Although I love the cold and snow, at the end of the winer season I’m always longing for the sun, warm temperatures, green landscapes and the possibility to walk barefooted along a sandy beach. Actually, I do have a beach right in front of my house, but the spring weather this year is far too unpleasant to walk barefoot on the beach, not to mention bathing in the sea. Cloudy sky, temperature just above the freezing point, wet and cold weather, rain, strong wind and not a single green leave can be seen on the trees. May in Finnmark can be as horrible as November in Germany. So, why not flying south to enjoy the sun which I’ve missed for so long time?
Samos is a small Greek island close to the Turkish coast. After arriving in Pythagoreio, I take the bus to drive to the western part of the island to a small village called Votsalakia. There I will not only enjoy the sun and warm temperatures but, hopefully, I will also find enough leisure time to sort out all my thoughts, make new plans and I hope I will also find new energy for my future projects.
It is still pre-season on Samos at the end of May and the beaches are almost deserted. Day temperatures lie between 20 to 25 degrees celsius and the water temperature is 18 degrees celsius. This feels like summer – at least for me. On my first day I can enjoy beach life without having other people around me.
On the second day, I go for a run in the morning and I notice a sign post just outside of Votsalakia indicating the way to the cave of Pythagoras. This name reminds me of endless and pointless math classes during school time: A mix-up of numbers, cryptical equations and formulas which are miles long. And how much of all of this did I really use in my life? How often in my everyday life do I have to take into consideration that the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other sides (a2+b2=c2)? Practically, I can use this theory to calculate how long a ladder has to be so that I can put it against the house wall if I want to paint my house. But how often in life do I paint a house? Otherwise, I would like to see the reaction of the sales person in a hardware store when I tell him or her the hight of the wall of the house and confront him or her with the Pythagorean equation instead of saying how long the ladder should be that I want to buy.
Although Pythagoras was so far quite irrelevant for my every day life – except from some tantalizing math classes in school – I’m visiting the place where he might have had his mathematical enlightenments on the following day. It’s only four kilometers to walk from the crossing of the main road just outside of Votsalakia to the cave of Pythagoras and you can follow an easy farm track to the cave. It is always going uphill because the cave is situated at the foot of the mountain Kerkis which is the highest mountain on Samos. There is an aromatic scent in the air, the Spanish broom is blossoming and the landscape is in some parts more yellow than green.
On Samos, yellow is not only in nature the dominating color. People seem to be very fond of the color yellow in general as well.
The path to the cave of Pythagors is quite narrow and steep on the last hundred meters. And I really doubt that those stairs on the last meters to the cave had been there at Pythagoras’ time. The entrance to the cave is pretty big and the temperature at the entrance is quite cool which is really refreshing after the last uphill. But, unfortunately, there is no light in the cave. So either you bring your own light or you have to creep into the cave in total darkness.
I try to imagine how it would be to live like Pythagoras in this cave for a longer time. In the beginning, it would probably be quite relaxing. But in the long run, I would probably also start to contemplate about silly things. And who knows what kind of enlightenment I would find which is troubling every school kid for the next centuries? To be honest, I don’t want to be responsible for that.
There is a small chapel in front of the entrance to the cave. But there was not enough space for the belfry. Therefore, the bell is hanging in the biggest tree next to the chapel.
On the following day, I walk aimlessly around looking for some special features on this island. Far outside of town I find an old and abandoned hotel. It is situated in the heart of nature and far away from the noise of the town and I guess it looked quite nice in his heydays. Actually quite a good place for relaxing and calming down from our stressful lifestyle. And actually this is exactly what most of the people are looking for nowadays. But there is no beach right in front of the hotel, you have to walk approximately one kilometer to the next beach. Probably this distance was far too long so that the hotel didn’t attract enough people to stay there. Unfortunately, the majority of the people nowadays also seem to be rather allergic to any kind of exercise.
Samos is a rather small island with a length of 44 kilometers and a width of 19 kilometers. Therefore, you can drive around this island by car easily in one day. A very positive thing I notice is the fact that there is almost no garbage lying around in nature which, unfortunately, can be quite common in other parts of southern Europe. So it seems that they have quite a good waste disposal system on Samos. But, on the other hand, there seems to be no official car dump place on this island. You can find car wrecks everywhere either right next to the road or in nature where they were abandoned to their fate. The dark-red car on the big picture below is incidentally standing next to the abandoned hotel which has almost the same color as the car. At least it seems that they have a good sense for aesthetics on Samos.
On my last holiday I rent a bicycle. The bicycle itself is not at all related to a racing bicycle, therefore I’m not really fast while riding along the road. But after one week on holiday, my rhythm of life has also slowed down and I am more relaxed. But maybe it is also due to the warm temperature during daytime that I am so slow this morning. Although it is only end of May, temperatures during the daytime can be already so high that it might be better for me traveling home to cooler temperatures in the north.
