High life | 21 February 2013

Gstaad

The Alps are aglow as never before. A record snowfall and an abundance of sun have turned the region into a postcard of long ago. From afar, that is. Up close the cranes are ever-present, although during the season building is verboten

. For the past few years I’ve been meeting three Greek childhood friends once a week for lunch in a nearby inn. We drink Swiss white wine, eat trout straight out of the tiny pool they’re kept in, and talk. They are Aleko Goulandris, my oldest friend — we met in 1945 — Karolos Fix, a German Greek who arrived in that tortured land along with my ancestors back in the 1830s, with the first King Otto, from Bavaria, and Leonida Goulandris, who is the youngest at 52 years of age and whose parents were my friends long before he was born. When the King of Greece is in Gstaad, he is the fifth Hellene at the table.