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Sponge diving was long the source of wealth on Halki, until a blight wiped-out the stocks in the 1940s. The divers emigrated to Florida, especially to Tarpon Springs, where they prospered and diversified. Some of the new money found its way back home and was invested, most visibly, in a ribbon of concrete, a road to nowhere - the Tarpon Springs Boulevard. This was a bold, if ill-considered piece of engineering. Practically free from traffic, it provided a convenient link for walks to isolated beaches, lonely chapels and enigmatic ruins. We were walking along it now, my wife and I, to get to the castle. We veered-off at the deserted Old Town and trekked up steep tracks between the ruined houses. This was medieval stuff, the oldest of it, clusters of dwellings with deep water cisterns beneath them. In the rubble, and embedded in walls, were huge chunks of carved and inscribed marble. Ancient Greek stuff - a strong suggestion that someone had been here before. A thousand or two years before. And they were better builders by far. The final scramble to the castle - a limpet of masonry on a spine of rock - was a bit gut wrenching but it presented us with a shimmering view of islands flung across the hazy blue, from here to Turkey. The Hospitallers had bought Rhodes and its satellite islands from the Genoese, and fortified them against Turkish raids. The castle itself was pretty impressive, but the foundations and the lower walls were made of immense stones, immaculately squared and fitted. This was much better than anything the Knights could manage. So they had the benefit of the groundwork having been done earlier - by Ancient Greeks. I had read nothing about ancient remains on Halki before arriving, but once settled-in we borrowed the Holiday Rep's Blue File. Instead of the usual banal invitations to join the fun on unforgettable excursions, this one was filled with contributions from people who had a special interest in Halki - an ornithologist, a botanist, a Feng-Shui buff, a heraldry enthusiast. It made entertaining reading. A few years earlier, a professor of archaeology spent his holiday here, and left an account of his observations. It was enough to send me in search of Halki's archaeological secrets, including a sculpted, snake-haired Medusa, casually parked behind the Town Hall, and a lost Temple of Apollo. I asked Bob the Rep. about possible ancient sites (it was Bob's book), and he told me of a high plateau where he had seen some ruins. I tramped around the headland, past the fish farm, came to a remote beach, picked my way past a couple of nude sunbathers, loudly discussing bird-life (“did you see that pied wagtail?”) and scaled a rocky slope. Sure enough, on a saddle between two hills there was a complex of rough ruins, and a pile of finely sculpted marble columns and capitals dumped in a heap. The view to sea was stunning - as a site for a temple it was, at the very least, plausible. There was plenty of this sort of thing to do, poking around the island, speculating idly on who farmed the abandoned terraces, or built those vast field enclosures, or lived in those primitive stone shelters. But it was easier and almost as rewarding to spend time loafing around the town of Halki. On its quay, there was always some activity - a cargo boat dropping-off a consignment of fish food for the farm; a fishing boat returning, its radio wailing Turkish-sounding music across the still waters; the weekly big ferry arriving, and dwarfing the houses. Besides its picture postcard credentials - this was reputed to be one of the finest architectural ensembles in the Aegean - Halki was still a working proposition, supporting a population of 300 or so Greeks. Among passageways too narrow and winding to qualify as alleys we would stumble on the occasional smoking bread oven, some sheepskins curing in the sun, builders busy restoring another lovely town house. Our house was right on the harbour and we could swim in its clear waters whenever the mood took us. Sometimes, silvery shoals of jumping fish would churn the placid surface. Once, while I was bobbing idly in the harbour, a pair of kingfishers whistled past my head in a flash of blue. A row of four
dry hills framed the town, each smaller than the one before. They slipped
into to the distance like a sea monster, sliding into the waves. The Feng
Shui expert informed us that this feature was, in fact, a Green Dragon.
There was also a White Tiger somewhere. He wrote: "...From a Feng Shui
perspective, Halki is about as good as it gets".
