Isle of Tranquillity

The ferry reaches Folegandros late on a cool October evening. The harbor, however, is simply a cluster of hotels, tavernas and summer homes with a winter population of perhaps five people. My destination is Folegandros Chora, a town that began as a fortified hilltop village built by the Venetians after the Crusade of 1204.

A small, crowded bus jolts its way from the harbor to the edge of a very dark, still village at the top of the hill. It is well after 8 p.m., and we grope our way down-slope perhaps 100 yards through narrow, dark lanes; we round a corner and--a brilliantly lit movie set! No, a village square so perfectly beautiful that the travel-weary mind at first cannot grasp the scene.

An acetylene-bright string of naked light bulbs stretches across the square. There are churches, new and old. An old man with a white mustache turns meat on an outdoor charcoal grill. Several other men are sitting at a cafe, and a flood of happy conversation pours out of a taverna. People come and go across the square.

In the morning I find a complex of three interlocking squares shaded by pepper and acacia and locust trees, lanes fanning out through rows of brightly painted homes and, towering over the town, a large white monastery on a mountainside.

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Folegandros (pronounced pho-lay-gan-dross) is a beautiful, rough, wild island, about seven miles long, on the southern edge of the Greek Cyclades Islands. It lies about 30 miles northwest of Santorini, its more famous neighbor island. In the spring and fall, Folegandros is a lovely world. No cruise ships call here. There are no imposing Greek ruins. Psychological stress cannot be maintained; it is too quiet. In the summer it becomes hot and crowded for such a small place, but it is still a peaceful oasis compared to the more heavily toured islands of Mykonos or Santorini.

It is exactly this tranquillity that brings travelers to Folegandros. Like many people, on my first visits to Greece, I fell in love with well-known Paros and was overwhelmed by the physical beauty of Santorini. On later trips, however, I searched for less commercial places, where traditional Greek village life still exists. I found what I was looking for on Folegandros--a beautiful island with rocky beaches that is a wonderful place to spend a few days just walking, reading or simply sitting in the village square. There is not much else to do. This is a subsistence farming and fishing island, where about 600 residents still conduct much of life in the old ways. Instead of crowds, trendy restaurants and clubs, travelers to Folegandros make do with the company of kind, friendly islanders, excellent traditional food and nights filled with stars.

In his book “The Greek Islands,” Lawrence Durrell suggests that the Greek village square has not changed much since ancient times. It has always contained the threshing floor, perhaps the prototype of the first theater, the bakery, the village spring, the cafe and, I would add, in more modern times, the taverna and the church. The squares of Folegandros have few variations on this theme: The bakery happens to be a block away from the main square, and a community water tap replaces the spring.

The main town on a Greek island is called the chora (pronounced HOR-a) and Folegandros’ Chora sits on the edge of a cliff that drops away 600 feet to the sea. As it grew larger over the centuries, the Chora gradually spilled down the slope. It now houses several hundred people, and at its center are the three connecting squares. A few small hotels have sprung up around the periphery of the village in recent years, but in October of 1989, on my first of many trips to this wonderfully provincial town, I could see no services other than those for the local Greeks. Electricity came to Folegandros only in 1976; television arrived recently and does not yet seem intrusive.

There is one police officer on Folegandros. I ask Anne Papadopoulos, a Danish sociologist who runs the island’s Cycladic School--featuring art, cooking and dancing classes--with her Greek husband, what the policeman’s job entails. “What does he do? Oh, let’s see, what does he do? Well, there’s no crime on Folegandros . . . . Oh, yes! He checks the prices in the stores. The prices are regulated.”

On another trip--this one in April--I discover that Folegandros is a springtime paradise. When I use this word with anyone on a beautiful morning, not the slightest blink of skepticism is expressed.

