We were headed to lunch at Naoussa, the town in the picture below, taken from a place obviously higher up and some distance away. More on that place later. First we wandered around the town, shoping in the places that were still open (many of them on their last weekend of the season). Our finds included a beautiful moonstone necklace for Alex, turquoise rhinestone Converse for Annabel (for 10 euros!), the most expensive piece of jewelry Annabel had ever bought for herself which you may be lucky enough to see in person one day, and a very cool scarf for Alex. We also had to buy some sunglasses for Annabel so she could survive the blinding sun off the white buildings at lunch--perhaps you will catch a glimpse of those rose-colored glasses in one of the photos below.
We ate at a dockside taverna, two kinds of fish straight off the boats in front of us, or so we chose to believe. Our restaurant was just around the corner past the breakwater in the inlet above. We ate in the lee of the wind, so it was very warm, and Annabel had another opportunity to feed cats.
After lunch we headed out to...you guessed it, another beach! This was a really spectacular and strange place. Annabel and I swam in the lovely water and took a water-eye-view of the rocks, while Alex lay in the warm sun out of the wind. After she took these pictures, of course.
The weird sandstone rocks were extended up into the hills above us, and Annabel and I were seized with scrambling fever. After drying off in the sun and getting dressed in the car (all the local facilities were shut down for the season), we drove a kilometer or so back in the direction of Naoussa, to the sign for an intriguing turn-off: "Mycenaean Acropolis." No one we'd talked to had said anything about this; it wasn't mentioned in any of the tourist literature we read. But we thought it would be worth investigating, especially since it was in the direction we wanted to go anyway: up those perfect scrambling rocks.
At what we presumed to be the right place there was a sign, and that's all. No path, no directions, just rocks and a hill. From our massive knowledge of acropoli, we concluded that it was probably in the "up" direction, and headed off. After just enough scrambling to satisfy Annabel and me and not enough to dismay Alex, we found a path that wound up towards the summit, through a field of tall, bumble-bee-pestered flowers, which I later learned were asphodels.
Homer described asphodels in the fields of the dead, but even without knowing that, the effect was haunting. As we continued upwards I had trouble keeping my eyes on the path, as there was so much to see in every direction, and the fabled Greek light was having its way with us. The summit was, you may say, satisfying. The views were dazzling in every direction. There were two people there when we arrived, but they left soon, and there were two people nearing the top as we left, almost as if we were taking turns having the place to ourselves. There was no evidence of tourist management, no signs except the one at the bottom, but clearly lots of people had been busy moving rocks around at this site in the several thousand years since the Mycenaeans had a sanctuary there. There were small buildings of piled rocks as well as lots of those little stacks of rocks that humans seem compelled to raise in high, rocky places. Annabel took her turn at making a stack of stones, then began gathering clay shards, especially those with traces of paint on them. She was practicing for her career as an archeologist, pretending to be finding ancient Mycenaean artifacts, one of which would give us vital clues to a deeper understanding of Linear B. I enjoyed her game but in my despicable pooh-poohing daddy way, said that there had been plenty of other people up here in the last few millenia and it wasn't likely there was any Mycenaean pottery still around. Well, Daddy, in your face! We showed the pictures to Michael, and he said that some of the pieces with paint on them were very likely particular kinds of ancient pottery. I didn't hear the details so can't supply them--I was busy eating my delicious humble pie while Michael was explaining things to Annabel--but I was cured forever of any patronizing attitude toward Annabel's archaeological explorations. (On our excursion in eastern Attica yesterday she found a shard that Michael identified as possibly the rim of a Hellenistic drinking cup--naturally, we left it where we found it, but Annabel was magnified in the eyes of not merely her doubting dad, but of all my students as well.)
We weren't entirely alone--these goats were climbing up the steep back side. And as you've guessed, this is where I took that picture of Naoussa from a distance. In the dying light and (finally) dying wind the place was magical, and we didn't want to descend.
