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.
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.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.
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