If you spend any time at all in Gavalochori, you are likely to run across a slight woman with fiery red hair who is an essential part of the cultural activities in the village. Meet Siobhan Timpson. If you are wondering how to pronounce her Gaelic first name, it is “Sher VORN.” And the reason for her red hair? She didn’t want to have gray hair and simply liked the picture on the box of red hair dye she found!
Siobhan can often be found staffing the desk at Gavalochori’s Folklore Museum. She began helping in the museum years ago when the regular paid employees were unable to staff one of their shifts. Since 2001, the museum staff have all been volunteers, and Siobhan volunteers regularly in the museum. She welcomes visitors in English or Greek as well as in the French and Russian she can remember from her schooldays. She usually covers the 1:30-6:00 p.m. shift, and she uses some of her time there to water the plans and to keep the weeds and leaves at bay both in the courtyard outside the museum and in the inside courtyard. The museum doesn’t have a regular cleaner, and because there is usually a lull around lunch time, Shiobhan takes that opportunity to do some cleaning inside the building. At the end of each month, she collects the earnings from the admission fees and gives them to the village manager for deposit.
Years ago, Siobhan was elected to the governing committee of the Gavalochori Cultural Association. Since April, 2015, she has been the treasurer of the Association because nobody else on the committee wanted the job. They still don’t! Siobhan is regularly involved in events sponsored by the Cultural Association. She sets up chairs for concerts, helps maintain the community center, and makes and serves food for various events. That’s her with the Santa hat serving raki and mezes at the opening of the light festival in December, for example. She is also a key member of a committee, Help Feed Families in Gavalochori. The committee raises funds to provide food for needy families who are unemployed between November and April. Between 2016 and 2023, the committee raised €16,748 for the effort through donations, bazaars, and coffee mornings.
Because she knows a lot about how things work in Gavalochori, Siobhan’s phone rings often, with people asking for her help with a variety of questions and projects. And she can usually help. As she explains, “All my life, I’ve been involved with something or other.” The telephone, by the way, is the best way to connect with Siobhan if you don’t see her in person. She doesn’t have an email account, and she doesn’t have a computer. She prefers to actually talk to people.
How did Siobhan come to live in Gavalochori? The story begins back in England, where she grew up in West Suffix, one of seven children in an Irish Catholic family (Siobhan is now Greek Orthodox). She had been married for 18 years to an Englishman in London, and they owned and operated a chain of furniture stores together. When the marriage ended, she decided she wanted to leave London. A good friend of hers who had spent a summer on Crete as an impoverished university student suggested she visit Crete. Siobhan did some research in her local library in London and thought the Apokoronas area of Crete sounded perfect. She visited Gavalochori for the first time in January, 1995. During the first four days of her visit, it poured rain (and there were even some hailstones) as she looked at houses in various villages in Apokoronas. On the last day of her trip, her realtor took her to Gavalochori. The sun was out, the mountains were covered with snow that looked like pink icing sugar, and she enjoyed a coffee at Monica’s Taverna. That sealed the deal. Although she originally had been looking for old houses, she told her realtor that she had changed her mind and asked him to look for land in Gavalochori that had a panoramic view of the mountains on which she could build a house. She gave power of attorney to her lawyer to finalize the purchase and returned in May to see the land he had purchased for her and to make arrangements to begin building a house. She returned to the village in June, 1996, and rented a house while hers was being built, a process that took just over a year.
As anyone who lives in Gavalochori knows, visitors are frequent. When Siobhan first lived in Gavalochori, her relatives came to visit every summer, and she happily hosted them and made sure they had enjoyable holidays. After 10 years, she was done, and she announced in her Christmas cards to her relatives, “The hotel is now shut. A very good one has opened in Almyrida.” She then bought an old house in Gavalochori and rented her other house out during the tourist seasons until COVID hit. Because she had had two brushes with cancer and was thus more susceptible to COVID, her doctor told her not to rent her house out anymore. She now lives in the house she built, unencumbered by relatives or renters.
Gavalochori has changed a great deal since Siobhan moved here. There were only eight English people living in or on the hills above the village when she came. She continues to enjoy the weather, the company of the Greeks in the village, and the growing number of expats (many of whom are volunteers in the museum). How can Gavalochori be improved? She would like to see the garbage issue addressed in Gavalochori and also wishes that more Greeks would staff the Folklore Museum (right now, most of the volunteers are expats). She is looking forward to the expansion of the museum, when it will be able to showcase more of the many historic items that have been donated over the years. She hopes the village will continue to be a farming community as well as attract tourists, and she would like the children of Greek residents to remain in or return to Gavalochori.
When you see Siobhan in Gavalochori, introduce yourself. You’ll find yourself involved in a lively conversation with someone who is “in the know” about all things Gavalochori. And you might want to thank her, too, for all she does for her adopted village.
