My first contact with Richard was when he started sending me emails asking all kinds of questions about Skiathos. Then he emailed & told me that they were going to stay on Skiathos, buy land, & build a house. I was really skeptical as I had heard similar plans before, & most of them didn’t work out. Then he & Anthea arrived the day after the worst snowstorm in memory & the island had no electricity. Therefore the banks weren’t working & there was no heating in the villa they had rented. I thought to myself, they will never stay. But they did! They bought some land (I assisted), built a beautiful house, & eventually became well known & well loved citizens of Skiathos. Read all about it in Richard’s first book: “ACT III”. He subsequently has written several books about Skiathos & Greece – all listed here.
Act III: A small island in the Aegean is a biographical memoir full of humor and humanity by Writers Guild of America Award nominee Richard Romanus.
A successful Hollywood couple decide that if life is structured like a movie, then why shouldn’t the last act be spent indulging themselves in leftover dreams?
So the couple sell their house, pack up all of their belongings in twenty-two boxes, and together with their large black standard poodle, Guido, start their last act by merrily going overseas to no place in particular until they find paradise.
Their first stop is the Greek island of Skiathos. What ensues is a comedy where these two Hollywood types are forced to deal with the Byzantine labyrinth of Greek bureaucracy, the peculiar Hellenic version of time, and a complete host of new challenges such as the neighbors’ goats who insist on eating their newly planted English roses.
In the process the couple learn to treasure the innocence and generosity of the people of this small island and discover things about themselves that they had long forgotten in the pace and glitz of Hollywood. Paradise indeed.
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It’s the bitter winter of 1940. Greece is on the brink of world war and the Axis powers are poised to invade. All the able-bodied men of Metsovo have left the village to defend the border. Their only means of survival are the supplies the village women smuggle them on foot. It’s a grueling nighttime journey over harsh, snow-bound mountain passes that only the strongest can survive. Tall, gangly, near-sighted 17-year-old Maria Christina burns to join the resistance, but her physical awkwardness keeps her at home, doomed to an early spinsterhood. When Maria Christina’s radiant and charismatic older sister Matoula dies on a midnight supply run, the opportunity to become a woman she’s always dreamed of is thrust into her hands. But not without a price. As the war rages on—and deadly civil strife is set to erupt across Greece—Maria Christina struggles to measure up to Matoula and raise an infant daughter left motherless by her death. Her grief turns to shame when her long-kept secret passion erupts into an affair with the worldly Yiannis, Matoula’s widowed husband, a doctor from Athens. But for Maria Christina the most perilous journey of all is the one she still has to make when she’s forced to flee Metsovo and the civil war to begin a new life thousands of miles away in New York City.
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Sketches of Skiathos Paperback
Some short stories of Skiathos, its residents, its foibles, & more
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The Holy Monastery of the Annunciation in Skiathos, Greece, is much more than a monastery.
It was where the supreme commander of the Greek War of Independence, together with his top commanders and admirals, strategized their main battle plan.
It was in the Church that those important national heroes swore the Oath of Freedom or Death; and it was in the monastery where the first modern Greek flag was woven and blessed in the church.
By the twentieth century the monastery had fallen into such disrepair it had become a ruin.
This book chronicles the personal history of those monks and lay people who shouldered the burden of maintaining and finally restoring the Lady’s house, this national treasure, to its original splendor.
Only available as a Kindle edition