The top American newspaper, the Washington Post, published an experiential tribute in the Mani area on its website, in which Roberto Loiederman mentions his personal experience, highlighting the beauties of our country, but also the life lessons he took.
Olthe whole article by the author:
"What we all really wanted was a pleasant place for a family, 10-day getaway. My wife and I, her brother and his wife and my 93-year-old mother-in-law, that is, a group of five people, connected by blood, marriage and common history.
What we experienced was much more than a reunion.
Because my wife's relatives did not want to travel far from their home in Israel, we all decided to gather in Greece. After searching travel websites, I found a suitable house in Mani, Peloponnese, where none of us had ever been.
According to the website, the house was in a non-tourist village, several kilometers above the coast, so we would need a car to go to the beach, to a restaurant or to find the nearest ATM.
Did we really want to do that?
My wife, Betty, had other concerns. Given the economic problems in Greece, he wondered what things would be like in a small village. Would there be basic services? After a reassuring, electronic dialogue with the owners, we rented the house.
We met with relatives at the Athens airport, then drove our rental car across the Peloponnese, to Kalamata, where, yes, we ate excellent olives. From there we took the winding road, two lanes, to the south, with the Messinian Gulf on our right and Taygetos on our left.
It is a fascinating entrance to Mani, a peninsula that protrudes to the Mediterranean, reminiscent of the hard, curved finger of a witch.
An hour later, in Stoupa, a coastal town flooded with Northern Europeans, we got a call from Deborah, an Irishwoman who runs a rented house. The blonde, nervous Deborah arrived in a three-wheeled vehicle. She told us that she had lived in Mani for years and had given birth to her children there. In addition to renting real estate, he rents horses, which he has brought from Ireland, and offers riding lessons.
She gladly told us that her own house, in a neighboring village, does not have electricity and water. We followed Deborah to Neochori.
As we approached the village, instead of continuing on the zigzagging road, he chose to climb a steep uphill. Her vehicle made various maneuvers, forcing me to use the parking brake and change gears frequently, with Betty next to me panting in agony. In Neochori, the alleys are not much bigger than a car. Relieved, we arrived at our destination intact.
Neochori, as far as we could see, was clean and quiet. Same as the illustration on the website, the tenant was a stone house, completely renovated, with a modern interior, with many energy saving devices and warm touches.
I asked Deborah about safety. "Do not worry about it," he told me, winking. "There are guards guarding the house. You will see."
After our installation, we gathered on the upper patio, which overlooked the bay and the mountains. We drank tea, enjoying the crowing of roosters, the only sound in the village.
Gradually, we began to hear another sound: Voices. Six women, of different ages, had settled outside our door, speaking loudly. Are we being expelled from the village? Creepy scenes from "Zorbas the Greek" flashed through my mind.
As it turned out, the women gather there every afternoon to clean their vegetables and chat. The biggest, dressed "Greek Widow" was cleaning zucchini flowers.
So these were the guards?
I said good morning to them and then corrected myself, good evening. The women, obviously wanting to connect with us, answered with smiles and a wave of questions. Unfortunately, I had exhausted my knowledge of Greek, so I smiled stupidly and shrugged.
Trails and taverns
Before the trip, I had read P.'s bookatrick Lee Fermor "Mani: Travel to the Southern Peloponnese", a lyrical portrait of the inhabitants of Mani, who, according to the author, survived thanks to their courage, ingenuity and wild independence. They have repelled invaders, managed to make a living from a wild land and maintained their good humor.
The next day, inspired by the fearless Fermor, I woke up at dawn and walked alone along a narrow path, paved with flat stones of strange sizes. Part of the route from Neochori to the neighboring village was grassy, thorny and green. The smell of sage was diffuse and cyclamen sprouted between the rocks.
Higher up, the route passed by olive groves. All of this had a harsh, intense beauty. It took me an hour to walk to Kastania. Near the village square, a woman, standing in front of a stone wall, was picking figs from a tree next to a house that looked abandoned.
In the square, a group of men sat outside two taverns, talking and drinking retsina or coffee. Describing a similar scene in the 1950s, Fermor wrote that the inhabitants he met in the taverns avoided talking about politics and instead talked about shipwrecks, Lord Byron, the fall of Byzantium, the migration of birds or the bad guys. of smoking hashish.
ΟWere the men in the taverns in Kastania the ones talking about hashish and shipwrecks or the ones talking about the possible sinking of the "ship" of the Greek economy?
What the villagers were saying was incomprehensible to me, but in Mani I saw no sign of people being consumed by the economy. Far from the centers of power of Greece, daily life in these villages seemed without haste and concepts.
