EV-ZONED OUT

 

It seems that the Evzones are coming to Australia again and this time, in an egregious affront to the natural order of things, they will be visiting Sydney and Canberra while bypassing Melbourne, a city which, depending upon the enthusiasm of the master of ceremonies, is either the third largest Greek city in the world, the largest Greek city outside Greece, the most Greek city outside Greece, or the only place outside Greece where one has reasonable prospects of obtaining a something that resembles a souvlaki after 2am, although I suspect Thessaloniki retains a considerable advantage in all four categories.

The news has caused consternation, with questions being asked, letters being written and feelings apparently hurt as members of our community attempt to comprehend how the motherland can dispatch its exquisitely accoutred Presidential Guard all the way to Australia and then permit them to pass Melbourne by. Sydney apparently merits a visitation, as does Canberra, whose principal contribution to Hellenism as far as I am aware consists of providing a convenient location in which Greek ambassadors may reside while contemplating how long it will take before they can return to Athens, yet Melbourne, home to generations of Greeks, countless organisations, churches, schools, brotherhoods, federations, festivals, factions and self-appointed fuhrers, must somehow struggle on without the consoling sight of tall young men goose-stepping in short skirts. I too am attempting to summon the requisite sense of outrage, although so far it has proved elusive.

This is largely because I adore the Evzones, having written about them, dressed like them, pursued them around community events and generally comported myself in their presence with all the dignity expected of a middle-aged solicitor and man of letters confronted by exceptionally tall men wearing four hundred pleats. During one of their previous Melbourne sojourns I found myself helping some of them change before an appearance, at which point one, weary of being photographed, admired and generally treated as though temporarily removed from a vitrine in the National Historical Museum, complained that people treated them like dolls or male models. “We have degrees, you know. If only you people loved us for our intellect,” he told me, leaving me chastened, for here was a highly educated young man seeking recognition for his mind while I was helping him adjust his foustanella, an inversion of the Platonic ascent in which, rather than proceeding from the contemplation of bodily beauty towards Beauty itself, we Greek-Australians appeared perfectly content to stop somewhere around the pleats.

His complaint exposes a magnificent contradiction, for we become indignant when Australians reduce Greek culture to Zorba, souvlaki, islands and men in skirts, yet whenever said men in skirts arrive, we descend upon them in our thousands and disseminate photographs of ourselves beside them with such intensity that an anthropologist could reasonably conclude that the principal purpose of the diaspora is the conservation of the ceremonial male thigh. The ideological versatility involved is even more impressive, for people who oppose militarism, nationalism, standing armies, NATO, American bases and most varieties of imperialism become positively Alcibiadean when an Evzone enters the room, whereupon rifles acquire the innocence of folk accessories and hardened anti-imperialists capable of detecting fascism in the seating arrangements of a community dinner blush, swoon and request selfies. If Circe transformed the companions of Odysseus into swine, the foustanella performs a gentler metamorphosis upon the Greek-Australian Left, transforming committed dialectical materialists into breathless maidens of Brauron at approximately the speed required to unlock an iPhone camera.

The irony becomes richer when one remembers that Greek political vocabulary still contains the term Germanotsolias, for the collaborationist Security Battalions of the Occupation appropriated elements of the Evzone tradition, leaving behind a word capable of evoking one of the darkest fractures of modern Greek history. The costume can therefore summon revolutionary heroism, the Balkan Wars and the mountains of Epirus while carrying, through its appropriation, the shadow of collaboration, for Clio has always been an inconvenient Muse, more interested in recording contradiction than assisting communities with their commemorative programmes. Yet place six feet three inches of immaculately groomed Presidential Guard before a Greek-Australian audience and even Clio appears prepared to close her tablets and admire the spectacle.

The distress caused by their absence consequently tells us rather more about ourselves than about them, for somewhere within our diasporic consciousness persists the suspicion that authentic Greekness has a metropolitan issuing authority and that our certificates require periodic renewal. The Evzones arrive as bearers of that authentication, reassuring us that Greece remembers us and that despite generations spent speaking English, marrying people from Folegandros when our grandparents expressly forbade it and developing the conviction that Oakleigh constitutes an extraterritorial possession of the Hellenic Republic, we remain members in good standing of the greater Greek world. Their diversion to Sydney consequently assumes the dimensions of yiayia gifting the better χωράφι to a cousin.

Perhaps, however, their absence is a compliment, for after more than a century and a half of Greek settlement in Victoria, Athens may finally have concluded that we can be trusted to remain Greek without supervision. Someone may have examined Melbourne and observed churches, schools, newspapers, radio programmes, festivals, archives, libraries, writers, musicians, academics, poets, artists, choirs and enough committees to administer the late Byzantine Empire, before deciding that another shipment of foustanellades can safely be sent elsewhere. After all, Seferis never came to Melbourne, Elytis somehow neglected us, went to the trouble of travelling halfway around the world while inexplicably failing to drop into Oakleigh. We have survived these successive acts of metropolitan indifference with Hellenism more or less intact, so there is at least a reasonable prospect that we can endure the Evzones spending a week in another polis.

A more serious issue arises from the habit of seeking metropolitan authentication, because it teaches the next generation that cultural legitimacy resides elsewhere. Children smell weakness, and if we tell them that Greek-Australian identity is rich, self-sustaining and worthy of inheritance while behaving as though Athens can diminish it merely by sending the Evzones to Sydney, they will identify the contradiction immediately. We become rather like the inhabitants of Plato's cave, awaiting the next procession of metropolitan shadows across the wall and arguing furiously over which constitutes the most authentic representation of Greece, while overlooking the culture already being produced around us.

