SURVIVING CORONA ON A GREEK ISLAND: CREATING A VIRTUAL VACATION
“Pretend you can never leave…” he said to me, when I first came here to Zakynthos for a visit, because I was so prone to leaving, because I was always on the run, ever the nomad, mapping out my next adventure.
But now here I am, on this Greek island in the middle of nowhere, unable to leave due to the Coronavirus crisis. For the last three years together we have built something here based on faith, hope and love, something set against the very thing that is tearing the world to pieces. So, we decided we wanted to share it.
In a world where in less than a week everything skidded to a halt, with shuttered stores and schools, empty public squares, abandoned landmarks and plans, cancelled vacations, and millions self-sheltering at home, I decided, along with my Greek partner Kostas Bozikis to venture OUT into the wild of our island. Every day I took my camera, my hiking shoes and sometimes our dog, Marley on a new adventure, creating a “virtual Greek vacation,” for anyone who wanted to join us. Turned out, a lot of you did!
LINK TO OUR VIRTUAL GREEK VACATION VIDEO SERIES
In a way, the virus has demanded we all become islands ourselves, as we retreat to our homes, apartments, bedrooms. Even though we’d had one death on the island so far and only four confirmed cases, we still felt we were some of the lucky ones, surrounded only by what can never be closed: nature. Our backyard was bursting with ways to take our uncertainty and fear on a hike. And we wanted to take you with us — into miles and miles of pristine cypress and pine forest, endless, empty dirt roads leading to stunning views of the Ionian sea.
Life in Zakynthos dates back to the time of Homer, when Zakynthos, son of Dardanus, King of Troy found his way to the island in the 8th Century, B.C. Homer writes about the spirit of resistance of the islanders, and how, after the Trojan Wars, a treaty was conceived that could have been one of the earliest documents of democracy. Covering an area of about fifteen square miles, the island was also known as “The Flower of the Levant,” and those first few scary weeks of March, when the rest of the world fled indoors, Zakynthos was exploding with wildflowers, making their glorious debut, ribbons of bright yellow and pink winding through vineyards and blanketing all hills around us.
Over the next two months we would wake up in the morning and head out, to the Black Caves above the village of Katastari, to the abandoned ancient Monastery of St. Andrew, so remote that its crumbling walls still had traces of the original Byzantine paint. One of my favourite finds was the Temple to Artemis, the Greek Goddess of the hunt and nature, its ruins also a site of an orthodox Church long ago abandoned. I sat next to one of the fallen stone pillars, and marvelled at how calm I felt. Thousands were dying and becoming infected from Covid-19, others had lost jobs and businesses, entire lives ruined, while most of our friends and family were far away. All of this was of course so hard to process, there was so much unknown. But our videos were helping. As the days turned into weeks, we started getting encouraging messages, to keep going, keep posting. And so we did just that.
It is now five months after the first cases of the Covid-19 virus hit our island and Greece, and the world as we knew will never be the same. The summer has arrived and the island is slowly waking up from the shock, with few tourists and many restaurants and hotels still sadly closed, the empty beaches and roads calling like lost children for their parents. But nature is a lesson that keeps on teaching. Our island sojourns gave us solace for what we were feeling and space to let go of what we did not understand.
We invite you with us on our Greek Virtual Vacation whenever you like, to explore the glorious, endless gifts of the natural world, to take a break, take a breath and wrap yourself up in the smells, colours and sounds of this magical island.
Virginia Woolf wrote on another island in To The Lighthouse (we also visited a Lighthouse in our series) “ In all the lives we ever lived, and all the lives to be, are full of trees and changing leaves…”
May the healing nature and trees of Zakynthos help us all to get through this unprecedented time.
Originally published at https://medium.com on March 19, 2020.
