ΚΗΔΕΙΑ

“I need to change my will,” the old man said, his eyes glistening. “I’ve just come from Thymio’s funeral.
In my experience, there is nothing like the loss of a friend to make one consider, not only mortality, but also the legal practicalities of life’s leave-taking.

“What do you want to change?” I asked, pretentious fountain pen at the ready.

“I want you to draft my will so that my properties won’t go to my son and daughter if they don’t give me a proper Orthodox funeral. If they bury me like a pig in a sack, as we say, they get nothing.” He tapped his fingers on the desk as if to drive home the point: “Nothing.”

“This is a problem,” I replied. “You have gifted all your properties to your kids seven years ago so that you could receive the pension. A gift is a gift. Your properties no longer belong to you and you no longer have any say in how they are disposed of.”

The old man frowned, his lips trembling: “Rubbish, they are mine. I still pay the mortgages. I don’t want to be thrown onto a fire like a barbeque. I struggled for those kids. I made sacrifices. I am entitled to some dignity. Not like poor Thymio.”

“What happened to Thymio?” I asked.

“Weren’t you at the funeral?”

I didn’t learn of Thymio’s passing until the day of his funeral and thus could not attend it. He was the only octogenarian that I have ever called by his first name, simply because he was too refined, too glamorous to be addressed as “barba” or “theio,” like the other elderly gents of our local community. With his sensitive, feline eyes, his aquiline nose and his immense height, he exuded the cosmopolitan air of the true Alexandrine.

On a weekly basis, I would run into him at our local shopping strip, impeccably dressed in suit and tie, choosing fruit with the distracted tragic air of a Byronic hero. Upon entering his field of vision, he would emit great yawps of triumph: “It’s Σερ Ουίλκινσον!” he would cry and promptly commence quoting verse after verse of Cavafy’s poem “A Byzantine Nobleman in Exile Composing Verses”: “The frivolous can call me frivolous. I’ve always been most punctilious about important things. And I insist that no one knows better than I do the Holy Fathers, or the Scriptures, or the Canons of the Councils.”

Apparently, as he once explained to a bystander, I was as phlegmatic and emotionless as an Englishman with a title, hence my sobriquet, and he should know, for in Alexandria, he had known plenty.

During Holy Week, Thymio was never in church like the rest of us. Instead, we would find him, walking down the main street, holding the service book of the Great and Holy Week in his hand, weeping ecstatically. “Behold, the bridegroom is coming,” he would proclaim, as I walked past him, shoving the service book under my nose: “Today he who hung the earth upon the waters is hung upon a Tree/ He who is King of the Angels is arrayed in a crown of thorns./ He who wraps the heaven in clouds is wrapped in mocking purple./ He who freed Adam in the Jordan receives a blow on the face.” Grasping the lapel of my jacket for emphasis, he would cry: “Such poetry, such a language! In all of the seven languages I know, no other can convey sweet sorrow in such a poignant way. We even have a word for it, χαρμολύπη. What beauty there is in sadness.”

The local Greek old men, hardened by adversity and age, would shake their heads in incredulity. “What is he raving about now?” one would ask. “If you ask me, he is a poofter,” another would respond. “Have you seen his garden? It’s overgrown with weeds. He is completely useless. Can’t even grow a tomato. His brain is only good for talking rubbish.” Taking me aside, they would advise: “Son, stay away from that man. He is not like us – he doesn’t come from a village and understands nothing about life. There is nothing you can learn from him. If you hang around him, you will get a bad name.”

"Scum, all of these Alexandrians, scum," another would pronounce, meticulously divesting his ear of wax with the overgrown nail of his little finger. "They all became foremen and ratted on the workers for the bosses because they spoke English. Class traitors all of them."

Nonetheless, even they were in awe of Thymio, because as they told me, he was an architect. it was common knowledge that all architects were Freemasons and as a result had powerful and malevolent connections. "Keep away, son, keep away," they enjoined.

