The idyllic setting however has reminders of troubled times. The more distant one is the commemoration of the surrender of the islands to the Allies in 1945.
The more current one is the rather battered 40 ft yacht in the harbour. I asked about its history and learned that it washed up here with 73 refugees on board. The probable sequence was that it was chartered for a week from some gullible owner in Turkey, and sailed up the coast to somewhere across from Symi, loaded with refugees, each paying thousands of dollars, and sent across the ten miles or so towards Symi with no skipper or sailor to bring her safely into harbour. It is now abandoned. The owner has probably no recompense as it was probably an unofficial 'charter', and it sits here awaiting its fate. Happily the refugees are long gone, the locals here having been very helpful, (there was a volunteer group who fed, watered and housed them) and the authorities would have brought them to Athens.
Still in Symi?
ReplyDelete