829 years too late: Jubal in Greece

[Jubal]

A thread for my travels!

The basics: I'm with my parents in Thessaloniki and Chalkidike, in northern Greece. We're spending two nights in Thessaloniki and six in the village of Porto Koufo.


So far (Thessaloniki day 1):
Thessaloniki greeted us in a rather familiar manner, with a grey overhang of cloud that would have looked more in keeping at Gatwick than the second city of Greece. The city is one that has grown fast and busy - and unhappily so, choking itself back into life after the slaughter and deportations of the Balkan wars and the destruction of its Jewish population (until the second world war it was mainly a city of Sephardic Jews, but over fifty thousand were sent to labour camps or the gas chambers). It is built in a gridded sprawl of blocks, fire and earth having claimed many of the old buildings, though a few nestle still between towering apartment buildings. The city feels young, and angry, and the cafés and nightclubs form a growing skin battling to paper over barely healed wounds. Bright shop signs are tucked under battered and abandoned balconies - it is a city that is alive and knows it, a squawking phoenix chick ostentatious in its new plumage but somehow all too aware of the struggle it took to claim it.

Today we visited a small selection of places after flying in and negotiating the rather anarchic road system; mostly a small selection of churches, a mosque, and some baths, all nestled or displayed amid characteristic apartment blocks. The tiny Lakadika quarter was something of a gem, a rare survival of smaller, older buildings and less blockish street patterns, but it felt under siege, and more tragically the ancient instruments museum that had been one of its jewels was nowhere to be found, perhaps victims to budget cuts or lack of popular support. The hotel is modern - free WiFi as standard - but costly, being on the seafront, and my parents and I are somewhat crammed into our single room. Discoveries here included that prawns can replace chicken very serviceably in Caesar salad, and weirdly that the waiter at dinner had spent some time in Norfolk/Suffolk living in the next door village to us.

I am of course 829 years too late for the chronicler whose work brought me here; it is hard to know what bishop Eustathios would have thought of this modern, vibrant, raw city. Tomorrow the museums are the major thing on the itinerary. Thessaloniki may be a phoenix, but it will be interesting to see what it remembers of the ashes.

[Glaurung]

Many thanks for posting: I'm glad you got there OK, and it's good to get a sense of the place from your evocative writing. You might be 829 years too late, but 1185 doesn't sound like a good time to have visited the city

[Jubal]

Today's update is not what I hoped it would be.

Whilst our Thessalonian welcome was much appreciated by my eyes and mind, it was apparently less appreciated by my stomach, which initiated rapid and unpleasant evacuation procedures at 6am. I spent most of today lying in bed with a very delicate and uncomfortable stomach, joined later by my mother who had much the same problem. Have got to the stage where I can eat grapes and dry biscuits, but very sad and annoyed at having lost our only full day in the city.

By late afternoon I did make myself stagger to the museum of Byzantine Culture, which was worth a visit. Stunning painted pottery, frescoes, stonework and mosaics were all laid out neatly. My camera largely refused to get decent pictures, but such is life. A set of Byzantine dice and playing counters rather intrigued me, as did the plethora of animal life in tomb decorations etc. A curious thing to note is that for the Greeks "Byzantine culture" includes post Byzantine church culture; probably a result of the centrality of the church to Orthodox identity under Turkish rule, whereas the later impact of secular Byzantine art and culture has tended to be less focussed upon.

I'm still feeling a bit shaky and tired, and rather fragile, but hoping to get more of the city done tomorrow before we head down to Sithonia. Overall very much a frustrating day.

[Glaurung]

Sorry to hear about all this - it sounds grim. *hugs*
I hope you have a rapid recovery, and time to appreciate the city further tomorrow.

[Cuddly Khan]

It was the prawns. Definitely the prawns...

[Othko97]

Sorry to hear about the illness, hope you had a better day today!

