The Boss Bar on Santorini

I like Greece and I like Greek tavernas, they are almost always friendly inviting places and the food is inexpensive and good value and it rarely disappoints. I like the carefree ambiance and the complete lack of formality, outside wooden tables and rattan chairs, check tablecloths, extensive menus and unhurried waiters. I like the cheap paper table covers so you can spill food and drink without worrying about being asked to pay the laundry bill, I like the certain company of scrounging cats and I especially like those with live bouzouki players running through the familiar catalogue of traditional Greek music and always starting and finishing with the obligatory ‘Zorba’.

My favourite Greek taverna, without a shadow of a doubt, was the ‘Boss Bar’ on the island of Santorini in 2004.

It was an untidy little place right on the beach at Perissa and on a fortnight’s holiday we dined there most evenings and when we felt obliged to try somewhere different, just for a change, we almost always wished that we hadn’t and went back there later for a final drink.

The ‘Boss Bar’ really had been an excellent place, the staff were attentive and friendly, the food was good, the beer was cold and the prices were reasonable.  There was always complimentary ouzo to finish the evening (except when there was complimentary melon which quite frankly wasn’t so good) but the place had my fullest recommendation.  On my fiftieth birthday a very substantial meal for nine cost only €85, I left a hundred, the owner refused such a generous tip, I insisted, and he completed our meal with at least €25 worth of complimentary sweets and drinks.

I returned to Santorini on 6^th September 2006 but was devastated to find that it had gone, probably because the owner had been far too generous with the complimentary ouzo.

Santorini, Rayleigh Scattering and Sunsets

“A large drop of sun lingered on the horizon and then dripped over and was gone, and the sky was brilliant over the spot where it had gone, and a torn cloud, like a bloody rag, hung over the spot of its going. And dusk crept over the sky from the eastern horizon, and darkness crept over the land from the east.”         John Steinbeck – ‘The Grapes of Wrath’

In 2006 I went backpacking to Greece and on 3^rd September visited the island of Santorini and late in the day went to the northern village of Oia which is famous for its sunsets.  Quite by chance, two years later, I was in Oia again also on 3^rd September.

Oia is even more picturesque than Thira but fortunately not nearly so crowded with fine walks along the top of the cliff, along narrow roads and down twisting footpaths, around churches, windmills and a castle and it was so much more leisurely and enjoyable than the capital.  The town has stricter rules on development and commerce and has managed to successfully protect itself from the excesses of tourism.

Oia has wonderful sunsets and about an hour before the appointed time coaches, buses and cars flood into the little town and brings hundreds of people in to see the spectacle.  They take up position all along the little streets and the place becomes overcrowded and far too busy so on both occasions I was glad that we were going in the opposite direction and back to Thira which by now was much quieter as all the cruise ships had started to leave.  We had timed our visit to perfection and here is my visiting Santorini tip; go first to Oia because while Thira boils over with visitors during the day it is empty in Oia and when this town starts to fill up for the sunset go back to Thira which calms down nicely at about this time when the cruisers all leave.  You can see the sunset in Thira just as well as Oia and let’s be honest, despite what they tell you in Oia, it is exactly the same sunset anyway!

If you have ever wondered why the sky is blue this is the reason.  Light travels through space in a straight line for as long as nothing disturbs it and as it moves through the atmosphere it continues on its journey until it collides with a bit of dust or a gas molecule and then what happens to the light depends on its wavelength and the size of the thing it crashes into.  Dust particles and water droplets are much larger than the wavelength of visible light and when light hits these large particles, it gets reflected in different directions. Gas molecules however are smaller than the wavelength of visible light and when light hits them, some of it gets absorbed and then the molecule radiates the light in a different direction.  The colour that is radiated is the same colour that was absorbed but the different colours are affected differently because blues are absorbed more easily than reds.

This process is called Rayleigh scattering and is named after Lord John Rayleigh, an English physicist, who first explained it a hundred and thirty years ago.  The blue colour of the sky occurs because the absorbed blue light is radiated in different directions and gets scattered all around the sky and since we see the blue light from everywhere overhead, the sky looks blue.  It’s as simple as that!

