The Olive Grove: Travels in Greece

Rating:
Summary: Beyond Tourist Greece
Review: Although melancholy and overly negative, Kizilos offers some solid information about Greece. The book would be of more interest to the traveller who anticipates an extended visit to Greece rather than a quick trip. The book is organized by sections on the sea, borderlands, and the village, but it sounds a little too much like "and then I did this." Sometimes she hinges on being judgmental such as when she complains about sightseers or claims that "Greece is full of people who are unashamedly idle." She does include interesting cultural tidbits such as the superstitious grandmother who makes her daughter-in-law stay inside for forty days after giving birth to avoid the evil eye and the fact that Tuesdays are bad luck in Greece because it was on a Tuesday that the Turks overran Constantinople. There's also a handy description of Lesbos' uneasy stance towards Sappho, the revered female poet.

Rating:
Summary: A great travel companion
Review: Katherine Kizilos, through her book, was one of my most treasured travel companions during my recent month-long trip to Greece. Though I kept thinking to myself, "this is not great literature," I enjoyed and benefitted from her writing immensely. In one part of the book she is a fairly typical tourist, in spite of her Greek roots and ability to speak Greek. It was comforting to read her mistakes and frustrations. But the larger theme of the work, both in the section where she is a tourist and where she returns to her father's village, is the contrast between the traditional Greek ways and the encroachment of the modern. Along the way are numerous insights into Greek history (and its effect on people today), the landscape, and the relation of Greeks and Turks.

I very much enjoyed Katherine Kizilos's warm and sensitive book and was very tempted to drive a few hours out of my way to her father's village on the off chance that she might be there!

Rating:
Summary: Vivid, concise account by an Australian-Greek journalist
Review: Sparked by childhood stories told by her father and a natural curiosity for the truth, Kizilos retraces the steps of her father to find the heart and soul of her roots. This entails a journey of not only the mainland, but several small islands and villages where the past struggles violently with the future.

Told in a concise and vivid way, she is both straightforward and philosophical. In contrast to other travel accounts, Kizilos' writing is accessible and often emotional because she is both a journalist who understands how to write for the public and a woman who feels life.

Because she travels to several "unknown" places in Greece -- not just Athens, Mykonos and other popular places frequented by tourists -- readers looking for something off the beaten track can appreciate her more.

Rating:
Summary: A Real Treat
Review: This book is about travel in Greece. It is not organized with care, and this is one of the things I most enjoyed about it. The reader sorta follows along as the writer takes him to this or that corner of the mainland and the islands without a preestablished itinerary, and that's the way it should be in a relaxed place like Greece. The descriptions of some places are superb and there are lots of interesting characters, each with his own emotional baggage and fascinating story. Some of them are likeable and others are pretty awful. The best thing about the book is the close connection the writer has with some of the people she writes about. They are her family and some of them have suffered fiercely from wars and political conflict, but the worst suffering is what the land itself is undergoing in the name of "development:" abandoned groves and fields, empty villages, people unaccustomed to the modern world and left without hope for the future, some not even able to understand the possibilities of the future. Since she is an Australian of Greek descent, the author knows there is no going back from Western values and attitudes, but her book asks what is so great about such attitudes and ambitions if embracing them means we have to leave behind the tenderness, beauty and love of the land that are still the basic principles of life in many areas of Greece. Interestingly, the writer is remarkably even-handed in dealing with Greek/Turkish relations. I would recommend this work to just about anyone, even those who are not particularly interested in Greece.

Rating:
Summary: A Real Treat
Review: This book is about travel in Greece. It is not organized with care, and this is one of the things I most enjoyed about it. The reader sorta follows along as the writer takes him to this or that corner of the mainland and the islands without a preestablished itinerary, and that's the way it should be in a relaxed place like Greece. The descriptions of some places are superb and there are lots of interesting characters, each with his own emotional baggage and fascinating story. Some of them are likeable and others are pretty awful. The best thing about the book is the close connection the writer has with some of the people she writes about. They are her family and some of them have suffered fiercely from wars and political conflict, but the worst suffering is what the land itself is undergoing in the name of "development:" abandoned groves and fields, empty villages, people unaccustomed to the modern world and left without hope for the future, some not even able to understand the possibilities of the future. Since she is an Australian of Greek descent, the author knows there is no going back from Western values and attitudes, but her book asks what is so great about such attitudes and ambitions if embracing them means we have to leave behind the tenderness, beauty and love of the land that are still the basic principles of life in many areas of Greece. Interestingly, the writer is remarkably even-handed in dealing with Greek/Turkish relations. I would recommend this work to just about anyone, even those who are not particularly interested in Greece.

