Ikaria

Matheos, at the house that his father built. He is restoring it and adding plumbing and electricity. Electricity did not come to the island until 1960´s. The house is on the side of a mountain and you need to hike to it. It has at least 30,000 sq feet of rock wall that was built to support several terraces, used to retain water and support agricuture in a remote location, which was necessary during WWII to keep hidden from Nazis who were in town. In fact, the whole island was built in a scattered manner, houses hidden in ravines on the hillsides and not clumped together like most towns. This was so that it appeared either poor or uninhabited to Turks and Pirates who were passing at sea.

Chrisa, at her mother´s house which overlooks the beach.
Everyone on the island of Ikaria has at least one of the following: orange, lemon, apricot, almond, olive, fig trees, in addition to goats, pigs, grapevines and large plots of vegetable gardens. Everything we ate here, much like Kefallonia, was from the island. In most cases, what we were eating was picked or killed that day. In fact the best meal I had out in all of 3 weeks in Greece was at a place owned by a man named Socrates, the second Socrates I´ve met. He built a restaurant out in the woods that looks like a ship, all on his own. The food we ate was fresh picked, the wine was his, the olive oil was his, he had just made the cheese, and we ate fresh pigs head and pork chop, the tastiest pork chop I´ve had.