Galaxidi

 

Galaxidi is stunningly beautiful.

 

 

 

 

 The town's public life is played out on the waterfront.

 

 

 



 

A narrow bay,





with the houses, tavernas and bars on the left





and a pine forest on the right

which is beautifully lit at night






and small islands and more of the mainland ahead,

so that the bay has the feel of a lake.

The architecture is traditional - most of the houses are listed and many are at least 200 years old

 

and mountains all around

with the odd snow-capped mountain peak in the distance.

 

The boats in the harbour are modest and that adds to the charm of the place.

The majority of the houses are lovingly restored

but not all.

These two geese are the mascots of the seafront. They untied Ken's shoelaces

when he tried to feed them.

A duckhouse

and a feeder for the three ducks. The town used to have 22 ducks but they got eaten by the stray dogs. The extremely friendly owner of the taverna that became our regular, told us that they have a real problem with stray dogs: at the end of every summer, some holiday makers abandon their dogs and the town people don't know what to do with them. Some get adopted but the rest roam the streets as there are no facilities to cope with so many stray dogs. The English saying of 'a dog should be for life, not just for Christmas', came to mind.

The town has three squares

and palm trees abound.

 

Lots of quaint little alleyways

 

 

 



some of which are beautifully lit at night

 

and some with steps.

 

 



 

 

This gorgeous house was on the way to our hotel

 

 

 

 



 

stone is the most common building material

 



 

but some houses favour a combination of stone and plaster

  

 

while others have elaborate plaster decorations

 



This is too cute for words

 

and the plaque by the door reads 'the little house'.

 

 

 



 

Everything is well cared for

 

 



 

including the drains.

 

 

This gorgeous building

 

 

 



has a plaque at the front that reads 'Virgins' Institute'. It must have been a school for girls, and what to make of the idea that all girls must necessarily be virgins?

 

The Karakolithos Memorial

While we were driving to Galaxidi we came upon the Memorial to the victims of the massacre in Karakolithos.

 

One hundred and thirty four men were executed by the German Nazi occupiers of Greece in Karakolithos on the 25th of April, 1944.

 

 

 

The monument is the work of sculptor Aggelika Korovesi.  You can see more of Aggelika Korovesi's work here .



 

 

 

During WWII Greece lost 13% of its population, some of it in battle, but mostly from the famine and from German war crimes. The Germans murdered the population of 89 Greek villages and towns, burned to the ground over 1,700 villages and many of their inhabitants were also executed. The country was reduced to rubble and its archaeological treasures were looted.

The area we were driving through suffered particularly badly from the Nazis, especially in the village of Distomo which is nearby. For over two hours, on June 10, 1944, Waffe-SS troops under the command of SS-Hauptsturmfuhrer Fritz Lautenbach went from door to door and massacred Greek civilians as part of a 'retaliation measure' for a partisan attack upon the unit. A total of 214 men, women and children were killed in Distomo.  According to survivors, SS forces bayoneted babies in their cribs, stabbed pregnant women and beheaded the village priest.

One of the survivors was four year old Argyris Sfountouris. Sfountouris lost both his parents and 30 relatives in the massacre. As a war orphan he was sent by the Red Cross to Switzerland. Even though as an adult he obtained a PhD in Mathematics and Physics, he has dedicated his life to humanitarian  and developmental aid projects. In 1944, fifty years after the massacre,  he organised a conference in Delphi. Under the heading 'Memory - Mourning - Hope' the issues of compensation, of overcoming hate and of reconciliation were discussed.

In 1995, Sfountouris and his three sisters submitted a legal claim for compensation. It was rejected. They then went to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg where the complaint is still pending. Above all, Sfountouris is indignant about the fact that the German government called the massacre of Distomo a 'measure in the context of war', although it is clearly a war crime.

'A Song for Argyris', a documentary film by Stefan Haupt recounts what happened in Distomo.

On the way to Galaxidi

We had a four-day break this week visiting Sterea Ellada, mainland Greece. We stayed in Galaxidi which is absolutely delightful, spent some time in Arachova and visited Delphi, something I had not done since I was a child.

On our way we saw the peaks of Parnassus covered in snow. I had not seen snow in Greece since my late teens when I used to go to Neurokopi which is as far north as you can get.  The purpose of my visits then was to see my first husband who had been conscripted to the army and this was his first post. It was a bleak place in the middle of nowhere and bitterly cold - that was the only time in my life when I got chilblains.

We had excellent weather for our four-day trip: sunny days and temperatures of around 22oC and the snowy peaks afforded an excellent contrast

 

 



 

 

as did all the wildflowers that lined the road.

 



 

 

It's spectacular countryside and the road wound around one mountain peak after another

 

 

 

 

 as we climbed higher and higher.

 

 

 

 

Churches of all sizes provided distraction on our way.

 

 

 

The first sighting of Arachova took our breath away.

 

Perched on the southern slope of Mount Parnassus, at 970m above sea level, above the small river Pleistos, it has become a tourist resort for people who want to go skiing.

 

 

 

 

Ragged, majestic, the views from the top are awesome

 

and each valley 

 

 

 

is followed by another.

 

Our next stop was the village of Delphi. We stood at one of the several plateaux that the village is built on and looked down on the dramatic gorge that runs through Parnassus

 
and which leads down to the sea

 

 it is truly spectacular.






The drive down the mountain was breathtaking






my basic camera cannot do justice to the depth of the view.  The whole area leading down to the sea is a vast elaionas, an olive tree field

 

One of the first things we saw when we reached the sea was this fish farm

 

 

Twin round islands, with a house built right in the centre of one of them






red poppies and other wildflowers lined the road

 

 

 

 

The scene changed completely once we reached the bauxite mine and everything was a deep red

 

 

 

 

a view of the mine once we reached the other side of the bay

 

 

 

 



 

and again, after the next bay

 

Another dramatic change once we reached Galaxidi

but this is the subject of another post.

Natural Histories

Natural Histories at the Gagosian Gallery, 3 Merlin Street, Athens.

When the figurative sculptures of ancient Greece and Rome were unearthed during the Renaissance, they were in a dismembered state, eroded, and had lost nearly all of their original colour. Pliny the Elder, in his wide-ranging treatise Natural History describes the original appearance of these antiquities in detail: brightly painted with pulverized malachite, cinnabar, azurite, arsenic compounds or burnt bone and vine.

Today, in Athens, this exhibition invokes the transformative and fractured lineage of painted sculpture by pairing two artists whose approaches are linked in their bold metamorphoses of wood and cardboard into bronze as well as their common engagement of figurative precedents ranging from antiquity to Expressionism. (from the gallery website).

Mark Grotjahn, Mask (image downloaded from gallery's website)

Cast in bronze from a cardboard assemblage this sculpture recalls the simple cardboard-box constructions of early classroom activity.

 

 

 



 

 

Georg Baselitz, Roman Salute

 

This patinated bronze leg is derived from a carved wooden form - the hacks and scars of the original wood are reproduced in the cast surface of bronze.