lack of sleep and seven-hour time difference. My father chatted with the driver in Greek about his parents coming from the island of Lesvos, about wanting his daughter to see Greece. I sat in the backseat with my father's girlfriend of five months, Arlene, a widowed social studies teacher. We listened to a story that we would hear repeated in Greek countless times before the trip was over.
Soon we were at the Acropolis - marble columns reaching up in testimony to the gods. And presiding over all, the Greek flag - proud royal blue and white.
Worn marble beneath our feet and an azure sky above. The lack of sleep made it all surreal, all stream of consciousness. I was walking where some of the greatest philosophers had taught.
I felt a strong sense of Greekness then - some sort of shared pride that my ancestors could create such a place with their brains and their brawn. And that it could last long enough for me to get there.
I flashed back to the moment last Thanksgiving when my little cousins played a game involving one of them becoming the queen of Greece. I felt pride then, too. Their passion for Greece intrigued me. They have only one Greek parent. Their parents do not speak Greek, yet somehow they had instilled the connection.
In part, I know the Greek ways are passed on through traditions like the ceremonial cutting of New Year's bread, with a slice for St. Basil, Joseph, Mary, Jesus and then family members, or the cracking of colored eggs for Greek Easter. My father taught me these things as a child.
But it wasn't until a few years ago that he made his first trip to Greece, intent on straightening out the ownership of six pieces of land that had been his father's. He fell in love with the land, and has talked many times of leaving his home in Middletown, Conn., and moving there in search of a simpler life.
After we had our fill of the history and drama of the Acropolis, we descended to the street.
Back in the car, our driver - a smooth talker experienced in hustling tourists - told my father he had last been to the Acropolis as a child in school. I couldn't imagine having this so close and not visiting more often. All I could do was stare back at the monuments as we wound our way down to the waterfront and the columns disappeared from view.
Next stop: El Greco, a restaurant on the Aegean where patrons could select their dinner from the establishment's kitchen. There were three choices that night: white fish, flat fish and lobster marbled in shades of lavender.
The feast included a traditional Greek salad featuring some of the sweetest, deepest-red tomatoes I've ever eaten. My grilled lobster was a violent shade of red-orange. There was beer, bread and butter and, for dessert, a fruit plate. There had been no menus, no prices discussed, and when the bill arrived, it was startling. Our guide, we later realized, had lured us to an overpriced tourist trap. Part of the charm of his species.
We would encounter this charm again when he dropped us back at the hotel. His bill for four hours of showing us around came to $100. Rather steep, my father thought. But he was too tired to argue.
The next day, we headed for the flea market with its endless gold and silver shops filled with necklaces, bracelets and earrings bearing the Greek key design - a symbol of eternal life. Here, too, were plenty of T-shirt and post card shops - enough to satisfy any traveler. Prices were negotiable. It helped to have my father sidle over, point to me and say ``my daughter'' in Greek to the sales clerks. In a matter of seconds the number of drachmas for any given item dropped significantly. I wasn't just your typical American tourist anymore. I was part Greek, and they acknowledged my connection to this land.
The next morning we had a 6 a.m. flight to Mytilini, the largest city on our ancestral island of Lesvos, also called Lesbos. It is the third-largest of the Greek islands, located in the northeast Aegean, four miles from Turkey. I took a side glance at the man one seat away from me on the plane as he looked out the window, busily working a set of Greek worry beads in his hands.
From the air, the island was a patch of barren mountains and red tile roofs meeting blue water. ``That's it,'' my father said.
We wedged five pieces of luggage, camera bag and ourselves into our rental car. Then we set off for Vatera Beach, a resort area on the southern part of the island.
We drove southwest, with my father at the wheel. The car was a five-speed, and I could tell it had been a while since he had driven a stick shift. Shift, shift, I thought in my head. Wasn't this the same man who taught me to drive stick? But he is rusty. Now I'm the experienced one.
Before long, we met mountains and hairpin turns. One after the other. Flanking us on either side were gnarled olive trees - trees that take 25 years to mature - then rock-face cliffs that touched the sea and overlooked hills adorned with white-washed buildings. Orange groves and lemon trees met the road. Goats grazed on terraced cliffs. In the steepest places, stone walls held in soil and life-giving water.
As the terrain got wilder, so did the traffic signs. My favorite was the exclamation point inside a triangle. My translation was that it meant to be ready for anything. Around there, it was good advice.
