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Published: September 1st 2023
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I join a select few of the Rembrandts for a short bus ride up the hill where they’ll be spending the morning drawing windmills. It seems the pull of the beach has been a bit stronger than the pull of the paintbrush for the rest of the crew; they’ve all opted to stay put down in Livadi.
The remnants of eight windmills are still sitting up here on the ridge below the Castle. I read that they’re believed to have been built in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the locals apparently used to bring their grain up here to have it milled into flour. They look almost identical to the mills on the ridge above Chora in Amorgos. The ones here in Astypalea were apparently able to spin horizontally to suit the wind direction; I might be wrong but I’m not sure the Amorgos mills had that level of sophistication. It was so windy up at the Amorgos windmills that staying upright was a real challenge, and forget trying to keep any headwear attached. No such problem here in Astypalea however, it’s dead calm. …well no problem for me, but I hope for the millers’ sakes that the wind
did occasionally pick up.
David, Tom and I leave the Rembrandts preparing their masterpieces and head up the hill towards the Castle. The views down over the port and its small beach are excellent. The Castle looks like an imposing structure from the outside, but there’s not a lot left behind the outer walls - a church and the remains of a few of the internal walls and rooms. The Castle’s otherwise known as the Castle of Querini. During the Middle Ages Astypalea was part of the Byzantine Empire. It’s thought that it was taken over by Latin types somewhere around 1204, after the Christian crusaders sacked Constantinople. Giovanni Querini was a Venetian nobleman. He’s thought to have bought, yep bought, the island sometime in the early fourteenth century, and built the Castle to protect against pirates and other undesirables. The Querini family ruled the island until 1522, when the Ottoman Empire turned up and took over the reins. The 1956 earthquake apparently made a bit of a mess of parts of the Castle, and it looks like a few enhancements have been added subsequently to stop some of the outer walls collapsing.
The old town of Chora
sits below the Castle walls. It’s very cute. It’s getting a bit boring repeating this, but here we go again - it’s as usual all ancient whitewashed buildings with mostly blue trim, connected by steep narrow winding alleyways. I assume the original town was built up here away from the pirates to at least give the locals a fighting chance of making it up into the Castle in time if they could see them coming. I wander down into the port area and along behind the beach, where the buildings generally look much newer.
Back in Livadi and Issy and I spend a very pleasant couple of hours vegging on the sand under some trees. The water’s a bit on the cool side, and it’s rocky underfoot, like ‘hard to stay upright’ type rocky.
I’ve completely run out of clean shorts. The Rembrandts already know I’ve got no artistic taste, and if I turn up to tonight’s formal dinner in my bathers I’m probably in real danger of being sent home early. So Issy dispatches me to the supermarket to buy some detergent. All the labels are in Greek, but it’s OK, there are pictures, of powder, and
a washing machine. So why is the check out lady looking at me so quizzically? “Sir, you do realise that this powder is for cleaning … washing machines.” If I didn’t realise before that I was just some poor clueless bloke, well I’ve certainly just been reminded…
Tonight’s full team dinner is excellent - home cooked Greek food right here in the comfort of the dining room on the covered terrace of our small hotel.
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D MJ Binkley
Dave and Merry Jo Binkley
The love of Greece
It is hard for me to read blogs and look at photos of this magical land and not book a flight.