Chapter 1: Among the ruins

Another beach, Elijah sighed, gazing out across the vast, undulating plain of a thousand liquid mirrors that came to a foamy end on the grey-white sand. They had been on Corfu for almost a week now, and on several other Greek islands before that, and in all that time, his friends had wanted to do nothing except lie on the sand, swim in the turquoise sea, and ogle the bevy of foreign beauties frolicking in the water. All Elijah wanted to do was explore. He and three of his friends booked this trip because they had all wanted to experience Greece, but once they arrived, it became painfully apparent that they had all wanted to come to Greece for reasons different from his own.

Elijah exhaled loudly. “Aren’t you guys sick of just sitting by the beach?” he asked, directing his question to no one in particular, but making sure he was loud enough for at least one of his friends to hear him.

“No,” Hewitt said matter-of-factly, taking the bait without even turning his head. Their other two friends, Chris and Ned, sniggered at Hewitt’s bluntness. Hewitt was the self-described “alpha male” of the group. A champion swimmer, Hewitt was tall and lean, with strong, broad shoulders and a torso that became ridiculously narrow at his waist. He and Elijah had been best friends since childhood, despite their interests diverging during high school, and they maintained a deep mutual respect and affection for one another. This meant they were comfortable being honest with one another. Perhaps too honest. Hewitt pulled his eyes away from a buxom brunette in a high cut, lime-green one piece emerging from the water to look at Elijah.

“Where else would you rather be, Lij?” Hewitt asked.

“Exploring. Look behind you.” Hewitt twisted his torso around as far as he could while remaining seated on the sand. “Behind those trees is the Palaiopolis, the ruins of ancient Corfu. What do you say we go and take a look?”

“Not now,” Hewitt replied. “Why don’t we check them out tomorrow?”

“We won’t have time tomorrow,” Elijah replied. “We have our cruise to Paxos booked tomorrow. And then we’re leaving Corfu the day after that. Remember?”

“Me remember? That’s what you’re here for,” Hewitt exclaimed mischievously. “Come on Lij, we’ve been to about ten museums already. I think you can go without seeing another one.”

“The Palaiopolis isn’t a museum. It’s an archaeological site. Besides, we’ve already been to about ten different beaches just on Corfu.”

“And why not? Greece has some of the best beaches in the world.”

“I didn’t fly to the other side of the world to sit at a beach. I can go to the beach at home. You can’t see ruins like this back home. Besides, Australia has better beaches than Greece does. White sand stretching as far as the eye can see, more space than anyone could ever want. Here you’re lucky to even get sand."

“Then I guess we’ve been pretty lucky on Corfu, haven’t we, lads?” Hewitt replied. Ned and Chris nodded and grunted in agreement. “And how about this water? You can’t beat this water.”

“Okay,” Elijah sulked.

And there are no sharks here. Or jellyfish.”

“Whatever,” Elijah groaned.

“Besides, whether it’s here or back home, I’d much rather be sitting by a beach than looking at some old rocks. I don’t care how special you say they are.”

Hewitt turned back towards the water and lay back on his towel. “This place is called Mon Repos. My rest. You’re supposed to be resting.”

“I’m tired of resting.”

“If you really want to go and see the ruins, then you should go and see them. No one is stopping you. We’ll be waiting right here for you until you get back. I promise.”

“Okay fine," Elijah said. He stood up from his own towel and dusted the sand from his legs. "See you,” he said, sharper than he had intended.

Hewitt took no notice. “Have fun,” he said cheerfully.

Hewitt’s happy tone irritated Elijah even more. “You have fun,” he snapped.