Sheep grazed in pastures dotted with red poppies. Occasionally, oblivious to humans and their irritating pursuits, they milled in the middle of the road, forcing us to slow down and go around or stop completely and wait.
The world was all rugged cliffs and ridges. As we drove through one small town, the street narrowed, and we heard chanting from within the church where members had hours yet to go in a Sunday morning church service that typically lasts from 8 to 11.
About lunch time, we arrived at Vatera. There had been much laughter about our visit here. A fax-number error in a tourbook had brought Arlene into contact with Barbara, an American woman who ran a hotel with her Greek husband. For days, I had heard about Barbara.
She sounded lonely - anxious to be with Americans. We should at least stop for coffee and take in her organic garden, Arlene decided.
The Vatera Beach hotel and Barbara and George Ballis were every bit worth the hype.
Barbara was a former biochemist who once worked in a research lab at MIT before deciding to move to Greece. As a retired nuclear chemist from a Veterans Hospital, my father and she had much to discuss. She arrived in 1971, not knowing the language, and ended up heading the Merrill Lynch office as a commodities trader, she told Arlene. She and George opened the hotel in 1989.
George was an actor and writer for television and theater. He spoke some English but was more comfortable talking to my father in his native language. At one point, he stopped my father in midparagraph and told him he had a Plomari accent. Plomari is the village where my grandmother was from.
Barbara told us tourism makes up only about 5 percent of the industry on the island of Lesvos. She spoke of olive oil flowing like rivers in the winter - the place has more than 20 million olive trees, some 2,000 years old. The hottest hot springs in all of Europe are here, she boasted. The island has 80 hotels, a socialist governor and no traffic lights.
We talked and ate long into the night. Greeks traditionally eat late, and we found we had slipped into the pattern. Talk turned to my grandparents and their early days in America, about their raising three sons who would go on to college and attain advanced degrees. We talked about the land in Greece that belonged to our family. My father demanded that I produce pictures of my son - his grandson - to show our new friends. Again, the family joke came up of my blond son being one of the rare fair-haired Greeks. Again I felt the tug of our heritage.
We spent that night at Vatera Beach. The rooms were attractive, all blue and white - the Greek flag in solid form. Each had a view of the ocean. And they were rustic, a bit like camping, with wooden blinds that opened to the ocean. But the season hadn't really started, and it was cold. Even with longjohns, a long-sleeved T-shirt, a sweatshirt and five blankets, I was freezing. My idea of Greece had been days of endless warmth. I was not prepared for this.
In the morning, we decided to explore. Nearby, in a field of red poppies, we found a ruined temple to Dionysus - the ancient god of wine and revelry. Like many of the ruins in Greece, the temple was in fragments - a few broken marble columns near a little church overlooking the deep blue of the Aegean.
Then we set off for Gavathas, a small town on the northwest side of the island where my grandfather had grown up. My father was talkative in the car.
``When I was young, I didn't like the Greek ways,'' he said.``I wanted to be with my American friends.''
My grandfather, he told us, had come to Ellis Island by boat at age 16 or 17 and worked in a bakery in Holyoke, Mass. My grandmother came at age 13 or 14. They met and married soon afterward. My grandfather was about 21 or 22; my grandmother 18 or 19.
``Think about how scared they must have been,'' my father said. ``Think about getting off at Ellis Island and having them say, `We can't pronounce your name, so we're changing it to Peterson.' What are they going to do, argue?''
Our name originally was Papamihalakis. Despite the Americanization of the last name, my grandparents' sons were given Greek names. My father's is Arthur Aristoteles.
As we drove west toward Gavathas, it looked as if there had been a rock storm between the small towns of Kalloni and Antissa. Sheep grazed precariously on the steep, stone-littered cliffs. Finally, the mountains gave way to the sea. Gavathas.
We pulled up to the hotel where my father had stayed on his two previous trips. He'd warned us that it was not fancy. We drove up the dirt road to the front door. It was called Paradise.
The owners, Stacey and her husband, Clifford, welcomed us at the door with smiles and kisses on both cheeks. (By the time we left, they insisted on four kisses.) They gave us keys to our rooms, which were simple, with balconies that overlooked the sea. Then they ushered us to their kitchen on the flat below for a traditional welcoming dish of sugared grapefruit rind. I remembered it, vaguely. I had tasted it before at some gathering of relatives.
Stacey, who grew up in nearby Antissa, once lived in Bakerstown, Pa., where she worked in a pizza parlor. Her English is good and Clifford's is lots better than my Greek. As children, the two were neighbors. They opened the hotel 18 years ago.
