The first step

Escaping Athens

The last month in Athens was a nightmare. The city was behaving like a betrayed wife, unable to accept that her companion was leaving for good. On top of all the practical things you have to deal with when packing your whole life into boxes, there was the anxiety of a life-changing decision and all the doubts triggered by the vagueness of our plan. And as if that wasn’t enough, the universe seemed determined to make everything as difficult as possible.

Last-minute clients, loose ends constantly popping up out of nowhere, obstacles around every corner, right up to the final night, which I spent at the dentist for an emergency operation that lasted until one o’clock after midnight.

Not to mention the absurd loading of our poor car, which would never have been completed on time if my partner’s brother hadn’t come to give us an extra hand.

But we did it, and on the evening of March 2nd, 2014, we took the ferry to Crete. With no jobs waiting for us, no property to rely on, no real plan. Just the firm belief that this was something we had to do.

Now that I think about it, it looked more like an escape than a move.

The tiny settlement that took us in.

We arrived at my late grandparents’ village with only two things that would help us through: the key to a 15-square-meter stone house with no windows, and a crumpled piece of paper with two phone numbers.

And my last name, which might have meant something there.

Ironically, the one phone number that turned out to be extremely helpful and practically determined our stay had been given to us by someone completely unrelated to the village, or even to Crete altogether. A writer from the island of Chios whom we had met in Athens.

One more of those strange things that happen when you take a leap of faith.

No, that’s not our house. But you get the idea.

Guess which species really runs this village.

I’ll spare you the “look how amazing our village life is” cliché. You can find plenty of that on Instagram. But I can tell you that the shift was tremendous. In our bodies, in our mood, in our mindset.

All the worries about what we were going to do in a village with forty elderly residents slowly dissolved as the days became weeks and the weeks became months. Before we knew it, we had settled into a routine that can only be described as healing.

We had dirt on our hands, messy hair and scruffy clothes, but the clarity in our heads mattered far more.

At the first piece of land we worked on.

There would be plenty of difficulties ahead of us. One thing I realised very quickly was that building a self-sufficient lifestyle nowadays requires money, money we didn’t have. And building a community requires people, people we couldn’t seem to find. At least not in the same place, or at the right time.

Instead, we found financial uncertainty, isolation, hard work, and many moments of doubt. But by then we had already taken the first step, and going back no longer felt possible.

Me, after two years in the village. Lastros, 22/1/2016