Rebetika is being played at Triakosia by musicians treating the tradition as something living, books are being written here by people articulating experiences that could have arisen nowhere else, while increasingly sophisticated discussions concerning Greek-Australian history, language, literature and identity are taking place. We even possess hordes of people monitoring one another on social media, identifying subversive remarks and conveying them to their respective superiors for immediate ghosting, proving that Athenian ostracism has survived transplantation remarkably well, save that the ostrakon has been replaced by the screenshot and ten years of exile by removal from the friends list. With such fidelity to ancestral political practice, exactly how many additional Evzones does our civilisation require?

Years ago I suggested that rather than repeatedly spending considerable sums importing Evzones, we should establish our own guard composed of Greek-Australian young people, allowing them to learn the history, wear the costumes and become stakeholders in their community rather than spectators applauding authenticity flown in from Athens. Demosthenis Manasis actually did something about it, creating the ‘Froura’ and thereby demonstrating the dangers inherent in taking one of my suggestions seriously. His initiative matters because the young people wearing the costumes are ours and inhabit the same hybrid cultural world as those watching them; in this respect Manasis has performed something resembling the theft of fire by Prometheus, save that the sacred technology wrested from the metropolitan gods consists principally of pleats, tsarouchia and the capacity to stand motionless for considerable periods.

Indeed, if Evzones are indispensable, the only ones I particularly want to see are those who have reconciled the foustanella with denim, as their counterparts in Albania have done in the accompanying photograph, where traditional dress is magnificently interrupted by blue jeans protruding beneath the pleats. Here, finally, is a Hellenism I can embrace, sufficiently secure to survive contact with denim, a sartorial synthesis worthy of Heraclitus, in which foustanella and jeans, permanence and change, coexist while the river flows on and the clarinet keeps playing. If our identity cannot withstand such innovation, the absence of the Presidential Guard constitutes the least of our problems.

There is also the question of frequency, for nobody is suggesting that the Evzones should be banished permanently from our shores and the sight of them once in a while is splendid. The problem begins when a ceremonial visit acquires the regularity of a touring franchise and the Presidential Guard starts to resemble the Hellenic answer to Cirque du Soleil or Disney on Ice, returning annually with the same costumes, the same choreography and an audience eagerly awaiting the moment when somebody performs the difficult manoeuvre involving the pom-pommed ice-skate. At some point we are entitled to discuss production values. If the Evzones are to become a fixture of the Greek-Australian entertainment calendar, surely each season requires fresh material, a revised programme or at least the occasional guest performer, because even Cirque du Soleil understands that one cannot tour the same spectacle indefinitely merely by changing the dignitaries in the front row. The Panathenaic procession itself occurred only once every four years, which suggests that even the ancient Athenians, hardly a people deficient in ceremonial self-regard, understood the dramatic importance of leaving the audience wanting more.

Such repetition also inadvertently vindicates the young Evzone who complained to me that they were being treated as dolls and male models, because somewhere along the way soldiers invited here as symbols have become performers whose absence from the next season causes patrons to demand explanations. Affection for a symbol, however, can become dependence upon it, allowing such visits to perform cultural labour that properly belongs to us.

The ancient Greeks, whom we invoke whenever convenient and return respectfully to storage whenever they become troublesome, understood this rather well, for their apoikiai remained recognisably Greek while developing institutions, cults, dialects and identities particular to their own circumstances. Syracuse required no annual delegation from Corinth to reassure its inhabitants of their Hellenicity, nor did Massalia suspend its Greekness pending the arrival of appropriately credentialled Phocaeans. The Greek world expanded precisely because Greekness proved capable of adaptation, and after generations in Australia we might finally concede ourselves the same privilege rather than measuring our cultural vitality according to the frequency with which representatives of the metropolitan centre come to inspect us. Faced with such abundance of natic cultural capital, I remain uncertain how much more Hellenism one city can safely withstand.

Besides, Cavafy understood better than most the melancholy truth that male beauty is transient, however fervently one attempts to preserve it through memory, poetry and art, and thus the Evzones will grow older, the immaculate symmetry of their youthful forms will pass and even those magnificent legs must eventually submit to Chronos, while the culture we create here, provided we possess sufficient confidence to make it our own and sufficient wisdom to entrust it to our children, has at least the possibility of enduring. Until then, Sydney is welcome to contemplate the foustanelles on our behalf, while we shall console ourselves, in appropriately Cavafian fashion, with his immortal words, θυμήσου σώμα.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 26 September 2026

OLYMPIA AND GOLD COAST: ON DIVINE SISTERHOOD

Upon learning the glorious news that hallowed Olympia and the Gold Coast have become sister cities, one experiences the same satisfaction that attends the discovery that two hitherto unrelated members of one’s extended family are in fact distant cousins, explaining in retrospect a host of otherwise inexplicable physiognomic and behavioural similarities. Certain affinities, hitherto dismissed as coincidence, reveal themselves as manifestations of a cultural relationship almost three millennia in the making. That it has taken so long to formalise the relationship can only be attributed to deficiencies in ancient municipal diplomacy and the failure of the Eleans to establish a properly funded Sister Cities Subcommittee.

The greater mystery is why Pausanias never noticed. In the fifth and sixth books of his Description of Greece, that indefatigable second-century traveller records Olympia with the forensic enthusiasm of a man constitutionally incapable of walking past a statue without finding out who paid for it. He tells of temples, treasuries, altars, athletes, cheats, obscure customs and forgotten wars, while a statue reminds him of a king, the king of an oracle and the oracle of something that happened in Arcadia. Somewhere between the Temple of Hera and the stadium, however, the geographical trail goes cold. Had he continued south-east for another fourteen thousand kilometres, his account might have been considerably enriched.

“Beyond the lands of the Antipodeans,” he could have written, “there lies a land called Queensland, in which lies a sacred coast which the inhabitants call Golden. There are many temples and many images of beings larger than mortal men, among whom are Batman and Superman. The women called Meter Maids appear to be priestesses of Aphrodite, although others say they regulate wheeled conveyances, and concerning this I cannot speak with certainty.” Such confusion would have been characteristic, for Pausanias records competing explanations even when he considers one ridiculous, a scholarly generosity particularly useful in determining why anybody decided meter regulation was best accomplished in gold bikinis.