Elijah grabbed his blue and brown backpack and swung it over his left shoulder. Elijah took one last look at the shimmering blue glass that was the Ionian Sea, then turned and walked up the beach, his flip-flops slapping against the sand. A short distance away the grey-white grains grew dark as Elijah passed into the shadow of the trees, following a short and winding path towards the bus stop where he and his friends had been dropped off. Next to the bus stop was a large, red bus offloading a caravan of tourists in all manner of board shorts and bikinis, wide-brimmed hats and baseball caps. The group’s vanguard passed by him on their way down to the water’s edge. Elijah walked on until the green sign pointing the way to Palaiopolis came into view. He walked in the direction the sign was pointing, along a gravel path that led him into a mass of trees. It was noticeably cooler in the shade of the trees than it had been under the blazing Mediterranean sun, and Elijah felt his own temper start to cool along with it. "Who just wants to sit in the sun all day?" he muttered to himself. A swim always feels much better after a hike. He had tried to convert his friends to his way of thinking back on Santorini, on the feast day of the Prophet Elias a couple of weeks earlier. Elijah had tried to convince his friends to hike from their accommodation along the black pebble beach of Kamari to the white-domed Monastery of Prophet Elias perched on the island’s highest peak, before cooling off in the crystal blue waters of the Aegean. They turned him down, believing it was better to just go straight to the beach instead. “It’s hot enough here without the heat from all those candles,” Hewitt had told him. “Besides, that incense they use makes me sneeze.”

Elijah’s feet crunched along the stony, woodland trail. His path was flanked by a mix of cypress and old olive trees grown tall and wild, their gnarly, knotted trunks resembling the fingers of wizened, black-clad widows. He saw trees with leaves of pale and dark and silver green, and everywhere coarse scrubs growing between them. The trail rose upwards, until he found himself walking above a beach, watching swimmers disporting in the water through gaps in the trees, like great windows framed by leafy boughs. As he ascended higher, the beach beneath the cliff was swallowed by the ocean, and all that remained were sharp rocks, protruding from the water to lick the foam from the crashing waves. As he moved deeper into the forest, the coarse scrubland grew thick with wildflowers whose names he did not know: honey-colored flowers with orange centers atop spiky stems, and yellow, bell-shaped flowers hanging off tall stems, golden flowers shaped like a scrolls of wax shaved from a candle, and delicate, dolphin-shaped flowers with blue bodies and pale pink fins. He even spotted flowers that looked like upside-down pineapples, bristling with blue quills, with crowns of half a dozen cobalt blue blades protruding from their bases.

Elijah walked through the forest until he came across a clearing filled with ruins. Each section of ruins had an information board in front of it. An old couple stood right in front of the nearest board. Not wishing to interrupt them, Elijah walked briskly to read the board in front of the ruins at the far side of the clearing. He found himself standing before the remnants of the Heraion, one of the first, and largest, temples to the goddess Hera ever built in the Greek world. As a young boy, Elijah had read about dozens of ancient Greek temples, believing that when he finally visited Greece, he would see them as they had once been, in all of their splendor. He had been sorely disappointed to learn that ruins were all that remained.

Once he finished admiring the Heraion, he turned left and noticed that the information board he had bypassed was now free. He started walking towards it, when suddenly, he saw a woman enter the clearing. If it wasn’t for his bad posture, he might have been taller than her, but she stood so straight they were of a height. He watched her as she glided across the grove, her feet seemingly floating above the ground. Her face was the color of burnished bronze, and her hair was a bouquet of tight, chestnut curls that stopped just above her shoulders, except for the tips of her tresses, which looked as if they had been dipped in gold. She was wearing a white chiton, an imitation of the type of garment typically worn by ancient Greek women, its hem embroidered with the meander motif in golden thread. She was also wearing a pair of leather sandals painted gold, each one bound to her legs by a pair of golden serpents slithering in a double helix around her ankles, before becoming entwined at the top of her calves. Her outfit, which was sold at souvenir shops right across Greece, looked unbelievably tacky on every tourist Elijah had seen it on. But this woman was a vision. On her, the costume was no longer a costume. She had brought it to life. Elijah might have even mistaken the woman for an ancient goddess, but for the fact that she was crowned, not with a laurel wreath, but with a pair of sunglasses with oversized lenses, and a caramel-colored leather bag dangled from licorice straps looped around her forearm.