So what about sunsets?  Well, as the sun begins to set, the light must travel farther through the atmosphere before it gets to us and more of the light is reflected and scattered.  As less reaches us directly, the sun appears less bright and the colour of the sun appears to change, first to orange and then to red and this is because even more of the short wavelength blues and greens are now scattered and only the longer wavelengths are left in the direct beam that we can see.

What makes it even more dramatic is that the sky around the setting sun takes on a lot of different colours and the most spectacular shows occur when the air contains many small particles of dust or water because these particles reflect light in all directions and then as some of the light heads towards us, different amounts of the shorter wavelength colours are scattered out and we get to see the longer wavelengths and the sky appears red, pink or orange.

“As the sun went down it seemed to drag the whole sky with it like the shreds of a burning curtain leaving rags of bright water that went on smoking and smouldering among the estuaries and around the many islands”                     Laurie Lee – ‘As I walked out one Midsummer Morning

Island Hopping in Greece and my Gladiator Sandals

 Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,
 And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
 Round many western islands have I been
 Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
 Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
 That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne; 
 Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
 Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
 Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
 When a new planet swims into his ken;
 Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
 He star’d at the Pacific — and all his men
 Look’d at each other with a wild surmise —
 Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

John Keats – On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer

Island hopping with a backpack was an immediately brilliant idea when Sally mentioned it in May 2006 and invited me to bring my credit cards along and join her for a week or two in the Greek islands starting on 27^th August.

Sun drenched beaches, friendly tavernas, Mythos, Metaxa and Ouzo, I knew immediately that I would take up the offer but at first I was slightly wary of committing to a holiday with two girls addicted to the internet and who sleep with their mobile phones but I have always wanted to be more imaginative about my holidays, to take control and make my own arrangements rather than rely upon a holiday rep from Thomsons or Airtours and those tedious welcome meetings that seem to go on forever in a dingy hotel lounge when all you want to do is get outside in the sun.

So the chance to do things my way was a real opportunity and I signed up.

Preparation involved booking the flights and finding suitable hotels on line. This, I later had to concede,  turned out to be a bit of a cheat because proper back-packers, I’m told, take their lodgings chances when arriving in port, but I just wanted to be certain of a basic level of accommodation. I was fifty-two years old and had certain standards to maintain! I wanted Olympic size swimming pools, air conditioning as fresh as mountain air and at the very least a minimum standard of bathroom facility!

Packing the rucksack was quite a challenge! There wasn’t a lot of room in there and it took a number of  trial runs before I achieved the perfect combination of items. I needed my snorkel and essential bathroom items and some books of course and after that I had room for some clothes. It was like doing the hokey-cokey, in, out, in, out and shake it all about until I got it right. Like most people I always take too many clothes on holiday, that extra pair of shorts, another shirt just in case, and usually some items just go for the ride there and back, this time I was sure I had got it about right but for some unexplained reason I took some socks along for the trip. I didn’t wear them of course because all I had for foot attire was two pairs of sandals including my famous gladiators.

I had had the gladiator sandals since 1999 when I went to Rhodes and they had accompanied me abroad on every single beach holiday since. They were showing signs of wear and were not expected to see through this adventure but I had made it my mission to see how long I could make them last.

Footnote (no pun intended) – the sandals lasted until 2008 when the straps gave way. I tried to repair them but it was impossible so I had to admit defeat and throw them away!

Volcanic Eruption on Santorini and The Palace of Knossos

In 2001 I visited Crete with my son Jonathan and while we were there we visited the ancient site of the Palace of Knossos.  This is the largest archaeological site on Crete and was the ceremonial and political center of the ancient Minoan civilization and culture who once lived there.

According to Greek mythology, the palace was designed with such complexity that no one placed in it could ever find the way out and King Minos who commissioned the palace to imprison the hideous Minotaur kept the architect prisoner to ensure that he would not reveal the palace plan to anyone.  The architect was Daedalus who was a great inventor and he built two sets of wings so he and his son Icaros could fly off the island and escape.  Daedalus warned his son not to fly too close to the sun because the wax that held the wings together would melt but Icaros was young and impulsive and flew higher and higher until the heat destroyed his wings and he fell to his death in the Aegean sea.  Daedalus escaped and gave the palace plans to the Athenian King Theseus who travelled to Crete and found and killed the Minotaur.

