24th September 1971

Greece

24/09/71

Dear Mum Dad and Nanny,

Thank you for the nice long letter which arrived in a record time of 4 days. I am sorry I have been so long writing we have been very busy this week without actually achieving anything.

I was amused at your account of the wedding but was puzzled by your reference to Trudi’s sister. Did you mean her sister from Switzerland? I agree with Harry- you are a good driver- but have I ever said otherwise? I hope you are recovered from your influx of visitors.

I was pleased to hear about your proposed trip to America. I can’t guarantee we will be there to welcome you but you never know, it is always a possibility. Tony’s application to ILO was too late and all the posts had been taken but they will put him on a waiting list and consider him if anything else comes up. The posts advertised had to be filled straight away so would not have been possible for us to take. Tony has written to several employment agencies and will also wait to see what is available in ICL so we still have no idea where we will be going next. I think living here has made us appreciate England a bit more. Of course our plans will also depend on how our family plans progress or not. I have hopefully started knitting but I think it will be Marc Ivor’s Christmas present and not for a small son or daughter.

Well now I must tell you about our holiday. If I wrote everything it would take a book. We travelled to via Erdine to Istanbul and camped on the outskirts in a Mo camp. These sites are run by BP garages and were the best we have ever stayed in with all facilities. They are scattered around Turkey in easy driving distance.

Istanbul was a little disappointing as it was not quite what we had expected but after a while we quite liked it. We visited the normal sites; the Blue Mosque- full of carpets and 19^th Century English grandfather clocks; The Topkapi museum where all the collections of past sultans are kept including beautiful china, Chinese vases, jewellery, and glassware. Very interesting. Also a very nice restaurant within the palace overlooking the Bosphorus- a very romantic setting.

The grand bazaar was a bit disappointing as it was obviously for tourists. I did buy a blue leather coat for £10 and Tony bought some new shoes. We left the Daf in a garage in a hotel to pick up on our return journey.

After Istanbul (where it had started raining anyway) we travelled to Izmir, a very sophisticated city, and spent the night there. We then travelled to the Mocamp at Kusadasi- shown in the postcard I sent you and stayed there three nights. It was a lovely area and very warm with temperatures around 100 degrees F. The sea was warm and nearby there many interesting places including Ephesus, a well preserved ancient Greek town which was deserted because of a malaria epidemic in the first century AD. All the places we visited in Turkey had connections with early Christians. At Ephesus not only did St Paul preach but St John was supposed to have written his gospel there and there was a house which was reputed to be the home of the virgin Mary. We also visited the cave of the ‘seven sleepers’ which was quite deserted and difficult to find. They were a series of caves which were used to bury early Christians and the tombs were decorated with frescoes.

After Kusadasi we went inland to reach the South coast at Atalanya. The scenery on this journey was particularly beautiful and varied. There were great sandstone mountains that had deep erosion gullies down their sides and still blue mountain lakes, steep mountain passes and fertile valleys. We stopped at Parmukkale for dinner. There have been  hot springs there since Roman times, containing white silt which deposits on the mountainsides in pools and makes the rocks brilliant white as they cool. This looks like a petrified white waterfall all down the mountainside. On route we saw Turks in native dress, threshing the corn in a traditional manner with flails then throwing it into the air to separate the wheat from the chaff.

We camped next at Sifliki. Here the camp site was in the middle of a Roman city. We could wander through the remains picking up pieces of roman glass and pottery disturbed only by an occasional donkey grazing nearby. Nearby was a town dating back to the pre Roman Hittite era where there were huge potholes 200yds in diameter with stalagmites and stalactites.

One day we drove to Antioch which is now quite a small town. In biblical times it had a population of half a million but now there were only 60,000 people living there. Hardly any of the Roman city has survived. There was an interesting museum full of well preserved mosaics from a nearby settlement where the rich Romans must have lived.

Antioch also contained remains of the first Christian church, hollowed out in the rock face from a natural cave and founded by St Peter. It is the first Christian church because Antioch was the first place the term ‘Christian’ was used to label the followers of Christ. As the religion was illegal there were tunnels in the rock leading from the church so worshippers could make a quick getaway if their church was discovered.