The sporting connection would reassure him that he had reached the correct place. Olympia gave humanity the Olympic Games, while the Gold Coast hosted the 2018 Commonwealth Games and now resides within the wider sacred geography of Brisbane 2032, meaning that both places understand the peculiar civic alchemy by which running, jumping and swimming become infrastructure, urban mythology and arguments about who paid for everything. Ancient Olympia operated a cheaper awards programme. The victor received a wreath of wild olive, sparing organisers the expense of precious-metal medallions and suggesting that Queensland could address future Olympic budgetary pressures with a pair of secateurs.

Competition on the Gold Coast hardly requires an official festival. Anyone attempting to secure a parking space at Pacific Fair on the Saturday before Christmas has entered an agon worthy of Pindar, involving endurance, feints, tactical positioning and appeals to gods who have otherwise received little devotional attention since childhood. A pedestrian carrying shopping bags becomes an oracle whose every gesture demands interpretation as two vehicles follow at walking pace with the concentrated solemnity of rival charioteers approaching the turning post. The ancient victor received the sacred olive wreath. The modern victor receives P2 near David Jones, an achievement for which nobody has yet commissioned an epinician ode.

Pausanias would probably proceed from there to the beach, where the deeper kinship becomes impossible to ignore. Greek athletes famously competed naked, the disciplined body becoming an expression of beauty and arete, while the Gold Coast has preserved the underlying philosophical proposition subject to sunscreen and Queensland law. Few places since classical Greece have invested comparable cultural meaning in the bronzed torso. If the sculptors of Olympia pursued ideal proportion in marble and bronze, Surfers Paradise has expanded the available media to spray tan, protein powder and tattoos of clocks surrounded by roses. Classical traditions survive most securely when nobody consciously realises they are preserving them, and in this context Schoolies becomes less an aberration than an extraordinary instance of cultural continuity.

At regular intervals large numbers of young people travel considerable distances to a famous destination, gather in an atmosphere of heightened excitement, celebrate physical vitality, participate in contests of endurance and progressively remove their clothing. Whereas Ancient Olympia boasted the stadion, wrestling and pankration, Surfers Paradise has disciplines for which records are less systematically maintained. The absence of the discus is probably fortunate, since bronze projectiles and Cavill Avenue after midnight would require amendments to Queensland occupational health and safety legislation. The Olympic ideal, suitably adapted to local conditions, is apparently alive and well.

All this leads inevitably to the Olympic ἐκεχειρία, the sacred truce permitting competitors and spectators to travel safely to the Games despite the Greek states spending much of their remaining time devising ways of injuring one another. Its genius lay in modest expectations: Athenians and Spartans merely had to stop killing each other long enough to watch the wrestling. The Gold Coast performs an analogous Pan-Australian function during school holidays, when Victorians, New South Welshmen and Queenslanders temporarily overlook disagreements concerning football codes, daylight saving and whether a thin disc of fried potato is a potato cake or a potato scallop. The truce generally survives until somebody attempts to merge onto the M1, whereupon Thucydidean realism rapidly reasserts itself.

The M1 would eventually lead Pausanias towards Q1, where the religious character of the relationship becomes apparent. His benchmark for enormity was Pheidias’ colossal Zeus, fashioned from gold and ivory and so immense that Strabo remarked that, were the god to stand, he would unroof his temple. The Gold Coast solved this architectural difficulty by giving the gigantic object the roof in advance. Where Pheidias employed chryselephantine technique, Queensland employs glass, concrete, strata title and investment capital. Both cultures understand that if something is made sufficiently large, visitors will travel considerable distances, stand beneath it with their mouths slightly open and pay to ascend it.

Olympia’s Temple of Zeus, Heraion, Metroon and innumerable sacred precincts also prepare Pausanias admirably for Dreamworld, Movie World, Sea World and Wet’n’Wild, although the gods inhabiting the latter possess more complicated intellectual-property arrangements. The ritual structure would nevertheless be reassuringly familiar. Pilgrims enter through monumental gates, join processions and encounter beings larger than ordinary mortals while children demand refreshments. Ancient visitors left votive objects; modern pilgrims return with refrigerator magnets and Batman drinking vessels. Given two thousand years underground, a Surfers Paradise bottle opener bearing the inscription “Mick’s Bucks 2026” will inevitably be described by archaeologists as a ceremonial object associated with male initiation rites, which will be substantially correct.

Sacrifice, on the other hand, has migrated into the economic sphere. Anyone purchasing lunch for a family inside a theme park understands the ancient sensation of watching valuable property consumed before one’s eyes pursuant to ritual obligation, while the timeshare presentation offers an even purer survival: the victim is separated from the herd, conducted into a designated precinct and attended by specially trained officiants until an offering is extracted. Ancient sacrificial animals at least enjoyed the consolation of never being asked whether they wished to extend their holiday accommodation entitlement for another forty years.

At this juncture the Eleans may derive considerable comfort from the Gold Coast’s attitude towards prophecy. The ancient Greeks had oracles, seers and diviners who inspected birds, entrails and sundry natural phenomena in order to determine whether an enterprise would prosper. Not to be outdone, the Gold Coast has real estate agents. The methods employed by both are remarkably similar. Both examine signs unintelligible to the ordinary person before confidently predicting future abundance, although the ancient μάντις at least occasionally conceded that Apollo’s meaning was ambiguous. An Elean contemplating the purchase of an off-the-plan two-bedroom apartment in Broadbeach would consequently feel entirely at home upon being informed that the signs reveal strong capital growth, excellent rental yield and an unprecedented opportunity to secure a premium lifestyle precinct before settlement.

