A Journey Into Greece’s Land of a Thousand Stories

Are there any Greek islands left that are not overflowing with tourists?

Greece is a beautiful, brutal place. I discovered Mykonos as a boy, fell in love with its “perfection” (probably my own projections of a stubborn idealism that Greece invented pure beauty), visited Athens and the island almost every summer until “Shirley Valentine” put Mykonos on the tourist map and horribly transformed it into a seething anthill of sybarites, shoulder-to-shoulder on the twisting mazes of streets now lined with Gucci, Chanel and numerous other onerous luxury boutiques. But Pico Iyer’s piece and Alex Majoli’s photos stirred up the old love again and made me yearn for that ineffable spell that Greece—warts and all—will always cast over me. Thank you for a wonderful read!

Just keep in mind air travel is extremely damaging to all we love. Better to check out a few books from the library on the region and google some images. NYTimes needs to think of the ethicality/morality of promoting highly damaging air travel. We need to start making some choices, meaning sacrifices, for the sake of the planet. Far-flung travel for pleasure cannot be rationalized any longer.

That was marvelous, Mr. Iyer. Thank you. Your trip of 1982--well sir, it brought back memories. I have only been to Greece once--the summer of 1971. After graduating from college. We visited some other countries as well--and my! what a time we had. But Greece! The sky, the sea blue as nothing else. Blue did I say? I'm forgetting Homer's oinopa ponton--"the wine-dark sea." He has all those epithets for the sea, doesn't he. Like atrugetoio thalasses--"the barren sea"-- --splendidly imitated by Philip Larkin in an early poem. "The proud, unfruitful sea." Which reminds me of something odd. You speak rapturously, Mr. Iyer, of natural beauty. Great hills, unclouded skies-- --and by the way how sparse the soil is! I visited Ireland two summers ago, a land dotted with sheep ever nibbling that long lush grass. But the grass in your photo. Thin, unsatisfying I would think. Well--who knows? I'm not a sheep. But what I meant to say was: only seldom do the Greeks and Romans dwell on natural beauty. Only now and then do they turn their eyes to the mighty mountains, green fields, flowers and trees all around them. Maybe I should go back and check. I'm probably missing stuff. In Theocritus maybe. Or Virgil. Or someone. BUT-- --there is that marvelous passage at the end of Book Something-or-other in Homer's Iliad. Where the stars suddenly come out-- --"and the heart of the shepherd rejoices." Thanks again. Wonderful!

What a lovely, lovely article. It tells with great insight and very felicitous phrases what life is all about in this country. We are presently in Greece, enjoying it and now illuminated by the words of a most touching, poetical soul. The terrific photographs by Alex Majoli are a great plus.

I allow myself to imagine that that's the little beach where Odysseus woke up with all his treasure around him, an tried to lie to Athene about how he got there.

Seemed like a good article until about 5 paragraphs in there was the phrase, 'black clad women gossiping'. Why is it that when women talk together so many men use the term 'gossiping'? It's a turn off to hear/read that word when 'talking together', or even 'chatting' would work without insulting the subjects. That word degrades all women when it's used freely.

Though the writing is lovely, it romanticizes an economic disaster and superstitious religion that keeps people from progressing. Not sure why people find something so quaint about things like rituals to keep away the evil eye. Is the high unemployment equally quaint?

the taxi driver doesn't speak english. strange, in a country where almost all children have been going to after school english classes since the 1980s... the man behind the hotel desk was 'wild haired and gesticulating'...and 'no one in greece seems in a hurry to get anywhere'. at least kefalonia scored higher than port au prince! (beautiful friendly people the haitians...) another englishman with an education in the classics writing the same tired stereotypes about the east of mystery...he should go home to his rainy island nation and explore the mystery of Brexit...

Is this article a reprint from 75 years ago? Who in this day and age refers to women--I assume older women--as "crones"? Or assumes that the reader knows what he means by "Asian magnetism"? Who foregrounds Mount Athos as a schoolboy stomping ground without mentioning the fact that women are not allowed to go there? It seems that the author's British colonialist schooling has prepared him to converse with Xenophon, but not with actual Greeks today. Maybe if the author had the language skills to engage with people, he might realize that he is not in fact still in his "grandfather's time." Why is the author surprised that there are no highrises in remote, sparsely populated areas? The explicit point of this piece is to insist that time actually stands still in Greece, which requires that it a place that is primitive: "We were back in a child’s box of dazzling crayons, with no signs of industry of modernity to be seen." Yuck.

Funny how it is that no one learns the trick travel plays on the psyche as Homer learned and wrote about in the Odyssey. You believe you can outrun yourself, but alas wherever you go -- there you are. An insidious "Nostos" has taken over in the USA. Homer taught that the rosy past was a trick of the mind. He illuminated the irony of having to be separated from people, places and things before being able to fully appreciate them. The individual search for a "purer" place, person or thing is absent from the Iliad and the Odyssey. In fact, Homer shows us that is a fool's errand.

