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Septemberis To be Greek is to be a sea rider, Greece reaching from Kastellórizon to the northern headlands of Corfu over days of open water That Aegean lens. Surfeit of mountains, plenitude of island coasts, and all that mystical history to overcome Jarring pounding-into-headon-seas passage north from Tel Aviv to Kastellórizon, that last lonely Greek island east on the Turkish coast Shelter from the Meltémi Tie up stern-to on the stone quay in front of one of the four working tavernas In the public room, in ceiling niches and on upper ledges over the bar, multiple house martin nests in the tavern's corner room They come and go through the casement windows and corner doors, the nestlings tseeping pleasantly for the insects their parents arrive with from the sky Plush tiny mud pellet vegetable fiber feathers and seaweed nests over the intimacy of that room crowded from midday well into the summer nights Coffee steamed, wine poured, kalamari and pastitsio on heavy white restaurant china slid on the zinc bar from the kitchen, parsley sprigs, thick glass oil cruets, bread broken, bottle-tinkle, chair-scrape Talking, talking, smiling, the owner's daughter on the cash, the house martins in and out above, skimming outside for insects drawn to the half dozen clear bulbs strung over the outside tables and to the high sodium vapor lights along the quay Kastellórizon a small teeming place at the very edge of Europe Vivid blue taverna culture, house-martin blessed, alive and as verbal as all of Greece Up on the almost treeless mountain behind, a tawny owl, Strix aluco, coursed in the dusk down a high murky gorge, hunting through the approaching night, vast empty rockslide place, eerily purposeful long glide, marvelous fixed-wing flight, to abruptly drop off away into the dark On the mountain again in the morning, pied wheatears, a flock of green finches, and a little owl, Athene noctua, stunned by the sunlight, trying to pass the glare of morning in a scanty olive tree The little owl left the tree twice in twenty minutes, deep catenary undulating folded-wing short glides, to sit on the wire leading up toward the saddle below a military radar station and the highest peak Owls and Greeks, Minerva, totemic beings, frowning eyebrowed flat-face image stone carvings, the upper niche house Lar, Athene noctua, of Athene herself, one of the Gifts of Athene, daughter of Zeus and Zeus's favorite child, wise owl, wise history through time, wise Greek Kas, the town within sight across the narrow passage from Kastellórizon, is Turkish In Turkish, Kas means cejas, ridge, edge. There is an immense 500 meter-high red rock cliff above Kas's old port Once Kastellórizon was near the center of the Hellenistic world, solitary corner of the eastern Mediterranean, near-barren waters, much early summer wind with the Meltémi drafting down from the melting snowpack mountains in the Balkan Turkish high-country Leaving Kastellórizon sailing fast with the Meltémi into glimmering evening coruscance back out on the Lycian coast An overnight passage to Rhodes Helios's grand sun island Arriving before dawn, Rhodes' lights a refreshing certainty, a classical wall, exact and definite out of empty seas and slamming wind on the nose on the whole passage north from Tel Aviv Sunrise astern through the Mandráki harbor gates that were once bestrode by a thirty-meter bronze statue of Helios The Helios Colossus of Rhodes gone without trace, brought down by an earthquake, left in place on the mole in hunks and fragments After eight hundred years shipped off to Tyre and sold to the city of Emesa, site of a great temple to Baal, or Helios-Baal, the sun god ubiquitous in Hebrew texts as the chief deity of Canaan In Emesa, now Hims in Syria, the pieces of giant Helios were melted down Modern Rhodes' upper city ramparts immense and still momentously real Rose moat garden Ottoman and Christian fortress Summer morning sunny golden stone, high open streets and squares Where the Italians paved the Palace of the Grand Masters with every classical mosaic they could steal from the surrounding Greek islands they'd just occupied Done to flatter Mussolini That trashy fascism followed on extended Ottoman occupation that had lasted the centuries Suleiman the Magnificent's conquest Predating Suleiman, the Knights Templar, peculiar early Christian history, Rhodes' special status within the Roman Empire — Caesar came to Rhodes to study Rhodes as an always independent island with prosperity as a naval and trading power, flip-flopping between Athens and Sparta, conquest by Persia in the sixth century BC In deep antiquity, Rhodes' three Dorian cities were mentioned in the