In each village, almost all available land is used for food production. In each backyard they grew zucchini or melons, vines, fruit trees, olives, vegetables and very often they had chickens.
In the following days, I saw that every village in Mani is unique, but everything has at least two things in common: agricultural autonomy and men, often women, who sit in taverns, talk, drink and laugh. The pace of the days For the five of us, most days had the same pace.
While Betty and my in-laws were still asleep, I got up for my morning outing. Back at home, I was making hot cereals and coffee. At the same time, my bride was walking up to the nearby bakery bringing freshly baked bread.
We sat in the lower yard, in the shade of the vineyard and enjoyed tomatoes, yogurt, cheese and grapes, from the bunches that hung over our heads. Early in the afternoon we drove carefully to the narrow alleys in Neochori and then we reached the beach.
The sandy beaches of Stoupa were full of umbrellas and sun lovers. We preferred Pantazi beach, south of Agios Nikolaos.
It was a pebble beach, without crowds, with a snack bar, public toilets and shady trees. It was the perfect place to read and dive in the warm waters of the bay.
Late in the afternoon we would return home and sit on the upstairs patio, drinking homemade grape juice and watching the sunset in the bay. In the other direction was Taygetos, the steep ridge of Mani, which is sometimes covered by dark clouds.
My wife's brother and his wife were walking late in the afternoon, before dinner. Fearless of the darkness, impassable gorges or exhaustion, they treated this hike as an exercise of courage in the Himalayas. During an intense hike, waiting to find a tavern with hot food and cold drinks, they continued walking upwards and found only springs of cold water on the mountain and a tree full of ripe figs, which they ate.
It was an unforgettable experience, much more important than the memory of a tavern. They had a story that was worth remembering, which is one of the reasons we travel.
Almost every night we went to the seaside villages for dinner. In "Yesterday and Today", a gift shop and restaurant in Stoupa, Voula Kyriakea, the kind owner, told us: "One hundred years ago, a young man came to Kalogria for mining. Nikos Kazantzakis".
"The one who wrote Zorba?" we exclaimed.
Voula nodded in agreement. "He hired a mining engineer, an older man who was buzzing with life. His name? Zorbas!" Voula laughed, enjoying Mani's past as well as her present. There was no doubt why she named her restaurant "Yesterday and Today".
Later, we walked on the pedestrian street of Stoupa, where you could not see any high-rise buildings, except the appropriate number of tourist shops, restaurants, small hotels and apartments for rent. Stoupa, Kalogria and Agios Nikolaos are pleasant and unspoiled places.
A few kilometers north is the beautiful Kardamili, which Fermor calls "Restored Byzantium". These are wonderful vacation spots. Day by day, we were enchanted by Neochori, our "own" village, with its churches, bakery and aroma, olive groves, painted doors and stone houses, whose roofs looked like hawk wings .
Above all, we anxiously awaited the daily gathering outside our door. Every time the neighbors showed up, my bride would announce: "Listen! The House of Women of Neochori has started the meeting!"
Caves and Acropolis
Ο Fermor wrote that the Tower of Dyros, with its stalagmites and stalactites, eerie colors and shapes, are the caves through which the famous descents to the Underworld were made.The".
An hour south of Neochori, the caves, which are crossed by boat, are quite impressive, even without the myths. But inside, dragging your fingers in the cool water, it is tempting to imagine Orpheus trying to lead his beloved Eurydice to the Underworld. Below is the village of Vathia.
Visible from sea level, Vathia looks like a collection of caramel-colored stone towers. Going up the road, you will find dozens of rectangular buildings of three and four floors, which were once family fortresses.
Today it is deserted and empty. Built hundreds of years ago, these buildings were emblematic of the thousand-sung independence of Mani. They provided protection from warring neighbors, invaders, other villages or invading troops, but had no protection against the economic downturn. So today almost all these mini-fortresses, despite their spectacular view, are empty and collapsing.
We left Vathia, drove to the southern tip of the peninsula and then, hours later, took a wrong turn and ended up back in Vathia. But now everything was very different.
The road through the abandoned village was full of cars from one end to the other. A wedding was in progress. A wedding? In a ghost village, known mainly for its vendettas? Strangeness. But there was the bride, the groom, the guests, the priest, the food, the decoration, the balloons, the music, a joyful celebration in abandoned houses and balconies.
It sounded as alive as laughter in misfortune. Like Zorba's dance after the disaster or like villagers drinking retsina in a tavern, while their country's economy may collapse.
