There’s a children’s song in the United States “Make new friends, but keep the old; one is silver and the other gold.” It may sound corny, but I actually heard this sing-song tune in my head over and over during our next few weeks in Crete. Because once we made the decision to slow down, we suddenly found ourselves surrounded by friends, both old and new, and thoroughly enjoying ourselves.
It all began the day after our boat broke down, as we walked to the bus station to pick up Fernando, one of Ángel’s good friends from graduate school in Spain. The plan had been for Fernando to be a third set of hands on board to help us with the passage from Crete in the south of the Aegean north to Ios. But with the broken gear shifter and gummed-up tank, we told him that the closest thing we’d be doing to sailing was drinking a sundowner in the cockpit, while still safely tied up in the marina.
Fernando is the quintessential Spanish gentleman and didn’t bat an eye at the change in plans. Instead, his cheery disposition, constant joking with Ángel, and gallant chivalry toward me were just the tonic we needed to lift our spirits. After spending months in lockdown in COVID-ravaged Madrid, Fernando was delighted by everything in Crete. He marveled repeatedly at the freedom to walk through the streets without a mask, a simple act that we had begun taking for granted a month ago. He exclaimed over the turquoise water, the delicious food, the joys of having a cold beer on the beach with friends instead of being shut up in his apartment as he had been for so many weeks. Seeing our new home through his eyes made us remember how truly lucky we were to live on a beautiful Greek island– especially during this strange, sad time in the world.
And after the exhaustion of our long drives to Chania and Rethymnon in Western Crete, Ángel and I relished staying closer to home in the eastern part of the island. Fernando was happy to let us play tour guides and he accompanied us to Panagia Kera, patiently indulging us as we filmed the remarkable Byzantine frescoes at that beautiful church.
We visited the fascinating island of Spinalonga- once a Venetian fortress then an Ottoman holding and finally a leper colony from the early 1900s to 1957 when the colony was closed, as all its inhabitants had either been cured or were being sent to Athens for further treatment. You can still see the little shops and homes that the men, women, and children who suffered from leprosy worked and lived in– though they’ve mostly fallen into disrepair now.
The story of Spinalonga is incredibly inspiring. In the first half of the twentieth century, leprosy was still a feared and incurable disease and its sufferers were often cast out from society with little more kindness than was shown millenia earlier in biblical times. But in Spinalonga, these patients who were so reviled by the rest of society built for themselves a thriving community, complete with a functioning internal government, shops, markets, a movie theater, a cafe for gossip and strong Greek coffee, an Orthodox church, and a hospital to care for the patients whose illness was more advanced. Many of the islanders found more comfort and acceptance among others who suffered from their disease than they had from their own families. I tried to imagine what it must feel like to be rejected by society, shunned as a contagious threat, and I was inspired by the tenacity and perseverance it must have taken to overcome these feelings of shame and rejection and instead to work to build a community which was the best home many of the patients had ever known. If any of you would like to learn more about Spinalonga, I can recommend Victoria Hislop’s novel, The Island, which (although rather melodramatic in parts) paints an excellent picture of life in the Spinalonga leprosy colony.
We ventured down to Ierapetra in the south of the island where we shared with Fernando one of the most delicious meals I had in Crete at a restaurant with a view of Ierapetra’s harbor and its Venetian fort. We followed up our languid lunch with a dip in the ocean and finally with that quintessentially Spanish drink–the gin & tonic-– though this one was served in a way Madrileños could only hope for: not just seaside, but IN the sea.
Fernando gallantly took in stride my proposal that we drive for two hours so that we could do a ten-mile round trip hike through one of Crete’s famous gorges. It wasn’t until we arrived at the gorge and realized that, with our late start, we would be hiking with the sun directly overhead for the next three hours that we abandoned this ambitious plan in favor of hitting the nearest beach. Funnily enough, this beach ended up being my favorite in all of Crete. There is something about Crete: when you let go and just let things flow, you’d be presented with plans far better with anything you could have concocted. It was like the island was directing us, making sure we could really see its magic.
Nowhere was this truer than with the new friends we made, who are an astonishing assortment of artists, creators, and free spirits with ages spanning from early twenties into mid-sixties. Once we stopped running ourselves ragged scrubbing the decks and filming archaeological sites, we began to make friends. As many of you know, Ángel has an unusual knack for meeting people, so it only slightly surprised me when he told me we had been invited to a beachside party by Leonidas, the man he had hired to do some work on the boat. It feels funny to introduce him in this way since I would now introduce him as our good friend, but in the early days, I knew him only as the laughing, fun-loving guy who worked in the marina.
