Tales From A Greek Island
Often surprising, sometimes bizarre, never dull. Roger Jinkinson takes us far off the tourist-beaten track to explore life — and death — in a small village on a remote Greek Island. Meet the people he has come to know over 25 years — at once traditional and modern, hard-bitten and generous, stoic and resourceful.
Learn how they sh, keep bees, hunt goats, make music. Read about the man who tried to ransom a floating crane, about the mule that outwitted the German army and the death of a giant. Read and you will feel the very pulse of a community as it fights to maintain its unique and vibrant culture.
More Tales From A Greek Island
For more than thirty years Roger Jinkinson has visited and lived on the small Greek island of Karpathos. In this, his second book of tales from the island, he tells how he first arrived by boat, his children mistaken for luggage, and how he found himself immersed in a unique and vibrant culture. The island’s people are tough, stubborn and highly individualistic. Read about the many and varied ways of fish and fishing, of the festivals and ceremonies that mark the year, of the intrigues and jealousies of café owners, of the unique wildlife of the island, of the once thriving villages deserted as their inhabitants left for cities overseas, and of the ambivalent feelings of the children of emigrants towards their ancestral homeland.
American Ikaros
A chance encounter in a small cafeneion on a remote Greek island led Roger Jinkinson on a quest to find out what had happened to Kevin Andrews, the author of The Flight of Ikaros, described by Patrick Leigh Fermor as “One of the great and lasting books about Greece.” The search for Kevin Andrews covers half the globe and contains a glittering array of characters including W H Auden, Louis MacNeice, Dylan Thomas, Patrick Leigh Fermor, E E Cummings, Scofield Thayer, Amelia Earhart, Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany and Queen Frederika of Greece. Kevin was born in Peking in 1924. His mother, Yvette Borup, beautiful and spirited was married at the time to the adventurer and explorer Roy Chapman Andrews, reputed to be the model for Indiana Jones, but he is unlikely to have been Kevin’s father. Gifted with good looks, an abundance of charm and natural intelligence, Kevin grew to be a confused and troubled man. His one constant love was Greece and the Greeks. He relinquished his American nationality and became a Greek citizen in 1975. The last few years of his life were spent in Athens living as a recluse. He died in 1989, swimming in wild seas off the Greek island of Kythira.