The practice of ornithomancy does, however, present a uniquely Australian difficulty. It is challenging to imagine Tiresias deriving anything useful from observing an ibis methodically disembowel a McDonald’s bag beside Cavill Avenue, although Aristophanes would undoubtedly have found employment for it. Since the Australian white ibis has acquired the appellation “bin chicken,” an ancient Greek visitor might reasonably assume that this constitutes some hitherto unknown hybrid creature, rather like the Chimera. If demi-god Heracles required twelve labours, retrieving a kebab from an ibis at three in the morning could comfortably have constituted the thirteenth.

All that remains is to determine which deity should preside over the new sisterhood. Zeus has the obvious historical claim, although appointing a serial philanderer who habitually assumed animal form in order to pursue women may send an unfortunate message about the values underpinning the relationship. Poseidon would seem more appropriate to the Gold Coast, save that his recorded dealings with coastal communities generally involve storms, earthquakes and the occasional sea monster, none of which Tourism Queensland is likely to include in its promotional material. Hermes, patron of travellers, merchants and thieves, offers a more comprehensive portfolio, especially once accommodation prices during school holidays are taken into account.

Aphrodite has much to recommend her, given the amount of exposed flesh, although her appointment might lead the Meter Maids to demand recognition as an established priesthood. Dionysus presents a perhaps even stronger claim. As god of wine, intoxication, ecstatic dancing, altered states of consciousness and people behaving in ways which seem entirely reasonable at the time and inexplicable the following morning, he already exercises something approaching de facto sovereignty over Surfers Paradise after 10 pm. The principal difficulty is that acknowledging him formally would require Schoolies to be reclassified as a religious festival, with consequences for public funding that neither sister city may yet have considered.

Perhaps, then, the most appropriate patron is Hermes. Pausanias tells us that his statues stood in gymnasia, while travellers invoked his protection upon journeys and merchants prospered beneath his gaze. He was also the god of boundaries and their transgression, which seems particularly apt for a relationship that has managed to extend the sacred precinct of Olympia fourteen thousand kilometres into Queensland. Most compellingly, Hermes was the divine trickster, capable of stealing Apollo’s cattle on the day of his birth and then talking his way out of the consequences. There can surely be no better supernatural qualification for navigating a Gold Coast body corporate.

The formalities can then commence. A sacred embassy should leave Olympia bearing an olive branch, cross the Antipodes and proceed directly to Surfers Paradise, where the envoys can deposit it before the statue of the Meter Maid and await an omen. Should an ibis immediately seize the branch and drag it into a bin, the augurs will have their answer. Should it survive, the sisterhood has divine approval and the ancient Olympic ideal may safely enter its Queensland phase.

Pausanias would record the result with his customary caution. “The inhabitants say that Olympia and the Golden Coast are sisters, and in support of this they relate many things which I have already described. I myself saw the sacred ibis take the olive branch, though whether it did so by command of the gods or because there was half a souvlaki attached to it, I cannot say.”

For once, there would be no reason to doubt him.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 19 September 2026

 

HOMER IN SPACE

In 1994, in England, a Czech psychologist and writer sat down and crafted a science fiction epic of some 6,500 lines in Homeric Greek, setting his hero wandering among planets, aliens, robots, computers and strange civilisations. The work was Jan Křesadlo’s Astronautilia, whose full Greek title, Ποιητοῦ ἀδήλου Ἀστροναυτιλία ἢ ἡ Μικροοδύσσεια ἡ κοσμική, describes it as a “Cosmic Micro Odyssey”. It was published shortly after his death.

Jan Křesadlo was the pseudonym of Václav Pinkava, born in Prague in 1926, classically educated, a psychologist by profession and an exile in Britain after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Astronautilia, one of his last works, belongs to a long and now almost forgotten tradition of writing new literary works in Ancient Greek. Křesadlo, however, took that tradition in an extraordinary direction, choosing Homeric Greek for a work of science fiction.

The connection with the Odyssey is apparent from the opening lines. Like the ancient epic poet, Křesadlo begins by invoking the Muses and Apollo, except that the subject he asks them to sing has been transferred from the sea to the cosmos:

“As I begin, I pray first to the choir of Muses from Helicon, and fervently to lord Apollo … that they may tell of my journey through the vast universe.”

The Homeric imitation extends even to the architecture of the poem. Its twenty four books follow the letters of the Greek alphabet, reproducing the familiar twenty four book division through which both the Iliad and the Odyssey have come down to us. Křesadlo is therefore imitating Homer at several levels at once: language, metre, narrative and even the external shape of the epic.

He immediately explains the purpose of the mission. The captain and his companions are travelling in search of “Mandys and the sheep that observes the cosmos.” The solemnity of the epic invocation collides delightfully with its subject, yet the epic form remains perfectly intact. Indeed, the absurdity acquires, through Homer, a peculiar grandeur of its own.

Even the hero’s name is a philological joke. The captain is called Οὐδείς, “Nobody”. Odysseus used Οὖτις, another form of “Nobody”, to deceive Polyphemus, while Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo bears precisely the same name in Latin. Οὐδείς himself explains that he chose his name after the mysterious «Νήμω καπιτᾶνον». In a single name, Křesadlo brings together Odysseus, Verne and science fiction.

At the centre of the story is a rescue mission on a cosmic scale. Mandys has stolen the sheep which, according to the poem’s satirical cosmology, observes the universe and thereby ensures its existence. The joke draws upon the observer problem associated with quantum mechanics: Křesadlo takes the idea that observation is implicated in physical reality and gives the universe a single indispensable observer, which turns out, magnificently, to be a sheep. The fate of the cosmos therefore depends upon the continued gaze of an animal that would have been entirely at home in the pastoral world of ancient epic. Οὐδείς and his crew set out to recover it, travelling from planet to planet through strange civilisations, conflicts and digressions, until the search eventually leads even into time itself.

