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Published: August 26th 2023
Today the Rembrandts and I are swapping places; they’re heading off up into the mountains in the middle of the island, while I head across the water to the neighbouring island of Paros. No one seems to be too sure about the details of the Rembrandt’s itinerary. I hope they’re not planning on trying to scale Mount Zas. My body’s gone on strike this morning after yesterday’s climb, and I think its message to me is something along the lines of “you’re not twenty-one any more, what the f**k were you thinking”. I’m trying to put the pain out of my mind, but I’m now forced to remember - four hours spent scrambling up and down hundreds of metres of near vertical rock faces on my hands and knees in searing heat. What was I thinking?
I climb aboard a ferry for the quick trip across the strait to Paroikia, Paros’ main port and its largest town. I take the opportunity to read up a bit about the island’s history. It doesn’t look particularly remarkable for a Greek island in these parts, but as I’m sitting back in my comfy ferry seat one paragraph does manage to catch my attention.
In September 2000 a ferry just like the one I’m now on ran into some rocks and sunk just outside Paros’ main harbour, and eighty-two people died. It doesn’t sound like the captain and a lot of the crew were paying all that much attention to the job on hand that night. Some of them were charged with negligent homicide and ended up in jail. The first officer was apparently watching a soccer match. He got locked up for nineteen years, and the captain for sixteen. My comfy seat’s suddenly not feeling quite so comfy any more. Hopefully everyone’s a bit more on their game today.
First stop is the very impressive Panagia Ekatontapiliani. This apparently translates literally to "The Church with 100 Doors”, and no one quite knows why, because it doesn’t have any more doors than most normal churches. I love Greek churches - they all look so dark and mysterious. This one’s ridiculously old. Its oldest features are thought to date way back to 326 AD, and therefore probably predate the official adoption of Christianity as the state religion of the Roman Empire; that only happened in 391 AD. As seems to be the case with
all Greek churches, it’s packed with characteristic icons, and the tradition when you come here seems to be to kiss a few of them. I can’t see anyone running around with disinfectant before the next kisser turns up, so I wonder how that turned out for the country during the pandemic. Now that I come to think of it we went to the funeral of our beloved Greek neighbour during COVID. Neither of us had ever been to a Greek funeral before so we didn’t quite know to expect. The drill there was to file past the coffin, and kiss the picture of Jesus that was sitting on top of it. There was no one running round with disinfectant that day either. The church was full of incense which gave Issy a coughing fit, so she had to go outside leaving me alone with a queue of Greek mourners. I panicked when I saw what was happening in front of me, and ended up just pretending to kiss the picture. I hope no one noticed. The neighbours do still talk to us.
I wander through Paroikia’s cute backstreets and then along the waterfront. There are a couple of good
looking sandy beaches within very close walking distance of the town. First up is Livadia Beach, and further along the very attractive Paralia Parikia beach, which is packed with rentable sunlounges and beach umbrellas.
As I’ve wandered around it’s a bit hard not to notice that two out of every three people here are Aussies … or at least two out of every three people who I can hear talking, and I assume the rest of the world hasn’t suddenly gone mute. What’s going on here? Best guess is that Paros has just appeared on an episode of a Aussie TV program about where best to take your holidays, but I suppose there could be other explanations. Issy was telling me the other day about a recent article she’d been reading about places that’ll pay certain categories of people to come and live in them. In some desperate cases they’ll take anyone, anyone at all - the outback Queensland town of Quilpie was one example. (I’ve seen where Quilpie is and what it looks like, and I wouldn’t want to live there no matter how much you paid me. I hope no one from Quilpie’s reading this. Sorry good
people of Quilpie.) I’m not quite sure why the Greek Government would want to pay Australians, and just Australians, to come and live in Paros, but if that is indeed the explanation, where do we go to sign up?
Last stop is the Paros Archaeological Museum which has got a fairly extensive array of items on display from the so-called Golden Age of Greece.
Issy returns from her day up in the mountains with the rest of the Rembrandts. Apparently I was the only one of the nine non-artists who didn’t go with them. She says she told them that I’d climbed the island’s highest mountain yesterday, which they assumed was the one you can see from Filoti with a church on top of it. She then told them that she’d seen pictures that I’d taken at the top of “my“ mountain, and there was no church. So now they all probably think I’m a fraud … who can’t draw … and who doesn’t want to come with them on their outings. It’s going to be a long road back from here.
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D MJ Binkley
Dave and Merry Jo Binkley
On the road..... still
You have really been bouncing around the world the past months. Keep posting.