Shorter Holidays

The new supermarket is in the cream building on the right.

It is a bright sunny summer’s day on the small island of Symi in the southern Dodecanese. While the rest of Greece grumbles about striking truck drivers it is business as usual here on Symi and the main news of the day is that Taxas Supermarket’s amazing new premises are finally open. A stately neo-classical mansion has been successfully transformed, over a number of years and with a great deal of hard work, into a modern and convenient supermarket. While most readers of this column might not find the concept of a supermarket with trolleys in any way worthy of excitement, for Symi this is indeed a first and ranks along with the arrival of the first bus and the advent of the first car hire as an milestone in the island’s modern history. As it is the only supermarket on the island that takes credit cards there are also two check out desks, one labeled CASH ONLY and the other labeled CASH AND CREDIT CARDS. Various visitors have been spotted lingering by the cold displays, murmuring ‘It’s just like Tescos’ while Yanni proudly takes regular customers on conducted tours to admire the chilled fruit and veg display and the deli counter. As an aside, when I first came here in 1993 this was the only supermarket on Symi to sell pet food and then only in the summer so that sentimental tourists could feed the feral cats ‘proper’ food instead of taverna scraps. Now every grocer and supermarket on the island sells pet food all year round.


Another landmark on the island’s retail map is Gompos, the new ‘cash and carry’ which has opened in the old Fish Farm building next to the fuel station at Petalo. Tavernas and restaurants can now place their bulk orders locally and as it is also available for private individuals who want to buy in bulk there are many Symi householders wrestling with that classic cash and carry conundrum, how to fit all those toilet rolls into a very small house…

Still life with shutters, taverna table and two cats.

Survival of the cutest

 

Symi is now heading into the busiest time of the year and for the next fortnight or so the island will be bursting at the seams. We have visitors arriving or departing on every boat tomorrow and that marks the start of a month where that will be the case more often than not. Hotels, houses and apartments are full but as so many people are taking shorter holidays than usual this year there are still occasional short stay gaps available in the latter part of the month so if you are looking for a last minute minibreak and can find flights, it is worth enquiring.



Have a good weekend.

Regards,

Adriana

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Comfort Food

Yialos at 8 o'clock this morning.

The recent heat wave has finally broken and Symi woke to low fluffy clouds rolling over the Vigla this morning. The Aegean Regatta sailed off into the mist and at one point the Turkish coast was completely masked by low cloud and a rain squall. There are still some clouds about but it is very warm and humid with a tropical feel to the air. The water ship came in today, for the first time in weeks. A welcome sight indeed as once again parts of Yialos were without water this morning.

The View from my Desk at Symi Visitor Accommodation. 

That isn't a sinking ship in the background - it is the much anticipated water boat from Rhodes.

The premiere of the Symi Festival took place last night. This year’s festival is quite low key in comparison to previous years, with smaller posters and the printed program only finally came out late last week. There was not the usual flamboyant firework display at the end of the opening concert either. In the new austerity Greece there is less inclination to send money up in smoke as municipalities around the country are having to tighten their belts and count the cents.

There is a Cat in this Photograph of Dimitri's Carpentry Shop at the bottom of the Kali Strata.

Symi has become quite an up-market destination in recent years, with stylish boutiques and glamorous shops for the summer visitors. A new addition to the harbour, however, caters more to the present craving for comfort food and specializes in all the different kinds of traditional Greek fried confectionary. Forget American doughnuts with a hole in the middle – Greeks have a wide range of traditional spiced and fragrant doughnuts, fried in hot oil and then plunged into honey syrup or rolled in cinnamon sugar. Never mind if you cannot afford the designer beachwear next door, you can always cheer yourself up with a box of sticky loukoumadia or diples!

Have a good week.

