Lesvos! A whole post!

OKAY! Wow! I left Greece altogether over a week ago, and Lesvos over TWO weeks ago, but that's how it goes in this miserable slog we call Blog Business (we all call it that, but the other bloggers are too cowardly to admit it, which is why most of them quit blogging and started substacks instead). Maybe that means it's time to.... CLICK THROUGH FOR A LOT OF DISORGANIZED THOUGHTS ABOUT LESVOS AND ALSO A VIDEO? Gosh! Boy howdy!

The beauty of Lesvos, as viewed from the Women's Cooperative in Petra! (You, the reader, are the Teen about to fall into the Aegean sea of nonsense that I am about to type at you, if we choose to interpret this photograph as a metaphor.)

So, Lesvos: it's... nice? Or at least I thought so! Um, here's a rush of images that may make the point better than my writing is about to:

 

OK, so We All Agree Lesvos Rules, but can we all get down to admitting why? Can we finally stop being polite and get real??

As I mentioned in my "talking to people: it's not just for losers any more!" post, the British and Dutch tourists I met on Lesvos had almost all been coming here for a decade or two, and the refrain I kept hearing from them was "you'll be back!" What was more striking to me, though, was that these people were all connecting to the year-round residents. As couples made their way into tavernas and bars, they were asking after the owners' children and siblings, after cafe owners who'd moved across the island or decamped for Athens. Unlike my experiences at some towns of the small size of Molyvos or Skala Eresou whose industry has become wholly tourist-dependent, people still live here, and both they and their visitors thrive on connection. 

Lookit this lil fishing village! There's a bunch of lil fishing villages! It's like an ISLAND in this regard!

It may fuel this dynamic that the island has a healthy skepticism about organized tourism; while they appear to be expanding a port on the west end of the island, which would make it more easily day-trippable from mainland Greece or as part of a larger cruising itinerary, locals are not terribly fond of tourism companies off-island, due to some bad blood in their recent history. Numerous summers - not only the catastrophic summer of 2020 - have seen companies like Thomas Cook send a full summer's worth of visitors to Lesvos, declare bankruptcy at the end of summer when their payments to local hotels and tavernas were due, and walk away scot-free. A few rounds of that, and I can see why you'd prefer to build one-on-one relationships with visitors who genuinely want to return. (Which isn't to say there isn't some desire for tourist infrastructure, as in the case of the Manicunean chap who I met who runs the island's homegrown tourism agency.)

I left this out of my "talking to people" post, as it marks a moment that I opted against it - but that spirit takes the visitors that I encountered as well, as evidenced by the phenomenally atmospheric group that dined next to me at The Captain's Table their first night opening for the season. About halfway through the meal, a woman came over and asked if I'd like to join them, because "I want you to feel the warmth of the island!" She went on to explain that they'd all been meeting up for years, an ecclectic group - a few professors, a few writers, a couple of architects, a Peace Corps worker, some from America, some from Britain, some from Australia. It felt magical, atmospheric, and I absolutely couldn't accept in the moment. I'm horribly, alarmingly tempted to return next summer to join their ranks.

Petra, down the road from Molyvos, has a monastery on a rock (hence "Petra") and is a lovely place to spend a day, including a maybe-the-best-meal-of-the-trip-so-far lunch at the Women's Cooperative cafe overlooking the waterfront. It's a bit resorty for me as a base (the one British couple I met that I didn't care for kept referring to their base town as a "resort," which might be true but... bleh) but lots of great independent shops and lanes and good friendly folk! WHAT! EVER!

That warmth and community is everywhere; restaurants outside the major tourist drags don't make much of a stink out of being local and seasonal. Instead, they have menus where they only mark in prices on the dishes that they got the ingredients for that day, and if the fresh catch didn't come in, they're not going to sell you something frozen. (The few that do clearly mark it as such.) It's not a gimmick; I spent the week seeing fishermen in hip waders trudging into waterfront eateries with bags full of catch to drop off, and seeing farmers on mopeds with crates on their back bracket trundling huge piles of greens to tavernas in midafternoon. The farmer's brother-in-law with whom I had a Greek coffee was, a night later, out for an evening walk when he stopped to kibbutz with the owner of the seaside restaurant where I was having dinner. Why live without that sense of community? (Speaking of community, it was great to see the proliferating refugee-focused, refugee-employing businesses like Nan in Mytlini, blending cultures in the most heart-affirming ways possible.)