The ruins at Knossos were first discovered in 1878 by a local man, Minos Kalokairinos, and the earliest excavations were made.  After that several Cretans attempted to continue the dig but it was not until March 16^th 1900 that the English archeologist Arthur Evans purchased the entire site and carried out massive excavations and reconstructions.  These days archeology is carefully regulated and supervised by academics who apply scientific rigour (except for Tony Robinson and the Time Team of course) to make sure that history isn’t compromised but it was very different a hundred years ago when wealthy amateurs could pretty much do as they pleased and went around digging up anything that they could find that interested them.

Evans employed a large staff of local labourers as excavators and within a few months had uncovered a substantial portion of what he named the Palace of Minos, at the same time applying the description Minoan on the people who lived there, although no one really knows what they called themselves four thousand years ago when the Palace was constructed.  In the Odyssey which was composed centuries after the destruction of Knossos, the poet Homer called the natives of Crete Eteocretans, which means true Cretans and these may have been descendants of the Minoans. There is much disagreement over the value of Evans’ work because experts argue that some of his reconstructions are inaccurate, unresearched and constructed from unsuitable material, including concrete.

Unfortunately, it is probably true that Sir Arthur got a bit carried away with his restoration and most of the famous icons are largely modern and what survives of the original paintings amounts in most cases to no more than a few square centimetres. The rest is more or less imaginative reconstruction, commissioned in the first half of the twentieth century by Evans.  Most of the famous dolphin fresco was painted by a Dutch artist, architect, and restorer Piet de Jong, who was employed by Evans in the 1920s and the ‘Prince of the Lilies’ is an earlier restoration, from 1905, by the Swiss artist Émile Gilliéron.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of the scholars arguments I have to say that it does make the site a whole lot more interesting than just a few old walls and foundations and some of the experts have been forced to agree that in some places the concrete has actually helped preserve the original building, especially on steps that would otherwise have been worn away by thousands of visitors over the last hundred years.

We left the holiday village of Agios Nikólaos early in the morning and arrived in Knossos an hour or so later and paid our entrance fees.  Once inside we were approached by a local guide who looked as though he was stuck in a 1960s hippie culture time warp and somehow he persuaded me to part with €10 to join his guided tour.  This isn’t something that I would normally do but on this occasion I was pleased that I did because he provided an informative and amusing tour and we learned that the Palace had one thousand interlocking rooms and enjoyed the comforts of an elaborate system of water supply and drainage systems as well as flushing toilets, air conditioning and paved roads.  The Palace was not the home of one privileged individual but housed a complete community and included artisans workrooms, shops and food processing centres and it served as a central storage point, and a religious and administrative centre for the north of the island.

Even at fourteen, Jonathan was cultivating a mean streak and he became very concerned when two non-payers joined the guided tour and tagged along, he kept trying to draw this to the attention of the guide who eventually responded to the hints and asked them to pay up, much to his satisfaction.  Actually I think freeloading in this way is quite good fun so long as there isn’t a spoilsport like Jonathan around!

The Minoan civilization was a Bronze Age culture that flourished from approximately 2700 to 1450 BC but it came to a dramatic end sometime between 1550 and 1630 BC as a result of the eruption on the island of Santorini which is about one hundred kilometres north of Crete.  This eruption was among the largest volcanic explosions in the history of civilization that measured six on the Volcanic Explosivity Index and is just about as big as you can get.  The Yellowstone eruption, six hundred and forty thousand years ago, was the biggest ever and measured eight.  So this would have been a fairly big bang and when it went off you would probably want to be standing well back because it ejected an estimated sixty cubic kilometres of material as it blew the devastated island apart.

To get a sense of perspective try to imagine the county of Essex rising sixty kilometres into the air into the earth’s mesosphere (a terrible thought I agree) and you can get a sense of just how much material that is.  Actually it probably wouldn’t be such a bad thing if Essex blew up in this way, except we would lose Stansted airport I suppose.  As it happened, one hundred kilometres was not far back enough and the eruption devastated the Minoan settlement at Akrotiri on Santorini which was entombed in a layer of pumice and created a huge tsunami that engulfed the island of Crete and destroyed the Palace of Knossos and many other Minoan coastal settlements.  Archeologists believe that the eruption created a crisis in Minoan society (well I imagine it would) and with trade and agriculture seriously disrupted they were easily conquered by the Mycenaeans from mainland Greece who took their place on the island of Crete.

