Patmos, Greece, the isle of many happy returns
Reporting from Patmos, Greece ——The first time I arrived in Patmos, I was actually leaving.
At noon, I had boarded a ferry in Piraeus for a 12-hour sail to small, hilly Patmos, one of the Dodecanese, or Greek islands. I watched from the stern as we glided away from the Athens port city across a calm sea, dodging hulks of rusty and dismantled old wrecks.
I would be working on a book and staying at the Monastery of St. John the Theologian, which would later become a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
On this voyage, I shared a cabin with a likable young Saudi named Shurief. After our introductions, we went our separate ways but met up again later. He invited me to join him for dinner.
We began a marathon exchange of ideas and then Shurief ordered a bottle of whiskey. Our discussions continued; we were neither drunk nor completely sober. Suddenly, I noticed some lights through a porthole. My watch said it was close to midnight. "Patmos!" I said.
As I walked along the deck, the harbor lights seemed to be going in the wrong direction. "Must be the whiskey," I said to myself. Then it hit me. We were leaving Patmos. Through the darkness, I could see my welcoming party, two black-robed priests, getting into a car.
That is how I ended up making a 350-mile detour (sailing back to Rhodes and then to Patmos) and arriving at midnight the next night. Some might accuse me of not knowing whether I was coming or going, and that might be true. But the greater lesson I learned was this: Friendships that begin under the oddest of circumstances and are sustained despite distances and language tend to endure.
I first came to Patmos in May 1979 and have returned half a dozen times. A decade had passed since my last visit, so in the summer of 2010, I paid another visit. It was this so-called Jerusalem of the Aegean calling, yes, but it was also the people I"d met who somehow had become threads in my life despite lengthy absences.
I was overjoyed as I stepped off the catamaran with 50 or so other milling passengers and heard, above the din, "Zephyros! Zephyros!"
In Patmos, I am Zephyros, "the spring wind that makes the flowers grow."
Zephyros blows in
How I became Zephyros remains a bit of a mystery. On my first visit, as I was exploring Patmos, I ran into three priests. They smiled and greeted me. My Greek was poor, and they didn"t speak English. There followed a moment of awkward silence.
Then one of the priests spoke in French, asking me my name. "Ah," I said, relieved. "Je m"appelle Geoffrey."
"Zephyros!" one of the other priests responded.
"No, Geoffrey," I repeated.
"Zephyros," the same priest said emphatically.
"OK," I said with a shrug. "Zephyros."
I have been called worse.
And now I heard my name — my Patmos name — above the din. It was my friend Serafim, a priest, there to take me to the small Monastery of St. Christodoulos, overlooking the Bay of Alykes. My heart sang as we drove, surrounded by spectacular scenery on this 13-square-mile sprite of an island.