Yannis Kavvadias was born in Nikiana in 1979, on the same stretch of beach where the apartments stand today. His father ran a small taverna under the tamarisk trees from 1968 until 2006, his grandfather had been a fisherman who kept his caique tied to the pontoon at the southern end, and the family had owned the strip of land — a long, narrow plot running from the village road down to the water — for four generations. Yannis left Lefkada in 1998 to study marine engineering in Rotterdam, met Annelies van der Wal in his second year (she was studying landscape architecture), and stayed in the Netherlands for fifteen years. In 2016 Yannis's father had a stroke; the taverna had been closed for a decade; the land was overgrown with brambles. Yannis and Annelies moved back that autumn with th