It was a project that would take its toll in various ways, emotionally, physically and financially over the years. We’ve watched the exchange rates, carefully noting when they went up or down. And then, when economic uncertainties hit Greece and the worldwide financial crash hit, we wondered how long we could afford to keep flying to Greece and paying for the renovations. There is no doubt that Ogden Nash got it right when he wrote that ‘It takes a heap o’ livin’ in a house t’ make it home. It takes a heap o’ payin’ too’.

While the dream of a house on an Aegean island, with sunshine, warm seas and rural peace, is something many busy, driven, city folk long for, it’s not easily achieved. Land in Greece always belongs to someone. Even if you spot a ruined house on an empty block you’ll very soon find it belongs to absent landlords who are planning to return sometime soon.

It was Takis’ perseverance over a very long period that enabled us to buy the house. We spent two years exploring our options and then six more years (while renovating) before we managed to fully own his great-grandfather’s house. And then it took even longer to renovate. However, all this time the house has continued to be a magnet for us and has made the effort worthwhile.

It’s been not only a big adventure, it’s been a love story - one with a house at its centre. On Lemnos we’ve lived and laughed, cried and sweated a most marvellous romantic dream-house adventure. Have we allowed the house to become our master? This wouldn’t be surprising, for as Emerson says, ‘A man builds a fine house; and now he has a master, and a task for life; he is to furnish, watch, show it, and keep it in repair, the rest of his days’. And dealing with the needs of our house we’ve found, with so many others, this kind of old house renovation project is addictive.

However, it’s not a simple thing to uproot oneself each year and take on a project such as this on the other side of the world. Travel does not get easier, mice still find holes to enter an old house, and in addition we’ve found that the house is big enough for many guests, sometimes too many! But, when I grumble about these difficulties, my friends are quick to remind me about the romance, ‘You’re on a Greek island, for God’s sake!’ they’ll say, throwing up their hands in frustration. ‘What have you got to complain about?’

I think what we’ve most enjoyed has been the fact that we have been thrown back onto our own resources. There are only a few shops nearby and it’s hard to get what you want when you want it. This is a challenge Takis enjoys, for not being able to go to a large Australian tradesman’s centre, he has to find ways of fixing things himself. As for me, I like working at a slower, more organic pace. One has time to notice the scent of lemon and nutmeg when baking a homemade cake, and to become more aware of garden scents when making bags of lavender seeds.

Of course, no one can have missed the fact that this decade has been a tumultuous one for Greece, with enormous immigration and fiscal problems. Has the economic drama affected us? Of course it has. We’ve always been aware there were problems with the way the Greek economy was run. But like many Greeks, up until the crisis hit the newsstands in 2008 we’d thought, ‘It’s just the way things are in Greece’. Now we’ve had to face the fact that, as sojourners with a property in Greece, everything we possessed in the country has lost at least half its value.

There’s a saying in Lemnos that one cries twice when coming to the island. This saying may have originated from the time when the island was a designated place of exile, and folk would cry when they landed on the island, going there reluctantly, but often they would cry again when they left, as by then they’d fallen in love with the island and its people. It’s a saying I’ve also adopted, for there have many been times when I’ve come to the island grudgingly, and many times when on leaving I’ve walked around my Greek garden very unwilling to depart.

But, after each questioning period, we’ll always decide that we’ll keep coming - at least for a few more years. For while riots and street marches occur in the capital cities, on the whole these troubles have not greatly affected our island. Here life appears to continue much as it did when we arrived. The town still doesn’t have municipal sewerage, the bells still wake us at seven on Sunday mornings, and while a few shops have closed on the Agora, others have opened.

The time will eventually come when we have to leave permanently and there will be so many things we’ll dearly miss, especially those sounds that are completely lost in a big city: the music of cockerels calling early each morning, the chatter of young children walking home from school, and even those street sellers who blare out descriptions of their wares as they drive past each day in summer.

By Dr Julia Catton

neoskosmos.com

Obsessed for decades by Greece’s unique music, Cade has plunged into Athens like a spring set free. The result, ‘Athens – The Truth’, is a 400-page revelation of aspects of the city unknown not only to tourists but even to many Greeks.

Graham Beattie, publishing guru and widely experienced judge of the Commonwealth Writers Prize, said: ‘I was immediately arrested by the 20-page introduction wherein he explains his fascination with all things Greek.’ Amazon readers have said that the book is ‘absolutely addictive’, ‘charming, critical, and thought-provoking’, and that it ‘makes the reader yearn for Athens’.

‘Athens – The Truth’ is a travel book that often reads more like a novel. As the author unearths the truths of the city, tension develops and the account moves towards a climax. At many points the writer’s love for Greece is obvious, but at other times his criticisms are frank. Whereas other authors appear to have been wary of treading on Greek toes, Cade tells all. 

Here’s part of Cade’s description of a young Greek dancing in an Athens nightclub:

‘No longer dispirited, he rises, lifts a thigh, slaps it too, as if to show determination, and then, gazing upwards, his arms raised, he begins to glide, like an eagle dignified and free upon the winds, maintaining balance while invincibly swooping and swirling above all the challenges of life.’

‘Athens – The Truth’ has been written for anyone who has yet to encounter the true Greece. The author explained: ‘I wrote it not only to help tourists, students, or business people get the most out of Athens, but so that people at home, perhaps with no intention at all of ever actually visiting, can also encounter all those locations, people, and facts which even the most adventurous seem to miss.’

‘Athens - The Truth’ can be ordered online or from bookstores worldwide by requesting ISBN 9780955209031.

