Siphnos

March 17, 2007

Apollonia, Siphnos, Greece.

I woke up this morning with the sun shining in the windows of the little cottage we have been living in for the past three days. It has been wonderfully relaxing and I am so happy to be staying in one place, or more specifically this little charming house in the little charming town of Apollonia.

To start off with, all of the houses on this island are completely whitewashed, simple square structures, with thick wooden shutters that provide the only color variety. The most popular color for the windows and doors is a bright shade of what my mom termed “Aegean blue,” a bright royal blue color that contrasts with the spare whiteness of the rest of the building. Most of these places are square buildings with square windows and flat roofs, and accessed by narrow shallow staircases to allow for mule as well as foot traffic. All of the roads here are made of stone set in concrete and accented with white paint between the stones and when the sun shines the brilliance of the white on the walls so close together and the white of the stones and the blue of the sky dazzle the eyes.

Our little cottage is spare and perfectly suited to the Mediterranean climate. It faces south, like the Greek stoas that we have seen so many places, and is not placed on a perfectly orthogonal plan: the two rooms of the house rest at an obtuse angle to each other, the mouth of the angle forms the little patio out front where we can sit and watch the roofs cascading down the hill all of the way to the sea and sky in the distance. One of the arms of the angle contains the master bedroom, the mouth of the angle itself has a small kitchen that opens onto a tiny bathroom, and the other arm contains a living/dining room. The furniture in the house is minimal—the few chairs are small and made of a teak colored wood, and the same with the tables. The couches and beds are built right into the walls and floor of the house, built up on plaster platforms that underneath the cushions has a storage compartment that reminded me of the cockpit of my dad’s boat the Sweet Haven. The couches are lined along the walls in much the same fashion, and are wide enough to be converted into beds, but when they are not used as such the addition of some vertical cushions provides padding for the back. The desk in the bedroom and the closet are set right into the wall, and the kitchen contains a tiny fridge and an oven that we originally thought was a microwave until we stepped closer and saw the three tiny burners on the top and the wire racks on the inside. Everything is whitewashed except for the wood furniture and the olive colored blankets and shutters.

All of the windows open wide to admit the cool breeze and the tile floors aid in spreading the cool air around the house in the tourist season, but because it was slightly cold when we were there we shut the windows up tight, left the shutters open to let the sunlight in, and turned on the space heater that in a few hours left the little place warm and toasty. It was a truly relaxing and idyllic setting: no TV, no internet, no phone, and no washing machine (which actually was bad because by that time my entire suitcase was full of dirty laundry). Our days were as slow and peaceful as the little place that we were in, giving full credence to Mr. De Botton’s theory about the impact of architecture on Happiness. Staying in this place I could very well believe that I never had to return to the hustle and bustle of the trip but could sit on the porch all day and read The Architecture of Happiness and write in this blog and walk around the town for the rest of my life. Which is what we have been doing for the past few days.

On the subject of architecture too, I also think that this type of house is one that Walter Gropius would have very much enjoyed for its simple functionality and its refusal for excessive ornamentation. The shutters he might have criticized, perhaps, but their value for closing out the bright sun during the morning and insulating the house at night are invaluable. The roof is flat, the façade is unadorned with anything, and it meets the needs of the climate and the resources perfectly. No trace of bourgeoisie snobbery here. It is a building that Wright would have liked for its intimate connection with the landscape that surrounded it. De Botton would agree that the use of local stone and the sensitivity to the bright Aegean sun and the breezes makes it a building of beauty. And its embodiment of the values that I myself find lacking in my daily life. De Botton tells us that we find beauty in buildings because they in some way embody an ideal that we find missing—an explanation for the increasing tendency toward creating “authenticity” in place when so much of our lives are based upon a template that can be dropped down anywhere. McDonald’s is everywhere, and locality and rationality seem to be disappearing in the face of mass capitalism. But here, this building stood for a pastoral, simple, and distinctly Aegean life—born and bred to the elements and restoring a sense of calm and serenity to me that is lacking in the busy schoolworld of Davidson and in the frenetic pace of the Classics Trip.

This was an Aegean Wright Prairie House. Indeed, the similarities go far beyond the Wrightian principles of spare ornamentation, use of local materials and congruence with the culture. Like Wright, great attention is paid to the windows. To save energy, Wright placed the windows on his prairie houses underneath deep gables, and often high on the walls. This house contained almost no windows on the northern side, where the summer sun would come pouring in—it faced south, allowing for the most amount of light and air. However, where there were windows on many of these houses, they were shaded by a trellis covered in vines—a natural and elegant solution to the problem of shade. Wright’s prairie houses were constructed using an L-form, and this house too was on a widened L. These were locally grown houses, devoid of false ornament and true to the land from which they emerged. And that is beautiful.

Being in the company of these houses and the sleepy little town that they compose has given me a valuable opportunity to relax a bit. Every morning we have gotten up late, had a simple breakfast and taken a long 2 or 3 hour walk around the island. Siphnos itself is only about 10 km wide and 20 km wide, and we were stationed right about in the middle. So each day we would walk down to a town close to the coast, admiring the bright white houses and the blue domed churches as we went. We climbed staircased trails that moved off of the roads and into the terraced hillside, witnessing scenes of pastoral life along the way—cows enclosed in stone pens, goats moving along a hillside, fields of olives and lemon trees. And then there was the wind—rounding corners we would get hit by a blast of brisk air that would cause my dad to grab for his hat and my mom to pull up the hood on her windbreaker and hunker down. Whenever we were sheltered from the wind the days were warm, but by the coast it was relentless and whipped around the trees and houses and us, the crazy tourists.

One day we walked down to the coast to a remote church located on a spit of land jutting out into the blue blue sea and accessibly only by a narrow band of stone stairs. Another day we descended to the port city of Kamares, lined with small rowboats and potter’s shops. But since this was not the tourist season and it was a weekday, we would arrive in these little villages to find them almost completely empty—shops closed, people entirely absent. It was rather like walking through a town in the computer game Myst—where everything is a little bit foreign and the settings idyllic, but its impossible to figure out what is going on because there is no one around and the signs are all indecipherable. We were walking through ghost towns, and although it was lovely, the feeling of being the only people in sight was slightly unnerving.

Today was probably the best day so far. I slept in and we had a late breakfast before walking up to this little town past Apollonia called Artemonas that afforded us scenes of the island life: people washing clothes and hanging them on the laundry line, smells of cooking, putting a fresh coat of paint on the bright white buildings and sidewalks, rebuilding a sidewalk, grocery shopping. Usually I greeted them with a shy “kalemera” or “yaisas,” some of the few words I have picked up so far (my parents brought me a Europe Phrasebook, so I am trying to learn the words for some staple groceries and how to say “how much”). We reached the top of the hill to find ourselves in the middle of a goat pen, with the goats unluckily hobbled with the fore and rear hoofs on one side of their bodies roped together. Past them were two squat windmills with signature blue roofs, although from the looks of things their sails were put away for the winter.

We descended the slope and passed everyone getting ready for the start of the tourist season, and returned to our cute little cottage where I proceeded to park myself on the front porch. It was warmer today and I sat in the sun and worked on my tan until lunch. We ate tomato and cucumber salad, along with bread and cheese on the porch, and I resumed reading and blogging until siesta.

What a great day.