ON ACHILLEAS

 

The first time I realised that Achilleas Yiangoulli was not quite like other people was when I watched him stop a rehearsal dead, mid-song. This did not take place because someone had played a wrong note, but rather because someone had played a note too earnestly. He paused, looked up slowly, and said, with perfect serenity: “This song has suffered enough.”

Then there was the time I brought my Chinese erhu to the Pontian Club and joined with Achilleas and the rest of the members of his band in playing rebetika. Soon after an elderly member of the club approached me:

-        Τι είναι αυτό;

-        Κινέζικη λύρα, I responded.

-        Μιλάς πολύ καλά ελληνικά για έναν Κινέζο, the man observed.

Achilleas, not being able to contain himself, smiled and asked: - Καλά, Πόντιος είστε;

I was gutted by the news of his death. Achilleas was a dear friend and a teacher in ways he may never have realised, or if he had, admitted. He was truly unique, a person who taught without instruction, corrected without humiliation, and mocked without cruelty. Truly, he possessed that rarest of talents: the ability to puncture pretension while leaving the human being intact.

Achilleas and I shared a birthday, and every year, without fail, he was the first person to call me to wish me happy birthday. He treated birthdays the way he treated music: miss the opening beat and the whole thing collapses. The call was never cliché in the conventional sense, but aways meaningful, invariably involving an obscure reference, a deadpan observation, something faintly absurd, and then laughter that appeared without warning, like a Shostakovitchian dissonance that unsettles the ear and takes a while to be resolved.

We also shared a fondness for the obscure and the absurd, and the deep privilege (mine, not his) of making music together many times. Achilleas was a quiet force for good in the world, though he would have visibly recoiled at the word “instrumental” for he despised puns unless he was the one using them, in sustaining the life of our community music scene. This he achieved without preaching, without seeking to draw attention to himself or big-noting his many achievements (he was, among other things, ‘instrumental’ in bringing about the first ever performance of Elytis’ Axion Esti in Australia,) but by showing up, at so many events around Melbourne and broader Australia, week after week, armed with a guitar, an impeccable ear, and an internal alarm system that activated instantly at the presence of nonsense, although he tended to employ a more strident term.

Achilleas had an innate ability to detect insincerity and hypocrisy. It was almost scientific. He could sense it before it had fully formed. To some, he may have appeared cynical or detached, but everything he did was driven by a fierce loyalty to his own beliefs, his moral code and the people who he loved. He had no patience for people who were insincere, though he was invariably kind to everyone. This apparent contradiction was, in fact, his genius. He understood that kindness does not require agreement, and honesty does not require brutality. At his funeral Irine Vela likened him to Simon the Likeable, the Kaos agent from Get Smart, in his innate capacity to have people warm to him. Unlike her, I am firmly of the belief that my friend was an agent of Kaos, in that he was innately subversive and refused to accept the tropes, ideologies, assumptions and buzzwords that frame our lives without interrogation.

I was constantly astonished by the breadth of his musical knowledge, which encompassed all spheres. Achilleas didn’t merely play music. He inhabited it. To sit with him and play was an overwhelming experience because he was the exact opposite of a tape recorder mechanically reproducing songs. To the contrary, his interpretations came from a deep, life-long engagement with lyrics, history, and the social conditions that produced them. Music, for Achilleas, was not nostalgia, or merely a means of earning a livelihood. It was life itself

I once argued with him about his version of Ραγίζει απόψε η καρδιά. Instead of singing Τυχαία δήθεν αν τη δεις, φέρ’ την στο ταβερνάκι, he sang στον Ταβερνάκη. When I objected, he laughed and said, “Imagine Tavernakis as the personification of all tavernas.” It was absurd. It was brilliant. It was completely correct. Achilleas had an uncanny habit of being right in ways that initially sounded wrong. He was always inserting fragments of himself into his art. That was what made it so intimate, so alive, so unrepeatable.

I will never forget his nonchalant, devastatingly precise remarks during the Canberra Greek Festival in 2009. Delivered deadpan as I struggled on stage, stoically attempting to introduce the band, they reduced me to helpless laughter. Those remarks are as unprintable as they were hilarious. Achilleas understood timing in the deepest sense, not just musical timing, but most importantly human timing. He knew exactly when silence should be broken and when it should be allowed to do the work.

