My Kythnos
Kathleen A. Saccopoulos
This site is a love poem in photographs for a small island in the Aegean Sea that I discovered in the early 1970s and have been intimately involved with ever since. In the earlier decades, I lived in the U.S. and only spent summers on Kythnos. Now in retirement, I live in Greece, and spend half my time on this Cycladic island. The story of my first years on Kythnos was told in a memoir published in 1993. Most of the photos in the book are displayed in the Scenes from the 1970s and 80s pages of this website.
These black-and-white images are now half a century old, and are a never-ending source of pleasure to me and to the islanders depicted.
From the Preface:
Photography books on Greece usually depict a tourist paradise of breathtaking landscapes and colorful peasants, or a melancholy land of disappearing culture. My own view, formed over a score of summers spent on the Cycladic island of Kythnos, fits neither of these themes. What I have found is a barren landscape of quiet beauty, villages of textural loveliness, and people who are indeed losing their traditions, yet are vigorously and unmistakably Greek.
Best of all, I found Manolas.
The fisherman Manolas embodies a rare essence, not just of Kythnos but of the Greek island culture. Even his name makes him distinctive. Many men on the island are called Manolis, the familiar for Emmanuel. But there is only one Manolas. It means “Big Manolis” but I prefer “Manolas the Great”.
In the early 1960s, a young German woman came to stay on the island. She seemed melancholy as she waited out the week until the next ferryboat’s arrival, and spent her time in the port of Merihas, writing long letters in a coffee shop run haphazardly by Manolas Psaras and his wife Foto. Manolas befriended her, entertaining her with outrageous stories, practical jokes and remembrances of his pirate grandfather.
When the day came for her departure, the woman asked Manolas to find a boy to carry her bags to the dock. Manolas insisted on carrying them himself, saying he hoped she would thus remember only the good things about Merihas. The stranger, who in just a few days was no longer a stranger, replied, “I will surely remember Manolas. But without Manolas, there is no Merihas.”
Today, the port of Merihas has become a booming tourist town. Restaurants and bars line the sandy beach and rooms-to-let stretch back into the hills. Yet for me, this story still holds true: without Manolas, there is no Merihas.
Without Manolas, and those other special individuals who populate Kythnos and the other islands, there is no Greece.
Kathleen Saccopoulos is a photojournalist, photographer, and retired university professor.
She and her husband Christos lived in Greece from 1966 to 1972. They bought a piece of land on Kythnos just before their return to the United States to pursue academic careers, and returned to the island each summer.
In 2001, they retired and moved back to Greece permanently.
Their home on Trivlaka Bay, Kythnos is a polyhedral ferro-cement construction described on their website, Mikro Horio.
This work by Kathleen Saccopoulos is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.