Walking through the Kato Meria area of Symi

December 3, 2014 James Collins

Symi Greece photos — Inside Agia Pareskevi

Today we start a walk, our second long walk of the winter walking season, and this takes us (well, me) through some places I have not been before.

It starts off in Horio and the church of Stavros from where we collect our walking companions and head off towards the old track from the village towards the hinterland. There’s a new-new sign just past the gate now directing you to Panormitis one way and Ksisos the other. We followed the path towards Ksisos and then turned off it having visited Agia Pareskevi where I had a quick word about eyesight (she’s the saint of eyes).

Walking through the Kato Meria area of Symi — Terracing ready for planting, or already planted

According to my map, this sub-path (which is not marked on it) leads us past ‘Teixos’ which means ‘Wall’ and that is listed as an ancient monument, but I think the map reefers to me. Having said that, there are many walls out there, so much terracing and it’s so hard to put a date on them. I can vaguely recognise Byzantine masonry, and more modern building works, but dry stone walls that could have been put up last year or 1,000 years ago are hard to date. We did see some terracing though, weeded out and ready for planting fodder for livestock, apparently.

And so, on across the side of the valley behind Yialos, below the main road, and through a line of trees, and over some very rough ground. Grateful for my new walking boots which stood up well to the day and didn’t provide blisters.

We came out in the area around Agios Fanouris where the pre-fab church lives now, and there, coming up to the main road, saw the Symi bus drive past. I’ve never seen it up there before and can only assume it was coming back from Roukouniotis or the army camp. It was St Andrew’s day on the day we were walking so perhaps there had been something going on. Anyway, Neil was happy to be on a flat surface again, as you can see, though Justine looks like she’l making a safe way around him as if to avoid.

Carrying on down the main road for a while we then stopped to have our photo taken at the ‘no photos’ sign and then took a right, following the red dots towards the area marked on the map as… (takes a look), well, actually there isn’t anything marked on the map, and the red dots ran out too. To our left and down is the area known as Kato Meria (Kate O’Mara as it was called by one of our party), and the church Panagia Katholiki. Further across and up was the famous landmark of ‘Michaelis’ barbeque’ and beyond that the church of Ag. Dimitrios (one of them). Between us and all that is a huge field of boulders and rocks, wild herbs, and a dry riverbed which then leads all the way down to the back of Nimborio.

That’s for tomorrow, as is the tale of the sacrificial altar, or Aslan’s Table…

Share on Facebook

Symi Animal Welfare

All going well for Symi Animal Welfare, Symi’s animal charity

December 2, 2014 James Collins

Today’s post is given over to a message from Symi Animal Welfare, the island’s only animal charity operating at the moment.

“Words can’t describe the last few hectic days on Symi when a visiting Australian vet neutered 74 cats. A simple ‘Thank you’ to so many people just isn’t enough to express our gratitude to everyone involved during the last week! Volunteers collected cats from virtually every area of the island, some brought 1 or 2, others brought 9 or 10. Yvette Berkeley the vet & Tove (whose house was used as a ‘surgery’) along with a team of volunteers, worked flat out from before 9am until late afternoon for 4 and a half days, the results are staggering – 51 females + 23 males were neutered!

Carol from the Nine Lives charity who chiefly-sponsored this programme was concerned that we wouldn’t find sufficient cats, especially after 115 were neutered on Kefalonia the previous week, however, she is so delighted with everyone’s hard work & the final tally that she has already suggested another visit at the same time next year!

Walking from the village, down the Kali Strata into Yialos earlier, I’m sure I saw several cats with newly-clipped ears wink as much as to say ‘thank you’………..or maybe it was my ‘pleased as punch’ feeling after an exhausting week?

This report is from all of the Symi Animal Welfare team, each have served such an important role in ensuring this visit would be such a success, your immense enthusiasm has been fantastic. The same goes for an increased number of volunteers, a few who have never been involved with vet-week before, so ‘well done’ each & every one of you.

