Greece Travel Blog

For many visitors, Greece is a place where their lives were changed, and where they awakened culturally. Greece, A Love Story is the winner of BATW’s Best Travel Book for Planet Earth 2008.

McGuire’s story, Siga Siga, Cycling in Greece, is about some of her cycling adventures in Greece, which provide her with “an unconventional lens through which to view the Greek people and culture. They also dramatize my love affair with this sacred land whose illustrious history and stupendous natural beauty humble me. Were it possible to designate an entire country a World Heritage site, I would nominate Greece,” writes McGuire, who is living out her dream in Greece.

While some of the stories are accounts of recent trips others are about trips that took place decades ago such as Special Delivery, by Linda Hefferman, which contains classic references to Greece in 1960, so different in many ways from the EU Greece of today.

Different yes, and yet, the past as in Pamela Samek Stamatiou’s essay A UFO in Greece, an old man she saw on a boat a couple of decades ago is a Homeric type still readily encountered: “Across the deck, an old man sat on a wooden stool. He took a tin cup from his bag and raised it to salute me before lowering it to the wind-chapped lips of his ruddy, whiskery face. I watched, mesmerized, and imagined him to be a thousand years old, right out of the ancient Greek stories,” and then, she continues, “As I thought, too, of perfectly sculptured men with names like Apollo and Eros, a boy with the head of Hermes, messenger of the gods, came and sat next to me.”

Other writers in the collection are: Katherina Audley, Simone Butler, Amanda Castleman, Cynthia Greenberg, Tara Kolden, Sarah McCormic, Marilyn McFarlane, Liza Monroy, Davi Walders, and Ronna N. Welsh.

Camille Cusumaro told TGN that she had always wanted to go to Greece “where art became inseparable from life,” not just for the sybaritic beauty that I knew I’d find there but because being Sicilian on both sides, I knew that “her roots went back to Greece, too — as Sicily was part of Magna Graecia”.

Does she have advice for first-time travelers to Greece? “Be sure to get out of Athens and see the islands — the smaller, less visited ones, for sure. Read books and literature on the country. A book like Greece, A Love Story would be a great companion because it reaches beyond the all-too-cliché travelogue and enhances anything the traveler might experience in Greece, with a lot of back-story. There must be nearly a hundred years of experience in the collection, all told, so you get a rounded view of the culture, its past, its light and dark sides.”

Source: greeknewsonline; excerpts, edited by Greece Travel Blog. The book Greece, A Love Story: Women Write about the Greek Experience, by Camille Cusumano (Editor)

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