Rocks in the Sea

No few Greek words have persisted across the millennia and centuries into modern English, the names for numbers among them.  Tripod, pentagon, octopus, decade — these need no explanation.  We also inherit “dilemma” from the Greek word for two — dio — and Madeleine L’Engle poached the Greek word for four to designate time travel in the fourth dimension — tesseract — in her classic novel, A Wrinkle in Time.

Ten, eleven, twelve.  Deca, endeca, dodeca.  A rummage through google and Wikipedia disclosed no English derivative from dodeca.  Fine with me.  That leaves the Dodecanese Islands of the southern Aegean as the sole heirs of twelveness.  Dodeca.  The word pleases the ear.  Dodecanese.  The islands delight the eye.

Weirdly enough, there aren’t twelve of them.  More like fifteen if you count the populated ones, or a zillion if you count the ones inhabited solely by goats plus all the bald ones plus the ones big enough to split your hull but otherwise worthless . . . except to the eye.  There are several explanations for the designation, Dodecanese, all boring and complicated so never mind.

Together they constitute a splatter of rocky islands hugging, and coveted by, Turkey, as if some spiteful Olympian hurled them down there under Turkey’s nose as a taunt.  Kos.  Kalimnos.  Leros.  Patmos.  Arkoi.  We anchored at these and gazed with longing at others. 

Inhabitants of the Dodecanese Islands build their homes with walled flat roofs to catch what little rain happens to fall, so the villages resemble clusters of sugar cubes each with a cistern for a basement.  Goats forage and clank on boulder-pastures more nearly vertical than horizontal but manage to nibble enough to clamber around with fat bellies.  In the odd lofty valley, a little farm irrigated by God knows what.  Perhaps the farmer’s tears.  As the sun crawls across the sky the ridges and peaks throw vivid shadows over the water-starved landscapes.  On the most remote promontories and distant ledges and rugged mountaintops, more white cubes, these with barrel vaulted or tiled roofs, and crosses.  Chapels.  Churches.  Monasteries.  The Greek Orthodox Church seems to favor austerity.  For color you look to the sea.  

Homer got it right.  Wine dark when clouded and wind-ruffled.  Blindingly glary should you glance down sun.  Bluer than Helen’s eyes in the sandy shallows of bays and coves.  Fanis clamped on mask and snorkel to prowl the rocky shallows flanking the beach of a lifetime — with a rustic taverna parked under the pines — and returned with a sack of urchins.  In another bay the following day he yanked two octopuses from their rocky lairs and handed them up to me in the zodiac for safekeeping.  Yike!  Whoa!  Ink everywhere.  Thrashing of unbelievable eloquence.  An escape attempt over the rim of the bucket.  We fished for calamari that night and later lunched on the bounty of the sea.

Fishermen in their gaudy caiques still plow these sparkling waters to net up what remains of that bounty, but the big commercial trawlers have depleted the schools so the economy of the Greek islands these days relies on a different catch — tourist euros.  During the summer season those euros accumulate sufficient to sustain things during the remainder of the year — sometimes rain lashed, often wind blasted, always free of people like us.  

We are more than happy to add our drops to the annual tsunami of tourist cash.  If that’s what sustains this sun splashed corner of the world, with its sound track of bouzouki music and tumblers of tsiporo at a beach taverna and servings of octopus with a side of fried feta cheese, fine with us.

Ahhh.

Greece.