ALEXANDER'S JOURNEY

 

In the annals of our diasporic cultural production, few works attain the intellectual gravitas, aesthetic cohesion, and spiritual resonance exhibited by Alexander’s Journey, a compelling dramatic oratorio that transcends mere theatrical performance to assume the dimensions of an ontological meditation on identity, destiny, and the communion of civilisations. Conceived with lyrical profundity and historical acuity, and brought to life under the aegis of the Pan-Macedonian Association of Melbourne, this work constitutes not only a homage to the great Macedonian exemplar par excellence, but an articulation of the Hellenic soul refracted through the prism of its greatest and most paradoxical emissary.

The production, initiated through the cultural foresight of Peter Stefanidis, President of the Association, is at once reverent and interrogative. It neither succumbs to triumphalism nor reduction, but rather situates Alexander within the rich tapestry of civilisational memory: a locus where myth, historiography, and existential inquiry converge. Structured as a sequential procession of monologues delivered by historical actors and diverse witnesses to the Hellenistic efflorescence, be they Babylonian scribes, Armenian sages, Greek elders, Indian monarchs, and the sovereign mother Olympias herself, the play constructs a palimpsest of perspectives, each inscribing upon the other the imprint of encounter, transformation, and enduring legacy.

From its inception, the play adopts a tonal register of solemn invocation. The prologue, uttered amid the ruins of ancient Pella by a figure that allegorically personifies Macedonia, assumes the quality of a threnody: a lamentation against the erasure of a people’s Hellenic lineage by the caprice of contemporary narratives. “Macedonia does not beg for its place in Greek memory—it is Greek memory,” proclaims the speaker, a refrain that constitutes the ideological keystone of the entire work. This is not a provincial cry for inclusion, but a juridical assertion of cultural continuity, anchored in dialect, ritual, art, and the consciousness of a shared heritage.

The dramaturgical edifice of the play may be composed of fragments, but these fragments cohere through a deeper metaphysical unity. Each monologue is an artefact of memory, suspended in time and space, yet suffused with a common yearning: to comprehend the phenomenon of Alexander, not merely the conqueror or legislator, but the man who strove to collapse the dichotomy between East and West, self and Other, Greek and Barbarian. His is a journey not only through geography, but through the interior realms of vision, loss, and transcendence.

The dramatis personae, carefully selected, serve as vessels of historical consciousness. The Babylonian scribe does not simply recount Alexander’s entrance into the sacred precincts of Marduk; he testifies to the ethical revolution implicit in that act. When Alexander dismounted at the Gate of Ishtar and bowed before the ziggurat of Esagila, he enacted a liturgy of reverence. His conquest, the play suggests, was sacramental and not iconoclastic. Likewise, in the Armenian highlands, the figure of the historian speaks of Alexander not as an invader, but as a figure who offered syncretism in place of subjugation, and whose presence, or at least the legend of that purported presence, sanctified, rather than profaned.

The play depictions demand a more nuanced interpretive framework. Theoretically, the play may be situated within a counterpostcolonial discourse, wherein the hegemonic paradigms of cultural imperialism are overturned by a model of dialogic encounter. Unlike the Orientalist typologies critiqued by Edward Said, Alexander’s engagement with the cultures he encountered is rendered not as a voyeuristic exercise in domination, but as a sincere and generative act of translation, between rituals, cosmologies, and ontologies. Accordingly, Alexander’s Journey, is not the harbinger of decline, but the midwife of hybridity.

The philosophical undercurrent of the play is nowhere more powerfully conveyed than in the monologue of Alexander himself, delivered on the eve of his traversal of the Hellespont. It is in these lines that the internal architecture of his psyche is most luminously unveiled. He declares: “What is a king if not a servant to vision?” This formulation reconfigures kingship from the coercive to the sacrificial. It elevates Alexander from a figure of martial prowess to one of metaphysical vocation. His campaign, the text intimates, was not against Persia, but against limitation: the boundary of the known, the parochialism of tribe and polis, the sclerosis of tradition untempered by encounter.

The choreographic interludes that punctuate the monologues, comprising dances performed by the Pontian, Macedonian, Armenian, Assyrian, and Indian communities of Melbourne, serve not as ornamentation, but as kinetic exegesis. Each movement, each rhythm, becomes a corporeal mnemonic, a non-verbal continuation of the dialogue Alexander initiated with the world. Here, the play calls upon the semiotics of the repertoire, in Diana Taylor’s formulation, where embodied performance carries meanings inaccessible to the written archive. Through dance, the communities represented are not merely echoing Alexander’s legacy. Instead, they are actively inscribing themselves within it.

The monologue of Porus, the Indian king vanquished at Hydaspes, exemplifies the ethical dialectic the play seeks to construct. In a moment of arresting sobriety, Porus recounts his defeat, subsuming his bitterness with his overarching admiration for his erstwhile adversary. Alexander, he affirms, did not humiliate his adversary but honoured him instead. “He admired strength not only in himself—but in others,” Porus reflects, suggesting a nobility that transcends both victor and vanquished. It is in this moment that the Hellenistic vision, conceived not as the domination of the world, but its reconciliation through a common ethos, is most fully realised.

The character of Olympias, so often relegated to the margins of historiography as either a shadowy manipulator or a footnote to the deeds of men, is here retrieved from historical silence and granted a voice of profound agency. In Alexander’s Journey, she emerges not merely as the bereaved mother of a fallen hero, but as a sovereign in her own right, a priestess, a queen, and the formative influence behind the man who would be called Great. Her monologue functions both as a personal lament and a political testament, articulating grief not as passive suffering, but as an act of defiance against the historical structures that have silenced women and elided their contributions to civilisational development. Through the dramaturgical space afforded to her, Olympias is emancipated from the distortions of classical misogyny and male-centred imperial narratives. Her voice, unflinching and oracular, proclaims: “Let history do its worst… Macedonia is the soul of Hellas. Alexander was not its end. He was its beginning.” In granting her the final word, the play enacts a feminist intervention into the canon, reclaiming a woman whose influence was foundational and whose pain, too long muted, is rendered audible, so that mourning becomes not only memory, but power.

