In Europe

Italian tourists causing this huge upturn in the local construction trade. It is the homecomers.
    Like large parts of the Mediterranean, this island was for decades a baby factory for Western Europe and the rest of the world. All the young people moved away, because they had no future here. I remember my first trip through Greece, in summer 1965: everywhere you came across villages inhabited only by old women. I recall a boarding house where I once ended up after a village feast: the woman of the house sadly showed me an enormous pile of beautifully embroidered blankets, made for her husband and her children. They had not been used for years.
    Having made their fortunes in Western Europe, Australia and America, these prodigal sons have reached retirement age and are coming back by the hundreds. And they are all living out exactly the same dream: a two-storey house in the old village, a big balcony, a rooftop terrace, a garage with an automatic door, electric shutters and marble steps before the door. You see the men sitting in front of Hotel Mirabella, talking to their old schoolmates, toying with their worn strings of beads, gossiping about dead acquaintances. But their island has been consumed by time, there is little left of the old place, and so they stick together, the homecomers, fallen forever between two stools.
    Upon arrival I announce my presence to the Grande Dame of the island, and am immediately summoned. Helena Cosmetatos (b.1910) resides in one of the few old houses that survived the 1953 earthquake and the ensuing demolition by the Greek Army. ‘Only the top floor is gone.’ The dark rooms are full of old paintings and antique woodwork. Her elderly husband potters about the house, occasionally singing a naughty French song from the 1930s.
    During our talk in the garden, a lady friend, a grandchild and a British couple all come to pay their respects, and we move back and forth through a gamut of languages. Helena was born in Rhodesia, grew up in Athens, and now lives comfortably from her family's colonial fortune. ‘I met my Waterloo in 1936,’ she said. ‘That's when I married a Greek. What a peaceful life I should have had if I had only gone for a British office clerk who died of a heart attack at the age of fifty-five!’
    She talks about her parents, who lived next door to the former dictator Metaxas, and about the parties that were held at their house all the time. ‘Ioannis Metaxas was a stern little man, he also came from these islands. But I had no idea what was going on behind all those closed doors. Back then all those men wanted to marry me, you know how it is. Metaxas was a great admirer of Mussolini, so when Italy declared war on us he felt utterly betrayed. He died not long afterwards. It was a catastrophe.’
    Her husband fought against the Italians, in the Albanian mountains. ‘One day he suddenly showed up at the door. At first he didn't speak a word, until finally he said: “A bath.” He had come back all the way from northern Greece, on foot.’
    Old Mr Cosmetatos shows me the big book of icons he has made, and whispers a racy joke in French. His wife shuts him up and starts talking about the war again.
    ‘The Italian years were good ones. When I arrived here on the boat in 1941 – you had to come ashore in a little dinghy then – my son lost one of his sandals in the water as he was climbing out. Two Italian soldiers ran into the water right away to fish it up. That was my first encounter with our occupiers.’
    She tells me how to get to the local museum, saying I should go take a look for myself. In the heat of the afternoon I flip through files containing letters and instructions written by the Italian occupiers in 1942, picturesof happy, marching soldiers, laughing men with a girl on a motorbike, and then a few clandestine photographs of the same boys sprawling on the ground, having been shot against a wall.
    The garrison on Kefallonia was manned by officers and soldiers of the Acqui Division, friendly Italians who were perfectly content to have the gods of war pass them by. Occupiers and islanders lived together in remarkable harmony, they had drinks together, lay on the beach together and played football against each other. The troops attached to the little German occupational force on the island shared in that same peaceful atmosphere, they lazed in the sun, and at parties and meals let themselves be carried along by the contagious good cheer of their Italian