Only 10 families live year-round in Gavathas. A priest comes to the little church by the sea once a month to hold a service.
Stacey and Clifford are the only residents who do not earn their living fishing - catching blackfish, tuna and lobsters.
In the summer, vacationers from Athens increase the population of the little town to about 60 familes.
We spent four nights in Gavathas, exploring the rest of Lesvos by day. We saw a Byzantine castle in Molyvos, a tourist town on the northern coast, and a petrified forest near the western coast. We wandered the narrow streets of the small mountain town of Antissa, where my great-grandfather, whose name was Peter, had once been mayor. It was the first I'd ever heard of this. I wondered what the town was like when he lived here. I walked over to a statue in the town square to see if it might be a tribute to him. It wasn't. But in my mind, the whole town was tribute.
Then it was time to leave. Another early morning flight whisked us back to Athens for a brief stop, then on to the island of Santorini, or Thira, its name from ancient times. The island, part of a cluster of islands in the south central Aegean called the Cyclades, is the site of a sleeping volcano that came to life about 1450 B.C. The eruption changed the shape of the previously round Santorini into a crescent moon containing its own islands within the hollowed-out place.
It was all terraced slopes, black and red sand beaches and aquamarine water. Exquisitely beautiful, it had a strange, forbidden quality. Our accommodations looked as though they were built on the very edge of the earth. A swimming pool ended in a wall, where the land dropped down hundreds of feet to the sea. In the distance, rising ominously out of the water, was the stark volcano.
We took a chartered boat to the volcano - an otherworldly, wildly shaped sculpture of black rock and treeless earth. At the top, I found vents where warm air still whispered of the fire within. There was power there. And magic.
Now when I think of Greece, I think of that volcano. I think of marble columns framed against cerulean sky. Of the dark silver green of olive tree leaves and the restless salt breeze. I think of traditions that defy time and space. And I linger.
Thanks, Dad. ILLUSTRATION: Photos by JUNE ARNEY
Arlene and my father pull up a rock seat on land owned by our family
on the island of Lesvos. The spot overlooks the town of Gavathas and
the Aegean Sea.
My father and I found our family named inscribed near a small church
on the island of Levos. Below, he views the Aegean Sea from land our
family owns
Church Bells, Left, Overlook the Aegean on the Island of Santorini
Graphic
TRAVELER'S ADVISORY
Before you go:
Contact the Greek National Tourist Organization for travel
information, Olympic Tower, 645 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10022,
or call (212) 421-5777.
Travel tips:
Credit cards and traveler's checks are not accepted everywhere on
the island of Lesvos or other Greek islands where tourism is not a
big industry. Bring cash. Even in Athens, not all restaurants accept
all credit cards. Visa is preferred.
A 10 percent tip is typical in restaurants. The exchange rate was
about 240 drachmas to the dollar when we were there. A calculator is
a good idea.
Places to stay:
In Athens: The Ledra Marriott Hotel offered spacious rooms, some
with views of the Acropolis. A breakfast buffet was included in a
package deal on weekends. Plan on spending at least $150 a night.
Located at 115 Syngrou Avenue, Athens GR-117 45 Greece. Phone: (01)
9347711. Fax: (01) 9358603.
On the island of Lesvos: Vatera Beach in Vatera. You won't find a
better host and hostess than George and Barbara Ballis. There is a
friendly, vacation atmosphere with clean, basic accommodations. Each
has balcony with ocean view, breakfast included. About $40 a night
off-season. Vatera, Lesvos 813 00 Greece. Tel: (0252) 61212.
On the island of Santorini: Astra Apartments. Built into a cliff,
extraordinary view overlooking the Aegean and the volcano. P.O. Box
45 847 00, Imerovigli, Santorini. Tel: 0286-23641. Suites come with
breakfast.
Places to eat in Athens:
Try Daphne's, an intimate restaurant where Hillary and Chelsea
Clinton dined when they visited on a recent tour of Greece, Bosnia
and Turkey. Reservations required. The owners do the greeting and
some of the serving. Dinner for three with wine and dessert was
about $70.
Bajazzo Restaurant offers an elegant atmosphere with
extraordinary presentation. Each course is displayed by a parade of
waiters. Seafood, veal, beef, pork - it's all here. But it's pricey.
The bill was close to $300 for three people.
KEYWORDS: GREECE by CNB