Her story

The visitor who never really left.

It began by accident. Indre is not Greek — she is Lithuanian — just a visitor who, on her daily walks, discovered a very sad, sick and shabby cat colony. Stuck on the island through Covid, she started leaving a few tins of cat food every day. The plan was simple: make the situation public, get some local people interested, and then go and live her life.

As a journalist and writer, she was curious and good with words, so she drew some attention and donations. There was already a wonderful local woman who was amazing with cats, so Indre thought that as long as the cats were sterilised, someone could feed them and she could find the money to sponsor it — that would be about it.

Six years on, she is as stunned as anyone that she is still here. It is not 30 cats anymore but around 200, and somehow she feels she is in charge of all of it while, in her own words, being a bit of a stray herself. With 200 cats, her personal life rather crashed.

So she muddles through, often pretending she knows what she is doing, and in the process she has met wonderful people, hundreds of cats and kittens, and somehow kept the majority alive and found many of them loving homes. She knows every vet in town — and is known as the one who always cries, or turns up with cats on weekends, public holidays, siesta times and after everything else has closed.

It has become her passion and her goal: to somehow be able to PAY for everything — food, litter, vets, bills. Alongside a very hectic day job, the rest of her time goes into managing the shelter: sometimes chaotically, mostly imperfectly, often hectically. That is why every volunteer, every skill and every connection matters so much to her — without the team, she says, she would just be the face in front of the lens, while so many others do what needs to be done behind it.

She is still not entirely sure how she ended up here. But somehow this became her life, and she cannot imagine not doing it anymore.