I had planned on announcing my retirement (after nearly 10 years being secretary) as the programme finished, however, this amazing team-effort has been an inspiration & proved to all of us just much can be achieved if we pull out all the stops, so I’ll be staying on if that’s okay?

A final message to our wonderful supporters – your generous donations have again helped us look after the welfare of Symi’s cats……. ‘Yamas!’
Bless you all, Melanie, Tove, Suzan, Claudia & Hazel”

Nine Lives Greece: http://www.ninelivesgreece.com/en/
Symi Animal Welfare: http://www.symianimalwelfare.org/

[Tomorrow’s post is about a long walk through the rocky riverbeds of Symi, or at least, through one of them.]

Share on Facebook

Family history

What are the chancels? Devon family history, Crediton, Scott

December 1, 2014 James Collins

Kalo mina, happy month! On Saturday, after weeding the garden a bit and cutting back the vine a lot, and after burning it all off and also the other stuff that’s been lying around all summer, and after assuring our concerned neighbour that we were okay and the house wasn’t on fire (very kind of him to worry about us, makes you feel a bit safer), and after (probably) annoying the other neighbours with the smoke and airborne burnt bits, and after lunch was done and an old episode of Lovejoy had been watched, I decided to see if I could find my great-grandmother’s grave in Devon. As you do.

I’d actually been to the churchyard, back in 2010, and I’d looked at all the graves there, or so I thought, but hadn’t seen one for Kate Scott. I later found out that she definitely was buried there, in Crediton, Devon, this is, and I’ve even seen the press cutting that described her funeral. It was seeing a church on the Lovejoy episode that set my mind to it, I guess.

I remembered that I had seen a website where interested people with very little else to do had been around photographing graves across the country and posting up results. I wondered if by any chance anyone had done Crediton. Sadly not it seems, so I started looking around for other sources which might help unlock the great Scott mystery, as it’s been called. (For more on this subject and if you fancy joining in, you can see the work I did on it a few years back at this link: https://symidream.com/scott/evidence.html)

So, if you live near Crediton and have nothing to do for a few hours and fancy a graveyard walk, perhaps you could look for her while you are there, and take a photo for me. Of the headstone I mean, I don’t want you going round digging anything up. She was Kate Scott (nee Maxwell) and was buried there in 1940. It’s a very nice churchyard to walk around, honest.

While I was in the area that time, I also walked around Sandford churchyard, as the Scotts lived nearby, at Priorton Mill. I did see one Scott headstone in Sandford, strangely, but not for the famliy I was looking for. I also went to look in Honiton where her husband, the elusive Arthur Henry Scott was buried in 1942, but couldn’t locate his grave either. I’m not very good at this game really.

Anyway, while looking around to see if there was any kind of list of graves or even photos on any other sites, I found this About Crediton church organ. It made me smile and it’s not made up. I thought I would share with you:

“The War Memorial Organ was designed based on plans drawn by the church’s organist Lieutenant Harold Organ FRCO in 1915. Organ was killed in action in 1917 but the plans were continued by Cyril Church…”

What are the chancels eh? Aisle bet you the current organist is one who can’t play c sharps? A Mrs D Flat, per-apse? Wouldn’t that be swell? No, I’ll stop now, I don’t want to bombarde you with a mixture of church organ related puns, that would be too rank.

Later on, I was distracted by Lugnabana, a townland in Co. Leitrim, Ireland, that no longer exists. It did exist in 1834 when another great-great ancestor of mine walked from there to Durham looking for work and I wondered if any other information about it had come online since my last search a couple of years ago. I ‘Googled’ ‘Lugnabana, Ireland’ and Giggle (sic), in all its wisdom, asked me if I was sure I’d meant to ask for Lugnabana and suggested, perhaps, that in my idiocy of not knowing what I was looking for, I had meant to ask for ‘Log Cabin Ireland’ or even ‘Rugby Ireland’? Certainly not. Who would want to find a log cabin in Ireland?

