Naples

A young man pulls up on a scooter – a pea green Vespa. He wears a polished metal bike helmet, a violet scarf, dark jeans and a tight green jersey. He whistles as he gets off the bike. At the bottom of the steps we are descending, a beagle, tied to the rail, barks and strains, tongue lolling, grinning, panting. The man unties the dog and together they get on the scooter, the beagle obedient in the footwell, tail wagging, the man's scarf whipping as he dodges traffic up the road and out of sight.


                                                       ***


Piazza Garibaldi, as we return in the evening from Pompeii: a mess of construction, taxis, buses, cars parked next to, behind and at angles to each other, pedestrians with suitcases, north African men hawking 'iPhones' and sunglasses, and above the Piazza, in the violet sky, several flocks of small black birds, merging and separating, turning and quivering like sequins.


                                                        ***


A fresh, damp, salty smell from the fish stalls. Wide low-sided white and blue plastic containers half full of water holding thin silver sardines, long flat smudge-skinned frost fish, clams the size of knucklebones, and octopuses, their mottled grey and violet hoods pulsating. The fishmongers hose refuse away over the cobbles.


                                                        ***


Along the narrow streets the view on either side gives into rooms with beds, tables, televisions, mothers fathers, sons and daughters all together, and washing drying on racks. In one room a girl is laying the table: her brother sits and watches her from a corner, his hands folded in his lap, his armchair a dusty violet bruise in the dim.


                                                        

Pompeii

I wasn't sure what to expect from Pompeii – slightly jaded from Knossos, I was, of course, keen to make the journey and have a look, but I was prepared for another reconstructed curiosity, interesting but slightly kitsch. 


Pompeii is far from kitsch.


The second storeys of most of the houses are gone, but at street level, almost everything is preserved. Along the main streets, there are snack bars and bakeries – I could imagine the ancient equivalent of souvenir shops dotted between them. The villas are recognisably pleasure houses of the wealthy – the little pools, the rooms still decorated with luxurious, charming, sometimes naughty paintings. There are three theatres. The largest could seat 12,000 – half the town – and the smallest perhaps 100, a suitable space for literary readings or recitals.

Street Scene

Fresco, Villa of the Mysteries

Snack bar counter

The city from below

Pompeii's excavators found impression after impression in the ash, where bodies of the townspeople had lain and decayed. The ash has been removed – but the empty shapes of the population remain, caught in plaster. As we passed the first of the plaster casts of the bodies, a guide said to his tour group, in accented English, 'they were in different positions, but all with their hands over their mouths'.


The ruins of Pompeii are astonishing and ghostly. It is a town that made a bargain with history – death and destruction in the world that it knew, but presence, real and human and touching, out into the ages.


                                                              ***


The next day, after visiting the site itself, I spent several hours at the Naples Archeological Museum.


I arrived in the afternoon, just before two, and wandered up to the first floor to look at the paintings and mosaics taken from Pompeii. There was a board pulled across that section of the museum, and a man in a uniform was just switching out the lights. He looked at me and then pointed at a sign – 'closed at 2pm'. The museum is open until seven, and so I had left it til last on my cultural tour of Naples, as the churches I also wanted to visit tended to close earlier. Behind the board blocking my way I could make out the dim shapes of the frescoes.


For the first time on this trip I felt truly frustrated. So damn close. Not only did I really want to 'colour in' my mental images of Pompeii, but this is also the place where the famous mosaic of Alexander and Darius is kept, which, (as those of you who know the story of 'Project Alexander' will understand), I had a peculiar desire to see.


I looked sadly at my museum brochure (only in Italian). Then I looked again at the pages from my guidebook. Then I smiled. The fresco section was, for unknown reasons, closed for the afternoon, but the mosaics were on the next floor down, and open.


Of all the art and artifacts I have seen on this trip, the Pompeii mosaics are closest to my heart. It is partly their beauty, but also I think, the way in which they blend the visible craft of their making – the thousands of tiny stones pieces, so carefully placed – with the charm and lightness. And then there's the fact that they deal in food, sweet animals, myths and sex – all things I am strongly in favour of (No, not all at the same time. Calm down).

History

It's one thing to visit a city like Dubrovnik, and admire the walls and cannons put up for defence from outsiders in the middle ages. It is another to see the bullet holes, spattered here and there on the stone street signs, and to look up at the steep hills behind the city and imagine them populated with narrow-eyed snipers.