The south coast of Turkey is very hot and interesting with fields of bananas and cotton growing. The Turks harvest the cotton by hand and you can see rows of brightly clothed Turks of all ages walking through the fields turning them from white to green. We spent about five days on the coast resting and swimming before travelling inland to Goreme. This area is famous for some of the earliest churches and monasteries all hollowed out in soft sandstone rocks. These rocks are weathered into a conical shape like a dunce’s cap about 30 foot high giving the impression of a moon landscape. Inside the churches are decorated with portraits of the saints. We only stayed a day here and then travelled to Ankara where we found a nice hotel. Ankara was very quiet with lots of soldiers on every corner but there was no trouble while we were there. In fact it was a lovely city with a fabulous museum which we spent a couple of hours visiting.

We came home via Istanbul and Thessaloniki and had both cars serviced. At present I am sitting in a small restaurant in a fishing village about 10 miles from Thessalonica as we had to come back to Greece this weekend to get the Daf mended. The gear stick got stuck in forward gear. Tony said it was a good job it had not got stuck in reverse gear as we would have to drive here backwards. It is mended now and we are enjoying a weekend in Greece. Tony bought some new swinging clothes and is looking very smart and disco. It is still warm here but cold for swimming after Turkey.

Last night we went to a discotheque- a new experience for us- all coloured lights and loud music. We did not get to bed until 1 o’clock. Two of our acquaintances from the American and Austrian embassy are also here plus one of our colleagues Frano.K. from ICL, and we plan to go out together for a meal tonight. I had better close now or this letter will never get posted- it should only take three days from here. My lunch has arrived, cheese pastries, salad, octopus and a lamb chop, eaten sitting looking at the deep blue Mediterranean sea under pine trees- paradise.

Lots of love for now

Love to Paula and family

Tony and Gill

We remember our first disco experience. Strange amoebic shapes were projected on the walls, the music was loud and cheerful and there were very few people there. We probably went to bed too early for the main action after driving to Greece. That day we had gone to a clothes shop in Saloniki and bought a completely new outfit for Tony. This was the beginning of the 70’s when clothes became more colourful and exotic. We can still remember the purple and rose shirts we bought.

We definitely had a love affair with Greece. We felt a feeling of freedom when we reached the border crossing. The Greeks were ruled by the Colonels at this time but it felt like a free country compared with Bulgaria. It developed further our interest in ancient history which has stayed with us for the rest of our lives. We were lucky to travel in Turkey and Greece and see the sites before they became swamped with tourists.

One weekend we went down to Kavalla and took a boat to the island of Thasos. Here Gill bought a bright yellow sun dress and we walked down the streets of the main town full of boutiques and night spots and cafes where you could drink ouza and eat calamari and stuffed vine leaves. The countryside on Thassos was beautiful. Unlike most Greek islands its mountains were still covered with chestnut forests making it a green oasis even in the summer. The beaches were sandy and deserted. The Greeks had the habit of building houses piecemeal. Starting with the ground floor and then gradually adding higher floors as they got the money to do so. We were very tempted to buy a plot of land on the beach and build a summer hideaway but then our practical natures took over. How would we get there from the UK? There were no budget airlines and the drive from the UK would take at least three days.

Another experience we remember from our Greek visits was one night driving to Salonika in the rain when suddenly the road was full of frogs. We tried to swerve round them so as not to crush them but there were just too many to miss them all. With the rain bouncing from the tarmac it looked as if for all the world it was raining frogs.

We remember one experience  of cultural misunderstanding in Greece  which also occurred in Bulgaria. In that part of the world people nodded their heads for ‘no’ and shook them for ‘yes’. A further complication in Bulgaria was that ‘ano’ meant ‘yes’ but was often shortened to ‘no’. So ask a question in Bulgaria you were likely to get a shake of the head and someone saying ‘no’. It worked against us in Greece one time when quite late at night we stopped at the first Xenia Hotel (a chain run by the state of very reasonable clean hotels) It was in a small village where they did not speak English. Tony went to enquire about a room and the shake of the head sent him back to the car to say the Hotel was full. This seemed unlikely but it was only later we realised he had misinterpreted the body language. We stayed at a rather inferior hotel with no en suite bedrooms in the next village.