He and the rest of Rebetiki Compania let me join them on Friday night rebetiko nights at the Pontian Koinotita for two years and it would not be an exaggeration to maintain that he played an intrinsic role in transforming Melbourne into one of the most important centres of the genre in the world. He lent me his preamp to give my violin more sound, delicately obscuring the fact the real problem was not the amplification but the violinist. Quietly, behind the scenes, he offered guidance, because he was gentle. He knew that ego is a fragile instrument and should never be played loudly. We ate much κατσίκι στο φούρνο together in those days and merely basking in his company was an education in itself.

After two years, I stopped playing, though I continued to follow him wherever he performed. One day he asked, “Have you still got my preamp?” I said yes and arranged to return it. When we met, I found I couldn’t hand it over. He noticed, smiled, and said: “It’s okay. Just give it back. It’s time to let go. Time for others to continue on.”

That was Achilleas in a sentence. We hold things only long enough to pass them on. We borrow sound. We borrow stages. We borrow one another. What matters is not what we accumulate, but what we release with grace.

Achillea, it was not time for you to hand over your preamp. You had so much more to give. But as always, you were right. It is time for us to let you go, and time for us to continue along the path you marked out: truthful, curious, allergic to pretension, generous with our gifts, and unafraid to laugh at the world when it mistakes seriousness for depth.

I close my eyes and I can see you winking at me, the way you used to whenever I would miss a note, or not get a joke. We will not miss you in the ordinary sense, because you are already everywhere we learned to listen more carefully. But our community will feel poorer, lonelier, and a little less sharply tuned without you.

Just a week before you left us, I purchased my daughter a guitar and when she asked which songs she should learn, I told her that this should invariably be your Beatles favourite, ‘Here Comes the Sun.’ To her I related my memories of you arguing over which Beatles song is the most technically perfect and I promised her that once she mastered the song, I would get her to play it with you. This is why I teared up at your funeral, walking into the chapel, only to hear ‘Here Comes the Sun,’ playing gently in the background. And this is why, when I returned home, I taught the song to my daughter, just as you taught it to me.

And somewhere, I like to think, the great Tavernakis in the sky is pouring you a drink, all tavernas condensed into one, while you correct his rhythm gently, and tell him kindly, with that twinkle in your eye, that the song has suffered enough.

Καλή αντάμωση φίλε.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday, 31 January 2026

HATE SPEECH PROTECTION - AN ORTHODOX PERSPECTIVE

The Australian government has published an exposure draft of the Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism Bill 2026, which would insert a new federal criminal offence of publicly promoting or inciting racial hatred, including by disseminating ideas of superiority over or hatred toward a person or group on the grounds of race, colour, or national or ethnic origin. The offence turns on intention and on whether the conduct would, in all the circumstances, cause a reasonable member of the targeted group to be intimidated, to fear harassment or violence, or to fear for their safety. The draft also provides that the offence does not apply to conduct consisting only of directly quoting from, or otherwise referencing, a religious text for the purpose of religious teaching or discussion.

Public controversy has coalesced around this treatment of religious texts. For some, it represents a necessary acknowledgment that religious traditions teach from inherited writings. For others, it appears as a loophole capable of laundering incitement through the cadence of piety. Australia’s peak Jewish body has publicly questioned the wisdom of such a carve-out, warning that it risks granting dangerous latitude to those who would shelter hostility behind quotation. From another direction comes the concern that the same drafting may chill legitimate debate while failing to capture the most effective forms of contemporary mobilisation. The dispute reveals the difficulty of legislating speech within a public culture structured by fragmentation, circulation and performance.

The Orthodox contribution to this debate lies not in seeking special accommodation but rather in questioning the assumption that Orthodoxy requires a clerical or scriptural exemption in order to remain faithful to its own theological commitments. Literalism has never functioned as a normative mode of reading within the Orthodox tradition. Within it, as opposed to other traditions, Scripture is received through an inherited discipline of interpretation whose purpose is to prevent the conversion of divine speech into an instrument of harm. Where the law struggles to distinguish instruction from incitement, Orthodoxy has long maintained that distinction internally, as part of its grammar of reading.