A Life in a Year – 6th September, The Boss Bar on Santorini

I like Greece and I like Greek tavernas, they are almost always friendly inviting places and the food is inexpensive and good value and it rarely disappoints. I like the carefree ambiance and the complete lack of formality, outside wooden tables and rattan chairs, check tablecloths, extensive menus and unhurried waiters. I like the cheap paper table covers so you can spill food and drink without worrying about the laundry bill, I like the certain company of scrounging cats and I especially like those with live bouzouki players running through the familiar catalogue of traditional Greek music and always starting and finishing with the obligatory ‘Zorba’.

My favourite Greek taverna, without a shadow of a doubt, was the ‘Boss Bar’ on the island of Santorini in 2004.

It was an untidy little place right on the beach at Perissa and on a fortnight’s holiday we dined there most evenings and when we felt obliged to try somewhere different, just for a change, we almost always wished that we hadn’t and went back there later for a final drink.  The ‘Boss Bar’ really had been an excellent place, the staff were attentive and friendly, the food was good, the beer was cold and the prices were reasonable.  There was always complimentary ouzo to finish the evening (except when there was complimentary melon which quite frankly wasn’t so good) but the place had my fullest recommendation.  On my fiftieth birthday a very substantial meal for nine cost only €85, I left a hundred, the owner refused such a generous tip, I insisted, and he completed our meal with at least €25 worth of complimentary sweets and drinks.

I returned to Santorini on 6^th September 2006 but was devastated to find that it had gone, probably because the owner had been far too generous with the complimentary ouzo.

A Life in a Year – 3rd September, Rayleigh Scattering and Sunsets

In 2006 I went backpacking to Greece and on 3^rd September visited the island of Santorini and late in the day went to the northern village of Oia which is famous for its sunsets.  Quite by chance, two years later, I was in Oia again also on 3^rd September.

Oia is even more picturesque than Thira but fortunately not nearly so crowded with fine walks along the top of the cliff, along narrow roads and down twisting footpaths, around churches, windmills and a castle and it was so much more leisurely and enjoyable than the capital.  The town has stricter rules on development and commerce and has managed to successfully protect itself from the excesses of tourism.

Oia has wonderful sunsets and about an hour before the appointed time coaches, buses and cars flood into the little town and brings hundreds of people in to see the spectacle.  They take up position all along the little streets and the place becomes overcrowded and far too busy so on both occasions I was glad that we were going in the opposite direction and back to Thira which by now was much quieter as all the cruise ships had started to leave.  We had timed our visit to perfection and here is my visiting Santorini tip; go first to Oia because while Thira boils over with visitors during the day it is empty in Oia and when this town starts to fill up for the sunset go back to Thira which calms down nicely at about this time when the cruisers all leave.  You can see the sunset in Thira just as well as Oia and let’s be honest, despite what they tell you in Oia, it is exactly the same sunset anyway!

If you have ever wondered why the sky is blue this is the reason.  Light travels through space in a straight line for as long as nothing disturbs it and as it moves through the atmosphere it continues on its journey until it collides with a bit of dust or a gas molecule and then what happens to the light depends on its wavelength and the size of the thing it crashes into.  Dust particles and water droplets are much larger than the wavelength of visible light and when light hits these large particles, it gets reflected in different directions. Gas molecules however are smaller than the wavelength of visible light and when light hits them, some of it gets absorbed and then the molecule radiates the light in a different direction.  The colour that is radiated is the same colour that was absorbed but the different colours are affected differently because blues are absorbed more easily than reds.

This process is called Rayleigh scattering and is named after Lord John Rayleigh, an English physicist, who first explained it a hundred and thirty years ago.  The blue colour of the sky occurs because the absorbed blue light is radiated in different directions and gets scattered all around the sky and since we see the blue light from everywhere overhead, the sky looks blue.  It’s as simple as that!