Elijah walked towards the information board, pushing his shoulders back and sucking in his stomach under his shirt. As he got closer, he realized that the woman was walking towards the same board as him. The woman reached the board a few seconds before Elijah did. Once he was a meter away from her, he stopped and tried to read the board while standing off to the side. Sensing him stop beside her, she turned to look at him. He lifted his eyes to meet hers, and noticed that they were hazel.

“Hello,” he squeaked in English. Damn. He thought to himself. Talk about a great first impression. He turned away from her for a moment, clearing his throat in the crook of his elbow, then back to her. She looked at him strangely.

“Hello,” she said back in Greek. Elijah was taken by surprise. Not only was her voice deeper than he expected, but he had not expected her to speak Greek. He knew better than to assume what languages people could or could not speak based on their appearance. On his first trip to Greece, he and his father encountered vendors from dozens of different backgrounds in the flea markets of Athens, all speaking impeccable Greek. Yet even now he had a particular idea of what he thought a Greek speaker might look like, and she did not fit it.

“Are you Greek?” she asked, continuing to speak Greek, every syllable a fresh challenge to his assumptions. “Yes,” he replied in Greek.

“Where are you from?” she asked.

“Sydney, Australia.” Elijah replied.

“I’m sorry.”

“Sydney, Australia.”

“No, no, it’s okay, I heard you the first time.”

“Oh” Elijah thought, slightly embarrassed. “What about you?”

“I am from Maputo. In Mozambique.”

“Mozambique? How interesting. Your Greek is very good.”

“Well I am Greek, so I should hope so.”

“Really? I didn’t realize there were any Greeks in Mozambique.”

“Well, there are. Though not as many as there used to be.”

“Which part of Greece is your family from?”

“Well, it’s not a part of Greece any more. Have you ever heard of Imbros?”

“Yes, I have.” Gökçeada, called Imbros by the Greeks, was a Turkish island in the north-eastern corner of the Aegean. He had first learned of it in high school, during lessons about Australia’s involvement in World War I, the Australian and New Zealand Army Corp, and the Gallipoli campaign. Many Australians and New Zealanders had been stationed on Imbros during the war.

“That is where my family is from. My father’s family at least. They left after the Treaty of Lausanne, when the island returned to Turkish control.”

“They left in the Population Exchange?”

She put her teeth together and clicked her tongue against them while flicking her head upwards, a sign Elijah now knew meant “no”. “The people of Imbros were not part of the Population Exchange, since the overwhelming majority of the population was Greek. No, it’s because they were tired of war. My great-grandfather’s uncle went to Beira in Mozambique to start a new life, and wrote back about work in the fields, and about the Greek community that taken root in the country. Unable to see a future for themselves on Imbros, my father’s grandparents decided to join him in Mozambique.”

“I thought you said you were from Maputo,” Elijah said.

“I am. After a while working in the fields, my great-grandparents saved enough money to move to Maputo and open up a Greek restaurant. The restaurant is no longer around, but my family stayed in Maputo.”

“Incredible.” Elijah exclaimed.

“Not really,” she said bluntly. “It’s quite typical as far as migrant stories go.”

“Yes, but why Mozambique?”

“Because they had an uncle there.”

“Yes, but why did he go to Mozambique?”

“Why not? Why did your family go to Australia?”

Elijah opened his mouth to speak, but realized he didn’t have an answer. So he just stayed quiet.

“Which part of Greece is your family from?”

“Mani,” he said. Elijah had family from other parts of Greece as well, but it felt like too much effort to explain.

“Oh, so you’re a maniac?” She said, laughing.

“Something like that,” he said, smiling.

“What other languages to do speak?”

“Portuguese,” she said, and another word that sounded like Bantu. “When I’m with my friends. What about you?”

