I was determined not to let this early departure spoil my holiday so I looked at the twenty four hours in Santorini as a new adventure and boarded the ferry for the three and a half hour voyage through The Cyclades archipelago as an enjoyable part of the expedition.



On board, I found a seat with a view and watched as we sailed away from Paros keeping our distance from the infamous Portes Islets where the ferry Express Samina sunk ten years ago with the loss of 82 lives. The captain is still in prison charged with manslaughter and negligence after the ship crashed into these distinctive rocks just outside Pirakia harbour whilst the crew were watching a football match on television.

The ship still lies at the bottom of the sea but I am told that lessons have been learnt and no ferries are now allowed to go anywhere near these rocks and, for certain, none of the crew were going to be watching the World Cup matches on board.

I am enough of a pessimist though to have kept my eye on the safety equipment just in case and I always sit near the life boats.

My voyage was uneventful and enjoyable as we chugged slowly through the Aegean in the heat of a very sunny Greek afternoon.


Santorini is the most southerly of the Cycladic islands and the only one to have an international airport. It is also a pretty spectacular place with its very own volcano which is still active even if it has been dormant since the 1950s when it last erupted. The island however shows all the signs of volcanic activity with its black sandy beaches and dark volcanic rock formations aping the movement of those dramatic lava flows of earlier times.

In fact the Santorini volcanic eruption that occurred some time around 1500 BC was the second largest since the evolution of man. It transformed the geography of the Aegean Sea and may well have put an end to the Minoan empire when its huge tsunamis devastated islands throughout the area. It also made Santorini towns the most alarmingly perched centres of civilisation that I have ever visited. Many of the buildings quite literally sit on the cliff edges defying the fates to topple them over into the sea.

Ferry disasters and volcanic eruptions were on my mind when I arrived in this extraordinary place which also saw a devastating earthquake in 1956 which destroyed most of the capital, Fira, where I had a room for the night.

Fira is altogether different to anything I had encountered on Paros. It is busier, brasher and unembarrassed about its role as a tourist centre.

The streets are lined with everything you could possibly want if your interests centre round souvenirs or t-shirts and the clubs only really get going between 1.00 and 6.00 am. I wasn’t sure that I was going to succeed in enjoying this place.

I was booked into the San Giorgio Hotel which was hidden away down a side street but which I discovered was only a couple of minutes walk from the heart of the town. I was prepared to have a quiet time in advance of my flight home to England so I was happy to check into my room with its balcony over-looking some residential houses and what sounded like a music school where some very industrious students were playing Bach violin sonatas whilst an old lady was hanging out a long line of men’s clothes on her balcony’s washing line. Sitting there in the evening sunlight and listening to the music of Bach, I decided that this was going to be fun.

It was all helped enormously by the enthusiastic hospitality of the hotel’s owner Yourgos, who had picked me up from the harbour and went to a lot of trouble drawing maps of where I could go and what I should do. He even struggled to stop me lifting my very heavy case. He could charm even the gloomiest soul away from thoughts of earthquakes, volcanoes and shipwrecks.

He also told me that I could use his roof for my kung-fu practice. Suddenly I was at home again and my spirits rose even further when the late afternoon light added its clear blue to a geometrical composition of architecture and washing that just had to be photographed.

He must have been a martial arts sympathiser because on the staircase up to the roof was a mural of Ancient Greek boxers just to put me into the mood.

Up on the roof, that evening and the following morning, I did my martial arts exercises, White Crane Kung-fu – here a straight sword pattern –  feeling that I was on top of the world…and, judging by the view, I think I really was up on a level with Mount Olympus. 

All I had to do now was to decide what to do with my one evening on Santorini. You have probably already guessed that it involved dinner and alcohol and you would be right but where to indulge was the question.

I had not expected though that the bars would be quite so spectacular or quite such a challenge to anyone with even the slightest sense of vertigo.

Look one way and it is a classic Greek cocktail bar with dutiful waiters and an absorbing drinks menu but turn the other way and you are sitting with one of the most sensational views any restaurant in the world could offer.