Yet how could I stay away from someone who, upon one’s approach to his home, could hear him on the back verandah singing in his rich baritone, Mozart’s Aria from the Marriage of Figaro? “Non più andrai, farfallone amoroso, notte e giorno d'intorno girando…” Or remove myself from someone who had autographed copies of first editions of the works of famous modern Greek poets and musicians stacked casually upon stacks upon stacks of books, LP’s and periodicals lining the walls of his study, all the while threatening to topple onto his desk, as regaled me with apocryphal stories about their erotic proclivities?

Thymio would push away the authentic Ancient Egyptian shabtis lined up fastidiously on his desk as he selected a disc and placed it on the gramophone. Invariably, the voice of Egyptian singer Oum Kalthoum would emerge, saturating the room in its musk. Thymios, eyes closed, seated in his armchair in a dressing gown, would stroke his goatee and be transported: “Kollina, Kollina fi ilhobi sawa wilhawa, ah minno ilhawa Ilhawa, ah minno Ilhawa, ah minno Ilhawa, aaah minno Ilhawa…” he would croon.

“Shut up dad, I need to practice,” a boyish voice coming from the next room would interpose itself upon his cadences, and the sound of an oboe would begin to seep through under the door.

“All of us, all of us are in love all together, and passion, ahhh from the passion, ahhh from the passion, ahhh from the passion,” Thymios would translate, chortling at his attempts to transpose his faultless English to the rhythm of Oum Kalthoum’s Arabic.

«Πήγαινε να κόψεις το χορτάρι έξω που έχει φυτρώσει ως το μπόι σου και άσε τους έρωτες,» κυρά Θύμιαινα, would cut in abruptly, mop and bucket perennially in hand, accompanied by an unchanging angry expression.

“Alf Layla W Layla,” Thymios would exclaim, “One thousand and one nights, or one thousand and one years with this woman. But what a woman she was in Iskenderiya! What a woman! Χαρμολύπη σκέτη!”
“Go and cut the grass Thymio!” κυρά Θύμιανα’s voice would achieve a shrill scream, of an intensity that Munch would be hard pressed to emulate, and I would know it was time my visit was ended. As I would walk away, I would cock my ear, so I could hear Thymio chant, as he attempted, always unsuccessfully to start the mower, the ninth ode of the Akathist Hymn: «Άπας γηγενής, σκιρτάτω τω πνεύματι λαμπαδουχούμενος· πανηγυριζέτω δε...» (“Let every mortal born on earth with festive lamps in hand, in spirit leap for joy.”)
The vicissitudes of life somehow found a way to interpose themselves between Thymio and I in the years that followed. No longer present at the fruit shop, it was rumoured among the local old ladies, that his wife had thrown him out of the house, among the local old men that he had found a Vietnamese gay lover and had moved to South Yarra, and among others, that his reclusive wife had died, he had become afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease and had been placed by his children, unable, or unwilling to tend to him in his illness, in care.
“You don’t understand,” the old man shattered my revierie. “Do you know what they did? They burnt him. Like a pile of wood. No priests, no chanting. Πήγε άψαλτος. Even puppies get a better burial. And then his shameless children, who should have been strangled at birth, went to a restaurant with their friends. Apparently this is what they do now. Go to a restaurant and eat, and remember the dead and then they sang his favourite song.”
“What was it?” I asked. 
«Ξέρω εγώ;» he responded. “Something called Amazing Greece. Doesn’t even make sense, he was from Alexandria.” 
“You probably mean Amazing Grace,” I corrected him, vainly attempting to stifle a chuckle.
“Are you mocking?” the old man snarled. “I won’t be made fun of. Not by you, nor my kids. I don’t want to go like that. Write in the will that I want a proper funeral so I can meet my maker like σαν κύριος, όχι σαν γυφτο-αιγύπτιος. I won’t be farewelled with lattes and chardonnay. I want my people to cry over me in my grave. If they don’t give me that respect, they lose everything.”
“Look,” I assumed my most emollient air. “I’m not making fun of you. But you need to know that it is you who have nothing, having given them everything. Unfortunately, you are in no position to dictate terms.”
“And this is funny?”

