Greek Islands: Travel Writing in a Nutshell

All too often these days, travelers to the islands will become the authors of nothing better than their own, sometimes considerable, misfortune.

It is particularly and shamefully a British phenomenon. Absorb the headlines and consider if you will the Kavos scooter army, or the never-ending cycle of crime and punishment between booze sodden Faliraki Brits and the Rhodian judiciary.

Officiates of the Darwin Awards should monitor the activities of these insular tribes more closely as the Fates are less tempted here than bated. Cynically, the object of the modern package odyssey almost seems to be a return flight in the hold of the aircraft, or at the very least an involuntary extension to the holiday, involving a prompt transfer to a Greek hospital or jail.

This can all too easily seem one sided but It takes two to tango, and the manner in which some Greeks have embraced, developed and exploited their relationship with package tourism has produced unfortunate results, allowing ad hoc vulgarity to triumph over order and ugliness to creep in where once there was beauty.

It is almost the lot of the seasoned travel writer to be chagrined at the demise of the Aegean arcadia of their youth, untarnished, azure and whitewashed as it remains still in the minds eye, but they too must concede that the unfettered epicurism of their own lotus eating days could only serve to prod island tourism in its current direction.

The identity of many island populations, and with it their cultural cohesion and 'character' as perceived by outsiders was changing dramatically as early as the late 1950's. The arrival of tourism and the nascent expatriate communities were significant agents for this change, within the wider context of economic, social and political development and the 20th Century Greek diaspora.

For example, the travel writing of the 60's and 70's is replete with cliched accounts of freeloading beatnicks and hippies shamelessly exploiting the Greek tradition of hospitality, while their Orthodox hosts are forced to observe their sexual shenanigans, on marijuana misted beaches, with varying degrees of perplexity and disdain.

Correspondingly, with the growth of the hospitality infrastructure and the first resorts, there are literary accounts, mainly naive in my own view, of how easily these 'poor' island communities were tempted to sacrifice the genius loci in order to meet the perceived requirements of a more numerous and financially lucrative, but less cultured, appreciative and therefore deserving clientele. It is far easier to hold the opinion that the best things in life are free if you are an independent educated traveler, from a privileged background, with the financial means to return to it as you please. The Greeks are, after all, a business minded people.

As a corpus, English language accounts of travel to Greece abound, and the genre attracted many highly acclaimed travel writers of the past century.

The topographical accounts of 19th century travelers and antiquarians are not as stylistically inaccessible as might be presumed. They often provide much fascinating detail but are now hard to find.

By far the most prolific generation of writers on Greece were published between the late 1930's and mid 1970's. Literati such as Patrick Leigh Fermor, Lawrence Durrell, Henry Miller and Dilys Powell are synonymous with the genre and it is not unjustified to regard this period as the 'golden age' of Greek travel writing.

In many ways, the evocative power of these books, relating as they do to a largely 'unadulterated' Greece in the nostalgic sense, sets the modern reader up for inevitable failure and disappointment, by generating an archetypal ideal, an impossible yardstick by which the travelers' Greece of today, physically and experientially, is too often measured. The pervading theme is the unique bond many of these writers felt with the Greek people and their cause, born of the exigencies of military, civil or diplomatic service in Greece during and in the aftermath of the Second World War. These writers cut their literary teeth in troubled times and are able to engage with their subject matter on a level rarely achieved before or since.

The postwar generation of travelers and writers encountered a rapidly changing Greece in an age of new possibilities. They brought with them new values and expectations, and the place of Greece in the western imagination, as a mystical, semi-eastern reliquary for the classical and Byzantine past, was changing too.

The Greece reflected in the travel writing of this era fulfils a variety of literary functions. It can sometimes be little more than an aesthetic backdrop to the bacchanalian rituals of those determined to drink as deeply as possible from the cup of life. For those seeking to achieve a balance between domestic responsibility, and a passion to live life differently, it can be a chance to flee the rat race, raise a family, get back to basics, perhaps go native and of course, to write a book about it afterwards. Others will write in order to record and share a spiritual odyssey, a catharsis, a pilgrimage to discover a tangible counterpart to the geography of the imagination or the landscape of a dream.