We have mostly made this a tour of old cities, staying in the 'old towns' of Athens, Hania, Bologna, Zadar, Dubronik and Naples. We have had one real excursion into 'nature' – the Samaria Gorge – and a 'rural' experience in Santorini, but in the main, we are here to experience a depth and continuity of settled, solid 'civilization' that is not bodied forth in any part of New Zealand's very different history and geography.


But. In some senses, New Zealand, at least in the last 100 years, is more civilised than almost any part of Europe.


The old town of Dubrovnik is on a jutting peninsula: sea on three sides, and the curve behind an amphitheater of stark, steep hills.


In modern warfare, a shooting gallery.


Most of the old town is unmarked – there are few signs that less 1 8 years ago, the town was under siege. We saw one roofless house that may have been a war casualty, and few buildings on street corners with a spray of bullet holes up the walls.


Mostly the city and the country have put themselves back together after the lacuna of communism and civil war, rejoining (for better, and no doubt in some parts, for worse), the mainstream of world history.


In Crete we were near to Maleme, and the graves of many New Zealand and European
soldiers.


On the train from Rome to Naples, we traversed land that looks fruitful, tamed, obedient, a castle or ruined villa in the distance adding shape and mastery, like Stevens' jar in Tennessee.


But the land does not just have layers of peasant work and the ruins and still standing palaces and pleasure homes of kings and princes: it also has the discreet scars of more recent trauma, fought and felt with a depth and continuity that, in a distant island country (albeit with our own divisions and injustices), is hard to credit.

Important life lessons

1. Travel with a pair of small sockettes in your handbag, in order to be constantly prepared for trying on fancy shoes (wisdom of OT).


2. More small cute men should wear small cute hats.

3. If you see Veuve Cliquot on special - buy it (thanks Pete)

Second Palace on the Right

Dubrovnik and Naples are not that far apart as the crow flies - but you can really make it quite a long journey if timetables and connections take you by bus to Split (5 hours), then by ferry to Ancona (10 hours, overnight), then by train through Rome to Naples (5 hours). With various waits in between. But we have reached a state where we are happy on the move, or even in the suspension of train station cafes and waiting rooms. 


In Ancona we missed a train to Rome by 3 minutes - and spent three hours drinking good Italian train station coffee, reading our books and watching the energetic life of the train station carry on around us. Even though we don't love Ancona (for example, we are irritated by its bizarre plan of having the place where you buy tickets for the ferry a 10 minute bus ride away from the ferry terminal), we were very pleased to be back in Italy.


Croatia is worth visiting - Dubrovnik is just stunning - but, well, Italy - the food and coffee is so good, the cities are so alive with people using them, yelling at each other, drinking in the Piazza, the men are so cheerful and helpful (although we have noticed that we have almost no interactions with Italian women - it might not be quite so fun if you live here...), the place is just so damn exciting and relaxing, grubby and elegant, bustling and ancient - what's not to love?


Last night we trundled a long way through Naples: out of the train station, across the Piazza Garibaldi, through a back street or two, down the Corso Umberto, up the Corso Duomo, down several more side streets and finally into our objective, the Piazza San Dominico Maggiore. 
It got dark as we trundled through the streets, and the little shops with bundles of long pasta hanging above their doors, jars of preserves stacked in the windows and proprietors smoking in the doorways glowed among the grey walls. 


We had been on the road for 36 hours. We were pleased to reach the Piazza. We figured we were now very close to our hotel, and showers, and then dinner. 


Some twenty minutes later we had circumnavigated the Piazza several times and asked directions twice, once to an uncomprehending stare, and once to vigorous arm waving in a direction that didn't yield anything that looked like a hotel.


Finally we asked again and were told "up there, second palace on the right". The hotel is in a palace. The palace forms two sides of a small piazza. The entrance to the piazza is guarded by a pair of VERY LARGE iron doors. Like VERY LARGE. Like PALACE large. The door for human beings to get in through these portals is very small in comparison. The sign for the hotel is also very small - subtle, as OT said.