Eventually, after a couple of glasses of ice cold Greek beer, I even looked down at the sea below and managed to resist the urge to jump.

Luckily my mind was diverted from diving by a Greco-American couple at the next table. Costas and Diane Touliatos-Miles are fellow website publishers (http://www.hellenicnest.com) and we soon got talking about Greek’s place in the modern world now that the euro crisis was calling for change.

Diane is a professor of musicology at the Missouri-St Louis University specialising, as you do, in Fourteenth Century Byzantine music and her husband, Costas is an economist and evangelist for all things Hellenic in his now native United States. They were my last travelling companions on this adventure in Greece and they were excellent sound boards for my early impressions of this absorbing country. They had plenty of far from obvious things to say about the relationship between Greece and America and Britain. I shall be visiting their website in the now natural way that travelers who meet in strange places can stay in touch in the much smaller virtual world.

After dinner I walked up the steps to the highest point in Fira not really realising that what I had considered to be high up was only really the beginning of a climb that seemed to take me up above the clouds, if there had been any, just as darkness fell.

That night I dreamt of, yes I am afraid so, earthquakes, volcanoes, shipwrecks and plane crashes
but none of the disasters came my way and, just maybe, it was all due to reading too much Homer and his epic about man as the plaything of the gods. I am now safely at home, away from Zeus’ unpredictably pointing finger and Poseidon’s watery wrath. Here in leafy but not nearly so sun-drenched England, my little rose garden has gone quietly wild in my absence but my love affair with Greece has only just begun. Was that a roll of thunder I heard just then?

The post Don’t Look Down, You Are On Santorini appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

Well, that was the idea but after a few days on Paros reading Homer whilst relaxing on the beach, I could not turn a blind eye to the many interesting pieces of history just lying around to be examined.

It started when I took a look at the remains of a Venetian fortress that used to guard the little harbour at Naousa and remembered from somewhere at the back of my brain that Venice had colonised/invaded the Greek islands in medieval times. They are long gone now, of course but their ruins are still lying around along with all those even older relics of Ancient Greece’s golden days.

Climbing the walls of the fortress and imagining 13th. Century Paros decided me. I was still going to relax but then I have always found knowledge more relaxing than ignorance and all around me the old meets the new and it would soon have become annoying not to know the whys and the wheres.

Going to the island’s main town, Parikia, a livelier and pleasantly more disorderly town than Naousa, I came across more Venetian remains when I saw this extraordinary-looking tower which was part of the remains of another fortress built in 1260 by the Venetian Duke of Naxos.

It was pretty obvious that the building materials were unconventional to say the least but it was only when I joined a tour of the island led by the irrepressible German guide, Utthe, that I realized that the stones were the ancient remains of a temple to Athena the goddess of wisdom.

Utthe was a bit of a wisdom goddess too and I was enthralled by her stories of the island as I joined a group of German and Dutch tourists on a guided tour. She has lived on the island for thirty-five years arriving as a very wild hippie and settling in a house which still has no electricity or running water. Paros is still a bit of a haven for bohemia but it took Utthe to show me why.

Through her eyes, I could see Ancient Greek remains where I least expected them. On this street corner were some stones and pillar bases from a temple to Apollo the sun god

and this pleasant outdoor coffee table was found by the owners of this house when the were restoring it. It is of course another temple pillar but why not put it to a much more sensible use and have it as a rock solid table to have your morning coffee on.

This young German couple who were also doing the tour had to move when they realized they were sitting on a marble fragment from the temple of Artemis, the goddess of hunting.

The voluptuous curves were symbols of her breasts giving the nice couple some non-architectural ideas for sure.

That pagan stone had been used as part of the door steps to this medieval Christian church which is itself becoming a bit of a ruin.

Another bizarre touch was the ceramic cross over the door which was made from some exquisite Turkish tiles which were presumably remnants from the centuries when The Cyclades was a part of the Ottoman Empire. I wondered if this was a sly gesture of reclamation on behalf of the Greeks.

