Me on a hillside over Kameni, Hydra on the way to Moni Profiti Illias. A Dianne Lima photo
February 9
I woke up at 5:30 a.m. My twelve hour nap had left me pretty refreshed, but I figured that sleeping another hour while waiting for the hot water to heat up wouldn’t hurt. I intended to quickly turn on the water heater. As I mentioned before, the switch for the water heater was in a room outside of our room. After I walked outside to get to that switch, I noticed a most glorious sight. The delicately illuminated town and the harbor were below me. I could see lights on through the windows of a couple of houses. However, there wasn’t a sound in the air. No car noise, or street sweeper noise, or annoying-European-motorcycle noise. There were only the occasion cries of roosters breaking the faint background sound of the waves rippling against the dock. It was an incredibly magical scene. I was so moved by it that I sat outside and took it in for 15 minutes (then I got cold and finished my mission). I knew that if I didn’t immerse myself in what I was seeing, I would regret it once I got back to “the real world.”
About an hour later, Dianne got up to take a shower. She immediately noticed that the hot water wasn’t on. She continued to shower, even though she only had cold water. I got up and stalled for a bit in the hope that the hot water would eventually come on. It didn’t. At this point, we had decided to inform to Dina about our water situation. However, I told Dianne that it was likely that I had thrown the wrong switch, thereby heating up water for another room.
Dianne had also come up with a plan for the day’s activities. She didn’t fall asleep when I did the day before. In fact, she was awake for a good part of the evening. In order to fill the time, she took up reading Lonely Planet’s description of Hydra’s sights. Having been familiarized with what was available on Hydra, she decided we should hike to the top of Mt. Eros to see the Moni Profiti Illias monastery and the Moni Efpraxis convent. Lonely Planet described the hike as a “strenuous but worthwhile one hour hike.” It sounded like a good way to spend part of the day.
We found Dina on our way out. I opened one of the phrasebooks which had “We have no hot water” in the Greek alphabet. Dina expressed shock. She took us back to the fuse box to see what happened. It turned out that I had thrown the wrong switch. Having proven that we were stupid Americans, Dina graciously showed us once again how to operate the hot water. I was embarrassed, but grateful.
We stopped by the grocery store and bought some water. We then began making our way up the hill. It was much steeper than we had thought. But, we just went slow because we had all day. Eventually, the dense concentration of houses began to thin. We found ourselves on a paved road lined with pine trees. We continued on to the end of the road and found a church complex. We first thought it was the monastery, but there was no one around. We decided to try a couple of other complexes that were about 100 feet up and 500 yards west of where we were. Both complexes had buildings with crosses on their roofs, so they seemed like strong candidates for being the monasteries wewere looking for.
We marched to the first complex. Both the outer walls and the buildings inside the walls were painted orange. Despite some evidence of people having recently been there, no one was around when we arrived. We walked around the perimeter of the walls, but didn’t see any entrance that was open. Instead, we set our sights on the second complex that we had spotted earlier. It was at the same altitude as the orange complex, but we had to cross a small ravine to get to it. We crossed the ravine and made it to the exterior walls. As was the case with the orange complex, there were no open doors. We marched around the entire perimeter and didn’t see anyone. Eventually, we made our way to the main door. We still didn’t see anyone, but I thought I heard someone inside. I yelled out “hello” in Greek. A man answered “hello” back to me in Greek. I asked (again in Greek) if this was the monastery. The voice answered “no” in English. At that point the door opened. A tall, thin, well-tanned man opened the door and said “hello” again in English. He said that he was the caretaker of the villa that we had stumbled on. We asked him how far it was to the monastery. He said that it was at the top of the mountain, at least 800 meters. He said to look for a sign next to a fence on the trail and follow the sign’s instructions. He then asked, “How much water do you have?” I had a liter bottle, and Dianne had two quart bottles. When he saw our stash, he said, “Oh, that’s not going to be enough. Let me get some more.” His comment didn’t sound good, especially since the day was rather cool (about 65 degrees). Before we had a chance to question it further, he emerged with two 1-liter bottles. He gave them to us and pointed us to the trail. We gratefully accepted his gift and continued on.
By this point, we’d be hiking for ninety minutes. We thought our detour had added about an hour to the trip, so we should only have about a half-hour climb ahead of us. We were wrong. It took a full hour of marching through switchbacks and rough trail before we finally reached the sign next to the fence. The sign said that the trail continued on the other side of the fence’s gate. We opened the gate, and saw a set of stone stairs that seemed to have no end. After two and a half hours of climbing, we were not in the mood to do stairs. However, we had come that far, so we started trudging up.