[Jubal]

Today was very much packed to make up for some of the loss of yesterday, and although I probably was barely well enough to manage it and now feel totally wiped out I was more than glad to have done what we did.

The morning began on an open topped bus, juddering around tiny backstreets that wound up into the old city, tucked away and uphill from the high apartment blocks that dominate the seashore. Here there is still an enclave of winding stone roads and tiled rooves, tucked between the corner between the old northern and eastern walls. These formed our first stop, providing impressive views up into the mountainous hinterland and down to the vast urban sweep below. An old Ottoman tower sat round and squat at the end of the wall a contrast to the Byzantine square style of the rest of the great curtain wall.

Hopping back onto the next bus, we then stopped at the arch of Galerian and the rotunda church nearby. Both were magnificent, emblems of Thessaloniki's vitality in the late Roman era - the triumphal arch a brash statement of military power, the neighbouring church an equally grandiose statement of where the religious future lay. Orthodox churches new and old are everywhere in Thessaloniki still; the eagles may be long gone, but their legacy still sits in side streets and at the heart of communities, binding together the Orthodox of the city. Indeed in this era, with the Muslim and Jewish communities shrunken ghosts to their former selves, it is the Church that has outlived them - perhaps triumphant, though if this is triumph the old ghosts remain, minarets and Turkish inscriptions bearing witness to the all too recent past.

Moving further into the past we visited the archaeological museum, which holds prehistoric and classical finds from the area. In particular two things stood out; firstly, it had a special exhibition of Mediterranean coinage which included an eye-opening range, incorporating a good number of Greek colonies I was previously wholly unaware existed. Second, there was the Macedonian gold exhibit, which was a long gallery of impossibly fine gold jewellery and other pieces from tombs. Golden myrtle and olive wreaths competed in the cases to be finer than one another and indeed finer than their real counterparts. The visit was enjoyable, though all too brief as we soon had to head to the airport (two hours late even then) to pick up the car that would take us to Chalkidike.

And so we bade farewell to what little of Thessaloniki's heart we had seen, and headed out into the sprawl of its growth. The full metropolitan area now numbers a million souls, and the opportunities and difficulties of growth are all on display. Gutted or never completed buildings stare forlornly past their shouting, brightly plumed new neighbours; a mixture of Greek and English script and words adorns the signage - the Eastern European tourists communicate with their Greek hosts in English as a common language here, the bright roadside signs only reaffirming the cultural power of the language. In some places empty fields still stand surrounded by new blocks of shops and apartments; in others a bright set of shops cluster around a dilapidated but once beautiful villa. The phoenix contorts, expands, hurts; but it lives and grows.

With car duly obtained we headed south into the olive groves of Chalkidike. This area contains some of the best arable land in Greece, far better than in Attica, though olives are still quite a dominant crop. The motorway roadsides are littered with new, old, and dead shops, reminiscent perhaps of the American Midwest as they cling to the arteries of the region in hope of life. Further south, past the turning to the tourist heavy Kassandra peninsula, the terrain gets wilder, though, and the strip development peters out into a mix of hastily built tourist towns - the real lifeblood of the area - and rocky hillsides in between.

And so we reached Sithonia, climbing up along a winding road clad in pine forest and scrub, a steep sweep of hillside leading down to the Toronis gulf below us. We are staying at the southern end, in the fishing village of Porto Koufo; this place is one of the few villages in Chalkidike with a sizeable and active fishing fleet still operating, tucked into a wide natural harbour. Tourism still crawls in all too fast of course, testified best by the fact that a new apartment block jjsts out to block half the view from our hotel room. But it is a far world from the rawness of Thessaloniki; life is slower and more seasonal here, and if modernity has changed the nature of life it has not managed to wholly accelerate its pace. On which note I should decelerate mine, and give in to exhaustion at long, long last.

