HELLENO-RUSTICA

If Hesiod is to be believed, the farming life is one of ill-rewarded, dreary drudgery. In his "Works and Days," a poem written in 700BC, he describes life in the small, agricultural community of Ascra, a "sorry place...bad in winter, hard in summer, never good." The context for him establishing a precedent that holds farmers to be perennial whingers, was the premise that a gulf exists between man's unending dreams and desires and the existing resources on earth required to make them a reality. The first half of Works and Days is thus devoted to the fundamental economic problem of the scarcity of resources for the pursuit of all human needs and desires. Hesiod characterizes society as one where "men never rest from labor and sorrow by day and from perishing by night." He notes that because of scarcity; time, labour, and production goods must be efficiently allocated, while pointing to basic need, social condemnation of indolence, and rising consumption standards as moving man towards economic development and growth. Fascinatingly, Hesiod mentions a spirit of competition of "good conflict" that tends to reduce the problems of scarcity.
Funnily enough, as a manual on farming, "Works and Days" fails miserably. His selection of tasks is spotty, omitting most of the important tasks on a farm, while emphasizing tasks and seasons of relatively little importance. The advice he does give is often elementary and his organisation is erratic. Yet Hesiod's anomalies each serve a distinct end, contributing in their way, to a dramatic re-enactment of the farmer's year. Examined in this way, the aberrations of Hesiod's account of farming lend Hesiod more, rather than less, credit as a poet.
One of the more dramatic highlights of the Modern Greek farmer's year is the annual blockade of important transport arteries, notably, the «κόμβος» of «Βιοκαρπέτ,» a major crossroads. Given that «κόμβος,» literally means "knot," it could well be said that the strangulation of Greece's transport network by farmers, represents a veritable modern day Gordian knot, the only difference being that the Greek expression «Γόρδιος δεσμός» also carries with it, connotations of bondage.
The reason for thousands of Greek farmers placing the entire country in the thralldom of paralysis with their winter wrath? A demand for compensation for low commodity prices and slashed subsidies. Using tractors and trailers, the farmers have blockade around seventy main roads, cutting Athens off from Thessaloniki and closing border crossings with neighbouring states. Even more alarmingly, they leave tonnes of fruit and meat rotting in trucks.
"Tractors are our weapon and we are determined to use them until our demands are met," Christos Sideropoulos, a farmer and one of the leaders of the protests, stated this week. "Let them say what they like. We are not going to give in." All this comes as Greece faces grave financial challenges, exposing the frustrations of Greece's underdeveloped agricultural regions. Despite EU subsidies, successive governments have failed to modernise a farming industry that remains dependent on state handouts. Dimitris Keridis, a political scientist explained: "It's an industry that depends on government handouts and is incompatible with the demands of modern societies. They produce produce that nobody buys."
Such subsidies are few and far between for other industries. Yet for some reason, farmers have been pampered and pandered to over the last three decades to such an extent that they cannot survive without forcing governments - and the rest of the population - to keep acceding to their demands for assistance. The farmers did not complain when successive governments went to bat for them in Brussels and came back loudly proclaiming victory in achieving high subsidies for their products, or when those same governments neglected to tell them that they should use the subsidies wisely, not as a bonus to be spent in a frenzy but as assistance to become more productive, to adopt new techniques and to make the leap to crops and products that would sell well on the international markets. Even if they did see the clouds on the horizon, farmers, farm unionists and government officials all pretended that farm subsidies were such an important part of the country's political culture that no one would accede to any demands - whether from the EU or the World Trade Association - for their abolition.
The over-indulgence of farmers is not a new phenomenon or indeed one particularly restricted to the Hellenic world. Significant constructs that comprise Australian identity myths continue to emphasise the country's agrarian roots and values. The bush, the harsh climate and their consequences - a tough, adaptable, pioneering, battling people, thoroughly individualistic but also united in adversity - as well as their icons: the swagman, drover, shearer etc attest to the intrinsic importance of the farming life to Australians, regardless of the fact that the majority are totally urbanised. The national poets and authors, such as Henry Lawson and Banjo Patterson all extol rural life. It is for this reason that natural disasters that blight rural regions capture the sympathy of and galvanise the nation. We revere farmers because subconsciously, their bucolic way of life is considered laudable and 'natural,' even when it is considered that the majority of the first transportees to this country were urban petty criminals. Quite simply, the farmers, in the common conscience, have not compromised or surrendered to modernity. Their symbolic presence as the last repository of mankind's innocence, inspires feelings of awe and reverence, along with enormous affection.
Rusticity in Greece is however, more bi-polar. While demotic songs and dances hearken back to a time where most Greeks lived in villages, massive urbanisation only occurred a generation ago. The common memory, (save in the diaspora where the rural lifestyle is idealised by the process of nostalgia for the homeland and lovingly re-created in Greek backyards all around Australia), thus evokes a not so distant time of illiteracy, deprivation, physical hardship and claustrophobic social restriction. As such, it is difficult for Modern Greeks to see them in the same light as Australians. For they safeguard a time and way of life that most Greeks have put behind them or consider quaint. Nonetheless, in a resource poor country where agriculture has only been supplanted as the mainstay of the economy thirty or so years ago, farmers are still a political force to be reckoned with, as the tsiflikades, or large land owners were in the renascent Greek state, and as it turns out, a liability.
It should be obvious to farmers that the Greek government has no more money to give them and that even if it did, at a time when markets and EU officials doubt that it has the political will to curb Greece's deficit and public debt, conceding to any financial demands would prove the cynics right. It is not without irony that the PASOK government, which instituted the mass-subsidy policy for farmers, causing them to become inefficient and non-competitive in an effort to buy votes, now has to deal with their further demands. Perhaps in this doom and gloom time, Hesiod, the archetypal farmer, provides away out for all parties: "Observe due measure, for right timing is in all things the most important factor." For he is right. We all want a piece of the pie but in Greece at the moment, the pie is particularly small. If the livelihood of Greek farmers is to be protected, they need to be guided towards, not shielded from the modern economy. Successive governments have not done this. Farmers in turn are not creating sympathy for their cause by holding the rest of society to ransom. Top of the economic pop charts for this week then: «Μια βοσκοπούλα αγάπησα,» followed by «Μπήκαν ορέ πήκαν, τα γίδια στο μαντρί.» Got to get those farmers moving somehow.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on 8 February 2010