There is an ancient Greek precedent for this journey beyond the earth as well. In Lucian’s True History, written in the second century AD, travellers are swept into the heavens, reach the Moon and encounter extraterrestrial peoples and a war between the inhabitants of the Moon and the Sun. Lucian is frequently claimed as an ancestor of science fiction, although his purpose was satirical rather than scientific prediction. The resemblance makes Astronautilia still more curious: Křesadlo combines the cosmic absurdity of Lucian with the language, metre and wandering structure of Homer.

This gives Křesadlo the means to reproduce the basic narrative structure of the Odyssey on a cosmic scale. The sea becomes interstellar space, the islands become planets and the strange peoples encountered by Odysseus are replaced by extraterrestrial societies. Οὐδείς is captured, fights monsters, faces mutinies, encounters societies with unusual sexual and political customs, attends feasts, escapes from danger and loses companions as he continues his journey. Křesadlo has therefore transferred something more important than Odysseus himself into space: he has transferred the way the Odyssey tells a story.

There is another, rather unexpected, connection with Homer in the technology of Astronautilia. Robots and artificial intelligence initially seem completely foreign to archaic epic, yet Homer had already imagined machines and artificial beings possessing qualities which, with the necessary historical qualification, bear a remarkable resemblance to automation and artificial intelligence.

The first examples occur in the Iliad. In Book 18, the workshop of Hephaestus contains self moving tripods that go by themselves to the assembly of the gods and return, as well as the famous golden attendants, artificial women who possess intelligence, voice and strength and have been taught their skills by the gods. Homer thus imagines manufactured beings capable of moving, knowing and acting. The Odyssey goes further still. The ships of the Phaeacians require neither helmsmen nor steering oars. Alcinous tells Odysseus that the ships themselves understand the thoughts of men and know the cities and countries to which they are required to travel.

In this way, Homer draws no firm boundary of the kind a modern reader might instinctively place between technology and the marvellous. Hephaestus makes objects that move and act for themselves, and their extraordinary powers belong to his τέχνη, his craft. The Phaeacian ships can think their way to a destination, yet they remain ships. Homeric poetry can therefore accommodate intelligent artefacts without having to explain away their wonder. This helps to account for the curious ease with which Křesadlo can introduce robots, computers and autonomous machines into an Homeric universe: the conceptual space for marvellous technology was already there.

Astronautilia goes one step further by bringing its machines within the conventions of heroic poetry itself. The robotic Ivo and Tonda are more than technological assistants to the crew. The exploits of these robots can even assume the form of an aristeia, the epic display of excellence that in Homer belongs to the great warriors. Technology thus becomes capable of Homeric heroic action, while computers and artificial beings occupy places in the story that ancient epic reserved for heroes, companions and the marvellous creations of the gods.

The language itself is subjected to a similar test. How does one write “computer”, “robot”, “spaceship”, or describe a technological process, in a form of Greek that supposedly belongs to the world of Homer? Křesadlo invents words, transfers modern concepts into ancient morphological forms and uses Homeric vocabulary to express things that lay beyond the horizon of its age. The systematic nature of the exercise can also be seen in the scholarly apparatus of the work, which includes a Greek English glossary of unusual words and a Greek index. The comic effect therefore coexists with a serious linguistic experiment: an ancient language is being asked to invent the future.

The author’s game extends even to the authorship of the poem. Křesadlo presents himself, fictitiously, as the translator of a Greek original by an «ἄδηλος ποιητής», an “unknown poet”. Οὐδείς is supposed to have dictated his adventures to Franta, his universal translator, who recorded them in Homeric Greek, after which the manuscript eventually reached Křesadlo for translation. This chain of narration, transcription and translation adds another level to the Homeric imitation. A work that plays with the antiquity of its language also plays with the question of who is speaking, who is recording the story and who, ultimately, is entitled to call himself the poet.

There is, however, a deeper reason why the Odyssey lends itself so naturally to science fiction. The Odyssey and science fiction share the same basic curiosity about unfamiliar worlds. Whenever Odysseus arrives somewhere unknown, he must discover who lives there, whether they are just or violent, how they treat strangers, what they eat, which gods they recognise and what rules govern their society. Alcinous himself asks Odysseus to tell him about the peoples among whom he has wandered, distinguishing between those who are «χαλεποί τε καὶ ἄγριοι οὐδὲ δίκαιοι», “harsh and savage and unjust”, and those who are «φιλόξεινοι» and possess a «νόος … θεουδής», a mind that reveres the gods.

This is also one of the fundamental possibilities of science fiction. Landing on an unknown planet allows a writer to imagine different ways of organising power, family, religion, technology or sexuality and, through them, to examine our own society from a distance. This is why Astronautilia can remind us simultaneously of Star Trek and the Odyssey. In both, the journey becomes a means of comparison: every new place raises again the question of what it means to be human among beings who live differently.

Perhaps the deepest Odyssean connection lies in nostos, the return home. The wandering acquires its particular significance because there is a place and a time from which the traveller has become separated and against which he continues to measure his distance. Even when Křesadlo extends the search across the universe and eventually into time itself, the possibility of return remains. The companions begin their journey back to Earth, while Οὐδείς follows Mandys backwards through time, again towards Earth. The wandering may be cosmic, yet at its heart it remains Odyssean.

Possibly, this is why the greatest joke in Astronautilia is ultimately directed at the reader. Křesadlo begins with the apparently absurd proposition that Homer can be made to describe a world of robots, computers, spaceships and time travel, and then spends thousands of lines demonstrating how naturally Homeric poetry can accommodate all of them. What at first appears to be an elaborate philological joke gradually becomes something more interesting. Homer had already imagined autonomous machines and intelligent artificial beings, while the wanderings of Odysseus already contain the structure required for journeys through unknown worlds. The supposed anachronism begins to look less like an anachronism at all. The technology may change, the geography may expand from the Mediterranean to the universe and the monsters assume different forms, yet the traveller always remains, trying to understand what he encounters, survive it and eventually return home. Almost three thousand years after Homer, Křesadlo sends another Οὐδείς into the unknown. His journey reaches the stars, yet it remains recognisably, an Odyssey.