Regards,

Adriana

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Lemonia Tsirimona

The Smile We All Remember So Well

Lemonia and Lefteris with George Bush Senior and Barbara Bush at Syllogos Restaurant

An evening dedicated to Lemonia Tsirimona will be held in Syllogos Square, Chorio, at 9 p.m on Saturday 24 July 2010. Entitled Human Stories, there will be music by Katerina Thomaidi on vocals and Homer Komninos on Guitar.

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Labours of Love

After a few fraught days Symi’s recent water crisis seems to be over for the moment. As the island steadily fills up with high season visitors Symi’s limited water resources, dependent as the island is on the desalination plant on the Pedi road and the occasional visit from a water ship from Rhodes, require very careful management. This is why Symi does not have infinity pools, rolling lawns and golf course hotels.

Vine and Water Meter near the Top of the Kali Strata

Symi Festival Posters on the Kali Strata, the 19th Century Main Street that

Connects Chorio and Yialos

What Symi has instead is one of the most uniquely beautiful neo-classical amphitheatre harbours in the world. Rows of prettily painted houses in shades of ochre and terracotta with touches of the blue they call ‘loulaki’, linked by a grid of steps and lanes, climb the cliffs and rise up into the old town of Chorio.

Ruin with Morning Glory in Central Chorio near Giorgio and Maria's Taverna

If you are visiting Symi and staying down in Yialos or Harani do make sure that at some point in your stay you take the bus or a taxi up to Chorio to explore the old Symi that predates the 19th century harbour. The upper town is also protected by the Archaeologia and despite serious damage during the Second World War is a fascinating labyrinth of small houses in the vernacular style, many of which have been built one on top of the other over the centuries into a veritable warren of tumble down rooms, kitchens and cisterns. Some have been lovingly restored by people who are prepared to pay the vast expense involved but many others still remain ruins. Apart from the amount of bureaucracy involved due to the architectural restrictions, many of these places cannot even be reached by donkey train due to the narrowness of the lanes and all building materials have to be man-packed from the nearest vehicle or donkey access point. Labours of love indeed.

Have a good weekend.

Regards,

Adriana

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When I First Came to Symi

I apologise for the lateness of this Symi report. On Monday afternoon, as I was answering the last of the emails, before settling down to write my blog, it came to my attention that all was not as it should be in the email department. Although my emails were being sent out they weren’t being cleared from the Outbox with the result that the recipients were receiving multiple copies. Sorting that out took much of the afternoon and I am still not entirely sure which of the several stabbings in the dark was the one that actually cleared the problem. This led me to thinking about how things have changed in the years I have lived here on Symi.

When I first came to Symi back in 1993 the island was still dependent on an undersea cable to Rhodes for its telephone communications. Even faxes were fairly unreliable due to the poor quality of the line and it was not unusual for the island to be cut off from Rhodes telephonically if anything disturbed the cable. The only place where one could pick up a mobile phone signal was Megalo Sotiris, if one aimed the phone at Rhodes. The first public card telephones on the island were installed that year and the satellite telephone station up on the mountain became operational a year or so later. Nowadays Symi has internet cafes, there are three computer shops on the island and everyone has a mobile phone that works. People who used to come here on holiday to get away from it all, secure in the knowledge that the boss could not contact them without great difficulty, now spend their days answering emails on their smartphones and skyping the office. Modern working habits are invading paradise.

Water, in those days, was something that households received in measured doses one day a week and Water Day involved frantic filling of containers and frenzied laundry during the hour or so that the water was ‘on’. Employers fitted their employee’s working hours around ‘Water Day’. The standard Symi washing machine in those days was a stainless steel drum with an agitator in the bottom. The same water could be used to wash several batches of clothes, starting with the cleanest, before finally being tipped onto the geraniums. Now we expect to have a continuous water supply and it is extremely inconvenient when it goes off without warning because householders no longer have the backup supplies that they used to depend on and tourists have come to expect a 24 hour water supply. The infrastructure of cisterns and Water Days has fallen away but its replacement, the desalination plant, is not yet quite up to meeting the island’s demands. It will, undoubtedly, eventually achieve its aim. After all, look at how far we have come in 17 years.

