How One Greek Village Voted

by Dave Seminara on

Greek voters went to the polls on Sunday and I spent a chunk of the day getting to know people at a polling station in a small village on the island of Naxos. By evening’s end, I’d witnessed a sea change in the village’s political preferences, a bar fight and the counting of 355 ballots for parties ranging from Communist to neo-Nazi.

Checking out polling stations and talking to voters isn’t generally high on the list of priorities for travelers in the Greek islands but with the fate of the Euro at stake and the world watching, I wanted to watch the ballots being counted somewhere on the island of Naxos, where I’m currently staying.

Over the last month, I’ve asked dozens of Greeks in Kos, Patmos, Samos, Syros and Naxos, as well as Greeks from the mainland who were vacationing on the islands, who they were voting for. Before answering, most took the time to denounce politics and politicians in general, and nearly all of them expressed a fatalistic view that it didn’t really matter who won or lost the election.After the May 6 election that produced a stalemate, with no government coalition formed, skepticism has been at an all-time high. A woman we met in Syros started crying when my wife asked her about the election.

“My country,” she said. “Everything’s gone totally wrong.”

Quite a few others told me they were going to vote for Syriza, a coalition of radical left wing parties led by the charismatic 37-year-old leader Alexis Tsipras. The coalition has promised to renegotiate Greece’s bailout deal with its European partners.

“Everyone hears that Europe and the financial markets are scared of Syriza, and that makes people interested in voting for them,” said Anna Avgouli, a newspaper editor in Kos, summing up the views of many I spoke to.

But as the election grew nearer, I started to meet more and more Greeks who said they were voting for the New Democracy party led by Antonis Samaras. Most said that Tsipras was too young and worried that he would isolate Greece, ruin its economy and very possibly get it kicked out of the euro zone.

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After driving about a half-hour outside of touristy Naxos town (Hora), I followed a sign leading us to an early 7th Century church, and then stumbled across a polling station in the small village of Ano Sangri. I went inside, introduced myself and Vasiliki “Vaso” Anastasopolou, a 30-something election volunteer, said that I could return at 7 p.m. to watch them count the votes.

Vaso told me that most of the village’s residents are potato and dairy farmers, and, while the rest of the country largely repudiated Pasok (the party that many blame for getting Greece into the mess it’s in), in the most recent election on May 6, they actually garnered the most votes in the village followed by Syriza.

“There are a lot of old people here,” she explained. “They always vote for the same party no matter what’s going on.”

Still, the fact that Syriza finished second in the village surprised many and she and the other election volunteers in the room predicted that Syriza might come in first in the village this time around.

I returned to the Ano Sangri well before the polls closed and had a drink in the village’s only taverna, around the corner from the school that serves as a polling station. A large group of senior citizens was gathered around a television showing a Greek news station that was providing election coverage.

An elderly man wearing an odd woolen suit on a hot day was screaming at another patron and threatening him with his cane. I asked the waiter what was going on.

“Oh nothing,” he said. “They are just, what do you call it…”

“Disagreeing about politics?” I ventured.

“Exactly,” he said.

I sat and watched for a few minutes and couldn’t take my eyes off of a cross-eyed man who looked like he was ready to belt someone.

“He likes Pasok, but the others don’t,” the waiter explained.

When I returned to the polling station amidst an escalating drunken feud at the taverna, I was the object of great curiosity, as everyone wanted to know why I was there and how I had chosen this particular village. I had no coherent answer to the question but no one seemed to care. I was introduced to the town mayor, Stelios Skordialos, a gray-haired man with piercing green eyes, who also held the key to the church I had been looking for that morning.

He cast the final vote in the village, at one minute to seven, and then the doors were locked. There were four volunteers plus representatives from three of the largest political parties to supervise the counting of the votes. The mayor and I sat in the back of the room, whispering.

“Nea Democratia,” he said, pointing to a bearded, wild-eyed man who appeared to have bird shit stains on the back of his shirt. “And him, koo-koo-eh,” he said, using the acronym for Greece’s largest communist party.

In my travels, I couldn’t help but notice how well organized the communists are in Greece. Their posters, featuring the party’s red and yellow hammer and sickle, are in almost every little village all over the Greek Islands, despite the fact that they usually poll at 10 percent or less.

As the mayor and I sat quietly the workers got busy taking the huge clear glass ballot box lid off and dumping all the ballots all over a big long table. The village had ballots from 17 of the 22 parties; a few of the smaller ones didn’t bother to send them ballots, I was told. But some of the fringe ones, like the Neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party, did have ballots and the volunteers told me they got 10 votes in the May 6 election.

“That’s 10 too many,” a volunteer named Takis said. “There are a few crazy people in the village – you’ll see; they’ll probably get even more votes tonight.”