The most famous church in the whole of The Cyclades is the so-called church of Our Lady of the Hundred Gates, the Panagia Ekatondapliani which was founded in the year AD 326. The “gates” are really openings including windows and it is a building of supreme beauty said to have been founded by St Helen, the Christian Greek Empress who stopped off on Paros on her way to Palestine in search of the remains of Jesus’s cross. Legend has it that she found it…well OK, I am not in an argumentative mood.

More amazing, I think, are the magnificent naturally coloured stones that make up the impressive domed ceilings….

…….and the wonderfully evocative baptistry with its cross-shaped font where many early Christians were baptised. It is in places like these that you can really feel the presence of those heroic early converts.

Wonderful too are the marble columns in the Lady Chapel where Christian architecture really did spring out of the styles of Ancient Greek temples. Paros is known as the marble island and white Parian marble was the reason for the island’s early prosperity. It is still quarried today but we know it best for what is probably the most famous of all Greek statues, the Venus di Milo which is now in the Louvre in Paris.

There is a special translucent quality to Parian marble as you can see on this wall topping which lets the sunlight penetrate into its mass to radiant effect.

Away from church and temple, Parikia is a fun-loving sprawling little town and it is no surprise that it has attracted generations of writers and artists from around the world.

There is also a beautiful street with a row of houses built by the Venetians, one of which is still home to an old Italian family.

Elegant though they are, there was, to my eye, something much more attractive in the simpler lines of the medieval Greek street architecture.

What really makes the place work though is the people. It is their town and their culture and ancient relics or not, they just go about their own business in their own marvelously care-free way.

I was amazed that the dog didn’t fall off the back of the motorbike but then I realized I was thinking in a Northern European way just as I was when I saw this old vegetable merchant selling his goods from the back of his equally ancient mule. They too seem to have come from Ancient Greece and were quite content with walking pace in the age of the motor car.

Those plastic boxes contained examples of Paros’ seemingly effortless fertility with gigantic tomatoes, bundles of green beans, lettuces, cherries, potatoes and most tempting of all, fresh apricots.

One of the most attractive sites around the island were the apricot trees which were decorated with their golden fruits and daring me to climb them in an Aegean form of scrumping.

I next took a short ferry journey from Parikia to Paros’ tiny neighbour, the island known as Antiparos which is, if that is possible, even gentler and more laid back than Paros itself.

There are no cars allowed in the little town’s streets and, consequently, the pace of life takes on a tranquillity which, in the strong Greek sunshine, seems just about perfect.

What else can anyone do but sit outside one of these little restaurants and enjoy a drink or two under the shade of an Oleander or Bougainvillea tree?

I wasn’t there for long but I could see why very rich and very lucky people like the Hollywood actor Tom Hanks have decided to keep a home here. I don’t know where he lives but I suspect it can have no greater elegance than the little town houses with their perfect proportions and simple lines.

On the ferry back to Paros, though, this young Greek man knew just what views he wanted to remember.

I moved inland where the June heat has parched the landscape and where the mountains reveal their rich marble seams and where disused windmills dot the hilltops.

Here, I felt, not much had changed since Homer’s time and, I hope, it never will. On other parts of the island, I fear that building for tourism is in danger of getting out of control Maybe the Greek economy crisis will be a hidden blessing and stop the encroachment of holiday villas.

No one knows if Homer, the Western World’s earliest-known poet, ever visited Paros but the second earliest poet, Archilochos (c.680 BC – c.645 BC) was born here. Archilochus, part soldier, part poet, is said to have invented the Iambic metre and is known as the first lyric poet but, sadly, for all his high reputation, only fragments of his work have survived. There is enough though to make you stop and wonder and, as a humble versifier, I felt a strange and unaccustomed sense of humility walking on the ground where Western poetry as we know it began.

I was heading inland to the old capital of Paros, the perfectly beautiful hillside village of Lefkes where you can feel cut off even from the calm atmosphere of the rest of the island.

