“I would stare out the window at these telephone wires and think, how civilisation had caught up with me and I wasn’t going to be able to escape after all. I wasn’t going to be able to live this eleventh-century life that I had thought I had found for myself.” – Leonard Cohen
Alonissos was tranquil, peaceful and perfect and at this precise time might possibly have been the most wonderful place on earth and we looked forward to our three days of perfection because apart from concrete, the internet and air conditioning this place probably hasn’t changed a great deal in a thousand years.
Not even in a thousand years because Alonissos is famous for nothing at all, no one famous was ever born here, it has no dramatic history, just a heritage of fishing, farming and everyday life. Life is slow and simple. The way that it has always been and long may it continue.
In the village we passed by a charming collection of houses, some old, some new and most with dazzling blue doors. Some of the older houses had dangerous staircases, some broken off like the dried stems of an ageing geranium and leading nowhere only to restart again at another level leading to precarious balconies that I wouldn’t trust even before a Mythos or two and it seemed to be sensible to pass by quickly lest they fall and transform themselves into a pile of dusty debris at that very moment.
The crooked alleys took us around in circles past kittens playing in a garden and stone walls that looked as though they had been carelessly assembled but had a most pleasing appearance and everywhere effervescent red geraniums boiling away in ad-hoc containers of various sizes and descriptions.
We had taken the mid morning ferry from Skiathos, about a two hour sea journey on a traditional old style boat, we sat on he top deck and drank Mythos and changed seats often to avoid the diesel fumes as the boat changed direction of travel as it negotiated the islands.
I like these old ferries where it is possible to wander around the decks from stern to bow and look out over the water challenge. At the front the gentle ‘sha, sha, sha’ as the boat carved a steady passage like a graceful dolphin leaping through the Aegean Sea and at the back a steady churn of frantic water disturbed by the urgent rudder turning the sea into the colours of the Greek flag.
The blue and white flag of Greece is called ‘Galanolefci’, which simply means ‘blue and white’. Originally it was blue with a white diagonal cross but the cross has now been moved to the upper left corner, and is symbolic of the Christian faith.
Being a seafaring nation, the blue of the flag represents the colour of the sea. White is the colour of freedom, which is something that is very important to the Greeks after years of foreign domination. The nine stripes of the flag each symbolise a syllable in the Greek motto of freedom: E-LEY-THE-RI-A-I-THA-NA-TOS, which translates literally into ‘Freedom or Death’.
In terms of size of the estimated two and hundred and thirty inhabited Greek Islands, Alononnis comes in at number forty, much higher than neighboring holiday island Skiathos but the beauty of it is that hardly anyone goes there. Alonissos barely gets a mention in any travel guides. US travel writer Rick Steves passes it by on his inevitable way to Santorini and Mykonos (very predictable), I find no mention of it by Rick Stein, Joanna Lumley of Michael Palin but worst of all is the total dismissal of it by Lawrence Durrell who documents almost all of the islands except this one.
He dismisses it on the absurd basis that of the Sporades Islands unlike Skiathos, Skopelos and Skyros it doesn’t begin with the letters sk, he then puts the boot in firmly by saying “Alonissos is an an island without adding anything at all in the way of grace or history”. Much in the same way of Bill Bryson and Grimsby I am left wondering if he ever indeed visited the place.
So we took the mid morning ferry out of Skiathos along with I estimate about two hundred or so fellow passengers and we stopped first at Skopelos, the Mamma Mia Island, where about one hundred and eighty got off. The few of us that remained continued on to Alonnisos and I was glad about that.
These are my kind of Greek islands, they have no airport but best of all they have no docking arrangements for the ugly cruise liners.
We watched the boat depart, we were now abandoned in a Greek idyll and then set about finding our accommodation.
Have Bag, Will Travel 