Postcard of Folegandros

I am writing this article in the middle of the Aegean Sea: we are on a boat and have just left Folegandros behind, one of the smallest islands in the Cyclades. We went there to look for what we have already lost at home: a bit of peace, a bit of sun, a bit of salt, and a bit of sky, to put it as Pere Quart wrote. Calm and nature. Here, electricity did not arrive until 1973, and cars did not become widespread as a means of transport, along with motorcycles, or the more recent quads, until about 20 years ago. Before, here, people moved on foot or by donkey, and they didn't have many reasons to walk beyond their small plot of land, to go to a funeral, to wait for news or essential products at the port. Right now, just over 700 people live here, throughout the year.We spent three days here. And three were enough for us to see how the blue, here, can be as blue as that of Mallorca, and that the whitewash of the walls is not so different from what still flakes off our oldest buildings, outside the town. Many things have happened here, in the last 50 years, and I am sure that the inhabitants of the island have not wanted to tell us everything. However, it is evident that tourism is the main economic driver: everyone works or has some connection with the twenty or so bars and restaurants there are, especially in Chora and also at the port, or with the grocery stores, the souvenir shops, the boat taxis and the buses that cross the island, slowly, but with a decent enough frequency. The drivers, when they meet at the turns, among bushes and prickly pears, among tamarisks and some pine trees, smile and greet each other. They do it as if they were speaking in a code known only to them. And I can imagine it, and at times it is as if I understood it: it is that of people who have known how to offer the best they have without it costing them the landscape that has facilitated it, that of people who have known (or have not had to) say enough.In the evening, the people who sleep here and there gather in the three or four squares in Chora. They come from watching the sunset on the path of white stones that leads to the little church of the Mother of God. They have taken photos during the golden hour. Before arriving, they were able to appreciate a concert of Greek pop song that three girls no older than five years old have improvised with a microphone with an amplifier. Now, however, the parents are having dinner, and they give scraps of matsata to the cats that patrol between the restaurant tables. Not far from them, next to the ice cream parlor, another group of girls prepares their stall for today's business: necklaces and bracelets that they must have made themselves, and that they will sell, not without first having to haggle over the price with customers. Flat little stones. The prices, scribbled with a blue pen. I look at them with great envy: at their age, my summers were also like that. And I don't know if what I feel now is nostalgia for my childhood or rather the longing for an island that has wanted to grow so much that it is no longer there. Mallorca is no longer like Folegandros.