For variety, there was a weekly boat trip to a deserted island with another superb Hospitaller castle. Besides this Dimitri, Halki's premier baker, would occasionally take a vanload of tourists to the monastery at the other end of the island and return at sunset. We went on one such trip but we waved the baker's van goodbye once we got there, opting to stay the night and return on foot the following day. There were no longer any monks, and the monastery was looked-after by a dour but friendly old couple. They tilled the fields, cleaned the cells, swept the courtyards and flushed the church with clouds of incense. While we consumed our sunset picnic outside, they prepared a bench-style bed for us in a small, vaulted chamber, and lit an oil lamp. It was an early night for us, but a cosy one, and a profoundly peaceful sleep. Our last stroll down Tarpon Springs Boulevard, we walked the full length of it. We left the monastery behind and crossed the barren hills, passing roadside chapels and ruined windmills along the way. We were to spend another day idling in the enchanted harbour of Halki before we left on the Nikos Express, the extra books unread, the laptop barely used. Tilos The goats, dozing in the shadows of the ruins, scatter as I scramble through the rubble of their domain. I peer around a doorway and disturb an owl from its dark niche - it flits silently into the mid-day sunlight. The couple of hundred houses that colonise this steep mountainside are roofless and crumbling. Until recent years, Mikro Horio was the capital of Tilos, one of the smaller Dodecanese islands, off Rhodes. It is an island of great natural beauty, rich history and slender resources. Most Tiliot families emigrated over the course of the last forty years, leaving one of the lowest population densities in the region. But some are returning, lured by the promise of a tourism-driven economic revival. The resident population of Tilos has stabilised at around 300, most of them in Livadia on the coast, or Megalo Horio, the island's village-sized capital. When Mikro was abandoned it was stripped of everything usable - including the roof beams. The deserted town remains as a monument to a toiling, agrarian past, to a time when entire families worked the stony terraces. Its piled-up houses and warren-like alleys impart an ancient feel, but surprisingly Mikro was a busy community with its own school until as recently as the 1960's. Vasili was born on Tilos, went to the United States to work, and returned to help establish a new family business in Livadia. He is fortyish, with the stubbly looks of a veteran rock guitarist. He smiles as he recalls his childhood on Tilos. "I was born here in Livadia...I lived in the old house that stood here before this one. I left when I was twelve years old but I remember so clearly what Tilos was like then". We were sitting
in Sophia's, the family-run taverna. Vasilis' dog slept in the road, there
was little enough traffic to bother him. Across the road was a beach that
swept in a long arc beneath the mountains to the harbour. "This road did
not exist, the beach was our road. My father was a shepherd and when he
married my mother (the eponymous Sophia) they both lived here. Before that
she lived with her family in Mikro. Money was unknown, but my father balanced
our account at the store from time to time with a baby goat, or a lamb.
The population then was about 2,500 but the life of farming was hard, and
people were beginning to learn about opportunities elsewhere"
Over field terraces choked with thorns, I climbed to the new telephone masts high above Mikro, and then took the concrete road back to Livadia, stopping at a lonely castle along the way. It was a tricky detour along a precipitous ridge, but the views were stunning. This was one of half-a-dozen fortifications on Tilos built by the Knights of Saint John, the military order that occupied these islands for 200 years. The biggest one was the kastro, above the white village of Megalo Horio. Many finely cut ashlars were incorporated into its rough walls, standing out like plums in the pudding of medieval stonework. These carved stones had clearly been salvaged from the ruins of a civilisation far older, from the time of the Ancient Greeks, a reminder that the process of decline and renewal is measured in centuries and millennia. The few tourists who negotiated the stiff climb to the kastro were now back down in Megalo, enjoying a cool drink on a terrace, waiting for the community bus. When it arrived, the schoolchildren who occupied it were re-arranged so that there were seats for all. Then we embarked on a lengthy tour, dropping-off the kids at their homes, even returning once again to Megalo before resuming our roundabout trip to Livadia. This was a good sign for the island - there were more children now than thirty years ago, when fortunes had ebbed to their lowest. At that time, Vasilis' parents were in Rhodes, but as tourists began trickling into Tilos (the first simple hotel opened some 20 years ago), prospects here brightened. The family wanted to run a business of their own so they returned, built a beachside taverna on the site of the old house, and opened their doors in 1986. "The life that I remember here was very simple and uncomplicated", Vasili recalls. "But there is nothing from that time that I miss. The island was so poor. It is better now. We have the means to make a living. There are new opportunities, and it depends on us, what we make of them. We can learn from the mistakes of bigger islands, where they have built so much, they have spoiled it". The population of Tilos is beginning to stabilise as families like Vasilis' become re-established in the small but growing tourist economy. Tilos has all of the history, scenery and traditional hospitality that the culturally inclined visitor could hope for. It also has superb beaches. But although its relative isolation has placed a natural restraint on development, intrusive new roads and apartment buildings have appeared in the last few years, and there is much European Union money flowing into projects of dubious value. Locals and regular visitors concerned at the early signs of exploitation have formed themselves into the Friends of Tilos Association, to support sustainable development and to try to steer opinion away from unsightly, fast buck errors. Mike Davies, a founder, says "We want to see Tilos develop in a way that will support a stable economy, and will continue to attract caring visitors". A tricky balance, but one worth going for. TILOS IS ABOUT 20 MILES LONG WITH A MOUNTAINOUS INTERIOR AND MANY GOOD BEACHES. THE RESIDENT POPULATION PEAKS AT AROUND 500 IN SUMMER. THE ISLAND IS REACHED BY A HYDROFOIL SERVICE THAT RUNS SEVERAL TIMES A WEEK FROM RHODES, AND A LESS FREQUENT ISLAND FERRY. The following articles are Richard's previous articles for the magazine:
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