Piraeus Gate E7
August 2004 was the golden summer of Greece: the Athens Olympic Games had just concluded, the national soccer team had conquered the Euro Cup, and the country felt indestructible. My younger brother Pavlos and I had two weeks of freedom before he had to report for mandatory military service in the Evros border garrison.
We boarded the old car ferry *Express Skopelitis* at Gate E7 in Piraeus Port. The ship smelled of heavy bunker fuel, fried calamari, and hot deck paint. We had no money for passenger cabins, so we hauled our sleeping bags onto the upper steel deck under the scorching Aegean sun.
Before boarding, Pavlos had bought a ten-kilogram dark-green watermelon from an old farmer’s truck. He sliced it open on the steel engine cowl with his Swiss Army knife. The fruit was ice-cold and deep crimson, smelling of clean river water in the middle of maritime salt.
Seeds in the Turquoise Wake
For seven hours, as the ferry plowed through the Cyclades past Paros and Syros, we devoured that melon. We argued about music, laughed about our terrible high school teachers, and spat black seeds into the churning white foam of the ship's propellers.
Pavlos looked at the horizon with those bright, fearless twenty-year-old eyes. 'Nikos,' he shouted over the roar of the diesel exhaust, 'when I finish the army, we’re going to open a diving school in Crete. We’ll never wear neckties, and we’ll never answer to a boss.'
I looked at his sun-bleached curls and his olive skin and believed every word. In your early twenties, life feels like an open sea with no shoals or storms.
The Empty Deck in 2024
Pavlos was killed three years later in a motorcycle collision on the coastal road outside Chania. The diving school in Crete was never built. The neckties came anyway.
Every August, I take that same ferry from Piraeus to Naxos. I buy a watermelon, sit on the sun-deck, and slice a piece for him. The Aegean Sea is still impossibly blue, the seagulls still cry behind the stern, and for an hour, my brother is twenty years old again, laughing with red juice dripping from his chin.
Solas Haven holds my beacon for Pavlos: the best brother a man could ask for. Sail on, Captain.
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