Yiannis and Katerina were a delightful couple; he was that rare thing nowadays - a highly-skilled stonemason who could build stone farmhouses in the original way and also was skilled at building the unique walls that pepper the landscape of Andros. Ironically, he was not from Andros, but from Northern Greece.

The traditional way of building has almost completely died in the tide of concrete that has flooded New Aegean architecture, and only a few people in Greece, let alone Andros, can still do it. Yiannis was invited over to Andros to rebuild some old farmhouses using traditonal methods, and his skill at doing so meant that he was never out of work for long. He stayed on the island.
The locals nicknamed him the 'Turk', because of his blonde hair and blue eyes. People who don't know Turkey won't be aware that the stereotype Turk with his swarthy complexion and moustaches is complete nonsense, and in fact Turks probably have much more of a mixture of racial types than the Greeks; there are plenty of blonde men and women in Turkey, much more than in Greece, and not entirely because of the Sultan's hareme, or the Janissaries either - though there's an interesting diversion looming.
Many years later, when I was teaching in Istanbul, one of my students was an expert at the symbolism of the moustache in Turkey. His theory was that during the fifties, sixties and seventies it was seen as a sign of being working-class, which is why middle-class radicals, such as the leftist film director and actor Yilmaz Guney, sported moustaches so as to identify themselves with the ordinary man. Nowadays, moustaches have ceased to mean anything at all, unless you are a Belgian detective investigating some unlikely murder in a tea garden in Istanbul.
Yiannis, not Turkish, but from an area of Greece which lay for longer under the Ottoman yoke, did not sport a moustache, and neither did his wife (another stereotype, maybe brought about by the fact that until recently many Mediterranean women did not shave under their arms, giving Northern Europeans the impression that they were 'hairier'). Though it's nonsense to generalise so much, I think Northern Greek women are better-looking than Southern Greek women (maybe because they dress more stylishly), and Turkish women are the best-looking of all. I'm not just saying that because the love of my life was a Turkish girl. Go to Istanbul and you'll see what I mean.
It was Yianiis and Katerina's nickname that started this diversion, and so we now come back to them; it was typical of their kindness that they invited me to share in a simple meal because I happened to be passing by a house they were working on. This kind of hospitality is increasingly rare in Greece, where cynicism has grown up as quickly as relative prosperity.