On a Greek Island: a Season in Zakynthos

By Ralph Lavelle

Hailing from Ireland, but based in Australia with his family, web developer Ralph Lavelle was tired of office life in Brisbane. You know how it is. So he went to Zakynthos, the Greek island his wife Tina's parents come from, to see how he and his family would get on living there for a season before he had to face real life and get a job again.

While they were there, however, it began to look like Greece could find itself out of the Eurozone any day the way things were going in Brussels between Syriza and the troika - oops, the "institutions". But the Greeks are resilient, and Zakynthos itself has seen off earthquakes and invaders over the centuries. It turned out to be an ideal base from which Ralph could launch a full-scale attack on the language, the music, and the culture in general, while his two kids were sequestered away in a village school.

A warm-hearted account of life on the Greek island of Zante, written by someone lucky enough to have spent a season playing guitar there, reading books there, and above all, doing nothing in particular there.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ralph Lavelle
• Release date: Jun 14, 2016
• ISBN: 9781311289063

Ralph Lavelle

I'm a writer, trapped in a web developer's career, living in Brisbane, Australia. 'On a Greek Island' was my first book, my first of at least twenty. 'European Odyssey' was my second.

Book preview

On a Greek Island

A Season on Zakynthos

Ralph Lavelle

Dedicated to Tina, φυσικά

Table of contents

Introduction

Chapters

Koúkla House

To school through the medieval olive groves

A dark and stormy night

Let’s speak Greek

Big Week

Joining the orchestra

A Stroll around the neighbourhood

The Plan

Time enough at last

Γιαγιά and Παππού

The special relationship

A walk over Marathiá

The French Connection

The Italian Job

Travels in the Southern Peloponnese

Et In Arcadia Ego

Όχι!

Paniyíri

Grexit?

A note about the Greek words in the book

Bibliography

Version 3.2 (August 2019)

Introduction

Overlooking Laganas Bay

Overlooking Laganas Bay

The first version of this book appeared over half a year ago, in September 2015, in a big hurry. We had left Zákynthos not long beforehand, and having at last finished it, I just wanted to get the book out there before I started the six-month web development contract that would tide us over the winter here in Dublin. With that gig fast coming to an end now, and the holiday season fast approaching, the time when people might, oh, I don't know, buy an ebook about Zákynthos, I thought I'd brighten it up a little with some of the photographs Tina and I took while we were there.

The addition of the forty-two photos is the big change in this version, which I grandly call Version 2, but I've updated the text too. Re-reading the book half a year later I found myself excising bits that didn't work, fleshing out parts that needed more explanation, and of course fixing mistakes. Ebook publishing is a bit like website design in that respect: you can tinker with the source files to your heart's content even after the book has been published, reupload the files when you're ready, and do the same thing tomorrow.

Thanks to my Mum and my sister Ciara for reading early drafts, and to my brother Gavin for doing the front cover. Thanks too to Karl in Brisbane for his encouragement. I especially appreciate the people who have already bought and read the book and who then wrote to me with encouraging words. Of course my biggest thanks go to the friends I made on Zakynthos while I was writing the book and who people its pages, especially Yorgo, Louise, and of course, the Maestro.

If you enjoy the book, you might be interested in reading about our other travel adventures on our blog, called, naturally enough, Koukla House. There are a couple of videos of me playing with the mandolinada group on my channel on YouTube. You can write to me at [e-mail] - I’d love to hear from you if you have anything to say about the book.

It goes without saying that any grammatical or punctuationy mistakes in the text are the result of me trying to be James Joyce and are not actually mistakes oh no oh nono.

Dublin, April 2016

In the course of finishing off my second book, European Odyssey , I went back to On a Greek Island , to see what typos I'd missed (surprisingly few) in version two, three and a half years earlier, and what parts needed beefing up (a couple) or cutting out (a lot). Otherwise there were no substantial changes.

The time in Greece described in this book was just part of a nineteen-month trip to Europe, and that entire trip is the subject of European Odyssey which made the Greek section of EO hard to write. Actually, there are two Greek sections. After our first time in Greece, the one described in this book, we spent nearly a year in Ireland, with side trips here and there. On leaving Ireland the following summer, we went to France and Italy, before ending our odyssey in Zakynthos, where we spent a mere six weeks this time.

So if you want to know what it's like to help restore a three-hundred year old mill house in Provence, go camping with insane people in Poland, run a Spanish conversation class in Dublin's Docklands, and, of course, go back to Zakynthos once again, then look for European Odyssey wherever you buy your ebooks.

Brisbane, August 2019

1 Koúkla House

View of Bohali

First view of the island

We entered Zákynthos through the front door, riding in on the waves, boots up on the gunwale, telescopes out, like the Spanish ‘Algerian’ pirates who plagued the Mediterranean for so long. We took advantage of the moments before disembarking to see if anything had changed since the last time we were here. Other than the ferry we were on, the new Fior di Levante , everything looked the same.

