A Step Back In Time
Having adjusted to island life, we had a nice sleep-in this morning, followed by a FaceTime from my beautiful kids (& a text from Tobes - also beautiful - who was already at work) to wish me a happy Mothers’ Day. What a great start to the day!
Rossco ducked out to get us some coffee (discovering ‘Nescafé Instant’ was actually on the menu) and some croissants and since the weather had turned a little cooler, we thought it a perfect opportunity to sink our teeth into some Greek history. For a small island, Mykonos has its fair share of museums & galleries.
Our first stop was “Lena’s House”, a walk-through folk museum set-up and fully furnished, showing what a typical house on Mykonos would have looked like in the 19th Century. It looked very cute from the outside but sadly, that’s as far as we got. The Greeks’ disdain for the morning perhaps responsible for its opening hours of 6:30-9:30pm. We’d have to come back later.
Next on our cultural pub crawl was the Museum of Maritime History. A little sign hung in the window looking like it was showing opening times in Greek. I put my trusty Google Translate camera to work (how clever is that thing?) to decipher when we’d be allowed in. With an opening time of 10:30, it was already 10:25 and there didn’t look to be any signs of life from within. In the mood for some more translating, I typed in: ”what time does the museum open?” and headed for a gentleman across the road who looked like he was a local. As I held out my phone screen, proudly displaying my Greek text, he took one look and said, in the clearest English possible: “ oh, they say 10:30 on the sign but usually don’t turn up till about 11”. It is amazing how many people here speak English. In fact, I don’t think we’ve met a single person that doesn’t. We’ve been practising our Greek thank yous, pleases and hellos but my “efcharistós” usually elicit a bit of a smirk (sometimes even a giggle) from their recipients. At least I’m trying. I should have known back in Year 8 - my last formal language lessons - when my teacher Mrs McDougall struggled to keep a straight face when I uttered “Bon-jaw” or when my “auf Wiedersehen” came out “Avweed-a-zane”. Languages are hard!
With two museums closed so far, we wandered over to the Archaeological Museum without high expectations, so were both surprised and delighted that the door was actually wide open. We paid our 4 euro entry fee (what a bargain) and were given a warm welcome from the family that ran the place - an older couple and their son, sitting together in the corner waiting for customers.
There was so much to see; the collection was huge and the sheer age of some of the pieces they had there was astonishing. We saw statues, pots, paintings, gravestones, ancient maps - the earliest going back to the 7th Century BC. Wow! It was so interesting to see the way they’d taken the fragments of different pots and recreated the pots with the fragments in place. It would be a painstaking job to piece them all together. A jigsaw puzzle extraordinaire. How exciting it would be to be digging in your back garden in Mykonos and to come across something as old and as impressive as this.
Speaking of impressive, the marble statue of Heracles was something to behold - marble-ous in fact - belonging to the 2nd century, he wasn’t unearthed until 1899. Missing a few body parts now, the most obvious one, namely his head, brave Heracles is depicted in the buff and holds a club and a lion skin in his left hand. He obviously worked out. We were also fascinated by the gravestones that depicted intricate carvings of whole families on them. Kind of like an ancient version of those My Family bumper stickers.
Being Sunday, we were hoping to visit an authentic church service somewhere on Mykonos today. With no shortage to choose from - 1200 in fact (one church for every family on the island!) - but information about service times was a bit thin on the ground. More or less giving up on the idea, it just so happened that as we walked around this morning, we stumbled upon a Greek Orthodox service that was already in progress. Loud chanting was emanating from the open windows and people spilled out onto the small verandah. Two huge chandeliers adorned the ceiling, along with multiple hanging pots responsible for the thick aroma of incense pouring out into the street. It was standing room only in the little ornately decorated chapel, in fact no one was sitting down at all. Everyone was gathered around the priest, who stood in the centre of the room, fully decked out in his fancy traditional white and gold robes singing the whole service heartily in Greek. People stood holding tall candles, crossing themselves and joining him in song. A little different to what we were used to that’s for sure.
After a big walk around town, getting up close and personal with the famous windmills and a quick squiz at the Maritime Museum that had finally opened its doors, we grabbed some lunch from the incredible artisan bakery, offering a mouthwatering array of sweet and savoury treats, including scrumptious baclava, spanakopita and ‘sausage pies’ (maybe what you get if you cross a sausage roll with a pie?)
The vast number of churches on Mykonos is rivalled only by the outrageous number of souvenir shops in town. In fact, we have one at the foot of our stairs. You can buy tote bags, snow domes, keyrings, towels, bottle openers, rings, t-shirts…you name it, they’ve got it. Everything is plastered with a big blue eye. Curious as to what this big eye was all about, I asked a couple of the shopkeepers. Apparently it’s common belief all over Greece that this eye, or ‘mati’, traditionally made from coloured glass, will bring good luck and ward off evil. Obviously a very superstitious lot, (which is interesting given their Christian heritage) you see big blue eyes hanging absolutely everywhere.
Our last dinner in Mykonos was at a little seafood restaurant across the road from us, called the Lucky Fish. Just like the restaurant we had been to in Milos, the Lucky Fish specialised in the fish of the day, which they de-boned right at your table. The waiter told us this “spess-ee-all” dish was weather-dependant and it had been our lucky day. Obviously as proud as punch of this signature dish, we felt obliged to order it and when Ross announced he’d like to try it, the Lucky Fish proprietor returned to our table, grinning like a Cheshire Cat; the freshly caught haul of not-so-lucky fish displayed for Ross’ perusal. The red snapper was cooked and returned to our table where, on a pop-up table next to Ross, the waiter expertly removed its skeleton, deftly wielding a fish knife and some George Calumbaris-style tweezers. Seeing this skilful display being played out, the couple at the table next to us, who had settled for prawns, clearly had fish of the day envy and could be heard muttering under their breath: “ I wish we’d had what he’s having”.
Incidentally, I opted for the Beef Tagliata, which sounded to me, a lot like it was pasta. When the waiter asked me how I’d like it cooked, I was a bit confused. Apparently, tagliata refers to the way the steak is cut, very thinly and on an angle. I can report that it was scrumptious indeed.