This position emerges early and decisively. Origen of Alexandria, writing in the early third century, articulated the tripartite structure of Scripture as body, soul and spirit. The literal sense belongs to the body. The moral sense shapes the soul. The spiritual sense discloses divine truth and directs the reader toward transformation. This schema establishes an order of authority rather than a catalogue of meanings. The spiritual sense governs because it alone fulfils the purpose of revelation, which is the refashioning of the human person. A reading that generates contempt or hostility betrays its arrest at the surface of the text, even where its language remains formally accurate.

Later Fathers deepen this insight by locating interpretation within moral formation. St Gregory of Nyssa describes Scripture as pedagogical movement, transferring what is contemplated spiritually into the life of the reader, so that narrative becomes a ladder for virtue rather than a quarry for assertion. St Maximus the Confessor insists that interpretation moves from multiplicity toward unity, from fragmentation toward the coherence disclosed in Christ. The letter remains indispensable, though it never exercises independent authority. Detached from its spiritual telos, it produces distortion rather than illumination.

St John Chrysostom brings this hermeneutic into the register of pastoral realism. Scripture functions as medicine administered within the Church, aimed at healing both reader and community. Accordingly, its purpose lies in the cultivation of humility, repentance and restraint. Saint Athanasius in turn, in his discourse on the Psalms, describes them as a mirror in which the reader encounters the state of the soul before presuming to address the world. Together, these witnesses establish a consistent Orthodox intuition: Scripture forms before it instructs, reshapes before it directs, and judges the reader before it authorises judgement of others.

This interpretive restraint is also reinforced structurally by Orthodoxy’s conciliar instinct. Authority is neither vested in the solitary reader nor concentrated in charismatic assertion. Instead, Scripture is received, tested and corrected within synodality, through councils, liturgy and the long memory of tradition. Conciliarity disperses interpretive power and subjects it to accountability. A tradition ordered in this way does not readily generate unilateral, literalist proclamations. Where interpretation remains communal and answerable, the temptation to weaponise isolated verses recedes.

A further distinction is required between offence and harm. Orthodoxy has never promised insulation from offence. Its saints endure insult, mockery and persecution without demanding protection, and its theology shows little patience for wounded pride elevated into moral principle. Harm occupies a different register. Speech that dissolves communion, dehumanises entire communities or habituates contempt strikes at the relational fabric Orthodoxy regards as constitutive of personhood. The law’s concern with intimidation and fear operates within this horizon. Restraint aimed at preventing harm does not conflict with Orthodox witness, because the tradition already treats disciplined speech as integral to faithfulness.

Thus the fragility of contemporary religious victimhood rhetoric is eposed. A tradition forged under empire, exile and marginality does not confuse the loss of rhetorical licence with persecution. Orthodoxy’s historical memory resists the inflation of inconvenience into martyrdom. It recognises that faith has often flourished under constraint, and that credibility erodes when every external limit is framed as existential threat. Proportion, therefore, functions as a theological virtue.

Underlying these questions lies a deeper divergence over the nature of free speech itself. Liberal discourse often treats speech as an absolute entitlement grounded in individual autonomy. Orthodoxy approaches speech ascetically. Words are acts. They shape the speaker as much as the hearer. Freedom of speech is measured by the capacity to speak without wounding communion. Silence can be an exercise of freedom. Refusal can be an ethical act. The highest use of speech remains blessing rather than assertion.

The legal controversy nonetheless exposes a genuine structural difficulty. Law and Orthodoxy manage meaning on different planes. Law operates externally, inferring function from intent, context, pattern and likely effect. Courts must determine whether an utterance operates as teaching or incitement using evidentiary markers available to them. The religious-text defence reflects this limitation. It gestures toward the existence of interpretive traditions without possessing the competence to adjudicate them from within. Orthodoxy regulates interpretation internally through discipline rather than procedure. The distinction the law seeks to draw already exists structurally within Orthodox practice.

