Like Joanna, I wanted to keep my memories of Santorini intact. So last year, when I was invited to Santorini to review the newly opened OMMA Santorini I wondered if a return would change the way I viewed the island and my narrative along with it. Much as I longed for the colours and culture of Greece I worried that by going back I would dilute my recollections and lose yet more of my parents.
It’s a question psychologist Fiona Murden, author of Defining You: How to Profile Yourself and Unlock your Full Potential and Mirror Thinking; Why Role Models Make Us Human and host of the pod cast Dot-to-Dot, also had to consider recently, when she decided to go with her husband and two daughters to a distant island off the Vancouver, a location she had last visited with her father and brother 30 or so years before.
“After my parents divorced, my father would take my brother and me to the island, where his best friend had a house,” she recalled. “It was a place so remote that we needed three ferries to reach it, but I remember us relishing even that journey: the getting there was so much a part of those holidays; so much a part of the promise of having hours, days and weeks with our dad.
“Each one was special, magical really, and each one added a new layer of really visceral memories. After he died, I looked back on those times and my overriding emotion was one of love. He loved us so much, and he loved that island, and my connection to it is so tightly bound to him and to my childhood. When he showed us the island, it was like he was sharing a part of himself. I don’t think I am retro-glazing it. I genuinely think I recognised even then that he was giving us something that was so incredibly precious.”
Murden says she was trepidatious about travelling there with her own family, worrying they wouldn’t love it, or that they would find the journey by sea, which she found so thrilling and full of promise, tedious. “Obviously, I didn’t expect them to have an emotional attachment to the island, but it did trouble me that they might find it boring,” she admitted. “And if they did, how would that affect my relationship with it? I also wondered how I’d feel if I couldn’t find some essence of my childhood there. I arrived full of what ifs, but thank goodness none came to anything. I made new memories, and I was also given old ones. I met a woman there who remembered how my dad would play with us for hours. Her recollections were a gift, a validation. I know he was a wonderful father, but hearing someone else say that, well, that was profoundly moving.”
I also took the plunge and decided to return to Santorini, acknowledging that my Greek memories, like Greek cats, would only run farther and faster when chased. So I gave up any idea of retracing my steps, or of trying to recapture moments, and instead allowed them to come to me.
A day’s sailing with Caldera Yachting, eating the finest of Greek foods – by which I mean olives, grilled fresh fish, tomatoes that tasted of the sun and the earth, a wedge of feta glistening with olive oil and sprinkled with oregano, warm bread to soak up that oil and potato salad – reminded me of how much more my parents valued simplicity over showiness. And how downright unenjoyable they found the fancy dining I sometimes subjected them to.
In Bar To Navagio, which delivered on its promise to “serve real drinks for genuine people,” the barman’s irrepressible philoxenia (‘friend to the stranger’) – the very essence of Greek hospitality – brought back fond recollections of my upbringing, when there would always be a warm welcome for whoever turned up at our door.
The most powerful emotions, though, were stirred up by nature and the shifting canvas it created. At sunrise and sunset I would find an isolated spot at the OMMA and sit staring into the caldera as my father had done.