Walking down those narrow streets with their mysterious side lanes and over-hanging shrubs, I wondered, as we all should when we are on holiday, if we need anything else in life other than beauty, tranquility and sunshine.

With that thought, I found the ideal place for coffee, in the middle of the village, under a tree, isolated and cut off but also, somehow at the centre of life and at the heart of our ancient and shared culture.

When I got back to Naousa, I discovered that I could not get a ferry on the same day as my flight home from the southern Cycladic island of Santorini so I would have to leave this paradise a day early. Tomorrow I will tell you about my twenty four hours on the top of a volcano.

The post The Wolf Wanders Around The Island of Paros appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

I was renting a small apartment in the town of Naousa (www.scorpio-paros.com), just behind the bakery and the butcher’s shop and next-door to a health club with the beach just five minutes walk away and some unused land immediately across the street where I went every morning to practise my kungfu and taichi patterns – my landlady, the charmingly optimistic Kiki, thought I was mad but she lent me her broom handle so that I could do my staff patterns when she thought I would be better off on the beach.

I think we made friends even though she did give me more than one queer look when she saw my “mad dogs and Englishman” out in the midday sun act. It felt good to be doing my kungfu again (with the special permission of my instructor back in Britain) there is something fundamentally warrior-like about doing marital arts in the land of Achilles and those other Greek heroes who fought and died on the battlefields in front of Troy.

Kiki shrugged when I told her that, it might have been a language thing, but she did invite me to a barbecue dinner out in her garden on a starlight and balmy night – her husband Michalis was there too by the way but his English was on the same level of my Greek.

I knew no Greek at all when I boarded my flight but, with the help of a small Greek phrase book that I bought at the airport, I had learnt the Greek alphabet by the time I landed on Greek soil at Santorini airport. Once you know what the letters represent, the language doesn’t seem quite so, well, Greek somehow.

I have always enjoyed learning languages even though I never get that good at them but I made an effort to learn enough simple Greek phrases to show that I was willing to be communicative, friendly even, and that I wanted to experience as much as any tourist can, the ordinary life of the island. The gesture was appreciated, I think, because soon I had made at least a handful of holiday friends such as Stelios who started out by trying to get me to hire one of his motorbikes but eventually settled for a daily chat.

I walked by every morning on my way to my post-kungfu, morning coffee in a cafe in the middle of town. After a few days, Stelios and I were firm friends even though I never did get to hire one of his bikes.

I was on my way to hide from the most aggressive heat of the sun under an umbrella outside my regular cafe where I could watch the world pass by on its way to and from the little harbour. It reminded me of a wild west frontier town and soon I recognised many of the local people about their business.

Those trees were a meeting point where people, just like I was doing, hung around to chat and watch other people’s business.

It was never quiet for long but it was never in a hurry either.

Island life means that everything that isn’t made or grown here has to come in by boat so, all day long, men with trolleys push boxes, packages and various products up through the square – all of Naousa life passed my table.

For all of that though, my main reason for coming here was my lifelong and unapologetic addiction to coffee and nowhere did it better than Xamithothiris’ even if I never got very good at pronouncing its name.

I started with a filter coffee with hot milk, a glass of water and a small biscuit as a way of acknowledging breakfast and then progressed to simple black coffee. Caffeine paradise brought to me every morning by Maria who was also helping me with my Greek.

Maria has a face that could have come straight out of Homer’s Iliad, my holiday reading in the wonderful English translation by one of my favourite poets, Alexander Pope. The range of expressions in her face from hilarity to tragedy always surprized me. We communicated in broken English and Greek but found an ease which allowed her to cry one morning and not to feel that she had to hide it from me. I will never know, of course, what had happened but our goodbye hug was long and drawn out.

My other friend at the cafe was feline – one of the many sleekly beautiful cats that, I suspect, rather over-populate the island. Greek cats look like those mysterious Egyptian ones, long and thin and exquisitely delicate in their movements. This one wasn’t really only my friend because I gave her the odd titbit from my table, I hope.

