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Saturday–Jeff
“Your assignment, Jeff, should you choose to accept it, is to find paradise (small p) on Mykonos.”
A mission impossible?
Some might say that, but I’m used to challenges of that sort for they come at me each year at this time in the form of an email from the managing editor of Mykonos Confidential. In it, I’m asked to contribute an essay to its eponymous glitz and glamour magazine –an icon of the high fashion lifestyle that rules Mykonos each summer.
This year’s topic was described to me as “inspired by the documentary ‘Super Paradise’ - you might have heard of it…we are looking for paradise stories on Mykonos!”
I’d not.
Still, in the three decades I’ve written for MC, they never changed a word of what I’d written, nor has its editorial content shied away from addressing controversial issues.
I reward that journalistic honesty by writing what I think appropriate for that summer’s topic “without fear or favor” of those who might feel otherwise.
Below is my contribution to this summer’s Mykonos Confidential, and here’s a link to my essay that appears at its pages 44-45.
A Place for Friends
Paradise is a decidedly subjective term.
We can adorn our respective images of paradise with modifiers such as “super” or some yet undiscovered supercalifragilisticexpialidocious version, but the bottom line remains this: each of us possesses an intensely personal view of paradise.
For millennia, creators of art, music, poetry and prose have extolled its virtues while others have proffered demonic versions consistent with their views on paradise as lush with amorality. That seems a topic worthy of serious attention for members of the Mykonos early morning kafenion crowd in their inevitably intractable musings on the state of their beloved island.
Among visitors to Mykonos, many likely envision paradise as involving turquoise waters lapping against golden beaches under azure skies––perhaps while in the embrace of a new-found lover.
Locals, too, undoubtedly subscribe in varying degrees to that paradisiacal vision of the sea that surrounds their island home. But mostly it is to their families’ deep roots in a shared hardscrabble past, and unabashed pride in their island’s new-found affluence, that they point to when describing Mykonos as their paradise.
And proud they should be, for prosperity came to Mykonos in no small measure because Mykonian families saw beyond the petty temptations, foibles, and feuds that often come into play when natives, conditioned to accepting as gospel a fixed vision of their paradise, find themselves adrift among compelling alternative perceptions of what paradise might mean going forward.
In an effort to precisely pinpoint what keeps my 40-year love affair with Mykonos still going hot and heavy, I reviewed decades of articles I’d written for Mykonos Confidential.
My first essay described what I liked most about Mykonos. That answer was easy: the people. Life then was more about hanging out with friends, be it for coffee in the morning, spearfishing and the beach in the afternoon, or joining in on any number of communal activities––all for the purpose of making me part of their lives and they part of mine.
Back then I saw Mykonos as every bit the legendary draw for tourists from around the world that at its heart still remained a small, Greek island village. A place where people raised their families and shared strong traditions—forever linked in geographic and spiritual kinship to the Delos of antiquity.
A few years later, for Mykonos Confidential’s Tenth Anniversary issue, I wrote:
“We have entered a different world. We no longer exist as we once did. We are separate and apart. We are imagination and fantasy, dreams and aspirations, a place in the sun unlike any other, fulfilling the great expectations of our planet’s buyers and sellers.”
Despite all that change, Mykonos remains a place of joy where friends from around the world seeking paradise still gather to celebrate. Old faces and new; Greeks, non-Greeks; gays, non-gays; locals, non-locals; rich, non-rich, all there in abundance listening to their eclectic music, grazing on modern cuisine, imbibing in whatever they desire, wearing as much or little as they wish, dancing, sunning, playing, perhaps even praying, but all smiling and doing whatever makes them happy.
And as the years roll on, I watch old Mykonos tales of magical moments being remade by the young in their own words, and though time will fly by for them surely as quickly as it has for me, I can assure them that those memories of their time in paradise shall always remain the property of their makers—staying just as fresh for them as mine do for me.
My memories of Mykonos as paradise shall forever remain linked to my Mykonos friends. Friends who continue to draw my heart and soul back to our shared island home. I’ve stood with them from midnight until two-thirty on an Easter morning crammed into the tiny second-floor space above the chapel of Agia Kiriake in Chora. I’ve danced at their weddings, rejoiced at their baptisms (at times, to both on the same day), and cried at the funerals of longtime friends.
Though I was not born here and my roots are not Greek, I met my wife here, and Mykonos is the place I call home more than any other. It is a place of wondrous contrasts and energy, a source of inspiration for my writing. But above all it is home to many of my most treasured friends. Which is why Mykonos is, and shall forever remain, my paradise.
––Jeff
Jeff’s upcoming events
2025
All Live Events
September 3 – 7 |
Bouchercon 2025 | New Orleans, LA
Friday, September 5, 4:00-4:45 p.m.
New Orleans Marriott—La Galeries 5-6
Panelist, “Tips and Tricks for Keeping a Series Fresh,” with Anne Cleeland,
Marcy McCreary, Charles Todd, Tessa Wegert, and Moderator Deborah Dobbs
Saturday, September 6,
10:30-11:25 a.m.
New Orleans Marriott—La Galerie 3
Panelist, “No Passport Required: International Mysteries and Thrillers,” with
Barbara Gayle Austin, Cara Black, Joseph Finder, J.L. Hancock, and Moderator
Mark Ellis
Wednesday, September 17,
6:30 p.m.
Greek National Tourist Organization
Presentation of the literary work of Jeffrey Siger
Ilias Lalaounis Jewelry Museum
Kallisperi 12, Acropolis
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