I could see the pine-topped hill of Bóchali, separated by a saddle from the echo of a smaller hill to the south; the signature icons of the town as you approach it from the sea. There was barely a sign of the ruined Venetian fortress which I knew was up there on top. Unlike Palamídi Castle, which dominates the old town of Náfplio in the Peloponnese, you wouldn’t notice Kástro tis Zakínthou if you didn’t know it was there; only occasionally through small gaps in the woods does it reveal itself. As the ferry got closer, I was able to pick out the platform in the fortress with the flag, the one we’d all stood at nearly two years ago. The whole fortress, as well as being a worrisome tinderbox for the authorities, is an open air history museum; just like Greece itself. It’s layered with the debris of the island’s previous custodians: the Venetians, the French, the English - whose contribution includes a football pitch - and, not so long ago, the Germans, during World War Two.

Moving down the hill, my eye stopped at the tiny church of Panagía Pikridiótissa, with its characteristic separation of bell tower and main church building. Tina took me there last time we were here, in July 2013, and up there, away from the tourist drag, I felt like a local. And there was the old hospital, where I ended up a few times the year I came down with chickenpox after picking it up on a visit home to Ireland just before coming here. Ah, I can laugh about it now, but you should have seen the state of me.

Below decks, the Fior had some nice old historical pictures of Zante. One sketch I loved showed the fortress in its heyday, overlooking the harbour which was full of sailing ships. Squinting out the starboard side up on top now, I could see it was too early in the season to see the usual quota of yachts lined up along the quayside. On summer evenings, they moor opposite the waterfront restaurants, so close that sitting there it’s easy to start fantasising about sailing the Mediterranean on one of those exotic craft. There were a few of the local fishermen’s caiques on the quayside this morning, of course, their owners sitting out on the upturned blue crates, selling the morning’s catch to the locals and probably talking about basketball.

As we got closer to the harbour, close enough to pick out the cars double-parked outside the cafés along Strada Marina, the town’s fragility became more obvious. The ridged limestone cliffs of Bóchali, with their epaulettes of cypress, seemed to bunch like tough guys over the thin layer of civilisation that flourished along the coast. It’s no idle simile: anyone familiar with the history of Zákynthos knows the role mother nature has played here; it showed little of the maternal, however, when it annihilated five hundred years of culture in a few seconds in the seismó of 1953.

But today is a day for thinking more positive thoughts. To the left is the hill of Skopós, which gave us one of the highlights of our stay last time. Tina and I posed for photos on the nipple of the hill overlooking Laganás Bay, the next bay over. The coastal zone of that bay is where we’d be based for the next four months, in Pórto Koúkla. Even though we’d be near Laganás town, which of course is famous for being a good place to see bad behaviour, the party wouldn’t start till June or thereabouts. And in any case, unless you go there at night time, which we never did, it wouldn’t affect us in the slightest. There was plenty of time to explore the island and see what things were like before the season started. Most people only ever see the same face of Zákynthos, the summer one, as if it was in captured rotation around them like the moon around the earth. What’s it like off-season? What does its far side look like?

View of Bohali

The bell tower of Ágios Dionýsios

We were in the embrace of the harbour now. Three young German guys, optimistically dressed in t-shirts, shorts, and sandals defied the top deck spring breeze and like me stayed up there until the last minute before we all turned away from the view to join everyone else on their way down to the already wide open mouth of the ferry. The bell tower of the church of Ágios Dionýsios, a flamboyant Italian doorman awaiting our arrival, marks the junction of the pier and the town. It’s a strange harbinger of Zante, one which resembles its much more famous prototype, the tower in St. Mark’s Square in Venice. Between that and the elusive Fortezza del Zante up on the hill, you can get a good sense of the dominant influence from the direction of the Adriatic Sea that Zákynthos has had foisted upon it. But just as there is more dark matter in the cosmos than visible matter, there’s also more darkness than light in history; the original Fortezza, and all the subsequent enhancements that have accreted on that site, were probably built on the ruins of an ancient acropolis called Ψωφίδα (Psofída). That spectacular Greek word refers to the name of the town in Arcadia that the mythical character Zákynthos himself came from, and the acropolis, which means a city on a hill, is three and a half thousand years old: the ground zero of Zantean civilization.