[Glaurung]

I'm glad you had a better day yesterday, and were able to see at least some of what you were hoping to - Thessaloniki sounds like a fascinating city. Hopefully a gentler pace of life over the next few days will help your recovery. I'm looking forward to your reports from rural Greece as much as those from the big city.

[Jubal]

A shorter entry for today.

Porto Koufo, if being developed slowly, still justifies description as something of an idyll. Quartz in the sand gives the relatively unspoiled beach flecks of gold; a sandy shelf and weak current makes the area good for swimming, and the constant ins and outs of the fishing boats heading out of the harbour are pleasant to watch. Indeed I spent the day doing rather little else.

The beach was sadly not uncrowded, that said, though I felt rather alone - around me, a sea of Bulgarian voices and faces providing a reminder of the changing face of tourism in these parts. Excitement for my parents was provided by signs of migrating raptors, though they soared too far overhead for any reasonable attempts at identification. For myself I have been digging into David Abulafia's The Great Sea, which if rather a tome is well written and manages to convey both the broad sweep and interesting details (and is very easy to hear in his voice, I can confirm!)

This was a rather feeble entry, but I'm too tired to write more - may amend it tomorrow.

The taverna across the road from the Porto Koufo hotel has provided both of our evening meals thus far; the waiters there have little idea what idea like timing mean or have to offer them, but the food is very good and certainly comes in large quantities. It is usual in Greek restaurants to get complimentary water and perhaps bread; the taverna does not provide water but provides extra bread and a free bread based starter, making it hard to get through a full meal. My grilled squid (literally, a whole squid, grilled, plus being stuffed with feta and cucumber and tomato) was excellent, as were the baklavas we ate afterwards; also surprisingly cheap, the advantage of a fishing port.

The local feral animals were of course in evidence; the entire Mediterranean basin is ringed by scrawny cats mewling for food and attention, and Porto Koufo is no exception. Early in the day a happy tomcat demanded stroking on the beach, and in the evening the local cats were wandering around the taverna and making good use of the excessive food portions, which probably support several of them through the summer months at least. Feral dogs also exist in this area, which I haven't come across in the other Mediterranean areas (around Dubrovnik and Paphos) that I've visited. The dog who came to beg at the taverna was fortunately delightful if rough looking, an oddly mismatched faced and floppy ear giving an "ageing soft toy" look best suited to the works of Jane Hissey. She also padded around, beged for scraps, and greatly enjoyed a pat and rub behind the ears. It is hard to know what impact these animals have on their local ecosystems; expanding with the human population, the feral animals likely put further pressure on local wildlife. That said, in some form they are undoubtedly here to stay, convenient communal pets and unintended beneficiaries of the tourist trade.

[Jubal]

Today we started early and nervously, the hotel reception having failed to get through to book a boat trip we wanted to go on the previous night. Fortunately, on the third attempt this morning, we got the response that there was space available; we rushed to the car, drove too fast around rugged bends, and headed for the the small town of Sarti, getting to the small port there late and hurried but still in the event well in time for a boat that was very much operating on Mediterranean time scales. From there, our voyage began. And what a voyage it was to be...

The boat was a tour by sea of the monasteries on the west coast of the Athos peninsula, the westernmost and least inhabited of Chalkidike's three long fingers. Athos is a world apart - almost literally. It is wholly self governing with a few exceptions (criminal jurisdiction is that of Thessaloniki, defence is the responsibility of Greece), and entirely devoted to monasteries and hermitages. Its exceptional status has developed since the middle Byzantine period, and the Greek politicians of today accord the monasteries of the holy mountain much the same sort of independence as their imperial forebears did. The only way to see it for most tourists is by sea; non-Orthodox males require a special permit, and women are wholly forbidden from setting foot on the peninsula.

