Holiday in Greece away from the developers

For something like 8 years (from 1988 onwards) my wife and I holidayed on
various Greek islands (some years going twice to different islands) and were
lucky in that we just managed to be one jump ahead of the dreaded
developers.



We ate and drank at old Greek tavernas and spoke what little Greek we knew
(we were improving but we, at times, raised a fair amount of laughter and
loved it). The food was good and the people lovely.



On the second visit we often found that the taverna we had loved the
previous year had been replaced by something built from Hollywood plastic,
bearing no relation to the Greece we had come to know and love so we never
went back to that island.



One of the problems was that everything was in English and the music (if
that is what one could call it) was played far too loudly and, instead of
Greek music, was, almost inevitably, the @!??##!! Rolling Stones.



We might just as well have stayed in England and gone to a Greek
restaurant - at ;east the food and the music would have been Greek..



We haven't been to Greece for about 15 years, now, because of our
disappointment but would very much like to visit, just once more, but, the
question is where? Is there anywhere, on an island or the mainland, that the
developers haven't turned in to Little Germany, Little England, or Hollywood
America or whatever?



Can anyone advise us of a place in Greece that is still Greek and where we
may relive those beautiful holidays we once had?



The worst example of the developers destroying the Greek culture was, to me,
the village of Laganas, on the island of Zakynthos, Within two years it went
from a small Greek village with no street lighting to a Greek version of Las
Vegas. In Zakynthos town, on our second visit, everything was in English and
prices in pounds sterling - it was there that we saw our first Greek drunks
staggering through the town - we had got used to the young English drunks
but seeing Greek ones was unpleasant.



Regards,



John.











..

On Mon, 13 Aug 2007 20:20:33 +0100, John Vanini wrote
(in article ):

> We haven't been to Greece for about 15 years, now, because of our
> disappointment but would very much like to visit, just once more, but, the
> question is where? Is there anywhere, on an island or the mainland, that the
> developers haven't turned in to Little Germany, Little England, or Hollywood
> America or whatever?
>
>
>
> Can anyone advise us of a place in Greece that is still Greek and where we
> may relive those beautiful holidays we once had?
>
>
>
> The worst example of the developers destroying the Greek culture was, to me,
> the village of Laganas, on the island of Zakynthos, Within two years it went
> from a small Greek village with no street lighting to a Greek version of Las
> Vegas. In Zakynthos town, on our second visit, everything was in English and
> prices in pounds sterling - it was there that we saw our first Greek drunks
> staggering through the town - we had got used to the young English drunks
> but seeing Greek ones was unpleasant.
>

I don't think things are nearly as bad as you describe. My sister and I both
hate the desecration that mass tourism can bring to the nicest places, but
we've been going to Greece every year for the last 10 years and always
managed to avoid the worst excesses.

I think the mistake is to go back to a place you haven't seen for 20 years
and expect it not to have changed. In those days Greece was a relatively
backward country, with life fairly hard for the majority of its citizens.
Most people in Greece are far better off now than then, and I for one don't
begrudge them this.

To avoid the unpleasantness you describe the first thing is to avoid the high
season. July and August are out as far as we are concerned. Secondly don't go
to islands with an international airport. These are always primary
destinations for package tours from Britain and elsewhere in Europe.
Literally thousands of tourists arrive every week on these, which cannot help
but alter the whole atmosphere of the place. This particularly applies to the
Ionian islands Corfu, Kefalonia, and Zakinthos which can get totally
overwhelmed.

There are many islands which are out of range of the
charter-flight-2-week-package-holiday crowds though. Tilos in the Dodecanese
is one that springs to mind (Laskarina use it as a base but the tourists are
quite few and very up-market and well-behaved ). Kalymnos is also quite
Greek in character still, as is Leros.

Earlier this year in May we visited Evia which is almost exclusively Greek
(we only met one non-Greek and he was an odd character who had for some
reason bought a house in a dusty little town on the coast where we stayed for
a night). We took the ferry to Skyros and again saw very little of anything
that wasn't Greek.

--
Mike Lane (UK North Yorkshire)
To contact me replace invalid with mike underscore lane