When we arrived at the party, Leonidas greeted us as old friends and his wife Zoie embraced me warmly, turning the full radiance of her intense gaze and striking beauty in my direction as she asked me in perfect English how I was liking Crete. Zoie, who is a film director (in fact, her most recent short film, Houhou, a re-envisioning of a classic Greek children’s poem, was just nominated in the Athens International Film Festival, a major accomplishment) has a singular intensity and when she focuses on you, it feels like lazers of warmth and interest are beaming out of her.
Over the thumping music, I gave a garbled response that we had enjoyed Knossos and the Minoan artifacts in the archaeology museum and how I felt like the artwork really echoed the colors and essence of Crete. Zoie nodded as if this wasn’t a completely pretentious answer to give at a beachside club party and agreed with me that Crete- and especially Eastern Crete- has a profound energy force. We continued to chat and then, before she swirled away back into the center of the action, she clasped my hands and offered,
“You must come for dinner at our house.”
“Thank you, that’s so kind.”
I thought little of Zoie’s invitation until the following day when Ángel woke up to a text message from Zoie inviting us for dinner on Thursday. Which leads me to another striking difference between Silicon Valley and Crete. In San Francisco, “You must come for dinner at our house” means “Someday maybe we will see each other again…maybe” In Crete, “You must come for dinner at our house” means “I will expect you at my home at 7 p.m. on Tuesday.”
Crete is not a flaky culture: invitations are given freely and sincerely and sometimes to near or total strangers. For example, while in Crete, Ángel attended the birthday party of one of Leonidas’s friends– a man who he had never met– and the party was so large that it was held after hours at a local primary school. Another time, we were invited to a party by the owner of a restaurant where we’d eaten lunch. After chatting with us for an hour, the owner apologized profusely that he had to leave because his friends were setting up his name day celebration in the fields by his house. He then earnestly instructed us,
“You must come to my party. Just drive down to that windmill down there and turn left where there are fields of potatoes”
It was a sign that we were beginning to fit in in Crete that we couldn’t attend the name day celebration because it conflicted with another party to which we had been invited. And when we told our Cretan friends about this generous offer from the restaurant owner, they didn’t find it at all strange. They all seemed to think it only proper that if you leave a good conversation to go to a party, you should invite your conversation partners to attend as well. Zoie and Leonidas told us about their 1,000 person wedding in Leonidas’s tiny mountainside home town in which it appears most of the Agios Nikolaos region was invited.
We began to realize: not only are Cretans very generous, welcoming people, they also just really like parties.
On Thursday morning Zoie texted us that there had been a change in plans: in true Cretan style, they had been invited to a gathering Thursday night and would now bring us as their guests. Unsure of who was hosting the party or where it would be or how many people would be there, I wondered what I should bring as a hostess gift. I still don’t know what the appropriate Cretan hostess gift is, but I can tell you it certainly isn’t what we brought. When we handed our hosts a package of baklava from our favorite bakery, they looked at it bemusedly and then set it aside on the counter where I believe it languished for the whole evening. Perhaps while baklava is exciting and delicious to me as a foreigner, maybe to Cretans it is as mundane as bringing a package of Oreo’s would be in the States. Or maybe we bought the wrong brand. Or maybe baklava is a breakfast food in Crete. Who knows? Sometimes when you’re a foreigner, you can tell you’ve done something just a little “off” but you can’t fully understand why or how to do it better the next time.
But I soon forgot our social gaffe as Leonidas began showing us around the property, explaining that the exquisite villa just up the road perched high on the cliffs above Mirabello Bay was the former home of one of Greece’s most revered film directors, Nikos Koundouros. Built in the 1960’s, the classically-styled buildings blended elegantly into their surroundings, and I felt all the drama of a film star, gazing out at the sea below as I descended the villa’s stone staircase carved into the rocky cliff.
Koundouros died in 2017, and his widow, our hostess, had recently sold the villa (which is now awaiting its new owners whose plans I believe have been slowed by COVID), but she had kept a little plot of land and a small outbuilding where now twinkling lights were threaded through the boughs of fruit trees and below their dappled light was spread a feast of home-cooked Cretan food and rustic jugs of home-brewed wine and raki. In one corner, the younger men were crouched over a fire, roasting meat, and the children raced through the trees, darting around the adults, and shrieking with laughter.
I felt like I’d been dropped into a film set. From the accosting views of the bay and the elegant villa to the warm glow of suspended lights amidst the trees and the chatter of friends all around me, the scene was so idyllic that I couldn’t believe it was actually real. I remember almost laughing when the young men who had been tending the meat began pulling out their instruments and playing traditional Cretan songs. I felt like I was living out every American’s idealized view of Greece. Between sips of a strong home-brewed wine that reminded me of the dry sherry favored by my grandparents and bites of juicy grilled meats, oozing cheese, and smoky roasted vegetables, I chatted in amazement with Ángel, Fernando, and our new friend Rebecca, a half-Greek, half-Spanish quadri-lingual architect and artist whose family owns the property next door to this heavenly enclave.
