Words would ruin Helen’s distilled images of our time on Kalymnos — at the Villa Melina, and at the nearby beach of Vlychardia

We often think of cities being built for commerce, convenience and colonialism, but here Lesley depicts the different driving force, which cause dthe fortified city of Chora to be established.

A crucial passage in Mermaid Singing is set at the convent at Argos. It records an argument between two of Charmian’s friends, Sevasti and Yanni. Here Helen imagines Yanni reflecting on that row from half a world away, and after ten years,

Clift’s essay ‘An Exile’s Return’ (written in the late 1960s) relates how Yanni, a Kalymnian immigrant to Australia, returns to his island because ‘there is no life’ in the new country. Here Kristin presents his point of view in a letter sent to a mate on Kalymnos.

Here Ann shares the video she made of Helen dancing on the threshing floor at Brosta — the place where Kalymnians gather for a glendi (festival) on Clean Monday (the beginning of Lent), as Clift records in Mermaid Singing and Honour’s Mimic.

To all these journal-pieces, the Clifties bring their professional knowledge, their life experience. Here Helen draws on her practical understanding of metal-working to dramatise the making of the Kalymnos Lady.

For all of us, the climb to the citadel at Chora was an overwhelming experience of mountains, panoramas, frescoes, heat, and pounding hearts. But here Lesley finds her focus in a tiny detail, which nevertheless resonates with a significant symbol that Clift uses in her account of the citadel-climb in Honour’s Mimic.

In the photo at left, Maureen and Lesley both are engaging with the Lady of Kalymnos. They both dramatise her story…but with very different emphases. Maureen links her back to an ancient myth of the missing daughter, a myth which still resonates today.

One of the highlights of our time on Kalymnos has been the climb up to the citadel of Chora, which Charmian Clift used as the location for the meeting between her lovers, Kathy and Fotis, in Honour’s Mimic. Here Maureen gives a wonderful sense of the exhilaration of the climb, and the mystical powder of the mountains. In the photo at left, we see the view back down to the port of Pothia.

Kristin, like Paula in an earlier post, was inspired by the inscription in the Archaeological Museum, acknowledging the role that Kalymnian woman Eutelistrate had played by donating funds for the new theatre in the sanctuary of Apollo. Kristin’s playful piece highlights the power of the island’s women, even so many centuries ago.

In this haunting piece, Lesley allows us to see through the sightless eyes of the Kalymnian Lady, as centuries and sea creatures pass her by. With hindsight, we know the end of her story: but she doesn’t.

Paula says: ‘At the Kalymnos Archeology Museum, I was drawn to the story behind a piece of the facade from a theatre bearing an inscription to Eutelistrate, who made a major donation to the construction of the theatre at the sanctuary of Apollo Dalios in the second half of the 3rd B.C. I imagined her as a child…’

Helen’s maps, done on site from the citadel of Chora, bring the mountain alive, in all its spiky wildness. And as she says, ‘The vista itself is a map in soil and rock.’

‘How to stay with the crippled, the maimed, how to go on living on Kalymnos, as the Kalymnians do, their beautiful children dancing the old dances and among those dances now the heart-breaking dance of the sponge divers, the mechaniki?’ Janey brings some of her own pain to this difficult question.

The boat-propeller… the shark… Both were dangers facing the sponge diver. In these two little windows into the Kalymnos Nautical Museum, Helen shows how both could mean death, or life.

Maureen weaves memories of her childhood on an Australian farm with an object she saw in the Nautical Museum at Kalymnos. For two very different groups of men, the vital work tool was the same. (‘Clip go the shears, boys, clip clip clip…’)

Paula reminds us that Kalymnos is an island of sailors as well as an island of spongers. Writing from the images she sees in the Nautical Museum, she summons up a wonderful connection between the divers of old and the climbers of today.

Lesley takes a photo we saw in the Kalymnos Maritime Museum and brings it to life as a piece of fiction, dramatising the moment when the sponge fleet returns, and the women wait to learn the fate of their loved ones.

In this exhilarating piece, Janey manages to evoke both our boat trip to Rina and our walk through Charmian’s neighbourhood: the music, the wind, the dolphins, the mermaids, and the contradictions of life on Kalymnos for Charmian Clift.

Kristin allows us to accompany her on two Kalymnian journeys — ‘me ta pothia’ (on foot) to the sponge warehouse in Pothia, and then by bus to Emporios, in the north of the island. In both accounts, her architectural eye is clear.