Illiad, out of its Minoan-Mycenaean beginnings A Dorian day's sail south of Mandráki, in a cove beneath the Lindos acropolis, Paul landed from Palestine, dark water looking up at the ruins and whitewashed town Swim there as if in time around those bare black seaweed rocks, dive to the cove's bottom and the classical detritus of potsherds and bits of glass, perhaps fragments of bronze and iron in the rocks and mud Paul's ship's keel cut a clean line in that tiny cove's beach sand Or he came ashore perhaps from a sailing galley in a coracle in that cove, exactly there On out to open sea, Rhodes to Simi, like most Aegean passages, recapitulation of course headings and wind-current readings made by Minoans, Phoenicians, Egyptians, Dorians, then the Greeks, the Romans, who've sailed that route Shelter from the Meltémi on Simi's east coast in Pethi. Climb the Pirgallia in the dawn through thorny brush above the olive groves, quail explode ahead all the way to tree line and the upper mountain's sheer bare rocky slopes Walled whitewashed and blue private chapels kept for centuries by old Simi families, some who live as far away as Patras and Athens. Glass shards cemented in the walls, nickel-steel padlocks on heavy wrought iron hasps, formidable masonry, barb wire, lizards, a small adder Tree line in the Mediterranean has less to do with microclimates than with thorough extirpation of whatever has been picked, scavenged, mulled, melted or burned for fuel Most Greek islands are virtually Sonoran, most trees, brush, topsoil, humus of all sorts long used up, eroded, gone Goat fences on Simi's bare slopes with rusty and broken bed-spring gates People slept their lives, sickened, died, on those bed springs, and lay on them talking, loving, dreaming, through their nights Polished tan tile steps in the warm afternoon sun within a small square at the top of Simi's town, blue wood and white stucco and bougainvillea, sit with a woman and her poised and patient teenage daughter who live with that glorious view and have an uncle in San Jose Sail on to Meglo Khorio on Tilos, a badly sheltered port open to the North. In the evening into the hills to the remains of mysterious pre-classical pedimented shrines Back down in the dusk to rush-seated chairs on the stone pavement and painted concrete under grape arbors. TVs moved outside for a World Cup match from the Rose Bowl in a Pasadena morning nine hours behind The next day's sail to a breakwater in Mandráki, the town of Nisyros Mandráki means small enclosed harbor, Mandráki means sheepfold Fine fish, Boutari red, saltspray on the windows banging in the stiff evening breeze, wave break crash, when an old mechanical clock strikes eleven the island's generator cuts down and the lights go dim In the Emorious Crater on Mandráki, like Ngorogoro — the sun even smells like midday East African bush Wispy fumaroles and blue rollers on the crater's floor, the large brilliant bird frequent in Minoan and Greek art, singular in the high-sky pristine savannah of the caldera bottom Serial evenings, serial days of wind and sun and sail To Antipálaia, the only Aegean island that has no snakes, swing at anchor in the shallow roads near a big French sloop Two Parisian couples, silent, lofty, skinny, proud, oblivious except for one of the woman's glances, sun- and sexually-toned in string bikinis, hours aft at their cockpit table eating chilled fruit and reading the season's novels from Edition du Seuil Thick mist off the water in the dawn, sky and sea and promontories melded An immense gray heron through the fog, a small forlorn cluster of modern stucco wall ruins ashore, nothing else at all Sail west that day running with the wind to Santorini Santorini dramatic in the afternoon, breathtaking horned volcanic sea cliffs "The world may continually receive news of the existence of the world, a contrivance at the service of the world for knowing it exists" Our world exists only since we are of it In the eastern Mediterranean, old cultures remain linked as if perpetually potent and alive "Moses and Agamemnon must have been very near or actual contemporaries . . . the Mycenaeans were struggling outside Troy at the same time as the Israelites were struggling across the Sinai" The Turks and the Greeks, the Israelis and the Arabs, the Islamists against the cosmopolitans Santorini's grand Minoan city, Akrotiri, was incinerated when Santorini exploded forty-six centuries ago Akrotiri was as antecedent to Minoan culture on Crete, behind whose culture lay, to the south, even more ancient Egypt on the Nile, Egypt's magic, Egypt's ways +++++++++++++++ Sampling credits to H. E. L. Mellerish and Italo Calvino.

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