Dispatches: Spetses, Greece
1.
The taxi was approaching the port of Piraeus before I felt myself relax. I’d made a rookie travel mistake, not a huge one, but it threatened to cost me an extra hundred bucks and ding my ego very early in the trip. My flight into Athens was scheduled to arrive at 12:30 and I was hoping to be on a 14:30 ferry headed out the Saronic Gulf and to the island of Spetses. I planned to take the Athens Metro to Piraeus. Google Maps told me that it was a one-hour trip. So by 13:00, I‘d cleared immigration and was waiting in a line at a kiosk to get a sim card. I figured it was safe to go online and book my ferry ticket. That turned out to be premature. The sim card line took a while and even by the time I’d gotten the card, my checked bag had not come out onto the luggage carousel. Then, I realized that the train ride itself was an hour and only left every hour, so the metro was out. When I got my bag and walked outside, I saw that the line for taxis was quite long. It was approaching 2pm and I had a paid-for, non-refundable ticket for the 14:30 ferry. This was not the auspicious return to the road that I had envisaged.
After a small bout of panic, I realized that I could call a cab through Uber and skip the line. I did that and was in a taxi and headed for the port, with a slim margin of error but hopeful that Athens traffic would be gracious to me.
I could have given myself some slack, but the next ferry wasn’t until 17:30 and it was a two- and a half-hour trip. I didn’t want to be getting into Spetses after dark and having to find my way to my hotel. The cab ride was expensive, but I managed to make the ferry with a comfortable margin, and Dimitris, my driver, turned out to be a very friendly welcome to .
There was no real reason to be going to Spetses. I wanted to visit Hydra and decided to squeeze in one more island in the Saronic chain. Spetses being the ferry stop after Hydra, seemed the obvious choice. So, I headed there directly from the airport, planning to spend a night and go to Hydra the following day.
The Saronic Islands sit nestled between the Attica peninsula and the Argolis region of the Peloponnese. Really, they spill out and around. Aegina, the largest of the islands sits smack in the middle of the Saronic Gulf while Spetses lies due south of Argolis. Like most of the other Saronics, Spetses is favored by Greeks on short holidays and weekend getaways. There were a lot of families, many of them couples with small children. I heard Greek spoken almost exclusively, but with a smattering of English and American accents along with a few others that I could not place.
I did see a group of young people who were decidedly not Greek in their appearance, many of them wearing lanyards that identified them as part of some group. I saw them at night though and not close enough to see what the lanyards said. Most of them spoke with American accents, but there were a few other assorted voices mixed-in, a German, a few South Asians. I do not know who they were, but several of the women wore the kind of sensible footwear that made me think they were a church group. I can't imagine that there is much missionary work on Spetses, but it could have been a retreat of some kind.
2.
Spetses has all the markings of a beach town. It’s full of shops and boutiques selling swimwear, jewelry and summery clothing. People wear their bathing suits far into the day and into the evening. It helps that Greek dinner is quite late. Restaurants remain open throughout the day, but their kitchens often shut after lunch, not reopening until 7 or 8 pm.
This late dinner is not solely the preserve of young people or older couples whose kids are off doing their own thing. It’s not unusual to see a family with young children turn up at a Greek restaurant at 10pm to be seated for dinner. Upon witnessing just such a scene, my mind turned to a video I watched recently in which a woman uses her "kitchen pliers" to pull the tendon out of a piece of chicken breast fillet, because that’s the only way her child will eat it. This video flashed into my head because it cut such a stark contrast to the image of Greek children dining late into the night, negotiating their way around the bones of a whole fish or tucking into a chewy piece of grilled octopus.
American children can sometimes be cosseted in a very particular way that deprives them of dealing with the normal day to day obstacles that might help them develop into healthy, fully functional adults while simultaneously having all manner of artificial hurdles placed in their path, paradoxically helping to speed the process towards our collective neuroses. Maybe it's too weighty a thought, too far to get there from a simple late dinner. But that was where my mind went. This is the danger of travel. It sometimes takes your mind much farther than your body and to all sorts of admittedly obnoxious and provincial places.
My dinner that first night on Greece consisted of some small fried fish, some grilled sardines, and a Greek salad. I took it at a place called Patralis, which I found it by searching "best seafood" on Google maps. That method produced a few candidates and I decided to walk the promenade and check them out. Patralis was the farthest but the place was doing a brisk business, always a good sign for seafood. The staff was especially friendly despite their running around frantically to service the dinner crowd. The meal was good. And I discovered Vergina beer, which ended up being one of my favorites in Greece. I recommend Patralis, if you ever happen to be in Spetses, though I don’t know that I would recommend going to Spetses, at least not unless you have a lot of time in the country.
The next morning, my first in Greece, I woke up and headed for the hills, which I would learn is an ancient impulse. The Greeks have always been a seafaring people and much of their wealth was derived from maritime trading, which led to the development of coastal cities and towns like Spetses. But people have always lived inland, as well. When pirates and enemy navies were a danger, living on the coast made you an easy target for raiders and slavers.
The transition from coast to mountain is often a dramatic affair in the Greek Isles. There are places where stark gray peaks rise straight from the aquamarine of the Aegean Sea. Luckily, I found a route up from the town of Spetses into the surrounding hillsides that was not too steep and made for a pleasant stroll. I had no clear destination but had seen a few churches on the map and decided to walk up and see where the roads might take me. After about an hour of walking, I spotted one of the churches and figured a route to it.
It was on this walk, that I began to notice the ground. Parts of Spetses are covered in thick pine forests and Cyprus trees abound, but the ground hints at how difficult it might have been to get those trees to take root. The ground is rocky, in spots it is composed of hard white clay, from which only a few rough, thorny shrubs and hearty succulents grew. It made for difficult walking in some spots, but I managed to make my way from one hillside to another, and to the church that I had spotted in the distance.
3.
Part of why I went to Spetses was because of the Bobalina museum, which I visited in the afternoon, after my hike. Bobalina was Greece’s first female admiral and a hero of the Greek Revolution. Her story is instructive. She came to her position by being twice married and twice widowed to ship captains. In that way, she inherited and expanded a minor fortune, which she mostly exhausted in the cause of Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire.
The Ottomans ruled Greece along with most of the Balkans for several hundred years. For a sea captain, like Bobalina, the ability to ply her trade was dependent on keeping good relations with Istanbul. In the museum, you can see the Ottoman permit that allowed her to operate her ships and outfit them with cannons for defense. According to the plaque, she was able to pay bribes for additional cannon. Because of this relationship, many of the wealthy ship captains were reluctant to join the cause for independence, but they eventually became instrumental in providing material support.
At a time when Athens was a minor settlement in the shadow of the Acropolis, the wealth and population of Greece was concentrated in the islands. Today, Spetses still reflects some of this wealth. Aside from the hotels and guest hoses, there are a lot of holiday homes as well. Some of Spetses feels like a very nice suburb. Many of Spetses’ houses sit on charming, flower-strewn lanes. There are almost no private cars. Most people get around on scooters. There are also horse-drawn carriages, which add to the charm but often come barreling down the road at an alarming clip. I dodged a few on my way to dinner the first night.
Spending a night and much of the following day on Spetses was a nice introduction to Greece. But again, I wouldn’t recommend it as a tourist destination unless you are touring Greece for a substantial amount of time. Someone with only three nights to spend in the Saronics would do better to spend all three on Hydra, which I will talk about next time.