 

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

 

First published in NKEE on Saturday 12 September 2026

 

AT THE DIVINE THRESHOLD

 

What is the divine? What is a threshold? And what is it about the human condition that compels us, across cultures and epochs, to approach such thresholds and attempt a crossing? A threshold is liminal, belonging completely neither to that which lies before it nor to that which lies beyond. In the case of the Orthodox icon, the direction of travel across that space remains ambiguous. Are we ascending towards the divine, training the eye through colour, form and contemplation to perceive a reality beyond the limitations of the material world, or are we engaged in the more audacious enterprise of bringing the divine down to earth, confining it within wood, linen, gesso, egg tempera and gold so that it can be seen, touched, kissed, carried into battle and installed in the corner of a home? The persistence of the icon across almost two millennia may arise from its refusal to settle the direction of that encounter.

These questions lie at the centre of the Hellenic Museum’s new Divine Thresholds: Icons & the Orthodox Christian World, an exquisitely curated exhibition of icons and sacred objects spanning the geographical and cultural territory of Eastern Christianity. During its development, Museum Director Sarah Craig consulted widely on the Orthodox tradition and the devotional meaning of the icon. Conversations ranged from the Incarnation, iconoclasm and veneration to Russia, Ethiopia, migration and the biographies acquired by icons as they move between churches, homes, countries and collections. That range is reflected in an exhibition whose historical breadth is matched by sensitivity to the religious world from which its objects come.

For an icon in a museum is already an icon displaced. Its viewer stands at a curatorial distance from an object that, within its devotional environment, could be kissed, incensed, carried in procession and addressed in prayer. Recreating these conditions within a gallery would risk converting worship into ethnographic theatre; ignoring them would reduce the icon to connoisseurship. Divine Thresholds negotiates this difficulty intelligently, treating its objects as historical and artistic artefacts while directing attention towards the relationships that made them sacred.

In doing so, the exhibition immediately unsettles the apparently simple question of what an icon actually is. It is neither merely the material object before the viewer nor simply the person represented upon it. Collapse image into prototype and the distinction upon which veneration depends disappears; sever the two entirely and the icon becomes merely an image. By presenting these objects within the history of the practices, beliefs and relationships that gave them meaning, Divine Thresholds locates the icon precisely within that interval between matter, representation and presence.

From there, the exhibition asks how Christianity came to represent sacred presence in the first place. Its juxtaposition of Christian images with earlier Mediterranean forms makes clear that the new religion did not invent its visual vocabulary from nothing. Christ as the Good Shepherd is placed within a tradition recalling the Greek kriophoros, the ram-bearer associated with Hermes, while the Christian orant preserves a much older religious gesture. Especially arresting is the juxtaposition of a relief of the Thracian god Sabazios with icons of Saint George. Here the argument is made through the objects themselves: across the rupture between pagan antiquity and Christianity, horse, rider, adversary and the grammar of triumph persist even as their theological meaning is transformed. By making such continuities visible, Divine Thresholds complicates any neat division between pagan and Christian worlds and suggests that while religious systems may displace one another, the forms through which human beings imagine protection, victory and sacred agency can prove considerably more tenacious.

The selection of icons confronts viewers accustomed to Western naturalism with an immediate difficulty: why do these figures look as they do? Seen together, the exhibition’s elongated bodies, hieratic poses, altered perspectives, stylised faces and fields of gold establish their own logic. Their recurrence across works of different dates and origins makes it difficult to regard them as failures of naturalism; instead, Divine Thresholds allows the viewer to recognise a deliberate vocabulary for placing the sacred beyond ordinary time and space. Gold backgrounds refuse the familiar coordinates of landscape and atmosphere, while pose, proportion and perspective consistently direct attention away from the incidental appearance of the individual. Through the cumulative effect of the works, the exhibition shifts the question from why icons do not look “realistic” to what conception of reality requires them to look precisely this way.

Through its treatment of iconoclasm and the Incarnation, Divine Thresholds uses the materiality of the icons to open a deeper theological problem: how can wood, gesso, pigment and gold legitimately bear an image of the divine? The biblical prohibition against graven images is set beside the Christian claim that the invisible God became visible and tangible in Christ. The Second Council of Nicaea’s distinction between veneration and worship supplies the theological key, yet the argument is made tangible rather than merely doctrinal. Every painted Christ before the viewer is itself evidence of the conclusion reached: if God truly assumed visible human flesh, matter could represent him without becoming the object of worship. The icons consequently function simultaneously as exhibits and arguments, their form asserting the capacity of matter to mediate sacred presence.

The movement into ordinary life is traced through the choice of saints and iconographic types, revealing a world in which images organised time, articulated particular needs and accompanied human uncertainty. Saint George remains recognisable across widely separated traditions while acquiring local resonances; Saint Nicholas gathers associations with sailors, travellers and protection; images of the Mother of God multiply into types and titles around which histories of place, danger, deliverance and miraculous intervention accumulate. Read together, these icons disclose a sacred geography in which the universal and intensely local overlap.

That geography contracts to the household. The exhibition’s attention to domestic devotion prevents the icon from being understood solely as an ecclesiastical object. The “beautiful corner”, lamp burning before an image, triptych carried on a journey and miniature iconostasis locate the sacred within dwelling, departure, return, illness and prayer. Paul of Aleppo’s astonishment at the profusion of icons in seventeenth-century Muscovite homes evokes a world in which sacred and ordinary space continually penetrated one another. The domestic icon establishes a divine threshold within the home itself, a boundary between everyday and sacred crossed repeatedly rather than only within the church.