A kindly Italian man standing outside took pity on us and unlocked the human-sized door. We found the hotel (with a lift, for which we were grateful at this point), followed the receptionist through a reception area, down a very narrow hallway, around a corner and into AN ENORMOUS ROOM FIT FOR A PAIR OF PRINCESSES. Vaulted ceiling miles above our heads, a vast red persian rug spreading out like the sea reflecting a sunset, a red, spongey, high-backed, be-cushioned sofa that makes me feel like a pasha, and elegant, curved wooden furniture.


The shower leaks and the sound-proofing is not great (we are in the bottom of the mid-range after all), but CRIPES. Second palace on the right. 

Wheelie suitcase

As mentioned in previous posts, OT and I have very large wheelie suitcases with us on this trip. To be quite accurate, OT's is an orange wheelie suitcase, mine a gray wheelie duffle bag, with back straps.

Yes, if I were packing again for this trip, I might bring slightly less with me.* No, I don't regret the size, capacity and range of my bag – it contains a wide range of minor comforts and conveniences, a number of flexible outfits that do not approach, in any regard, to the cargo pants, ill-fitting tank-top and bum-bag (with optional poncho) that many of my lighter packing fellow tourists are forced to exhibit themselves in.

Trundling wheelie suitcase behind me along the docks of Split today, I wondered to OT whether I am wheelie suitcase's servant, or he is mine?

In my favour, he carries all my items for me from place to place, and always travels a respectful step or two behind me in public. I am also responsible for his upkeep (gaffer tape), and good order (regular re-foldings).

In his favour, I am the beast of burden that carries him up stairs (with a Pooh-bear like 'thump, thump, thump'). He is also willful, in a way that a truly servile being might be too anxious to perpetrate – his favorite trick is the turtle-roll, usually executed as we drop over a curb, in which he “loses” his balance and flips over, exposing his webbed underside. I have been interpreting this as defiance, but it has just occurred to me that perhaps he wants a tummy pat?

OT's suitcase, a slimmer, broader and altogether more stable creature, does not have this little routine up its sleeve. It does however, have a well-honed ability to temporarily digest items, only regurgitating them after a thorough shakedown. It would be unfair to blame the creature overly if it was a little wobbly on its wheels – the one item that seems to have been a permanent sacrifice is half our emergency supplies – a fifth of Johnnie Walker Black Label. (Don't judge us, Singapore Airport has a restricted choice of strong drink in small bottles. What was I supposed to do, buy Midori?) 

 

* My suitcase was overweight at Wellington Airport. I transferred two guide books to my carry on and gave my husband one pair of brown and fawn striped socks to take home. That fixed it.

The physical body

OT and I, heathens both, were each raised by lapsed Catholic mothers, with Grandmothers who took us to Mass. For me, midnight Mass on the night of Easter Saturday – Christ has risen again, the annually renewed Easter candle is lit, we will shake hands with our neighbours and wish one and other the peace of Christ, then walk from the small Church holding tapers, out into the sanctified Masterton night.

These early experiences of ritual (it would be wrong to call them experiences of religion, as the real possibility of any of it relating to anything beyond itself never occurred to me) established a sense (no doubt facile and undeserved) of understanding and belonging in the high church. It is natural, on entering a Catholic or Orthodox Church, to pay over a small coin, take a beeswax candle, light it from those already burning and place it upright in the sandy dish.

These last few days I have been lighting candles for Grandpa Jim – an action that would no doubt cause dismay, or at best incomprehension, in his plain Protestant soul. However. As I always felt eating the apple and honey for a sweet life on Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year), we can all use each and every blessing we can lay our hands on.

Jim Tocher, my husband's grandfather, died at 5:30am on October 22, 2009. He left a large and loving family.

Death, even, as in this case, where expected and with elements of a merciful release, is a shock and a sorrow to those left. The body changes, as the breath leaves it: from beloved object to be cherished, touched, cared for, enjoyed, sought out, to the cooling macabre.

When my own Grandma died, her face, wracked and drawn by long illness, was plumped and reshaped by the undertaker. She looked, as my auntie said, “like a nice little old lady” - but some other little dear, not herself. At the funeral home I kissed her polished cheek. The chill alien sensation hung on my lips for hours.