The crystalline light etches the lines of each building in the village. The corners and lanes are filled with bougainvillea, roses, geraniums and daisies. The trees are just leafing out. Redbud and apple trees billow with flowers, backlighted with warm, filtered sunlight. A lacy haze hangs in the air. The squares and roadways are paved with green-slate flagstones. And all of this is arranged in a beautiful geometry of terraces, walls, squares, churches, stairways and cafes, populated with laughing children and smiling men and women. The old man who cleans the squares is going about with his short broom and dustpan, sweeping up redbud blossoms. He does this as if it’s an act that pleases him. Deliberately. Almost a meditation. In the same way, older women take tiny brushes and, stooping, outline with whitewash the green flagstones of their lanes and dooryards. Much of what goes on in Chora is done with the same meditative feel.

At the Chora bakery, a hot brushwood fire burns in the main oven during the early morning hours. The oven is filled with long tins, each holding a loaf, and at 9:30 a.m., the villagers come for their daily loaves. A man draws the tins from the oven on a long-handled paddle; old women knock loaves from the tins, nearly too hot to touch, and stack them on end like piles of wood. As I arrive, an elderly woman dressed in black leaves the bakery clutching two loaves to her breast as one might carry a baby. A workman leaves when I do; each of us carries a long loaf casually in one hand. Our eyes meet, he smiles and says Kala. Good. I walk to the square and sit with my coffee in a flood of sunlight on the terrace of the Piatsa Taverna. The air hums with the quiet sounds of a community awakening to its deliberate and traditional tasks.

The visitor needs only one other scrap of information, and this sketch is complete: The Piatsa Taverna has a fax machine.

In the early evening, the air is warm, fragrant from the masses of flowers in the squares, soft, full of music. At the Cafe Melissa, just across the square from the Piatsa Taverna, men gather and talk. The owner sits in the sun, very still. A goat bleats behind a wall. Soft Greek dance music comes from the cafe. As I walk through the square, the owner of the Piatsa says to me in passing: “You like pastitsio (a Greek version of lasagna)? It comes out of oven tonight at 7.” From another taverna, the rich odor of grilled chicken floats across the squares. This is typical fare--all local tavernas serve grilled meats, often fish, and a variety of salads and casserole dishes.

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Often when speaking of Greece someone will say, “I like this place (or that place), but I can’t tell you why.” Fuzzy words like charming or pretty will not do; the quality they’re trying to describe is intangible. But I know what pervades Folegandros Chora: kindness.

One night, during an all-night party at the Piatsa, I see an old woman become agitated and go about knocking drinks out of people’s hands. She is not excluded or punished, even though she creates a bit of havoc. The villagers are similarly tolerant of a foul-mouthed alcoholic who is half-mad and sliding downhill toward death. And they are equally kind to children: I think particularly of Daphne. Two years old, she wanders untended through the nearly empty lanes and squares on a warm evening, dressed in a simple dark-blue dress and bright red shoes trimmed with lovely embroidered designs of yellow and blue. As I sit and watch, she walks with solitary confidence back and forth through the squares. She has a very deliberate and satisfied air, like that of an inspector doing a job. Every so often she is greeted by older children or an adult, and frequently the greetings are accompanied by kisses or hugs. Daphne is always watched; it may be from 100 feet away, but she is monitored by the people of the village she explores.

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The beauty of Folegandros, as with that of many other islands, depends on the season and the eye of the observer. This place is not for everyone. The Romans thought it a terrible, remote place, and in 92 AD they dumped 9,800 exiles here. Between 1930 and 1974, Greek dictatorships periodically exiled political leftists to Folegandros. Locals say that when leftist Athenian intellectuals were relocated here in the 1930s, the quality of education on the island improved greatly.

In 1884, an English traveler, Theodore Bent, wrote that “of all the islands of the Aegean Sea, Folegandros can boast of the most majestic coastline; in fact, I doubt if it can be equaled anywhere.” Yet he also says a street in the walled town was “quite impassable from the mire of pigs.”

In more recent times Linda Lancione Moyer, in her 1992 book “Undiscovered Islands of the Mediterranean,” writes: “We so loved the natural beauty and healthy community life that we considered entitling this book ‘Folegandros and Other Mediterranean Islands.’ ” On the other hand, a young American woman, a computer programmer living in Athens, couldn’t believe Folegandros is my favorite island: “You’re kidding! I just spent two days there. I was bored sick.”