We did, however, want to spend a little time at the fabulous house, and needed to get cleaned up before dinner, so when the next couple of people arrived at the summit we surrendered the site and headed down the hill, back to the car, and back to the house. Over a glass of wine on the veranda in the last of the light we read in an English-language magazine a glowing review of a restaurant near Naoussa and decided to eat there. It sounded from the review like the place to go for a fancy meal on Paros, but the summer crowd had thinned out and we were eating very early by Greek standards, so we didn't worry about a reservation. It's a good thing we were so early. They seemed strangely reluctant to seat us even though there wasn't a single diner in the restaurant when we arrived. But it filled up very quickly, and I think towards the end of our meal the people who had reserved our table were sitting at the bar impatiently. As we were eating the first course, of vegetable puree soup that even Annabel pronounced delicious, we recognized the voices at the table behind us. Sitting down right next to us were the only people we knew on the whole island, a couple we had met two weeks earlier at a reception at the Athens Centre. He turned out to be the architect of Rosemary's house, which we praised copiously. Petros and Marilyn were also the source for the information I mentioned earlier, about the marble for Rosemary's house coming from Naxos and the history of Lefkes. The happy coincidence of this meeting gave me a powerful impression of how small the island was, and indeed how small Greece is. Thus do we magnify chance into significance, as any of the six or seven million people in Athens might remind me. I said it was a powerful impression; I didn't say it was accurate.
The next morning we enjoyed the sunrise over Naxos in a complete absence of wind, and dawdled with our packing, reluctant to say goodbye to the house. Among other things we also said goodbye to the sad pink bathing suit, which could no longer be tolerated even by Annabel. As we were of course leaving all of Rosemary's towels behind at the house as well, we had to tell Annabel not to expect any swimming on our last day. But conditions were the best they'd been all weekend, and Annabel was quite sad about the prospect of staying dry. As we made our sweep around the south end of the island, along the prime beach stretch, she insisted on seeing the Punda Beach Club, which had sponsored the printing of our map of the island, covering the borders of that map with photos of throngs of happy bikini-ed young women. It looked like spring break in Tampa. So we turned off at the sign and wound down to the beach. We expected the place to be quiet. We just didn't expect it to be desolate.
I tried to capture the rotting planks and pennants of the Punda Beach Club, in hopes of contrasting it with the beauty of the wide, sandy, absolutely empty beach. Perhaps the fierce wind tore up those flags in just one summer. But it sure looked like it had been closed for more than a week or two. Sometime between the printing of our map and the present, the mighty Punda Beach Club had fallen very far, perhaps a victim of the "crisis," as it is referred to here. As you can see from the complete absence of waves in the last picture, the wind had died completely by this time, and it was a balmy, if not exactly hot, day. We had some fun with Annabel up in the lifeguard chair looking out for nonexistent swimmers. But then I found an abandoned beach towel, which we concluded must have been a gift from Poseidon, and Annabel decided she had to go in, suit or no suit. The last picture is of her out there in the altogether, a picture which she insisted on approving before I could post it, naturally. She had a good swim, but then people arrived simultaneously at both ends of the beach, and she had to scramble out of the water and pick her hurried way among the rusty nails and missing boards of the Punda Beach Club to a safe location to dry off and get dressed.
Oh, but wait. I almost forgot. Before we headed to the Punda Beach Club, even before we stopped for delicious pastries and coffees in Maripissa, we had followed one of the standard brown tourist locale signs to a site near Rosemary's house. This was perhaps the biggest anticlimax of the weekend. In the picture Annabel is trying to catch a butterfly. We did see our first Greek lizard, which was something. But as archeological sites go, this was something of a bust. You're seeing pretty much the whole thing. Of course, we had to call it by its complete and proper name, which you may read on the sign.
Back to chronological order. The southern coast of Paros was very beautiful, and we especially enjoyed the very charming little town of Drios, where we picked up handfuls of salt that had dried in the tide pools, watched fish swimming more than fifteen feet down in the perfectly clear and perfectly still water, jumped around on rocks, and even picked up a shell or two. One of which Annabel regretted picking up some five minutes into the walk back to the car, when something pinched her.
We put the little hermit crab in a water bottle to keep him hydrated, then returned him to the sea in Parikia. On the way up the western coast we turned inland and up a steep road to the "butterfly valley," an oasis of green in the otherwise dry landscape where a particularly flashy species is abundant. We were disappointed to find it all locked up, but as the very helpful signs informed us, "butterflies gone--not in season." Hmmm.... I suppose we should have figured that out on our on, perhaps from the guidebook descriptions that talk about them storing up energy for their winter migration. Nevertheless, it was a little odd to find the entire "valley" locked behind a high fence. We would have enjoyed walking under the big trees. Perhaps I was wrong about the Tower of Hellenistic Period; perhaps Butterfly Valley was our biggest disappointment.