This strange modern world we live in provides so many opportunities for us to physically separate ourselves from those we love. New Zealand parents with children in London or Sydney (or children with parents who abandon them!), partners on business trips or long holidays, siblings who move away – we miss them, and no amount of skyping, writing, phoning makes up for the distance. This is what George Monbiot tries to face up to when he writes about 'love miles' – the recognition that indefinite physical separation may be unsupportable, that traveling to place your body across the table from family and friends, to wipe pumpkin from your granddaughter's chin or smell the familiar mix of perfume and human that means 'dear friend' may be, might be, in a category of its own. Can any of it be justified? – perhaps not, but love miles tries to divide what is essential from what is not. It is a very human excuse.

The love of the physical body takes another form in the tradition of reliquaries.

Reliquary:

A receptacle, such as a coffer or shrine, for keeping or displaying sacred relics.

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[French reliquaire, from Old French, from relique, relic, from Late Latin reliquiae, sacred relics; see relic.]

1. Something that has survived the passage of time, especially an object or custom whose original culture has disappeared: "Corporal punishment was a relic of barbarism" (Cyril Connolly).

2. Something cherished for its age or historic interest.

3. An object kept for its association with the past; a memento.

4. An object of religious veneration, especially a piece of the body or a personal item of a saint.

5. or relics A corpse; remains.

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[Middle English relik, object of religious veneration, from Old French relique, from Late Latin reliquiae,sacred relics, from Latin, remains, from reliquus, remaining, from relinquere, relqu-, to leave behind; see relinquish.]

With the Catholic Church's crazy beautiful literalism, there in that golden arm, a single finger pointing upwards, is the femur of St Catherine, in this boxed monstrance a shred of skin from John the Baptist is visible, this silver shoe holds, hidden but strongly present, St Lucy's foot.

The Museum of Religious Art in Zadar was room after room of these relics. The Church of San Petronio in Bologna too, had a chapel on one side devoted to reliquaries. These scraps of flesh and bone are the ultimate profanity – an abandoned body – made sacred, the object of veneration and pilgrimage. The pilgrims' journeys to this place, to kiss this gold, inside which is this particular bone, another type of love mile, a no more or less irrational belief.

Relinquish:
 1. To retire from; give up or abandon.

2. To put aside or desist from (something practiced, professed, or intended).

3. To let go; surrender.

4. To cease holding physically; release: relinquish a grip.

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[Middle English relinquisshen, from Old French relinquir, relinquiss-, from Latin relinquere: re-, re- + linquere, to leave; see leik^w- in Indo-European roots.]

 
I.M. Jim Tocher. Safe travels.

Inside, Outside

When I was a gel at Kelburn Normal School, playtime and lunch time were nominated by the deputy principal as "inside" (rainy), "outside" (fine) or "inside/outside" (overcast, or fine but cold) days. There was a hand-lettered cardboard sign at the end of each corridor which she flipped to show the rule for the day.


Being the book-obsessed sloth that I have (almost) always been, I preferred "inside" or "inside/outside" days.


As a grown-up (ish), I have discovered that inside/outside is one of my favorite spaces: a covered porch (hello 608 Ronald Street and 82 Tararua Drive), a chair, rain or beating sun just beyond the lintel, a book, a cup of tea or glass of wine. To be outside in the fresh air, but defended by human structures from the elements. To be exhilarated by the smell and rush of a downpour without getting wet. To look up from the page and see the brimming, blinding light on the garden from the luxury of deep shade.


Today we visited the cloister of the Franciscan monastery in Dubrovnik, and the Rector's palace, which has an internal courtyard, open to the sky and surrounded with colonnaded balconies on two levels. It is easy to imagine the pleasure of his daughter or wife, passing from room to room along the balcony, lifted above the business below and free to step forward and view it, or retreat to the privacy of the recessed niches.   


The palace was a place of business and activity; cloisters were designed for contemplation. They are places of thought, where, in all weathers, the monks could pace out the square, the garden always in view, their slow walk civilised by the measured bands of light and shadow shaped by the evenly-spaced columns.


In the garden of Dubrovnik's monastery, there are grapefruit and pomegranate trees, the pomegranates, at this season, overripe, blown and spilling seed, the grapefruit just turning yellow. The capitals of the columns are all different, dogs and flowers, faces and scrolls carved into the white stone. 


It is a beautiful place, and echoed in me memories of the cloister at Arles – another old and quiet place, an inside/outside, an elegant and understated explication of the relation of the constructed and the natural, movement and thought, the relation of human to god.

