GREECE

May/June 2026

It’s hard to write an insightful or even just an interesting newsletter about Greece when so many of you have been here already. In this journey I was revisiting some places and the impact of the landscape and the history wasn’t as powerful the second time around. Even some of my photos weren’t as good because as the number of tourists to famous sites like Corinth or Olympia increases year by year they irritatingly stand in the way of trying to get that decent shot of Atreus’s Treasury or the Temple of Hera. Mind you, I suppose I’m in plenty of other people’s pictures as well.

Still, I’ll do my best to entertain you. The focus of this part of our journey was a combination of culture and dipping into the Mediterranean  but it turned out to have an unexpectedly good focus on food as well. Susan was interested in exploring the Peloponnese and I found a small group tour that balanced visits to historic sites with time to swim. It turned out to be an excellent choice - although our beach lounging was sometimes cancelled because of rain. Epos Travel & Tours https://www.epostravel-tours.com/ is a family-owned company. Dad, based in Tripoli,  has designed some of the itineraries and does some driving. Mum lives on Aegina and she provides cooking classes and hospitality at the end of the Circle around the Peloponnese tour that we did as well as keeping the books. Two of the three sons do the management, administration and lead the tours. And the drivers are all family friends from Tripoli.

We were lucky enough to have the utterly charming Dionysis  as our guide. Passionate about the history and culture of the Peloponnese. Equally passionate about ensuring that his guests had a good time particularly when it came to lunch. I confess I have never had such late lunches (usually starting around 2pm) but it meant that we rarely bothered with anything more than a glass of wine, nuts or chips, and a dessert for dinner. The joy of the lunches was that it turned into a meze meal. Shared between 8 of us, we could try a wide variety of foods. As an example, here are flavours we experience in Stoupa:

• Bread with an olive spread

• Shrimp Saganaki 

• Patzarosalata - beetroot salad

• Greek salad

• Tiropitakia - small cheese packages wrapped in pastry

• Feta me Meli – feta in phyllo pastry drizzled with honey and sesame seeds

• Lemon pork 

• Beef stifado 

• Spetzofai - sausage with capsicum 

• Prawns wrapped in bacon and served on lemon

• Lamb wrapped in parchment with potatoes and other vegetables

Needless to say, there was good local wine to go with each meal. As with Morocco and the Stans, we were in cherry/strawberry/apricot season but the most surprising fruit was some loquats in Olympia. I remember them being irritating fruit – you had to peel them, they mainly consisted of large seeds, and were usually quite bland but these ones were juicy and sweet. As for sweetness, the Greeks really know how to respond to that craving at breakfast. Not just fruit but endless different types of what one might call tea cakes – marble, chocolate, raspberry, apple.

Because the food was so fresh and tasty, people would dive in as soon as a plate arrived on the table so I usually failed to get photos of our feasts but here’s some fish from a café near Methoni Castle to share with you. 

Our fellow travellers were an American couple and a couple from Portarlington in Victoria. Very different but all very pleasant. The Australian couple were a recently retired nurse and electrical engineer. The Americans were almost retired. She was a medical advisor to a research centre and he was an academic research specialist in Pfas chemicals. And not Trump voters, thank goodness. We travelled in an 8-seater van through narrow village roads, clinging to the sides of mountains, up to clouds and down to bays from Napflio in the east to Monemvasia in the south to Kalamata in the west and Tripoli in the centre. We visited sites that captured all the historic periods of the Greek story  but if you have no interest in history, feel free to ignore the next couple of paragraphs and move onto the world of flowers. 

Luckily, I’d been reading Robin Lane Fox’s The Classical World: An Epic History of Greece and Rome before we left and so I had some idea of the early stories of Greece and through a combination of the wonderful TV series Kaos and Nigel Pivey’s great YA book Songs of Bronze, I was almost up to date on my Greek gods and myths as well.  Our visits included sites which covered each period of this land’s history:

• Mycenae and the Trojan War: the beehive building called the Tomb of Agamemnon constructed between 1300 and 1250 BCE

• Geometric & the beginning of the Olympic Games: Ancient Olympia

• Archaic & the beginning of democracy in Athens: Athens (albeit only for a minute and we did a food walking tour rather than a history one) 

• Classical with the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars: harbour of Pylos, the site of an Athenian victory over Sparta in 425 BCE

• Hellenistic with Greek becoming an international language as colonists moved around the Mediterranean: Sparta,  which suffered a decline during this period in the 3rd century BCE

• Roman: Ancient Corinth with it’s Forum and the Bema where apostle Paul was tried in 52 AD 

• Byzantine: the ghost city of Mystras perched on the steep slopes of Mount Taygetos 

• Venetians: Methoni Castle which changed hands a number of times between the Venetians and the Ottomans

• Ottoman: 16th century mosque in Monemvasia

• Greek War of Independence: Aeropoli where the first flag of the War of Independence was raised in 1821and Nafplio which was the first capital of the new country.

We visited some of the places where Hercules enacted his 7 labours. We rode on small boats through caves that might have inspired visions of the underworld. We went to the remains of an oracle of Poseidon. We saw the faded frescoes of churches saved from the Ottomans. And sometimes, we just wandered through small towns enjoying the ambience. 