JEWS IN GREECE

In his magisterial work: The Balkans: nationalism, war and the great powers 1804-1999, Misha Glenny writes that Greek Jews had never "encountered anything remotely as sinister as north European anti-Semitism. The twentieth century had witnessed the rise of anti-Jewish sentiment among Greeks... but it attracted an insignificant minority". The European Union Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia 2002-2003 report on anti-Semitism in Greece noted that there were no instances of physical or verbal assaults on Jews, along with examples of "good practices" for countering prejudice. The report concluded that "...in 2003 the Chairman of the Central Jewish Board in Greece stated that he did not consider the any rise in antisemitism to be alarming." On November 21, 2003, Nikos Bistis, the Greek Deputy Minister of the Interior, declared January 27 to be Holocaust Remembrance Day in Greece, and committed to a "coalition of Greek Jews, Greek non-Jews, and Jews worldwide to fight antisemitism in Greece".
Indeed, Jews have had a presence in Greece for aeons and have profoundly influenced and have been influenced in return by Greek culture. Christianity it could be argued, marks a dialectic between Greek and Jewish thought. At a time when Jews were expelled from England (1290) and then Inquisitorial Spain, Greece was a haven of tolerance. This is why the recent arson attack on the Etz Hayyim Synagogue in Hania, Crete, the only remaining synagogue on that island is such a horrifying and uncharacteristic act. Over 2,000 rare books and much of the recently restored building was destroyed. It is gratifying at least that the two Britons and two Americans responsible for this heinous hate crime have been arrested. Unsuprisingly, popular sentiment in Greece is outraged, for despite the odd crackpot historian or populist’s ravings, the Jewish community in Greece is held in high esteem, as is meet for what constitutes undoubtedly, the country’s oldest minority community.
The first recorded mention of Judaism in Greece dates from 300-250BC on the island of Rhodes. In the 2nd century BC, Hyrcanus, a leader in the Jewish community of Athens, was honoured by the raising of a statue in the aogra. According to the Jewish historian Josephus an even earlier mention of a Hellenized Jew by a Greek writer was to be found in the work "De Somno" by the Greek historian Clearchus of Soli, where Clearchus describes the meeting between Aristotle in the 4th century BC and a Jew in Asia Minor, who was fluent in Greek language and thought:
"'Well', said Aristotle, 'the man was a Jew of Coele Syria. Now this man, who entertained a large circle of friends and was on his way from the interior to the coast, not only spoke Greek but had the soul of a Greek. During my stay in Asia, he visited the same places as I did, and came to converse with me and some other scholars, to test our learning. But as one who had been intimate with many cultivated persons, it was rather he who imparted to us something of his own.'"
Archaeologists have also discovered ancient synagogues in Greece, including the Synagogue in the Agora of Athens and the Delos Synagogue, dating to the second century BC.
The ties between Greeks and Jews were further augmented in the aftermath of Alexander's death, as the Seleucid and Ptolemaic kings fought for control of Israel. The Jews of Alexandria created a unique fusion of Greek and Jewish culture,while the Jews of Jerusalem were divided between conservative and pro-Hellene factions. When the High Priest Simon II died in 175 BC, conflict broke out between supporters of his son Onias III (who opposed Hellenization, and favored the Ptolemies) and his son Jason (who favored Hellenization, and favored the Seleucids). A period of political intrigue followed, with priests such as Menelaus bribing the king to win the High Priesthood, and accusations of murder of competing contenders for the title. The result was a brief civil war. The Tobiads, a philo-Hellenistic party, succeeded in placing Jason into the powerful position of High Priest. He established an arena for public games close by the Temple. The high priest Jason went further and converted Jerusalem into a Greek polis replete with gymnasium and ephebeion. Some Jews are known to have engaged in non-surgical foreskin restoration in order to join the dominant cultural practice of socializing naked in the gymnasium, where their circumcision would have been a social stigma. Antiochus IV’s desecration of the Temple and outlawing of Jewish religious observances culminated in the revolt of the Maccabees and the resurgance of the first Jewish state since the time of the Babylonians. In many ways, it was the disassociation with Hellenism that defined the Jewish identity.When Greece fell to the Roman Empire in 146 BC, the Jews living in Roman Greece had a different experience than those of Iudaea Province. The New Testament describes Greek Jews as a separate community from the Jews of Judaea, and the Jews of Greece did not participate in the First Jewish-Roman War or later conflicts. The Jews of Thessaloniki, speaking a dialect of Greek, and living a Hellenized existence, enjoyed relative authority. It is widely held by the Jews of Ioannina, that the Roman emperor Titus, after capturing Jerusalem in September 70, was transporting many Jews to Rome as slaves when his ship was driven by a storm onto the coast of Epirus. Instead of throwing his captives into the sea, he allowed them to disembark, and they eventually made their way to the area in which loannina later was established.
Perhaps the most important Jew to influence Greece at this time, was Saul, the Hellenized Jew from Tarsus, who, as Paul, was instrumental in the founding of many Christian churches throughout Rome, including Asia Minor and Greece. Paul's second missionary journey included proselytizing at Thessaloniki's synagogue until driven out of the city by its Jewish community, and he also preached about the ‘unknown God’ in Athens. In the fervour of his new found, faith, Paul could see no distinction between Greeks and Jews, as he wrote in his epistle to the Galatians: “There can be neither Jew nor Greek, there can be neither bond nor free…for ye all are one man in Christ Jesus.”
During the Byzantine Empire, some Byzantine emperors were anxious to exploit the wealth of the Jews of Greece, and imposed special taxes on them, while others attempted forced conversions to Christianity. The latter pressure met with little success, as it was resisted by both the Jewish community and by the Orthodox church synods.
The community of “Romaniote Jews” speaking a Greek dialect written with Hebrew letters and known as “Yavanic,” was to by augmented in 1376, by an heralding an Ashkenazi immigration from Hungary and Germany to avoid the persecution of Jews throughout the fifteenth century. These communities would be further augmented by the settlement of Sephardic, Ladino-speaking Jews from Spain, who settled primarily in Thessaloniki. These immigrants established the city's first printing press, and the city became known as a centre for commerce and learning. The exile of other Jewish communities swelled Thessaloniki’s Jewish population, until Jews were the majority population in 1519.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, Sephardic domination of Thessaloniki was paramount. According to Misha Glenny, Thessaloniki was the only city in the Empire where some Jews "employed violence against the Christian population as a means of consolidating their political and economic power",as traders from the Jewish population closed their doors to traders from the Greek and Slav populations and physically intimidated their rivals. By the early 1900s Thessaloniki's Jewish community comprised more than half of the city's population. As a result of the Jewish influence on the city, many non-Jewish inhabitants of Thessaloniki spoke Ladino, and the city virtually shut down on Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath.
Thessaloniki’s liberation in 1912, was met with scepticism by many in the Jewish community, as they feltBulgarian control would keep the city at the forefront of a national trade network, while Greek control might affect, for those of certain social classes and across ethnic groups, Thessaloniki's position as the destination of Balkan village trading. After liberation, however, the Greek government won the support of the city's Jewish community, and Greece under Eleftherios Venizelos was one of the first countries to accept the Balfour Declaration, 1917.There are few Jews left in Greece today. The Holocaust saw the community’s extirpation, despite efforts by Greeks and especially the clergy to protect them. The 275 Jews of the island of Zakynthos, survived because when the island's mayor, was presented with the German order to hand over a list of Jews, Bishop Chrysostomos returned to the Germans with a list of two names; his and the mayor's. The island's population hid every member of the Jewish community. When the island was almost levelled by the great earthquake of 1953, the first relief came from the state of Israel, with a message that read "The Jews of Zakynthos have never forgotten their Mayor or their beloved Bishop and what they did for us." In Ioannina, a once vibrant community has been reduced to less than twenty elderly members and the Jewish instriptions painted on the facades of houses in the old castle quarter have no faded. Yet the partership, fusion and dialectic of Judaeo-Hellenic thought has determined the course of Western civilization. Faced with that knowledge, petty-minded bigots and racists should feel particularly small. Until next week, this rare Graeco-Jewish joke with a caveat for the cringe factor: “Did you hear about the half Jewish/half Greek owner of a pencil company? No?! His name is Mo Levy.” Oy vey!

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on 1 February 2010

ASTROLOGICA

I was fifteen when I first returned to the home country. Stepping of the plane and travelling to meet my aunts for the first time, I was replete in the expectation of an expression of bittersweet gushing sentiments about the tyranny of distance that sunders familial ties and inexorable determinations of unity based on the fact the blood is of greater viscosity than water. What I received in its stead, was the following question: "What star sign are you?" My star sign is ambiguous as I was born on the 21st of May, something which is known as the "cusp,' whereupon depending upon which reading one adopts, I am either Taurus or Gemini and depending upon which facet of my character one has the misfortune to be exposed to, I display facets of both.
The Greeks of Greece are absorbed by astrology and the horoscope. The reading and ensuing discussion of the horoscope forms a significant segment of daily morning shows and plays an important consideration in matchmaking. On my first trip to Greece, I entered a taxi driven by a huge, hairy bear of a man with a lilting lisp. «Κούκλε μου, τι ζώδιο είσαι;» he asked, as I fastened my seat-belt, the primary give-away sign of the foreigner. Taken aback not only by his unsolicited display of camaraderie but also by my wonderment as to how a man of such mythical proportions could conflate them into the limited space of a vehicular exoskeleton and indeed, how this could possibly impinge upon my innocence, I decided not to antagonize the beast, stammering: Ταύρος.» «Τάυρος στον έρωτα;» he wheezed, in his impossibly high, insinuating voice, placing his hand on my knee. As I imagined myself disappearing slowly down the back of his cigarette-tarred throat, having first been immobilized by a crushed knee-cap, I hastily alighted. Relating my ordeal to my aunts hours later, they thought for a while and then pronounced: "He must have been a Virgo. All Virgan taxi drivers are perverted." After casting my horoscope through the use of a do it yourself astrological chart to be found on the back cover of «ΚΛΙΚ» magazine, sporting a particularly pneumatic semi-clad goddess, which at the time I found infinitely more absorbing, my aunts predicted that the people that will entrance, captivate and otherwise scratch indelible grooves upon the turntable of my psyche throughout the course of my life will be of the Scorpian persuasion. In this at least, they were uncannily correct.
Despite the threadbare mantra that would hold our race to be, at its best, a most dispassionate and logical one, we seem to be engrossed by the supernatural and this is a thread that transcends the ages of our sojourn as a collective identity upon this earth. After all, the term astrology is a Greek one, signifying the study of the stars, though it seems that
the origins of much of the astrological doctrine and method that would later develop in Eurasia are to be found among the ancient Babylonians and their system of celestial omens that began to be compiled around the middle of the 2nd millennium BC. Before Alexander's conquest, the practice of astronomy and astrology in Babylon flourished but was not yet of much interest to the Greek thinkers. Babylonian priests/astrologers, notably Berossus, who settled on the island of Cos, are thought to be responsible for introducing astrology to Greece and the surrounding area. Plato mentions those who seek celestial portents in the Timaeus while the student of Plato who authored the Epinomis paved the way for application of astronomical studies to astral piety.
Epinomis, most likely written by Phillip of Opus, demonstrates a transformation of the view of the heaven that soon paved the "western way" for astrology. This dialogue shows the transformation of the planets into visible representations of the Olympian gods, just as the Babylonian planets were images of their pantheon. The older names of the planets encountered in Homer and Hesiod designated their appearance rather than divine personification. Jupiter was shining (Phaithon), Mercury was twinkling (Stilbon), Mars was fiery (Pureos) and Venus was the bright morning star and evening star (Phosphoros and Vesperos). In the Epinomis, the planets are given proper names for Greek gods, though the author leaves open the question of whether the celestial beings are the gods themselves or likenesses fashioned by the gods. The author of Epinomis extends the sentiment of astral piety evident in the Laws, and goes so far as to say that the highest virtue is piety, and that astronomy is the art/science that leads to this virtue- for it teaches the orderliness of the celestial gods, harmony, and number. While Plato himself would never place the heavenly gods in direct control of a person's destiny, the distinction between the fatalism of such a control measured by astrology and an astral piety that permitted some intervention of gods in human affairs was not sharply drawn. Does the care of the gods for "all things great and small" mean that it is through their activities or motions they control, guide or occasionally intervene in human matters? While a clear distinction between astral piety and practical astrology is not apparent, later texts on mystery cults, Gnosticism, Hermeticism, and magic demonstrate that someone who either worships stars, or is concerned with their ontological status, need not be technically proficient in astronomy. Nor must they believe that life is fated by astrally determined necessity. Likewise, the technical Hellenistic astrologers who calculated birth charts and made predictions did not necessarily practice rituals in reverence to planetary gods.
As the intellectual centre in Egypt, Alexandria oversaw major developments in Hellenistic astrology. Surviving Greek astrological writings, catalogued over a period of fifty years in a work called the Catalogus Codicum Astrologorum Graecorum, reveal that for the sake of credibility, many of the Hellenistic astrologers attributed the earliest astrological works to historical or mythologized figures such as the pharaoh Nechepso, an Egyptian priest associated with Petosiris. Hermes is a legendary figure credited with the invention of astrology. Some fragments attributed to Hermes survive while some of the Nechepso/Petosiris work from the mid-second century B.C.E. survives in quotes by later authors. Asclepius, Anubio, Zoroaster, Abraham, Pythagoras, and Orpheus are additional figures having astrological works penned in their names. There are late Hellenistic references to three Babylonian astronomers/astrologers, Kidenas, Soudines and Naburianos. The rivalry between the Hellenistic Seleucid and Ptolemaic kingdoms may be reflected in the astrologers' varying attributions of the origins of astrology to Egyptians or Babylonians (called the Chaldaeans). By the second century B.C Babylonian astrology techniques were combined with Egyptian calendars and religious practices, Hermeticism, the Pythagorean sacred mathematics, and the philosophies of the Stoics and middle Platonists.
After a system or systems of Hellenistic astrology quickly developed, the later practitioners and writers did not follow any one philosophical influence as a whole. In fact, the surviving instructional texts only scantily betray the philosophical positions of the authors. Vettius Valens, whose Anthologiarum is one of the most valuable sources for historians of this subject, indicates Stoic leanings. The astrologer, astronomer, and geographer whose work greatly influenced later development of astrology, Claudius Ptolemy using Aristotelian influenced manners of argumentation that had been absorbed by other Hellenistic schools such as the Middle Platonists and the Academic Sceptics, sought to portray astrology as a natural science, while dismissing a good portion of doctrine due to lack of systematic rigor. The later Platonic Academy had its fair share of astrological interest - head of the academy in the first century, Thrasyllus, for example, acted as an astrologer to Emperor Tiberius and is credited for works on astrology and numerology. He also predicted his own death. Neoplatonists Porphyry, Iamblichus and Proclus all practiced or accepted some form of astrology conforming to their unique contributions to Neoplatonism. It is thus difficult to imagine that the practice of astrology would have been divorced from philosophy by philosophers who were also astrologers. The idea of astrology, as a systematic account of fate, had a pervasive impact on the influential thinkers of the time who helped to shape the theoretical and cosmological understanding of the practice. Thinkers in the skeptical Academy and Pyrrhonic schools sought to attack the theoretical underpinnings of the practice of astrology, using a variety of arguments centering around freedom, the ontological status of the stars and planets, and the logical or practical limitations of astrological claims.
Horsocopes too can be attributed to us and continued the debate about fate. Technical manuals by Greek-speaking astrologers used for casting and interpreting horoscopic charts date as early as the late second century B.C. Many surviving scrolls exemplify the practice of katarchical astrology, or the selection of the most auspicious moment for a given activity. Katarkhe was also used to ascertain events that had already happened, to view the course of an illness, or track down thieves, lost objects, and runaway slaves. This use of astrology implies that the astrologers themselves did not prescribe to strict fatalism, at least the kind that dictates that knowledge from signs of the heavens cannot influence events. Such fascination with either the fate or predisposition of individuals reflects a stronger concern in the late Hellenistic world for the life of the individual in a period of rapid political and social change.
Hermes Trismegistus, not a form of a venereal disease but a syncretic deity combining the Egyptian Thoth and Hermes, inspired the study of Hermetica, secret knowledge based on astrology, throughout the Middle Ages. Quite frankly, the whole thing makes the uninitiated see stars. The other day, an associate of mine confided in me that he will not do business with someone until he had cast their astrological chart, as this gives him unique insight into their psyche. He also advised that a knowledge of astrology is particularly useful in engaging otherwise disinterested females in conversation and determining which ones to pursue. In riposte to my incredulity and question as to what transpires should the charts fail, he came up with the following Cretan folksong: «Άστρα μη με μαλώνετε που τραγουδώ τη νύχτα,/ Ω, γιατί 'χα πόνο στη καρδιά και βγήκα και τον είπα.»
Until next week then, the diatribe horoscope leaves you with the following prediction: «ΤΑΥΡΟΙ ΣΤΟΝ ΕΡΩΤΑ!»

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on 25 January 2010

DOROTHEA

It was an old, rickety divan whose embroidered upholstery was unravelled to the extent where it had formed its own natural patterns of the disparate and chaotic strands of time, the type one looks up uncomprehending, contriving to read within the loose threads, a possibility of a destiny. As I sunk myself upon it, the seat gave way like quicksand, causing the divan to shudder and wheeze like an asthmatic time lord.
"That's actually quite a historic divan," she said. "My father and Esat Pasha would sit upon it and discuss the affairs of Yiannena. Have you noticed the silver tray that I used to serve you coffee? It's exactly the same tray that we used to serve coffee for Esat Pasha." Rummaging through some drawers, she limped over to me, dog-eared postcard photograph in hand. "So you can see them there," she indicated, caressing the figures with a gnarled, trembling finger. "That's my father right there. And there's the bishop. And that sad looking man with the sensitive eyes is Esat Pasha. This was taken a few years or so before liberation. You would know of course how that was brought about...."
Once a teacher, always a teacher. During the week I stayed with Dorothea, one of the first female teachers of Epirus, it was not just an extensive course of lectures upon the general history of Yiannena that I was treated to, but also family history. For long before I had ever met her, she was conceptually for the family, the image-definition of a teacher, having taught all my great-grandmother's children, save my grandmother, who attended a Vlach school, and my mother.
I knew Dorothea years before I met her. I could picture her mounting her bicycle in Yiannena and riding to the village school, to the astonishment of the conservative villagers. This was due to the fact that as a child, I was difficult to feed, and the only way I would open my mouth was when my long-suffering mother would distract me by relating stories about her teacher.
Invariably, every three months, for over twenty years, a letter, written by a heavy hand in spidery writing, as complicated as a piece of lace woven by a blind woman would arrive in our letter box and I would set myself to the arduous task of attempting, mostly in vain, to decipher her handwriting. In doing so, I learned how to spell in the old way, differentiating which verbs were to be ended with an H and a subscript iota, as opposed to the general EI. I also learned that the correct way to begin a letter was in the way she began every single one of her letters, never deviating from her constancy: «Αγαπημένοι μου, σας φιλώ με πόνο πολύ.»
When my mother was young, the divan was aged but not unraveled. It stood in the parlour and was sat upon by such dignitaries as the town mayor, the bishop, and the local member of Parliament. Seated inconspicuously in the corner, my mother would watch diligently, noting how dessert spoons were utilized and gazing in wondernment as such unheard of condiments as freshly made mayonnaise. "What is this Vlach-child doing here?" her sister-in-law would snap, brushing past her. "She is fine. Leave her alone," Dorothea would reply. And my mother would sit motionlessly and listen as an entire world would unfold before her, one that was not based on the inevitability of farm animals, soil, chores and subsistence, but on music, literature, imagination, aesthetics and the conviction that people were indeed, masters of their own destiny. Ensconced in her kitchen in Melbourne decades later, my mother, hard at work straining yogurt in order to make tzatziki would muse: "Do you know where I first found out what tzatziki was? At Dorothea's house when I was a girl. But they had a different name for it. They called it 'talatori.'" Again, on New Years Eve, while making the traditional, swoonworthy rice and chicken pita, my mother would again fall into the same reverie: "I remember Dorothea and her sister-in-law making this. Of course they made it a bit differently. I've added more cheeses."
It was while listening to the unself-conscious discussions of the well to do Yianniotes at Dorothea's house that my mother learned of the existence of Hector Malot's "Sans Famille," and plucking up courage, wrote to my hard-pressed for cash grandmother in Athens, begging that she purchase it for her. This request was only fulfilled when, twenty years later, my grandmother sent the book to me for my tenth birthday. Somehow, all the books that my mother had seen on the shelves of Dorothea's house, or had heard mention of from her, invariably found their way into my room, where I devoured them eagerly.
Upon starting school, and mastering English, I was invariably disappointed. Having been reared upon stories of an amazingly inspired woman, who could construct the map of Greece out of coloured sand, kept jars of preserved reptiles in her classroom in order to teach her pupils natural history and in an age of rural class stratification, where if you could dress your child in shoes, you thought you were somebody and didn't have to consort with peasants, would take an individual interest in each child, trying to show them a way out of poverty through education, I assumed all teachers were like that. They weren't. Or were they? Looking back at the various multicultural and underprivileged programmes my mother instituted at the school in which she taught in the eighties, I can perceive the vague shades of a kindly though crusty old Epirot school-teacher, with immense love for her pupils, determined to make a difference.
Dorothea never had a family of her own. Instead, she transposed all her love upon her nephew, a talented but terribly conflicted artist and journalist, who was to eventually commit suicide. Heartbroken, she turned for solace to a young girl she had befriended and who was now living on the other side of the world. When I went to stay with her for the first time, at the age of twenty, it was as if I had known her all my life. I could remember most of her letters by heart and would ask questions about events as if I had experienced them. Dorothea would proudly show me photographs of her trip to Australia, before my parents were married, Paris and other exotic locations, mixed with historical artifacts from Yiannena. She would also rummage through her drawers, to extract pictures of my aunts, photographed with King Paul on the occasion of his visit to the village. Further, she had kept photographs of almost every single class she had ever taught, a veritable family tree for me. On that first stay, she would wake me up at the crack of dawn on Sundays and send me off to church. Upon my return, a breakfast consisting of mouth-watering pita would ensue and a lengthy lecture in her heavily accented didactic tone, about Bishop Seraphim's time as minister in the Autonomous Republic of Northern Epirus, because of course, she knew him. He was a friend of her father's.
The last time I saw Dorothea, I was in Greece with my mother. She was by now 92 and in a very poor way. Paying an impromptu visit to her house, we were shocked. Walking in unannounced, we saw none of the antique furnishings, Byzantine icons, books, or photographs. Albanian families were living in each room and she was alone, in a room bereft of any furnishings save a bed and a tabled, a shriveled, emaciated caricature of her former self. "She probably won't recognize you," her Albanian carer lisped. "Most of the time she is unconscious." As my mother leaned over her bed, tears in her eyes, and whispered: "Dorothea, it's me, and Kosta," I noticed my first two poetry collections on her bedside table. "Are you Kosta?" Dorothea's carer asked. "I've been wondering who you were. Until a month ago, she would make us read from these books every day and tell us all about you."
Dorothea, lying on her deathbed, stirred and opened her hollow eyes. She blinked twice as she looked at us. "Eleni, Kosta," she whispered, "I love you." And that was it. She lapsed into unconsciousness once more, sinking lower and lower into the mattress as if into oblivion and we took our leave, too distraught to be thankful for the opportunity to have bid her farewell.
Three months later, Dorothea died. The night before, my mother dreamt that someone had taken the divan out of her house and was chopping it to pieces. In it, were the multitude of letters that she had written to us over the years and they flew into the air, where they caught fire, spreading ash over the road. If you are ever in Yiannena, go to the mosque in the citadel, which is now a museum and seek out an exquisitely worked silver tray displayed in a cabinet near the window. It is of great historical significance. For it was at one time, used to serve Esat Pasha, the last pasha of Yiannena coffee and at another, the last person that Dorothea ever spoke to.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on 11 January 2010

STRANGE PORTENTS

“The night has been unruly: where we lay, Our chimneys were blown down; and, as they say, lamentings heard I’ the air, strange screams of death, And prophesying with accents terrible, Of dire combustion and confused events…” Macbeth

The portents of ill omen have been many in this most troubled and vexed of years. Supreme of all such infernal signs of disquiet has been the recent bizarre robbing of the grave of the late president of Cyprus and noted opponent of the fractious Annan Plan, Tassos Papadopoulos. Body-snatching was quite the thing in Victorian times, inspiring such artists of the macabre as Edgar Alan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne and most likely, resulting in various advances in mankind’s knowledge of anatomy. Nonetheless, the august president has been deceased for some time and his body would presumably be in such a state of decomposition, that it would not be useful for anatomical purposes. A nihilistic metaphor perhaps for the direction the solution to the Cyprus issue is taking? Contrariwise, the Orthodox tradition holds that the bodies of saints are incorruptible. Were the pious grave robbers so inspired by the saintliness of the deceased’s tireless ascetic struggle for Hellenism that they sort to purloin his holy relics in order to advance his canonisation and their own proximity to the divine? After all, have not the Irish recently claimed that parts of the body of St Nicholas are buried at Jerpoint in Kilkenny? Or are they indeed going one step further and purporting that when the national guardsmen who loved him came to pray at his tomb, they found the tombstone rolled away and the body missing? Is this then a lame metaphor for the resurrection of Cyprus?
Probably not. It appears that the desecrators of the president’s grave were motivated out of malice and stupidity, attacking an important historical figure at precisely the moment when he cannot defend himself. It is sickening to be compelled to recognise that we are capable of such heinous, disgusting actions.
Yet the theft and most probably destruction of the corpse of a man who all his life fought for what he believed to be the good of his people and country heralds the emergence of a society that appears to have misplaced its moral compass. Having overlooked or discarded tradition for the sake of economic prosperity, and having lost that too in turn, the Greek people, much like the Romans of the Middle Ages, who would exhume dead popes and condotteri in order to subject them to ridicule, are turning upon their dead leaders, exhuming them in order to insult them, or in the case of the recent spate of unjustified violence in Greece, turning their vehemence and venom upon society in General.
In 1892, a poster was published, featuring Greece’s prominently nosed prime minister Trikoupis at the helm of a sinking ship. The accompanying caption read: “Trikoupis, looking for a loan.” For upon assuming high office for the fifth time, Trikoupis was compelled to deal with the vast amount of debt incurred by Greece as a result of its aborted military preparations as the result of the union effected between Bulgaria and eastern Rumelia. At that time, the Great Powers blockaded Piraeus, forcing the Greeks to abandon their claims. Trikoupis believed that he could raise the value of Greek paper currency to par in a short time, in order to service the debt. However, he was not given the opportunity to impelement his currency reform as he lost the election. Assuming power for the sixth time, Trikoupis had to deal with a national treasury that had been depleted by overspending and systemic corruption, caused primarily by political campaigns in which parties promised massive spending programs. Trikoupis stood before parliament and made the most famous statement of his career: "Regretfully, we are bankrupt" ("Δυστυχώς επτωχεύσαμε"). The servicing of foreign loans was suspended, and all non-essential spending was cut. Trikoupis tried to make terms with the creditors of his nation, but failed in this also. The taxation measures he proposed aroused great hostility, and in January, 1895 he resigned. At the general election, four months later, he and his Modernist Party were defeated by a population used to bread and circuses.
Trikoupis’ situation is eerily reminiscent of the present. Analysts consider Greece to be on the verge of bankruptcy and Greece could conceivably exit the Euro and bring back their drachma if the crisis hits an acute state where the Greek government loses the ability to refinance debt at affordable interest rates. The European Commission projects Greece's 2009 budget deficit at almost 13% of gross domestic product, versus an EU average of just under 7%. Greek government debt, currently about 112% of GDP, probably will balloon to 130% before stabilizing. All of a sudden, our European partners are questioning our “European” credentials. "This raises question marks over the long-term viability of the euro's current membership," Simon Tilford, chief economist at the Center for European Reform, observed. "On current trends, we'll end up with economic stagnation and mounting political tensions in the euro zone, and, at worst, fiscal crises and a loss of political support for continued membership."
A high trust high social capital is integral to a healthy state and this is not somoething that Greece enjoys. Instead, as one analyst bluntly put it, “Greece has low trust and high contempt for government. One in four workers in Greece work for a government that most do not like.” The underground economy, estimated at 30 percent of gross domestic product, is integral for the preservation of a “European” standard of living in a country that has European prices but salaries below the European average. I was incensed to read this interesting snippet in an analysis of the woes of the Greek economy: “As he sat in a cafe with friends in the chic Kolonaki area on a recent afternoon, Antonis, 33, who disclosed only his first name, proudly announced that he refused to pay taxes. “Why should I pay?” he asked with a grin. “I don’t care about my government; I don’t care about my country,” he added. He conceded, however, that he did care about soccer and women.”
This is not how we were brought up. We were brought up to believe that Greece was a small, poor but valiant country that had suffered much but whose mission was to be of benefit to the world. At Greek school, at dances and all other functions, we were taught that we were all shareholders in that greatness and that we all had the responsibility to drive the progress of our corporate state. Whether true or not, it is a wonderful social charter to have. Sadly, what we seem to have created in its stead, is an insular, resentful, dysfunctional, divided Balkan appanage that having sucked and grown fat from the milk of its European wet-nurses, refuses to grow up and fend for itself. The violence that erupts at the slightest pretext in Greece is indicative of a people who hate their state and ultimately themselves for the predicament they find themselves in, trapped in “Tinakanoumestan,” a land where progress is a dream for the disconnected and the train of destiny has derailed itself.
Whether or not Yiorgos Papandreou will in the months to come mount the podium in Parliament and declare “Regretfully we are bankrupt,” is immaterial. His projected budjet cuts and reining in of spending may technically satisfy European fiscal requirements and cuase howls of protest and more violence by the irresponsible, immature Left but will not cut at the cause of Greece’s malaise. Somewhee, somehow, the Greek people need to be made to believe in themselves again. Europe can assist in this through responsible economic planning and a commitment to making all its members economically as well as socially viable. Greece’s greatest strength is its history and traditional aspirations – unity, cohesion and progress, too often because it so sorely lacked these essential ingredients to its viability. Post-modernism and crass westernisation have rendered these at best quaint and at worst, much maligned. Yet in those elements that form the substratum of the Greek identity can be found the seeds of regeneration. We, even here in the diaspora need to learn to trust each other, love each other and be responsible for one another and we can draw these lessons from a tradition that sees us as the illuminators of the world, or at least, our dark little corner of it. Let us replace our corpses in their graves, honour them, and concentrate our efforts upon the living. That is as good an end of year’s resolution as any, lest we lament like Macbeth: “Had I but died an hour before this chance, I had lived a blessed time; for, from this instant, There 's nothing serious in mortality: All is but toys: renown and grace is dead; The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees Is left this vault to brag of.”
KAΛΑ ΧΡΙΣΤΟΥΓΕΝΝΑ

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on 21 December 2009

ICONODUELS

Quite frankly, if anyone is to blame, it is not the mindless godless minions of the European Union who in their inexorable quest to impose uniformity upon the diverse nations labouring under their sway, threaten to reduce the multicultural mosaic of the continent to blandness. No, in truth, blame must be laid squarely upon the porphyry-clad feet of the august Byzantine Emperor Leo III the Isaurian. For it was he, who sometime between 726-730, ordered the removal of an image of Christ prominently placed over the Chalke Gate, the ceremonial entrance to the Great Palace of Constantinople, and its replacement with a cross. Writings suggest that at least part of the reason for the removal may have been military reversals against the Muslims and the eruption of the volcanic island of Thera, which Leo possibly viewed as evidence of the wrath of God brought on by over-the-top image veneration in the Church. The Emperor is said to have described mere image veneration as "a craft of idolatry,” and apparently forbade the veneration of religious images in a 730 edict, which did not apply to other forms of art, including the image of the emperor, or religious symbols such as the cross. He saw no need to consult the Church, and he appears to have been surprised by the depth of the popular opposition he encountered.
This opposition enmeshed the Empire in throes of controversy. People, including clerics and royalty were variously persecuted and mutilated for their support of, or opposition to icons. The upshot to the whole controversy was a brilliant exposition of the place of icons on the Orthodox Church penned by St John of Damascus, a noted iconodule, in which icons are instrumental in depicting the Incarnation, and finally, the official restoration of icons in 843. So important is this event, that it is celebrated even today, in the annual Sunday of Orthodoxy, where the congregation joins the priest in a procession around the church, holding their icons triumphantly.
Vestiges of the iconoclastic controversy still remain. In the church of St Irene in Constantinople, for instance, once can see in the apse, how the surviving cross was mosaiced over an icon of the Panayia. This notwithstanding, icons are all-pervasive in Greece. They appear everywhere from street-corner shrines, to car dashboards, key-rings and court-rooms, shops and classrooms. As such, they form an inextricable part of our culture. The various legends that periodically arise about the miraculous properties of certain icons, the public consternation that is evidenced when particularly beloved icons are stolen or damaged and the mass veneration still afforded to such icons as those of the Panayia in Tinos, or Panagia Soumela attest to their continued intrinsic importance to the Modern Greek people.
It is for this reason, that the recent ban on crucifixes in classrooms in Italy, as a result of a November 3 ruling by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) that the presence of crucifixes in a classroom in Italy violated a child's right to freedom of religion has so jarred both the Greek Church, and the people of Greece generally. The European Court of Human Rights found that the compulsory display of crucifixes violated parents' rights to educate their children as they saw fit and restricted the right of children to believe or not to believe. To a society that holds its religious symbols also as national ones, the prospect of the removal of these from the apparatus of the State seems a most frightening one.
Experts fear that the decision by the ECHR could result in the removal of all public displays of Christian symbols in public buildings throughout the member countries of the European Union under provisions of the newly-passed Lisbon Treaty. The Italian ruling effectively incorporates the European Convention on Human Rights into European law. Given the inter-relationship of the ECHR, the Lisbon Treaty and the European Convention on Human Rights, “unless the European Court of Human Rights overrules itself on appeal, Italy, and indeed the rest of Europe, has a serious problem.” If an appeal by Italy to the ECHR fails, Italy’s only resort would be an unlikely separation from the EU as a whole. As it stands now, Italy must report back to the court as to its efforts to remove the offending religious imagery from its public classrooms, courts, and other public venues. In Greek parliament recently, a member of the government, responding to a question by a member of the LAOS party, speculated that, given the Italian ruling, should it be pressed to do so, the government would be compelled to remove icons from classrooms.
This is because the Lisbon Treaty’s Declaration says clearly that the EU would have primacy over the laws of member states: “The Conference recalls that, in accordance with well settled case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union, the Treaties and the law adopted by the Union on the basis of the Treaties have primacy over the law of Member States, under the conditions laid down by the said case law.”
What is even more deeply disquieting is the fact that the demand for the removal of icons from classrooms seems not to come from any widely-held grass roots conviction that there is no place for religious articles such as icons in schools. Indeed, the vast majority of Greeks view the presence of such items as natural. Instead, pressure is imposed by extrinsic bodies, such as human rights groups like Helsinki Monitor, which has demanded that Greek courts remove icons of Jesus Christ from above the judge's bench and that the gospel no longer be used for swearing oaths in the witness box. Helsinki Monitor is also urging labour unions to challenge the presence of religious symbols in Greek schools.
As a conduit between east and west, our historical relationship with both cardinal directions has been a vexed one. Perennially under siege from the east, it was the west’s cultural imperialism, in the form of ecclesiastical expansionism, culminating in the Fourth Crusade, that is widely held to have cost the Greek people their freedom and, removed them for a considerable period of time, from the path of progress. Historical expressions such as “Better the Sultan’s turban and the Papal mitre,” indicate that as a people, we have deep-seated misgivings about the “West” and its benefits to Greece, despite our status as pensioners, I mean, members of the European Union. Unilateral and culturally insensitive applications of laws that offend the religious sensitivities of the vast majority of citizens of a nation threaten to damage the credibility and cohesiveness of the European Union. The ability of a few bureaucrats or jurists in Brussels to apply a broad-brushstroke approach to matters going to the heart of people’s identities, and in the process, disregarding thousands of years of history ought to be challenged and circumscribed.
Archbishop Ieronymos of Athens, as well as many Italian politicians are correct in stating that the court is ignoring the role of Christianity in forming Europe's identity. Bishop Nikolaos echoed the views of the majority of Greeks when he opined that without the religious icons young people will not have any worthy symbols to inspire and protect them. This is not quaint. I still have a small pocket icon of the Three Hierarchs that I took into each of my exams. My grandmother gave it to my father when he was at school and then to me. I in turn, have passed it on to my sister, whispering the secret of its operation: “Praying to the Three Hierarchs doesn’t help if you haven’t studied.” I also have a small icon of St Nikolaos, patron saint of travellers that my grandmother enjoined me to carry with me whenever I go overseas. Many of the people of my generation have had similar experiences. At Greek school, all my classrooms sported an icon above the blackboard, and a map of Greece, as does the classroom in which I now teach. Not all of us may subscribe to the doctrines or teachings of Christianity. The presence of icons in our daily lives may appear quaint, but it most cases, they have been instituted by people who love us and have sought to protect us in some way. Their religious importance aside, they represent warmth and continuity and are important to our public as well as private identity.
Greece is at this stage, far from being a secular culture akin to France, Germany or England. Religion, or at least the rituals of it, if not the doctrine, still forms an inextricable and significant part of the Modern Greek identity. In seeking to impose a uniform approach to matters of equal opportunity and rights, without regard to the unique socio-historical context of each country, the European Union threatens to destroy the diversity of culture that makes Europe unique in the first instance.
It is axiomatic that Modern Greece is increasingly becoming a culturally diverse country and that the rights of its minorities should be respected and protected. Forcing children to venerate icons would impinge upon those rights. However, the mere presence of icons in classrooms, reflecting the culture and religion of the majority of the Greek population and its importance to Modern Greeks does not.
At the end of the day, Europe seems still to be labouring under the Jacobinism of the French Revolution that saw traditional beliefs replaced with the State-imposed cult of Supreme Reason. The Greek people will not take this latest attempt at iconoclasm lightly. It will cause them once more, to question their position within Europe and within their own emerging East-Western identity. The process will not be without pain.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on 14 December 2009

HUBBLE BUBBLE TOIL AND TROUBLE

“It is when I sit in an AGM, listening to all the screaming and carrying on that goes on that I feel ashamed of being Greek.” First Generation Greek-Australian.
“I went to my first AGM the other day. Never again.” Second Generation Greek-Australian.

You wouldn’t know that bugger all students are choosing to study Modern Greek at VCE Level, their number declining rapidly over the past ten years. The media space devoted to yet another harbinger of our doom as a linguistic community is miniscule, and peppered with flimsy attempts to blame government policy, universities, anyone other than ourselves for this terminal decline.
The decline in student enrolments, is perhaps the most serious problem facing us as an entity today, for ethnic communities rely not so much upon shared racial characteristics to maintain cohesion, as they do upon a shared culture and language. Lose the language and you lose the main vehicle of cultural expression that underlies any attachment to an ethnic community. It may be argued, and in fact has been recently, in order to assuage our egos about our declining skills in the estranged mother tongue, that one does not have to speak the language in order to identify with the culture. However, if one can’t speak the language of that culture, then one will gradually become estranged from its thought processes and mores, to the extent where, communication with that culture and members of it will become impossible. As a consequence, identification with that culture will be gradually rendered impossible. The end result is assimilation, or in the best of cases, a Poseidonian identification with elements of a bygone culture that we merely re-enact, rather than live, and which we do not understand.
If you ask most of our community doyens however, the fact that marked and widespread language loss is occurring within the first generation’s life-time, does not seem to rate a concern. Instead, what is important is the perpetuation of the plotting and scheming which is a pre-requisite to an immersion in the byzantine world of internecine communal strife and petty politics. At a time when Greek schools, arks of the future, are in crisis, the letters pages of our print media are taken up in impassioned dissertations as to the magnitude of the inherent evil of various Pontian community ‘leaders.’ Further, in a scene reminiscent of Stanley Kubrick’s 1960’s blockbuster ‘Spartacus,’ diverse Pontic personages are purporting to be the legitimate committee of the Pontian Federation. If it is not the Pontians, then some other regional group will invariably find itself splashed across the pages of the papers, through the intercession of some righteously aggrieved member, performing a public service by outlining just how the non-disclosure of tens of dollars in an annual report or the omission to inform a committee about a certain act by its executive has placed the entire community in mortal peril. Once in a while, a fervent Christian will appeal to readers to reject the ways of this world and espouse Orthodoxy, while in riposte, fervent atheists, convinced that belief in religion is backward and that belief in nothing is downright intelligent and enlightened write in exposing the fallacies of their opponents and identifying in Christianity, the sole source of Hellenism’s problems.
Of late, the issue that has become the primary focus of the Greek community, is the upcoming elections within the Greek Orthodox Community of Melbourne and Victoria. This venerable organisation occupies a key position within our wider cosmos as unlike most of the community organisations that compromise “the community,” its basis of existence is not the region of origin of its members. As such, it is seen as widely representative, given that it comprises, (especially since the latest bout of branch-stacking), some 4,000 of the reputed 150,000 member strong Greek population of Melbourne. As such the GOCMV acts as a sort of Oracle of Delphi for the Melbourne Greeks and other, pettier organisations measure their legitimacy and status according to their relationship with it. Indeed, some organisations, especially those with a political aim, go so far as to claim a stake in the GOCMV, while the GOCMV itself is not averse to attempting to influence the governance of other organisations, in order to secure regimes more favourable to itself, quite akin to the manner in which the ancient Macedonian kingdom created client states for itself – that is, if the rumours are to be believed.
I once let myself be talked into nominating for the board of the GOCMV. At that time, I believed that the board, was like any other Greek board, where interested parties put up their hand to assist in the running of the organisation. A week after I nominated, I was advised that no place could be found for me on the ‘ticket,’ and was asked to withdraw my nomination which I duly did. Come the next elections, I was asked again to nominate for two different tickets diametrically opposed to each other. By now alert to the pitfalls of partisan politics, something that I abhor as something conducive to extreme nastiness, I cheerfully declined, though I note with amusement how even until recently, my name apparently appeared on various draft tickets. No, ticket evasion is the only way for a diatribist. We are after all, whiners, not fighters.
It is fascinating to watch the various political constellations, negotiate, batter each other, align and then fall apart again as egos, vested interests and idealism all condense into a critical mass that threatens to implode come every petty disagreement. The current period, in which the various parties position themselves in order to fight the election is absorbing. On the one hand, there is that perennial electoral favourite: continuing concern about the fate of the Greek government’s cheque that may or may not have been intended for Alphington Grammar. Last time around, the issue was where the cheque was. Now it is what it is used for.
Debate also raged among the gladiator pits of the Saint Dimitrios Parish hall among the stalwart community warriors with regard to resolving the vital question of whether to limit the Emperor’s reign over the Senate and People of Rome for two terms or not, as well as whether the leftist opposition and Trotskyite wreckers should be rehabilitated into the Party, or best left alone in case a Thermidorian reaction consigns all the sans-culottes into the guillotine. These stalwarts screamed, wailed and gnashed their teeth in the furtherance of the cause of their future and consequently, were afflicted with sore gums for days. Interestingly enough, the previous pole of differentiation, namely, the erection of a very large, very hard tower that would grant us amazing potency and ensure our longevity for aeons to come, appears to have, temporarily at least, drooped flaccidly to the wayside.
A brief plunging into the abysmal depths of various community haunts and one emerges dripping with damp and dank rumours about community presidents who are organising certain events in order to sabotage other organisations, at the behest of shadowy forces in the Greek Foreign Ministry, about opinionated doyens becoming so infuriated at certain obscure policies held by youth organisations that they set the media bloodhounds on them in an effort to cower them into the submission of conformity with their views. Then there is the story about a reversion to fisticuffs between members of a regional organisation as a consequence of a recent argument as to their stance on a certain “national issue” before an audience of youngsters, coupled by an impassioned observation by a significant community leader: “If you do not share my opinion, then you have no place in here.” Dem’s fightin’ words. And of course, there are the various rumours as to projected planetary alignments that will reconcile the zodiac and ensure that x rather than y becomes president of the Council of Greeks abroad. These rumours are most absorbing and only time will tell whether w will be able to really “get the numbers” as he says he will, to upstage v’s support of x and really cause an upset. It all depends on whether....
Where we were? Oh yes, Modern Greek VCE enrolments. Was that not what were we are talking about? I’m clicking my tongue in shame and disbelief at the parlous state of the Modern Greek language. How did this come about? I mean, we have so many schools, so many teachers, and is not Melbourne the third largest Greek city in the world? It can’t be that drastic that we can’t fix it. I mean, there are so many Greek organisations out there. I’m sure that if we got them all together in a mass forum or something, we can work out something with the government to get it all going again. But mark my words, if that man attends the forum after what that other guy said that he said about my organisation, then I am going to tell his president that I will make sure that the other organisations will never work with him ever again. Anyway, I hear that moves are afoot to remove him from his position. Apparently one of the factions in the GOCMV is demanding his removal and the way they are going about it is this........

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on 30 November 2009