We’d put half the breadth of Greece behind us since the day’s first light. Three hundred kilometres longitudinally we’d come; latitudinally, we’d barely moved (it’s funny; despite Greece’s complicated outline, with its wide scattering of islands, the vast spaces between them, and the strange shape of its continental mainland, Athens is nonetheless positioned bang in the middle, horizontally and vertically). On Zantiot terra firma at last, we got sorted out with the car we’d be renting for our first week, and in the early afternoon set out along the main road out of town towards the village of Lithakiá. The last stretch. At the village crossroads where you have to decide whether you’re going to the mountains or the beach, we turned left towards the beach.

Driving through the ancient olive groves past overflowing rubbish containers, we turned at the signpost for Anastásios Korianítis Street. This is an unofficial street sign Pappou, Tina's Dad, put up a few years ago in memory of his father-in-law, who used to own the land on which Koúkla House, the house we’d be staying in, was built. It’s one of the only named roads you’ll see anywhere outside the town itself.

We nosed the car through a clutch of small dwellings whose chickens and dogs moved aside begrudgingly, in no great hurry at all. Ah, there she lies: Koúkla House. No earthquakes had levelled her nor winds blown her down. Built by Tina’s parents in 2003 on the site of the family’s kalíva, the shack they used to summer in to get away from the heat up in the village. Unlike Lithakiá itself, wherein the family’s main residence used to be, down here right by the coast you get strong sea breezes. They grew tomatoes, cucumbers, aubergines, onions, and peppers in the neighbouring fields. And when the old shack was levelled to make the handsome new, two-storey, no-frills, modern house, a lot of family memories - Tina’s mother’s, of growing up there, and Tina’s own, of her grandparents and of a family trip from Australia in 1985 - were razed with it. ‘Koúkla House’ is simply the name we’ve given to the new house, coming from the area’s name, Koúkla. Hence, Pórto Koúkla is the part of Koúkla right by the sea.

The first thing I noticed about the house was that the usual Greek flag flapping over the balcony wasn’t there. It must have been stashed by the last people to stay here. Something else was different too: the fields surrounding the house were all planted, whereas normally they’re scruffy and overgrown by the time we arrive. A wiry, tanned guy, stripped to the waist, was working a field of potatoes with a mattock as we pulled into the driveway. We didn’t recognise him as the owner of the neighbouring house, so either the house had changed owner in the two years since we’d been there, or he worked it on behalf of the owner, or he rented the field, or he worked it on behalf of someone who did. One of those. Kaliméra! we shouted. Kaliméra sas! he answered.

As we pulled in, we saw that someone had tied balloons to the balcony columns out front, which were being whipped around by one of the island’s meltémia breezes. We were in a part of the world where not every street had a name, but the breezes did.

Koúkla House is a duplex house, like I say. This year, we’d be staying upstairs, the bigger area, with our boys Alexander and Eoin in one bedroom, Tina and I in the other. Tina’s parents, Yiayia and Pappou, would take the ground floor when they arrived in a month’s time, and my own Mum would join us upstairs a month after that again. We walked up the wide, stone, spiral staircase and let ourselves in. The furniture had all been diligently covered in dust sheets by whoever was here last. We’d never seen it like this before, because we were months early. For once Yiayia and Pappou hadn’t arrived before us to whip it into shape. This is a place whose natural state is to be wide open to the elements, encouraging you out onto the balcony. But of course that was because we only ever used it in summer. That open, breezy state was the state that a chemistry teacher might well have said that the house wanted to be in if no other forces were acting upon it. Well, the cold force of spring was acting on it now. The shutters had been closed, but while we had to open them to let the light in the windows would remain closed for the time being. We noticed that the normally welcome cooling effect of the ceramic tiles was actually a liability now.

But as much as the tiles’ effect was to make everything seem cooler, a gesture of good old-fashioned Greek hospitality put a glow of warmth back in our cheeks. We had expected, naturally, to find the cupboard as bare as Old Mother Hubbard had found hers, and had begun mentally preparing a shopping list of food for a trip to the mini-market later on, but on the kitchen’s marble counter we found a note, alongside a plithóra of food:

Καλώς ήρθατε! Welcome! Hope you’re all well and that you’ll have a great time. We’ll chat soon. Until then, here are our phone numbers…

Bravo, cousin Angela! She’d brought us potatoes, bread, cheese, olive oil, milk, and much more. In fact, everything we needed to live on for the next week was on the counter. But alas, no wine. Hope the mini-market's open.

---

The best feature of Koúkla House is its upstairs balkóni . Generous of girth, it faces the Mediterranean, which is only about two hundred yards away here. Half a world away, however, back in the office in Brisbane , this exact spot is where I always fantasised about being when I drifted off at a meeting or planning session; scanning the dragon-backed mountain ridge on Vassilikós peninsula in the distance, until, distracted by the swallows flitting around their nest a few feet away in the corner of the balcony and the roof, I’d turn back to the book I was reading, at the same time quaffing a glass of mini-market krasí *. Like everyone else I know, I try and avoid meetings at work. In my case, however, it’s because they just make me nostalgic for Zante.

