71. Alyki and the Cloisters

My friend Roswitha from Graz to whom I owe choosing Paros for my winter quarters introduced me to another lady who has been living in Paros for many years. She is originally from Karlsruhe, Germany, but Paros is the center of her live. I didn’t really get to know her in 2014 but this time now we have built up a nice contact. She has lived in different location on Paros but her favorite place where she lives now is Alyki, a fishing village in the south of Paros near the regional airport.

Going to Aliki from Marmara by bus is quite a way but my bonus is that I can stay in a flat owned by Helena which is empty at the moment. She rents it out in summer but stays presently at the house of a Greek friend living in Athens at the moment which apparently is right on the beach in a very beautiful location. That means I can stay overnight when I visit Helena and the distance is no problem. It is a nice flat [part of a house] in a quiet area with a big terrace facing south.

The area is popular with a number of other expats living on the island and it is a custom that one of them, a guy from Ireland, is giving a pre Xmas concert every year for his friends at a nice restaurant called Aqua Marine. Being invited by Helena I am delighted to participate. Hoping to hear something Irish I am a little disappointed because the program consist of old pop songs but it is fun anyway and I meet some very nice people. Helena has reserved a table for us and I meet her friend Barbara, a lady from Switzerland and a Polish couple Marek and Margarita. The lady in the middle is Helena, a spiritual healer and retired teacher of Hawaiian dance [among other talents].

Alyki doesn’t strike me as old place, like my villages, but it does have a number of nice places as you can see. Like this picture book Beach Café at the harbor front.

Lovely garden! Plenty of palm trees looking rather healthy. [In other places on Paros there are some problems with bugs killing palm trees. Possibly due to a lack of water during winter.] Or what about this restaurant advertises the Alps?

Towards the end of my stay I get to know the place where Helena lives right now. It takes about an hour’s walk along a very beautiful rocky coastline, interspersed with some nice sandy beaches.

The ground is rocky and arid but there is still enough soil and moisture for this very beautiful plant life.

Helena is flying a turquoise flag for me to let me know that I have arrived at the right place. It is very beautiful. The house is spacious. It was built as a summer House some 50 years ago and has since been renovated to make it fit for occupation during the winter month.

Aside from being fed a lovely vegetarian lunch I spend a nice time just watching the view and the changing of the light while Helena took her evening swim at the beach in front of the house. What a place. Even Helena’s dog Ronja shows full contentment.

Another discovery of the hidden highlights of Paros I owe to Christine and her friend Alex. It is a church with a mountain spring and a big cloister high up in a mountain valley.

Christine [on the right] was my neighbor when I lived up north in 2014. She lives on an off on the island in the house of her deceased mother who fell in love with Paros and with a Greek some forty years ago. The other halve of the year she lives in Giessen, Germany. Alex [on the left] is from Serbia. She has been living on Paros for a very long time, speaks Greek fluently and is the partner of John. John is the nice guy from England, who fixed an old bicycle and loaned it to me.

It is quite obvious: Monks and the work and often hard labor they did during the centuries are an important pillar of our culture [agri- and otherwise]. And they did discover the perfect places to live which is more or less equivalent to the presence of water and a fact of remoteness to make it secure in times of war and strife. Down in the little gorge there is still some water but the main spring is dry, a reason why the place is no longer permanently inhabited.

The second place is Aghios Georgios a big monastery and church way up a steep dirt road. It is nice to be a friend of Christine because she owns an old car. What’s even nicer is the fact that there is no road too steep or too rough that she wouldn’t attempt to drive it.

I don’t know the names or the varieties of the trees but I am sure that some of them exist only in this place. Here too, there are no more monks but there is a caretaker which shows one around during opening hours and although the buildings are not in a very good shape, the land is still farmed and taken care of.

There is a whole bunch of peacocks, there are pigs in an open stye below the monastery and there is a nice watch dog. Alex is a member of a “society for the care and protection of animals” which is taking care of stray cats [sterilizing them so they don’t get rampant] and especially of maltreated dogs. Cats are mostly treated well by the people of Paros but dogs are not treated well. I wonder, if there is some mythological reason.

The pictures of these old buildings will be the last for a while. Being built more or less at the same time long ago they remind me of the old house in Marmara where I have been living now for 7 month. It is also a reminder to come back one day to Paros. The contents of the next Blog Post are still open. But I am pretty sure there will be more. So stay in touch!