Mount Athos itself is at the western end of the peninsula; it loomed out of the mist, tall and proud and wide-footed. It gives the impression of neither being a bitter crag or a friendly hill; it stands alone, and aloof; and the monks in its shadow are just specks in a fragment of time, a brief recognition of its unquestioned glory. The legends suggest that it is the result of the Titanomachy and a duel between Athos and Poseidon; the mountains is either a rock thrown by the former and the latter, or the defeated corpse of the former. Either way,  the Christians were not the first to see the echoes of divinity in the mountain. It is beyond us, altogether present and remote, its peak standing above time.

Clinging to its shores, the monasteries of Athos are a litany of relics and libraries. Many are built close to the shore for seaborne access, others built precariously high, barely grasping at crags on the gut instinct of a medieval saint. They are old, many founded in the tenth and eleventh centuries, though the buildings are often newer as a result of fire - the old enemy of those who work with candles, paper, and wood. At the east end of the peninsula one monastery was just beginning to rise from recent ashes, a new church sitting white walled amidst gutted stone buildings in the midst of a burned pine forest. The buildings are, however, not without diversity; one of the largest and most lavishly built of the monasteries we saw had strong links to Russia, both theologically and architecturally, the sloped tile rooves of its neighbours suddenly broken by a stack of bright green onion-domes reminiscent of another world entirely.

Athos is a world apart in theory, but the impact of the outer world is clear. The monks of today are icon painters, scholars, and of course farmers, almost wholly self sufficient and only very rarely straying from vegetarianism. The impact of the twentieth century is far from negligible though; buses snake along the island roads, solar panels shine out of newer developments, and cranes can be seen erupting from the rebuilding of old buildings. A shortage of new monks is also proving a problem; the holy sanctuaries face new challenges in clinging to their ever aloof mountain.

We stopped for lunch at the island of Ammouliani, the only inhabited island around Chalkidike. The port taverna there was excellent, mainly for the highly entertaining sea life and wide variety of easily visible and feedable fish - entire bread rolls were being propelled around the bay by knots of sea life giving chase, before being carried off by the ever present yellow legged gulls. Ammouliani seems pleasant, and is across the bay from Ouranopolis, the last outpost before Athos and site of an impressive fourteenth century fortified tower.

This seemed to be our lot, save a long ride back to Sarti - but the sea life proved us very wrong. No fish this time, but a bigger treat, the sudden appearance of a dolphin beside the ship, then another, then a mother and calf, and soon enough an entire pod playing around the boat. The relative rarity of dolphins in the Mediterranean (the common dolphin's mediterranean population is red listed as endangered, though it is hard to tell whether we we were seeing them or their more common striped cousins) made this an especial treat. The frequent depictions of dolphins on ancient coinage in Thessaloniki were quickly brought to mind, the curved leap as timeless a symbol as the great mountain that, now cloud-wreathed, still presided over the gulf. It goes without saying that the calves were particularly notable, tucked close to their mothers in the pod; I had never previously been quite so close to cetaceans as I was then, sitting right in the prow of the boat with the dolphins running along barely a metre below. It was genuinely a great privilege.

Sarti is worth a final mention, its long thin strip of buildings reappearing  as we rode a sun-track back into port. It is a tourist town of postcard shops and beach cafés, with a wide sandy beach occupied by serried ranks of sunbeds that face out to the (perhaps rather disapproving) sight of Athos in the distance. There is a good bakery in the middle of town, and much accommodation; it is probably more a town for sun, sea, and sand than for exploration, but its status as a base for boat trips alone makes it -as I hope the above has shown -worth passing through to get onto the sea at the very least.

[Glaurung]

Wow, what a day! It sounds wonderful
Also, you sound much healthier and more energetic, which is good.
I'm waiting to see what tomorrow brings.

[Jubal]

Today was mainly occupied by a visit to Toroni, the next village north of Porto Koufo. It has a long history indeed; its heyday was in the classical period, and it took part in the Peloponnesian and Macedonian wars. It is a tourist village, much like Sarti; a long strip of beach cafés and apartments along a sandy bay. The modern town is tongues north of the ancient; where the old town (vacated in the 18th century) was is hard for me to say, as guide books were rather lacking in details and there is sadly no interpretative stuff around the town itself.