ΠWe came to Mani purely by chance, for a family reunion. But as the days went by, very quickly, I realized that it is impossible to spend time there without taking at least a few life lessons. "
The translation of the article was done by travelstyle.grRead the article in ELEFTHERIA http://www.eleftheriaonline.gr/oikonomia/tourismos/item/32932-washington-post-mani
Olthe whole article by the author:
"What we all really wanted was a pleasant place for a family, 10-day getaway. My wife and I, her brother and his wife and my 93-year-old mother-in-law, that is, a group of five people, connected by blood, marriage and common history.
What we experienced was much more than a reunion.
Because my wife's relatives did not want to travel far from their home in Israel, we all decided to gather in Greece. After searching travel websites, I found a suitable house in Mani, Peloponnese, where none of us had ever been.
According to the website, the house was in a non-tourist village, several kilometers above the coast, so we would need a car to go to the beach, to a restaurant or to find the nearest ATM.
Did we really want to do that?
My wife, Betty, had other concerns. Given the economic problems in Greece, he wondered what things would be like in a small village. Would there be basic services? After a reassuring, electronic dialogue with the owners, we rented the house.
We met with relatives at the Athens airport, then drove our rental car across the Peloponnese, to Kalamata, where, yes, we ate excellent olives. From there we took the winding road, two lanes, to the south, with the Messinian Gulf on our right and Taygetos on our left.
It is a fascinating entrance to Mani, a peninsula that protrudes to the Mediterranean, reminiscent of the hard, curved finger of a witch.
An hour later, in Stoupa, a coastal town flooded with Northern Europeans, we got a call from Deborah, an Irishwoman who runs a rented house. The blonde, nervous Deborah arrived in a three-wheeled vehicle. She told us that she had lived in Mani for years and had given birth to her children there. In addition to renting real estate, he rents horses, which he has brought from Ireland, and offers riding lessons.
She gladly told us that her own house, in a neighboring village, does not have electricity and water. We followed Deborah to Neochori.
As we approached the village, instead of continuing on the zigzagging road, he chose to climb a steep uphill. Her vehicle made various maneuvers, forcing me to use the parking brake and change gears frequently, with Betty next to me panting in agony. In Neochori, the alleys are not much bigger than a car. Relieved, we arrived at our destination intact.
Neochori, as far as we could see, was clean and quiet. Same as the illustration on the website, the tenant was a stone house, completely renovated, with a modern interior, with many energy saving devices and warm touches.
I asked Deborah about safety. "Do not worry about it," he told me, winking. "There are guards guarding the house. You will see."
After our installation, we gathered on the upper patio, which overlooked the bay and the mountains. We drank tea, enjoying the crowing of roosters, the only sound in the village.
Gradually, we began to hear another sound: Voices. Six women, of different ages, had settled outside our door, speaking loudly. Are we being expelled from the village? Creepy scenes from "Zorbas the Greek" flashed through my mind.
As it turned out, the women gather there every afternoon to clean their vegetables and chat. The biggest, dressed "Greek Widow" was cleaning zucchini flowers.
So these were the guards?
I said good morning to them and then corrected myself, good evening. The women, obviously wanting to connect with us, answered with smiles and a wave of questions. Unfortunately, I had exhausted my knowledge of Greek, so I smiled stupidly and shrugged.
Trails and taverns
Before the trip, I had read P.'s bookatrick Lee Fermor "Mani: Travel to the Southern Peloponnese", a lyrical portrait of the inhabitants of Mani, who, according to the author, survived thanks to their courage, ingenuity and wild independence. They have repelled invaders, managed to make a living from a wild land and maintained their good humor.
The next day, inspired by the fearless Fermor, I woke up at dawn and walked alone along a narrow path, paved with flat stones of strange sizes. Part of the route from Neochori to the neighboring village was grassy, thorny and green. The smell of sage was diffuse and cyclamen sprouted between the rocks.
Higher up, the route passed by olive groves. All of this had a harsh, intense beauty. It took me an hour to walk to Kastania. Near the village square, a woman, standing in front of a stone wall, was picking figs from a tree next to a house that looked abandoned.
In the square, a group of men sat outside two taverns, talking and drinking retsina or coffee. Describing a similar scene in the 1950s, Fermor wrote that the inhabitants he met in the taverns avoided talking about politics and instead talked about shipwrecks, Lord Byron, the fall of Byzantium, the migration of birds or the bad guys. of smoking hashish.
ΟWere the men in the taverns in Kastania the ones talking about hashish and shipwrecks or the ones talking about the possible sinking of the "ship" of the Greek economy?
What the villagers were saying was incomprehensible to me, but in Mani I saw no sign of people being consumed by the economy. Far from the centers of power of Greece, daily life in these villages seemed without haste and concepts.
In each village, almost all available land is used for food production. In each backyard they grew zucchini or melons, vines, fruit trees, olives, vegetables and very often they had chickens.
