Dear friends,
I thought I would share about Gunter’s and my journey to our new home with you all.
On our first date I mentioned to Gunter that I’d like to move to Portugal and he said he’d be open to that too. Portugal turned out to be the gateway drug. So much choice felt a little overwhelming and thankfully we didn’t get bogged down. We were looking for a home that would nourish our respective creative missions and a harmonious life. We longed to be closer to nature, ideally near the ocean and mountains. Warmer climate but still having seasons was appealing and a culture that we intuitively felt drawn to. Somewhere between throwing a dart blindly at a map and feeling called home we decided on Greece.
We decided to come to Greece for 6 weeks in January 2024 to look for a home. I’d joined facebook expat groups and been gleaming information.
A lovely woman named Denise who I met on a forum invited us to stay with her and her husband for a few days because she’d come the year before to find a home here too.
So we made our way from Athens to near Leonidio where Denise lived and stayed with her for 3 days.
Gunter drove us along the coastal road cut into the mountainside. It was very challenging and he loved it; looping, bending, narrow, hilly roads with plenty of hairpin turns and a relentlessly gorgeous landscape with new microclimate and treasure around every bend.
There are small doll house sized chapels mounted along the roadside known as “kandylakia”.
I was told they were shrines to people who died on the roads and later learned they are also often built by survivors of accidents in thanks.
They are poignant reminders to drive safely and ephemeral nature of life.
Denise and Phil welcomed us to their beautifully restored stone house and introduced us to the charms of a traditional Greek village. The houses are spaced very tightly, often touching yet they didn’t feel claustrophobic.
Each one is unique and has something very special about it, a small courtyard, a view of the sea, an orange grove.
This is the view from their lovely traditional stone cottage. It was so wonderful to be initiated this way because what we may have been perceived as foreign transformed into magical over the course of the few days we shared. We became enchanted by the traditional village and could imagine ourselves living in one.
We visited a few properties in the area with a local real estate agent. A beautiful ruin very high up the mountain with magnificent views captured our imagination. The house was 1500 sq ft wonderfully large rooms on a third of an acre of land and it was permitted to add another 1500 sq ft house. It had a mysterious feeling olive grove with15 trees, one that looked a few hundred years old. And so many lovely opportunities to create experiences on the lot and enjoy its majesty. The road to it was very narrow and winding and felt a bit like a goat path but it was navigable and it was only a 10 minute drive to the sea. It was listed for 100,000 € and we figured it would need another 200,000€ in renovations which apparently are easier to navigate here than new builds. In retrospect I think it would have cost much more to develop. It has a wonderfully inspiring energy and we both felt alight with the many opportunities to bring out its beauty.
This is the view from their lovely traditional stone cottage. It was so wonderful to be initiated this way because what we may have been perceived as foreign transformed into magical over the course of the few days we shared. We became enchanted by the traditional village and could imagine ourselves living in one.
We visited a few properties in the area with a local real estate agent. A beautiful ruin very high up the mountain with magnificent views captured our imagination. The house was 1500 sq ft wonderfully large rooms on a third of an acre of land and it was permitted to add another 1500 sq ft house. It had a mysterious feeling olive grove with15 trees, one that looked a few hundred years old. And so many lovely opportunities to create experiences on the lot and enjoy its majesty. The road to it was very narrow and winding and felt a bit like a goat path but it was navigable and it was only a 10 minute drive to the sea. It was listed for 100,000 € and we figured it would need another 200,000€ in renovations which apparently are easier to navigate here than new builds. In retrospect I think it would have cost much more to develop. It has a wonderfully inspiring energy and we both felt alight with the many opportunities to bring out its beauty.
I love this line from the English Patient, where a married woman tells the lover, “With you I am a different wife.” We felt drawn to the life this ruin presented and if I was younger I would have probably chosen it because I hadn’t yet embraced the path of least resistance as my destiny. It is beautiful and so ripe with possibility. I wrote Buzzy saying I think we found our home, but he knows how hot blooded I am and wisely waited to hear more.
We decided on some properties we wanted to view and made our way along the coast towards Kalamata where we met Dimitrios, an agent we decided to work with. He’s about 6’4 and looks a little like Liev Schreiber but more handsome. The men here are striking in their masculinity, it seems like they haven’t been shamed for it like in North America and it’s refreshing. (We’ve got to stop bashing men, but I’ll go into this in another story. ) We see fewer women but Dimitrious assures us there are some and that the elder women hold Greece together. The younger women seem to mostly dress in black and often have long wonderfully thick hair that they toss elegantly.
Even the teenagers seem to mostly dress like boys in oversize jeans and dark shirts, except the girls might have their tummy exposed and lovely long hair. We stopped in Vienna on our way home and I realized it wasn’t my imagination because the women were decked out and seemed to want to be noticed in a way that I didn’t see much of in Greece.
Gunter suggested maybe the women feel more secure here but he doesn’t have a read on it either. I wonder if it’s different in summer. I sense a harmony in the older couples in the villages that I find and a subtle polarity that appeals to me.