It was a world of flowers from the pink and white oleander growing on the side of the roads to the red bottlebrush that occasionally appeared to please an Australian eye. The other reds I loved were the poppies amongst the marble remnants and the bougainvillea falling across white walls in towns like Nafplio. The landscape varied between rich green valleys, hills covered in olive trees  and stony mountainous outcrops. One village was made of tower houses, built out of stone with hardly any mortar. It had been deserted but slowly people were moving back in. 

My favourite moments were:

• Sitting out on my balcony in Monemvasia looking out at the golden castle walls as a kitten played amongst the grass

• Having my first swim in Kyparissi, a tiny village off the beaten track which, for that very reason, was a favourite of Princess Diana 

• Having a cocktail on the cobblestones of Aeropoli, looking at the monuments that celebrate the starting point of the 1821 Greek War of Independence 

• The whiff of wild onions and sea salt as we walked through the ruins of Methoni Castle

• Thrilling Dionysis when we knew some of the names and stories from Greek history.

Due to a rockfall on a major road, the last couple of days of our trip had to be changed and we caught the ferry from Athens to Aegina. This is the home island of Dionysis’s mother Argiro. After her four children had left home, she couldn’t bear living in Tripoli any longer and headed back to a place where she could see and breath the sea, leaving her husband behind. She gave us a lesson in how to make tzatziki and fed us at her home, another special night. The next day we went out in a little boat with a fisherman friend of hers to visit some nearby islands. The unexpected pleasure of this trip was being greeted by an ostentation of peacocks on Mani and then being feed some freshly caught, freshly cooked sea bream, sitting on the boat in Agistri harbour after a couple of island swims. 

After we said goodbye to Dionysis and his family and our fellow travellers, we caught a plane to Rhodes for a couple of days of rest and relaxation before returning home. And that strategy worked beautifully. I’d spent a couple of weeks in Rhodes as part of my Mediterranean book writing trip in 2014  but Susan hadn’t visited this island. It has elements of all those Greek periods of history that I mentioned earlier with a special addition – the Italians. They attempted to colonise the island from 1912 to 1943. While they bulldozed part of the old city to allow for cars and tanks, they also preserved and renovated much of it, such as Palace of the Grand Master,  and also created a port that reflects early 20th century architecture. From this perspective you look out imagining where the Colossus of Rhodes  might have been and also look across a short strip of the Mediterranean to Türkiye. It’s equally easy to imagine another conflict because the Turks are currently arguing for expanded maritime rights in the Aegean Sea. 

We rented an Airbnb in the old town and I spent many an hour lounging in the company of local cat looking at the walls of the city, the Palace, a minaret and a Byzantine church dome. Other lounging was done at Elli Beach on the day the season officially started and sun lounge cost increased to 30-50 euros, depending on which row you chose. 

The best flavours of Greece this time are linked to places:

• Sipping honeyed Malvasia, a dessert wine, at the edge of Monemvasia Castle 

• Eating a delicious serving of hummus and pita after we’d walked of one Rhodes restaurant that was more interested in numbers than service

• Enjoying deep fried white bait and grilled sardines sitting next to Methoni castle

• Toasting a great day on the water with Captain Dinos’s (“I only drink for medicinal purposes”) special Cretan wine made with 15 herbs and honey

• Eating the bread that Argiro usually makes for her local church to be followed by a delicious roast pork 

• Drinking  wine made from local grapes while eating a meze at Anastasia Vineyard in the centre of the island Rhodes 

• And all those village lunches….

Every time I had a serve of Feta me Meli, I was in my own version of heaven. 

We did get to share some of these wonderful treats with the local cats. Compared to those in Morocco, Greek cats look slightly less flea-ridden and slightly better fed but this didn’t stop Susan buying some cat biscuits for our neighbours in Rhodes.

In every aspect of our travels this year, people have been kind and helpful. Perhaps it’s my grey hair or the occasional use of a walking stick. But it was even more obvious on this leg of the journey: the random person who took my carry-on luggage down the stairs at Athens airport; the young electric buggy driver who waited to make sure our Rhodes taxi was going to appear; the young woman who waved us ahead of the airport security queue because she liked our glasses. We’ve been well treated. In addition, we’ve received endless compliments from Greek men and that’s not just because we remind them of their yiayia  but rather because of our colourful clothes and glasses. And I confess I love the phrase that is used by service people all over Greece when addressing women of our vintage: “my ladies” they say; “what would my ladies like?” 

So the “ladies’ have returned to Australia although as I type this Susan is Melbourne for a funeral. There was a period of great sadness during our time in Greece when we heard news that the delightful daughter of a dear friend had taken her own life. In some ways, Greece provided a framework for mourning with all its tragic stories but it also provided warmth, both literal and metaphysical, to help the healing.

Thank you for taking the time to read these missives. It’s good to reflect on one’s travels and this process of writing helps me as well as, I hope, entertains you.

Photos:

1. Dionysis

2. Fish meal  near Methoni Castle

3. Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus

4. Roman plinth, Archaeological site of Ancient Corinth

5. Mystras

6. Frescoes in Mystras

7. Olive trees driving through Coastal Arcadia

8. Bougainvillea of Nafplio

9. Ann & Susan in front of Vathia

10. First swim in Kyparissi

11. Peacocks on Mani Island

12. Captaim Dinos’s boat

13. Fluvian Terrace, Rhodes

14. Dusk at Monemvasia Castle

15. Late lunch with Alexis & Susan, Rhodes

16. Dinner with Dionysis and Argiro

17. Susan & the cats of Rhodes