Dubronik - wild weather and beauty

Fort Revelin

City Walls

Map of Dubrovnik old town

Key

Street Scene

Ah ha, Zadar

Zadar - a certain cool country reserve, a long but comfy overnight ferry trip, Roman ruins including the ´shame post´, reliquaries, nuns, delicious fish and the SEA ORGAN. Overall, a little haunting.

Shopping

Yesterday OT and I arrived in Ancona, North Italy, planning to take a ferry out that night to Zadar.


Yes the ferries go to Zadar from Ancona. No they don't run on Sunday. Ancona, while pretty from the sea, is a fairly uninspiring port town.


'Let's get on a train,' said OT. 'We'll go to Florence.'


An excellent plan – but the next train was leaving for Bologna. 'Bologna,' we cried, consulting our guide books... 'the culinary capital of Italy...'. We got on the train.


Bologna is not a tourist mecca – it doesn't have the artistic reputation and glorious architecture of Florence or Venice, the dirty edge of Naples, the high-fashion glam of Milan, the southern sensuality of Sicily, and it's not Rome. But. We are charmed.


The centre of town leads out from Piazza Maggiore. The buildings are warm red, the streets lined on either side with portico'd walkways. We arrived on Sunday evening, around 5:30. In the dusk, families, groups of young men, couples holding hands were meandering up and down Via Dell' Independenza. The passeggiata – the Italian tradition of taking a walk before dinner - happening right before our barbarian colonial eyes.


We found a central hotel with large clean rooms, viewed the famous and slightly lewd Neptune Fountain, ate (of which more in a subsequent post, no doubt), and noted the wide and enticing variety of shops selling gloriously, stupidly, beautiful items of physical covering and adornment.


Today was devoted to shopping.


[Note: if you are feeling at all puritan, or would prefer to think of me as a serious-minded person, stop reading now. Perhaps a cold shower would be nice instead?]


Shopping, to be perfectly pleasurable, requires a certain set of conditions, enough time and the right mindset. 


The correct external conditions:


A match between your budget and your habitat. 
It is no fun shopping when either:
* even if you see the one most desireable item of the day, it will cost so much that your      card will be declined, or your financial stability for the next six months will be seriously endangered; or
* everything is 'cheap' (whatever your standard of cheap is). This just encourages spur of the moment, less than perfect purchasing. And there is little challenge, and therefore little triumph in buying an average item at an average price. A truly memorable shopping experience stretches and reshapes your budget and your conception of yourself.


Cool, overcast weather.
Too much heat and sun lead to dehydration, frustration and sunburn. You do not want to be constantly flipping your sunglasses up to peer more closely into a window, or having your judgement of items of clothing and their effect on you marred by slightly sweaty hair that's been flattened by a sun hat.


Shops with personality. 
Ideally, a shopping district will have a mix of small but perfectly curated shops, each offering a harmonic or counterpoint to the related shops around them, and one or two leviathans, a Harrods that covers all bases, or large shop in which cosmetics, or hosiery, or sweetmeats stretch away from you and reflect back in the distant back mirrors. A great shopping experience never involves a mall.


Solo time
A shopper's pace is personal.


Preparing yourself:


Comfortable, slip on shoes. 
Laces, or boots that catch the heel, destroy the ease and pleasure of changing rooms.


A favorite outfit. 
This is very important. Like going to the supermarket when you are hungry, shopping for trifles when feeling ugly leads to over-purchasing. A good outfit provides the baseline – do I look better in this as yet un-bought X than I did when I walked into the shop?


A sense of calm. 
Shopping is meditative and imaginative. Is this texture deliciously soft, or verging on slimy? Which of these colours steps forward from the shelves of folded jerseys? Will I ever want to cook a whole chicken in this dish, and if so, will the lid be deep enough?


Considered, and real, but not urgent, desires. 
A list in your head of the people you love and will wish to give gifts to, now or in the future. A few special items of clothing, something beautiful to sit in a particular corner.


The over-riding rule: thou shalt listen to the item that speaks to you, and thou shalt pass over the item that is silent.