Friends have doubted that I would be able to relax on this holiday but I think I have suceeded in proving them wrong and, like a cat, I too had a siesta, after lunch, in the extreme heat of the day.

This usually happened after a desultory wander around the little harbour which is still, in spite of the tourist trade, a proper working fishing port….

…. with real fishing boats, real fishermen……

….. and real fish….

…with even the odd octopus hanging out to dry in the sun after being bashed against a tree or wall to tenderise the meat.

In former days the centre of the village, with its tiny narrow streets, could be gated off at night to protect itself from pirate invasions (or, shhh, even Turks) when the women folk would pour the boiling contents of their cooking pots from their balconies onto any unsuspecting invader who got through the gates. Today, it is all very smart and full of very classy designer clothes and jewelry shops where, mostly, beautiful French, Italian and German tourists invest some well-needed Euros into the ailing Greek economy. If I wasn’t already so hopelessly trendy in my t-shirt and shorts, I could have been persuaded to buy some new clothes in the oddly named “Kinky Wear” – I think I looked kinkier in what I was wearing but maybe not quite so elegant.

Naousa, if you want it to be so, can be very exclusive – just the place to dock your luxury yacht for a spot of late-night shopping. This is especially true now before the high summer arrives with its hordes of vomit-prone eighteen year olds.

Down one of these little side streets is my favourite restaurant in Naousa, Glafkos where you can sit outside on the beach and watch the sunset whilst eating some excellent fish which you may well have sen being gutted on the quay-side.

At Glafkos, you are made to feel as if you are a local resident even though everyone knows that you are not – soon we were all old friends of course, and, in holiday mode, I began to wish that I really did have one of those little houses in the harbour.

There is a genuine spirit of hospitality on Paros and no one showed that more that the owner of Glafkos, the charismatic and irrespressible Nikitas who probably gets his energy from his champion Greco-Roman wrestling grandfather.

Nikitas likes to work hard but he also finds time, when dinner is done and the ouzo is flowing, to sit down and chat about life on Paros and beyond.

He would be worth the visit even if my special friend Felix was not also there every night with his wonderfully wild expression and his appetite for sea bass tails and fins.

It was difficult deciding on my favourite cat but Felix has it just even if the little marmalade and white cat from another restaurant was very seductive too …….

Maybe I am just too easy after a few glasses of ouzo but whilst I am on the subject of furry friends, I have to mention the butcher’s dog who guards the short cut between the butcher’s shop and my apartment with an aggressive show of barking which was just much too easily turned into tail wagging if you don’t run away. After making friends it was more a matter of preventing this joyful creature from moving into the apartment.

No animal is happier than a butcher’s dog.

But this was now true mad dogs and Englishmen time – the streets empties, the sun blazed down and it was time for me to retreat to the darkness of my bedroom with my copy of The Iliad of course.

Homer, in the elegant heroic couplets of Alexander Pope, was a constant inspiration over the holiday and the epic tale of the Trojan Wars coloured everything I saw….this is where so much of Western culture began that is was impossible not to look for Homer everywhere.

This was true even at the health club, Technofit (www.technofit.gr) next to my apartment where I took out a temporary two week membership. I was the only tourist member as far as I could see and I had to work hard at the warrior stakes to compete with all those silent war-like Greeks lifting weights.

I was safe in the hands of the owner, Manos, who kept a quizzical eye on me as I evaporated into pool of sweat every evening after coming back from the beach.

The most difficult bit was summoning up the energy after climbing the steps where the gym’s cat had a better idea.

Manos, a bit of a Greek warrior himself, gradually saw that I was serious about fitness and he even let me use a wonderfully airy upper room which had no roof but which was the perfect space to end my daily exertions with a calming session of very private tai-chi.

For all of this, most of my day was spent with my book on the beach reading about the heroism, brutality, passion and love that is crammed into the many pages of Homer’s epic.