All of the ballots were in sealed envelopes and the volunteers stacked them all neatly on a table and began to open them one by one, using the ballot box as a trash can for all the discarded envelopes.

A couple of minutes after the counting started, a man slipped into the room from a side door and was loudly rebuked by Vaso. A lawyer by trade and the room’s only fluent English speaker, she was clearly in command of this room full of men. As she began to call out the votes, I kept hearing “Syriza, Syriza, Syriza,” and it was clear that a big change in the village was afoot.

Vaso said that all the old people kept voting for Pasok, but clearly many of them had defected. After a few minutes, the count grew tedious and I studied the classroom we were in. There were two chalkboards, a set of old, dusty encyclopedias, an old looking computer, some children’s paintings and portraits of important figures in Greek history adorning the walls.

An hour into the count the results were tabulated; 355 people had turned out to vote and Syriza won in a landslide. The results for the parties that did best in the village are below.

Syriza- 125
Pasok- 70
New Democracy- 52
Golden Dawn- 22
Panos Kamenos- 28
Fotis Kovelis- 21
KKE (Communist)- 16

Syriza had carried the day, but there were also apparently 22 neo-Nazi sympathizers and 16 communists in the village.

After the results were tabulated and Vaso called them in to the appropriate ministry, the volunteers cleaned up and I walked out with the mayor and Vaso, who was carrying the ballots in a big white sack (see photo gallery). I asked them why the village had gone for Syriza.

The mayor speculated that seniors were angry that their pensions had been slashed in the austerity measures but Vaso had a different theory.

“They want something different,” she said. “They want to leave the euro and go back to the drachma.”

I scrambled to figure out if Syriza’s win in the village was an outlier or something that had happened all over the country.

The school had no Internet connection, so I repaired to the taverna around the corner to watch TV with the Hatfields and McCoys, who were even more intoxicated by the time I returned.

I shook one man’s hand and he declined to release it, grabbing both of my hands and trying to engage me in an arm wrestling competition. After I broke free, I met Haris Orfanosc, an engineer who grew up in the village but had moved away to Athens. He was back for a visit and had voted in the school he attended as a child.

He explained that New Democracy was slightly ahead of Syriza in the exit polling. The winner would get a 50-seat bonus in parliament and would have to form a majority coalition with at least 150 of the 300 total seats in parliament.

Stelios insisted on buying me a beer and the conversation soon moved on to a much more pleasant topic: Greece’s upcoming EURO 2012 match with Germany. No one could deny that a win over Germany would be sweeter than any bailout deal or election victory.

Shortly after I arrived back in Naxos town, New Democracy’s slim victory over Syriza was confirmed and economists and investors all over the world are breathing a sigh of relief. But unlike the previous night, when Greeks took to the streets to celebrate a soccer win over Russia, the streets were quiet and no one was in the mood to celebrate.

Party Time In Greece As The National Side Stuns Russia In EURO 2012

by Dave Seminara on

There’s nothing like being in a soccer-mad country when the national side scores a big win in an important tournament like the World Cup, The European Championships or the African Cup of Nations. On Saturday night, Greece shocked Russia, 1-0, to send the Russians home and advance to the quarterfinal round of this year’s Euro 2012 soccer tournament, and I was in Naxos, a Greek island in the Cyclades group to take part in the celebration.

A win like this one would be significant under any circumstances, but given the economic hell that Greece has been through in recent years, the triumph was especially meaningful. One didn’t have to search far and wide to watch the match – you could walk the streets of Naxos town and hardly miss a play, as nearly every business had a TV set up for people to watch the winner moves on match.Bars had big projection screens, but small shops, bakeries, travel agencies and other business also had a variety of much less impressive looking TVs tuned in, some were just ancient little boxes set up on top of plastic chairs, but still attracted small crowds of onlookers.

The mood was festive, but tense in the first half, until Giorgos Karagounis came charging down the right flank and buried a low missile right past the Russian keeper just before the half to give Greece a 1-0 lead. The crowd in the outdoor café I was in exploded, men dropped their worry beads to applaud, people hugged each other, and some jumped on top of tables and danced.

But in the second half, everyone had to sweat it out as the minutes seemed to tick by in an agonizingly slow march, as men all over Greece, nervously fingered their worry beads and chain smoked, praying Greece could hold on.
Greece had seemingly legitimate goals wiped out by the officials in the first two games of this tournament, and when Karagounis was given a yellow card for supposedly diving in the penalty area in the 61st minute, all the men in my vicinity were convinced that the world was once again conspiring against their country, perhaps in payback for the damage Greece has done to world financial markets.

But the plucky, mostly monastically bearded Greek players hung on for dear life and as the final whistle blew, pandemonium ensued, as men sang, chanted and danced on tables. Bar owners gave out free shots of ouzo and the celebratory roars could be heard all over Naxos.

