Gorgeous Greece: A Holiday In The Pelion The Country apos;s Last Hidden Corner
De Wikifliping
Gorgeous Greece: An expedition into the Pelion peninsula, the country's last hidden corner (with its rustic charm galore)
By
Updated: 13:22 GMT, 4 May 2010
</a>
It wasn't the proximity of a range of mountains that worried me as our plane sped towards the tiny landing strip of Volos...
it was the terror of disappointment. Twenty years had slipped away since my last visit to Greece. Back then, part-owner of a pretty villa on a Corfu hilltop, I'd lived as if in another era, in a village untouched by tourists.
Back in the old routine: Miranda's holiday in the Pelion was her first visit to Greece in 20 years
I loved my life in that village where, each night, an old man with a lantern walked the boundaries offering hospitality to strangers who had lost their way; and each Sunday the only car-owner in the village brought out his vehicle for admiration - but never for driving.
Only one proud family had a television and all political disputes with the resident outsider (me) were settled by common agreement among the village elders (all, of course, male) that England had acquired, in Mrs Thatcher, an immensely strong leader, a magnificently fine woman.The village ladies, interestingly, took a somewhat dimmer view, sensing - it seemed - that the Iron Lady lacked Mediterranean subtlety.
My hilltop home passed, eventually, into the hands of strangers.
Since then, I've never dared to return. All that I heard in the interim years convinced me that the old-fashioned Greece I'd known was for ever lost. Until, that is, I overheard a friend talking about the Pelion Peninsula.
RELATED ARTICLES
Share this article
Share
I didn't even know where the Pelion was. My friend pointed it out to me on the map: a long, sharp-toed boot of land jutting into the Aegean between Salonika and Athens, its heel almost touching the island of Skiathos.
'The Greeks themselves love the Pelion,' my friend said.
'But the landscape is wild and the roads are kind of scary, so the tourists haven't really taken to it. Still, if you're looking for a place that hasn't been "discovered", hurry up! Even the Pelion won't stay safely in the past for ever.'
Two months later, driving thankfully away from the noisy streets of the port city of Volos - only to find myself alongside the rusting towers of a disused cement factory - I wondered if my friend had perhaps gone mad, or whether he'd taken an unaccountable dislike to me.
Why would anybody recommend a fellow being to visit, for pleasure, a hot industrial city set beside a featureless plain? If the few broken stone columns sprouting from a field beside the road represented the Pelion's contribution to Greek architecture, I thought the Pelion could keep them.
Having spent our plane flight out rapturously reading about Jason setting sail from Volos with the Argonauts to seek the Golden Fleece, and the gods coming down from nearby Olympus to frolic on Mount Pelion, my husband and I started to dread our fortnight's holiday.
A couple of hours later, sipping ouzo and orange beside the sun-dappled harbour of tiny Damouchari, where several scenes from the movie Mamma Mia!
were filmed, I felt as if I'd entered paradise.
Striking: The Roussanou monastery sits amid truly dramatic scenery
I also felt glad to be alive, as the road from Volos to Damouchari - across the mountainous spine of the peninsula and down to the eastern seaboard - is one of the most beautiful and consistently terrifying I've ever travelled.
The sense of holding destiny between shaking hands each time I ventured out by car from Damouchari stayed with me.
I've never encountered roads more tortuous in their twists, or more lacking in barriers to protect the unwary driver from a drop into the void. But it's easy to get accustomed to dicing with death when you're on the road to heaven, and by the end of my visit my driving was almost nonchalant.
Roads are still quite a novelty in the Pelion. Until the early Sixties, the only means of travelling around here were the narrow cobbled tracks known as calderimi.
They are now being revived for the use of the athletically serious walker (count me out: this is no sport for rank amateurs). But before the arrival of tarmac, the only way to reach Volos from Damouchari was to undertake a two-hour hike through treacherous ravines, crossing mountains smothered in dense pine and chestnut woods, forging all the way up to the cloud-high little town of Milies.
From here, the midway point, travellers could take a spectacular trip down to Volos on a narrow-gauge rail track built more than a century ago by the father of the surrealist painter Giorgio de chirico. Sadly, the line had just shut down at the end of the summer when I arrived, and I never had the chance to peek from the train's windows at the mythic mountain cave of chiron the centaur, tutor to Hercules and Achilles.
But how on earth, I wondered, did everyday living supplies ever reach the tiny villages that climb and wind from straggling square to square all around the ravines that slice into the mountainous slopes of Pelion?
The answer supplied itself one morning when, watching the sun rise out of an aquamarine sea, I spied a small boat chugging steadily towards Damouchari, across the sun's bright track.
The vessel wasn't, as I first thought, some fisherman's skiff, bringing home his night's catch; the sacks hauled out on to the jetty by two sturdy old locals were filled with groceries - vegetables and household staples, enough to stock, for a month at least, the stores of three mountain villages.
The Pelion, then, offers two entirely different experiences: sea and mountain. The best way to imagine the incredible eastern seaboard is to picture a long series of immaculate horseshoe bays filled with glittering turquoise sea - just salty enough to let you float for hours without the slightest effort - and white soft sand or smooth round pebbles.
Iconic: A decoration at St Marina church in Kissos
Place each enchanting lagoon at the base of a majestic mountain gorge and add - only not too often - an occasional modest strip of tavernas.
Agios Ioannis, up in the north Pelion, features some of the best. You can also add a simple scattering of beach-chairs and parasols, which you can hire for a few euros a day.
Keen walkers can clamber along the Aegean's rocky promontories from one lovely beach to the irresistible next - but it's easier to take the car, winding up from one placid cove, and vertiginously down again to its neighbour.