The deeper issue, therefore, is neither whether the law protects Orthodoxy nor whether it threatens it. The law addresses effects that Orthodoxy has always treated as symptoms of internal failure. When interpretation collapses into assertion and Scripture becomes an identity marker rather than an instrument of transformation, it has already exited the Orthodox hermeneutical universe. Legal scrutiny arrives late, responding to consequences ecclesial discipline was designed to prevent at their source.

This returns the argument to the centre of the Orthodox position. Orthodoxy reads Scripture teleologically, ordered toward communion. The Gospel announces this in its very name. Εὐαγγέλιον signifies good news, proclamation directed toward repentance, consolation and reconciliation. When Scripture is mobilised to cultivate contempt for ethnic or racial groups, it has been severed from its Gospel telos, even where its wording remains intact. The tradition has always regarded such severance as spiritual disorder. St Paul’s diagnosis remains decisive: the letter kills, the Spirit gives life.

The ultimate question raised by the present controversy is inward rather than juridical. The Church does not depend on exemptions to preserve its integrity. It depends on its capacity to continue forming readers capable of restraint in an age that rewards excess. Whatever boundaries courts succeed or fail in drawing around incitement, the Orthodox responsibility remains unchanged: to refuse the reduction of Scripture to slogan, to resist the conversion of divine language into instrument, and to insist again that the highest reading of the text is the one that gives life.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 24 February 2026

THE MOTHER MUST DIE

From first page to last, Koraly Dimitriadis’ The Mother Must Die refuses comfort. This short-story collection locates itself in the aftermath of migration’s myth: the romanticised hearths, the nostalgic refrains of “home” whispered across generations. It dismantles the notion that cultural continuity is necessarily kind, or that the migrant mother is automatically heroic. Instead, the author enters the shrine, touches the glass, compelling us to examine what is inside. She demands we see what that sanctified maternal figure has cost, what it has demanded in silence, submission, memory, and debt.

Dimitriadis understands that for many Greek-Australian and Cypriot-Australian families, the mother came to serve as the living archive; the vessel of loss, labour and survival. In these stories, her monologues will often shift fluidly across decades and geography, from a dusty village, through working-class suburbia, into the fluorescent corridors of Australian hospitals and supermarkets. That chronological and temporal drift does not blur meaning, instead it clarifies it: the pain does not fade with generations. The homeland does not remain behind because memory persists. Maternal labour is recorded as ledger rather than as anecdote. When a mother confesses that she “killed herself” for her children and then counts the meals cooked, the hips that bore children, the nights spent awake, she does not simply speak of hardship, revealing instead a moral economy in which love becomes indebtedness, sacrifice becomes entitlement, and devotion writes permanent contracts. In migration theory that model is known: displacement produces “guilt economies” through which parents expect generational repayment. Here, Dimitriadis shows that the repayment is less financial than existential. Daughters are born in arrears.

Within this architecture of obligation, shame becomes the instrument of control. In the opening story, a mother declares that her children have made her “a rezili,” turning her unhappiness into a public humiliation. She imagines relatives, neighbours and church acquaintances whispering about her, transforming private disappointment into communal disgrace. The surveillance she fears is not institutional but social, and she enforces its rules inside the home. Respectability becomes her currency, and maintaining it becomes her daughter's burden. In this way, the domestic space becomes the first frontier: the mother stands at its threshold, policing conduct and feeling, and the daughter learns that protection and acceptance are possible only through compliance.

What makes The Mother Must Die especially unsettling is its dismantling of the very category of “Greekness.” Dimitriadis refuses a monolithic interpretation. She allows the cracks in the façade to show. Some characters whose heritage claims “mainland Greece” speak with Cypriot inflections. Others who are Cypriot occupy a liminal space: neither wholly integrated into the mythic “Greekness” that the mother guards, nor comfortable in assimilation. That displacement reveals that “being Greek” is not an essence but a contested construction. Language shifts, dialects merge, identity becomes layered. In the diaspora, Greekness becomes something inherited conditional on compliance, cultural performance and silence. That conditionality is often forgotten in public mythology. Dimitriadis refuses the forgetting. She inserts confusion, friction and hybridity, allowing identity to fold in on itself, to fracture, to reassemble. In doing so she manifests a sense of belonging can be claimed, declined, modified, or rejected. It becomes unstable and alive.

