It's All Greek to Me! by John Mole

Author:John Mole [John Mole]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Quercus
Published: 2016-07-10T16:00:00+00:00

Making it up

People who buy houses in nice places often end up running a guest house. Friends and relations who usually keep in touch through photocopied Christmas letters start to phone and write in the spring, just to see how you are and coincidentally to discuss their holiday plans. In our case word had got round about the standard of accommodation, so we had few visitors and those who did come did not stay very long.

Our friends Frank and Marcie from Pittsburgh were not put off, however. They were our first visitors and stayed with us at Kyria Sofia’s fish taverna down in Limanaki. They had just finished converting an old barn and advised us on our new wooden floor.

Barba Mitsos said that in the days before imported chestnut and pine floorboards, the floor would have been made of earth laid on layers of reeds, supported by olive or cypress joists. The neighbours joined in trampling down the earth and poured on buckets of pig’s blood to make it hard as concrete. It sounded jolly, but what about the smell and the flies? A waste of good food, said Elpida. In any case, it was hard enough to lure my craftsmen away from chipboard and plastic tiles onto wooden floorboards. In the interests of fake authenticity we thought old boards would look better than new Swedish pine, but there were none to be found on the island.

One of the most famous temples of Ancient Greece was Eleusis, pronounced Elefsis, about fifteen miles from Athens. It was allegedly the last place that the corn goddess Demeter looked for her daughter Persephone, who had been carried off by Hades alias Pluto alias Lord of the Underworld. Zeus intervened and let her have her daughter back, except for the four months of winter when she had to go back down to be Queen of the Underworld. Every autumn for thousands of years, until about 400 AD, secret ceremonies commemorating the death and rebirth of corn and promising life after death were held at Eleusis. The solemnities began with a procession along the Sacred Way from Athens. So I did my best to instil a sense of awe and timeless mystery in the two eldest lads as we sat in fumes and traffic jams on the way to the tips and salvage yards that now line the Sacred Way.

Frank came along to help load the splintery old boards. If I sat sideways at the wheel they just fitted between the front and rear windows and left a space for the boys to stand in their usual place, leaning up against the back of the front seats. Frank slept off jet lag and last night’s retsina on the back seat under a low planking roof. Dangerously loaded, we laboured in third gear from Athens to Skala Oropos.

Everything was going well until we were halfway down the steep winding road to the port. I was musing on the past lives that had seeped into the wood and wondered what memories would season it in future.

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