Winter in the Greek Islands!
For some years now, my husband and I have been going to the Greek islands for our annual summer holiday. We have explored many of the islands, both with our children, and more recently without them; they have now learned to fly and fled the nest.
Like most visitors to the islands, we have our favourites, but all in all, we just love Greece. It’s not for one reason, but for many, and for me to write about them all would take a long time. We have so many fond memories of past trips, many of them with our friends and relatives, that life would be quite unbearable if we were unable to get to the islands in the future.
Four years ago we bought a holiday home on the island of Kalymnos. It was an impulse purchase, but nevertheless, we have no regrets. Since buying the house we have spent three to four months in each year travelling around the islands, whilst using Kalymnos as our base.
Recently, my husband retired and we were considering a permanent move to the Dodecanese. In particular, we are very fond of Patmos. It is a beguiling, captivating island and seems to have struck a chord with both my husband and me. Of course, living on a Greek island year round is far different from the visiting for just two weeks or even four months.
Invariably, our time in Greece is spent during the months of April to June or September to November; we find July and August too hot now that we are getting a little older. The one thing that we had never done, until recently, was spend a winter in our house. Obviously if we intended to live on the island of Patmos year around, we thought it would be a good idea to check out what it was like to exist in the colder climate of the winter months.
We weren’t too concerned about the months of July and August as we thought it would be a good idea to return to the UK and visit family and friends during this time. However, we weren’t too excited about the idea of moving around Europe in the months of January and February, as it’s much too cold and the only place we longer to be during this cold spell is in the comfort of our own home.
So it was that we decided to spend our first winter in Kalymnos just as a ‘test run’. We extended our summer vacation which was scheduled to end in November and rescheduled it to end in March the following year. By the end of November, all of the lingering tourists have gone home, and the place seems to take on a new dynamic and feels like a completely different place. It’s not worse, it’s just different.
Most people that we talk to about the Greek islands think of them as laid back, relaxing, slow paced and friendly but in all honesty it seems as if the whole place shuts down; a bit like a bear which goes to ground for five months and sleeps. We did enjoy it. We particularly enjoyed going to the capital of Pothia for lunch, where it’s sheltered and its restaurants are exposed to the winter sunshine.
In December, it isn’t warm enough to dine out in your shorts and T-shirt, but it was pleasant enough to sit with just a shirt and light-weight sweater. Often, it can be warm enough whereby it is comfortable to remove the outer layer.
We loved our winter vacation until the arrival of the north winds in January. England can be cold in the winter, as most people probably realize, but nothing had prepared us for the devastating, bone-chilling winds that drive south from northern Siberia. We have never felt as cold as we were in our summer holiday home during the winter of 2008. No matter what we did, we just couldn’t get warm.
What we have now realized is that Greek homes are built for living in a climate which for 90% of the time is mild to very hot, but they are not insulated sufficiently to keep out the north winds. Of course, you can do the improvements necessary to stave off the debilitating gales, but that is something we have decided to leave for the next owner of our home.
We are so glad we did our trial run as I’m sure we would not have been able to live comfortably in the house during these cold times, but of course what it does mean is that we can still look forward to spending our summer holiday times in our new home, in the warm, sunny heavenly Greek islands that we’ve come to know and love.