The most impressive remaining feature is the Byzantine fort that overlooked the old harbour, which has long since disappeared to sea level rise (the harbour wall foundations are now sixty metres from the coast). The fort sits on a small headland, and retains the remains of once-high walls, though it is sadly fenced off awaiting a refurbishment which may be in progress or may have stalled (it was hard to tell). The fence is easy to get around but we refrained from doing so in favour of climbing the near hill, the old acropolis. This rocky bluff is carpeted with pottery, long since scattered and out of place, its historical value essentially lost in the mass. The remains of towers can be seen on the fried major bluff, as can what appears to be the old well (covered only by a battered wooden pallet). For those prepared to scrape their legs on the local bushes, a climb to the peak of the hill yields more wall ruins and an impressive panorama from the distant Kassandra peninsula around to look down to Porto Koufo in the next valley.

Down at the bottom, a single building shows the remains of a mosaic, unexplained and fenced off. The major attractions of the place, most notably its old defensive walls, were removed by the Turks in the early twentieth century for road surfacing. More can be seen by diving, but without any gear we had to satisfy ourselves with what was there. Toroni clearly has vast potential for making good use of its history; and what's there is very well worth a visit indeed. A better prepared site would be an exceptionally worthwhile attraction, however.

We lunched by a small mountain stream, which included a visit by a locust - I'd not seen one before, and would naively have expected a heavily built brown beasst ready to wreak the plagues of Egypt on the world. The creature was actually resplendent in green and gold and very elegant, flying through the long grass as the king of the grasshoppers and crickets that scattered out of our path. The rest of the day was somewhat quieter, though included some rather pretty fish sightings in the bay and an excellent dinner up in Porto Koufo itself, including octopus (well worth trying) fried courgette (SO worth trying), and plentiful local wine (which was rather strong and is to blame for any typos today!)

And so, as a rather more famous diarist once said, to bed...

[Jubal]

Today we wound around the peninsula once more, to the valley south of Sarti, in which the town of Sikia nestles a little way inland in a basket of mountain slopes. The Sikia valley is wide, flat, and agricultural, with winding half-dried waterways, giant reeds, olive groves and cattle. Beehives are very much in evidence; the trickles of water running along riverbeds are swarmed by thirsty invertebrates. Sikia looks deceptively modern architecturally, but older buildings sit among the new and culturally its inland location has given it a more a authentically Greek pattern of life. Shops are shut in the heat of the day, and Orthodox chanting could be heard loudly from the local church.

With some difficulty, we found the starting point of our walk in a rather poorly written guidebook. Whilst we were impressed by the sight of a short toed eagle wheeling overhead, we were less impressed by the lack of signage until, by chance, I spotted a tiny shrine that was portrayed in the book and thus found the start of the trail. Heading through the bees, olive groves, and mulberry trees,we eventually found ourselves on a winding rocky path that, barely a goat's track, headed on and up the mountainside. The difference was rapid; the slope was drier, and covered in scrub vegetation, and played host to a wide variety of grasshoppers and butterflies that played in the heat of the sun. We were rather less jubilant, picking our way through the maze of routes and smoothed paths as the very warmth that fuelled the hyperactive butterflies slowed and irritated us. Fortunately the natural world kept finding incentives and rewards; new butterflies, a bright orange mantis. And then, halfway up the tiny track, almost trodden on by my father, I spotted Plod.

