One note on a scale can tell you where you are
Listening to the Greek island of Lefkada
A slight detour to visit a friend took me over the causeway onto the breezy Ionian island of Lefkada. It was good to be back, wandering the old town.
Down one narrow street, away from the traffic, an old man with a deep and penetrating voice sat in a darkened room by an open door singing a slow folk song. His smile and his wave told me that he wanted to be heard, even though it sounded a melancholic old tune with deep roots. As it flowed upwards, the melody danced over the delicate microtones that a fully Westernised ear like mine (acclimatised to the diatonic scale) struggles to internalise: fleeting but poignant inflexions that spoke of the historic tussles between Western European and Ottoman influences which played out in this region for centuries.
Before Greek independence in the 1820s enabled a stronger continuity of culture, Lefkada had changed hands between Frankish, Ottoman, Italian, Venetian, French – when Napoleon conquered Venice – and British rulers. Just a few horizons away in the town of Ioannina (as I discovered on my previous visit), mosques and churches share the old centre, and even on this western coastline of Greece, Turkey’s shores aren’t so very far away.
Whether the old man’s song was native to the island or had been learned during his travels, I couldn’t say. I know nothing about Greek folk song, and wish I had stopped to ask. (Pathetic, but I needed the loo!)
Lefkada wears its history lightly. In its docile marina, pleasure yachts outnumber fishing boats twenty to one, and the nearby pavements teem with spacious restaurants. It has a small folk museum devoted mainly to musical instruments, including two 19th-century pianos with unusually detailed stories (one German, one Italian), and an 1862 Hopkinson’s Albion Press (No.4045) that printed newspapers here for nearly a century.
The further inland you go – past the workshops and suburbs to the mountainous interior with its oak forests and old windmills and high-altitude views over the Aegean – the more you feel like you’re discovering “the real Greece”. Not today though, not for me. As I cooked my meal out of the boot of the Land Rover with the sky growing darker over the gently slapping rigging, I felt I could live down in that boat-encircled town forever. Sometimes the desire to travel needs to be tempered by the desire to stay put. Industries are built around the creation and curation of our desires (hear it straight from the horse’s mouth) but we can subvert those efforts if we are careful with our attention, and notice when our needs are satisfied.
So my dog Alfie and I spent an unplanned layover on Lefkada, sleeping in the car in a forest near the abandoned mill at Melissa’s Gorge. A blissfully peaceful night.
If you’re ever on Lefkada and fancy discovering its wild interior from the seat of an enthusiastically-driven Land Rover, my friend Iannis is your man. He lives on Lefkada, lives for off-road exploration, and runs tours throughout Greece. To give you a flavour, here’s a feature we once created for Land Rover Owner magazine.
