Elaine has driven us 13 miles southwest of Kontopouli, past frighteningly steep cliffs. Beautiful paintings of landscapes try to capture the island’s magical light, but none can rival the actual scenery we’ve soaked in along the way. “If you make it to the top of the stairs without it falling off, you can place it in the shrine and make a wish.” I select a stone the size of an iPhone and walking slowly, my knees creaking, I place it in the little blue and white shrine with its red tile roof and big white cross - a miniature of the dozens of churches we have passed in the countryside.Īnother day, on our way to yet another gorgeous beach, we stop in Kontias, a pretty village with a gallery that features the work of Balkan artists. “Take one of the rocks and place it on your head,” she says. I massage a handful onto each achy knee.Ī few steps below, the sea’s edge is covered in flat rocks of various sizes. “Just rub it on whatever hurts,” Elaine instructs. Past the white and blue dollhouse of a shrine, down a long flight of rocky stairs to the beach, we find four rectangular outdoor baths filled with muddied sea water, just above the shoreline. Charalambos, a miracle healer whose name in Greek means “glowing with joy.” People once took their sick donkeys and other farm animals here for its healing clay, known as terra Lemnia. Afterward, Elaine will take me to the nearby tiny shrine of St. Just looking at this place, the remnants of my work tension melt away. The next day at Plaka, a 15-minute drive to the northeastern tip of the island, the beach crowd is even smaller and mellower than the one at Keros, with only about a dozen chairs and thatched roof umbrellas. Stella shrugs and shakes her head no, looking out into beautiful Kotsinas harbor, its waters a steady gradation of a half dozen blues. “Do you miss Miami?” Elaine asks Stella in Greek as she brings us the check - a mere $53. After years of promising to visit Elaine’s family homestead on Lemnos - a small, peach-colored stone house where her father lived until leaving for America in his teens - I’ve finally arrived, worn out and in need of rest on the island’s peaceful shores. Now divorced, she’s visiting with her grown daughter and infant grandson. As a child, she’d come to Kontopouli with her parents, then returned every summer with her own children. Elaine was born in Greece but raised in New York, where we met. My friend Elaine has invited me to stay with her at her home on the northeast side of the island in the village of Kontopouli, just 10 minutes from where the mythical Hephaestus set up his first forge at the foot of Mount Mosychlos. But he survived - injured and with his telltale limp - and would go on to become the god of fire, a craftsman and blacksmith responsible for Achilles’ armor and Hermes’ winged helmet. In one telling of Greek mythology, Hera tossed her ugly, unwanted son Hephaestus from the top of Mount Olympus to Lemnos island. It is the anti-Mykonos, the real deal, where the only tourists are those few surfers camping at Keros or the vacationing descendants of Greeks who emigrated from here long ago to settle in the United States. I’m here to spend a week exploring this undiscovered bright spot, a place that’s rough around the edges, but with hidden luxury rentals and incredible restaurants. Since I’ve come to your country, I know that light is holy: Greece is a holy land to me.” “If you have light, such as you have here,” he wrote, “all ugliness is obliterated. Miller fell deeply in love with Greece and wrote about it in The Colossus of Maroussi. It is nearly as deserted and peaceful as when American author Henry Miller first came to the Aegean and Ionian islands back in the 1930s. Lemnos (Limnos to the Greeks) is what Greece once was before throngs of tourists invaded, and some were surprised by $500 bills for cocktails and snacks. (From March to May, temperatures range from the 50s to 70s.) And the island of Lemnos - though it feels just as hot during my visit - seems like the perfect place for it. After two months of teaching summer school in humid New York City in record high temperatures, I am here to chill. I stop on the mazelike streets of the next town over, Kalliopi, named for the Greek goddess and muse of poetry, where kite surfers from around the world gather each summer to fly across the turquoise waters at the edge of the white and sandy Keros beach nearby.īut I’m not here for kite surfing. While it’s still cool out, I head in that direction, southwest on a dusty, treeless, and empty road. I pause to look as the sea beckons, much brighter now, from 2 miles away.
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