Skiathos

Almost precisely half of my life has passed since Lori and I first stepped off the ferry here with Kate in arms thirty four years ago. Skiathos seduced us then with its tranquil sandy beaches, its valleys filled with wind-ruffled gnarly olive trees, and its ancient rhythms. In the mornings the women of the village ambled gabbing down the cobbled lanes of town to the bakery and the butcher and the vegetable seller. In the afternoons the men assembled in the harborfront tavernas for their glasses of tsiporo and their expressions of opinion.

When we hiked we encountered the old boys riding sidesaddle on their donkeys or hard at work in their steep groves pruning the trees or cultivating the arid soil by hand with mattocks. At morning the fishermen returned exhausted from their night at sea and tied their beamy caiques in a colorful row along the paralia’s seawall to sell their catch to the broker who packed the fish in ice for the transit to Volos on the mainland.

Our first landlord on Skiathos, Kieryako Karabalas, gave me a scare one morning when he lurched into view outside the French doors — swarthy, unshaven, and red eyed from a night at sea. Despite his menacing initial impression he was a sweetheart. He taught me the syrtaki at Vanda’s wedding to Yorgo, took me octopus diving, and had us over to dinner the next night when his wife Katarina cooked up the catch. One day we happened upon the funeral procession of an eleven-year-old boy who had been run down by a car, and learned what keening is. Kieryako and three others shouldered the slender coffin through the streets, staggering and weeping under the terrible burden. Four years later when we returned to Skiathos with baby Tucker he caught my sleeve as we ambled the paralia and greeted me with a kiss.

Among the 6,000 residents of Skiathos Kieryako was a power to be reckoned with. His extensive olive holdings were tended immaculately. His large house stood at the top of the town next to the church. His sixty foot caique was by far the largest on the island. Some years later the Greek government noticed that Kieryako and his compatriots had raked the Aegean very nearly clean of fish so offered cash payment to any Greek fisherman who permitted an official to cut his caique in half with a chain saw, the amount of the payment depending on the waterline length. Kieryako converted his payment into a Russian built excursion boat with which he now hauls tourists to the neighboring island of Skopelos and back. He is not the only Skiathiti to have turned from the old ways to pursue tourist euros.

By installing a few villas or apartments or cottages any Adonis or Stathis can reap a summer income far beyond what a year of hard work yields in the orchards or at sea. Skiathos now charms Northern Europeans by the tens of thousands. The runway at the airport has been extended to accommodate chartered jet flights direct from Gatwick and Frankfurt and Zurich. The donkey paths we hiked in 1981 have been bulldozed and paved, but not all of them.

We return here every few years to stay with Geof and Lida Baldry with whom we became fast friends in the months after our first arrival. They came from England and Holland respectively to make their lives here, and raise their daughters here, and welcome their friends here from the world around. With us they share the remaining donkey ways, and the isolated beaches . . . and half a lifetime of memories.

Old Friends