“No, I wasn’t laughing at you. I was just thinking how ill fitting Amazing Grace is for Thymio. Now, if I could have it my way, at my funeral, as my pagan children throw logs upon my pyre and my soul begins to smoulder, I would ask the Lord to bring Thymios back solely to sing me away with the Non più andrai Aria he so loved: “You shall frolic no more, lustful butterfly, Day and night flitting to and fro; Disturbing ladies in their sleep/ Little Narcissus, Adonis of love.” I shrugged. “Maybe then it would be somewhat bearable.”

«E, τέτοιος μαλάκας σαν κι αυτόν είσαι κι εσύ,» the old man spat and stormed out of the room, slamming the door behind him, twice, for emphasis.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 17 September 2016

SMYRNA UNPUNISHED

“What thou seest, write in a book, and send it unto the seven churches which are in Asia; unto Ephesus, and unto Smyrna, and unto Pergamos, and unto Thyatira, and unto Sardis, and unto Philadelphia, and unto Laodicea.”

The Seven Churches mentioned in the Apocalypse of St John no longer exist. They were methodically destroyed in a campaign of genocide lasting several decades but culminating in the Apocalyptic conflagration of Smyrna in September 1922. Greeks call this, the Asia Minor Catastrophe. Seemingly inexplicably, they traditionally distinguish between this “Catastrophe” and the Pontian Genocide, even though they form but parts of a broader plan to acts committed by the Ottomans and later, nationalist troops and irregulars with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, the Greeks of Anatolia by (a) Killing (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm; (c) Deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the Greek’s physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births by the Greeks of Anatolia; (e) Forcibly transferring  their children to another group, that of muslim Kurds an Turks.

The aforementioned acts, of which were committed against the Greek of Anatolia fall within the definition of the crime of genocide, as adopted by the UN General Assembly in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in 1948.

The perpetrators of course, and their successors, have denied that any genocide took place. Instead, they have been able to form the framework of the narrative, one that sees a modern secular Turkey emerge from a backward past, emancipating itself from the shackles of colonialism and imperialism. According to this narrative, the genocide of the Greeks is downplayed by the orientalist west as collateral damage arising out of an internecine squabble between Middle Eastern groups, or anachronistically considered a bit of tit for tat, for what is deemed to be the Greek “invasion,” of Anatolia, which is ridiculous and inordinately hurtful, considering that this particular genocide commenced decades before the Greco-Turkish war.

Consequently, it is instructive, in the face of Modern Turkish denial, in concert with their western apologists, to consider the thought processes of the perpetrators themselves. Talaat Bey, Minister of the Interior and one of the ruling triumvirate of the Young-Turks who created the constructed and implemented a policy of genocide in the Ottoman Empire, had this to say in 1914:

“It is urgent for political reasons that the Greeks living on the coast of Asia Minor are obliged to evacuate their villages and to settle in the vilayets of Erzeroum and Chaldea. If they should refuse to be transported to the places indicated, you will like to give verbal instructions to our Moslem brothers, in order to oblige the Greeks, by excesses of any kind, to emigrate themselves of their own accord.  Do not forget to obtain, in this case, certificates stating these immigrants leave their homes of their own initiative, so that later political questions do not result from it.”

Greece was not an initial belligerent in the First World War. In fact, one of the major reasons why the king of the time wished to keep Greece neutral was because of his concern that the slaughter and forced removal of the native Greek population of Asia Minor, already well underway while Greece was at peace with the Ottoman Empire, would increase in scope and severity, as a result of Greece’s entry into the war.

There seems to have been some sort of apocalyptic sense of a necessary and urgent final showdown among Ottoman officials and policy makers which informed the perpetration of genocide. As far back as 1909, just a year after the Young-Turks proclaimed the equality and brotherhood of all races and creeds within the Ottoman Empire, General Mahmut Şevket Paşa, the Ottoman Commander-in-Chief, told the Ecumencial Orthodox Patriarch Ioakeim III: "We will cut off your heads, we will make you all disappear. Either we will survive or you."