Very few houses had air conditioning and it was not uncommon for people to set up beds and mattresses outside their houses on hot summer nights. In the winter everyone had gas lanterns at the ready because power cuts were a fact of life, particularly after the first rains shorted out every cable damaged in the course of the long dry summer. Now air conditioning is regarded as a basic need and the humble fan is becoming an endangered species. The power station on the Pedi road has more generators outside than in and roars away on hot summer nights to contend with the increasing demand for these power hungry appliances. We have sacrificed peace and quiet for an ambient temperature of 25 degrees centigrade in August.

Symi has entered the 21st century and has many of the amenities of the modern world but it is still fundamentally a nineteenth century neo-classical gem with beautiful but quirky architecture and far more steps than it will ever have roads. Visitors and residents alike need to remember that this is what makes Symi special. There are plenty of Greek island resorts and artificially created Greek-style complexes for tourists, but Symi is unique. Not just because it has some of the finest authentic neo-classical architecture for a small island in Greece but also because visitors actually get to live in and experience this way of life at first hand. Visitors to Symi share the same trials and tribulations as the local residents because they are staying in the same houses, dining in the same tavernas, shopping in the same supermarkets and travelling on the same bus. This is not a luxury resort where visitors are isolated from their hosts, this is a place where visitors become part of the community for the duration of their stay. Which may go some way to explain why so many people return to Symi year after year, enjoying the island’s progress but also catching up on old friends and savouring a way of life that is slipping away elsewhere, a life where people know their neighbours and children have an unprecedented amount of freedom.

Have a good week.

Regards,

Adriana

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Cool Blue Sea and Sun-Drenched Land

Tomorrow morning, Saturday 17 July at 7 a.m David O’Meara, the One Mile Runner, will be running a measured mile as part of his project to run to run 6 one-mile races, in 6 weeks, on 6 continents in less than 30 minutes total time. This means that for each one mile leg he is aiming to complete the route in under 5 minutes. His route on Symi will be from the windmills on the crest above Yialos down to Petalo where he will be met by Deputy Mayor Ilias Haskas who will present him with a copy of the Symi coffee table book. David first met Ilias Haskas at the Sister City Twinning Ceremony at Tarpon Springs in 2008 which Ilias was attending in his official capacity as the Deputy Mayor of Symi. It was through this encounter and speaking to Nikos Halkitis at the same event that David came to hear about Symi as a possible venue for his venture.

Symi represents the European leg of David O’Meara’s round the world run and his stay on Symi is sponsored by the Hotel Fiona and Symi Visitor Accommodation.  The Symi event is organized by Nikos Halkitis and Wendy Wilcox and a video will be posted on David O’Meara’s One Mile Runner blog shortly after completion of the race. David and his wife, Sekyen, leave the same day to start the long journey to Nigeria for the African leg of his mission. The race was originally scheduled for 8 a.m but it was decided to make it earlier in the light of the present heatwave and also the amount of traffic on the road at 8 in the morning, even in a quiet place like Symi. Sharing the road with Symi’s bus on its first trip of the day plus the island’s dump truck heading up from Yialos to the landfill seemed a bad idea. Measuring out the route today was done by David O’Meara and Dominic Lillicrap of Symi Visitor Accommodation with the loan of a measuring wheel from Symi Tours, last used in the days when Symi still had lots of package companies offering the island and reps had to measure to the last inch how far each holiday let was from the nearest taverna and beach.

On a less strenuous note, it is another sunny Symi summer’s day. Birds are chirping on my office balcony, the water taxis are running fully laden to the beaches and the day trippers from Rhodes are working their way systematically through the island’s beer and ice cream supplies in the shade of various waterfront cafes. The stack of crates of empty beer bottles outside Pachos is rising at the same rate as the temperature and no one feels much inclined to consume anything hot or substantial. It is the season for convivial picking at a colourful Greek salad in the company of friends old and new while the waves lap lazily against the shore and somewhere out across the bay the puttering engine of a small fishing boat can be heard. The summer flavours of Symi are salty and sweet and reflect a happy combination of cool blue sea and sun-drenched land.