“Just English,” he replied. This chance meeting had been more than a pleasure. It was profound. Here they were, two people who grew up far away from one other, bound by a common heritage, and able to converse in their mother tongue. Their mother tongue was a thread that spanned continents, spanned worlds.

“Have you finished reading this one yet?” she asked him.

He took a moment to understand she was referring to the board. “Oh yes, yes I have.”

“About time,” she said, grinning. “There's still so much to see. Shall we?”

Elijah smiled, then nodded. “Let’s go.”

Elijah and the woman wandered the rest of the ruins together. While they wandered, they passed various other people exploring the ruins. Elijah noticed a few of them pointing at his companion and whispering among themselves. He desperately wanted to say something to them, to tell them to stop mocking her. At first, Elijah thought that she had noticed people pointing at her, but had simply chosen to ignore then. As time went by, he became convinced that she hadn’t even noticed them. Here, among the ruins of ancient Palaiopolis, she seemed to be lost in another world.

Before long, they reached the ruins of the temple of Corcyrean Apollo. They stopped to read the information board in front of them.

“Interesting. I never knew Apollo was worshipped as a war deity,” she said.

“Me neither,” Elijah replied. “Though I suppose it makes sense. He does carry a bow and arrow after all. His silver arrows wrought havoc in the Greek camp during the Trojan war.”

“True,” she replied. “Who is your favorite ancient Greek god?”

Elijah gestured to the ruins before them. “Actually, it would probably have to be Apollo. God of arts, healing, prophecy and warfare. Not to mention the fact Apollo is associated with the sun, just like the saint whose name I share.”

“And a name I still don’t know”, the woman said. “What is your name?”

“Elijah,” he replied. “Elias in Greek, which obviously sounds a lot like the word for sun. That’s why a lot of the high places once devoted to worship of the sun now have churches dedicated to the saint. Just shows you how Christianity isn’t a clean break from the past so much as a continuation in a different form.”

“Like the Parthenon,” she replied. “Once Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, the Parthenon was turned into a church dedicated to the Virgin Mary.”

“So are you telling me your name is Athena? Or perhaps Maria?"

She smiled. “Neither. It’s Thekla. Short for Theokleia.”

Elijah felt the hairs stand at the back of his neck. “That’s a beautiful name.”

“Thank you,” Thekla replied.

“So who is your favorite Greek god? Or goddess?”

“Well, it used to be Athena. Goddess of wisdom and warfare. It’s one thing to know how to fight. But it’s even more important to know when to fight, don’t you think? I'm also quite fond of owls.”

“And now?”

“Nike. When I visited the Acropolis Museum, do you know the thing that struck me most? It wasn’t the carvings that once adorned the top of the Parthenon. Nor was it the caryatids, silently weeping for their stolen sister. It was the frieze of Nike fixing her sandal. Do you know which one I mean?”

“Yes, I think I do. It wasn’t so long ago that I visited the Acropolis Museum myself.” Elijah and his friends had visited the Acropolis Museum during their stay in Athens, a few days into their trip, when his friends still had the patience for it.

Thekla pulled her phone out of her bag, tapped the screen a few times, then spent half a minute scrolling through her phone, her brow furrowed with concentration. Once Thekla found the image she was looking for, she held it up so Elijah could take a look. Elijah saw the familiar image of a headless, wingless woman that had once been Nike, the winged goddess of victory. Nike held up her right leg at a ninety degree angle and, bending over slightly, reached down to adjust her sandal with her right arm.

Thekla waited a few moments for him to examine the image. “I think it’s an incredible image. An immortal goddess doing something as mundane as fixing her sandal.” She paused. “Do you believe in God, Elijah?”

“I do,” he said quietly. “But I am not very religious. I only go to Church on major days.” For Elijah, going to church was about practicing his culture as well as his religion. Without church, listening to prayers, the smell of incense, the sounds of the bells on the priest's censer clinking together, red eggs on Easter, there wouldn't be much Greek culture left.

