Hellas: In and Out

By
Fraeda Dubin

When I hear traveler's tales, I always listen for the date. It tells something about the place and the traveler. Surely visiting Kathmandu now is not the same as having been there two decades ago when young people from the West went trekking to find spiritual gurus. London in the early sixties—at the height of Beatlemania—was not London of the seventies or eighties. Nor was Paris of 1951 the Paris of the twenties, of Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, although once I tried hard to find their footmarks.

Dating places depending on who went there when creates "in" and "out" destinations that are like shifts in style. But at some point, time and place seem to merge together resulting in more history and less fashion. Am I, writing about Greece in the fifties, a travel writer or historian?

I was there before the images of cobalt sea, white-washed houses, and windmills had become travel poster cliches, before travelers knew of Greek dancing, before feta cheese and retsina had become supermarket staples, before a Greek actress named Melina Mercouri snagged a Hollywood director, Jules Dassin, to make a movie called "Never On Sunday." And a decade before Anthony Quinn became "Zorba."

This dilemma over writing history vs. travelers' tales loomed in my mind when I read Louis De Berniere's novel about Greece and the Ionian Islands, Corelli's Mandolin. What startled me was the author's date of birth: 1954! That was the year we first bumbled into the port of Piraeus on our way to the Balearic Islands off the coast of Spain. Why the Balearics? Because we'd learned it was cheap to live there; it was the "in" place that year among young travelers.

We were a few years into our first decade of marriage, Ben and I, bonded by a passion to see the world, not ready yet to settle for life at home in conformist, fifties America. Ben had taken a job in India for two years and we'd promised each other to cash in our return air tickets and see how far the money would go traveling steerage class, so to speak. That's how we hit upon the Balearic Islands, if we could find a way to get there by ship from India.

I heard about one from people who also worked at the international school in Calcutta where I taught literature and composition, but not "English," since I had an American accent. It was a Greek ship under contract to the United Nations. Outbound, it sailed from Greece to Australia carrying emigrants. Inbound, the ship stopped at ports from Perth to Piraeus picking up Greeks looking for a rock-bottom fare back home.

The Despina picked us up late one night in the Colombo harbor (Ceylon then, later Sri Lanka) where we were sitting in a sampan with our luggage. We'd been waiting for the Despina for weeks, spending time on all the beaches of the island, making periodic telephone calls to the agent in Colombo who'd booked our passage.

That slow boat to Greece gave me one of my best geography lessons: from Colombo to Durban to Mombassa to Djibouti, through the Red Sea to Alexandria. At every port the Despina picked up Greeks eager for a trip home to reconnect with family. That we were a couple of Americans who didn't speak their language didn't bother them.

One passenger, an outspoken woman in her early thirties, went out of her way to make us feel comfortable when the talk was all Greek. Eleni was a social worker who traveled with the emigrants when the Despina was outbound. On the homeward trip she was on holiday. Through her we got to know others on board who were "staff," a few doctors, social workers, and nurses. Mostly, Eleni wanted to cue us in to who was "left," who was "right." The pallor of Greece's recent civil war and years of starvation hung heavily among them. But we were innocent wide-eyed Americans hazy about those events, so we and Eleni ended up talking about books, art, and music. It turned out she was social worker on the outside and passionate poet inside.

"Forget those bloody Balearics!" she urged. "Come to Greece. I'll take you to our islands, where I go with my friends from Athens. We take the tram to Piraeus. Walk along the quay. See what ship is docked. And there, on the spot, decide where to go. All the islands of the Aegean are magnificent; you go depending on where the ship is headed."

We decided to take Eleni's advice and see how far our money would last in Greece. A few days after we'd gotten our landlegs back by taking short excursions around Athens, we began looking for trips to the islands. We found that Athenian newspapers printed boat schedules, and we'd bought some maps and guidebooks. Just the names of the places seemed magical. Ben read aloud: "The Neraidha leaves daily at 8 a.m. for Aegina, Methana, Poros, Hydra and Spetsai; the Helioupolos leaves at 9 p.m. on Thursday for Andros, Corthion, Ysternia, Tinos, Syra; the Anatoli leaves on Friday at 7 p.m. for Syra, Paros, Naxos, Heracleia, Amorgos, Anaphi, Thera, Pholegandros, Sikinos and Nios;" . . . Ben read on and on. We wanted to go everywhere.

Eleni had given us her telephone number at work. "So, Ben, you still want to convince me you're not rich Americans?" she quizzed.

