Santorini was the first island we visited, just because we had been told that the view is incredible. It is, but there’s not much else to the island. Santorini is very small, but in tourist terms very big - so the island doesn’t seem to have much life of its own. It is all an extended tourist resort. My recommendation for this island would be: stop by if you’re in the area, because the situation of the cliff-top town is astounding, and the view from up there is incredible. But don’t stay here long, if you can avoid it.
Next stop, Naxos. This is more like a real human inhabitation: people going about their business, not just trying to sell me an “experience”. But it’s still outstandingly beautiful, and much bigger than Santorini, so there’s more to take in.
We spent two fantastic days renting first bicycles, then a motor scooter. The interior is mountainous, quite rocky, yet nonetheless fertile. Between the rocks there are always bright green patches of vegetables, olive groves, or wheat. There are marble quarries glittering in the sun, and of course the shiny outcrops of whitewashed houses - the obligatory, cute mountain villages. Almost every person we met was very friendly and kind: strangely, in a place that has quite a bit of tourism, we were given lots of things for free. When you ride through villages on a bike, the oldies sitting around in the main street wave, smile and call out greetings.
On Naxos I noticed that it is not unusual to find multiple chapels built very close together. You might see one little white church of “Saint Yiorgos” on a rock, then a hundred metres up the mountain there will be another, this time “Saint Yiannis”. This led me to a theory on the differences between Greek Christianity and the Western European versions: the thousands of chapels in Greece are not really temples of God, because there wouldn’t be any point in having two temples right near each other, serving the same purpose. More properly, these are temples dedicated to the various saints - which would explain why you might need to have more than one in the village. Of course, churches in Western Europe also take saints’ names, but this is not such an important feature. They are principally dedicated to God, with the saint being more of a peripheral patron.
If the Greeks build temples to worship saints, rather than the one Lord our God, then this is quite significant departure from Western theology, where monotheism is crucial. Perhaps it could even be considered a residue of paganism; as if, when Christianity was imported/imposed in the centuries after Christ, the bearded islanders here only superficially accepted it, keeping alive all the while their traditional constellation of deities.
I also wondered whether village-based societies are inherently more anarchic than urbanised ones. Things in Greece seem so much less controlled than in England. When you stop your vehicle in a village, it is not at all clear where you can park it, and where you cannot. And even if it was clear, you know that there will not be any figure of authority to enforce such rules. Perhaps such a pattern continues all the way from parking to the most important social arrangements? Villages are famous for being conservative - and of course they are small, so they need to stick together. But perhaps this is a different kind of authority, compared to the modern, urbanised phenomenon. In the village, people would worship in small groups, sometimes just a chapel connected to the most prosperous house among a cluster of houses. Religion of this type would still be a vehicle for social control, but not the same type of social control as a large church in town, more firmly connected with the religious establishment.
In the main town on Naxos, I went to an Orthodox mass again. It wasn’t as dark this time, and the various MCs gave a slower and more musical performance, compared with the double-time rapping I heard in Athens. I like this music, it is strange and gravid - but it doesn’t vary much, so I got bored after about half an hour. When I first sat down, I noticed that all the people around me were women. I thought maybe I had sat down in some kind of “women’s section”. But when I looked around, I realised that 95% of the congregation were women. I don’t know why this is - maybe just because women on Greek islands have fewer opportunities than men to get out of the house? Oriana said that this is the case in Spain.
After mass I walked along the sea-front in the fading evening light. I had to leave Naxos early the next morning, and I felt sad about this, like I’d made a new friend but would never see them again.
Post a Comment