Talaat Bey also mirrored these ‘final solution’ type sentiments in his own utterances, commenting in January 1917 (again prior to Greece’s entry into the First World War): "... I see that time has come for Turkey to have it out with the Greeks the way it had it out with the Armenians in 1915."

Rafet Bey, a prominent member of the Young-Turk movement, informed Dr. Ernst von Kwiatkowski, the Austro-Hungarian consul in the Pontic city of Samsounta in November 1916:"We must at last do with the Greeks as we did with the Armenians...” Two days later, he informed Consul Kwiatkowski: "We must now finish with the Greeks. I sent today battalions to the outskirts to kill every Greek they pass on the road." According to the London Post on 5 December 1918, he was if anything, efficient: "Rafet Pasha, the late Governor of Bitlis, was sent to Samsoun with express orders to become a scourge to the Greeks. He did the work thoroughly. Over a hundred and fifty thousand were deported in this district and in Trebizond."

Damad Ferid Paşa the Ottoman Turkish Grand Vizier, was one of the few official to describe Turkey's policy of extermination against the Christians in June 1919 at the Paris Peace Conference as crimes: "... such as to make the conscience of mankind shudder with horror forever." Nonetheless, regime change meant that his solemn and sensitive admission was discounted and later explained away as a product of western compulsion.

For the genocide did not cease with the fall of the Young Turk movement and the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in the Second World War. Instead, old perpetrators, rebaptized as Kemalists, continued their heinous crimes under the guise of a newfound patriotism. The American Stanley E. Hopkins, an employee of the Near East Relief, wrote on 16 November 1921:

“… the Greeks of Anatolia are suffering the same or worse fate than did the Armenians in the massacres of the Great War. The deportation of the Greeks is not limited to the Black Sea Coast but is being carried out throughout the whole of the country governed by the Nationalists. The purpose is unquestionably to destroy all Greeks in that territory and to leave Turkey for the Turks. These deportations are, of course, accompanied by cruelties of every form just as was true in the case of the Armenian deportations five and six years ago.”

By this stage, Greece had occupied Smyrna, at the behest of the Allies. Greek Prime Minister Venizelos sought territorial concessions in Asia Minor, which were granted on a conditional basis and with grave misgivings by the World Powers, for they doubted the Greek State’s capacity to police the areas under its control and maintain stability. It is important to note that the plight of the Anatolia Greeks barely rated a mention in anyone’s considerations. Poorly resourced and unable to quell Turkish unrest in the areas under Greek administration, the Greek army was forced to march deeper and deeper into the Anatolian hinterland in order to quash the Kemalists. The World Powers formally abandoned their support for Greece after a democratically achieved change of government in that country and Kemal’s army emerged victorious, sweeping the Greek Army out of Asia Minor, and committing depravities on the native Greeks of Anatolia who were also compelled to leave their homelands.

Kemal was subtle, a brilliant tactician and a masterful politician, which, despite the ruthless manner in which he stifled democratic dissent among his own people, is why  he is seen as such an attractive figure among western historians and politicians. For them, the fact that he created a supposedly secular Turkey and “modernized the alphabet” (restricting future generations from access to their past) is seen as praiseworthy and massacres of opponents or the fate of the Christians of Anatolia, are either discounted, denied and explained away. Thus, while French military colonel Mougin, may claim that on 13 August 1923 in the Turkish Grand National Assembly, Mustafa Kemal declared: "At last we've uprooted the Greeks ...", in an interview with Swiss journalist Emile Hilderbrand, published on Sunday 1 August 1926 in the Los Angeles Examiner under the title "Kemal Promises More Hangings of Political Antagonists in Turkey", Mustafa seems to express outrage at the fate of the Christians: “These left-overs from the former Young Turkey Party, who should have been made to account for the lives of millions of our Christian subjects who were ruthlessly driven en masse, from their homes and massacred, have been restive under the Republican rule.”