A half-hour after we began the stairs, we reached the gate of the Moni Profiti Illias monastery. There were a couple of gardeners working on the grounds just outside of the gates, but they gave us no more than a glance as we approached. There didn’t appear to be anyone else around. The gate was open, so we proceeded through it to the interior courtyard. There was no one around the courtyard either. The chapel for the monastery was in the courtyard’s center. We tried the door and found it to be open. It was quite dark in the interior, but even the darkness couldn’t diminish the splendor of the sanctuary. We couldn’t believe our eyes at the stunning altar and the magnificent painting on the dome. While we were aware that picture taking was unofficially forbidden inside of Greek Orthodox churches, it seemed a great shame not to capture this in film. I snapped a couple of pictures and Dianne did the same.
As the film in Dianne’s camera was automatically rewinding, the door to the church opened. I rushed to the church’s door to run interference while Dianne’s camera finished rewinding. As I approached the door, a monk entered the church. I said “hello” in Greek and then asked if he spoke English. He replied to my greeting and said that he only spoke Russian and Greek. By this time, Dianne had packed away her (thankfully silent) camera. She moved next to me as the monk asked us if he could help us. I explained that we were tourists who had heard about the monastery and wanted to see it. I then said that the church was beautiful (which it was). He asked if we wanted to join him for some coffee. We declined, saying that we wanted to visit the convent before we went back to town. He said that since it only took an hour to get from the town to the monastery, we’d have time to join him. We then related the story of our arduous trek. He looked at us as though we were wimps. However, he was polite and pointed us in the direction of the convent. We walked out of the monastery’s gates and headed in the direction he indicated. (By the way, all of the conversations with the monk were conducted in a very broken form of Greek, with a little English interjected. While it is possible that we misinterpreted the statements, I think that we understood the heart of the conversation. Thank God we brought our phrasebooks!)
After a twenty-minute walk, we arrived at the convent. It looked as deserted as the monastery initially did. We were about to walk away when the front door opened. A small, elderly woman dressed almost completely in black emerged from the doorway. It was pretty clear that she was a nun. I immediately said “hello” and asked my standard question: “Do you speak English?” She replied “No.” I thought we’d have to retreat to our phrasebooks again, but she seemed to know why we were there. Without a word, she motioned us to follow her. We followed her into the convent’s grounds and toward a church in the middle of the complex. All of us entered the church. It was a smaller version of the one at the monastery, but was equally as impressive. After a few minutes in the church, she once again motioned to us to follow her. She took us out of the church and into the convent itself. We passed through an old kitchen and out to a patio. She motioned for us to go outside. There we found the most spectacular views of the north side of Hydra that one could imagine. We stayed there for a moment with our jaws open, before realizing that we needed to immortalize these views with some pictures. I noticed that the nun had disappeared, but then turned my attention back to the gorgeous scenery. After about 10 minutes, the nun reappeared. She motioned for us to go back into the kitchen. When we entered, we found that she had prepared cookies and water for us. Seeing that it was well after noon and that our bottled water was almost out, we hungrily ate the food and drank the water. In between bites and gulps, we talked to her as best we could (again, thank God for phrasebooks). She told us that there were three nuns in the complex and that they made various products that they sold to support themselves. We asked if we could see some of these products. She led us out of the kitchen, through the cells of the nuns, and into a library. Nothing in the library seemed modern, from the 18th century books on the shelves to the room’s thick, musty air. In the room’s center was a table that was covered with icons, lacework, and worry beads. We decided to buy a small icon as a souvenir of our trip. After we paid 1,000 drachma for the icon, the nun led us out of the convent.
We made it down the mountain in about an hour. We talked the whole way down about what an incredible experience it was to spend time at the monastery and (especially) at the convent. We felt privileged to be able to see these sights and interact with these people. It gave our stay a richness that we hadn’t expected to achieve. While the hike up the hill turned out to be three hours instead of the one hour touted in Lonely Planet, it was still worth the effort. I strongly recommend that any visitor put a hike to these monasteries on their itinerary.
We got back to the Hotel Dina at about 4 p.m. We showered and changed out of our sweaty clothes. Since we were quite famished by this time, we set off in search of food. However, we didn’t want to shock our systems by eating another big taverna meal. Fortunately, we were able to find a small bakery named Il Forno on the dock. In addition to the usual sweets, Il Forno sold croissants with ham and cheese baked into them. We bought two of these and some sodas for 1,900 drachma. We took them back to our room and ate dinner there.
By the time we finished dinner, we were too tired to do any further exploring. But, we were happy to be tired. We had gone on a wonderful hike and exposed ourselves to some incredible experiences. It was with a very satisfied (but sore) feeling that we went to bed.
Hydra Town from the hill above the town.
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