Tales from a Greek Island

by Roger Jinkinson

Often surprising, sometimes bizarre, never dull. Roger Jinkinson takes us far offthe tourist-beaten track to explore life — and death — in a small village on aremote Greek Island. Meet the people he has come to know over 25 years — atonce traditional and modern, hard-bitten and generous, stoic and resourceful.Learn how they fish, keep bees, hunt goats, make music. Read about the manwho tried to ransom a floating crane, about the mule that outwitted theGerman army and the death of a giant. Read and you will feel the very pulseof a community as it fights to maintain its unique and vibrant culture.

Genres: Greece

180 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2005

Reviews

[Jennifer Barclay · Rating 4 out of 5]

There’s a wonderful scene in this book by Roger Jinkinson when he describes how the ferry used to stop in Diafani, the village by the sea below Olympos, before there was a dock. Nikos’s small boat would go out to the big ferry and back to the port, back and forth with ‘villagers, tourists, goats, freezers, washing machines, flour, tools, seeds, cement…’
Roger Jinkinson has lived in Diafani in the north of Karpathos for years and clearly loves the place that has become home. His stories held a special fascination for me since I’ve been living in the area for the last few months. The stories are not just about Olympos and Diafani, though; they’re about the Greek way of life, especially as it is in these out of the way places.
He has a fine chapter on the customs surrounding the burial of the dead and later exhumation of a person’s bones. There are excellent stories about fishing, as he’s learned to dive and spear-fish; of steering a boat across the short passage between Karpathos and Saria, and of an encounter with manta rays. And there are wondrously strange stories he’s learned of from the past, such as that of blinding pirates with mizithra cheese.
The book has some incredibly beautiful – and hilariously funny moments. I laughed out loud where he talked of a sign advertising ‘Nice rooms with toilet in garden two hundred metres away’; and the lady talking to the tourists in imperfect English – I can just hear her saying, ‘Seven nice day.’
Only a pedantic editor like me with intermediate Greek would notice the occasional tiny mistakes, though you may notice a bit of repetition among the chapters, which were perhaps originally written as stand-alone pieces.
The one thing that distanced me from the storytelling at times is the way he sometimes reminds us he’s an outsider (Jinkinson is a former lecturer from a London university) and at other times he includes himself as one of the villagers. He says at one point that anthropologists come to the village from universities to study its ways and cultural traditions and ‘explain to us what we are’. I think he’s trying to capture both points of view and at first it grated on me, as it felt he was elevating himself above mere outsiders who don’t understand. Is he speaking in the voice of a villager when he says, ‘we look after our animals’ while ‘you love your cars’? There are plenty of villagers who prefer cars to animals, and plenty of travellers to Olympos who love their animals back home.
I’m sure he wrote it this way for good reasons but it made the book hard to get into at first. I’m so glad I persevered, though. These tales from a Greek island are full of brilliant detail, and they weave together nicely, and I wholeheartedly agree that life is ‘never dull’ year round on a Greek island, with its hardships and its beauty. This was his first book set in Greece – he’s since published More Tales from a Greek Island – and I look forward to reading on.