In a taverna one spring afternoon, I meet an English teacher named Sophia who gets “combat pay” to teach on Folegandros. She has a contract with the Greek government, which awards teachers compensation points for working in less desirable locations. The worst spots are awarded the maximum points (which accumulate and later allow one to choose desired teaching spots). Folegandros, a paradise in April, is considered one of the worst spots. Why? Because it is terribly windy, cold and isolated in winter. Sophia told me she spent one winter in an unheated room. To get hot water, she had to boil it on the stove. Then there was a 10-day windstorm, and the ferry that visits the island once a week during the off-season didn’t come for two weeks. The markets ran out of most food. But she says she would stay for good if her husband, who is in Athens, could get a job here--which is impossible. She likes the low-stress island life, where people have time for each other. It’s a good place for her child to grow up.

On Folegandros, children grow up knowing where things come from and where everything goes. Water comes from the sky. Electricity from the generating plant at the harbor. Bread from the wheat. Artichokes--the plants are in the dooryard. Lamb--well, perhaps the children watch when, four days before Easter, a lamb’s head is bent backward for the knife across its throat.

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In the 13th century, the walled fortress town of Folegandros Chora consisted of several noble houses and a few dozen tiny homes built wall-against-wall. Three sides of the kastro (the old fortified part of town) are still enclosed by the much-modified remnants of solid, high walls. I usually stay at the Danassis Hotel, which was once a Venetian noble house, in a whitewashed 6-by-18-foot room. My tiny window and balcony look out over a 600-foot cliff.

Since about 1980, Folegandros has gradually developed modern tourist lodgings and restaurants. The town is being surrounded by new two- and three-story concrete buildings. The islanders refer to them as hotels, but I don’t think so; they are siege-towers. The island is becoming better known to foreign visitors, and on a busy August day it may house 1,200 to 1,500 tourists. Gift shops and restaurants open during the summer months just to handle the influx. The majority of visitors are Western Europeans. Many Danes make their way to Folegandros because Anne Papadopoulos and her husband, Fotis, advertise their school in Denmark.

This growing prosperity is needed by the islanders--and yet there is a price. Ute, a lovely German woman who is married to a Greek on Folegandros, tells me that “there is not much music or dancing now. The people who played music now work in construction. After work they are too tired to play.”

On my most recent visit to Folegandros Chora, I wondered if, because of the increasing tourism, the town might show any damage. On the contrary, the Chora is more lovely than ever. The lights in the main town square have been rearranged to highlight the facade of the oldest church, the geraniums have been cared for and at night the square is a meticulously floodlit stage.

Even in summer, it is still possible to avoid the crowds. Many small sandy beaches and rocky coves offer an escape. One of my American friends told me about a favorite spot called Livadaki Bay, a tiny turquoise cove surrounded by rocky slopes. It is reached by a long, craggy path from the hilltop settlement of Ano Meria. It is near a little lighthouse, and one edge of the pool is formed by a shoulder of alabaster marble streaked with veins of copper red. The bay compares favorably with the most beautiful spots on the French Riviera. However, the walk back up to Ano Meria is practically lethal during an August heat wave.

Ano Meria is a farming community that follows the long, high ridge-top road for several miles along the spine of the island. It is here, looking out over the sea from both sides of the road, that the really remarkable beauty of this island becomes apparent. The ridge is 600 to 800 feet above the ocean, quite exposed to the raging north winds of winter, and very dry. The pittance of rain that falls is trapped and guided off the roofs into cisterns for drinking water, or off concrete roads for livestock and laundry. In this Empire of the Wind, inhabitants must build circular rock walls around their lemon trees, enclosing them, to protect them from gales. They build the walls about seven feet tall, which is as high as the trees can grow. Every winter, the wind sheers off any branches that dare to grow taller.

