"All of Greece is absorbing and rewarding. There is hardly a rock or stream without a battle or myth or miracle or a peasant anecdote or a superstition; and talk and incident, nearly all of it odd or memorable, thicken round the traveller's path at every step." - Patrick Leigh Fermor
...hello, welcome to grecofilia...
Some of us wander into Greece for fun and relaxation and when our time is done we return to our routines until the next time. But there are those of us who are changed forever by its light, its generosity, its tenderness, its learning, its people and the warmth of their traditional hospitality.
My first visit to Greece came at a time when I needed some reassurance after a particularly depressing period in my life, a time when everything I valued seemed worthless. I felt stifled with city living and confused. I was lost. I needed to stand back, to find some perspective, to get away from that environment and find myself again. It was just at that moment a friend suggested I join him and some friends for two weeks in Greece and it seemed the perfect solution.
During the flight, I began to have second thoughts. My friends were overdoing the, 'let's make sure he has a good time' - and two weeks of that would drive me nuts. But from the moment we began our dawn descent over the ancient city of Athens and my eyes settled on the Parthenon, there they stayed, fixed on the centre of the centres of all the centres in the world and it was at that precise moment I realised I was home amongst the unpredictable magic and mayhem that would accompany every future visit to Greece.
It was during that first visit that I had my sparkling moment.
One day we sat down to lunch in the garden of a small estiatorio and because our table felt a little cramped with all the excitement and the chatter and the jokes, I decided to move to another a little to one side. Later, whilst waiting for the others to finish, I happened to lean back on my chair and look up through the tall, positive poplars at the open blue sky and slowly I became aware of something happening to me. As I watched the sun reappear from behind the clouds I remember smiling and gradually becoming aware of a gentle reassurance and a meditative stillness and a glee that just grew and grew and grew. Then a quiet confidence spread through me, a bright clarity, and I knew I was part of it all.
We Grecophiles try other destinations and other ports of call and without a doubt they charm and frighten us in turn, they each have their own distinctive flavours, but it is only when walking in Greece that we truly find ourselves - and this awareness, I believe, is grecofilia...
...the first step on our journey...
Tony Brown, St.Keverne, Cornwall.
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