This subversion dismantles maternal moral authority because the mother asserts ownership over a heritage that is no longer stable, uniform or uncontested. That heritage appears in fragments: differing accents, contradictory memories, rival claims over whose experience constitutes “real” suffering or “proper” tradition. The mother’s certainty loosens as the daughter recognises that Greekness in diaspora is performed, rehearsed and selectively applied. In that recognition lies a shift in orientation, an acceptance that belonging may depend on stepping away from inherited scripts, and that estrangement can operate as a form of survival.

From a feminist perspective, the book exposes how patriarchal expectations do not disappear in migration but sediment within nostalgia. The mother, shaped by that earlier formation, becomes its most vigilant custodian. She demands silence, endurance and unpaid labour from her daughters, presenting these as proof of moral worth. Domestic continuity becomes an ethical ideal; marriage is upheld as evidence of stability; sexual restraint signals virtue. When a daughter seeks divorce, refuses inherited gender scripts or asserts autonomy, the maternal response is reproach that draws authority from communal memory, honour and reputational fear. Rebellion becomes coded as disloyalty rather than growth. Dimitriadis shows how endurance, once a strategy for survival, ossifies into emotional captivity. Liberation emerges only when that inherited structure is relinquished. The mother as archetype must die because her authority safeguards suffocation, and its dismantling becomes the condition of self-possession.

What this book also makes strikingly clear is that men occupy a symbolic position rather than a psychological one. They appear less as complex agents and more as conduits through which patriarchal expectations are reproduced. Across stories such as “Conquest” and “Blood-red Numbers,” men become the bearers of sovereignty, possession and entitlement, embodying what Raewyn Connell identifies as hegemonic masculinity, where status is affirmed through accumulation, sexual conquest and emotional withholding. Their masculinity functions as an infrastructure that underwrites the moral economy binding women into obligation. That economy operates through men’s capacity to decide, to abandon, to withhold and to remain unaccountable. These qualities are vividly staged in Louie’s transactional view of intimacy and the corporate protagonist’s imploding sense of entitlement. Even when men remain peripheral, their absence structures harm, their silence produces anxiety and their failures generate labour that is absorbed by daughters and wives. Dimitriadis reframes masculinity as a site of emotional vacancy that others must continually fill, positioning men as embodiments of a structure that privileges their comfort, mobility and desire. The mother’s severity acquires historical intelligibility in that context as a compensatory response to male abandonment and irresponsibility that remain largely unexamined within the domestic sphere. Masculinity becomes an inheritance that daughters must navigate and ultimately survive.

Time in the book remains deliberately unsettled. Rather than moving through clear progression, scenes drift across decades and geographies, sliding from ancestral villages into Australian suburbs, from early caregiving spaces into psychiatric wards. The effect is not fragmentation for its own sake but a loosening of chronological authority, so that inheritance cannot stabilise into a single lineage of meaning. Nostalgia, once treated as assurance, is revealed as a fragile reconstruction. Memory does not arrive as a coherent legacy; it circles back, disturbs, and refuses closure. In one story, a woman continues to encounter her mother as though alive, seeing her walk through the city and beckon to her. Only when her child gently reminds her: “Your mum died when you were twenty-five,”does the illusion fall away. The moment folds past and present into one space. The mother remains ongoing, lodged within voice, within longing, within the unfinished labour of grief. Mourning never completes, moving beside the living, shaping their interior life rather than receding into history.

The author aligns that psychic persistence with psychoanalytic theory. Freud wrote that ego formation requires withdrawal of libidinal investment from the lost object. Mourning achieves that through acceptance. When mourning is incomplete, melancholia becomes the afterlife of loss. In Dimitriadis’ world the mother, even in death, commands. The daughter remains tethered. Only symbolic matricide, the dismantling of the maternal myth, can permit separation. The book stages that matricide through refusal, through writing, through silence, through departure. The daughter’s sense of self comes into being only when the mother’s symbolic presence recedes. If that presence remains intact, identity remains accounted for inside another person’s ledger.