In the fall, the fields around Ano Meria are dotted with wooden plows pulled by teams of donkeys or oxen. The fields are fertilized; the wheat is sown by hand after the first early-winter rains. Now, in April, the grain is ready for harvest, and the drier terraces are being cut with both small hand scythes and larger ones of the Father Time variety. The stalks are bundled and tied, often with stems of wheat, and carried to the threshing circles on donkeys or in the occasional battered Toyota truck.

Every little farmstead has its threshing circle, its courtyard: walls enclosing a sheltered theater with a bread oven, a pile of brushwood fuel, cisterns and huge ceramic pots. Flowers grow in old oil cans and from every crack in the walls and flagstones. From a gap in a wall, a mass of lupine pushes forth. From another comes a great pile of ochre or yellow daisies. Bright red poppies burst from the seams of the soon-to-be-busy threshing circle. In a few weeks, teams of donkeys will circle round and round, treading wheat from chaff. Now, in preparation, the bundles of grain are piled high around each circle. I stop at one to take a photograph, but I don’t wish to intrude. There are no people in sight as I walk up the slope that looks down on the neat flagstone threshing circle. Piles of golden wheat are spread about--a beautiful and archetypal scene. I raise the camera, focus--and from a wheat field 200 feet away a loud Greek voice shouts: “What do you want?”

Crestfallen, I lower the camera, spread my arms wide at the scene before me, and--helpless, speaking very little Greek--shout back “Aurea, poli aurea!” (Beautiful, very beautiful!) Instantly the man, standing in his wheat field, raises both arms over his head toward the heavens and shouts back “Aurea!” He is backlighted by the blazing sun, which glitters on the tiny scythe he holds high against the blue sky. “Aurea!” seems to hang in the air. He stands there momentarily, with the steel fang bright above his head, and then bends again to the harvest.

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Guidebook: Finding Harbor in Folegandros

Telephone numbers and prices: The country code for Greece is 30. The area code for Folegandros is 268. All prices are approximate and computed at a rate of 330 drachma to the dollar. Room rates are for a double for one night.

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Getting there: The closest international airport to Folegandros is Athens. There are no nonstop flights from Los Angeles to Athens; however, Delta and Olympic Airways have direct flights via New York, and Lufthansa offers direct flights via Frankfurt. From Athens, Olympic Airways flies to many of the islands, though not to Folegandros. There are ferries that run from Santorini and Athens. Because ferry schedules change constantly, check with the Greek Tourist Organization, telephone 1-322-3111, the day of your trip for a current schedule. On Folegandros, motorbikes are available at Jimmy’s, tel. 41-448, in the port town of Karavostassis.

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Where to stay: There are now more than 500 hotel rooms on the island, ranging from simple rooms with shared baths to fully equipped apartments. Expect to pay between $20 and $80, depending on the type of accommodation. (Note: No one may answer at hotel numbers during the off-season.) One of the few places to stay within the medieval kastro is the Danassis Hotel, tel. 41-230. There is a penthouse on the roof with fabulous views. The Hotel Odysseus, tel. 41-239, fax 41-276, is slightly more upscale. Another lovely old location is Hotel Fani-Vevis, tel. 41-237, on the road to Ano Meria. The Anemomilos, tel. 41-309, fax 41-407, rents modern, well-equipped apartments, all with views.

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Where to eat: Piatsa Taverna, on the main square, serves breakfast and a basic Greek menu at dinner. O Kritikos, next door, serves delicious roast meats. The M.A.T. market in Karavostassis sells basic provisions, fresh fruits, vegetables and traditional bread.

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What to do: The Cycladic School (no phone) offers courses in painting, drawing, Greek cooking, folk dancing and yoga. For information, write to Anne and Foti Papadopoulos, Fole-gandros 84011, Cyclades, Greece. The Chrissospilia cave on the northeastern cliffs has ancient writing on the walls. The Folk Art Museum of Folegandros in Ano Meria includes a traditional island residence and local costumes.

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For more information: Greek National Tourist Organization, 611 W. 6th St., Suite 2198, Los Angeles, Calif. 90017; (213) 626-6696, fax (213) 489-9744. Greece Port Authority, tel. 1-422-6000.