Have a good weekend.

Regards,

Adriana

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The Lie of the Land

It is a warm summer morning on the small island of Symi in the Dodecanese. A fisherman is whacking an octopus on the quay. Unwhacked octopus is very tough indeed. I know of at least one innovative fisherman who uses an old cement mixer to tenderize his but a good pummeling on the quay does just as well if it is only one or two. The crews of the excursion boats and water taxis are making their preparations for the day and the aroma of strong Greek coffee and tobacco wafts up from Pachos cafeneion below my office. Turkish gulets are unraveling their anchors from the bottom of Yialos and departing with occasional shouts and toots on horns. The detritus of millennia litters the bottom of Symi’s harbour and fouled anchors are frequent.


First time visitors often find Symi’s mountainous topography difficult to envisage before they arrive on the island. The tiers of houses that line the amphitheatre harbour of Yialos, linked by their hundreds of steps. The winding lanes of old Chorio punctuated by many churches. The remnants of the Kastro on its battered acropolis overlooking both the harbour and Chorio. The rolling green sweep of the Pedi valley, ever more built upon but none the less still a welcome patch of verdure in an arid summer landscape.

Here are some photographs to show new visitors the lie of the land and to bring back some memories for those who have already had their Symi holidays.
 

Yialos, the main harbour of Symi, with Harani behind it. 

The clock tower is where the big ferries dock from Pireaus.  The Nireus Hotel, the Aliki, Sofia's House, Stavros Mansion and several other well known holiday accommodations are in the Harani.

This photograph was taken from half way up the Kali Strata steps on the opposite side of the amphitheatre harbour.

 

Central Chorio and the Upper Pedi Valley as seen from Lieni, one of the areas of Upper Chorio.  Yialos and Harani as seen in the previous photograph are on the other side of the ridge of hills with the windmills.  In the foreground you can see the Taxiarchis Hotel. The Little Blue House, Zoe's apartments and Olympic Holidays' Anastasia Studios are all on this hill and have views across this valley. The motor road on the right comes up from the harbour and there is a T junction just where it disappears in the photograph.  You can either head up the hill to towards the centre of Chorio or down the hill to Pedi.  This is the main motor road on the island and all the rows of houses you can see on that hill side are connected by narrow lanes and steps with no immediate vehicle access.

 

 

From the row of windmills in the previous picture there is a steep lane, just wide enough for one car, which goes down to a small square and a lane that connects to the Kali Strata steps.  In this area you will find the Hotel Fiona which is the blue gabled building in the foreground, Villa Anastasia, the Old Bakery, the village square and the routes to Lemonitissa church and the Kastro. That hill in the background with the small blue and white church on it is the kastro and the hill itself is often referred to as Symi's acropolis.

 

Have a good week.

 

Regards,

Adriana

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Pick Up Some Colour

The heat wave has broken at last and a fresh breeze is rippling across Symi harbour. Temperatures are in the mid thirties with humidity at a comfortable 50%. It is too windy for the water taxis and excursion boats to operate today but those beaches which can be reached on foot or by bike and car at Harani, Nimborio, Pedi and Toli Bay enjoyed business as usual. The rest of Greece is still experiencing the summer thunderstorms and showers that have brought floods to parts of the Balkans but the skies are clear blue over Symi and new arrivals to the island are conspicuous by their pallor amongst the sun-tanned locals. They won’t stay pale for long though as the long range weather forecast shows sunshine all the way and it is impossible not to pick up some colour in this climate.