There was something very apt about reading this work, lying under a straw umbrella with the sounds of the sea lapping at my feet.

It was the only place to be when the temperature rose to nearly 40 degrees Celsius and I was happy to lie there with only occasional forays into the warm sea. Others, inevitably, had more energy that me and, at weekends, there was an influx of local lads who, like their heroic ancestors, were never happier than when they were fighting even if it was simply a seaside ball game.

Rather like the evocative ending to Visconti’s film of Death in Venice, these lads, soon I suspect to be conscripted into the Greek army, took out their pent up energy in an aggressive marine wrestling match where they could well have been remembering Homer’s tale where warriors willingly accepted the choice of death or glory.

Peace broke out, of course, and as Apollo the sun god weakened his heat, I lowered my book too and gazed into space.

If you want to know something about the history and culture of Paros then I thought I might tell you about that tomorrow.

The post A Wolf’s Life On The Greek Island Of Paros appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

I left not knowing if I would be deeply bored after a short time on an island where there was not much more to do than soak up the sun or swim in the Aegean sea.

I got back last night and, first of all I have to tell you, that I more than survived lulling around in the sun with temperatures pleasantly endurable beginning at 26 Celsius and rising to somewhere approaching 40 by the time I left. Sometimes there was really nothing you could do but swim in the Aegean or find some shady place to read or to have a drink. I found out that relaxing is really not difficult at all and I am missing that warm, clear blue water already.


I flew from an overcast London Gatwick airport to the volcanic island of Santorini, the most southerly of the Cyclades where the second largest volcanic eruption in human history permanently changed the culture and the geography of Greece and beyond in 1500 BC.

Arriving there was my first experience of Greece and nothing could have been more different from damp leafy England. The towns of Santorini are perched precariously on the cliff edges as I was to find out when I returned for a twenty four hour visit at the end of the holiday. For now though it was just a view from on board the ferry which took a leisurely three and a half hours to navigate its way through the Cyclades to Paros in the North.

It might not have been one of the Onassis luxury yachts but it did it for me and was my own modern day Odyssey – giving me my first glimpse of those islands previously only read about in Greek mythology.

Our only stop was for Naxos, Paros’ larger, more mountainous and greener neighbour. It was, as all you Greek scholars also know, the island where Theseus abandoned his lover, the beautiful Princess of Crete, Ariadne who stayed on to find a much better lover, the God of wine, Dionysus, who was also a lot more fun than boring old Theseus who was much better at fighting Minotaurs. Naxos, less dramatically, is also known for its excellent potatoes. Believe me, I have eaten them.

Naxos was also where I saw my first Ancient Greek ruin, as we steamed by the remains of a temple top the sun god Apollo. Everyone on that ship was a sun worshiper so it seemed appropriate to thank Apollo for the perfect weather conditions.

Actually, the temple isn’t really a ruin at all, it was never finished in the first place. Well, it was much to hot to imagine anyone wanting to lift all that stone especially as there were so many temples all over Greece, they must have thought the God wouldn’t have missed this one. Better to grow a few potatoes and fry up some chips as an offering.

With Naxos behind us, it was only another half hour or so before we arrived at the island’s largest settlement, Parikia. Somehow, its remoteness from England was already apparent by the epic nature of the journey to get there, by train, plane, taxi and boat.

One of the first things I saw in Parikia harbour was a lorry with the Greek word metaphores emblazoned on its side. Now here was a place, I thought, for poets. Here on Paros, they actually have lorry loads of metaphors….the life blood of poetry. OK, I know the word really means furniture in Greek, but I was on holiday that was also a metaphor for escape.

It was just a short taxi ride to the next town of Naousa and to a rented apartment that was to be home for the next two weeks.

Sitting on the balcony as Apollo drove his chariot beyond the horizon to the West, as Homer used to say in the Iliad, I sat on my balcony in the heat, listening to the cicadas and crickets and toasting that other God from these parts, the wine god Dionysus. If you want to know how I got on, there will be more tomorrow.

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