Dimitriadis enacts this death in a variety of ways. In one story the daughter retreats: she stops calling, stops visiting, stops reporting her movements. No confrontation. The omission becomes severance. In another, the daughter rejects the domestic scripts: she discards cooking, refuses the apron, chooses work, desire, union, sex, divorce, actions that are treated as sacrilege within the mother’s moral code. The result is an existential rupture, carried most powerfully through writing. Dimitriadis enters the story herself and inscribes material that once circulated only in kitchens, in back rooms, in the hush of obligation. What had remained sealed by fear becomes visible on the page. Writing turns into refusal, a deliberate refusal of silence, and a dismantling of the maternal hold. The formerly unspoken becomes sayable, then recordable, then part of shared narrative rather than private burden. Secrets lose their force when articulated, and the sacred archive dissolves into open terrain where its claims no longer hold authority over anyone’s life.

The book also dismantles the comforting caricatures of the Greek migrant mother that populate wider Australian culture. In TV, film, popular comedy, that figure is often rendered as comedic, loud, overbearing but ultimately lovable. The mother who yells at the kids, sweeps the porch, gossips incessantly. Dimitriadis refuses that gentleness. Her mothers are real: tender, but also savage in their emotional withholding. They are elemental, almost titanic beings. They can feed and clothe, yet count every hour and every sacrifice, judging sons with indulgence and daughters with suspicion. That complexity is stripped of comedic softening. Consequently, the book demands that readers recognise the emotional price of survival within diaspora culture. Such a cost is not always borne by the immigrant generation only. It is transferred, encoded, inherited. Dimitriadis forces us to look at the psychic residues, the fractures, the silent losses.

Dimitriadis’ language destabilises familiar stereotypes in both Greek and English. She keeps the hybrid syntax intact: the accent, the inflected rhythms, the abrupt shifts between registers. Mothers speak in English that carries residue from another grammar, sometimes fractured, always unfiltered. The daughter’s interior voice moves with urgency, pared back and sharp. This juxtaposition disrupts ease of entry and draws the reader into uncomfortable proximity. Language becomes a structure that confines, echoes and fractures, carrying the weight of difference within the home. Keeping that linguistic impurity intact is deliberate. Literary smoothness is refused. Sanitised representation is withheld. What others have labelled broken English is treated as meaning-bearing, historically charged speech. Through that syntax the diaspora remains present, imperfect and still sounding.

Ultimately what emerges from The Mother Must Die is neither hatred nor punishment, but an appeal to release the mother from the impossible elevation that once immobilised daughters. The book seeks restoration rather than censure. The mother’s losses are acknowledged, her grief articulated and her ruptures held in view. The myth that formed around her through silence, duty and unquestioned reverence is gradually dismantled, revealing an ordinary and wounded human figure rather than a sanctified emblem. From that recognition, the daughter gains room to exist beyond inherited obligation, to speak without fear and to inhabit a self not defined by maternal expectation. Yet the central dilemma remains unresolved. If freedom requires the symbolic ending of the maternal figure, how does life continue when the source of life is conceptually erased? The work suggests that the daughter’s future is shaped inside that question, where love, loss and autonomy coexist without resolution.

Reading The Mother Must Die is tantamount to participating in a ritual of release, save that he final page does not so much close a story as open an interval. The mother remains. The daughter remains. Their history remains. The authority that arrested identity possibly remains but is contested. The daughter may turn toward the future, if not absolved of debts, at least able to author her own. Koraly Dimitriadis’ unique form of iconoclasm speaks across the generations to all of those who would worship or fetishise myths. In dismantling myth, she offers space for humanity.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 17 January 2026

 

CELEBRATION AND IRONY: CAVAFY AND WORLD GREEK LANGUAGE DAY

The proclamation of World Greek Language Day by UNESCO in 2025 reached Australia bearing more than ceremonial significance. It arrived as an occasion freighted with self-examination. Publicly, it constituted a long overdue international recognition of the Greek language as a civilisational medium through which philosophy, science, theology, literature, and political thought have been articulated for millennia. Privately, it exposed a moment of national dissonance. Australia had initially failed to support the adoption of the Day. This omission did not pass quietly. Through sustained, lucid, and principled advocacy, Professor Anastasios Tamis brought this absence into the open. Only after considerable community publicity and activism did Australia amend its stance. The projected celebrations of World Greek Language Day this February in Melbourne, may therefore be read against this background, as a deliberate act of correction rather than an unthinking reflex of affirmation. Regardless, the Day is now ours.

