Everything Here Is White Except the Doors – Mykonos

There is a door at the top of the old town that is exactly the red I had on.

Victoria van der Berg in a red swimsuit standing against a red panelled door on Mykonos

I would like to tell you I planned it.

I did not.

I got dressed in a dark room at eleven in the morning and walked out into a street that had already decided what colour it was going to be, and the street won.

Once you see it, you cannot stop seeing it.

The whole island is white. Not painted white the way a house is painted, but whitewashed, over and over, by hand, until the corners have gone soft and the walls look poured rather than built. It goes over the stone, the steps, the joins, the bits that are not really wall at all.

Lime, mostly.

It was practical long before anybody came here to photograph it. Lime kills things, and an island that has spent centuries worrying about water has every reason to care about keeping things clean.

So the buildings here all agree with each other.

The doors get most of the personality.

A dark red wooden door set into a thick whitewashed wall on Mykonos above stone paving

Every door is painted, and that paint feels like the only decision anybody on the street was permitted to make.

Deep red. Blue. A green gone chalky with salt.

You get a household’s entire argument about itself resolved in one rectangle of gloss, and then twenty metres further on there is another one, completely different, in a town that is otherwise the same colour from end to end.

I spent the morning looking at doors like a woman casing the neighbourhood.

They are not even trying to match, and that is the part I like.

Somebody’s grandmother chose that red once and somebody has been maintaining the decision ever since. The house two doors down is quietly disagreeing with her in blue.

None of it is permanent either, which I had not really thought about until I watched a man doing it.

The whitewash goes back on by hand, a wall at a time, and eventually the doors need doing again too. Every year somebody is up a ladder repainting something that will need repainting again.

The colour might have been there longer than they have.

You could change it.

Mostly, they seem not to.

Victoria van der Berg in a red long sleeved bodysuit against a red painted door on Mykonos

The cats have worked all this out long before I did.

There is a white one who lives around the steps below the church, and she is the only living thing on this island that matches the architecture exactly.

She let me pick her up, which I understood at the time to be a transaction rather than affection.

She is not mine. She is not really anybody’s. That appears to be the arrangement here.

They are everywhere, and they are all somebody’s in the loosest possible sense. A taverna puts a bowl down at the back step. A woman keeps an old towel on a wall because one of them sleeps there. Nobody seems particularly interested in claiming them and nobody seems willing to let one go hungry.

I rather like that system.

And they do not respect a single one of these doors.

The whole town is arranged into households, each behind its own painted rectangle, and the cats walk straight through all of it as though the lines are not there.

She was back on her wall within a minute of establishing that I had nothing further to offer.

Victoria van der Berg holding a white street cat against a whitewashed Mykonos wall

By early afternoon the lanes had gone quiet and I walked up through them with no particular destination, which I have stopped apologising for.

Barefoot, because the paving here is worn smooth as a floor and after five days it no longer feels particularly like being outside.

Victoria van der Berg walking barefoot up a narrow stone lane between white walls on Mykonos

Then the colour drains out of the day, which is not a metaphor.

It is simply what happens when you go down to the water.

The beach clubs have all agreed on turquoise.

Umbrellas, loungers, towels, the tiled lip of the pool where the water goes over the edge and falls into more water. Somebody was paid a great deal of money to think about that edge and I have no intention of pretending it did not work on me.

It is beautiful and it seems completely uninterested in the town above it.

Nothing down there is white and nothing down there is red. The colours of the old town do not quite reach the shore. The shore has brought its own, imported and repeated all the way along the sand.

I had changed by then into white, and I want to be honest that this was also not a decision.