Instead of decades or centuries; being here, in Pyrgos, prompts me to look back even further. To consider thousands of years, millennia.
It’s almost unfathomable, walking among ruins of the Bronze Age – being a witness to ancient signs of human habitation. Just the thought of Akrotiri demands adjustment to my lens on existence. It challenges my perspective.
I wish I could have taken a photo of the visitors pouring out of ships and ferries at the port of Santorini yesterday. Cars and roller-bags tumbling to the shore of this otherwise beleaguered mass of volcanic ash. Here, on the most visited of Greece’s 6,000 islands, “…there is now more wine than water”.
Our driver told us that Santorini has “…over 1,000 restaurants, 900 hotels, up to 75 international flights per day, hundreds of cruise ships and ferries – all bringing more than 2 million visitors each year.”
I couldn’t take the picture of our disembarking, because Bill and I were among the relentless stampede of unbelievers, gawking. A towering shore seemed to leap straight up, dramatically, out of the sea. It was like nothing I had seen before. Suddenly dwarfed by earth standing miles above our heads, I immediately understood why we were all here.
“It’s too much!”, the driver said, as he scaled the mountain, following a trail of tour buses zig-zagging our way to the top. But, “…thank you for coming to Santorini.” He said. “I hope you enjoy your stay.”
Our hotel is at the highest point on the Island. God only knows how Bill finds these uniquely iconic locations. This one (with only 4 suites) is as far away from the maddening crowd as one can get.
Santorini Heights in Pyrgos, overlooks acres of vineyards and orchards – now stripped brown from the recent September harvest. Only the 18th century monastery, dedicated to the Prophet Elijah – stands between us and the endless Aegean sky.
Remember in “An Affair to Remember”, when Cary Grant takes Deborah Kerr to meet his grandmother – who lives on an island, and she goes to pray in a chapel? Well, this is it! I’m here! (Actually, film buffs say it was filmed on Villefranch-sur-Mer. But you get the picture.)
How much longer do we have, I wonder – our bodies, this earth, each other?
All we seem to have for certain is our experience of each moment. Even our memories change with the passing of time.
Although we yearn for what lasts, none of it remains the same.