Reflections: Mani Peninsula Part 2

 

Here in Mani life goes on at a pace that disarms; it seldom frustrates!  Older men in the nearby Kardamili village stake out the village square, drink coffee and talk loudly at what seems cross purposes. Others sit alone and drink coffee and smoke continuously. The waiter from the cafe across the road services the square dodging trucks, cars and buses. 

Down the road I enter a courtyard where a photographer is setting up for an exhibition opening. He’s an expat from England and has plied his art from a very small village a few kilometres up the mountain which we visited. He’s been living there for over 20 years. He was a newspaper photographer but has traded his life in England for Greece and the Peloponnese landscapes. 

A short walk from there to the sea and sunbakers lie on the taverna’s banana lounges and every so often tread warily across the polished stones into the water. They lie back and seemingly float on the calm and tepid water. The respite in the water is a diversion from the real task at hand; sunning the body. 

Speaking of bodies they come in all shapes and sizes. Men often have trouble keeping within the confines of decency but leniency is in plentiful supply when it comes to sun seekers. Kardamili is a short drive from Stoupa..but a longer distance in its fashion, jewellery, antiques, tavernas offerings and its  tourists. Stoupa is the ‘playground’ of young families, oldies, middle aged couples and others! 

Last week I commenced reading ‘Greece: Biography of a Nation’ by Roderick Beaton, Kings College London and a scholar in Greekness. He commences by questioning the notion of ‘nationhood’; his book is thus a biography of the Greek nation that ‘traces the history of that subject just as a biography teases out the life and career of an individual’.  He therefore weaves a complex pathway to the creation of the Greek nation following the fall of the Ottoman Empire in  the 1820s. 

So while we like to believe that Greece has something to do with Ancient Greece the best that can be said is that the ancients ‘did live in the same mountains ending in the sea’. What came first was not the Greek nation but the Greek language and their Christian Orthodoxy.