Leonidas, Zoie, and Rebecca soon became our fast friends. And little did we know that this magical evening would be the first of many and that at each of these gatherings they would introduce us into the circle of their fascinating collection of friends and acquaintances.
One evening, we barbecued by the beach, dining on sticks of salty, juicy pork souvlaki, and swimming in the crystalline, turquoise water, then watching the sea change to a deeper blue as a heavy purple dusk settled around us.
That evening, our group had swelled to include a Polish girl and her American boyfriend who were visiting from Germany. The girl had a friend in common with Zoie, who I believe had made the introduction, and they seemed as dazzled as we were to have been dropped into this seaside gathering of Greeks, Spaniards, Americans, and Poles. When pressed about why he lived in Europe, the American boyfriend explained that he worked in Berlin as a large scale installation artist. As he discussed his various works, he described how one enormous work had been made primarily out of berries. As he explained that he secured whole raspberries using toothpicks and, for varied texture, also used smashed berries held together in hairnets, I remember thinking “How on earth am I here on a beach in Greece nodding along as someone explains the efficacy of using a hair net for holding strawberry mush? What a wild world.” And then Leonidas voiced aloud exactly what I believe we were all thinking,
“What you mean, you use berries? Why berries?”
I don’t fully recall the answer– I think the answer basically was “It was interesting to me” which as an artist is really all that matters. But that evening sparked a conversation about the nature of artists, creators, and what drives the creative process that I will never forget.
We spent other evenings at Zoie and Leonidas’s house in the Cretan countryside, a house which Leonidas has built almost entirely by himself. They are the type of hosts where even a small, informal gathering will inevitably swell into full-fledged soiree, as their wide circle of friends each invite a few friends of their own. One particularly memorable evening saw the arrival of a friend who brought in tow his twelve family members visiting from Armenia–along with a karaoke machine.
I did my part to represent the United States, belting out Dolly Parton’s Jolene to an audience that included Zoie, Leonidas, and Rebecca, along with the celebrated British novelist Victoria Hislop and her daughter, Zoie’s Scottish sister and her boyfriend (both of whom manage underground nightclubs in Edinburgh), a half-Greek, half-French friend of Rebecca’s who is both a surgeon and an Instagram fashion darling, and the family of thirteen Armenians.
Zoie and Leonidas’s hospitality was matched only by Rebecca’s, whose Cretan and Andalusian heritage make her the consummate hostess. And it also doesn’t hurt that her house, which enjoys similarly spectacular vistas as the neighboring Koundouros villa, is one of the most stunning places I’ve ever been. Rebecca is a funny, introspective, deeply kind person, and we both loved getting to know her, but I think for Ángel in particular, her blend of Andalusian humor and frankness combined with her warm generosity breeded an immediate closeness and familiarity.
I’ve never seen myself as a deeply American– rah-rah, hamburgers and NASCAR– kind of person, but I am starting to see that I may be a bit more American than I thought. I often worried we were imposing on our hosts’ incredible hospitality, and I wondered how we could ever repay them. Coming from a more individualistic society in which the assumption, especially in Silicon Valley, is that everyone is busy all the time with their own priorities and projects, falling into this languid, easy, immediate friendship was new to me.
Perhaps it’s the difference between growing up in Mediterranean countries, spending summers by the beach with whatever kids happened to be around, versus my suburban California upbringing of scheduled playdates and summer camps. I thrive in routine with set, understandable boundaries. Ángel and our new friends were much more comfortable falling into a natural, if time-bound, summer friendship. I still struggle with how to be this loose– something that I think is partly my upbringing and heritage and partly just me– but if there’s ever someone to learn loose-ness from, it’s Leonidas.
During this month we also grew closer with our neighbors at the marina. Elsbeth and Christian and their dog Ronja had the berth next to us and next to them were Ota and Petra and their dog Bauki. These generous souls, as willing to share their tools as their knowledge gleaned from years of sailing, were a constant source of entertainment, kindness, and wise counsel. In the morning when we’d hear Elsbeth calling to her husband in her Alpine-accent (“Christiaahhhhn”), at lunchtime when Petra would bring by some of her delicious baked treats, in the afternoons when we’d see Christian flying his model airplanes over the marina (back in Switzerland, Christian flew hot air balloons but in Crete he had to content himself with remote controlled planes), and then in the evenings we’d hear Ota playing guitar and gently singing on the foredeck of New Dawn.
After Fernando’s visit in early July, our month of slowing down was bookended with another visit, this one from one of Ángel’s Canarian friends, Consuelo, and her French boyfriend Bertrand, who were visiting from Nantes. They were holidaying in Rethymno, but drove out to Agios Nikolaos to see us and to meet Gradisca.
