Oia Santorini – sound of silence…

We always knew there was a very old room at the back of the first cave…it had been filled in with all the rubble from the original work done to the cave many years ago. It took a week to dig it out (more pics on that soon) and then it took me several hours to dig this candle window, as well as two more. It was winter, bitterly cold outside, but deep inside the cave, well…. that’s a different world.

 

 

It’s a weird thing to be several metres underground in a raw cave. There is something very primal about it. The candle light reflected off the raw “aspa” cave walls and there was something that most of you living in big cities simply wouldn’t know about……”the sound of silence”.

No….I don’t mean quiet, I mean  s i l e n c e !

Complete silence…to the point where all you can hear is your heartbeat and your mind.

So what would you do in this blissful silence?

 

 

Well I don’t know about you… but I got myself some nice Santorini red wine, put on some very soft music (which echoed amazingly in the cave) and sat there for a couple of hours thinking about what this bathroom is going to look like. Candle light flickering…. with what seemed like soft sense-around-sound. Bliss….

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TIP OF THE HAT

Her name is Michele and during the day she makes a living as a management consultant….. but deep down she wants something else.
Look at her beautiful blog  ”My Notting Hill” and discover what this elegant woman really wants to be….

Michele was gracious enough to mention the caveman in her blog yesterday…. and for that we tip our hat in gratitude.

Oia Santorini – less is more

Many of you have wondered how a cave house is lit…

 

The answer is less is more…

 

The magical, luminous Aegean light is ample during the day. At night… the little candle windows I dug on the sides of the cave create a warm ambience and give out soft light that in turn captures the curved surfaces of the cave walls. Each candle window was sponged a different colour to contrast the stark white walls of the cave. Yes…there are electric lights… but what would you rather use?

More on the cave soon ;-)

 

 

Oia Santorini – digging a cave home (working with an end in mind)

for whatever the mind can conceive and believe, the mind can achieve.

                                                                                                    ~ Napoleon Hill

 

Many of you have sent emails asking about the cave… as promised the story continues!

The boys started work at 7am daily… and continued, often till 10pm. Three jackhammers and up to six others shovelling the dirt into bags for the mules to carry up. The noise and dust is unimaginable. I stopped them after a couple of days and asked why none of them were wearing ear-muffs?   They just looked at me…

 

Decisions had to be made…where do the robes go? where does the bookcase go? how wide will the tunnel joining the two caves be? The beauty of digging a cave is that within limits you can dig any space you like….but the dirt has to go somewhere and the cost of the removal by mules can be higher than the cost of the people digging. This old dug out spot was going to be the first robe…

 

The tunnel was to be three metres long and two wide. It took ten days to dig completely…what you see here was not even half way.

 

Outside the bags of dirt were piling up…and we weren’t even a quarter of the way through. 

 

Meantime the boys were starting to put the plastic up. Why would you need plastic on the cave walls you say?

You see dear reader there is a lot that’s not known about the cave houses of Santorini. Visitors arrive in spring or summer and find them all freshly painted and ready for the season. The fact is that a lot of them (at least the older ones) have moisture and damp problems. Paint peels off every winter and they have to be scraped and painted every year….unless of course you completely cover the walls with a thick plastic membrane and then place a steel wire mesh over it, to hold the render. Its a delicate art. Every nail holding the plastic has to have rubber seals so that damp will not go through and ruin the walls.

And you thought paradise was easy…

To put all this in some perspective I need to tell you at this point that my average week for almost twenty years consisted of flying to another city twice a week, working with clients and staying in hotels. On average… 80 trips a year, for many many MANY years. On most days I would leave a client’s office at 6 or 7pm…. go to the hotel and work till midnight or 1am. I am a nocturne and the many years of travel have reduced my sleeping requirements to no more than four hours a night. So…up at 5am….some more work, then off to the clients for the day followed by a flight home. Apart from the last few years at home, that was my routine for a long long time. But here…. well here things were different. Instead of room service I woke each morning with dust in my mouth. My ears were still ringing from the jackhammers the day before and when I went outside all i could see were endless bags of dirt waiting for the mules. Once those were taken…there were dozens more to replace them from the daily digging.
But I’m a patient man…and the little movie of the whole project (beginning to end) kept playing in my head. The little church you see below is almost in front of my house…

 

 

At the end of each day (weather permitting) I would go and sit on the roof-top ledge of this little church with a coffee and just look out.
 I would often sit there till dusk….and everything would become clear.

 

 

 

 

 

Open Sesame…

(cont. from “Buying a house in Santorini”  - if you want to read the story from the beginning please go to “Oia – A cave to call home” under categories)

 

There was three of them….three young Albanian boys, working 10 hours a day. The work was hard, the rocks were heavy and it seemed never ending. Volcanic lava rocks are very heavy…much heavier than normal rocks. These boys worked tirelessly for a week, forming a daisy chain and passing rocks to each other with bare hands.

After  a week the entrance to the old cave finally became visible. It was a moment of great excitement for me…and puzzlement for them. I dont know what they thought would be under the rocks, but I think they expected a bit more than they found. Still…the boss was happy, so they were happy too.

“Just clear a small hole to crawl through” I asked them…..they did and after crawling through on my hands and knees here is what I found inside:

 

King Tut’s treasure it certainly wasn’t. Years and years of rubbish it certainly was….

Suddenly there are voices in my head….all the people I spoke to about this little adventure:

 ”Going to live in cave? Are you mad?”

 

There was still a ton (or several) of rocks that had to be removed…. and now, now there was all this rubbish that had to go before anyone could possibly do any work. “How is all this #@&* going to get up to the top?” I kept thinking…

 

Yep, Santorini’s tireless workers….and they would need to make a few trips. Make that a LOT of trips! 

 

Now….just follow me on this. Every bit of dirt, every rock, volcanic ash-pile & rubbish, has to be put in a bag. Then the bags have to be

loaded on the mules (2 bags at a time) and then they have to walk up the 100 or so steps to the top.

And you thought paradise was all fun and games right? 

 

And just so we get the mental imagery right….see these bags? Mutliply this lot by 100.

By the time this little cave was finished we had moved 180 cubic metres of dirt to the top.

 

Open cave…finally. Now we just need to get rid of the rubbish and the “fun” of digging and building begins.

I was on the island alone at the time…family back in Australia. I would get emails and text messages from them and friends, telling me how wonderful it must be on the island, having so much fun renovating the “little cave on the cliff”. They of course hadn’t seen any of these pictures. If only they knew just how much “fun” it was…..

But….and it’s a big but!  Facing this entrance…. was this:

Once the cave entrance was cleared, the workers and the mules gone, I was able to sit inside the cave and for the first time see what the view from inside would look like. Now it was just a matter of getting rid of all this dirt and digging it out and moving more dirt and doing more digging and moving more dirt………

But hey, that’s just details right?