Rating:
Summary: excellent travel book on Greece
Review: This is a first rate travel book on Greece, covering some of the mainland and several interesting islands in the Aegean Sea. Author Katherine Kizilos, daughter of a man who emigrated from Greece to Australia, does not cover all of the country, but such is not her intention. She brings to life some of the various corners of Greece, and does so with wit, enthusiasm, and in an informative manner.

She begins the book with visits to several islands. We travel to Syros, an island that is struggling but is still productive, with a declining though still active seaport. She takes us to Thira, the shattered island as she calls it, the ancient name now in use again, though in more recent times it was known as Santorini. Once part of the Minoan civilization, a cataclysmic volcanic eruption nearly destroyed the island around some 3500 years ago and may have been the source of the eventual extinction of the Minoans. The island's ruins boast many of the hallmarks of that great civilization, including multi-storied villas equipped with running water and flushing toilets. Now, it is filled with sweating, complaining tourists she writes, many of whom are not appreciative of the ancient ruins or even of the old ways of the islands, and has gone in part from an island of proud fishermen and farmers to one of shopkeepers and waiters dependent on tourism. We also visit Lesbos, most famous for being the island of Sappho, less so for the undeservedly obscure Theophrastus, who was renown in ancient times, esteemed by Aristotle; regrettably the island's more famous ancient artist overshadows him. The island is subject to periodic pilgrimages by lesbians, to the combined embarrassment and wonderment of some of the island's residents. I would have liked that the spent more time on the island of Ikaria, but she was pressed for time. Not one of the "stony, sun-flooded" islands that dot the Aegean, instead it is rich and verdant, and for a time was an independent country, as it was the first northern Aegean island to free itself from Turkish rule.

I really enjoyed her visit to Patmos, the so-called island of the apocalypse. It was on this island where St. John wrote the Book of Revelation, his "esoteric and doom-laden prophecy." I loved how she compared it with Thira; in that island, the results of an apocalyptic upheaval are easily visible, yet on Patmos "the dark thread of apocalypse" was invisible, difficult to see, but perhaps more real. Kizilos visited the shrine where St. John was said to have written, yet was unable to get any sense of the man or his writings, instead encountering yet more tourists, oblivious to the deeper meanings of the cave where he worked, directionless hedonists, filled with "manic, purposeless haste."

I was surprised she made a trip to Istanbul, home to a small and declining Greek population. Caught in a perhaps an increasingly Muslim society, victims still of a past (though perhaps improving) Greece-Turkey rift, many stubbornly hang on in that ancient city, once capital of the Greek Byzantine Empire, and still home to the head of the Greek Orthodox Church. I enjoyed how she contrasted the Greeks who call Istanbul home to the non-Greeks who call Thrace in northeastern Greece their home. There we met Turks, Muslims who have been in Greece many generations and know no other home, as well as even a small community of Nubians, descended from servants of an Ottoman emperor and a group of nomads, the Sarakatsans, who had once grazed their flocks on the peaks of the Balkans, but now have largely abandoned those ways. Yet all of these people are part of Greece too, ethnic minorities that are not always accepted or understood by those in Athens but are all a part of Greece.

A good portion of the book was spent in the towns of the Peloponnese near the Gulf of Corinth where her father grew up. It was here more than anywhere else in the book I got a sense of what it was like to live and grow up in Greece. Like most of the rest of Greece, it is a land of declining villages, as sons and daughters flee to busy Athens for jobs or even overseas. Olive groves grow weedy with brambles, grape vines are no longer tended, houses once inhabited for generations lie abandoned, in some areas only the scattered shepherds remain, particularly in the "cold and solitary country" of mountainous Peloponnese. Whereas there was once a complex relationship in families between the pethera, or mother-in-law, and her nifi, or daughter-in-law, the nifi made to do many tasks to prove her worth, sometimes the target of vented frustration from the pethera's days as a nifi, now the pethera are anxious to please the often well educated nifi, immensely pleased when she visits her mother-in-law's village from the busy and prosperous city.

Vividly the author shows that Greece is a land struggling to cope with its past. Its people still sometimes obsess about the Greek-Turkish rift, even though the author makes apparent that is more of a problem for Greeks than for Turks. The country still struggles with the German occupation during World War II and the later civil war, smaller villages still bearing scars where neighbor turned against neighbor and whole families were betrayed over petty greivences. She provided the stories of several who were caught in both conflicts and they make for gripping reading.

The country though is also trying to cope with the future, with declining rural populations, the rising importance of the tourist industry (some Greeks actually upset that all many foreigners ever want to see are old stone ruins), and even with Albanian refugees, disliked but needed as rural workers. Kizilos, like many in Greece, is uncertain about the future, but I think she is ultimately hopeful, as the Greeks have more than anything else proven to be a resilient people