Soon, cars were making laps in the little town, honking their horns as people hung out the windows waving Greek flags and pumping their fists at revelers on the streets. Greece had won and the country finally had something to feel proud of, on the eve of an election the whole world will be watching.

Before this recent trip, I was last in Greece in the summer of 2004, and watched Greece win EURO 2004 from the small town of Nea Marmaris, just south of Thessaloniki in Halkidiki. That party lasted all night and was doubly satisfying for me, because I also won 150€ in an office pool at the U.S. Embassy in Skopje, where I worked at the time.

My Macedonian colleagues, who love visiting Greece but have decidedly unpleasant feelings towards the Greeks due to the political standoff between the two countries over its name, had laughed when I picked Greece out of a hat. They were convinced that I’d picked the worst team in the field, but I was the one laughing when they won it all.

Once again, no one believes that Greece can advance in this tournament except for the Greeks themselves. I have no idea if they’ll advance further, but for now, Greeks everywhere are feeling very good about themselves for a change.

Picture Perfect Patmos

by Dave Seminara on

Have you ever fallen in love with a place before you’ve even been there? Several years ago, I became obsessed with the Greek island of Patmos, after reading “The Summer of My Greek Taverna,” Tom Stone’s highly addictive account of his adventures operating a taverna on the island.

Stone fell in love with the place and decided to move there with his family after a Greek friend suggested they open a taverna together. Stone’s business partner swindled him but it didn’t diminish his love for Patmos, an island that’s been occupied by the Romans, the Venetians, the Turks and the Italians again from 1912 until 1948.

I’ve been plotting a visit to the place ever since reading the book, but my wife and I had one child, and then another. We finally got to Patmos last week, and unlike many places you fantasize about long before you visit, Patmos did not disappoint.Patmos is a special place. The island is best known for being the site where St. John the Divine wrote the Book of Revelation, but it also has stunning scenery, great hikes, lovely beaches, historic monasteries with frescoes and antiquities that date to the Middle Ages, great food and a bustling port. But there are quite a few Greek islands that have all of those things. What sets Patmos apart, in my mind, is the way locals and tourists mix seamlessly in a relaxed vibe.

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On many Greek islands and indeed many touristic places everywhere, tourists inhabit one universe and locals another, and their paths only cross in order to conduct commercial transactions, i.e. you buy, they sell. I did not have that experience in Patmos.

Unlike Kos, for example, no one thrust a menu in my face, or tried to pressure me into taking a boat excursion. I broke bread and prayed with the monks of St. John’s, I spent hours chatting with locals at Agriolivado Beach, and by the time I left the island, I felt like I knew half of its 3,000 inhabitants. I asked Kostas Chatzakis, a banker I met on the island, if there were any tourist traps to avoid.

“There are none,” he said. “If a place wasn’t any good, we wouldn’t go there and they’d go out of business.”

And he was right. I never had a bad meal on the island, and, in fact, I had some unbelievably good grilled octopus, calamari and souvlaki, always for less than 10 euros. It’s a beautiful island for hikers, a terrific spot for seafood lovers and for those with a love of history and beaches. But what I loved about the place is that I never felt like a tourist and was never treated like one.

The best way I can describe Patmos’s laid-back hospitality is to tell you about Andreas Kalatzis, an artist I met who lives in a tiny, 400 year old house in Hora, right near St. John’s Monastery. I’d heard that an artist had a small studio somewhere in Hora, but couldn’t find it. A neighbor pointed me to Andreas’s tiny house, and he answered the door in his bare feet, which were appropriately splattered in paint.

Kalatzis has a small but impressive gallery in the first floor of the house to demonstrate his work, but he has no sign outside, no website, no email address, and like everyplace else in Patmos, there is no number on the door or street name. After seeing some of the religious icons and other paintings he does, I asked him if he had a business card.

“Sure, I do,” he said, before tearing out a large piece of construction paper from a sketchbook.

He then filed off a square of paper with a razor, then dumped a big dollop of gold colored paint onto his left hand, and reached for a fine paintbrush with his right. I had no idea what was going on, but in a matter of minutes, he’d painted a beautiful little image of an angel releasing a bird. He dated it, and wrote his contact info on the back before handing it to me. (see right)

“Here you go,” he said. “There’s my business card.”

If you go: You can fly to Kos or Samos on a variety of discount and charter airlines and then Patmos is a three- to four-hour ferry ride from either place. I spent a week in a lovely two-bedroom apartment at the Hotel Australis in Skala for just 50 euros a night in late May (the price goes up deeper in the season). The family who runs this place would give you the shirts off their back.

My favorite places to eat were Pitta Konne for souvlaki and Trechantiri Taverna for seafood. And Jimmy’s Balcony in Hora has the best view of any restaurant I’ve ever been to, and the food and drinks are quite good as well.