Plod, as I have named the animal, was the highlight of the day. It was a tortoise, stepped over by my father as he wandered along the path. As with the dolphins of Athos, the tortoise of Sikia was something a little special. Plod was probably a Hermann's tortoise (though we don't have a guide to reptiles with us); I could probably have picked it up with one hand, but of course used two to get the all important underside photograph for identification later. Only one eye stared out at me from the shell, the other long since gone and healed over, perhaps from a failed attempt at predation or, more likely, the victim of a thorny scrub bush. Pootling across the path, Plod was probably none too pleased at being shifted as round for the cameras, but soon enough we had finished subjecting the poor creature to the unexpected paparazzi and let it trundle back into the thorny bushes of home. My brief video of Plod leaving is perhaps the best thing I have from the encounter; for a group of animals that have suffered so heavily from habitat loss and collection by pet collectors, one leaving a human encounter to return to a safe haven of leaf and shade is perhaps especially a hopeful though.

We got thoroughly lost after that, observed and perhaps mocked by rock thrushes and butcher birds. Lunch was had in the shade by a trickling stream, from which we eventually scrambled up to where our "path" (such as it wasn't by then) met a wider car track used for servicing power lines and a phone mast. We kept walking up to a viewing point at the mast, from which wide panoramas of the valley below could be seen. We were barely a quarter of the way around the walk, but decided that was quite enough given the heat and, moreover, the near total lack of decent walking tracks. A group of German walkers we met hit the nail on the head; we had the tiny goat tracks and the car tracks, but no human tracks, which rather hampered having a good hill walk. As such we slowly descended, having a drink in town before buying baked goods for dinner on the way home.

The rest of the day was uneventful, though a trip to Porto Koufo harbour involved a sighting of a large eel hiding between the rocks and the unfolding story of the Mediterranean continues to enthral. The town was busier today; more boats, pleasure boats rather than fishing ships, indicated that the weekend was, even in this somewhat timeless feeling place, certainly upon us.

[Jubal]

Today we attempted another walk from the book, this one rather easier and actually starting from the hotel. Climbing the long dry valley to the north of Porto Koufo we reached dry grasslands and olive groves. Olive trees are everywhere here, still clearly of great importance to the local economy. The groves have little between them - a few holiday shacks, but mostly rough grassland that stands rugged and empty except when roaming goat herds pass through. There is some new building, but little; once the beach is more than a moment's walk away the impetus to colonise the land disintegrates. A rutted track wound along the valley, and we followed it on south towards the end of Sithonia.

What's we found there, in the semi-wild grasslands beyond even the olive groves, was birds. It is migration season, and the tip of the peninsula was wholly ready for it. One field was covered in wheatears, the next in shrikes of many species (red backed, woodchat, and lesser grey). The red backed shrike is known as a butcher bird for its habit of keeping larders of invertebrates skewers on thorns. A hoopoe flew in the background; swooping over proceedings were swallows, in great numbers, tacking left and right down the wind to flee the peninsula and head south down the coast or across the Aegean sea.

Our path then turned, and butterflies exploded out of the scrub as we followed a narrow, unkempt path around the hillsides to reach views back down the valley. Tucked over the brow of a hill we found a large complex of goat sheds; outside the tourist zone the agricultural life of Greece still wears its livery of corrugated iron, sticks, and straw. Olives are still tended and livestock are still herded; indeed agriculture in Greece is if anything more specialised than it was as global trade has reduced the need for scraping out poor arable returns where more profitable olive groves could be situated. Whilst some gnarled olives had clearly been there for generations, it was notable that there were much younger groves as well.

Tonight we finally tried the famous fish of Porto Koufo, and they lived up to their billing. The fish restaurants there are and should be an attraction in themselves; the fishing industry has tied itself to the tourist trade. There are without a doubt two (at least two) Porto Koufos; a littoral based public fasce of fish and sand, but also an older, wider agricultural reality that winds on up into the half wild hillsides of this land.

[Glaurung]

Many thanks for your recent posts - I read them while I was away, but didn't have a good opportunity to respond. You've written very evocatively about the things you've experienced - so much so that I'm forming mental images, despite never having visited Greece. You've certainly whetted my appetite for a trip there!

If you've put any more of your travel writing on-line, I'd love to read it.