Description - Wild Abandon: A Journey to the Deserted Places of the Dodecanese by Jennifer Barclay
'There's something about abandoned places which captures the imagination,' says Jennifer Barclay as she walks with her dog and her backpack through the most deserted areas of the Dodecanese islands, places once bustling but now half forgotten, reclaimed by the wild due to a mix of misfortune and the lure of opportunity elsewhere. Join her on a journey through abandoned villages and farms, cave-houses and captains' mansions, the homes of displaced Muslim fishermen and poets, as she discovers beauty in the ruins, emptiness and silence, and inspiration in the stories of people's lives. Wild Abandon is an elegy to the deserted places and a search for lost knowledge. A seasoned travel writer and long-term resident of Greece, Jennifer Barclay spent several years researching Wild Abandon, listening to the stories of local people. She travels to the furthest points of the Dodecanese, taking in some of the smallest and the biggest islands, highlighting different threads of the complex history behind these havens of tranquillity. She discovers a villa intended for Benito Mussolini's retirement, an island that links a gramophone from St Petersburg and a portrait in the American National Gallery via a pack of cigarettes, and reflects on the days when an economy based on sponges and burnt rock supported thousands. She also learns of the countless connections with Australia: the sponge diving families who left rocky Kalymnos to make their fortunes in pearl-diving communities in Darwin; those from Astypalea who fled the continued grip of the Ottoman Empire after 1821 to help build the railways in Fremantle and Melbourne; the families who left formerly prosperous ship-building Kasos to run a takeaway shop in Canberra, whose daughter returned and fell in love; those who left Kastellorizo en masse after the island lost its trade links with Turkey, and formed in 1912 the oldest ethnic organisation in Australia. During several months in Australia she is fascinated by traces of the Greek diaspora, people who found stability and safety in the New World but still long for the old, rural Greece. And back in the Dodecanese, she talks to those who have returned to their island homes to reclaim it. AUTHOR: After growing up in a village in the Pennines, Jennifer Barclay studied Ancient Greek at grammar school and English at Oxford. She then lived for a year in Athens and has travelled widely in the Greek islands, settling on Tilos, a small island in the Dodecanese, in 2011 to work from home and write. She now lives surrounded by hills and the sea, travelling often to other islands with her dog, Lisa. She has written about her life in Greece in her books Falling in Honey and An Octopus in my Ouzo, and in publications including The Times, Metro, The Daily Mail and Psychologies. She has appeared on Greek television and been interviewed across Greek media, and given talks to the Scottish Hellenic Society. 4pp of colour photographs, 1 map
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