Surrender: The Greek Affair Series Book One

www.dianakarezi.com

Publishing Details

Surrender
by Diana Karezi

Published by
Australian eBook Publisher

© Dora Kitinas

Edited by Suzanne Kiraly

The moral right of the author has been asserted. All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright restricted above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

1st Edition 2015, ePub and Mobi

eISBN: 978-1-925271-76-8

Ebook creation: Converted from digital source file

Ebook files created and distributed by:
Australian eBook Publisher

www.AustralianEbookPublisher.com.au

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Hope is a waking dream.
—Aristotle

Meaning of character names

Chapter One

She had fallen in love with the island in the same way people react when, driven by sensual desire, they experience what we call “love at first sight”. The love was passionate and all encompassing. She loved everything about it: the people, the beaches, the landscape, its industry, and especially, the food. She found the mythology and its history intertwined in the mist of time. In fact, the two become ensconced somewhere between legend and history; and truth and lies. In her mind it was this ambiguity that made the place so damn sexy! It was the mystery that allowed the imagination to conjure its own version of the truth that fascinated her.

It was not a tourist’s version of a Greek Island; it did not have white houses, or an overload of bars, clubs and foreign tourists. There was enough entertainment for everyone, however, during the long warm Greek Island summer nights. The local population was vibrant and local industry was not reliant purely on tourism, as they were in the white islands. It had the pristine beaches, of course, the must-have medieval fortress, a history with many buried archaeological sites and a mythology that makes one’s imagination soar. She found the excessive mythology from pre -history was what gave the island its darkness - a mystery that made this piece of land jutting out of the Aegean Sea somehow sensual to her.

Hope understood darkness. So they were made for each other.

The houses in the villages were built of stone, carved from the rock in the landscape, blending with the surroundings and harking back to the day where not only did the people need protection from their enemies, but also they were isolated and had to rely on whatever the island had to offer. There were jagged rock formations that had forced themselves out of the earth like a rampart collection of clustered razors. It was as if the underworld gods were attacking the heavenly gods and their weapons had become solidified into rock in that attack position for all eternity.

The Island is a large island compared to most Greek islands. It is in a strategic spot in the Aegean Sea, so that it could have army and air force bases. It has a long and troubled history of wars, in fact, and had played a major part in both world wars in the 20th century.

Along with the local population, there are the young men who are doing national service and both women and men beginning careers in the armed forces. The island also hosts the Department of Food Study from one of the Universities, therefore there is a high proportion of youth not local to this place. In the summer, loved ones and friends of the men serving, plus tourists arrive in the main town, and the beaches are full of carefree frivolity. It’s an island that has appeal to all ages. The majority of the time the serving young men are seen in civilian clothes and only when on duty are they in khakis.

Hope had left this island as a six year old with her family, and as an adult, came to this island for the first time to find documentation about her birth. She was wanting to retrieve her Greek citizenship and to become part of the European Union family, since she had decided to leave Melbourne and live in Athens, whilst she also knew she would be allowed to keep her Australian citizenship.

It was October so she was not swayed by the summer ambience. It was already cold. The streets were void of people (unlike in the summer, when everyone is out all over Greece), the holiday-makers who came in the summer had left, (a good percentage of them being Greek, with old family homes on the island). She had been born in the main town, the capital of the island. This used to be the most affluent part, with the architecture of old neoclassical homes built in the early part of the 20th century. (Some of them were so big and beautiful and pointed to the time of Greek men travelling to other lands, and had brought their money back, and also to Greeks who had gone and settled in Egypt in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, where they had planted cotton and brought the wealth back to Greece). And a lot of that wealth was indeed on this island.

The town also had other less impressive neighbourhoods, but still very visceral, with meandering cobble stone streets and less impressive homes, that had been built of the traditional grey stone, but for the sake of modernisation some had unfortunately been rendered over the stone.

Hope explored the cobble stone streets in the main town and wondered who lived there. Had the families always been here? What work did they do? And how many of the men were seafaring, like her father and grandfather had been? There were main arterial roads cutting through the town, roads that connected the capital with the many villages on the island. These were also connected to the many archeological sites that are so important to modern day history and help in discovering where people came from originally and who they are now. It’s only by knowing the past, can the future be understood.

She hired a car to go and explore the other villages and their archaeological sites; sites that go back to pre history and the road the Tuscan race took to get to the Italian Peninsular to create Tuscany. The Kabeira Mysteries rivaling those of the famous Eleusinian Mysteries were available to her, and close by, was the famous city of Hephaestus buried until recently. Now, of course, the theatre has been excavated and the digs keep on going. The Archeology is endless on this Island; it spans five thousand years that have been verified and the myths go far into prehistory. Myth and legends abound, history becomes entangled on this island. It is said that fire was invented here. The more Hope explored, the more she fell in love with the place.

She thought of herself as an urban person. She could never live in the provinces, no matter how beautiful the surroundings were there. It was a love affair that could never be consummated. She could love while she was there, but had to leave with the unrequited love behind her. This meant she would be thinking about what was left behind of that love, thinking about what she could not have, and what she was not allowed to have, yet what she wished she could have had.

In that cold October month, Hope found herself walking aimlessly through the main town, drinking in the mystery of the island, making love to it with her eyes and her feet, as she covered just about every cobble stone in the town. But most of all with her heart, she likened the feeling as somewhat orgasmic! She could not explain why she found this place so erotic. After some time, she stopped searching for an answer and just went along for the ride. It was enough for her to just “want” and not “have”. After all, it was what her life had been like up until now. Life had never allowed her to receive a true love.

Chance would have it, that during one of those extended walks when it felt like she was going to have that orgasm, (always hanging there by just mentally hugging the surroundings), she saw a “For Rent” sign on the sea front residential area. And, (as she often did things simply from passion and not reason), she made inquires and found that the building consisted of two apartments, and the top one was for rent. Hope didn’t hesitate.

She rented it by the year, (even though she knew she had to live in Athens and she could barely afford to keep two homes), but she knew she would get to the island, whenever it was possible. Hope just had to do this so she could breathe, as she was hoping that this island would heal her soul.