Far and Away

Dont like these paints at all .... but making my way with them ....

Have to go out for a while now .... bit of a drive for lunch today to a port and a fish tavern.

Catch y'all later ....

💗

A taste of fish tavern .....

The streets here are lined with orange trees. They look beautiful, although the streets are really .... let's say "rustic". This is an ancient city. It grew up from goat tracks amongst a lot of hills. The main city was like any other Meditteranean city .... houses built into the hills from whatever materials they had, and all the menfolk were soldiers to defend it .... a city-state at that stage, rather than a whole country.

And somehow, the orange trees have always been a part of it. When England discovered orange trees, they had to build buildings for them, called "orangeries" to keep them out of the cold weather. Here they grew wild, as did the olive trees and pomegranates ..... there are olive trees on some of the city streets, but I have only seen pomegranates growing in the gardens.

Once civilisation settled into more peaceful times and the arts flourished, architectural styles became more elaborate as they grew more functional, but still the mpnatural, native sprawl of the city remained and grew too .... rustic and organic .... amongst the beautiful marble and statues .....

Its still here ... new and ordered amongst rustic and organic ... so many of the suburban city streets are not straight, you can turn a corner from a Main Street and find you are on something that looks like a country road, with chickens behind wire fences, and one or two room ancient cottages .... and orange trees .....

The orange trees, being wild, have very bitter fruit, more bitter than grapefruit ....

You can't eat it ....

So the trees are ornamental, primarily. But the Greek people are resourceful .... they haven't survived for thousands of years against all sorts of adversity without reason .... they adapt and improvise .....

The thick rind of the bitter oranges is taken off, and rolled into thick tubes secured with toothpicks, then boiled in sugar syrup until it becomes sweet ....

There is an empty shop near here, with a small window pane broken in the back of the shop .... it's a small shop so you can see right back to the small window next to a back door.

Sitting in the shop front window is a cat ... a medium sized tabby cat ... enjoying lounging on the tiled floor in the winter sun ....

We were here two years ago. It was there then. Wonder what the real estate is worth .... and this beautiful cat has a beautiful home in the winter sun .....

Meet Wintersun Cat ....

Stories from Santorini ....

While we haven't visited Santorini on this trip ... it's really a Summer destination, more for the fact that that is when the large ferry boats come and go from there .... at the end of Summer they change down to a smaller ferry, and having done it once, I would never recommend the small ferry passage with any sort of swell happening ... not unless you want to revisit your lunch, and not in a good way ..... but Santorini hold a special place in my heart.

Let me tell you some stories about the place.

Where you see the blue doors .... these are some of Santorini's ancient cave houses. Their primary function was to hide the inhabitants of the island from marauding pirates.

By the same token, transforming a natural cave in the pumice (layer of solidified lava) was much easier than gathering stones to build houses from scratch, and the pumice us an excellent insulator agains heat and cold .... helping to maintain a fairly constant temperature inside.

Some of the ancient cave dwellings are still in use as wine cellars in the modern hotels built on the island for this reason.... and Santorini is famous for its wines.

Can you still see the blue doors in this image ?

If the doors were left their natural sun-bleached wood colour, you can see how hard it would be to notice them amongst the rock-face of the volcano caldera they were nestled in.... especially if foliage was grown in front of them.

The caldera is massive, and the cave houses are small .... easily overlooked by pirates if you had a spring of fresh water close by, and enough food to last whike they were there on the lower reaches of the caldera lagoon. Trying to climb the rock face without identifiable paths that the locals knew would have been treacherous.

Hi @BlueBay .... Here are a couple of views of "modern" Santorini - many of the buildings you see here are hundreds of years old, but they are built the same way, and clustered on the rim of the volcano caldera in exactly the same way as the houses were thousands of years ago ....

I love the photos @Faith-and-Hope Thankyou for sharing them and your stories. xo

Love the painting you are doing as well. You are very talented.

@Faith-and-Hope

COOL PAINTING!!!

Wherever I look, there is a chair looking at me.