There's a very plausible theory that Ithaca is not The Ithaca: https://www.odysseus-unbound.org/

Lovely writing. Brings back wonderful memories of sensory Greek delights. In the beginning was Athens and Sparta thriving after the demise of Mycenae by natural disaster aka Atlantis. The ideas that Rome and Constantinople ' refined' for Western Europe's vision of Greece are still devolving and evolving. I saw so many a ' Roman copy of a Greek original' that became a British then an American copy of a Greek original that I lost count and track. Two and half millennia after the rise of classical Greece and it's cultural heir Rome, it remains for history to determine how well the British and American Empires managed their classical heritage.

I have been to Greece many times, and this article is the best description. It is thoroughly enjoyable. Kudos!

No part the authors "journey" through Greece sounded anything other than a fairytale and the comments of people here re: the current state of affairs in Greece, which are so sad, seem to be the new realty of what Greece has become. The Greece I hope to visit one day no longer exists.

I spent six weeks on Ithaca the summer of 2002, working with an archeological project to uncover remnants of the lost palace of Odysseus. I was 23 years old. At that point, the project had been going for over ten years with little to show for it other than a hypothesized Cave of the Nymphs. Nonetheless, every day we returned to Vathy, the locals would say, "Did you find anything digging today?" Their unfailing optimism paralleled their nonchalant sense of time. I adored them for it. As Mr. Iyer suggests, Ithaca's antiquity hides in plain sight in the remarkable cast of characters and daily rituals of the island: the firemen who parked their firetruck by the beach and stayed there all day, the spinster and her mother walking hand in hand, the old man with a radio flyer wagon bargaining for vegetables, the fishermen tenderizing octopus by beating them on the rocks, the gypsies with a truck full of melons and, yes, the old men with beads and dark coffee sitting like boulders outside of cafes. Among my most precious memories, and there are many, was one day I sat among the men outside the cafes facing the harbor. There was a funeral procession. All of the men and everyone along the crescent of the water's edge stood up, and Vathy stood still for as long as it took for the trail of mourners to disappear. It was the closest I felt to Homer that entire summer.

Outstanding writing, of the likes of Thubron. Clear mordant wit, incisive without injury.

Beautifully presented and strangely uplifting... Maybe this is the last glimmer of a Greece on its way to extinction and absorption into a suffocating conformity. Then again, she has been through several near-death experiences throughout her history, and is still here. All I can say is, let her glimmer.

Greece ill fated decision to join the E.U. was the last chapter in the storied past of this once glorious country. Goldman honchos, Blankfein and Cohen, showed Greeks technocrats how to cook the books allowing them admittance to the E.U. When international financiers called in the notes and Greeks were put on an austerity diet the country imploded, careening from left to right but always in homage to Brussels. The fire sale of public assets to feed the maw of Wall Street vulture capitalists has brought misery to millions of ordinary Greeks as those with money left on their yachts for tax free havens. It’s a story that is being played out around the world, privatizing the profits, strip mine the assets as the debts are hung around the necks of those left behind, whether Nafplio, Kiev or Detroit the formula is the same. The result is nationalism and a rise of the right, this to is something we’ve seen before and it never ends well.

The Greek nation continues to suffer from the economic crisis and a continuing negative birth rate. Without tourism, the country would be in total ruins. Wonderful islands like Mykonos, which I first visited as a child in the mid '60s, became a haven for "spring break" youth and are now totally overrun by tourists and high prices. Which makes the tourism industry a set of "golden handcuffs" for the Greek people. Fortunately, the Greek people are also a people of endurance.

Absence of high-rises and modern technologies?? The cities are crammed with ugly cement high rises, and web access is nearly universal.

"But in Greece, it’s the absence of modern developments — of high-rises and high-speed technologies" - the Athens public transit system is of fantastic quality, carries over a million people each day, and is constantly expanding and improving. Athens is swarming with construction and new development, having visited family there quite recently. You must have found very special blinders in the agora if they showed you that nothing in Greece has developed in modern times. Furthermore, this article absolutely nothing to help the Greek people alive today, as opposed to a 2000+ year old mythological figure, by espousing about 'crones' (really?) and the idea that nothing in Greece has changed or improved in millennia. If you want to do something helpful to Greece, maybe something about the excellent Greek ability to blend old and new might actually be of interest. Examples of this are dotted all over the country if you can take off your rose-tinted glasses for a moment to see them. Take your exoticizing and put it somewhere else.