Set beside one another, these local manifestations raise another problem: how does a sacred image remain recognisably itself while passing between places, periods and cultures? Across Divine Thresholds, Christ, the Theotokos and the saints recur according to shared prototypes, yet seldom identically. Differences of palette, line, material, costume and composition disclose the worlds through which those prototypes have passed. Brought into the same field, they demonstrate a paradox: iconography depends upon repetition, yet survives through the capacity of repetition to accommodate difference.

The Cretan icons provide the first answer. Products of workshops operating within the Venetian sphere, they belong to a Mediterranean world in which Orthodox and Catholic patrons, Byzantine forms and Italian painting encountered one another. Western elements enter the images, modelling alters and compositional devices migrate, yet the Byzantine grammar remains legible. Their hybridity becomes evidence of the processes by which an ostensibly fixed iconographic language negotiated the cultures surrounding it.

The Russian works test the proposition differently. Within the exhibition’s wider geographical field, they demonstrate how a common Byzantine inheritance acquired distinctive lives in centres such as Novgorod, Moscow, Palekh, Smolensk and Vladimir. Differences of palette, line, local saints and devotional emphasis register regional identities without rendering the underlying language unintelligible. Canon appears more supple than uniformity, establishing the terms within which identity can persist without requiring sameness.

With Ethiopia, North Africa and the Levant, the proposition becomes more complicated still. The objects resist any simple account in which Byzantine iconography radiates intact from a self-contained centre towards passive peripheries. Ethiopian material reveals inherited Christian forms transformed within an indigenous tradition, while the Levantine works inhabit a region where Byzantine, Syriac, Arabic-speaking Christian, Crusader and local vocabularies encountered one another through pilgrimage, conquest and trade. Divine Thresholds instead presents the Eastern Christian world of images as a network of encounters in which influence moves, changes direction and is continually translated.

One of the exhibition’s most eloquent objects makes this materially visible: a Cretan icon that travelled to Ethiopia and was subsequently retouched there, Ethiopian elements being added to the existing Mediterranean image. Is it Cretan, Ethiopian, Byzantine or African? Each description identifies one layer of its biography without encompassing the whole. Its surface becomes a proposition in pigment: an icon may remain itself while accumulating other places, hands and ways of seeing. How much difference can a tradition absorb before continuity becomes rupture? Divine Thresholds supplies no convenient point at which one ends and the other begins.

Movement across cultures is one kind of transformation. The exhibition gives rise to a further question: what is the afterlife of an icon when the devotional world for which it was created disappears? Revolutionary Russia provides the most dramatic example. The Bolsheviks persecuted religion and destroyed sacred images, yet something of their authority survived in the monumental portraits, processions and exemplary lives of the new order. Lenin occupied spaces from which saints had been expelled. Theology could be repudiated while habits of seeing endured.

Divine Thresholds poses the same question through migration. Icons carried to Australia as objects of prayer may become heirlooms, cultural markers or, as their devotional significance recedes, objects found in antique and opportunity shops, private collections, museums or even the rubbish. Yet the icon endures, passing from altar to suitcase, household shrine to marketplace and museum, acquiring new meanings as it goes. Divine Thresholds itself participates in this afterlife, asking what survives these transformations of belief, ownership and circumstance.

Where, then, does sacredness reside: in the material object, in the prototype to which it refers, in the practices performed before it, or in the relationship between image and beholder? Divine Thresholds is at its most intelligent in permitting these possibilities to coexist. Across the exhibition, icons change context without necessarily losing identity: they absorb foreign artistic languages, cross continents and survive persecution. Their surfaces accumulate histories even as the figures upon them continue to look back at successive generations of beholders. Everything depends upon the encounters that take place before it. Divine Thresholds leaves us at that point of encounter, where matter becomes image, image becomes presence, and the visible world seems, for an instant, insufficient to contain everything we ask it to mean.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 5 September 2026

WHEN MULTICULTURALISM BECOMES A MATTER OF PUBLIC ORDER

 

The recent cabinet reshuffle in Victoria contained one appointment with particular symbolic resonance: Paul Edbrooke was given responsibility for Police, Emergency Services, Crime Prevention and Multicultural Affairs. There may be perfectly practical reasons for bringing these portfolios together. However, the way a government arranges its ministries also says something about how it understands the relationship between different areas of public life. The new arrangement therefore invites a reasonable question: does placing Multicultural Affairs alongside policing and crime prevention simply reflect administrative convenience, or does it also reveal a broader change in the way cultural diversity is being understood?

The question becomes more significant when considered against the findings of the Victorian Multicultural Review. Completed in 2025 after extensive consultation with multicultural communities, the Review argued for a stronger institutional presence for multicultural policy at the centre of government. Among its recommendations were a dedicated Minister for Multicultural Affairs, retention of the portfolio within the Department of Premier and Cabinet, and mechanisms requiring major government policies to be considered for their effects on multicultural communities. It also recalled an earlier period when Victorian premiers themselves held responsibility for multicultural affairs, giving the portfolio considerable authority across government.

Ministerial portfolios inevitably bring different policy areas into conversation with one another. Roads sit naturally beside road safety, agriculture beside regional development, and the creative industries beside culture. It is therefore worth asking what relationship the government sees between Multicultural Affairs, Police and Crime Prevention. Equally, one might ask why multicultural affairs are not associated more closely with education, culture, community development, or the Premier’s office, particularly given the direction proposed by the Review.

Consultation presents a further question. The Victorian Multicultural Review drew upon extensive engagement with multicultural communities and produced numerous recommendations about the future of multicultural policy. The association of Multicultural Affairs with Police and Crime Prevention does not appear among them. It would therefore be useful to know whether the new arrangement arose from subsequent consultation with communities, or from the government’s own assessment of how the portfolio can best operate. That distinction matters because Australian multiculturalism has developed most successfully when governments and communities have treated one another as partners in shaping policy.