Consequently, the production evokes a tragic aesthetic, akin to that found in the works of Aeschylus or Sophocles, wherein greatness is always entwined with sacrifice. Alexander’s ambition may have been luminous, but it consumed him. His desire to unify the oikoumene, to bring all peoples under the aegis of a singular civilisation, rendered him both a builder and a destroyer. It is this duality, of creation through conquest, of elevation through erasure, that the play interrogates with rare moral intelligence.

One may draw from Nietzsche’s concept of the Dionysian as a lens through which to interpret Alexander’s existential orientation. Like the Dionysian archetype, Alexander is driven by a will to transcend the Apollonian bounds of order and containment. Yet unlike the ecstatic chaos of Dionysus, his project is rationalised, ordered, radiant. In this, he embodies the synthesis of both archetypes, bringing to the world a cosmology wherein multiplicity is not abolished, but subsumed within a higher harmony.

In an age increasingly defined by insularity and the reification of national boundaries, Alexander’s Journey thus emerges as a timely and necessary intervention. It posits that identity is not a zero-sum construct, but a palimpsest, with each layer enriching, rather than erasing, the one beneath. The multiculturalism of the play is not superficial tokenism. It is an ontological statement: that the Hellenic spirit has never been static, but always already open to the world, capable of transformation and interrogation, without dissolution.

The Pan-Macedonian Association of Melbourne, in staging this ambitious and spiritually resonant work, has accomplished more than a celebration of ancestral memory. It has facilitated a reclamation of civilisational purpose. Peter Stefanidis and his collaborators have demonstrated that cultural stewardship is not a passive act of preservation, but an active engagement with the legacies that define us.

In its totality, Alexander’s Journey transcends the confines of historical dramatization to become a profound meditation upon the nature of sovereignty, the transmission of legacy, and the transformative potential inherent in the convergence of civilisations. It interrogates the ethical dimensions of conquest, probing whether domination, when tempered by vision and reverence, may be transmuted into communion; whether alterity can be not merely tolerated but integrated; and whether a solitary figure, possessed not of hubris but of transcendent purpose, might indeed reconfigure the trajectory of the world. This is no simple chronicle of martial exploits; rather, it is an exploration of civilisational synthesis as sacral vocation.

For Alexander, as the drama solemnly proclaims, “did not march to punish Darius alone. He marched to rewrite the world.” Thus, the figure of the conqueror is elevated to that of a mythopoeic agent, one who channels the metaphysical aspirations of an epoch, collapsing the binaries of this time. In this capacity, Alexander’s Journey, through the luminous stewardship of the Pan-Macedonian Association of Melbourne, becomes not merely an act of remembrance but a summons. It calls upon the contemporary viewer not only to recollect, but to transcend; not only to witness, but to participate in the ever-unfolding dialectic of Hellenism. For through Alexander, we do not merely encounter the historical; we confront the numinous—and are compelled, in turn, to aspire.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

Alexander’s Journey will be performed at the Clocktower Centre, Moonee Ponds on 29 June 2025 at 2:30pm. For tickets visit: https://clocktowercentre.com.au/alexanders-journey

First published in NKEE on Saturday 21 June 2025

ASHPOEMS

 

It is only when the fire burns to ashes, when the embers are glowing, that cooking, and warmth is possible. Similarly, in George Vassilacopoulos’ latest poetry collection: Ashpoems, we are presented with the smouldering verses of a poetry that having been consigned to the flames of fervour emerges as a philosophical and sensuous meditation on existence, shaped by a Platonist framework that privileges the erotic, not as divine ecstasy nor as political passion, but as an immanent condition of being. His verse, or at least its “ashmemories” contemplates the cosmos not as a transcendent or hierarchical order, but as the felt, relational field of human presence—a shared reality that is loved through the loving of others. As he says: “I gather/ The elsewhere in you/ Around my neck/ Into a charm/ For the Bad Omens/ Of the next poem.”

At the core of Vassilacopoulos’s poetry is a unique articulation of eros—not as sexual desire or celestial yearning, but rather, as a form of ontological attunement. His poems do not speak of eros as aspiration toward a separate realm of perfection, as in some classical readings of Plato’s Symposium, but instead, as a resonant, inner force that draws beings toward one another within the temporal unfolding of existence. This is an eroticism grounded in mutual recognition, in the silent but potent gestures that constitute relational being.

His notion of “erotic minimalism”—a term he has invoked in relation to his poetic practice—evokes a phenomenology of love that recalls Emmanuel Levinas’ ethics of the face-to-face encounter. For Levinas, the Other’s presence is not reducible to comprehension or assimilation, but calls forth an ethical response prior to cognition. In a similar vein, Vassilacopoulos’s sparse but affectively charged lines gesture toward this immediate openness: the erotic is the presence that disarms, the nearness that transcends domination. As he writes in: I Welcomed You, language is not an assertion of authority but “a whisper to the visitor from the visionary future”—a mode of receptivity, not control. In the Ashpoems, language is that which emerges from the conflagration of words being conscripted to evoke that which defies articulation: “You stutter/ Sighs of broken words/ Out of this world.”

