Sappho Made Me Do It

Words and Photography by Constance McDonald

I came to Sappho sandwiched between a thousand Tumblr notes. Swans on starry waters, an image of a fan-made jacket announcing ‘LEONARD COHEN WAS RIGHT’, and Sappho’s fragments translated by Anne Carson, reblogged by teenagers in their bedrooms.

I was a teen, too, and my Google Maps was already littered with stars of dream sites: houses covered in seashells, Anna Atkins’s grave, and the wet-process photobooth outside Flinders Station in Melbourne. All were impossibly far from my all-girls school, snuggled deep in the bosom of Aotearoa New Zealand.

During the Lesbian Renaissance of the seventies, the girls of the world were searching for a heroine. They landed on Sappho, who, 2600 years ago, wrote about loving women (well, that depends on who you ask, but, babe, stick with me).

(Also, who cares? It’s the lure of the lore!).

Sappho’s birthplace, the beach town of Skala Eressos, was, naturally, the decided pilgrimage site. Since then, a steady flow of international lesbians has made it their mission to summer here. In the early days, they built shelters on the beach out of bamboo and driftwood. Some still do today, but more adopt the nylon tent alternative, and even more rent a simple seaside apartment.

The virtual pin on Skala Eressos, Lesbos, waited patiently for years.

Finally, I found myself in Türkiye, just a one-hour ferry ride from Lesbos. I Googled ‘volunteer’ and ‘Lesbos’, but the results, coupled with a quick Google Maps check, revealed that the spots were all too far from the jewel – Skala Eressos, Sappho’s birthplace.

I reached into my arsenal and employed The Last Approach – one I had thought about but never had to follow through on. I found and joined the small town’s community Facebook group. A brief scroll revealed the page’s function: people sharing ideas for upcycling (using bald car tyres to make garden swans), complaints of rubbish dumped in a field, and an image of an escaped donkey in the town square with a plea for his owner to please retrieve him as soon as possible.

I posted an image of myself taken a day earlier at the train station photobooth with a short text asking “if anyone had a project” for me to help with in exchange for, and try not to roll your eyes, “a place for me to rest my head.” Shocked by my uninhibited move, I turned my phone onto Flight Mode for the rest of the day and went to the beach a short walk from where I was staying in Dikili, Türkiye. I could see Lesbos’s silhouette behind a pink, gauzy dusk light.

The next morning, I braced myself as I connected my phone to the world. I told myself, “We can only but try,” “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take,” “What will be, will be,” etc. Was my post cobwebbed in the corner with a single polite like?

Forty comments! An argument! A man, clearly struck by my “place to rest my head” wording, asked “are we still in the Middle Ages?”, stating that anyone who took up my offer was going to be “exploiting” me. Women replied back and forth, falling on their swords, defending my honour. Then, the comment that started it all: “You are heaven-sent! I have just acquired an old restaurant to turn into a community centre for women. I am about to pick up the keys. I’ve messaged you.” I turned off the comments.

Two days later, I took the one-hour ferry from Türkiye to Lesbos.

I arrived to discover I was staying in a six-bedroom Palace, on the beach, alone. My room was palatial and sparse: a double bed, single bed, two mirrors and a low table. My windows were bare, so I fashioned curtains with red gingham tablecloths I found in a cupboard.

The best ‘rooting’ activity for me to feel at home in a new place is finding the washing machine, and, with textile-frenzied eyes, collecting everything that could possibly be washed. Climbing on tables to take down (either too short or too long) dusty curtains, unzipping couch covers, even removing ‘Welcome’ mats almost glued to their spots after years of use. I created a pile that would take me seven days of hot washes to deplete. My Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: food, shelter, blue skies and a washing machine. Sappho gave me it all.

(The etymologist in you has probably already connected the dots but, yes, the word ‘lesbian’ comes from the island of Lesbos, and ‘sapphic’ comes from Sappho.)

After just twenty-four hours, I slipped into a role I have always dreamed would come up for me: community-creator-project-manager. Work began quickly. Every wall was painted white, and the building was named: Sappho’s Palace. I organised a collaboration with the local juicery – a celery, apple and ginger juice called Sappho’s Juice. (There is a fragment of Sappho’s poetry, Fragment 191, that simply states ‘celery’).

I secured the @sapphospalace handle on Instagram (phew, that was close), the Gmail address, and put Sappho’s Palace on Google Maps. I painted signs with house paint onto queen-sized bedsheets and hung them from the railing outside, visible from the beach. The shore was relatively shell-less, at odds with the smattering of beach-side tourist shops selling glossy conches (which I was later told are imported from the Philippines).

I was given a basket, originally for collecting olives, by the man who owned the former restaurant, now Sappho’s Palace. He told me to go, pointing at the sea, right away, and dunk the basket thrice, then let it sun-dry.

He told me the salt water strengthens it, and that I must do this annually. I nodded enthusiastically and signed the proverbial dotted line.

The deadline hurtled towards me. It seemed an impossible prospect, but Sappho’s Palace was a promised venue for a hundred events during the lesbian festival. A thousand women (mostly lesbians) begin arriving in Eressos at the beginning of September. This was their twenty-fourth year of running it, and each year, attendance grows.

To utilise the Palace to its absolute, I set up four low-cost bedrooms for rent. I painted each room’s door with a word from Sappho’s poems – Rose, Bloom, Honey and Heart. When the first guest arrived, I explained that to keep the rate low, she had to make up the bed for the next person and sweep out the room.

