(Note: Click on small pictures to see a larger version)

Our first stop was the Greek island of Lesbos, just off the Turkish coast. The island is covered with millions of olive trees. Millions and millions of olive trees. When we were there, it rained. While we were in the bus, it rained lightly, just enough to keep the windows fogged up. When we got out of the bus, the clouds opened up and it poured!

From the port city of Mitilini we went through the olive groves to a museum of the works of Theophilos, a Greek primitive painter. The guide and the guidebooks admitted that he was eccentric, but he impressed us as having definitly gone around the bend. We forgot to take pictures.

Our next stop was the Eleftheriades Museum of Modern Art. Since Eleftheriades had been the patron of Theophilos, we entered with some foreboding, having had a sample of his taste in art. Image our surprise to find that Eleftheriades was better known under the French name that he adopted: Tériade. He lived in Paris and founded Éditions Tériade, and the magazine Verve, specializing in the works of such artists as Chagall, Picasso, Léger, Cartier-Bresson, Gauguin, Mirò and Matisse. The museum houses a wonderful collection of Tériade's publisher's proofs of collections of their prints, art books, and so forth. It was not what we had expected to find out among the olive trees! We were so excited that we forgot to take pictures.

We ended up in Agiassos, a picturesque village built on the side of a mountain which normally has a stupendous view. We saw rain, in fact we were hailed upon at one point. We visited a church with a famous Icon of the Archangel Michael. The interior should have had mystic darkness pierced by beams of sunlight. We saw darkness.

As we returned to the ship, the sun broke through and we had a nice panorama of the harbor of Mitilini. Except for some cloudburts in Ephesus, the good weather followed us for the rest of the cruise.