We did have one more very big and very pleasant surprise. On Sunday afternoon in Parikia some things were closed, including many stores and the archeological museum. But the church of St. Constantine was open--in fact, it was just about the most open of any church I've ever been in, and as you'll see in a minute, we were even able to peek behind the iconostasis down into the mysteries behind. The church has an associated monastery, and the courtyard was beautiful and very quiet. But we were not prepared for what we found in the church itself. Alex is, as I may have mentioned before, even more into the Byzantine church stuff than the Bronze Age and Hellenistic stuff, and she was happy to spend more than an hour here, sitting, wandering, purchasing small stamped tin squares for hanging on the icon of your choice (with pictures representing what you were interested in having God intervene about, from isolated body parts to symbols of love), and just generally soaking in the ancient Christianity of it all.
We wandered around the main floor at first, looking up and around and peeking through the iconostasis, the wall that divides the congregation from all the mysterious actions the priests are doing behind the scenes, behavior way too sacred for lay people to witness. I included a picture taken by pressing the camera up against the screen of the iconostasis--they were deliberately made so that by standing very close the congregants could see through to the beautiful altars and icons behind the screen, especially in the two side chapels. But what looked like a figure of Christ from my keyhole view turned out from above and behind to have a disturbing resemblance to the big cut-outs of actors you see in the cineplex, or the stand-up advertisements for movies and games on display at the Comic Shop. Once we'd discovered that the upstairs was open, and we could wander all around the back and side, peeking down behind the iconostasis, I started snapping pictures like mad. I've just given you a few. There had been a church on this site since the fifth century, and some of the parts we could see were very old, as old as the oldest churches we've been in in Spain. There were only traces of the original frescoes on the walls. There had been any number of re-modelings over the centuries. The Greek Orthodox Church makes for some fascinating comparisons with Roman Catholicism, but I'm still digesting what I've seen, and don't have anything to contribute on the subject at this time. Annabel seemed as impressed as either of her parents, and no one was in a hurry to leave. Well, maybe Annabel was in a little bit of a hurry. She wanted one last swim in the town beaches just past the port. We couldn't find a girl's suit, but I came up with the brilliant suggestion of a boy's suit and a t-shirt, and it worked fine. We still weren't sure how much of her sea-bathing experience was actual fun and how much was a kind of defiance of the seasons, but we indulged her, and admired her spunk, and had a drink and read the Athens News at a table in the sand, while she walked carefully out into the sea over the somewhat rocky and less-than-pristine town beach. This, my friends, was no Punda Beach Club. But it had more people.
We returned our rental car by depositing it on the curb sort of close to the office and a little further away from where we'd picked it up, and informing the people in the desks near our rental company's desk (which was unoccupied), who said that would be fine, and just leave the keys on the desk there. When we rented it there had been none of that business of looking over the car to confirm dents, no discussion of whether you want insurance or not, just plunked down our money, and then had some trouble actually getting out from behind another car parked directly behind us (and not connected in any way with the rental car agency). Clearly the car rental business in Paros is pretty relaxed. The port was bustling with three evening ferries coming in and going out in close succession, but apparently it's a small town, they know what their car looks like, and they'll find it if we leave it anywhere in the vicinity. Indeed, as we were having coffee and waiting for our boat, the last of the three that evening, we saw our rental agent George go by, and I started to tell him where the car was, and he waved me off with "Yes, yes, fine." Okay. I guess it was fine.
(By the way, half the men in Greece are named Georgios, and the other half are named Costas. Makes it very easy to remember men's names, there being only those two. Well, and the odd Iannis. Greeks name children for their grandparents, so names are cycled and recycled. Sorry for the digression.)
I'll leave you with a final couple of pictures, taken after we left the church and before we went to the beach. One of the local sites in Parikia that couldn't close, because it didn't have any fence around it, was a Roman-era site just sitting there alongside the road, about a block off the main drag in an industrial area. I took some pictures of the nice mosaics, but I was more interested in the cricket game going on in the vacant lot next door, to the accompaniment of what we guessed to be Pakistani or Afghani music. For some reason I couldn't stop thinking about who these men were, and about how they established their Sunday-evening cricket game in this gravelly lot on the edge of this particular town in this particular island in the middle of the Aegean. If I learn anything relevant about it, I'll be sure to tell you.
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