"In sun-beaten Greece, I learned that the past is receding faster than ever"

ITS OBVIOUS, I KNOW, BUT CHANGE IN HISTORY moves at a different pace at different times and in different places.

- MICHAEL WOOD

Whenever I visit the Greek islands – with novelist Lawrence Durrell, French historian Fernand Braudel and Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis in mind – I find myself thinking of this. Behind the facade of the modern world, and the mass tourism that has boomed since the late 1960s, an older world remains just below the surface. You can glimpse it when the summer timetable for the boats ends, the package tours stop jetting in to Santorini and Mykonos, and the beach bars close.

I’m sitting in the little kafenion by the Church of the Anargyri in Tholaria on Amorgos. The owner serves thick, sweet Greek coffee and little glasses of honey-and-clove-flavoured psimeni raki as mourners leave following the mnemosyno – memorial service – for Nikos the fisherman. He and his friend Synodinos died recently, “the two best fishermen in the island gone in the same month”, said one of the old folks, shaking his head. Nikos’s widow hands round cups of kolyva, a thick mixture of boiled wheat kernels with walnuts, almonds, raisins and pomegranate seeds, sweetened with honey – Persephone’s food. Always eaten at funerals, this rich, chewy nourishment protects the living from the ever-present lord of the underworld.