In the following days, I saw that every village in Mani is unique, but everything has at least two things in common: agricultural autonomy and men, often women, who sit in taverns, talk, drink and laugh. The pace of the days For the five of us, most days had the same pace.
While Betty and my in-laws were still asleep, I got up for my morning outing. Back at home, I was making hot cereals and coffee. At the same time, my bride was walking up to the nearby bakery bringing freshly baked bread.
We sat in the lower yard, in the shade of the vineyard and enjoyed tomatoes, yogurt, cheese and grapes, from the bunches that hung over our heads. Early in the afternoon we drove carefully to the narrow alleys in Neochori and then we reached the beach.
The sandy beaches of Stoupa were full of umbrellas and sun lovers. We preferred Pantazi beach, south of Agios Nikolaos.
It was a pebble beach, without crowds, with a snack bar, public toilets and shady trees. It was the perfect place to read and dive in the warm waters of the bay.
Late in the afternoon we would return home and sit on the upstairs patio, drinking homemade grape juice and watching the sunset in the bay. In the other direction was Taygetos, the steep ridge of Mani, which is sometimes covered by dark clouds.
My wife's brother and his wife were walking late in the afternoon, before dinner. Fearless of the darkness, impassable gorges or exhaustion, they treated this hike as an exercise of courage in the Himalayas. During an intense hike, waiting to find a tavern with hot food and cold drinks, they continued walking upwards and found only springs of cold water on the mountain and a tree full of ripe figs, which they ate.
It was an unforgettable experience, much more important than the memory of a tavern. They had a story that was worth remembering, which is one of the reasons we travel.
Almost every night we went to the seaside villages for dinner. In "Yesterday and Today", a gift shop and restaurant in Stoupa, Voula Kyriakea, the kind owner, told us: "One hundred years ago, a young man came to Kalogria for mining. Nikos Kazantzakis".
"The one who wrote Zorba?" we exclaimed.
Voula nodded in agreement. "He hired a mining engineer, an older man who was buzzing with life. His name? Zorbas!" Voula laughed, enjoying Mani's past as well as her present. There was no doubt why she named her restaurant "Yesterday and Today".
Later, we walked on the pedestrian street of Stoupa, where you could not see any high-rise buildings, except the appropriate number of tourist shops, restaurants, small hotels and apartments for rent. Stoupa, Kalogria and Agios Nikolaos are pleasant and unspoiled places.
A few kilometers north is the beautiful Kardamili, which Fermor calls "Restored Byzantium". These are wonderful vacation spots. Day by day, we were enchanted by Neochori, our "own" village, with its churches, bakery and aroma, olive groves, painted doors and stone houses, whose roofs looked like hawk wings .
Above all, we anxiously awaited the daily gathering outside our door. Every time the neighbors showed up, my bride would announce: "Listen! The House of Women of Neochori has started the meeting!"
Caves and Acropolis
Ο Fermor wrote that the Tower of Dyros, with its stalagmites and stalactites, eerie colors and shapes, are the caves through which the famous descents to the Underworld were made.The".
An hour south of Neochori, the caves, which are crossed by boat, are quite impressive, even without the myths. But inside, dragging your fingers in the cool water, it is tempting to imagine Orpheus trying to lead his beloved Eurydice to the Underworld. Below is the village of Vathia.
Visible from sea level, Vathia looks like a collection of caramel-colored stone towers. Going up the road, you will find dozens of rectangular buildings of three and four floors, which were once family fortresses.
Today it is deserted and empty. Built hundreds of years ago, these buildings were emblematic of the thousand-sung independence of Mani. They provided protection from warring neighbors, invaders, other villages or invading troops, but had no protection against the economic downturn. So today almost all these mini-fortresses, despite their spectacular view, are empty and collapsing.
We left Vathia, drove to the southern tip of the peninsula and then, hours later, took a wrong turn and ended up back in Vathia. But now everything was very different.
The road through the abandoned village was full of cars from one end to the other. A wedding was in progress. A wedding? In a ghost village, known mainly for its vendettas? Strangeness. But there was the bride, the groom, the guests, the priest, the food, the decoration, the balloons, the music, a joyful celebration in abandoned houses and balconies.
It sounded as alive as laughter in misfortune. Like Zorba's dance after the disaster or like villagers drinking retsina in a tavern, while their country's economy may collapse.
ΠWe came to Mani purely by chance, for a family reunion. But as the days went by, very quickly, I realized that it is impossible to spend time there without taking at least a few life lessons. "
The translation of the article was done by travelstyle.grRead the article in ELEFTHERIA http://www.eleftheriaonline.gr/oikonomia/tourismos/item/32932-washington-post-mani