I came to notice that there were three distinct groups in the town:

The Lesbians (the women-loving-women kind). The ‘Patron Saints of Conversations That Pass The Bechdel Test’, i.e., they are talking about moving in with the woman they met two days prior;
the Lesbians (the people from the island of Lesbos), and;
the Meditation-crystal-chakras, who spent time at the close-by meditation centre.

The crossover between these groups was small and infrequent, but as someone on the petticoats of a new place, I found myself moving between them.

A local man about seventy (although it is abhorrent and unbecoming to guess a person’s age) sat near me and played ‘Dance Me to the End of Love’ on his guitar. He turned to me and asked what kind of music I liked. I said, exactly what you’re playing – Leonard Cohen is my favourite. He told me they were friends. The sides of his eyes were soft like when you touch a forgotten balloon.

He would be one of two people I met here with a connection to Leonard Cohen. The second was another local man who had owned a taverna on the island of Hydra for many years. He told me, with certainty, that “Leonard Cohen was a bastard.”

Leonard would leave his young son with him, promising to return in three days. Three months later, he would finally return. It was confronting information to learn, but truly unshocking. He may have been a father, but he sure was not a Dad.

Despite my psychologist accusing me of being schizotypal, I made several quick friends. At the nude beach we drank ouzo mixed with spring water and chewed mastic (an ancient, natural gum, grown only on the neighbouring island of Chios). A mother knelt down on the water’s edge with her amber-necklace-wearing babe suckling. A man excitedly asked if I was “the girl from New Zealand” and that he had “met someone else from there eleven years ago.”

(When the great Library of Alexandria burned in the third century, most of Sappho’s poetry was lost – kind of like when a voice memo doesn’t send. All that remained of Sappho’s nine volumes were half-burned fragments.)

I dutifully read a stark-white A4 printed PDF of Anne Carson’s translation of Sappho’s fragmented poetry. Page 31: “Holy and beautiful maiden around.” Sappho would have loved it here.

A bald sunscreen-denier bobbed around the water like an Eve apple. A woman shared her scone with her dog called Roxy. Another woman with a waterproof bag rolled the top, creating a floating bladder of her preciouses, to swim to the next beach around the side of the rock that looks like the profile of a woman’s face. This is referred to by residents of Skala Eressos as ‘Sappho’s Rock.’ There is a cave there, equipped with a frying pan, good olive oil, salt, a fishing line and one hook.

It is important to distinguish between the two rocks. One is Sappho’s Rock and the other is simply known as The Rock. The Rock is Everything: a craggy, volcanic being that sticks out of the blue water like a horse’s tooth. It takes ten minutes or so to swim to it, and another seven to swim around it. The back of its head boasts the bluer water and more plentiful fish.

Each weekday, women gather at half-ten to swim alongside Tamsin, the community organiser with her capable and kind finger in every pie, who is in a kayak in case someone needs a break and wants to hold onto the side. Some have not swum in years. There was a fizzy, encouraging buzz as one woman, at the last minute, said “I am scared, but I am going to do it.” One woman is blind; others are clearly triathletes with toned arms and tight torsos. Many swim topless.

After everyone had completed the swim, we formed a circle for the ceremony, a makeshift lectern in the centre with hundreds of ribbons tied to it. Tamsin reminds everyone to put their tops back on because she has only just got out of Zuckerberg’s naughty corner for uploading ceremony photographs with too many bare breasts. If it is your first swim, you are presented with a medal. People hypothesised about Sappho swimming to The Rock, too, a couple of thousand years ago, perhaps with hoards of women?

Along with being the key-holder of Sappho’s Palace, I also got the keys to a nonfunctional second-hand shop, now home (and toilet) to roaming cats. I spent around thirty hours there in total, looking at every item. I found Gaultier, Galliano, Vivienne Westwood, cashmere, silk and leather. (Damn, Vinted would have loved this haul…) I decided to scrub, soak and hot wash everything (well, not the cashmere! I know better!) and sell the items to raise money to care for the cats in the town.

Everything was one to five euros apiece. People arrived asking me to pick out outfits for them, their wives and their grown-up children. At first, I tried my best to explain the cultural significance of Gaultier and Westwood, but realised it did not really matter; they liked how it felt on.

My breakfasts were fresh bread, two soft-boiled eggs (boiling water, six and a half minutes, then into a bowl of iced water) and a smoothie that requires its own sentence. Tahini, cacao, Greek yoghurt (using yoghurt in a smoothie takes away all of my milk thoughts – i.e. when did I open the oat milk? Is it off?), banana, ice, flax seed, walnuts (for clarity) and prunes (for regularity). The local supermarket where I purchased all these ingredients added me as a friend on Facebook.

I deadlined myself to get off the island; then, the last day of summer came and went. The last day of September did, too. Opening hours dwindled up the street, including at the small archaeological museum with ancient mosaics and busts of women – the marble softened like butter.

The ceramicist, who I routinely helped to post her Instagram stories, boarded up her shop with a hammer, nails and wood. The two tattoo shops in the town announced their last days. They offered flash pages of The Rock, interlocking scissors (get it?) and contemporary imaginings of Sappho (with round sunglasses and a cigarette. You know the style, it is what people have been doing to dear Frida Kahlo for years).

It was abhorrently early and as dark as the inside of a pocket when I slipped thank-you letters under the doors of my favourite spots in the town – the bakery, café, gyros place, vegetable shop and supermarket – on my way to the bus that would take me to the ferry terminal.

In the crook of my arm was the wicker basket, with flakes of Aegean salt in between its wicker molars. An ancient motorbike clattered past like a dishwasher post dinner party as I (again) unzipped my belt bag to check if my ticket and passport were there.

@princess.constance