[Have returned to Lesbos for a week's holiday along with parents and girlfriend; decided to revivify blog.]
Lesbos is still, initially, a land of snapshots and discrete images: pictures reflected in the glass front of a kafeneio or caught in a camera's peripheral view. The island and its civilization are so old that you can only look at them sideways, like the Medusa, herself a metaphor for nothing less than complete comprehension.
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Lesbos is an alluring place. Molyvos town winds its way up a hillside, topped by a Byzantine castle; it's a maze of cobbled streets and low stone arches, balconies jutting out over air and motorbikes roaring their way up impossibly vertical lanes. There are trace elements of the Ottoman Empire here still: a fountain near the Municipal Cafe bears an inscription in Arabic under a roughly-carved Star of David. Turkey is visible across the bay, blue hills shading away into the mythic past. Small cats flow through the streets like water; they doze on car bonnets or stone benches. A wisteria tree is so old and so heavy that it's grown vertical and forms an overhanging canopy for a row of shop-fronts, held up at intervals with red-painted metal struts. We drink Greek coffee in mugs the size of plant-pots and gaze down at the translucent water in the bay. It's clear enough to let us number the stones just off-shore. I buy Chian mastic chewing-gum, flavoured with mandarin orange juice, which brings back last summer and the walk to Loutra.
The modern town is itself lovely and you could be forgiven for thinking that it's the 'safe' kind of historical - picturesque enough to to be 'quaint' - yet there are still mysteries in Molyvos. At the bottom of the town, where the road branches off to Eftalou, is a grassy hollow with gathered stones in it and a few sunbathing cats. The rectangular stone troughs could be water-tanks, until you see that one still has a shallowly-pitched lid. These are tombs, in all probability belonging to the ancestors of modern Molyvos' residents; they might be from the classical period (5th century BCE onwards), given the Turkish/Lydian influence on eastern Greek communities at that time, but they may be later. There is no indication of who was buried there. The empty graves and the living town co-exist, telescoping the three millennia between in less than an acre of ground.
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We walked to Petra from Molyvos today, nine miles across goat-tracks and hills and the coastal highway. Greek attitudes to health and safety regulations being what they are, most of the journey was along steep drops and gravelled paths, treacherous underfoot. We passed endless flocks of local sheep, the small, long-haired variety common here. They had bells around their necks which produced a constant babbling, like a rushing river, each peal blending into the surrounding noise. A few farms had sheeps' skulls on prominent display, their twisting horns looking like any medieval priest's ideal of the Devil. The fields were full of gorse, olives, wild poppies; it was tempting to think that very little had changed since the time of Sappho. The continuities are striking, when they occur: the word for 'wine' in Modern Greek is exactly the same word as when Achilles calls Agamemnon οινοβαρης, 'wine-heavy', in Iliad 1, while 'pharmacy' was first used on the Linear B tablets 3700 years ago.
What point am I making with this? That the past is lost to us? That the continuity of island life bears examination in the same way as hypnopompic visions, seen out of the corner of the eye? Surely we know that. The mystery, I think, is not what has been lost and what we half-percieve: it is that we grieve its loss and crave the half-perception anyway.