Vassilacopoulos’s cosmos is not the grand rational architecture of Neoplatonic metaphysics. Instead, his poetry returns us to the world—sensuous, fractured, temporal—but imbued with meaning through our loving relation to it. Here, his Platonism deviates from the ladder of the Symposium, where love ascends from bodies to souls to forms to the Good. Consequently, his work resonates more with a Platonic immanence, one echoed in the work of contemporary philosophers such as Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, who reimagine Platonic eros not as a disembodied striving, but as a poiesis of being-in-relation: “You keep coming back to the warmth/ Of my darkness/ To my words of consonants/ They tell the story of the world again.”

Consequently, in the ashpoems where the cosmos appears, it does so not as a background but as a beloved—at times fragmented, melancholic, or in exile: “I sprinkle your abyss/ With poems/ Redeeming us with surprises.” Vassilacopoulos thus breaks from classical metaphysical aspirations to describe a world not perfected, but lived. The stars are not ideal markers of eternal truths, but participants in the dance of longing and recognition. As Irigaray writes in An Ethics of Sexual Difference, “We are always already in the cosmos, even if we have forgotten it.” Vassilacopoulos’s poetry invites us to remember—not by ascending but by opening ourselves to the presence of others and the “silent messages” they bring: “How can I recite you a poem/ Made from ashes?/,,, I curved my palm to give a place/ To their dark tiny crystals/ Words magically appeared/ Little ashmemories.”

Though steeped in Platonic thought, Vassilacopoulos’s poetic logic often moves dialectically, recalling Hegel’s formulation of love as unity in difference. For Hegel, love is the synthesis of individual selves into a shared spirit—not through erasure, but through mutual recognition. In this way, love becomes a dialectical process, a movement that preserves contradiction as it unfolds into reconciliation.

Vassilacopoulos’s poems mirror this dialectical rhythm: they often begin in the solitude of exile or the sorrow of absence, but gesture toward the promise of relation. The lover in these poems does not master the world; instead, they attend to its openings. As the poet writes in The Pleasure of Exile, “there is no home but the arrival of the guest.” The very condition of exile becomes a poetic ontological stance—one of receptivity, vulnerability, and openness to the unexpected presence of the Other: “My words roll/ …You wait for them/ Open mouth in the void/ As they land/ They recite us/ Into stalactites.”

Such ideas resonate with Hegel’s insight in the Phenomenology of Spirit, where spirit comes to know itself not in self-possession, but through the struggle and reconciliation with the Other. Vassilacopoulos poeticises this in existential rather than political terms: the cosmos becomes intelligible not through mastery, but through a tender dwelling-with, in which the erotic is the site of recognition, the unfolding of “you” in the space of “we:” “We float/ In the vertigo/ Hollowed by the poets.”

A hallmark of Vassilacopoulos’s poetics is his attention to silence—not as absence, but as the space where meaning gathers. In many of his poems, it is the unsaid, the pause, the breath between words that carries the deepest charge. This practice echoes Heidegger’s belief in the “saying of the unsaid” (das Sagen des Ungesagten)—that poetry opens the clearing in which Being can show itself. Yet unlike Heidegger, whose concern remains with Being in the abstract, Vassilacopoulos roots this opening in the erotic relation, in the space between persons: “Baptised/ In the mist/ Of your silence/ I am ready to be named by you.”

In the Ashpoems, silence becomes a kind of ontological gesture, a touch that does not grasp. The erotic here is not the frantic desire to possess, but the capacity to be-with, to bear witness, to offer one’s presence without domination. This echoes Jean-Luc Nancy’s description of love in The Inoperative Community: “It is not a fusion of souls but a spacing, a sharing, a withdrawal that allows for being-together.” In Vassilacopoulos’s cosmos, love is the distance that binds, the silence that listens, the χώρα in which everything indwells, whether this is where: “With the ancient silence of my hands/ I wash your face,” or in the process in which: “We sway/ In each other’s breathing/ Fathoming their silence.”

Rather than being linear, Time in Vassilacopoulos’s poetry is recursive, melancholic, and oozing with memory. The presence of the past is never far: loss, exile, and return haunt his verses: “Carrying/ he dead of the tribe/ Into aethereal heights.” Nonetheless he refrains from romanticising nostalgia. Instead, he reclaims the erotic force of the now, the “minimal” moment in which love discloses itself not as totality, but as trace, gesture, echo: “Recite me/ And listen to the ancient echo/ Of your breathing.”

This temporality finds kinship in the thought of Giorgio Agamben, particularly his notion of kairos—the “opportune moment,” where potential becomes presence. Vassilacopoulos’ poetics in the Ashpoems embraces such temporal ruptures, where ordinary time is suspended and a new intimacy with existence is made possible, “carrying the heaviness of worlds/ From one to the other.” The cosmos is not behind us or above us, but here, in the hush before the word, in the gaze that holds, in the quiet arrival of the other, “In the mornings of sorrows/ Over a cup of coffee.”

George Vassilacopoulos’ Ashpoems constitutes a philosophical inquiry through verse: a poetics that situates eros at the heart of existence, not as escape from the world but as devotion to its fragile beauty. In dialogue with Plato and those who have transformed his legacy, from Hegel and Heidegger to Levinas, Irigaray, and Nancy, his work insists that the cosmos is something we love into being through the simple, radical act of welcoming another: “I breath you in/ I breath me out.”

In place of divine ascent or political mastery, Vassilacopoulos offers a human cosmos—erotic, relational, temporal—where the soul does not seek to transcend the world, but to belong in it. And in the whisper of his lines, in their minimalism, we find an invitation: not to conquer truth, but to accompany it, as one accompanies a beloved across the trembling silence of a shared world, “as drops of the world/ Sweating.” It is for us then to decipher these ashes, written by “the bell/ Of all sounds,” in order, in silence, to “Return our Tribe/ To the beginning.”

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 14 June 2025

RITUALS: GIFTS TO THE GODS

 

The Hellenic Museum of Melbourne’s most recent exhibition, Rituals: Gifts for the Gods, is not merely a curated display of antiquities, but a contemplative pilgrimage through the spiritual psyche of the ancient Greek world. It is an eloquent testament to the sacral imagination of a civilisation that perceived the divine not as an abstraction relegated to distant heavens, but as a living, breathing presence interwoven with every facet of mortal existence. With unerring precision and deep cultural empathy, the exhibition maps the arc of ritual practice from the Minoan epoch to the Hellenistic age, revealing not the detritus of a bygone religiosity, but the luminous thread that binds the ancient with the modern, the sacred with the secular, the individual with the cosmos.

What emerges is a vision of ritual not as a fossilised rite or performative gesture, but as a sacred grammar through which the ancients negotiated their place in an ordered yet mysterious universe. Each artefact, each fragment of votive expression, is imbued with the breath of supplication, the tremor of fear, the serenity of faith. As Sarah Craig, the Hellenic Museum’s visionary CEO, affirms, the exhibition compels us to recognise that the yearning for ritual is not a culturally bounded phenomenon, but a deep-seated human instinct: one that transcends ethnicity and epoch, and invites us into the shared sanctity of human experience.

In the Greek cosmos, the sacred was not encountered solely within the columned grandeur of temples or the solemnity of public festival. It was born in the flicker of a household flame, in the whispered prayer, in the libation poured to unseen presences at the crossroads. Ritual was the breath of life itself: a sacred choreography through which order was sustained and chaos transfigured. This exhibition renders visible that metaphysical intimacy: the conviction that the gods dwelled not apart from the world, but within its very substance, within the home, the grove, the city, and the body.

The visitor is drawn first into the world of the Minoans, where divinity was encountered through the fecund rhythms of nature. Here, ritual was an invocation of renewal, inscribed upon the earth itself: performed in subterranean caves and lofty peak sanctuaries, in open-air altars and labyrinthine palatial courts. The divine was female, serpentine, vegetal, and cyclical: manifest in priestess and bull, in double axe and spiral. It was a vision of sacred continuity that enfolded life, death, and rebirth into a single, sacred breath.

As one moves through the Mycenaean and Archaic landscapes and into the Classical period, the divine order expands in splendour and complexity. The Olympian deities assume their majestic thrones, and the cultic apparatus of the polis rises with solemn beauty. Yet the exhibition, in its profound insight, does not linger on the splendour of processions or the magnitude of temples. Instead, it draws our gaze to the votive: small, intimate, and often crude, where the true pulse of faith is felt. These are the artefacts of the common soul, whispered into clay or marble with trembling hands, left in the sacred precinct as silent appeals for mercy, for healing, for hope.

These votive offerings, in the form of figurines, libation vessels and inscribed tablets, speak with quiet eloquence of a society in which the sacred was not removed from the pain and joy of the flesh, but was responsive to it. Each object represents not merely a transaction with the divine, but a revelation of the inner topography of the devotee: the longing, the vulnerability, the recognition of forces beyond human ken. Here, ritual becomes not only an act of reverence, but also, of self-disclosure.

Among the most affecting are the anatomical votive: terracotta and stone effigies of limbs, eyes, breasts and other body parts, dedicated to Asklepios, the god of healing. These votives bear witness to a theology of suffering and restoration, to a sacred economy wherein pain is transmuted through ritual into meaning and grace. They are at once acts of beseeching and proclamation, tokens of affliction and testaments of deliverance. Their mute, fragmentary forms speak volumes about the human desire not only to be healed, but to sanctify suffering, to place it in relation to the divine.

It is in these offerings that the most startling continuum is revealed, one that spans millennia without interruption. For these anatomical votives, far from relics of a vanished age, find their modern analogue in the τάματα still lovingly placed before icons in Orthodox churches today. Crafted from silver or tin, these contemporary ex-votos, depicting eyes, limbs, infants, or entire human figures, are identical in function and intention to those of antiquity. They are prayers made flesh, expressions of a faith that refuses to fade. The exhibition thus permits the viewer who is aware of both traditions to make a connection that will facilitate them beholding an unbroken line of devotional expression that transcends Time itself.

This juxtaposition is not merely aesthetic. It reveals both the stubborn durability of ritual form, and the capacity of sacred gesture to adapt and endure across seismic shifts in theology, polity, and cosmology. In these artefacts, one perceives that ritual is not the province of dogma, but of the human spirit itself, a vessel for the eternal needs of hope, gratitude, and connection. The shape changes; the impulse remains.

As an exhibition, “Rituals” is also attuned to the public dimensions of ritual in its civic, social, and psychological roles. In ancient Greece, rituals were the fabric from which society was woven. Festivals such as the Panathenaia or the Dionysia were more than acts of collective worship: they were affirmations of civic identity, instruments of cultural memory, and mechanisms of intergenerational transmission. Through such rituals, citizens participated in the mythic past and affirmed their place in the communal order.

A reconstructed domestic altar featured in the exhibition speaks powerfully to the intimate spaces in which sacred time unfolded. It gestures to the often-overlooked agency of women in sustaining ritual life within the oikos: tending to hearth deities, guiding children through rites of passage, and honouring the dead. In these quiet, private spaces, ritual was no less potent; it was the axis upon which the rhythm of family and cosmos turned.

Equally, ritual served as a balm in times of existential uncertainty. In moments of illness, transition, or misfortune, the Greeks of old did not turn inward, but outward: toward ritual gestures that transfigured fear into supplication, chaos into cosmos. Purification rites, oracular consultations, and sacrificial offerings constituted a symbolic architecture through which the inscrutable could be rendered bearable. Ritual, in this context, was not ceremony: it was salvation. Those of us for with transplanted memories and experiences of our ancestral villages will instinctively sympathise and understand.

What the exhibition ultimately reveals is that ritual is not a cultural embellishment but an ontological necessity. It arises from the human compulsion to order experience, to locate suffering within a moral and metaphysical framework, to enact the sacred in the midst of the profane. It is through ritual that we come to terms with finitude, with longing, with the mystery that undergirds existence itself.

Thus, Rituals: Gifts for the Gods surpasses its immediate thematic remit to articulate a broader, more urgent truth: that ritual is the foundation upon which all cultures, all identities, all human communities rest. As Sarah Craig observes, the exhibition is not an insular act of cultural self-regard, but a gesture of inclusion; a bridge between times, peoples, and faiths. In a world beset by fragmentation, alienation, and dislocation, the exhibition offers a luminous counterpoint: a vision of continuity, of shared humanity, and of transcendent connection.

It is within this expansive humanistic vision that the Hellenic Museum finds its highest purpose. It is not a mausoleum of antiquity, but a crucible of dialogue, a sacred space where the legacy of Hellenism is neither fossilised nor fetishised, but interrogated, reimagined, and made relevant to the living concerns of the present. Through exhibitions such as “Rituals”, the Museum offers the Greek diaspora and the populace at large, the opportunity to situate themselves within the continuum of a civilisation whose rituals, though ancient, remain urgently contemporary.

For those of us living at the confluence of memory and migration, Rituals: Gifts for the Gods becomes something more than an academic exercise. It becomes a mirror through which we glimpse ourselves: fractured, searching, and yearning for meaning. It invites us to retrieve what has been forgotten, to name what has been unspoken, to craft out of fragments a coherent self, or at least, to recognise those fragments, disparate and often unintelligible as part of a multi0faceted and infinitely complex whole. In this sacred encounter between artefact and identity, the Hellenic Museum performs its most vital work: enabling us to reconstitute our place in the world, not as displaced inheritors of a fading tradition, but as conscious participants in a living, breathing cultural ethos.

In summoning the sacred past into the present moment, the exhibition reminds us that we are never severed from our origins: that the gods we honour, the invocations we intone, the rituals we perform, endure within us, awaiting remembrance. And in remembering, we become whole.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 7 June 2025

THE MELANCHOLY OF THE POLITICIAN

 

"Despite their promises at the last Election, the politicians had not yet changed the climate"  Evelyn Waugh, 'Love Among the Ruins' 1953.

Giorgio de Chirico, one of my favourite artists, painted “The Melancholy of the Politician in 1913. A metaphysical masterpiece that explores themes of isolation, alienation, and the human condition. Using a unique blend of classical architecture, everyday objects, and distorted perspective to create a dreamlike, almost surreal atmosphere that evokes a sense of unease and mystery, he poses the question: just how much of a politician can you be in a polis bereft of citizens? The statue of a politician looms large over an empty square populated by the silhouette of a person. Is this also a politician, one who seeks validation by the petrified and the departed? Or a citizen, vainly looking for someone to vote for?

It is exactly this scene that I envisaged when I came upon a most animated friend passionately handing out leaflets on my way to the ballot box, a few weeks ago. I thought I would provoke him by refusing to take his leaflet. To his question as to why I was refusing direction, I pointed him gently in the direction of doyen of the Greek Enlightenment, Iosipos Moisiodax, who asked in 1761, as I did at that moment:

"And what benefit does the state expect from a politician who regards custom and legality indifferently as one and the same thing: who has neither learned, nor shows any desire to learn, what is law, or what is polity?"

 

My friend persisted, extolling the virtues of the candidate he was tasked with spruiking, and desperately cajoled me into at least tarrying in order for him to complete the entire sales pitch, but I was having none of it. Instead, I referred him to the Ancient Greek tragedy “Hecuba” where, commenting on Odysseus intention to sacrifice her daughter Polyxena to the spirit of Achilles, even though Hecuba has saved Odysseus’ life, the Trojan Queen rails against: “these politicians who cringe for favours from a screaming mob and do not care what harm they do to their friends.”

 

By way of riposte, my friend demanded that I show him which daughters were sacrificed by his party, in order for this to form the basis of my argument, arguing that I was talking excrement. I shrugged his copronymic assertion aside, reminding him of when, returning to his native Tarsus philosopher Athenodoros had his front door smeared in excrement by partisans of his rival Boethius, Athenodoros wrote: “One may recognize the city’s illness and disaffection in many ways, and particularly from its excrement.” We are after all kin of the Modern Greek αγανακτισμένοι.

 

This in no way dampened my interlocutor’s fervour. He wanted to know what my political philosophy was, in order, as he maintained, to prove to me that his candidate was aligned with my views. This is an easy task, for such views as I may hold are best expressed by the queen of political activism and dissidence, Lysistrata, who Aristophanes quotes as proclaiming:

"If you had any sense, you would handle all your affairs in the way we handle wool....

First of all, just like washing out a raw fleece, you should wash the sheep-dung out of the body politic in a bath, then put it on a bed, beat out the villains with a stick and pic off the burrs; and as for those people who combine and mat themselves to gain office, you should card them out and pluck off the heads. Then card the wool into the work-basket of union and concord, mixing in everyone; and the immigrants, and any foreigner who is friendly to you, and anyone who is in debt to the treasury, they should be mixed in as well.... and then make a great ball of wool, and from that weave a warm cloak for the people to wear." Even back then, Lysistrata was proud to be Union.

 

The shadows were lengthening, like those in De Chrico’s empty, windswept square, and still the candidate, who I was asked to wait for and meet, and not materialised. As we waited, we mused at how gerontocratic Greek community politics is, as compared to Australian politics where renewal is the norm. My friend, of a conservative bent, considered that as our ancient forebears were wise and that wisdom comes with age, the origins of our gerontocracy must lie therein. I disagreed vehemently. In closing his argument as to why old men should remain active in politics, Plutarch digresses, explaining why certain statues of Hermes are designed the way they are:

“That is why representations of Hermes showing him as an old man are created with no hands or feet, but with erect member: the intimation is that there is little need for physical vigour in old men, but they should have, as is fitting, a fertile and productive reason.” This then is the reason why so many elderly members of our community hang onto their positions in brotherhoods with such tenacity and insist on playing politics. It also explains why many Australian contenders in the game tarry longer than they should in search of the elusive fourth term. It helps with their love life.

 

When the candidate did arrive, at the very end of the day, there were few people to greet him with a cheer. One of his supporters uttered the un-Australian political war-cry “Booyah” which left me completed gobsmacked. Enquiring as to why I was so visibly moved, I confided in my friend that that the American exclamation used to express triumph "Booyah!" actually comes from the Souliote War Cry "Boowah!" and we have Lord Byron's poem "Song to the Suliotes" to prove it:

“Up to battle! Sons of Suli

Up, and do your duty duly!

There the wall — and there the Moat is:

Bouwah! Bouwah! Suliotes!

There is booty — there is Beauty,

Up my boys and do your duty.”

 

Best election campaign theme song since “It’s Time,” if you ask me.

 

I didn’t speak to the candidate. Crisp, clean and eminently a poster boy for Anglo-Saxon vitality, I sidled inside the polling booth, therein to perform my democratic rites. Emerging from the sanctum of the polis, I did not deign to respond to my friend’s entreaties to reveal for whom I had voted, by advising him instead that in 2016, in voting for the President of Lebanon, a Lebanese MP wrote "Zorba the Greek" on the ballot. It was noted (in accordance with the power sharing arrangements between religious groups in Lebanon) that Zorba was a Greek Orthodox Christian, while according to the Constitution the President must be a Maronite (Catholic) Christian. A true but bizarre story.

 

Inspired by the Lebanese politician and suffering the malevolent after-effects of a rather contrary democracy sausage upon my digestive system  as commensurate to the quality of the argument I had advanced with to friend previously, I considered those who would do away with the right to choose altogether and caused to be posted the following piece of frivolity upon my social media page:

“In breaking news it has been announced that in order to effect the necessary cost-cutting needed to bring Australia back from the brink of financial collapse, the Australian Labor Party is merging with the Antiochian Orthodox Church.

Since its prelates are appointed directly from Antioch, Syria (a place infinitely more accessible than Canberra) rather than having politicians be elected, elections will henceforth be abolished. Instead, the victor will be popularly acclaimed with the words “Axios!” pronounced with a lisp.

This will save Australia billions in puerile advertising costs, cheesy photo shoots and will achieve Economies of scale and efficiency as politicians dispense with the need to pretend to listen and claim they care about the electorate.

Electorates will be abolished and replaced with parishes. The first order of business will be to excommunicate the Trumpet and his Patriots and reconcile with the Greens but only on Palm Sunday and Saint Patrick’s Day.

Given that Dutton comes from the Greek άδυτον, a holy sacred place where one may not enter, he will be excluded from the running.”

It was only when reading Tacitus that night that I recalled that acclamation by “Axios” is a process infinitely fraught with danger. Long associated with approbation and acclamation, ἄξιος is the only word the Roman general Gnaeus Domitius Corbulo uttered when in arriving at Cenchreae, the port of Corinth, messengers from mad emperor Nero met the general and ordered him to commit suicide. Undaunted, he strode forward to accept his fate, and fell on his own sword after exclaiming, "Axios!"

Best stick to ballots and preferences, albeit in desolate squares, after all.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 31 May 2025

ΠΑΠΟΥΤΣΙ ΑΠΟ ΤΟΝ ΤΟΠΟ ΣΟΥ

 

Honestly, the goings on of the Ministry of Culture of the Hellenic Republic make a person with the future of the race at heart despair. I mean serious, imagine getting stroppy with ADIDAS ^TM  simply because the good people headquartered in Herzogenaurach, Germany, had the inspiring idea of placing a colourful drone shoe above the Parthenon.

I remember as if it were yesterday, being ten years of age, warming my hands in front of the spit at an aged family friend’s nameday, and being approached by an older boy, who asked: “Hey, do you know what ADIDAS stands for?”

Had I been just a few years older, I imagine I would have advanced the opinion that they stand for the proletariat seizing control of the means of production so that the production of commodities is done away with, but instead I shrugged my shoulders. Moving close to my ear, the boy whispered in a hoarse voice: “All Day I Dream about S*x.”

“Rubbish,” boomed a voice from the other side of the spit, the purple face of his uncle contorted in various hues of inebriation. “It stands for “All Day I Dream About Soviet Union.” Crushing his stubby in his enormous proletarian fist as easily as he would crack the knuckles of the petit bourgeoisie, he then raised that fist in comradely salute and fixed us with a glare that would brook no opposition. I never did sum up the courage to illuminate him, when I found out years later, that ADIDAS is actually an acronym for the name of the company’s founder, Adolf "Adi" Dassler.

Viewed from this perspective, one could never accuse for Minister of Culture Mendoni of mendacity, in responding to the drone shoe with such fury. Not so long ago, another Adolf tried to stamp his jackboot on our sacred rock. Now this Adolf is trying to plant his sneaker upon it. Seriously though, the warning signs were all there, had we bit paid attention. Take the Adidas trefoil design, which apparently stands for North America, Europe and Asia, the continents or at least the markets of said land masses, that Adolf presumably seeks to conquer, subdue or at least peddle his product in. It was only a matter of time before his cohorts arrived to press us all under his athletic foot. After all, did not Adidas recently drop their marketing slogan for twenty years: “Impossible is Nothing” (a prescient warning to us if there ever was one that anything is possible, even the appropriation of the Parthenon), to the even more ominous “You’ve Got This,” no doubt referring to the Acropolis, its environs and all ticket sales therein?

While pundits and politician cry foul, something more sinister and profound is going on here and if the good people at the Ministry of Culture had just heard famed film director Yiorgos Lanthimos out, rejecting his recent application for filming rights to the Acropolis, they would have realised that the future of the world is at stake. For in Bugonia, his in production film, Lanthimos purports the tale of two conspiracy-obsessed young men who kidnap the high-powered CEO of a major company, convinced that she is an alien intent on destroying planet Earth. This, we are told and are expected to believe, is Science Fiction. And yet that is exactly what they want you to think. The truth is, that there are two CEO’s of two major companies vying for World Domination under our very noses and we are completely oblivious.

By now, you have probably guessed the identity of one of them. As to the other, consider this: What is the name of the temple to the right of the Propylaea at the entrance of the sacred precinct of the Acropolis? Ten ADIDAS vouchers to those of you who answered “the temple of Athena Nike.” Yes, NIKE. And I ask you gentle reader, have you ever heard or read about any Greek government, its officials, employees, assigns, clients or general hangers on make a gesture of at least the slightest disapprobation at this blatant infringement of our trademark and gross violation of our intellectual property by company b? You will not find one reference to such a protest anywhere, I promise you. For Pericles’ sake people, just do it.

So if it is not the violation itself that incenses the Hellenic populace, for we have already taken sides surreptitiously in the turf war of the alien companies, one which Lanthimos in his audacity threatens to disrupt, one can only deduce that the offending component in the whole story must be the shoe. For this at least, there is ample cultural evidence. Traditionally, to show the sole of one’s shoe to someone was a sign of the grossest disrespect, which is why one never sat with their legs crossed on a chair in front of one’s elders and betters. Here we have not just a whole sole but an entire shoe resting upon us. Then there is the revolutionary saying: «Παπούτσι από τον τόπο σου κι ας είναι μπαλωμένο» (a shoe from your own land, even if its is a patched one), a powerful Trumpian protectionist tariff increasing call to arms if there ever was one, which in breach of European Union regulations, tells Adolf to go stuff his shoe where the Sun of Vergina does not shine, since the Greeks have their own local shoe industry, even if this is comprised primarily of leather sandals in tourist kiosks on the Cyclades and tsarouhia for Manasis’ Froura in Melbourne.

But one defies one’s European masters at one’s peril. After all, were they not the ones who in the recent crisis μας έβαλαν τα δυο πόδια σε ένα παπούτσι? And when the people rose up as one and voted resoundingly NO in the referendum against the TROIKA’s bailout conditions, did they not proceed να μας πατήσουν τον κάλο? And of course, one needs to consider what our response had been had the shoe been on the other foot, although it must be said that while Greeks did have imperialistic proclivities before being taught the error of their ways, you never saw a Byzantine emperor plant his imperial porphyry buskins on the public edifices of any of its vassal states. Κλέφτες με ποδήματα, all of them, I say, and instead of protesting against Adolf, verifying the old adage: «γλώσσα παπούτσι, μυαλό κουκούτσι» perhaps we should be grateful that our overlords «δεν μας δίνουν τα παπούτσια στο χέρι» exiling us beyond the lands of the Union where we shall abide in sparsity and austerity, «με μισό παπούτσι.»

Of course the corollary of all this may just be that dear old Adolf in planting his sole upon the soul of our nation, is actually trying to pay us a Teutonic complement, which is why I rail at the overreaction of the Greek Minister of Culture. In positioning his shoe upon the columns of the Parthenon, is he not telling us that the very foundation of his foot-cladding philosophy is based upon ancient Greece, to whom he owes all? Furthermore, pundits who look into these things closely with the numerologists in Velopoulos’ Ελληνική Λύση Party, reliably inform me that the shoe actually does not rest upon the temple itself but rather, being comprised of drones, hovers above it at the conceptual point where the entasis of its columns meet, suggesting that all things will inevitably converge and it is futile to resist. (That by the way I am reliably informed by my astrologer, will be ADIDAS’s marketing slogan for 2026 and they have applied for it to also be adopted by the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics Apparently, they are a shoe in).

If after this length disquisition, you are not convinced and instead of welcoming Adolf with open arms, have maintained your rage and your enthusiasm, console yourself at least in the knowledge that our people have from times ancient developed a tried and true traditional method of dealing with interlopers, foreign and domestic. Τους γράφουμε στα παλιά μας τα παπούτσια.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 24 May 2025

HYDRA IN WINTER

 

Just imagine, if you will, that you could read a humorous version of the Pentateuch, written by a particularly witty in-law of a descendant of Abraham, who peppers her pages with an innumerable quantity of puns and allows you to join her as she retraces the steps of the patriarchs.

This is exactly the experience you are presented with when called upon by author Shelley Dark to sojourn with her in “Hydra in Winter.” Her narrative technique is one which co-opts you and makes you complicit in her journey of discovery, compelling you to trust her as your guide, by the simple act of turning the page. She disarms you, not in the least by calling you “buddy,” but also because her lucid, chatty, effortlessly accessible prose allows the ready to transcend time, space, season, and even Greek pronunciation, for which she displays remarkable aptitude.

The author of the recently published “Hydra in Winter,” is on a biblical mission. If Genesis traces the journey of patriarch Abraham from Ur of the Chaldees to the Promised Land, whence we all come, spiritually or otherwise, “Hydra in Winter” is also a Testament, attempting to trace the journey of one of our own community patriarchs from his homeland of Hydra, to Australia. Shelly Dark is perhaps best placed to do so, because her husband John, is a direct descendant of Gkikas Voulgaris, also known as Jigger Bulgary, one of the seven first Greeks to arrive in Australia, having been transported here in 1829 after a conviction for piracy.

The author’s attempt to trace our illustrious common ancestor’s journey back to its source in Hydra is an inspired one, not in the least because in doing so she puts her finger on the nub of our own ontopathology when it comes to our founding fathers and our identity as Greek Australians. On the one hand our national narrative renders our pirates as heroes: bold men who sailed the seas on a quest to liberate and defend their nation, defeat their enemies and compound their foes with feats of ingenuity, audacity and downright genius. On the other hand, Greek-Australian scholars have taken issue with a discourse that appears to grant their compatriots a convict heritage. It is after all, before the story of the seven pirates was widely known, an absence of criminality that comprised one of the elements that differentiated us from the dominant group’s narrative. Consequently those scholars point to efforts to present the seven pirates as convicts as symptomatic of a tendency of the ruling class to cast aspersions upon our pedigree, seeking to transfer to us, their own identity, possibly in order to make us complicit in their violent seizure of indigenous land and the assumption of its sovereignty. Is this then the original sin that is common to all of us?

Happily, Shelley Dark does not deal in the abstruse and the obscure, although hers is a pen that is as meticulous in recording details as it is in defying stereotypes. Hers is not the travelogue or indeed the journey of the tourist, peddling tired tropes about bouzouki, tzatziki and retsina and indeed on many of her inspired asides, she expertly is able to open-heartedly play with the expectations and deep seated cliches that accompany a westerner’s  (and not a few latter Greek-Australian generation’s ) understanding of Greece, (her quip about breaking plates, but not the ones off the wall, is a case in point). Instead, the cajoles us to accompany her to not touristic-Greece: Hydra in the off season, which far from being a sun-drenched paradise is icy cold, and where almost everything is shut. This is the real Greece, inhabited by real people and this place, as desolate as Ur itself, is the topos in which Shelley’s drama will unfold.

The narrative charmingly unfolds in andante prose, a walking pace to accompany our own steps as we explore the hibernating island. We learn that half the island is related to the Voulgaris clan, which has played a significant role in the Greek Revolution. Along the way, we also meet some remarkable elemental characters who assume Titanic proportions in the way that appear to inhabit in complete harmony with their surroundings, are inscrutable, incomprehensible and unpredictable but nonetheless, are warm-hearted, generous, omnipresent and willing to provide advice, hospitality and assistance.

In true Indiana Jones style, Shelley Dark’s exertions form a backstory in itself. She and the reader explore every nook and cranny of the island, which is rightly called Hydra since like the mythological creature of same name, (and let us not forget that the Lernaian Hydra was killed by Heracles – which coincidentally or not, was the name of Voulgaris’ (alleged) pirate ship) each of her lines of inquiry give rise to another three, as she searches for a lost book that contains the history of the Voulgaris Family.

The reader conjures in vain for a dusty, weighty tome,  silver clasp securing its many secrets. Instead, the object of the quest is “The Boulgaris Family of Hydra,” written by Ioannis Papamanolis in 1931. After a series of misadventures, the book is found exactly where it as supposed to be on the island for after all the Truth is not only out there but also lies within, in both sense of the word and much more can be learned about a story from its construction and the motivation behind its construction than from the events related themselves. Especially so, since the book mentions a Damianos Ghikas whose life and times seems to mysteriously mirror Ghikas Voulgaris’ own, though they predate his by a few decades…

Along the way, the author traverses another path of discovery, that of discovery of the self, something that seems to be uniquely the preserve of the visitor to a land whose completely unself-conscious native inhabitants have been born without an inner monologue. The climax of the novel where the author proclaims: “I hear the whisper of the Greek Chorus on the waves almost as if the island is speaking to me: “She stood in the shadow of a pirate, yet she found the outline of her own,”  is as profound as it is side-splittingly funny, coming as it does after a heavy earlier dose of pirate jokes.

For it is this that makes “Hydra in Winter,” a singularly unique and endearing book: It’s quirky, quintessentially self-deprecating and ironic Aussie humour. The text is literally dripping with quips, asides, wry observations and eye-wringing dad jokes. This is an author who loves a challenge, will test herself to the utmost and still in Antipodean fashion, refuses to take herself seriously. Consequently, she is a boon travel companion: knowledgeable, positive, entertaining and completely free from the psychological baggage that often afflicts the more emotionally vampiric fellow traveller that one may chance upon during one’s travels and from whom the only escape is to shut the book. Fascinatingly, she freely admits to being as afraid of us as we are of her.

By contrast, “Hydra in Winter” is a real page turner and if Shelley Dark, in searching for Ghikas has come to realisation that she is an aspiring novelist, she had better drop the adjective qualifying the noun with due speed and urgency. Tantalisingly, her story ends with a cliffhanger – after all her sleuthing and archival work on Hydra, leaving us high and dry (if you’ll pardon the pun), inviting us to come with her to the place where the Original Sin of our community took place: the island of Malta where the trial of Ghikas Voulgaris for piracy was held and where he was convicted and sentenced. Knowing what I know both about the trial and the history of the Greeks of Malta, I can’t wait.

Ultimately, “Hydra in Winter” causes us to reflect upon the traditional differences in the way people understand history. Shelley Dark enters into a world of people who can tell you in intimate detail what happened to Alexander the Great over two thousand years ago but for whom the details of their family just a few centuries ago is completely obscure. Perhaps there is some solace and security in the historical amnesia that seems to frame our perspective. Nevertheless, with Bertrand Russell’s “In Praise of Idleness” as her inspiration, Shelley Dark engages in writing as being “about the sheer, ridiculous fun of making things up and calling it work.” And we are all the richer for it.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 17 May 2025