"Of course we're not. We're trying to make the money last as long as possible."

"And you're really an artist, too?" Eleni asked.

"Well; I'm an architect, not licensed yet, but on my way. And I took a lot of art courses in school."

"Endahksee—Okay. You must go to the Ministry of Fine Arts. I'll take you. You'll tell them you are a foreign artist, an architect from America. They'll give you a permit to stay at the Art School on Mykonos. You'll have a studio and an apartment. The view from there is the best on the island. About thirty drachmas ($2.00) it will cost for a month. But before you go to Mykonos, come with me and my friends to Hydra for the weekend. We'll meet at the quay in Piraeus."

Ben looked down at the newspaper: "Fine, the Neraidha to Hydra Saturday at 8 a.m. Endahksee?"

I've never forgotten a Greek word Eleni taught me on that first boat trip to Hydra. The islanders have much filotimo, she told me. "They want to make us feel welcome. It brings them honor. We all had such bad times during the war. Now we just want to sit on the quay, drink ouzo, enjoy the view of the sea, take in the sun's warmth."

"The people from the village will come down to the ship when we dock and invite us into their homes for the night; you'll see," Eleni told me.

She was right. Within a few minutes after landing, Ben and I, Eleni and three other Athenians, had sorted ourselves out between three or four villagers. The Athenians negotiated with the villagers in Greek, some American cigarettes (our ante) were thrown in, then we all went off with our hosts.

Our hostess was a crone I later recognized on scores of Greek Ministry of Tourism posters. Dressed in black for mourning, her head was covered in a black kerchief. She wore felt slippers over heavy, cotton stockings.

We slept in her bed that night. It was built into the wall of the main room, like a crèche. Ben had to sleep in jack-knife position because it wasn't long enough for his legs. During the night, I woke up; my period had started. I climbed over sleeping Ben and pulled a cotton T-shirt out of my travelbag. I folded it as compactly as I could, wondering if I'd find any tampons to buy in Hydra the next day.

I woke in the morning to find that Ben had been up and out before me. I put myself together with more makeshift supplies from my bag. But what to do with the now soaked T-shirt I'd used during the night? I carefully wrapped it in the newspaper with the ship schedules and put it in a can in the tiny w.c. "I'll buy Ben another paper," I thought.

The others—including Ben—were sitting in the same outdoor cafe where we'd had dinner the night before, drinking tiny cups of coffee; a plate of fresh croissants was in the middle. The sea was azure blue; the sun was blazing; it was a picture postcard scene of Greek island magic. The breakfast was leisurely. As we were leaving, the crone, our hostess, came up to me and placed a package in my lap. Inside the same newspaper I'd discarded, but carefully re-folded, was my laundered, sun-dried, T-shirt. Maybe this was filotimo, but it took a long time to get over my embarrassment.

We took the ship back to Piraeus that afternoon. "You're both baptized now," Eleni exclaimed. "You're ready for Mykonos and all other islands you might land on."

"You said you'll have a holiday soon," Ben said. "We'll be at Mykonos for a whole month. Come and visit. You can stay in the studio."

"Mykonos?" Elena replied quizzically. "Okhee—No. We don't go there any more."

"Why not?"

"They're building a hotel there, for American tourists, I'm sure. It's ugly and luxurious. The first tourist hotel in the Cyclades. You'll see it. It's at one end of the waterfront. But if you stand with your back to it, the view in the other direction is still unspoiled."

* * *

When I tell people about our adventures in Greece in the fifties, they typically respond with me-too enthusiasm. "I remember when we visited Mykonos," they say. Or, "Hydra, did you climb up behind the village and see the view of the harbor?" They might even boast of other islands they visited, places I didn't mention. Their stories always have a quality of discovery. Whether told by honeymooners or retirees, travel recollections tend to hum a similar tune, as though the tellers were the first to step foot on the quay at Mykonos or see the view from Hydra.

Listening to others talk about their travels—no matter the year or decade—has helped me reconcile my quandary about being an historian or a travel writer. I'm not bothered that travelers of the twenties or thirties would have found Ben's and my adventures in the fifties no more than the pratfalls of brash Americans. I've come to realize that the year doesn't matter that much.

Of course, destinations such as the islands of Greece have changed over time, but first encounters with foreign locales create memories which become the traveler's own personal history. Never mind who was there before.

Fraeda Dubin, a retiree from academia, lives and writes on the Mendocino Coast

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