An e-book edition is available from Amazon for Kindles, iPads, iPhones, smartphones, and PCs. A second e-book edition has been made available for Nooks, Kobos, Apples, Sonys, and other devices.

Or you can get it from Public here: http://www.public.gr/product/books/english/diafora/athens-the-truth/prod5111007pp/ or from the Book Depository here:

http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/Athens-Truth-David-Cade/9780955209031

Athens - The Truth
Searching for Manos, Just Before the Bubble Burst
by David Cade
406 pages
Paperback Edition: ISBN 9780955209031
Kindle Edition: ISBN 9780955209048
Smashwords Edition: ISBN 9780955209055
Published by Tales of Orpheus

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David Cade is a writer and actor based in the Shropshire Hills, England. He has worked in classical record production, schools, universities, and theatre. He studied Drama, Theatre Arts, and Music at the University of Birmingham and has an MA in Linguistics from the University of London. Besides the United Kingdom, he has lived in New Zealand, Fiji, Australia, and the Middle East. The music of Greece is his passion.

RELATED INFORMATION

Author’s website: http://www.davidcade.net

Twitter: https://twitter.com/AthensTheTruth

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AthensTheTruth

Featuring evocative images of the beautiful island, the home which she and her partner have lovingly restored, and the many friends - and animals - who have welcomed them into their lives, My Greek Island Home is a celebration of a way of life that Claire and Matthew have embraced with open arms. They have now bought and restored a second home, Ken's Spiti, also featured in the book, which they offer for personally-tailored holidays to people wishing to experience and be part of 'the real Greece'.

My Greek Island Home by Claire Lloyd will be published by Clearview Books on 28th April.

20 European cities will compete for this trophy between January 20 and February 10: Amsterdam, Athens, Barcelona, Berlin, Bordeaux, Brussels, Istanbul, Innsbruck, Lisbon, Ljubljana, London, Madrid, Milan, Paris, Reykjavik, Riga, Rome, Valetta, Vienna, Zagreb.

The winner will be the city with the most online votes!

One of the 20 destinations will be awarded the title of “European Best Destination 2015″. The next nine destinations with the highest number of votes will be announced through EBD’s communications, website and social networks as being one the best European destinations to visit in 2015.

The 2015 best European Destination will be authorized to use the title and affix the “European Best Destination” logo on all its communications, adverts, website and photos; it will also have the right to authorize its own public and private partners to use the logo.

The destinations in the Top 10 can also use the logo by indicating that they have been chosen as one of the ten best destinations to visit in Europe. Their news, photos and videos will be shared by the European Best Destination organization’s website and major social networks throughout the year.

 

“Maybe the otolith?” another scientist suggested.

“Ah,” Panopoulos said, “the otolith.”

He worked a knife into the fish’s head and removed the pearly ear bone. Then, using his glass as a primitive magnifying instrument, he counted the otolith’s layers, which accrue like rings in a tree. “I see four,” Panopoulos said, “and they are uneven. This fish is four years old and wild.”

That the fish before us was indeed wild is a rarity in modern Greece. Never common, wild European sea bass are today one of the more overfished creatures in the Mediterranean. So rare that when you want to say you “hit the jackpot” in Greek, you say you “epyase lavraki” — you caught a sea bass. But as is increasingly the case with prized sea creatures, the end of a fish in the sea does not mean its disappearance from the plate. In fact the diminishing of a wild population is often the trigger that starts research on a new species’ domestication.

Sea-bass farming has been a long time in the works. It was piloted in France and Israel in the 1960s, and it took years to decode the biochemistry behind reproduction and diet. A final element — the warm, protected inlets of coastal Greece, turned it into a commodity.

In Greece it began, as it should, with a man at sea. In 1982, Thanasis Frentzos set sail from Kefalonia, an island some archaeologists believe was Odysseus’ Ithaca. Frentzos bears a certain resemblance to Homer’s protagonist, and so it follows that when he traveled to Sicily to purchase 100,000 inch-long sea-bass juveniles, his return trip was interrupted by a fierce gale known as the donkey mistral, and 90,000 bass perished in the storm. He installed the surviving bass in a pen and grew them to maturity. From this first farm (now called Kefalonia Fisheries), Greece came to dominate world sea-bass production, and the Selonda company has emerged as an international leader, with exports to the United States growing to more than a million pounds in 2004 from 10,000 pounds in 2000.

American appreciation of foreign bass has risen in inverse proportion to the decline of our own domestic striped bass. Similar in shape to European sea bass, American striped bass were recently found through DNA analysis to be so closely related as to share a common genus (Morone). With their meaty white flesh, “stripers” were a favorite from the Carolinas to Maine all the way back to Colonial days. Fishing pressure on stripers mounted progressively until the mid-’70s, when the catch plunged. By the early ’80s, just as Thanasis Frentzos was sailing for Sicily, conservationists were suggesting stripers for the Endangered Species List.

But while Europeans generally turn to the farm when fish go missing, Americans tend to look to the wild. In a major conservation act, a consortium of states halted striped-bass fishing in the ’80s, and a program was introduced to rebuild the breeding stock in the Chesapeake Bay. One scientist the government engaged was Yonathan Zohar, an Israeli-born biologist at the University of Maryland at Baltimore who helped decode European sea-bass reproduction. Zohar, who refers to himself as an “OB-GYN for fish,” got wild striped bass to spawn in captivity in a predictable manner. Supplementation combined with fishing moratoriums yielded results. Today striper populations are listed as “fully rebuilt,” and the fish has once again appeared on seafood menus — alongside branzino.

To read more, please visit nytimes.com

By Paul Greenberg