An Athenian Diary

A Day on Aigina

It's late Sunday morning. We're standing on the docks at the Peiraieus, Athens' bustling port. Big container ships hug the docks, cranes hanging overhead. An Italian warship sits across the way, grey and serious -- why are warships always grey? Directly ahead are docked a bunch of big car ferries, the workhorses of inter-island transportation. For a few dollars you get your ticket at a shed on the docks, wait for sailing time, hustle on board, and an hour or two later Athens becomes a wispy memory as you sit on the seafront of a little island village, the masts of the fishing boats rocking in the breeze across the way, radiant island light glimmering everywhere. That's our goal, for the day -- a trip to Aigina.

Aigina's the closest big island to Athens. Even on smoggy days you can easily see its lumbering profile from the Akropolis. Perikles called it "the eyesore of the Peiraieus" because Athens and Aigina were longtime enemies, having fought wars in the Archaic and Classical periods. The Aiginetans were among the first Greeks to adopt the eastern habit of striking coins, supplied with the memorable emblem of a turtle. They competed with the Athenian owls in the Aegean region, as did the traders from the island; perhaps this competition explains some of the hostility. The Aiginetans today -- many of whom are not native islanders but refugees from the Peloponnesos and the islands of Chios and Psara in the aftermath of the war of independence (more perhaps on these matters in another installment) -- have claim to a certain superiority over their Athenian neighbors (who now of course massively outnumber them) because Aigina was the first capital of independent Greece, in 1826-1828. The central square of the main town remains dedicated to the memory of Ioannis Antonios Kapodistrias, the first head of Greece, who officiated from Aigina.

Like most Greek islands, Aigina has a main town where most of the boats dock. Its capacious harbor shelters a fleet of small fishing boats, pleasure boats (both sail and motor, hailing from as far away as London), and cargo ships laden with grain or oil. The big ferries are too cumbersome to get inside the harbor, so they dock on the seaside of a quay jutting out along one end of the harbor. Our day was a beautiful, sunny, late summer Sunday, with just enough wind to make the journey fun -- you knew you were on a ship if you walked to the bathroom or the snack bar -- but not enough to interfere with docking -- or guarantee seasickness. Out in the Kyklades, in the middle of the Aegean, summer's marked by the endless days of the meltemi, a fierce north wind generated by a settled low pressure system in the Middle East that greedily sucks air out of Europe. The meltemi can make travel a nightmare, even on the big ferries. I recall once going to Amorgos on a ferry surely among the largest, which was forced to wait hours outside the harbor because the wind make it too dangerous to dock. Another time, on a much smaller ship, I spent hours braced against floor and wall in the passenger cabin as the boat rolled through 45 degrees in mountainous waves the meltemi had spawned. (I had to throw away the newspaper I read ferociously the whole time to keep my mind off the possibility of sinking, because even on shore, whenever I looked at it, the nausea came back like Satan himself.)

We disembarked on the quay and walked into town. There was bustle everywhere -- people walking, motorcycles, folks sitting in the endless row of sidewalk cafes, shady with umbrellas, that stretched along the seafront as far as you could see. But the bustle wasn't the fast-paced, serious bustle of Athens; it was the happy bustle of people on holiday, of locals making money, of enjoyment of a sunny day. We didn't see many foreigners; the tourists were largely Greeks, probably Athenians like us escaping for a day or a weekend to this nearby refuge. We stopped in a little park to apply sunscreen and decide what to do. Edie and I had talked about going to see the archaia -- most notably here the temple of Aphaia, remarkable because its cella (the interior structure) is preserved to two stories. But the temple stands on a hill at Ayia Marina, the other main town, 20 or 30 minutes away by bus; by silent agreement ambitious plans faded away; we found a cafe to have some lunch in, and then went for a stroll around the town.

