Anna Fienberg — Swirling in my head today are stories and visions

Bobbing above the port are the blue and white and yellow houses, their whitewashed steps plundered by pirates. Hungry, lean, a leg missing or an eye, cats seize upon the plastic treasure chests humped in the lanes. Rubbish scraps flying, yowls shrilling, ginger fur electric with attention as the garbage truck lumbers slowly towards them.

Epano, above Charmian’s coloured cubes, the mountains send down shivers of shadow, loud with visions and stories and the Panaghia riding on waves of liturgical singing that sets my blood on fire.

This morning, when we were gathered at the early Christian church, our guide, Kyria Evdoxia, told us the story of the shepherd who witnessed a miracle.

Walking through the bushes of wild oregano and thyme, looking to sell his cheese, the shepherd heard a fierce crying out: ‘The pirates are coming, hide, hide!’

The shepherd hurried up the hill and came upon a church filled with people feasting and celebrating. It was Holy Saturday, and the Virgin Mary had blessed them.

‘Panaghia,’ the cry came again, ‘bury yourself under the church, the people must be saved!’

The call was urgent and the Panaghia descended and did bury herself under the earth.

Later in the day the shepherd came across another traveller, and told him of this strange event. ‘The people in the church were celebrating Holy Saturday,’ he said, ‘but there was something odd about them. Their clothes…they were dressed weirdly, as in ancient times.’

The traveller shook his head. ‘That’s a mystery,’ he said. ‘There’s no church in these parts, and no people that gather for Holy Saturday.’

And so it is understood that the shepherd witnessed a miracle.

A good story? A vision? A legend?

As Kyria Evdoxia told the story she stopped suddenly, overcome with emotion. ‘The Panaghia, the Virgin Mary, she is always there for us, she holds us in her arms,’ she explained, and tears ran down her luminous face. Evdoxia was magnetic standing there with her night-black hair and eyes, rocking with the ancient story that was living inside her, right then, right now, and flowing into us.

As we sat on the wooden chairs in the church that has now been built in this spot, under the frescoes and saints with eyes just like Evdoxia, it seemed the ghosts of those people came alive in the silence. The air filled with sorrow and love and the inevitability of death in life.

But not yet, not yet! Feast, dance, pray, climb the towers into the divine embrace.

Being the Jewish atheist I am, I was amazed at my own tears, and heard again the deep male singing of the priest that morning. I thought how porous we all are, weathering away under a flood of visions and stories from those past and present.

Fresco of the Panaghia, which we saw in a small church in the Valley of Vathy.

The notes on the loudspeaker were still winding around the streets as I made my way home. People hastily stepping into church, making the sign of the cross, buying oranges or chatting in the doorway of a café, we were all being stitched together, each scale and climbing note sewing us closer. Come in! the notes called, and you couldn’t help but be drawn, your blood lighting up, your nose and breath filling with incense.

This is a community living either side of narrow stone streets so scant as to seem like corridors, where vases of geraniums blare and motorbikes toot as you turn a corner.

Coming from a safe, quiet suburb in Australia, where the bins are emptied each Thursday and no one shouts across the square, the contrast is loud. Back home space between us is sought, the fragile business of being human muffled, and the sounds of neighbours to be avoided. Mowers and the blowers drive you mad, and the Neil Diamond songs drifting in from next door have always set my teeth on edge.

Here in Kalymnos I’m outside looking in, I know, and staying only nine days, riding along Charmian’s gilded words and my own invention, but still, but still…such a hankering I feel to stay longer, to understand.

What is this delight? To be assailed by mystery, to be taken over – oh it feels wonderful to surrender, to walk down a dream in the company of others, as natural as the wild rush of oregano that wafts up as you brush against the bushes growing in the stones.

Walking through rigani as we climb the citadel above Chora…

On this last morning, I’m thinking about Charmian’s writing, as I’ve done each of these nine precious days. In her novel, Honour’s Mimic, she opened the door to this culture and place, with her characters Kathy and Fotis providing shoes for us to step into, paths to see and hear and dig our way into the heart of things.

During these nine days, we breathed in Nadia’s profound insights, knowledge and questions, investigated each other’s responses, Martin’s poetry, the rituals of Apocreas, Easter, revelations about the effects of immigration in Charmian’s life and ours. Oh so many things!

We lived in the pink Villa Melina and in our minds inhabited the yellow house on the port. We walked Charmian’s streets, visited her St Nicholas, were awed by the shadows of her ‘appalling’ and magnificent mountains. Her stories, flavoured by the island, its rituals and myths, landscape and portraits gave us a vocabulary and palette to approach this world.

I thought about the way my skin had stung at the priest’s singing, my tears at stories coming true in the streets, the yearning that’s strong in the songs and history of this place, and it seemed for a moment that religious striving toward God’s blessing was akin to my own yearning — to capture this existence in words.  How blessed are those rare sunrise moments when you climb the tower day after day and at last a phrase takes shape that resembles the divine image that once flamed in your mind.

History revealed (or perhaps concealed) in the stones on Telendos…

Charmian’s Kalymnos blended seamlessly with archaeology and religion, pagan gods and Byzantium, Christianity and the wonderful rites of lunch. Oh, Lunch! If I began to talk about lunch, I would never stop… melting garlic feta enclosed in baked red peppers, creamy moussaka, saganaki to die for, chick peas with tomato and caramelised onion melting on your tongue, zucchini flowers, yoghurt with walnuts and honey…The honey!

Just now, on this last morning, I can’t help thinking of Pooh Bear, the friendly philosopher of my childhood. Another time, another culture, but the appreciation of honey surely is universal. Wouldn’t Pooh have loved this Kalymnos honey, ‘the best in the world’!? I wish I could watch him dip his paw in the jar and savour the spread of this most delicious spicy sweetness, produced by bees that bathe themselves in the thyme of Kalymnos.