So what about sunsets?  Well, as the sun begins to set, the light must travel farther through the atmosphere before it gets to us and more of the light is reflected and scattered.  As less reaches us directly, the sun appears less bright and the colour of the sun appears to change, first to orange and then to red and this is because even more of the short wavelength blues and greens are now scattered and only the longer wavelengths are left in the direct beam that we can see.  What makes it even more dramatic is that the sky around the setting sun takes on a lot of different colours and the most spectacular shows occur when the air contains many small particles of dust or water because these particles reflect light in all directions and then as some of the light heads towards us, different amounts of the shorter wavelength colours are scattered out and we get to see the longer wavelengths and the sky appears red, pink or orange.

“A large drop of sun lingered on the horizon and then dripped over and was gone, and the sky was brilliant over the spot where it had gone, and a torn cloud, like a bloody rag, hung over the spot of its going. And dusk crept over the sky from the eastern horizon, and darkness crept over the land from the east.” John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

A Life in a Year – 27th August, Island Hopping in Greece

Island hopping with a backpack was an immediately brilliant idea when Sally mentioned it in May 2006 and invited me to bring my credit cards along and join her for a week or two in the Greek islands starting on 27^th August.  

Sun drenched beaches, friendly tavernas, Mythos, Metaxa and Ouzo, I knew immediately that I would take up the offer but at first I was slightly wary of committing to a holiday with two girls addicted to the internet and who sleep with their mobile phones but I have always wanted to be more imaginative about my holidays, to take control and make my own arrangements rather than rely upon a holiday rep from Thomsons or Airtours and those tedious welcome meetings that seem to go on forever in a dingy hotel lounge when all you want to do is get outside in the sun.

So the chance to do things my way was a real opportunity and I signed up.

Preparation involved booking the flights and finding suitable hotels on line. This, I later had to concede,  turned out to be a bit of a cheat because proper back-packers, I’m told, take their lodgings chances when arriving in port, but I just wanted to be certain of a basic level of accommodation. I was fifty-two years old and had certain standards to maintain! I wanted Olympic size swimming pools, air conditioning as fresh as mountain air and at the very least a minimum standard of bathroom facility!

Packing the rucksack was quite a challenge! There wasn’t a lot of room in there and it took a number of  trial runs before I achieved the perfect combination of items. I needed my snorkel and essential bathroom items and some books of course and after that I had room for some clothes. It was like doing the hokey-cokey, in, out, in, out and shake it all about until I got it right. Like most people I always take too many clothes on holiday, that extra pair of shorts, another shirt just in case, and usually some items just go for the ride there and back, this time I was sure I had got it about right but for some unexplained reason I took some socks along for the trip. I didn’t wear them of course because all I had for foot attire was two pairs of sandals including my famous gladiators. 

I had had the gladiator sandals since 1999 when we went to Rhodes and they had accompanied me abroad on every single beach holiday since. They were showing signs of wear and were not expected to see through this adventure but I had made it my mission to see how long I could make them last.

 

Footnote – the sandals lasted until 2008 when the straps gave way. I tried to repair them but it was impossible so I had to admit defeat and throw them away!

A Life in a Year – 16th March, The Theory of Atlantis and The Palace of Knossos

In 2001 I visited Crete with Jonathan and while we were there we visited the ancient site of the Palace of Knossos.  This is the largest archaeological site on Crete and was the ceremonial and political center of the ancient Minoan civilization and culture who once lived there.

According to Greek mythology, the palace was designed with such complexity that no one placed in it could ever find the way out and King Minos who commissioned the palace to imprison the hideous Minotaur kept the architect prisoner to ensure that he would not reveal the palace plan to anyone.  The architect was Daedalus who was a great inventor and he built two sets of wings so he and his son Icaros could fly off the island and escape.  Daedalus warned his son not to fly too close to the sun because the wax that held the wings together would melt but Icaros was young and impulsive and flew higher and higher until the heat destroyed his wings and he fell to his death in the Aegean sea.  Daedalus escaped and gave the palace plans to the Athenian King Theseus who travelled to Crete and found and killed the Minotaur.