One Equal Temper I Ulysses have seen much and I repent. Always when the storms cease, the horizon Flattens and the circumference returns. So must the ship seek still by star and lode That at least there is some hope of harbor Come to ground in calm clear waters. Do not tell me again of mystery islands Or the sirens seductive in their melody Or empires to be conquered come the dawn. Let me simply find a sand shore and footfall Set down and landed on the ocean’s edge And feel again the particles of broken shells. I will not be so foolish as to think of home Or finding hearth and solace in an ancient hall Or dream of sons to carry name and blazon. My only thought is that the storms are done And that the line is drawn so clear and straight That sets the lesser and the greater blue.

I was fortunate to travel to Greece and Turkey on a Fulbright Hayes Seminar Abroad in 2006 and I had the strange feeling, leaving the Minneapolis airport that I was not leaving home, I was going home to Greece. I had a true epiphany in Meteora. I hope the Greek people can recover from the horrific economic troubles that plague them. If I did not have grandchildren and children here, I would live in Greece.

Nice article. Epidauros by the way does not have an amphitheater (a Roman oval stadium) but rather a proper Greek theater!

It is tempting to describe Greece today the way one is keen to cherish it in memory - unhurried, postcard-perfect, steeped in time etc etc. Probably nothing that the author writes in this article is wrong - and yet, having been born and raised in Corfou, and kept coming back to Greece over the decades, I feel that this story lacks the depth that countless visits to the country should have revealed to the author. It's difficult to blame him. There is so much to love here. But the picture of Greece is all the more poignant when it is contextualized in the dramatic developments the country has faced recently. Even in a travel piece.

Like the writer, I tend to romanticize the recent trip my wife and I took to Crete, even if reality butted in. Like: A Cretan lamented that spring rains were relentless and lots of bridges collapsed. In fact we saw landslides spilled over onto many narrow roads. I learned that in rugged interior forests shepherds let their goats roam illegally. They’re munching on the bark and killing the trees. As for commerce, most waiters and some hotel receptionists looked at credit cards like plastic could have the Black Plague. More on money: one business person said she had a very difficult time getting paid and, anyways, didn’t want to give her hard-earned money to “the Athenians.” On the other hand, consider a picnic lunch inside a 1900 BC Minoan archeological site off a side road, alone amid the ancient village stones, outrageously green grass and wild flowers. The clouds float over a blue sky and a green blue sea blesses the background. That makes up for a lot. So too, the gorgeous Minoan artifacts in the Heraklion museum. So too the seafood, the raki and the whole wild, white Mediterranean sparkle of the island. Getting romantic here. The problem with Greece is you can’t resist.

I love Greece because it was the beacon of democracy and the foundation for the West. The descent of Greece, consequently, mirrors the descent of liberal democracy. The United States is not a Christian nation but a Greek one. Look at the architecture in Washington, D.C. It's all Enlightenment Greece. The Founders were fascinated with Greece and Rome and constantly referred to the Greeks in assembling the Constitution. The Founders worried, though, that this sort of government wouldn't work or couldn't work because the people lacked virtue. I think that's right. Our country (and democracies in general) is in trouble because the people here lack virtue. Montesquieu didn't mean religious virtue but civic virtue. It's easier to live under a despot (Trump) an aristocrat (Trump) and kleptocrat (Trump) than it is to live in a messy democracy. Restore Greece, return home to Ithaca (nostos) and the dream might survive.

Some folks I spoke with in Athens years ago wouldn’t romanticize their country or way of life the way this article does, though the author does nonetheless capture many thoughts and visions I experienced on my trip and could never articulate as well. Many Greeks feel their past is a burden and are not proud of their country or culture. In each conversation I tried to point out the good and the reasons to be hopeful, but I sensed a profound sadness and hopelessness with many Greeks I interacted with. Not to mention all the graffiti everywhere. I’ve never seen so much in any city anywhere. And the modern complex built for the 2004 Olympics has become a modern abandoned ruin. These two sides of Greece - the one described by the author and myself - exist simultaneously.

I am of greek descent, and have been to Greece 50+ times over my lifetime. It has changed alot and for the worse. Joining the EEC was the beginning of the end of what made Greece amazing -- and now it is being overrun by millions of careless tourists, and making deals with China that signal the beginning of a new occupation. This article - tho' charming and nice to read on a rainy Monday-- just romanticizes reality and misses what is really going on in the country.

So beautifully written, even the breakup part.

Thank you for this article. I am planning my first trip to Greece next spring. It's so beautiful

What a nice read on a gray morning while sipping my coffee. Thanks for the sunshine.

As a visitor of Greece in the last 20 years and an expat European here in France I can attest that Greece will probably never again see its glory days. The final Greek tragedy is that the very soul of the country and culture is lost or has been stolen by ghost like people that live somewhere else, like high rise penthouses in Manhattan. The psychological depression that has taken over Greece sucks the very life out of both visitors and residents!