I’d recommend using Skala as a base, but make sure you rent a car or moped for at least a day to check out all of the island’s nooks and crannies. My favorite beaches were Psili Ammos, which requires a 30-minute hike, Agriolivado, and Kambos. If you want to have a great meal right on the beach, check out the taverna on Lambi Beach, in the north of Patmos. Be sure to hike up to the Ancient Acropolis, and for a truly unforgettable experience ask the monks at St. John’s Monastery, built in 1088, about attending one of their prayer services.

A Monday Morning Party in Samos

by Dave Seminara on

It’s 10 a.m., Monday morning and I’m surrounded by intoxicated Greek senior citizens on a lonely mountain road on the island of Samos. Empty ouzo bottles litter the plastic tables encircling the dance floor, and I’m stuffing my face with loukoumades, little Greek-style donuts drenched in honey that are worth selling one’s soul for.

The band plays a melancholy ballad, loud enough to be heard in Athens, and a group of women spin and whirl like dervishes on the dance floor. When Monday morning arrives in America in a few hours, most of my friends will be stuck in traffic, waiting for the opportunity to sit in front of a computer screen for at least eight hours.I was driving with my wife and two sons up to a mountain village called Manolates with our windows down on a beautiful day when we heard the thumping live music and wondered what kind of party could be taking place on a Monday morning.

We pulled over, grabbed a table right at the edge of the dance floor and watched the dancers and the drinkers. Greece may be mired in a horrible crisis, but people still know how to cut loose. After downing our first bowl of loukoumades, I asked the proprietor what the occasion was.

“It’s a religious festival,” he said, to my surprise. “It’s to honor the Father, the Son, and the Holy, how do you call it?”

“Spirit,” I said, completing his thought.

Before I’m accused of blasphemy, I don’t claim that getting drunk and dancing is a normal part of what is apparently a celebration of the Trinity in Greece. But for some reason, in this village on this morning, there was a host of old people living it up for this occasion.

As we sat and soaked up the scene, I thought about how these kinds of serendipitous experiences make travel worth the expense and hassle. The memory of how I spent this morning will stay with me, and I’ll pull it out one Monday morning when I’m doing something far less pleasant. Reminiscing will be a bittersweet reminder that somewhere in the world, people are partying while I’m at work.

A Honey Crawl In Samos

by Dave Seminara on

I’ve never been a big honey consumer. Sure, I usually have a messy plastic jar of the stuff somewhere in my kitchen, gathering dust, but it usually only comes out when I have a sore throat and want a cup of tea. But shortly after we arrived in Samos, a verdant, breathtakingly gorgeous Greek island in the eastern Aegean, I heard that the island was famous for its excellent honey.

The first time we drove on the dizzying road leading west from Pythagorion out to Kampos, in the island’s west, we passed a slew of small shops and stands selling honey. My interest was piqued but I didn’t bother to stop. Honey is honey, and since I’m used to the gloppy, factory produced cheap stuff that has the consistency of glue, I was doubtful that it could be any better than what I’m used to.But the next morning, I changed my mind after trying some loukoumades (right), a delicious Greek treat that resembles a small fried donut, but comes drenched in delicious Samos honey. I realized that I needed to get a jar of the stuff post haste.

“I saw some in the supermarket,” my wife said. “Just go get some.”

But I didn’t want supermarket honey, even if it was the same kind of locally produced stuff sold on the side of the road. I wanted the whole roadside honey experience. So we set off the next day back on the same carsickness-inducing route, which traverses a nice chunk of Samos’s pretty, mountainous green interior, and I stopped at every honey stand I could find.

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At the first shop, we were given only a small taste on toothpicks, which was a bit of a tease, but it was enough to make us want more. It was lighter, sweeter and far tastier than any honey I’d ever had before.

At the second shop we visited, just west of the village of Pirgos, the honey tasted even better, and the owner let us take samples by the spoonful from a big jar of the stuff. While my wife distracted him with questions, I kept dipping into the stuff like an addict, as my children looked at a collection of trapped bees in the shop.

When I couldn’t reasonably sample any more without feeling like a thief, I grabbed a big jar of it and pulled out my wallet before my wife objected.

“We’re only here for a week,” she said. “How much honey can you eat?”

As it turns out, an awful lot. I loved the stuff so much, that I started planning all my meals and snacks around things that I could pour honey on. And I burned through the four honey-drenched sesame bars I bought in less than 48 hours. One afternoon, I asked my wife how some honey might taste on my ham and cheese sandwich, and she tried to set me straight once more.

“Dave,” she said. “You can’t put honey on everything.”

Maybe not, but when in Samos, you can certainly try.

(All photos and videos by Dave Seminara)