Mesta's Web

There was a period, between 1975 and 1992, when the Greek Ministry of Tourism targeted a number of traditional towns for preservation.  The idea was not to create massive development, but to bring a small amount of tourism to these towns in order to help sustain them without damaging what was already there. It sounds a lot like slow cities.  Mesta was one of the towns the government targeted.  But somehow, the effort ended nearly 20 years ago, and only vestiges remain.  Although you see a handful of tourists when you walk through the town, most are day trippers who come for an hour or two, maybe a meal.  Hardly anyone stays here.

This has its problems and its benefits.  On the down side, the people who rent out their apartments do not have a good sense of what travelers need.  It took us days to figure out how to get our laundry done, for example.  Our kitchen lacks a coffee maker, a cutting board, a sharp knife (we bought a knife weeks ago and have been traveling from place to place with it).

But on the positive side, the village has not turned into Disneyland, as so many cute, small villages have.  It is a real working village.  Most of the people here have always lived here—their homes and land have been passed down for generations.  And there are not enough of us—tourists—to ruin the place for them.  As a result, we feel welcomed.  Having spent a week here now, we already feel ourselves becoming a part of the web of relationships that is Mesta. 

Our neighbor across the street brought us a cucumber from her garden one day, and told us to pick the herbs growing in pots on her steps whenever we wanted.  The woman who lives diagonally from us, Maria, runs the little market near the town square; she lent us her grill.  Lemoinya, who lives right next door to us, poked her head in our door on the first day.  I sat and “talked” to her for awhile out on the bench in front (I speak no Greek and she speaks no English). The next day she brought over a paper towel filled with freshly shelled almonds.  I brought her a copy of the picture of the two of us, below—she had been so delighted to see it on the screen of my camera—and she invited me in for coffee and cookies.  I sat with her in her immaculate room, a kitchen along one wall and a couch along another, with a table in the center.  Then she insisted on bringing a cup to Alec; he sat out on our stoop and drank it with Socrates, her husband.  Yesterday, we stopped at the market for cold drinks on our way to the beach, and Panayotis, the man who had taken C.C. and Milo fishing, happened to come in.  He motioned for us to wait there, and took off on his scooter.  When he returned, he had two gorgeous shells for the kids—from the smell of them, the shells had been recently inhabited.  We boiled them when we got home, and now have to figure out how to get them back to Brooklyn.

Having spent time in eight different countries in the past year, it’s easy to be tempted into making overly simplistic comparisons that could cross the line into stereotyping.  And yet it is interesting to note just which cultures one feels most drawn to.  I am attracted to the warmth of the Greeks we have met, and this is perhaps most in evidence in the way they deal with our children.  The Greeks we have met, both here in Chios and in the Peloponnese, have been very physical with the kids. Everyone tousles their hair, squeezes their shoulders.  C.C. and Milo are often kissed and hugged by near strangers.  Having spent the year in Spain, they are somewhat accustomed to the physicality, but it’s so clear that it is not what they come from.  Waiters, shopkeepers, and neighbors do not routinely embrace our children in Brooklyn.  So I’ll miss this little town, which has wrapped us up like a warm blanket.