Here we are on Ikaria, the ‘red island’, named so for the large numbers of communists, anarchists and assorted left wing political undesirables sent here, as a alternative to being shot, after the greek civil war in 1945, and under the military dictatorship of the ‘colonels’ in the 1970s.
Our initial experience suggests that, just like Russia and China, the ‘red island’ has found its way to embracing capitalism in all its pervasively and ruthlessly efficient shapes and forms, but in a low gear, steady sort of way. For example, when phoning a day ahead to scope out a room,Jane asked the proprietor how much it was, the reply was promptly, and specifically, ” fifty-eight euros”. Jane said something like, “we are looking for something cheaper”, to which the woman replied, ” well, how much do you want to pay?” Put on the spot Jane came up with forty-five ( still quite a bit more than we usually pay) to which the woman replied ” Kala, OK”.
When we arrived at the ‘rooms, the following day, which are the only rooms in a lovely village called Karavastamo, we found that they were absolutely palatial, on two floors linked with a wide marble and chrome staircase, with both a terrace below and a balcony above, a bathroom with a bath off the bedroom and a fully fitted kitchen, dining area, day bed and shower room below. We felt cheapskate, briefly, about haggling over the price but that didn’t last long. In fact our modus operandi from now on, when finding rooms that are empty at short notice, will be for us to tell them how much we want to pay.
But it is a nice change to be in a place where everything works and you can do things like open and close the front or balcony doors without spending twenty minutes learning the particular snatch, lift, twist required to achieve exit/entrance. On Agathonisi we had to lash the handle of the door in the permanently open position with string for five days to be sure of not being locked out. In fact most of the places we have stayed have felt like they were designed for a laugh by a sadistic producer of a reality TV series called something like ” Health and Safety Nightmare in the Sun”, where a few families of unsuspecting north europeans are placed in ‘rooms’ and subjected to huge amounts of sun, drink, greek music, etc while the audience at home make predictions about who will have the first or worst accidents; on the unpredictably irregular stairs (often leading to nowhere), the invisible but surprisingly deep kerbs, the skiddy, awash bathrooms, the hilariously ‘organic’ electrical systems, the sometimes cold, sometimes scalding water, the moped hire on hugely pot-holed roads where you are joined by, statistically, Europe’s unsafest drivers.
Of course Health and Safety Nightmare in the Sun could be a glimpse of the future of our own country, ( obviously with considerably less sun), after the Brexiting bastard tories have “got our country back” and “cut through all the Brussels red tape”. I know that Greece is in the EU and supposedly subject to EU regs but they simply don’t do anything that they are told that they don’t want to do. They still smoke everywhere and very few Greeks wear crash helmets. Anarchy seems to be a Greek word meaning “Yeah I know, but that doesn’t really mean me”. Why couldn’t we have just done a bit of the same instead of flouncing out like a girls blouse.
The first morning in Karavastamo when I stood on the balcony and looked at the white houses with pretty flower filled gardens sweeping down the lush green hillside towards the village plateia and small harbour I sensed that this wasn’t really an ordinary Greek village. There seemed an air of affluence about it. Not blingy or flash, but tidy substantial houses all nicely spaced out in their own garden areas and plenty of them all the way up to the North Ikarian skyline. My first thought was that this was Athenian money, second homes and apartments, but this turned out to be so in only a minor way.
The real economic force behind Karavastamo is American money from the Greek American diaspora some of whom we have now met, here on their annual summer holidays visiting relations or visiting parents who have returned to live out retirement here after working for decades in the USA. The ones we have met told us the story of how their fathers secretly built little boats during the second world war Italian occupation and then rowed them to Turkey. Quite a journey from Ikaria and an interesting reversal of recent events, maybe explaining the Greeks laid back acceptance of what most other countries would call an ‘invasion’. They also left after the Greek civil war, when Ikaria was left to get on with being communist, preferring to seek work and fortune in America.
When established in the USA they formed ‘chapters’ of Ikarian expats and sent money back to help relatives and build schools and infrastructure in the villages and so developed the delicious irony of communist Ikaria being kept going and even made prosperous through cash flows from capitalist, neo-imperialist USA and now it has a sizeable community of American Greeks who, while in the States, probably voted Republican.