Beach life can offer its own adventures.
It was on the last day of our stay at the pretty and secluded Damouchari Hotel that my husband and I finally discovered that the steep cobbled track beyond the beach climbed up to a tiny, eccentric pagoda, perched on top of a jutting brow of a cliff. And it was to our delight that --with hearts in our throats at the drop on to sheer rock lying beneath our feet - we found we could also take this perilous route down to the loveliest and most hidden inlet of them all: the tiny, exquisite cove of Fakistra.
Here, we found a long-haired, olive-skinned girl out for a swim with her retriever puppy; a young man placidly burying his body in sun-warmed pebbles, and a young family of four splashing each other in the broad, safe shallows of the surf.
We stayed all day at Fakistra.
At twilight, we moved along to the next beach, Milopotamos, for sunset cocktails at a hillside bar overlooking the vast serenity of the sea at dusk. 'We Waiting the Night for Drinks', somebody had scribbled on the back of the menu. It might have been a complaint but in a setting like this, waiting felt like true luxury.
Further south, a couple of hours' drive down from Damouchari, the eastern Pelion offers lovers of seafood small, delicious fresh-fish restaurants (popular with day-trippers over from Skiathos); on the western side, overlooking the Pagasitic Gulf, the little town of Afissos presents a sweetly sleepy hillside of white houses cascading down towards a promenade of cafes and bars, flanked by a couple of perfect beaches.
'You'd better hurry,' my friend had advised.
He's right. Driving up the mountain roads, it's impossible to miss the evidence of development. New houses have recently started to mushroom from the hillsides; bulldozers leave a red clay marker of their daily, inexorable progress. A splendid new highway swoops up to a mountain-top ski resort - which by September is populated only by a couple of hoary shepherds attending obstreperous goats.
A brand-new amphitheatre sits high in the hills behind the lovely old village of Tsagarada - home to a 1,000-year-old plane tree, and Pelion's best restaurants: the Agnante and The Lost Unicorn.
Simple tastes: A local woman prepares a meal in a wood-fired oven
Happily, such development doesn't yet seem to have had much adverse impact on the 24 mountain settlements of the Pelion.
The villages, each with a breathtaking view of cloud-capped peaks, are the secret glory of the Pelion. It's easy, nevertheless, to be distracted from their beauty by your first encounter with a sullen cafekeeper, ready to charge you €30 for a salad and a glass of wine.
It's easy, too, to be exasperated when another, more modern music system blares out across a tranquil village square: enterprising Greek bar-owners are convinced this is what well-heeled visitors crave, and nothing's going to stop them pumping up the volume, all the better to enchant you.
Take such small annoyances in your stride.
They're worth it for the sake of the beauties that lie hidden away in the churches and monasteries of these remote villages. The Pelion is only a few hours' drive from one of Greece's most astonishing treasures: the monasteries of the Meteora, perched on sheer spikes of rock that rise from a desolate plain. And the region possesses some glorious churches, hidden away within its mountain strongholds.
each has its own charm: my favourite stands on the crest of Makrinitsa, an oldfashioned hill village that seems to hover in the air, high above Volos.
The best-known, by far, lies up in the north-east Pelion, at kissos.
Built in the 17th Century when the Pelion was under Turkish rule, St Marina of kissos is a gem. Multicoloured marble pillars, each topped by a startling painted face, divide three aisles flanked by high wooden seats and richly elaborate frescoes, all perfectly preserved.
The kissos altar screen is worked in gold while the domeless wooden ceiling is decorated with vivid biblical scenes.
Nobody was present in this sanctuary at the time of our visit but outside, on the porch, the first stray leaves of autumn were being swept away by its dark-robed, blackbearded priest.
Also among the Pelion's horde of treasures are the archontiko, the merchant mansions of the mountain villages.
Often converted these days for use as hotels, these wonderful old stone houses were originally built by Greeks who made their fortunes in egypt and returned to make a show of their success, back in the Pelion. Visiting one of the archontiko at Vizitza, an hour's drive south from Volos, I was enchanted by its combination of strict practicality and sheer beauty.
Animals were housed on the ground floor, the warmth of their bodies helping to heat the small, cosy winter rooms of the family above. Up a second flight of shiny chestnut-wood stairs is the glory of these sturdy hilltop palaces: a suite of arched and richly decorated summer rooms, their windows with long wooden balconies looking out across the terracotta tiles of village roofs to a fairytale panorama of hills, woods, and faraway glimpses of islands, beyond blue sea.
Thank goodness for that: Miranda relaxes at a waterside cafe in Damouchari after a battle with the local roads
And - just as we were about to leave - I couldn't help noticing that one of these glorious old houses, neglected, but not beyond rescue, had a notice attached: it was up for sale.
My thoughts turned back to my hilltop home in Corfu, my life in a Greece that I had thought was for ever lost.
I looked up at the handsome walls of the archontiko to its prettily arched casement windows. Unwillingly, I registered the broken shutters, the absence of guttering or pipes, the last remaining fragment of a graceful balcony that must once have stretched the length of the front facade.
Impossible. Ridiculous even to think of it. But still. I made a note of the telephone number. Perhaps I'll call...
Travel Facts
Greece specialist Sunvil Holidays (020 8758 4758, website offers a seven-night stay at the Damouchari Hotel in the Pelion from £663.
The price includes accommodation with breakfast, return flights from Gatwick to Skiathos (Bristol and Manchester departures available at a supplement), return ferry crossings and transfers.
Chaplin's Girl: The Life And Loves Of Virginia Cherrill, by Miranda Seymour, is available from Pocket Books, £8.99.