List of items that spoke to me, I bought and have never regretted:


Black knitted wrap, Punakiki
Lance, Kapiti (Peter Ireland)
Small round painting (Ange Lane)
Silver leaf earrings, Nelson
Black Ricochet jacket, Auckland
Trestle table, Finn Robson-Marsden, Wellington
Red coral and brass ring, Invercargill
Tank girl boots, London
Feather duvet, Briscoes
Oak escritoire, Taranaki Street Salvation Army
Silk velvet jacket with cowl, Bologna




List of items that I should never have abandoned:


Peach and green jug with reversed handle, Otaki
Turquoise liquorish allsort ring, Tinakori Rd


List of items purchased with an uneasy heart, that have brought nothing but regret:


Four white soup bowls with lids, Wanganui Op Shop
Several items of 'good work clothing', Auckland, prior to starting my first 'grown up' job
Hydraulically adjustable desk, Wellington
Several esoteric and unreadable texts of post-modern literary criticism, sale bin, Victoria University Bookshop.


Dear readers, it was a wonderful shopping day in Bologna today.

Italy

stupidly beautiful clothes and jewelery

Bologna smells of

cigar smoke, traffic, roasting chestnuts, cold air, perfume, and for a moment, from a side-alley, watermelon.

Dogs of Attica (and friends)

Lions, Acropolis

Dogs of Plaka

Dogs of the Acropolis

Cat of the towel cupboard, Hotel Perissa

Restaurant cat, Emporio

Dog, Oia

My Santorini love, come home. He has been tethered to a tree as punishment for wandering for a night and a day. If you look closely, you can see that the string is tied round his neck, and the collar buckled around the tree. 

Stowaway kitten, port, Santorini

Minoan lion, with 2000 year old hangover.

Endearingly pop-eyed Minoan donkey

This goat is standing in Samaria settlement - humans have lived here since neolithic times. 

Really an amazing bee, Samaria Gorge

Beehives, Samaria Gorge

It's a sheep, Jim, but...

Warden's horse, Samaria Gorge

Saddle of same.

Alley cat, Hania

Rabbit that knows what it's about, Hania Museum of Folk Art

On being fed

I am writing this on the train from Athens to Patras.


Last night we sailed through the night from Hania (Crete), to Pireaus (Athens). We slept in a small cabin with four bunks, Maria and Eleni on the bottom bunks, Anna and OT on the top bunks. Maria and Eleni, Cretan sisters, were on their way to Athens for their nephew's wedding. Nai, nai (yes, yes), they assured me, his wife-to-be is very nice.


It is 11am. I'm not usually one for going without my breakfast – the old tummy rumbles eagerly in the morning, as a rule. However, this morning all I've had is a coffee (at Starbucks, shame on us) when we got off the boat in Pireus. And although I will soon be ready for my lunch (perhaps some seafood in the port town of Patras?), I am not yet hungry. Why not? Last night, and the night before, and the night before that we ate at Portes, a Hania restaurant run by Susanna Koutoulaki (an Irish woman abroad), and her husband, a Cretan from the village of Maleme.

On the first night we arrived late, perhaps 11pm. The restaurant was empty – a woman with short curly hair and a face open and charming as a gold coin sat outside.


Portes is the last restaurant in one of the alleys of the old town. It is down past the large Samariais Taverna, past the Banana Garden (a restaurant aiming to attract tourist families with children who need amusing), and around the corner. Outside there are square white tables, each with four slim thrush-egg blue chairs. We stopped by the tables, uncertain if the restaurant was open.


'Hello girls', said Susanna, standing up and gesturing towards the door, 'come in'. 


Inside the walls are the same chalky blue. The tables are covered with white cloths. A niche holds a brass pot, an amphora, a bunch of flowers. Intricate and beautiful old doors, salvaged from other buildings around the town, lean against the long left-hand wall. The bar and the small serving hatch through to the kitchen are on the right.


That first night, we ordered hora (boiled weeds), baked sardines and meatballs with leeks. We had a half litre of the house red. I asked Susanna if I should have the sardines or the gavros (small marinated fish). The sardines, she said as she scooped olives out of a barrel for us. 'The gavros is finished,' she said and laughed.


'What's good?' asked OT.


'Have the meatballs,' said Susanna, 'with leeks'. Then she brought us our bread and olives.


Restaurants in Greece will almost always offer a small bowl of olives and a basket of bread to start the meal, adding one or two euro to the bill. In most cases the bread is soft and white, with sesame seeds on top. Sometimes it comes with butter, sometimes we dip it in the olive oil from the cruet provided on every table. At Portes the bread is brown and tasty, homemade and filling.


