Panagiri in the mountains.

I meet Aruni at the Village Hotel at 8.50 and we’re straight into a taxi and soon heading up and out of the village towards Xisos. Turning onto the rough, concrete and rubble road we arrive at ‘The church of the Panagia of the Myrtles’ a few minutes later. There are already many people sitting outside near the door of the small chapel and a few inside as we quietly enter, light candles and leave while the priest and his helpers continue around us.

We take up seats a little way off, under a Symi oak tree. Friends greet us, I am introduced to strangers as a photographer and computer teacher (!) and I sit drinking ever warming water as Aruni goes to chat with people and later take communion. I can see down into the valley to the west onto the monastery of Michaelis Roukoniotis and over the sea to Datca on the Turkish coast. A breeze is blowing up, welcome on such a hot day. It is August 15th. The sea is calm and the hills around me are dotted with farms and trees, but horribly severed by a new road leading to Toli.

Aruni returns and tells me of Panagias gone by when the whole family would be up here for days before the day of Assumption. She remembers being here as a child when everyone slept at the small house outside of which the cars now park. In those days the boys would sleep the nights outside and the girls would be locked inside the house for the night. Locked, mind you. The next day the service would be held - as it is going on now - in the morning, later they would sleep under the Symi oak tree at lunchtime with the smell of coffee wafting down from the house and, in the evening there would be dancing, feasting and music. But not this year; someone has put a stop to it (though I was here two years ago for the evening festivities) and no one is sure who has ordered this, so best not dwell on it.

The priest comes out to bless the congregation, myself included even though I am the only non-Greek person here. Here’s a tip, if you are attending a church event in Greece then bring spare change; it’s customary to put in a little for a candle and, as the collection plate is now brought around, for the collection and blessing. It all goes to help maintain the church and pay for the goodies we will be having after the service.

Now there is only the sound of the liturgy being sung inside and the wind and cicadas in the trees outside, the congregation stand silently for a while and then sit and continue their disparate conversations. I admire the array of pennants and flags and try and translate some of them; they are red, green, yellow blue or white with dark writing. ‘Love each other,’ ‘The monastery of the Panagiri of the Myrtles,’ ‘Christ son of God,’ the Byzantine flag of the double headed eagle, the Greek flag…

I am distracted in my translations as the Icons are now being paraded. The procession stops at the top of the grounds, in front of the house where the girls were once locked in, and a prayer is said, presumably not just for them. Then it moves back down to complete its circumnavigation of the church. Boys and men carry the flags and Icons, displaying them all to the faithful congregation before taking them back inside where the service is completed.

And now it’s time to eat and socialise. There is much ‘ka tou kronou’ being said, (doesn’t really translate but it’s a wish for good years and many of them) ‘Xronia Polla’ - many years to you - and much cheek kissing and chatting. I see the Artos - the big round brown loaves being taken into the refectory to be cut into Antithoro (in the singular), the small wedge shaped pieces that are blessed in the ‘holy of holies’, behind the screen in the chapel. We are offered Boutireva, the round, hard bread rings made with butter in them, milky, sweet coffee in china cups and Akoumia, sticky, sweet and delicious donuts. Everything is offered from baskets and later napkins and small bags are offered out for round two so that you can take away some of these sweets for people who can’t be here.

As the morning slowly passes (it is now 11.00) I look back out to sea. I cont twenty two boats now in the channel between us and Asia Minor and suddenly a weight is lifted from my shoulders, from my head… the cicadas have suddenly stopped singing and I realise how much noise they make. I actually feel myself relax slightly now that they are quiet; a strange thing to notice but my head actually feels lighter. I can hear children playing on the other side of the church, coffee cups chinking in the refectory, much chatter, a calmer wind, laugher from the other courtyard. As I am offered a small, cream filled cake people start to leave and the cicadas start up again.

I meet up with Aruni (now changed into suitable hiking clothes) and we set off back to the village on foot. Crossing the main road a Xisos we take the old donkey path that will bring us into the top of the village. We stop at the small chapel of Paraskevi, the patron Saint of eyes, for a short prayer before continuing on the path. We can see Yialos way below us as Aruni tells me of panagiries of her past. Getting up at two in the morning for the long walk up to Stavros Tou Polemou when her father had ordered mules for her and her sister; but the mules always walked too close to the sheer cliff edges (there was no road then) and so the children preferred to walk. It all sounds so long ago and so distant that I imagine it all in black and white when in fact it was only forty years ago. But it is like the rest of this morning, apart from the taxi maybe; nothing has changed at the Panagiri for hundreds of years.