Island life

When I was a child, island life for me was all about playing hide and seek inside the labyrinth of a traditional settlement until it was too dark to see and my mother was searching for me to get me home. A few years after, island life was about the times I was brave enough, to dive into the sea from our small fishing village dock, as the oldest children of my community used to do. Some years later than that, my idea about island life could be synopsized in the hours of getting ready to go out for the night: it was the period when the island under the sunlight seemed to have lost its charms, while dancing and being all night out with friends was defining and cool. Now, island life is a source of inspiration and peacefulness. Somehow in my head, the whole island life concept has shifted from summer to winter. This is cool for me now and this is my new defining thing: to be an insider of a romantic minority that chooses winter island life over city rhythms and urban philosophy.

The truth is that you are never an insider in a closed Greek island society and that if most locals had to choose a word that underlines their concept of life, it wouldn’t be the word romantic. As Harrison Ford said to Anne Heche in one of his witty quotes about island magic and romance: “It’s an island, babe. If you didn’t bring it here, you won’t find it here.”

Although I am sure that each one of the about 13.000 inhabitants of my island has a unique concept about what island life means to them, and that one’s perspective can change in time, there are some common beliefs that unite the people of the island, no matter how different are their backgrounds and experiences. There is a common love for the island and there is a common feeling of pride about being connected to it somehow. I have heard a lot of people say that they adopted the island but I always feel that it’s the island that adopted us  – and then we spend energy and time trying to figure out how to behave like a big family. It’s funny.

The most common thing that island people share is a choice to live there. Locals, people originated from the island that grew up elsewhere and returned, emigrants, foreign people that fell in love with it and moved here permanently, others that spend half a year here and half a year in a city, they all say, that their choice to stay in an island or move there was conscious. A good friend of mine, told me recently that during her last holidays in the neighboring island of Naxos she met an old man, very happy about his choice to live in the village where he was born all his life. “It feels like heaven here, why should I move?” he told her. “Even if I got the chance to live for 400 years, right here I would choose to live all of them”.

As suffocating or blissful as this may sound to you, it is difficult to overlook the way people become what they are, by living near the sea and the wind and the Aegean light.

photography by christos drazos