“Before I retired, I felt guilty if I spent time reading fiction. When I got home from work, I had to clean the house, tend the garden etc. Now I’m all about reading,” says Sue Manley from Liverpool. “My house is full of books, towers of them. This holiday combines two things I love: Greece and psychological thrillers.”
We met Manley, 72, last week in Syntagma Square, in the center of Athens, waiting, along with 10 other people, most of them between 35 and 50 years old and originally from the US and Britain, to board the bus that would take us to the coastal village of Tolo in Argolida, in the eastern part of the Peloponnese peninsula. All of them had signed up for Imagine Greece Retreats, a private initiative that organizes retreats in various locations around Greece, focused on literature, reading and creative writing.
“I learned about it from an email from my favorite author, Clare Mackintosh, informing her group of readers about the book launches she would be doing, as well as a writing retreat on Amorgos, the first one I had participated in. It was an ideal opportunity to visit a Greek island,” Manley tells us excitedly as we board.
In recent years, a network of reading and writing retreats has developed in Greece, operating mainly off-season, on islands such as Naxos and Santorini, but also in areas of Evia and the Peloponnese, with most organizers being foreigners.