The choice of 9 February as the date of commemoration lends the Day an added layer of poignancy. It marks the death of Dionysios Solomos, the national poet of Greece, a figure whose life and work complicate any simple narrative of linguistic purity or cultural rootedness. Solomos lived outside the borders of the modern Greek state, was more fluent in Italian than in Greek, signed his name in Italian, and composed Greece’s national anthem under conditions of linguistic struggle and self-translation. The Greek anthem remains singular among national anthems in being prefaced by an Italian quotation from Dante. Such symbolic implications are difficult to ignore. The Greek language is commemorated on a day associated with a poet whose relationship to that language was fractured, diasporic, and hard-won. From the outset, World Greek Language Day gestures toward complexity rather than certainty and toward inheritance shaped by displacement rather than seamless continuity.

This background matters, for it coincides in Australia with a moment of undeniable contraction. The Greek language has been retreating from daily use. Intergenerational transmission has thinned. Greek language programmes labour under dwindling enrolments. The sound of Greek has faded from streets and shopping strips once defined by its cadence. In such a climate, the invitation to celebrate the Greek language provokes unease. Celebration appears discordant when the object of celebration is visibly receding. It raises the suspicion that ritual affirmation risks standing in place of sustained practice, that commemoration might soften rather than confront decline.

Such unease is neither novel nor confined to our own circumstances. It finds a resonant articulation in the poetry of Cavafy, whose work persistently interrogates the tension between cultural memory and cultural erosion. In The Poseidonians, Cavafy evokes a Greek community of Magna Graecia that has lost its language through centuries of assimilation. All that remains is a festival: music, contests, wreaths. Toward its conclusion, fragments of Greek names are uttered, recognised by only a few, and the mood darkens as the participants recall that they were once Greeks and now inhabit another linguistic and cultural world altogether. They remember, “that they too were Greeks once, citizens of Magna Graecia,” and the recollection renders the celebration heavy with ennui.

This ennui deepens when the poem is read alongside In the Year 200 BC. Here, diasporan Greeks speak with expansive confidence bordering on hubris. They enumerate cities and territories, celebrate their adaptive governance, and exalt the Common Greek Language carried as far as Bactria and the Indians. “We the Alexandrians, the Antiochians, the Seleucians,” they proclaim, assured of “our Common Greek Language which we carried as far as Bactria, as far as the Indians.” The tone is exultant yet the irony is severe. The speakers remain blind to the fragility of their moment, unaware that contraction, dispersal, and marginalisation lie ahead.

Read together, these poems trace a familiar arc: expansion yielding to attenuation, confidence giving way to ritualised remembrance. The parallel with Greek Australia is difficult to evade. Within living memory, Greek was transplanted across oceans and woven into the fabric of Australian urban life. Melbourne was spoken of, without hesitation, as a New Alexandria, the fate of the original city’s Greek population seldom troubling the analogy. Today, as Greek recedes from the streetscape, does the turn toward celebration risks recalling the Poseidonian festival, a gesture of memory shadowed by loss?

From this vantage, World Greek Language Day may appear less a sign of resilience than an index of vulnerability. It may seem to console without confronting the deeper currents shaping linguistic retreat: the marginalisation of language education, the pressures of monolingual public life, and the quiet internalisation of the belief that Greek belongs more securely to the past than to the present. Celebration, under such conditions, can feel untimely. Γλεντάτε γιατί χανόμαστε.

Yet with Cavafy, nothing is what it first appears. Even as he laments, the lament itself takes on an ironic inflection, edging toward the melodramatic. It is as though Cavafy is gently mocking our propensity to absolutise loss, to take our fear, our sorrow, our pride, and our nostalgia with excessive seriousness. His poetry warns against confusing anxiety with historical law. History, in Cavafy, moves in tides rather than straight lines. Languages vanish from particular places and reappear elsewhere. Greek receded from regions where it once flourished, Egypt among them, and endured improbably in others, Italy for example. This elasticity unsettles any reading of decline as extinction and invites a more measured consideration of what celebration might yet signify.