These brave friends were our first guests aboard Gradisca (Fernando had opted for a hotel given the COVID-depreciated prices), and house guests the world over can learn from Consuelo and Bertrand. Even though their first night was blisteringly hot and windless, they lied quite convincingly that they had slept very well. In addition, Bertrand upheld the honor of la belle France by rising early and bringing back coffee, pastries, and the best approximation of pain au chocolat that he could find in our Greek fishing town. It was wonderful to be able to serve dinner and drinks in the cockpit, where we laughed late into the night, as Consuelo and Ángel wandered down a memory lane of Spanish songs from the 1980s.
I remember sitting in the cockpit, laughing as Consuelo described her devotion to the Eurovision competition (every year she assembles a varied collection of kitsch to serve as prizes for her Eurovision party attendees and it’s now on my bucket list to attend this party), and thinking “I’m happy. This is what happiness feels like.”
It had been a wild month, but our friends brought us back into balance. I was feeling like myself again, no longer run ragged, but instead topped up with energy and joy. When Consuelo and Bertrand left, we looked around Gradisca and realized: we were caught up on our projects; the engine and diesel tank were dealt with; we were rested; we were happy; there was a moderate breeze and blue skies above.
It was time to finally go sailing.
6 comments
I love it!!!You should be thinking about a book! Too many experiences and discoveries not to share with the world.you brought so many memories! i spent from 1985 till 2006 ( when my first daughter was born) doing this same kind of trips all along the coast of france, italy, greece, turkey plus all the islands….and meeting this kind of people, and parties…interesting your reflections on how an american relates and adapts to this environment…
if you are in search of a good book, I would RECOMMEND The_Story_of_San_Michele, by Axel Munthe, it is partially based in Crete but it is an incredible recount of the atmosphere and feeling that your own STORIES transpire….
say hello to Angel and KEEP on writing!!!
Hi Alvaro, thanks for the recommendation- I’m trying to track down an English copy of The Story of San Michele because it looks fantastic. I’ve always loved historical travel works! And thank you also for your kind words and for reading along. Knowing that people are enjoying the chapters gives me the motivation to keep up with my writing even when the beach is calling 🙂 Sending all the best to you and the folks back at FB!
And when you think the journey couldn’t be even better and you’re still enjoying the amazing memories of that fabulous adventure, you see this astonishing report from the wonderful Katy!! Thank you so much!! (Ok ok Angel might have somehow contributed!, I’ll give you that!)
I use to value the moments not by the place or the experience but by the company, so that time was absolutely unforgettable and perfect guys! Memorable conversations from the tiniest and most irrelevant fact up to personal and philosophical topics, always laughing and enjoying superb food at the best spots in Crete. Funniest road-trips, great heritage and cultural spots, Spinalonga by ferry, drinks at the beach, fantastic dinners on the boat, marvelous instantly discovered rocky-beaches (Kate, you made me a super-fan of rocky beaches!!) and much more!! Kate, I’m actually following your swimming lessons and copying Angel’s receipts – but those are not the same without you and out of the boat!
Angel’s incredible social skills represented the most efficient shortcut to the traditional cretan hospitality – the first night I was there I was invited to one of the most amazing birthday parties in my life! Afterwards everything got even more interesting and lovely; enjoying fantastic wine at Zoie and Leonidas hand-made amazing high-end house, traditional live music during a perfect dinner where I met Rebecca, lovely dinner at the incredibly and luxury Rebecca’s house by the coast-side, meeting Manolas during an unforgettable sunset at Voulisma beach, boys night out with Leonidas, and more memories!!
It was simply fantastic meeting so many new amazing people; Zoie, Rebecca and Leonidas (sorry, ladies first!) it was a real pleasure meeting you, really wonderful people with a great sense of humor. Please don’t forget giving me a call when you are in Madrid!!
Just to support my argument above, as you know I was really close to spend one week more in Crete even I’d have been remotely working! Considering it until literally 12 hours before the flight is significantly representative. Rebecca can confirm this – we were discussing this until the last minute with a drink in a port’s terrace!
Kate / Angel, thank you so much for this great time, hospitality and unforgettable memories. I wish you the best during your adventure, and don’t even doubt I’ll try visiting you again!!
Miss you guys!!
Awwwww Fernando, my favorite Spanish gentleman, thank you!! We had such an incredible time with you as our guest and you are always welcome back aboard any time that you crave more swims in rocky beaches or long discussions over glasses of raki. Sending you lots of love!
Hi Katy, i am an old friend of angel, im following your trip since a couple of weeks ago 🙂 I love how you express the different cultural encounters of a couple that comes from the USA and travels without a return ticket to the Greek islands. Awesome trip Guys!
Hi Fede- so glad you’re enjoying the Diaries! Angel te da un fuerte saludo. Thanks for reading and letting me know what you find interesting- I’ll make sure to keep sharing our reactions to the different cultures where we travel!