One of multiculturalism’s greatest achievements was precisely its capacity to move cultural difference beyond the realm of social anxiety. During the closing decades of the twentieth century, multicultural policy became part of a larger project of nation building. Australian identity expanded so that people of different languages, religions and backgrounds could participate fully in public life while retaining their cultural inheritance. Interpreting services, community languages, migrant resource centres, ethnic media and recognition of community organisations were therefore more than accommodations for migrants. They became instruments through which democratic participation itself was broadened.

The vocabulary surrounding multiculturalism has since changed. Social cohesion, community safety, hate speech, extremism, foreign interference and resilience now occupy a much more prominent place in official policy. These concerns respond to genuine developments, and governments plainly have a responsibility to protect synagogues, mosques, churches, schools and community centres. The difficulty arises when the vocabulary of risk begins to crowd out the older language of participation, cultural continuity and belonging. Seen in that light, the new ministerial arrangement brings two understandings of diversity into unusually close proximity: diversity as a source of social and cultural strength, and diversity as something increasingly approached through the structures of security, prevention and public order.

For the Greek Australian community, the issue carries particular historical resonance. Greeks were more than beneficiaries of multiculturalism. Through decades of organised advocacy, they actively helped to build it, campaigning for community languages, interpreting services, ethnic broadcasting, equitable access to government services and funding for cultural endeavours. Greek communities, brotherhoods, parishes, schools and newspapers often performed functions resembling an informal welfare system, supporting people whom public institutions had yet to reach effectively.

That history also explains why the language surrounding multiculturalism matters. The first major generation of postwar Greek migrants arrived in an Australia where assimilation remained the prevailing expectation. Greek was frequently regarded as an obstacle for children, migrant institutions were expected eventually to disappear, and successful integration was often understood as progressive approximation to an Anglo-Australian cultural norm. Multiculturalism represented a profound change in that conception of citizenship. It established the possibility that someone could remain culturally Greek while participating fully and unambiguously in Australian civic life.

Yet the abandonment of assimilation as official policy did not necessarily extinguish the older expectation that migrants continually demonstrate the compatibility of their identities with the national norm. Thinkers George Vassilacopoulos and Toula Nicolacopoulou have explored this more complicated history, arguing that migrants in Australia have often occupied the position of the “subordinate foreigner” and the “eternal subversive”, required repeatedly to demonstrate their loyalty and their compatibility with the national narrative. Their analysis provides a useful caution in the present context. When multicultural communities are increasingly discussed through the language of cohesion, surveillance, prevention and foreign interference, legitimate political advocacy can more easily become entangled with questions about loyalty, connections with ancestral homelands can acquire an atmosphere of suspicion, and vigorous disagreement with government policy can be interpreted through the language of integration rather than ordinary democratic contestation.

There is an internal consequence as well. Community organisations that depend substantially upon government funding may gradually learn which forms of advocacy attract support and which create discomfort. Over time, the temptation arises to shape public interventions around the language favoured by government, particularly the language of “social cohesion” or “unity”, while difficult or politically inconvenient questions receive less attention. Representation then risks becoming increasingly concerned with maintaining access to government rather than articulating the independent concerns of the people represented.

None of this requires us to romanticise an earlier age of multicultural policy. Victoria faces challenges that previous generations encountered in different forms, or scarcely encountered at all, and governments have a legitimate responsibility to respond to extremism, hate crime and racism. The question is how those responsibilities can be met without allowing security to become the organising principle of multiculturalism itself. This is particularly important at a time when, across Australia and other Western democracies, political forces are again promoting versions of national identity that favour greater cultural uniformity, expressed through calls for assimilation, anxiety about migration, suspicion of transnational identities and the belief that social cohesion requires a stronger common culture. This makes clarity about the purpose of multicultural policy especially important. Political movements hostile to multiculturalism have long sought to portray cultural difference as a source of fragmentation, divided loyalties and social danger, with greater cultural uniformity offered as the remedy. If the language and structures of government themselves begin, however inadvertently, to associate multiculturalism predominantly with security, extremism and crime prevention, that argument becomes easier to make. A confident multicultural policy should provide the answer: cultural plurality and social cohesion are entirely compatible, and common citizenship derives its strength from democratic participation rather than cultural sameness. In this political climate, where Multicultural Affairs sits within government assumes a significance extending well beyond the allocation of ministerial responsibilities: it speaks, however indirectly, to whether diversity continues to be understood primarily as a dimension of democratic citizenship or is increasingly viewed through the prism of security, prevention and public order.

This also places a responsibility on those who represent multicultural communities. The presence of ministers and parliamentarians from diverse backgrounds is itself one of the achievements of multicultural Victoria. Representation acquires its fullest value when those representatives participate openly in debates about the future direction of multicultural policy. It would therefore be useful to hear from elected representatives of diverse backgrounds and from the representative bodies of our community organisations about whether they believe the new arrangement strengthens multicultural affairs, how they understand its rationale, and how they envisage the portfolio retaining a broad role across government.

Labor played a decisive role in establishing multicultural Victoria, alongside politicians and governments from other traditions. That history gives the present government a particular reason to explain how the new arrangement accords with the recent Review’s recommendation that multicultural policy should enjoy stronger influence at the centre of government. Such an explanation would also clarify what practical authority the portfolio will retain across departments whose decisions directly affect multicultural Victorians.

Governments are entitled to organise their ministries in the way they consider most effective, and administrative arrangements will inevitably change with circumstances. Multicultural communities are equally entitled to ask what those arrangements signify for a policy that has contributed profoundly to the character of modern Victoria. At its most ambitious, multiculturalism rested on the proposition that cultural difference could enrich a common democratic life without weakening common citizenship. At a time when that proposition is again being challenged by those who present cultural uniformity as the answer to social division, governments and multicultural communities alike have an interest in stating clearly what multiculturalism is for and why it remains worth defending. The question raised by the present arrangement therefore reaches beyond the distribution of portfolios: it concerns whether cultural difference continues to occupy a legitimate and confident place within the political imagination of Victoria itself.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 29 August 2026