Mixing with movie stars on Naxos

Today we decided to tour around Naxos with a driver/guide I had made contact with last year. We hadn’t booked a tour with him because I thought we could see enough of Naxos on our own by bus. But once we arrived and Ron was told that the buses only run every three hours it was clear we needed a better plan. Ron is pretty all-accepting but when he truly thinks my plan is bad, he can be quite expressive. So we contacted Nicolas, who runs a guiding business here, and he was free today and so he picked us up and off we went.

Nicolas is French but he’s taken up residence on Naxos permanently. He’s lived and worked all over the place but Naxos is it for him. He grew up in Paris, has a degree in Psychology and has spent some time in the US doing movies and commercials. Indeed, I was able to confirm he’s been in a few (French) movies. A little digging by me, at the end of the day, provided this fun video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3tUnhnKLNI0.

The best thing about touring with Nicolas is that he seems to know everyone on the island now and he has devoted time to cultivating access to sites that we’d never see on our own. He took us out to the Temple of Demeter from 530 BC:

Nicolas told us there are 1000 chapels on Naxos, many of them private family chapels, and would we be interested in seeing one?? So he took us to an old house in the middle of nowhere and this woman came out and handed him this key:

And then we walked through her backyard fencing and past some orchards and we came to this chapel, from the 13th century. The family uses it for daily prayer and there are some 13th century frescoes and idols in there. There’s antiquities everywhere in Greece. There was a nearly identical chapel right next door to this one that the Greek government had focused on – they came in and took all the frescoes and put them in a museum in Athens. But for this chapel – who knows why – it sits intact.

We also toured the small village of Halki, known for having Venetian architecture on this Greek Island but now I see I didn’t get a picture there although I distinctly remember pointing the camera at things. We moved on to Apiranthos, a small mountain village that’s built completly out of marble. There’s massive amounts of marble on Naxos and in Apiranthos, which sits near the marble quarry, they just covered the town. Nicolas said that the further up the mountainsides you get on Naxos, the more conservative the people get. In Apiranthos, right at the top, they have arranged marriages only within the village and many of them have never traveled the 27 kilometers down to the beach. They’re so superstitious that Nicolas, with deeply feared blue eyes, instead of brown, (did you watch the video I linked above?), is not allowed near children for fear that he will curse them. Most people, he says, will not look him right in the eyes since they’re blue.

Here’s the backside of the nearby quarry:

Finally, Nicolas asked if we wanted to see the site of a 16th century abandoned Jesuit monastery. He took us onto a dirt road that grew more and more rutted with rocks and holes as we drove. Sometimes the road was so curvy that he had to complete part of a turn, then back up, turn the wheel a bit and take on part two. He commented that the road was in bad shape since the recent rains and that he was trying the road for the first time in his new (old) car and it was clear that, if we got stuck, we were stranded. I haven’t seen a police car or a tow truck since we got here.

But here’s the site. It was only used for about a century and it’s been slowly decaying ever since.

That’s it from Naxos. Tomorrow we take the ferry to Santorini and finish out our trip there.