I read about hora recently, when I was cooking greek beans at home, and the cookbook noted that the dish would usually be served with boiled weeds. I improvised with puha, dandelion, kale, chickweed and silverbeet. True hora is closest to a small dandelion. The plant is boiled whole and served in oil and lemon. When served, the fleshy white bases and the rosettes of limp green leaves look like small sea creatures, rather than vegetables. They taste of oxalic, and a slight dark green astringency.


On that first evening we were just passing through, unlikely ever to be seen again. Still, as we stood at the bar paying the bill, Susanna reached under the counter and brought out a little hour-glass shaped flagon, two shot glasses and a big green bottle. She filled the little flagon and then poured us out two shots. The raki was smooth and sweet, a definite alcohol hit to the mouth and brain, but nothing like the stomach-twisting offerings we'd had so far.


'This is good!' we said.


'My husband makes it,' she said. 


Full and loosened by food, wine and raki, we made our way home.


The next day we decided to go back. This time Susanna's Cretan husband served us. He raised his eyebrow as we decided on a litre of the house red, and ordered four dishes (hora, roast vegetable salad, baked giant beans and mousaka). 


'I bring the salads first,' he said, 'and then...' He circled his hand to indicate bringing us the rest of our feast.


He brought us the hora and little crucible of rock salt. 'Here', he said, 'a little more oil, and use this salt'. We looked up at him tenderly.


The food was, as mentioned in previous posts, exceptional. The roast vegetable salad with local cheese: the cheese soft, almost sticky, a gentle relative of feta; the vegetables varied, and each cooked to be al dente; the 'unique dressing', as promised in the menu, uniquely delicious. The mousaka spiced, the eggplant melting around the grains of mince, and the giant beans, big as the flat of a big man's thumb, in a tomato sauce orange with caramelised sweetness and olive oil. 


That evening we sat outside. Our host, impressed at our capacity, brought us the little flagon of raki and a bunch of green table grapes. We motioned him to join us. He stood by the table, smoking and raising his glass with us, and talking about making the raki with grapes from his home village of Maleme. The red wine, as well, he makes. He told us that Susanna is from Ireland, and that the restaurant has been open five years. 


It was late, again. He went inside then came out again with another little bottle, slipping it onto our table. He went inside to clean. We drank the raki. He came back out and saw the empty bottle. He clicked his tongue in amusement, fetched another bottle, and sat with us to drink it. We toasted each other, and Crete, and New Zealand, and said we'd be back for an early dinner before the ferry tomorrow.


We left, very relaxed, and climbed the three flights of stairs to our beds. 


On the third night, our host touched our arms as we arrived to show his pleasure at seeing us, and called Susanna to say hello. We asked him to choose our dinner. He looked carefully over the menu, running his finger down the list, pausing on a dish, considering, saying 'too much cheese', or 'not two pies', putting together a meal.


He choose smoked pork and cheese pie, eggplant rolls, rabbit with prunes, and, though we ordered the roast vegetables again, brought us instead a different vegetable dish, saying 'try this, if you don't like it, I will eat it'. 


We liked it - we liked it very much, a stack of zucchini and eggplant, layered with pesto and mint. The rabbit was light and parted gently under the teeth, the dark meat by the bone soft as jelly. The crisp short pastry of the pie enclosed a slab of white cheese and slices of aromatic, pink and fawn pork. 

We drank the house red and worked our way through the food. Our host moved around the restaurant, serving his other customers, but coming to check on us - was it good, did we like it? It was, we did.


We asked for the bill - he bought the check, the familiar clear hour-glass shaped bottle, and a plate of chocolate cake and ice-cream. Kaimaki ice cream, with the herbed taste of Cretan hills in the sheep's milk, and chocolate cake baked in its own sauce, luscious and dripping.

We ate, and had to leave for the boat, our bellies full and our minds at ease and comforted by being fed, freely and with care.

Food and Drink #2

Wine tasting, Santo Wines, Santorini

Yoghurt and honey, Knossos

Halva and raki on the house, Hania

Hora - boiled weeds

Dinner at Portes, Hania - moussaka, baked giant beans, hora, roast vegetable salad, red wine, followed by home-made and delicious organic raki. This is some of the best food I have ever eaten.

Garlic and onions, Hania

Butcher's shop, Hania

Organic Cretan dry white wine - Yiamas.