from
Christiane Schlötzer, Spetses
Everything is still there. The outside staircase that leads to the first floor on the terrace with the Moorish arches. And inside the carved wooden ceiling from Florence, the English porcelain and in the large salon the memory of cold winters on the island: a brazier, the handle of the lid a Turkish crescent moon. “Never forget, we were part of the Ottoman Empire,” says Pavlos Demertzis-Bouboulis and hurries forward through the great house of his ancestors, of whom one woman in particular is revered in Greece to this day: Laskarina Bouboulina, the Kapetanissa, the woman, who commanded their own fleet, which first hoisted the flag of the revolution on Spetses. 200 years ago, in the war of liberation against the Ottomans, which ended almost 400 years of foreign rule in Greece.