Greek has persisted less through institutional authority than through density of meaning. Across centuries, it has served as a language of philosophical inquiry, theological reflection, civic deliberation, and narrative subtlety. Terms such as logos, polis, ethos, and a host of others, carry within them entire traditions of ethical and conceptual thought that resist reduction to instrumental speech. The erosion of Greek entails more than a numerical diminution of speakers. It signals a thinning of the conceptual registers through which much of the the world has been apprehended and contested. In this sense, the celebration of World Greek Language Day may be understood as an act of intellectual guardianship rather than ethnic sentimentality.

The Australian context further complicates linear narratives of decline. Greek historically functioned as a bridge language among migrant communities of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Balkans. Assyrians, Albanians, Arabs, Armenians, and others traditionally employed Greek as a lingua franca of labour, commerce, and urban coexistence prior to migration. Their linguistic relationship to Greek rarely features in communal self-description, yet it constitutes an integral strand of Australia’s migrant history.

That history persists in modest and often overlooked forms. Migrants from Iraq, Syria, and the Balkans often arrive in Australia with Greek already embedded in their linguistic repertoire, having sojourned there prior to migrating here. My local Indian fruit shop owner addresses elderly Greek customers in fluent Greek acquired prior to migration. Such speakers seldom transmit the language to their children, yet they occupy a neglected position within the Greek linguistic ecology. Their presence reveals Greek as a language of contact and exchange rather than enclosure, and they are worth acknowledging and celebrating on World Greek Language Day.

The same is true of Australians of non-Greek background who engage deeply with Greek language and culture. Musicians Wayne Simmons and Paddy Montgomery play a formative role in Melbourne’s Greek music scene and converse in fluent Modern Greek. Carol Fraser composes poetry and rebetika lyrics in Greek. These engagements are eminently generative rather than commemorative. They treat Greek as a living expressive medium shaped by practice, affinity, and imagination.

Such instances expose the limits of utilitarian arguments for language preservation, arguments that assume value must justify itself in measurable terms. Appeals to cognitive benefit or economic advantage seldom cultivate enduring attachment. Languages endure when they are experienced as irreplaceable, when their absence would leave a conceptual and emotional void of the kind Cavafy understood all too well. World Greek Language Day creates a space in which Greek may be affirmed in Australia as culturally and intellectually indispensable rather than merely advantageous.

Forms of diasporan Greek also demand reconsideration. They are frequently measured against imagined metropolitan norms and judged deficient on account of accent, borrowing, or code switching. Linguistic history suggests a different lesson. Greek has never been static. Its vitality has always depended upon adaptation. The Greek of Alexandria diverged from that of Athens, only to give rise to Koine Greek which spread throughout the Middle East. Diasporan Greek, reshaped through migration, generational shift, and even attrition, as well as the fact that we retain here dialects of Greek that are dying out in their original home, continues this long tradition of transformation and merits recognition and celebration on World Greek Language Day rather than apology, even as it recedes in the face of Satellite television from Greece.

What renders contemporary discussions of Greek language decline most disabling is the quiet conversion of description into destiny. Loss is framed as natural, organic, and therefore immune to intervention, until explanation hardens into alibi and resignation masquerades as realism. World Greek Language Day interrupts this abdication of agency. It offers no assurance of recovery, yet it refuses the foreclosure of possibility. By naming the Greek language publicly and globally, it reintroduces contingency into a discourse numbed by inevitability. Decline may be acknowledged without being treated as destiny, and trajectories may be recognised without being accepted as immutable.

In In the Year 200 BC, hubristic voices speak as though history were settled in their favour. In The Poseidonians, the later voices remember too late. Between these two poems lies the narrow space in which cultures actually abide. World Greek Language Day occupies that liminal space between boastfulness and lament, confidence and elegy. It affirms, regardless as to whether we will speak Greek merely to remember that it was once spoken, or whether we will continue to speak it while knowing, with Cavafy and Solomos, that language survives not because history guarantees it, but because people persist in using it even when certainty has vanished. Celebration, in this light, is neither denial nor consolation. It is an imperative.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 10 January 2026