I had never been to Samos, but I had been hearing about it for years, which is its own sort of knowing. My parents came back from that island every time with the particular glow of people who have decided somewhere belongs to them, and somewhere in all that talking I built my own version of it without ever having set foot there.
So when I heard we were all going, I was genuinely excited, and not in the polite way. It would be the first holiday we had taken as a family in exactly this group.
Then we arrived and it was more or less the island I had been carrying around: beautiful, unhurried, not trying to impress anybody. But hearing about a place and standing in it are different things. There was the heat and the light and the scenery, and underneath all of it the simple fact that we were finally in the same place at the same time.
Pythagorio
We stayed in Pythagorio and I loved it straight away. Small streets that go nowhere in particular, the harbour, the general hum of a town far too little to be as busy as it is. Something always seemed to be happening, usually just within earshot.
You can also tell quite quickly that it is a tourist town. The restaurants along the main streets are built for people passing through, and I think you can taste it. There is a particular flatness to food cooked for strangers.
My favourite thing we found was a tiny wine and delicatessen shop on a corner of the main street. We went in for a glass and came out considerably later, because the woman who runs it could not hand anything over without telling us where it had come from. She talked about the wine, and then about the island, and the whole thing stopped being a drink and turned into an afternoon.
That turned out to be Samos all over. Even in the parts that are busy and a little polished, there is nearly always something small and real waiting round the next corner.
Being together
Travelling in a group that size should have been complicated. Somehow it just was not. We were split between two apartments, and Pythagorio is small enough that we kept colliding with each other anyway. You would wander out for a coffee and find half the family already sitting there. Plans made themselves. Lunch, then dinner, then one more drink.
The best bits were never the planned ones. They were a drink that went on too long, a table, everybody laughing at the same moment, the particular looseness of an evening with nowhere to be.
Not all of it was serene. At one point the navigation sent us up a mountain road I can only describe as a rumour of a road, and I was the one driving it, despite being comfortably the least qualified mountain driver in the car. It was not the gentle Greek island I had pictured. It is, naturally, now one of the stories we tell.
The quiet hours with my boyfriend were my favourite. We sat on the beach and watched people, and watched Luka dig with the seriousness only a small child can bring to sand. We found little places for a drink and took the island at exactly our own speed. The best holiday moments are usually the least complicated ones.
Food, fish and olive oil
Before we went I had a list, although I would not have admitted to calling it that. Giant white beans. Baked feta. Good bread and better olive oil.
My favourite meal of the entire week turned out to be none of them. Our family chef, who is also my brother, bought fish that morning and cooked it over charcoal at the apartment that evening. It was, without any competition, the best fish we ate all holiday. Nothing clever was done to it at all. Fresh fish, fire, good ingredients, olive oil. It did not need anything else and nobody tried to give it anything else.
What I loved almost as much was how long everyone takes over food here. Meals are slow and sociable and faintly chaotic, everything in the middle of the table and everyone reaching across it. Nothing is hurried, ever. It made me notice something I had stopped noticing at home, where I eat far too quickly.
A meal can be the reason to stay at the table another hour, rather than the point of being there at all.
Olive oil ran through all of it. I had already started buying Greek olive oil at my local market before the trip and I have not been able to go back to the supermarket stuff since, which I am aware makes me sound insufferable. On Samos I noticed it differently though. It was not only the thing you cook in. It went over salads and vegetables and bread and more or less everything else, generously and without any ceremony, treated as part of the food rather than a means of getting the food cooked.
The olive trees
I properly noticed the olive trees on our first drive around the island, and after that I could not stop noticing them. That seems to be how it works. You see one, and then you see ten thousand.
They are the landscape: down near the sea, over the hills, standing quietly around the edges of the villages. The old ones stopped me. There is a startling amount of history packed into something as ordinary as a tree.
My first thought, I am slightly embarrassed to say, was entirely practical. How many olives does it actually take to fill one bottle? There was a bigger question sitting behind it, though.
Olive oil starts with a place, long before anyone opens a bottle.
Meeting the Markou family
I had been hearing about the Markou family for years through my brother, and about what their family has to do with Gaia Iluka, so meeting Katerina was strange in the best possible way. I had so many stories about her in my head that it took me a moment to match them up with an actual person standing in front of me.
She was every bit as warm as I had been promised, and so was the rest of her family. Welcoming, completely without airs, and visibly proud of their family, their island and the work they do.
Then there is the olive tree outside their house, which is enormous. Standing next to something that old, in the place it has always stood, made the history behind the oil stop being a story and start being a fact.
Until then, Gaia Iluka had been something I knew secondhand, through my family and through the things people say about a brand. Standing there, looking at the trees, meeting the people who actually make the oil, that shifted. The family, the Markous, the trees, the bottle. They stopped being separate things. It felt personal.
The Samos pace
What surprised me most was how green it all is. I knew it would be beautiful. I had not expected quite so much growing on it.
I also noticed how much of life happens outside. Sitting under an old tree for hours over one meal is simply what people do here, and nobody appears to find it remarkable. There is a strong sense of togetherness in Korea too, but this particular outdoor version of it was less familiar to me.
Everything moves more slowly. You can sit outside for hours, eat well, talk, and never once feel you are supposed to be somewhere else. It made me realise how good it is to slow down and simply stay put. If I could bring one thing home with me it would be that. And a bottle of Gaia Iluka.
One table under an old tree
If I had to choose one photograph from the entire trip, it would be the one taken in the little square near the Markou family. The whole family round a table under a big old tree. Food and wine on it, everybody there, nobody going anywhere.
It gets Samos better than any view of it ever could.
When I think about the island now I think about the smell of the sea, the sun on my skin and the sound of people laughing through a long dinner. I miss the pace. I miss the warm evenings outside and the food, and most of all I miss everyone being in the same place. I miss the olive oil too, if I am honest.
And if someone handed me a ticket tomorrow, I know exactly where I would go first. Straight to the beach, to sit in the sun, listen to the sea, and let the island slow everything down again.