It extends to the cats; they are known to the hoteliers and restaurant owners even though they don't own them, and they note their relative levels of health and plumpness, as the diners toss them the final scraps of their meals.

Local idiot refuses to give food to local feline idiot: a photo essay of Criminal Activity

As advertised, the island is beautifully variable - driving a major paved road through thick pine forests in the southwest feels almost like making your way through a national park back home, while there are gravel roads through the center that put you in the middle of olive groves and rocky alcoves with distant views of the sea. One beach may be aggressively rocky, with an abandoned (but still open! and great!) hot spring facility to encourage alternate hot and cold dips in the mineral and sea waters; drive a ways down the coast and you've got smooth silty sand. (I still refuse to be somebody who gets into cataloguing kinds of sand, please immediately block and report this blog if I go any further on this count.) There's a wildly exposed petrified forest to the west coast, and flamingo-filled wetlands to the south. You could find a vibe for your tastes without much effort, I feel. 

For myself, Molyvos was wonderful - a tremendously vertical pedestrian-centric town with lots of great walks and waters nearby and phenomenal human beings throughout. And, you know, the food is good! The Captain’s Table was my favorite stop of the trip so far, a totally perfect but totally unpretentious harborside café in Molyvos with some great “and they’re good people!” bona fides, but food to match it. There, at the urging of their charming/terrifying/kind/mean server Aphrodite (no really) I tried Tsipouros for the first time, nearly yelped in delight, and then took a bite of the grilled smoked mackerel she’d recommended (served with chopped red onions and olives) and DID yelp in delight. (That wasn't my favorite meal on the island, which would probably be from the Women's Cooperative in Petra, which serves fantastic home-style meals including the best fried zucchini blossoms I’ve ever had.) And while I thought ouzo was just fine (had a great glass at Captain’s Table after a fairly meh bottle at another restaurant down the way, still don’t feel tempted to keep chasing it) the tsipouros at Captain’s Table was a real gamechanger.

I liked Skala Eresou, though it took me a while to adjust to a fully "you are just in a beach town to read and relax" atmosphere; I'm curious to make a longer visit to the small town by Melinta Beach, a stunning south-facing beach that takes a dizzyingly winding route through the mountains to reach, where I stopped for an afternoon on my way back to Mytlini. But in large part, what I liked was how connective and human-scaled everything was. While I was here just a bit before high season begins in earnest (a few places hadn’t yet reopened for summer) it was so pleasantly non-crazed with tourists. That just makes everything... better. The wildly switchbacked roads through the island’s center would be terrifying in high-speed traffic, but it’s generally light enough that you can stop in a pullover periodically to let braver drivers pass you by as you resume your poky way along, pleased as ever not to die by careening off a ridge at high speed and plummeting to an exquisite Greek death of automotive stupidity. You can spend a half-hour chatting with your Lesvian bartender out on the balcony looking out at the coastline of Turkey without worrying that you're costing him business back at the bar. You get the feeling this conversation is why he likes running the bar. You get the feeling they want you here - not as a wallet, but as a human.

Look, I'm sure many Greek islands have this kind of magic, and I just happen to have stumbled into this one, but I really do think something special is here, and I have to say, as somebody who sighed and said "I guess a week on an island then, if I have to," I recommend it unreservedly. Get there! Feed a cat! Eat a fish! Befriend an... EVERYbody?!?

I will meet you here in the harbor; you will recognize me as the guy in a linen shirt and trousers yelling "TSIPOURO IS BETTER THAN OUZO" and begging strangers to throw me into the ocean