“It’s the same with me,” Thekla replied. “But I cannot picture God ever needing to fix his sandal. It’s interesting to think about how attitudes towards the idea of God has changed throughout history. The Christian God is the perfect ideal that we must all strive towards. God represents humanity as we ought to be, but no matter what we do, we will always fall short. The ancient Greeks thought of their gods as powerful, but flawed, like them. The ancient gods represent humanity as it was, as it is, and as it will always be. Weighed and measured before God, each of the ancient gods would be found wanting. Even so, the ancients still regarded the gods as worthy of reverence and respect. The ancients were able to see the human in the divine, which I think made them better equipped to see the divine in the human. If you are able to see imperfection in the divine, it teaches you to see the divine in the imperfect.”

Thekla paused dramatically, allowing her words to sink in. Elijah did not know how to respond, and so the pair stood silent for a while. In that time, all they could hear was the summertime chorus of cicadas mixed with the occasional chirping of birds. Elijah looked at Thekla. A few moments later, her eyes rose to meet his gaze.

"Amazing," Elijah finally said. "You have such an interesting way of seeing things.”

“It’s not me, Elijah. It’s this place. These ruins. How extraordinary that a bunch of rocks can continue to capture the imagination, over 2000 years after they were built. 2000 years later, and people still write books about them.”

“As long as they keeping writing about them, then I’ll keep reading them,” Elijah grinned. It was only then that he looked down at his watch and noticed the time. It had been almost three hours since he had left his friends on the beach. He groaned.

“What’s wrong?” Thekla asked.

“I should probably get back to my friends. I’ve been gone a while. They’re probably wondering where I am.”

“Where are your friends?” Thekla said.

“Mon Repos beach,” he replied.

She pulled her phone out of her pocket and looked at it. “I should probably get going as well. I think we have seen everything. The next bus should be here soon. I might just make it. Will you walk with me?”

“Yes,” Elijah said.

Elijah and Thekla walked back along the woodland path towards the bus stop. As they arrived, they could see the bus approaching.

“Well, there’s the bus. Perfect timing,” Elijah said.

“Yes. Thank you for your company this afternoon, Elijah,” Thekla said. “I had a wonderful time. It seems that ancient ruins have plenty to teach us about the living, as well as the dead.”

“Yes, it does. It was very nice to meet you, Thekla.”

“Nice to meet you too.”

Elijah looked into Thekla’s eyes. Now that they were out in the open, he could see her hazel eyes had flecks of green in them, which flickered in the sunlight. Then the bus arrived. Thekla slipped her sunglasses over her eyes, then joined the queue of people waiting to board.

“Thekla,” he said softly, savoring the taste of her name on his tongue.

“Yes,” she replied, looking at him expectantly.

“I need to see you again. Spending the afternoon with you had been the highlight of my trip. I have to learn more about you. And from you.” He felt his throat go dry, and swallowed. “Would you like to have dinner with me?”

A smile crept across Thekla’s lips. “I’d like that.”

“Fantastic,” he said, smiling. “Whereabouts are you staying?”

“In the Old Town. Near Liston Square.”

“That’s not too far from me. I am just above the sea wall.”

“I think I know the place.”

“I will meet you at the Gate of Saints Michael and George. Do you know it?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Good. I will meet you there at 8pm.”

“See you then,” Thekla said.

Thekla boarded the bus and sat down on the nearest available seat. She looked at him through the window and smiled. Elijah smiled back. He stood and watched and waited as the bus drove off down the street and turned left, heading for the Old Town. Once the bus was out of view, Elijah jogged back down towards the beach where he had left his friends a few hours before. He hoped Hewitt had kept his word, and that his friends were still at the place where he had left them, but he was so elated that he couldn’t have cared if they weren’t.

Just wait until I tell the others, Elijah thought to himself. They’re not going to believe this.