Today we start a walk from Horio to Horio, via the top of the hill, a ridge, some ancient sites, a church and a road, among other things. The area we’re walking towards, at the start of the walk, is called Χαμές, or Hames, of Chames on some maps depending on how you want to translate the Greek letter X. It’s pronounced kind of like the ‘ch’ in the Scots word ‘loch’, unless it comes before and i or an e in which case it’s pronounced as the h in ‘hew’, so in this case it’s more correctly ‘Chames’ though not as if the ch came from ‘church.’ Try saying ‘loch-ames’ without the lo, and pronouncing the ‘ames’ not as in ‘James’ but as in two syllables so: ‘loch-am-es’ and with the accent on the ‘es- part. Got it? Good, now you know where we are going.
By the way, I don’t know exactly what Χαμές means, it’s not a word in my dictionary, but the closest I can come to is χάμω, an adverb meaning ‘to, or on, the ground,’ and χαμένος, the adjective ‘lost’ or ‘the loser’ (as at cards, which is what we were on Saturday night before this tale starts). Being Greek, the word also means: break off, spend (money), wear out, reduce quality of, pull down (building), undo, change, seduce, kick up a row, move heaven and earth, deteriorate, spoil, go bad, get out of order, lose one’s looks. And if you add a slightly different ending you get, ‘there is a great to-do’, and also, ‘things are not so serious.’ All of which sound a bit like today’s blog, and possibly none of which have anything to do with the place we are going to so let’s get walking before we reach the end of the post.
So, we started from home, a very good place to start, and wandered through the village and up to Ag Marina cemetery where we turned a sharp right, just through the gates and past the noisy dog. Upwards is the way to go when climbing up a hill and we certainly went upwards, in fact we climbed to the ridge which, on my map, is at 400 metres, 1,312 feet. This is rough terrain, mainly with a narrow path made by walkers and goats, but occasionally with man-made steps. Not the kind of steps we see in the village or on the Kali Strata, but a few ‘here and there’ steps, suddenly appearing in the middle of nowhere; it makes you wonder what they are doing there – the answer becomes apparent later.
There are great views from up here as you might see in some of the photos. There was also a great skyscape with all manner of clouds, some threatening rain (which we didn’t get until after dark, by which time we were home) and there was a rainbow over the sea between us and Turkey. We stopped every now and then to take photos and swig from our water bottles, and then carried on. You can follow the red and blue dots or the not-always-obvious path and find your own way up here when next on Symi, but make sure you wear the right shoes.
At the top, at 400 meters, you meet a threshing circle and a large area of once agricultural land. There are a few houses up here and a couple of chapels, one of which is called ‘Panagia Chamon’ (Χαμών), and that form of the word is the possessive plural, so, with ‘Panagia’ being the Virgin Mary, the church is ‘The Virgin Mary of the lost’ (perhaps), or ‘of the losers’ (maybe), or ‘of those who have lost their looks’ (more likely in my case), if it means any of those things at all, and I am sure someone who knows will put me right at some point. But the amount of habitation, stones walls, and evidence of once-well-farmed land now makes sense of those steps heading down to the village. If you were talking your goods to sell or put on ships, you’d come down the way we just came up, you wouldn’t go around the Vigla.
Okay, that’s got us started on the walk, tomorrow we will carry on but I wanted to leave you today with another ‘Sounds of Symi’ video. This is the sound of the village church bells ringing on a Sunday, for a name day or festival, or perhaps because we are in Advent, as heard from the side of the hill at roughly 300 meters up. (Sorry about the crunches from the camera.) You may need to turn your volume up.