Almost one hundred years after the Holocaust of Smyrna brought to an end over 3,000 years of Greek civilization in Anatolia, realpolitik has seen the World Powers, shift from a position of openly condemning the genocide, (Winston Churchill in his memoirs wrote: “... Mustapha Kemal's Army ... celebrated their triumph by the burning of Smyrna to ashes and by a vast massacre of its Christian population...”) to blatantly not seeking to disturb Turkey with any mention of this terrible crime against humanity. The legacy of such a policy has been to send the message to other genocidal regimes that despite the rhetoric of the United Nations, crimes of this nature can and will go unpunished.

Proof of this is that while the US has recognized that the current crimes against Christians perpetrated by ISIS in Syria and Iraq are tantamount to genocide and indeed, are merely just another more recent continuation of the genocide commenced by the Ottomans, they did nothing to prevent it from taking place.

In a world where modern Great Powers wreath their rapacity or self-interest in buzz-words, little peoples and their plight are still given as short shrift as those that suffered in Anatolia so many years before, and we can cynically pick and choose which perpetrators to punish, and which ones we can protect, in exchange for their oil, their bases or their influence. Yet the unwillingness of those Powers to confront such crimes, condemn them and bring pressure upon the perpetrators and their successors to accept responsibility, is a major threat to world peace today and a blight upon the legacies of the innocent Greeks slaughtered in the Catastrophe of the Anatolian Genocide.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday, 10 September 2016

GOODY'S GOODY'S YUM YUM

Many years ago, when first invited to eat at Goody’s, I was enraptured, labouring as I was under the misapprehension that in fact, I was being conveyed to a BBC ‘Goodies’ themed restaurant, where cardboard representations of Tim Brooke-Taylor, Graeme Garden and Bill Oddie would greet me with the slogan: "We Do Anything, Anytime, Anywhere," one which resonated with me, as I was a perpetually hungry student at the time, and possessed of a surprisingly similar world-view. 

As I walked through the streets of Ioannina, salivating, I mentally re-imagined various Goodies episodes to fit in with my environment. In particular, I recall daydreaming that the entire black population of South Africa had emigrated to Ioannina to escape apartheid. As this meant that the white South Africans no longer had anyone to exploit and oppress, they in turn, introduced a new system called "apart-height", where short people (being the entire Greek migrant population) were discriminated against. The scenario ended in classic Goodies’ fashion, with the short Greeks migrating to New Zealand and reconfiguring the haka to the beat of the tsamiko, as the whole of the North Island sank within the Pacific Ocean, under the weight of their egos.

Goody’s at Ioannina was nothing like that, neither was the Athenian Goody’s I compelled to patronise a week later. Indeed, I was incensed to find out that at no Goody’s I entered then, or ever since, had anyone ever heard of the real Goodies, their denial of any and all knowledge of the aforementioned giving rise within me, to reasonable suspicion that the forces of evil had in fact, as part of a Goodies episode, immured the three Goodies within the walls of the establishment, and were now nonchalantly feigning ignorance. Somewhere between the “extreme clubs” (a fascist metaphor if I ever saw one), and the Pita Goody’s, which is something I suspect, would be the result of a Goodies steamroller rampaging through any given franchise, lies the truth.

Having frequented all of the Ioannina eateries purveying delectable ῾φαγητά της ώρας,᾽ such as giouvetsi and giouvarlakia, which are as close to home cooking as one could possibly purchase publicly, replete with thick sauces that could be mopped up with the unlimited slices of bread provided, I was not particularly impressed with the diminutive ᾽κλαμπ σάντουιτς᾽ that was placed in front of me. 

Furthermore, there was something reassuring about the old lady doling out the giouvetsi a my favourite haunt asking me: ᾽Τι να σ᾽βάνω μωρ᾽ μάνα᾽μ; and tapping my shoulder exclaiming: ῾Φάε παshά᾽μ φάε,᾽ as I reached for my third basket of bread. At Goody's by contrast, back in those times, all we received was a barely audible grunt from the cashier, whereas in my last Goody’s foray, I received a dazzling white smile, so forced in its intensity that I marveled that the heavily foundation layered cheeks that had delivered it, had not cracked, nor that the ᾽Kαλή σας όρεξη,᾽ enunciated with the enthusiasm of a Subway television commercial extra, did not turn into ash in both our mouths.