So I felt relieved. I even felt euphoric. That's a good Greek word. This was my eighth time on the island over the last fifteen years, and everything felt familiar and exotic at the same time. Memories rushed up as much from the objects and the smells inside the house as from the sight of the donkey and the bougainvillea outside. All these things naturally reminded me of our previous holidays here, holidays so fleeting we often just left the suitcase open on the bedroom floor and operated out of it, like backpackers or couchsurfers, hanging out all afternoon on the balcony, reading the paper, watching the kids grow up in front of us, but ever conscious of our looming departure. Other than the time we had to postpone leaving by two weeks because I was recovering from chickenpox, we'd only ever managed to spend two or three weeks at a time here. And it was always at the same time of the year; high summer. It felt like every time we came to Zákynthos it was too hot, too crowded, too English, Irish, and Dutch, and everything looked the same as the last time. So this time we’d come in April - shoulder season - and we were going to stay till the end of July. Actually, to judge by the watery sun and the cold breeze around the balcony, it was more like cold shoulder season.

Laganás bay’s usual flotilla of pedalos, motor boats, fishing boats, yachts, and the strange shop boat that parks on the beach at Marathoníssi island and plies its littery trade - none of them had started their comings and goings yet. Like I said, closer to hand we noticed more people working in the fields immediately surrounding us to the east, west, and south than we'd usually see. To the north were two smallish hotels, both with beach bars we frequented during the season for an afternoon frappé. I don’t have an actual compass, by the way, I just use the Android compass app on my phone. The last real compass I bought was in the ‘70s, when I was around 12 and I used to cycle across the bogs of Connemara with Gavin. I didn’t really need one then, and I’ve certainly never needed one since. To know in which direction magnetic north lies just doesn’t come up in my work or my leisure. Now however, I found myself interested, especially since from the balcony we’re lucky enough to have a clear view across the party waters of Laganás bay to the sunrise cordillera on Vassilikós peninsula, topped by the peak of Skopós.

At this time of the year I reckoned that the daily sun would come up quite far along the peninsula at around 7 in the morning, down near Gérakas beach at the end in fact, the one where the turtles lay their eggs. That’s because I knew whereabouts it would come up at around the beginning of July from the last time I was here. As the season advances, the point of first light will march north along the peninsula in the direction of Zákynthos town, but will only ever get as far as the Byzantine church of Panagía Skopiótissa on top of Skopós. Summer solstice, in other words. Fitting, I suppose, but only from here, that the sun rises over there every morning, since that peninsula was the first part of the island to rise from the sea, seventeen million years ago.

As short-lived as any other tourist’s stay here usually was, I’d never really bothered trying to observe any of this sideways movement, the processional march of the sun north, but this coming four months would afford me plenty of latitude to do so. It’s not often you enjoy such an unobstructed view of the morning sunrise. What was I here for if not to pay attention to stuff like this?

---

"Y ássas! Ti kánete?" * It was Yorgo, on his Honda 50. This sturdy Lithakián, with not a word of English to his name, was a walking advanced Greek lesson. We went downstairs and greeted him in the courtyard. Clad in army camouflage pants and khaki combat jacket, he loudly welcomed us to the island. Kálos orísate sti Zákintho! When it became clear that there would be kisses, I decided to let him handle the logistics. Tina knows how to do this stuff; I don’t. She moves her head the right way, positions her body at the right distance, and puts her hands in the right place. Then it was my turn. Yorgo my man, you’re going to have to lead, I thought. Two bristly pecks on the cheek later and that was it: I'd been officially welcomed to the island.

Yorgo looked after the house on behalf of Tina’s parents, what small amount needed doing, in return for the use of the plot of land surrounding it. He had a fine patch of potatoes coming along; fifteen rows of ten metres or so. And now here he was with a big bag of trofí * for us: mandarins, oil, wine. I could see four of the ubiquitous 1.5 litre plastic bottles on which so much of the island’s economy relies, straining to burst out of a yellow plastic bag tied optimistically at the top: two were of olive oil, two were of wine. All the oil and wine was homemade, made by him. Which is outstanding, since he doesn’t drink alcohol any more. I’m positive he has me pegged for a pisshead though, which is unfair, since Tina and her parents also drink wine. And why wouldn’t they? But it’s always given to me in situations like this or at the dinner table with a nudge and a wink. Krasí, eh? Krasí! he said, laughing, handing me a bottle and looking at Tina, who was laughing at me too. Ah, ha, ha! Krasí! I said, laughing, holding it up, pretending to neck it there and then. The guy working in the field looked over at all of us laughing, and at me holding up the krasí and laughing, and probably had to fight the urge to come over