Coming home

Missy Bear was heading home on the last leg of her spring adventure clockwise around the northern Aegean. We were sailing southwards just off the Turkish coast from Lesbos. After Samos we would leave the Eastern Sporades and arrive back in the Dodecanese.

Missy Bear 'Coming Home'

After spending a delightful, few days on the tiny and charming island of Oinousses, we sailed south to Samos, and anchored in a beautiful sandy bay on the north-west corner. This beach is a gem, but it is a long, hard and steep hike for landlubbers to reach via land. Fortunately, we have a boat. And the right weather, which was a southerly wind. During the Meltemi season, and during any other periods of strong northerly winds, the waves would roll into this bay making any stay uncomfortable or untenable. And strong northerlies were expected within a day.

Secluded beach on the northern shore of Samos

So next morning we weighed anchor, and sailed around the west of Samos, tacking through the windy gap with Fournoi to reach shelter on the south side of the island. We reached beautiful Ormos (which means ‘bay’), which is the bay of the village of Marathokampos, which perches half way up the mountains behind. Here we would be sheltered from the waves that would be piled up by the northerly wind.

But we would not be sheltered from the wind itself, by a quirk of geography. The western half of Samos is quite mountainous, and the terrain significantly affects the passing airflows. Wind at sea-level arriving from the north has to rise up to 4,500 feet to pass over Mount Kerkis. In order to clear the summit, it starts to rise a good way offshore, and so the wind pressure experienced at the shore itself at sea-level can be surprisingly light. In fact, a calm can be felt quite a way offshore north of the island. The waves that that wind has built, however, continue to roll southwards to crash into the bays.

Conversely, all that squeezed air has to go somewhere after it has mounted the peaks. It drops heavily in a swirling downdraft on the leeward side. And these strong downward gusts can be felt several miles offshore.  Ormos is located right in the downdraft zone. So, when Stefan - the German manager of the marina - handed us a second lazy line for our bow when we parked up stern-to, we accepted it gratefully. Our stay was characterised by quite violent gusts, which strained those old, dry anchor lines and made them squeak, strain and groan against our bow cleats, all day and all night. For days.

Ormos, in calm before the northerlies kicked-off

Alix decided that, on our car-based tour of the island, we should have a night away from Missy Bear in Pithagorio. This would also give us a night’s respite from the cacophony. We checked the lines once more, then hopped in the car. Later that evening we were strolling along the wonderful, arced quayside of that ancient port. The waterfront was full of Turkish boats as it was a Turkish national holiday. The Turks had sailed all of 6 miles to invade Greece once more, and then decanted into the nearest bar to watch their football team perform in Euro 2024.

We were served by a young Australian-Greek waitress in a cocktail bar. She’d found a much better place, either with or without her pals from down under.

You come across quite a few Aussie accents in Greece. Our butcher on Leros is an Aussie. So is the man that runs the electrical shop. The two men that run the car-rental place in Mytilene, on Lesbos, are Aussie Greeks. I wanted to talk cricket with them, with the start of the T20 World Cup being imminent. That was OK. But, when I mentioned rugby, it turns out these Greeks prefer Aussie Rules football!

Only two thirds of Greeks live in Greece. There are still five million people of Greek descent who live abroad. Australia is the third largest hub, being home to 600,000 Aussies of Greek descent. The US is in first place, but I wouldn’t have guessed Germany to be second. The UK is fifth with 300,000 souls.

There have been many, many periods of history where a Greek must have found a very good reason to emigrate; overfishing of sponges being one niche example. Many would have sought freedom from the taxes and serfdom of Ottoman rule. But even independence wasn’t the panacea that the romantics wanted. The newly independent Greeks continued to enjoy infighting, and the Greeks have had many civil wars, including a miliary coup d’etat as late as 1967. But the most seismic event was the recent financial crisis, where 600k Greeks emigrated to avoid unemployment and financial hardship.

If all these destabilising events led to dreams of joining a small Greek community far away, then perhaps the most recent stability has raised a home-sickness in these exiles? Certainly, 350k of the recent financial emigrants have returned home.

Beautiful, verdant and bountiful, Samos is a good example of the historic trials and tribulations faced by island-living Greeks; events that have caused whole populations to migrate back and forth across seas. Or even up and down mountains to retreat from sea-borne piratical threats.

The island has been settled by different immigrants since the Bronze Age, if not before. Its location on the edge of Asia Minor always attracted covetous gazes from the west, and the Ionians colonised it as part of their eastwards’ expansion. And there is certainly not much water – the narrow Mycale Strait - to protect it from the continentals. The greatest Samian, Polycrates, managed to hold off the Persians, but they later took the island and removed many of the Samians, to put into slavery. 

The island was essentially a prize, passed between the hands of successive winners: Persian dynasties; Greek polis (Athens and Sparta); the Romans; the Ottomans; and then the Nazis.

During the period of the eastern Roman Empire, Samians had very little respite: the Normans invaded in the 12th century; the Genoese harried the island, and the Turkomans caused trouble from across the Mycale Strait. To secure their Aegean islands from such attacks, and from a growing threat from Arab pirates, the Roman emperors accepted help from the Venetian navy, in exchange for trading privileges. Then, in the long aftermath of the Fourth Crusade, the Emperor enlisted Genoese help to force-out the Franks and Venetians, and to protect the islands from piracy. But by 1475, a much greater foe- the Ottomans - had occupied the island.

A large part of the Samian population left, many moving north to Chios. Samos was left with few remaining inhabitants and in decline.

Centuries later, Russia caused a reverse of fortunes, albeit indirectly. By beating the Ottomans in one of their many wars, the Russians secured a treaty with commercial rights for all Greek-speakers living within the Ottoman empire. Greek merchants took advantage of this, and a shipping business grew in Samos. The island had gained some degree of success, autonomy and a noble class.

But in 1812 the Ottoman authorities, perhaps out of suspicion or jealousy, decided to expel the elites from the island.

It is no surprise that the Samian Greeks were some of the first to join the subsequent fight for independence. But in the 1830 Treaty of London, Samos was, somewhat bizarrely, excluded from the borders of the new Greek state. I can only begin to imagine how upset the Samians must have felt at that pen-stroke.

The plucky islanders continued to refuse to accept sub-ordinance to the Ottomans. So, the Ottoman fleet enforced it! Many Samians fled their island. Many ending up in Chalkis. (Samos was not united with Greece until 1913.)

The Axis powers then delivered other body-blow to the Samians, when they occupied and plundered the island for their World War II efforts. They killed many of the islanders and starved the rest, as food supplies were needed for their war effort elsewhere. The situation was not improved by the Allies’ forced blockade of the islands.

Two thousand Samiots died of hunger, and thousands more escaped across the Mycale Strait to Asia Minor.

It makes you wonder, how many original Samian families managed to stay here on the island through all these catastrophies.

Ironically, perhaps, Samos is now the ‘home’ of many truly-foreign immigrants, housed in purpose-built camps surrounded by barbed-wire. Perhaps they are refugees seeking asylum. Perhaps some are economic migrants?  But, unlike our Australian waitress in Pithagorio, these economic migrants have not or cannot follow the same channels. Whereas, she has probably filled out all the right forms, and has the right family credentials to live and work here, they have not or do not.

Whereas the stories of our Aussie-Greek folk is an optimistic one of ‘coming home’, I wonder what stories the camp internees or their descendants will end up telling?  Will they ever want to, or be able to, ‘come home’.

Anyway. its time to weight anchor and sail the final few miles down to Leros. Its blowing a northerly F5, so we might only need the jib!