The World Is Looking at Greece Again

This month the world's most anticipated film arrives in cinemas: Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, released on 17 July. The oldest story we have — a man trying, against everything, to get home — retold on the largest possible scale, and filmed where it belongs. Much of it was shot across the Mediterranean, and a great deal of it in Greece: the rugged Peloponnese, the fortress of Acrocorinth, the ancient palaces of Messinia. Spear's has a lovely piece on one corner of that filming, down in Messinia, and it is well worth reading.

I find myself watching all this with a particular kind of pleasure — and a note of caution I think is worth sharing.

The pleasure is obvious. For a few months, hundreds of millions of people will see Greece the way those of us who love it always have: not as a summer postcard, but as somewhere ancient, serious and profoundly beautiful. A place with weight. Nolan chose it because nowhere else could stand in for the world of Homer — and nowhere else needed to. The landscape is the story. That is not marketing; it is simply true, and it is nice to see the rest of the world catch up.

The caution is this. A spotlight is a wonderful reason to look at a place. It is a poor reason to buy in one.

Every time Greece has a moment — a film, an award, a magazine cover, a friend's envied summer — a certain kind of interest follows it. Fast interest. The kind that wants to act on a feeling before the feeling fades. And in my experience, decisions made in that state are almost always the wrong ones. The property bought in a rush of enthusiasm, in a place chosen because it was in the film rather than because it suited a life, is the property people quietly regret. The spotlight moves on. You are left with the house.

The Greece worth building a life in was here long before the cameras, and will be here long after them. It does not need a premiere. It rewards the opposite of haste: time, local knowledge, and a clear sense of what you actually want from it — which island, which coast, which kind of life. That is unglamorous work. It is also the only work that matters.

The Island of Return

There is a detail in the Odyssey story I keep coming back to. When Odysseus is at his lowest — shipwrecked, exhausted, washed up with nothing — the island that takes him in and gives him refuge is Scheria, the land of the Phaeacians. Scheria is Corfu. Long before it was anyone's holiday, this was the place in the poem where a traveller, at the very end of his strength, was finally shown kindness and sent safely home. Three thousand years later, that is still, to me, what the best of Greece offers: not spectacle, but refuge. Somewhere to arrive.

So watch the film — I certainly will, and on the biggest screen I can find. Let it remind you how extraordinary this country is. But if it stirs something more than admiration — if it makes you think seriously about a life here — then do the unglamorous thing. Come quietly, look properly, and take advice from someone who works only for you and knows the ground. The spotlight is a fine reason to begin the conversation. It should never be the reason you finish it.