A DAY AT THE DOOCOT

Georges has invited us to spend the day with him and his family at a dovecot he’s made into a little mountain retreat among the olive terraces. We rendezvous with Georges outside his photographic shop/studio in town on Sunday morning so he can show us the way to the peristerioni. During the summer months, the family work long hours in their shop and restaurant, so winter is the time to be together in the beautifully restored dovecot.

Doocots are a common sight in Tinos, some of them big as houses, all of them decorated with the same distinctive circles and triangles that look like a face. Quite a scary face. They appear like totems amongst the terraces. The bird droppings collected from inside are used to fertilise the surrounding land.

 

The doves are long gone from Georges’ birdhouse. As well as rebuilding the surrounding terrace walls, he has transformed the inside of the building into the best mountain hideaway EVER. Upstairs, there are Tinos tapestries and paintings on the walls of the tiny bedroom, kerosene lamps, handmade chairs, an antique writing desk. Downstairs, if it wasn’t for the photograph showing a young Georges sitting proudly on his motorbike, it would be hard to tell what century we are in.

We drink Greek coffee and eat custard pastries outside while the kids play on the terraces. Paraskevi - Georges and Evangelista’s daughter – is three months older than Hector and capable of trotting along the top of the walls with ease, not in the slightest put off by the four metre drop to the terrace below. The little kids collect black olives while the bigger ones play cards.

Evangelista serves up a fantastic meal for lunch. The pasta is made by her mother in the north of Greece using wheat, oil and eggs from the family farm. After lunch, the boys entertain us with a bit of music. And as the sun starts to slip away behind the mountains, we go inside the birdhouse and sit around the open fire drinking shot glasses of raki. Can things really get any better than this?

A day earlier, and it is ideal beach weather. Hector cuts a fine figure in his wetsuit while Michael helps Flora get her confidence in the water.

Later, while Michael does some online tutorials in creating java script, Max, Flora and I walk over to the next beach up the coast. The week before, I’d been getting the boys to do a bit of science, reading up about different types of rock – sedimentary, igneous and metamorphic – mostly to help them understand how marble is made. And right here above the beach was a perfect illustration of the topic:

Christmas, it has to be said, feels very distant here. Perhaps it’s the weather. Or the increase in daylight hours. Maybe it’s the fact that aside from one specialist gift shop in town and a small table at the front of the supermarket, there really is very little evidence of the consumer side of things. Santa, we’ve been told, comes on the 1^st of January instead of the 25^th December and usually arrives by boat, although if the weather is bad, he’s been known to use a helicopter. He gives out presents to the children who go along to the pier to see him, which sounds very sensible and out in the open instead of all this sliding down the chimney and creeping about in the dark. It’s going to be a hard call convincing our lot to wait until the 1^st for their presents. But when in Rome…

Even with a vastly reduced number of toys and screen distractions, the kids seem to be managing to amuse themselves pretty well, though I did detect a hint of home sickness in the following drawing: