Thor and I follow in the footsteps of Philhellene author Lawrence Durrell as we admire the ancient city overlooking the blue Aegean Sea.
NOTE: Since our recent trip to Greece to research more settings for my novel-in-progress, THE ARIADNE DISCONNECT, Thor and I knew we had to return to this magical region. My first entry in this new blog series posted here on Saturday, 10/20/2018. It gives an overview of our rambles from Athens to seven islands in the Dodecanese and Cyclades groups, ending our ferry-hopping pilgrimage on the anciently sacred island of Delos.
After visiting Durrell’s haunts in Old Rhodos Town, we rounded out our visit to this beautiful island with a trip to one his favorite sites. Kameiros was one of three Doric cities that controlled the island from around 400 B.C., with later occupation by Romans. It’s a lovely site perched among pine trees above the sea, the layout of the town well preserved.
Since I’ve spent the last week in the fog of a nasty virus going around our own town, today I’ll turn to Lawrence Durrell for a description of the site as he saw it in the 1940s, from his memoir Reflections on a Marine Venus:
“You arrive in the centre of the ancient town almost before you know it; it is as sudden as a descent from a balloon. The whole thing assembles itself before your eyes like a picture thrown upon a cinema-screen. It lies there in the honey-gold afternoon light listening to the melodious ringing of water in its own cisterns, and the faint whipping of wind in the noble pines which crown the amphitheatre. The light here has a peculiar density as if the blue of the sea had stained it with some of its own troubled dyes. The long sloping main-street is littered with chipped inscriptions….”
“If such a city, you find yourself thinking, if such a landscape-out-of-time was not able to strike the right chord in the human heart by its appeals to clemency, truth, and intellectual order of life, what chance have we with our unburied cities to do so? And when you see the grave-stones from the little necropolis of Cameirus stacked in our museums (it is inevitable that the treasures of towns like these are hoarded up in Museums) it is the so-often repeated single word — the anonymous Chaire — which attracts you by its simple, obsessive message to the living. It is not the names of the rich or the worthy, not the votive reliefs and the sepulchral epigrams, but this single word, Be Happy.”
During my first trip to Crete many years ago, I learned this all-purpose greeting, farewell, and ritual toast: Chairete! Rejoice! Living among such natural beauty, perhaps it’s the only term, as Durrell suggests, to sum up the Greek approach to life and death.
Not quite on death’s doorstep, I’m weathering the virus, and will return next week with our photos and historical information about this stunning ancient site. Meanwhile, Chairete!
*****
You will find The Rambling Writer’s blog posts here every Saturday. Sara’s latest novel from Book View Cafe is available in print and ebook: The Ariadne Connection. It’s a near-future thriller set in the Greek islands. “Technology triggers a deadly new plague. Can a healer find the cure?” The novel has received the Chanticleer Global Thriller Grand Prize and the Cygnus Award for Speculative Fiction. Sara has recently returned from another research trip in Greece and is back at work on the sequel, The Ariadne Disconnect. Sign up for her quarterly email newsletter at www.sarastamey.com
Sara Stamey, thanks! And thanks for sharing your great posts every week!