The Symi Festival program has finally been released and the official grand opening concert on 25 July will feature Greek pop divas Despina Vandi and Elli Kokkinou so we can expect a very full island that weekend. As the concert falls on a Sunday evening and this year there are no ferries scheduled from Symi to Rhodes early on Monday mornings we hope that this event will provide an incentive to Dodecanese Seaways to do something about this lack. Plenty of people will be wanting to come over from Rhodes for the concert but may think twice about it if they cannot get back the next morning. The theme of this year’s festival is ecology and the fresh green posters will be going up around the town in the next few days.

A mobile mammogram unit is visiting the island this weekend to provide free mammograms for the women of Symi. Any woman over the age of 40 living on Symi is entitled to this x-ray and there has been a very good response to this initiative. When one lives on an island with limited facilities a basic check up usually entails a day or so in Rhodes and these things, though important, are often put off due to lack of time and money. Bravo to the organizers of this program.

Have a good weekend.

Regards,

Adriana

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Quiet Symi

While mainland Greece has had violent thunderstorms and deluges heavy enough for the fire brigade to be called out for basement pumping in various residential areas, Symi is sweltering under the shimmering haze of yet another heat wave. The air is heavy with humidity and the only relief is to be found out on the water or on the beach. As the Greek schools have closed for the summer holidays the local children are making the most of the beach down in Pedi and it is not unusual to be sharing the afternoon bus with various inflatable toys and lilos. Symi may be short on swimming pools due to the architectural restrictions and lack of natural water on the island but there are plenty of sheltered places where children can safely swim, usually under the watchful eye of an aunt or grandmother because at this time of the year much of the adult population of the island is working in the tourist industry.

Yialos is very quiet with most visiting yachts continuing to favour swinging at anchor in Pedi bay rather than coming stern-to in Yialos. The water front tavernas are not as busy as they usually are at this time of the year as those yachts that do come into the harbour seem to prefer on board catering to dining ashore. This is a pity as Symi has some extremely good tavernas and can offer a wide range of dining experiences to suit all tastes and budgets. On hot summer nights it is far pleasanter to let someone else slave over a hot stove and sample the local fare.

One spin off of the recent increase in fuel prices is that there are far fewer motor bikes and cars on Symi’s roads and few teenagers can afford such mindless pastimes as driving up and down the Vigla. Symi has become quieter in the new austerity Greece but this is not necessarily a bad thing.

Have a good week.

Regards,

Adriana

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Symi's Golden Light

It is a hot summer’s day on the small Greek island of Symi in the southern corner of the Dodecanese archipelago. Far from the hurly burly of mainland Greece, Symi basks in its own golden light. The picket lines of the general strikes in Athens and Piraeus so beloved by the media are a long way from Symi and belong to a different world. The local ferry companies that serve Symi, http://www.anes.gr/ and http://www.12ne.gr/, are small businesses where the crews are virtually family members and connections between Symi and Rhodes are running smoothly. The only difficulties that visitors to Symi may experience this year is that due to the economic climate there are not as many boats serving the different routes on a daily basis as there were in previous years and the Aegli hydrofoil still has not been replaced. The local island shipping companies are not buying more boats at the moment but are doing the best they can with what they have. The next general strike has been called for Thursday 8 July but at this stage it is unclear which unions will be participating. So far the air traffic controllers have not been joining in and international flights have not been affected.

The Symi Festival opens on 11 July. More information will be available next week as the details are being finalized this weekend and the festival brochures are being printed on Monday. On 12 July David O’Meara, the One Mile Runner http://www.onemilerunner.com/ will be running on Symi in support of the Symi Festival. Another important date to note if you are on Symi this summer is 28 July which will be dedicated to Lemonia Tsirimona from Syllogos Restaurant who died suddenly on 18 June 2010. She played such an active part in the life of the community it is very strange for the island to be without her. So many everyday questions were answered with ‘I’ll just ask Lemonia’. Hers will be difficult shoes to fill.

Although Symi is now edging into high season there is still quite a lot of last minute availability on the island outside of the peak dates of 14 and 15 August so it is not too late for a quick Symi summer break and enjoy Symi’s golden light for yourself.

Have a good weekend.

Regards,

Adriana

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