Actually that sounds like a rather interesting idea, and if it had suggested Rugby team… But I digress and will do so again before I go. We recently watched a film called ‘Invictus’ about the South African rugby team winning the world cup in the first year of Nelson Mandela’s presidency. I don’t know how accurate a film it was, but we liked it. So, if you’ve not seen it, it’s today’s recommended purchase.

Share on Facebook

Day to day on Symi

A few Neil photos for Saturday

November 29, 2014 James Collins

Some photos from Kos in November (‘cos I got up late). As usual, click the photo for the full sized version, then back button back to this page. Must try and find a widget plugin thing that runs a slideshow of photos in a post… And ideas Allan?

Share on Facebook

Day to day on Symi

The Sunrise, an anagram of ‘Sure Sin’, and other matters

November 28, 2014 James Collins

The last couple of days of our holiday were spent in the usual fashion for us: walking everywhere, stopping for lunch, having an afternoon café experience of some sort, doing some more walking and then spending an evening watching the world go by and maybe having a light dinner.

Our last day, waiting around for the boat, took us on one last lap of the town and the sites we’d not seen enough of yet, followed by a glass at what had become our favourite kafeneion. After this, lunch at the famed ‘Mummy’s Cooking’, a traditional Greek taverna which was, on this Saturday lunchtime, popular with local families. We’d read some reviews about this place on Trip Advisor and some had criticised the waiter for his arrogance. We didn’t encounter that at all and I have to assume those reviews were written by people visiting in the summer when I can see how the place would be very busy – so busy you have to book, apparently. We settled in for some banter, some homemade ‘gigantes’ and some homemade pork and leak stew, and very nice (and reasonable) it was too.

An after-lunch walk around saw us finally settle at the hotel terrace to wait for the boat. The sea was a bit choppy but we’d checked in with HQ (Jenine) to make sure the boat was running, and it was. Back at the port, with rucksacks slightly heavier than when we started thanks to the only-once-used dumbbells and a few extra ‘bits’ as gifts, and there was still plenty of time for a last Kos-cocktail as we watched various people check in through passport control. Seems a bit odd seeing such a thing, but as the town is so close to Turkey, many people come for a day, or go for a day, and pop in and out of Europe as if it were Sainsbury’s.

Our boat arrived only a few minutes late and was not busy. We were treated to a spectacular sunset on the way back which we saw from the back of the Express. Just before arriving back in Symi one of the crew came up and found us and checked that we were getting off at Symi, which was nice of him. And of course we were. In fact we were the only people getting off at Symi and I got the impression that had we been going on to Rhodes the captain would have said, ‘Oh, let’s not bother stopping here then,’ like the bus drivers used to do on country routes when there was no one waiting at the stop. But there were loads of people waiting at the stop and, as one of the crew cleared our path as his only disembarking passengers, a throng of ‘embarkers’ bustled on.

And there we were, back home again. Almost. We still had to get past Pacho’s, failed, and then the Sunrise, failed, where memory starts to blur (Sunrise is an anagram of ‘sure sin’ after all). Back home, Jack was pleased to see us, having been living outside for a week, but well looked after by Sam (and a little bit Harry), and before you could say ‘unpack’ we’d unpacked and were back into our usual routine.

So, I hope you enjoyed our rush around Kos Town last week, now I can get the blog back to its usual mundane nonsense about nothing in particular and tell you:

Since being back I have been working on ‘Lonely House’ the novel I wrote during the summer. It is currently being edited and is due for ‘release’ in the New Year with ‘RC publishing.’ This is another horror story, a bit more horror than The Judas Inheritance, and not set on Symi. Once I have done my share of the proofing I will have more time to get back to the next novel, which is a comedy called ‘Straight Swap.’ More about that in days to come.

Share on Facebook

Symi Dream

Walking through the Kato Meria area of Symi

All going well for Symi Animal Welfare, Symi’s animal charity

What are the chancels? Devon family history, Crediton, Scott

A few Neil photos for Saturday

The Sunrise, an anagram of ‘Sure Sin’, and other matters

Writing on a Greek island