The streets are narrow and cool, above balconies project into the street space to add more shade and tamp down noise. Many streets have been reserved for pedestrian traffic alone. The shops have all the kitsch of the Plaka in Athens (proving that it can't only be the American tourists who buy reproductions of Greek vases or ithyphallic satyrs) but less of the pressure; the shopkeepers held back as we walked by, inspecting their wares, kids fascinating especially by calendars (the "Girls of Greece" in its endless variety of uncovered flesh provided a special focus for their silent meditation). There were cats too, sleeping on the street, sleeping on chairs, seeming less driven -- and fatter -- than their Athenian compeers. The scale of everything is just more human than Athens -- this feels like a town that you could get a handle on, come to understand. We strolled without map or plan, back through the shopping district and out into streets slightly broader (big enough anyway that two cars going opposite directions might hope to contend for passage), where ordinary people lived. Here were the grocery stores, furniture shops, clothing stores to support ordinary life, and the bougainvillea to lend it joy. We stumbled on a little orchard of pistachios adjacent to a church. Aigina is famous for its pistachios. As we stood there admiring the trees,

intertwined at the top to cast an unbroken shadow on the ground, a man came up to us and started telling us all about the pistachios, how sweet they are here on Aigina (or maybe he meant the ones in the church yard), how when he was a child they used to collect the trimmings of the branches and fallen leaves and take them home -- but no one, he said, did that any more. It was such a typical encounter out away from Athens -- he started talking to us without hesitation or introduction, because he saw us looking at the orchard, and he told us what he thought we'd find interesting. When he was done he said a cheery good-bye and went on about his business. He didn't want anything from us; he just wanted to share what he knew because he thought we ought to know it too. And he didn't care about my sloppy and ungrammatical Greek. I don't mean to romanticize -- there are plenty of problems out in the islands, to which I may revert later -- but the encounter was genuine, part of Greece that you don't get in Athens, where everyone is too busy being modern and European and plugged in, or in the big tourist centers, but that still lives on elsewhere.

Our walk took us by the local hospital, along a street that seemed very unpromising -- till suddenly we rounded a corner and before us rose a stunning mediaeval tower! Three stories high, it glowers over a little park and some other structures across the way that look  early too. There was absolutely no information about this structure -- no placard, no historical marker, not even a label with a name or date. Only a sign marking the square as the Kapodistreion, the "spiritual center of Aigina" (obviously having nothing to do with the tower). The big door under the stairway and the smaller one at the top were resolutely locked; shutters prevented even a peak at the inside. Was this perhaps the headquarters of the Venetian prince or Turkish pasha who ruled Aigina long ago? Or perhaps a relict of the Franks, or even the Knights Templar? The absence of authoritative information at the site opens the gates to imagination. So for Alison and Caroline the tower became their castle for an afternoon, and they princesses, who threw plastic bottle caps from the top of the steps to admiring but undeserving subjects below. (Probabilities are that the tower is Venetian. Venice or Venetian and Catalan families controlled the island from 1204 to 1573. From 1573 until 1654 the Ottomans held it, but in 1573 the Venetians recaptured Aigina and retained it till 1718, when the Ottomans got it back.)

Without having planned it, our walk took us in a great circle back to the seafront. We choose a cafe and settled in to pass the hour till our boat returned. We'd bought tickets for a really big boat, to give the kids the experience. Meanwhile, overpriced milkshakes and standard priced french fries (the patates you get everywhere in Greece, hand-cut in the kitchen and fried fresh in olive oil, delicious as no french fries anywhere in America have been for decades) satisfied hunger and filled the time.

Soon enough it was time to leave. We headed down for the quay. A line of cars was already queued up, waiting for the boat. (When the boat docked at Athens out came not only all the cars we had seen but many more and a gigantic tourist bus -- it's amazing what can go down in that capacious hold.) Pretty soon it appeared rounding the cape, and everybody began jostling down to get on board -- no order, no lines, squealing motorbikes, the shrill whistle of the sailor trying to direct traffic, shouts of grandparents saying goodbye, families trying to keep together in the press of the crowd or share out tickets in case they got split up. We held hands like a human chain, threading our way through, till at last we climbed the steep gangways to the top of the ship and headed back for Athens in the late afternoon light sweeping down from sudden clouds, paced by seagulls, swept by wind that finally drove us off the upper deck to the shelter of the cabin.

September 20, 2003