Out on a walk on the Greek island of Hydra, a foreign tourist comes upon an old Greek man sitting on a rock, sipping a glass of ouzo, and lazily staring at the sun setting into the sea. The tourist notices there are olive trees growing on the hills behind the old Greek but that they are untended, with olives just dropping here and there onto the ground. He asks the old Greek who owns the trees.
"They're mine", the Greek replies.
"Don't you gather the olives?" the tourist asks.
"I just pick one when I want one", the old man says.
"But don't you realise that if you pruned the trees and picked the olives at their peak, you could sell them? Where I come from everyone is crazy about virgin olive oil, and they pay a good price for it."
"What would I do with the money?" the old Greek asks.
"Why, you could build yourself a big house and hire servants to do everything for you."
"And then what would I do?"
"You could do anything you want!"
"You mean, like sit outside and sip ouzo at sunset?"
This pretty much sums up Greece and how I remember my eighteen months there from late 1983 to early 1985 which included trips to several islands, one of which was legendary Hydra where the Australian writers George Johnston and Charmian Clift, along with their children, lived from 1955 until 1964.
The movie Boy on a Dolphin was filmed on the island in 1956. If you can take your eyes off Sophia Loren's physique long enough while watching this movie, you'll see Hydra as it was in the 1950s. A time before tourism became its chief industry; when fishing and sponge-diving were the mainstay of its economic stability (although it's hard to believe that a woman would have had a sponge-diving job in the Greek male-oriented society back then).
The movie is not easy to come by but I have just been able to buy a copy through - you guessed it! - ebay. Although today the movie comes across as an outdated and very unsophisticated drama, it is a historic record, of sorts, of the old Hydra.
And it reminds me very much of the Greece I knew and loved!