The ruins at Knossos were first discovered in 1878 by a local man, Minos Kalokairinos, and the earliest excavations were made.  After that several Cretans attempted to continue the dig but it was not until March 16^th 1900 that the English archeologist Arthur Evans purchased the entire site and carried out massive excavations and reconstructions.  These days archeology is carefully regulated and supervised by academics who apply scientific rigour (except for Tony Robinson and the Time Team of course) to make sure that history isn’t compromised but it was very different a hundred years ago when wealthy amateurs could pretty much do as they pleased and went around digging up anything that they could find of interest.

 

Evans employed a large staff of local labourers as excavators and within a few months had uncovered a substantial portion of what he named the Palace of Minos, at the same time applying the description Minoan on the people who lived there, although no one really knows what they called themselves four thousand years ago when the Palace was constructed.  In the Odyssey which was composed centuries after the destruction of Knossos, the poet Homer called the natives of Crete Eteocretans, which means true Cretans and these may have been descendants of the Minoans. There is much disagreement over the value of Evans’ work because experts argue that some of his reconstructions are inaccurate, unresearched and constructed from unsuitable material, including concrete. 

Unfortunately, it is probably true that Sir Arthur got a bit carried away with his restoration and most of the famous icons are largely modern and what survives of the original paintings amounts in most cases to no more than a few square inches. The rest is more or less imaginative reconstruction, commissioned in the first half of the twentieth century by Evans.  Most of the famous dolphin fresco was painted by a Dutch artist, architect, and restorer Piet de Jong, who was employed by Evans in the 1920s and the “Prince of the Lilies” is an earlier restoration, from 1905, by the Swiss artist Émile Gilliéron.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of the scholars arguments I have to say that it does make the site a whole lot more interesting than just a few old walls and foundations and some of the experts have been forced to agree that in some places the concrete has actually helped preserve the original building, especially on steps that would otherwise have been worn away by thousands of visitors over the last hundred years.

We left the holiday village of Agios Nikólaos early in the morning and arrived in Knossos an hour or so later and paid our entrance fees.  Once inside we were approached by a local guide who looked as though he was stuck in a 1960s hippie culture time warp and somehow he persuaded me to part with €10 to join his guided tour.  This isn’t something that I would normally do but on this occasion I was pleased that I did because he provided an informative and amusing tour and we learned that the Palace had one thousand interlocking rooms and enjoyed the comforts of an elaborate system of water supply and drainage systems as well as flushing toilets, air conditioning and paved roads.  The Palace was not the home of one privileged individual but housed a complete community and included artisans workrooms, shops and food processing centres and it served as a central storage point, and a religious and administrative centre for the north of the island.

Even at fourteen, Jonathan was cultivating a mean streak and he became very concerned when two non-payers joined the guided tour and tagged along, he kept trying to draw this to the attention of the guide who eventually responded to the hints and asked them to pay up, much to his satisfaction.  Actually I think freeloading in this way is quite good fun so long as there isn’t a spoilsport like Jonathan around!

The Minoan civilization was a Bronze Age culture that flourished from approximately 2700 to 1450 BC but it came to a dramatic end sometime between 1550 and 1630 BC as a result of the eruption on the island of Santorini which is about one hundred kilometres north of Crete.  This eruption was among the largest volcanic explosions in the history of civilization that measured six on the Volcanic Explosivity Index and is just about as big as you can get.  The Yellowstone eruption, six hundred and forty thousand years ago, was the biggest ever and measured eight.  So this would have been a fairly big bang and when it went off you would probably want to be standing well back because it ejected an estimated sixty cubic kilometres of material as it blew the devastated island apart.

To get a sense of perspective try to imagine the county of Essex rising sixty kilometres into the air into the earth’s mesosphere (a terrible thought I agree) and you can get a sense of just how much material that is.  Actually it probably wouldn’t be such a bad thing if Essex blew up in this way, except we would lose Stansted airport I suppose.  As it happened, one hundred kilometres was not far back enough and the eruption devastated the Minoan settlement at Akrotiri on Santorini which was entombed in a layer of pumice and created a huge tsunami that engulfed the island of Crete and destroyed the Palace of Knossos and many other Minoan coastal settlements.  Archeologists believe that the eruption created a crisis in Minoan society (well I imagine it would) and with trade and agriculture seriously disrupted they were easily conquered by the Mycenaeans from mainland Greece who took their place on the island of Crete.