I feel I’m expressing this clumsily and not in a politically incorrect way. I’m curious about the man woman story here and everywhere actually. Cultivating harmony is my life’s thesis. Harmony can evoke a connotation of stasis, it’s actually dynamic though and at best a sublime dance of yin and yang. This dance is what intrigues me. I’ve always felt if we could just get the man woman story right everything else would fall into place.
We made our way along the coast to look for a home and stopped for a few days in the magical village of Monemvasia. A medieval castle town, carved on the slopes of a rock and designed to be invisible from the mainland to avoid enemy attacks and connected to the mainland by a narrow path. It’s enchanting like entering a fairy tale and can only be seen only from the sea.
A small, high density perfect village with houses puzzled together harmoniously creating delightful surprises. When you come visit we will bring you here if it calls to you.
Canada, real estate marketing; staging, photos, video walkthroughs and floor plans – is slick. Not so much in Greece, at least not in the price range we were shopping at. You could make a good living here raising the bar on real estate listings. Some houses were much less wonderful and occasionally much more but rarely anything like what the listing. It’s an enigma. Like the homes are trying to hide until just the right people arrive when they blossom in all their glory like the cherry trees in Japan. Dimitrios offered to show us a house that wasn’t on our list since it was on the way to the other 4 we planned to view that day. We said sure even though the listing didn’t look very enticing.
As soon as we walked in, even though it was all shuttered up, we knew we were home. Later we found this video online which shows its potential and magnificent surroundings. It’s funny how it takes longer to show the closet than the view. I’m telling you, there’s a good living to be made here in real estate marketing. We wanted to play it cool, not that either of us are very capable of it, so we just said it seems interesting and followed Dimitrios in our car to the next 2 houses. We were so gone though and after Dimitrios showed us the first one he said, what’s going on? Do you even want to see these other houses? And we fessed up that our hearts already belong to Trahila. We hired a lawyer and put a deposit down with the balance to be paid once we sell one of our homes in Ottawa.
So instead of looking around for 6 weeks as planned we found our new home after looking at 14 houses over 4 days. I wanted to cut our trip short and get onto selling in Canada so we could move here but Gunter suggested we just enjoy our holiday. So we travelled around and explored the mainland and never saw some lovely areas but nowhere called to us like Trahila.
After we decided to buy this house we kept seeing signs validating and affirming our choice. Things like birds of prey flying ahead of us and circling back to Trahila.
Gunter kept noticing meaningful number sequences when he’d look at the digital clock in our car, the odometer or the licence plate in front of us. We’d meet up with people we met in Trahila during our 2 very short visits 2 and 3 times over the course of just a few days in the next village over where we were staying.
There were so many signs I laughed and told the angels, “We get that this is where we are meant to be. You can go watch over others, we are committed.” It was sweet. I’ve never experienced such strong cosmic encouragement. Whenever people hear we bought a house in Trahila they’re so surprised because most have been owned by families for generations and rarely come up for sale. Yet ours sat on the market for 3 years. I feel it was waiting for us.
There is a very special geological feature right in front of our new home. It’s like a cave without a ceiling. I call it the portal. The stone cradles and is smooth like a baby’s skin, only the sea can be heard and seen and it feels like being somewhere deserted yet our home is only a few feet away.
It’s so vibrant and intense yet calm and cocooning. When we discovered it on our own after deciding to buy the house, our decision made even more sense because I think it’s a muse that wants to broadcast.
Gunter and I have taken the leap and left our day jobs to devote ourselves to our respective missions. We want to create and share our arts with the world. When we pass we hope to have established a foundation so this home can become an artist’s residency so others can create and share their arts.
Gunter and I have been married now for 6 months, and in Greece for 2 weeks. It feels like the road has truly risen up to greet us.
It’s been easy right from the start. Which surprised me because I have never really done this before. I had a few affairs and this is my first real relationship with a man. Before we married we looked at just one wedding venue and it was perfect.
Someone suggested an officiant and she was great. Our wedding was so lovely and everything I hoped for and so easy. We booked a cottage on the river in Wakefield for a week and had friends and family stay with us and got married barefoot under the apple tree. Easy peasy and so lovely.
We also decided to have a wedding ring day beforehand to make sure the rings fit and we could wear them a whole day. We had just sent out an announcement about our pending nuptials. We went for a walk at the river near Columbus and Madeline and Jeung were also out walking and told us they hardly ever go. So we all walked together and came upon Ba and Sunjoy and Amanda.
We all congregated there spontaneously when none of us had been for a walk there for a very long time. It was so sweet to have this impromptu opportunity to celebrate our engagement. Life is often like this for me these days.
I feel like I am where I am meant to be right on time.
We hope to be in our new home by the sea in Trahila soon and look forward to welcoming friends and family soon. Apparently our orange tree has the sweetest ones in the village. We are presently the last house on this side of the village and there are about 22 people who live there year round. Most homes have been passed down for generations.
There’s a wonderful taverna in the summer and no other commerce in the village, apparently by intention. We hear that in the summer the population swells when the other villagers come home (and some tourists but there is so little to buy and no sandy beach so they don’t stay long).
They accepted our offer so now we need to sell a house and move here. Once we are settled we look forward to welcoming guests. There are 4 bedrooms from where one can hear the sea just a few meters away.5
