I was sailing through the channel between Poros and Galatas on a large motor yacht, it was afternoon in early summer with sunny warm weather and soft winds. The yacht was passing close enough to the coast of the Peloponnesus and I saw something that fascinated me.

 

There, just on a deserted and quiet seashore I saw a nice, wonderfully preserved old house, a typical building of Morias (aka Peloponnesus). The gray stone walls glowed at noon and the tiled roof lit as a red spot inside the deep green landscape. Green colors were  everywhere at the surrounding low hills, in the gardens with orange and lemon trees, from scattered cypress groves and old olive groves. A small tuft with a few majestic pines is located right next to the house and onto the shore of Argolis, like a somber tone on the balance of this unique picture, like a watercolor painting…

This image enchanted me … and marked me with a unique way.

I do not know why. Or the more I think I know. In my personal mythology such a landscape provides something very… Greek in a unique way, something very special, stylish and distinctively dazzling. It sets something that I love and I carry within me, as a compass that shows me the way, during those many years of traveling in Greece, it is more than a picture of a nice Peloponnesian landscape with an old stone house; it is a symbol to me.

I would like to stay in this house.

And then thoughts came to me: To whom this house belongs? How many years is it here? Who built it? Behind the house, on the Peloponnesian coast, somewhere at the soft slopes of the mountain of Aderes  and  among orange groves lies the birthplace of Theseus, the ancient city of Trizina. A little bit to the south, and among the lemon groves Patrick Leigh Fermor lived in a mill with Balasa Kantakouzenos. Do they had seen this house?

The wind blew fresh and northerly as the boat twisted east to come out of the strait into the open waters of the Saronic gulf. The nice house stayed behind, that extraordinary landscape faded away and I had been standing on the railing, as if in a dream.

“Come on, come take  the wheel ..” the captain called me.

I obeyed and jumped on to the fly bridge.

The Saronic gulf’s water spread before us like generous blue meadow.

I thought the sea was my home forever…