Nonetheless I raised a dispassionate hand to grasp my glorified sandwich while my host looked upon me with horror. Through gritted teeth, he spat, sotto voce: “You do NOT eat club sandwiches with your hands. Where do you think you are? This is Goody’s. Use your knife and fork.” The next time I visited Ioannina, we steered well clear of Goody’s, to which, my friend determined, I was decidedly unsuited. In its stead, he pointed me in the general direction of a patstzidiko and, ever since, replete with memories of tripe and garlic, I remain eternally in his debt.

Having reconciled myself to the fact that Modern Helladic Greeks tend to lack appreciation of the subtle art of nonsense that would render the Goodies intelligible to them, my next memorable Goody's foray took place in Athens, where, seated among a group of people who proclaimed themselves intellectuals, I was treated to a fascinating discussion about Goody’s, being a Greek-owned company, representing the forces of local resistance against the evils of globalization and multinationals. One particularly eloquent member of the symposium, carefully removing the frilly toothpick from his ᾽κλαμπ σάντουιτς᾽ in order to carefully, methodically and in full view of all his friends, attend to the void between his teeth, went so far as to opine that in this day and age, when it is not in the interests of the plutocrats to assert themselves through wars, economic resistance was the only way in which to oppose the Western juggernaut. This was of course, prior to the second invasion of Iraq. 

Had I known then, what I know now, that is, that the Goody’s franchise has not only managed to dominate the Greek market at the expense of other multinational behemoths, that it has not only been the subject of New York-style hostile corporate takeovers, but it has also carefully, and cautiously extended its sway into such countries as Cyprus, Albania, FYROM, Mayotte, Australia and soon, the break-away state of Kosovo and Saudi Arabia, thus indulging in a little of that globalisation my interlocutors so denounced, I would have pointed this out to all present in tones as strident as the potato chips and the eye-wateringly delicious burger stuffing my mouth would have permitted me so to do. As it stands, globalisation is, for the modern Greek ideologue, a terrible thing, unless we are doing it, in which case, we are merely fulfilling our destiny. Look at Alexander for instance.

Scintillating discussion aside, that particular Goody’s experience was notable as well for the foray into the store, of some particularly ebullient Greek –Australians who proceeded to make such comments in inordinately voluble English as: “Shoulda gone ta Macca’s,” (prompting one of our party, who was an English teacher to ask me if I knew which language they were speaking,) trying to recite the ingredients of the Big Mac, “Two all beef, patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese….” before lapsing into a rousing chorus of “Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, Oi, oi, oi.” I cringed, culturally of course before exiting the premises with them, onto Omonoia, where I harassed, for their amusement, a hapless policeman with the question: “Excuse me sir, can you tell me where Omonoia Square is?” When he replied “here,” I responded with indignation, pointing to the decrepit roundabout before us: “Come on man, this is a circle, how can it be a square?” Much majesty arises therefore, in the trivial outcomes of the marriage of Goody’s and Greek-Australians.

Now that Goody’s is made manifest among us in the heart of our own Greek-Australian community, let none deride it as a mere western imitation. Let no one ask how its Angus burger range, which include the ‘Texas BBQ’ and ‘Red Hot Chili Burger’ (affectionately known among Greek-Australians from Northern Greece as the ‘boukovo,’) are in any way connected with Greece. Goody’s cuisine notwithstanding, is the personification of Greece in ways subtle and unsuspecting. It even reflects the demography of that country and its phenomenon of mass migration to the cities, with seventy-two of its one hundred and seventy two Greek stores being located in Athens. Its very name precludes negativity and directly refers to the Ancient Greek quest for beauty: το καλόν. It, like Ancient Greece itself, is an ideal, and thus occupies a exalted space far beyond the decay of this chthonic world.

More importantly, rather than aping the western culinary and marketing traditions of corporate entities that in reality constitute a vanguard for global domination by rapacious, capitalist world powers, Goody's represents something profound and exciting. It is, by its very existence, Modern Greece's riposte to the west for appropriating Ancient Greek culture, with all its constituent ingredients (theatre, democracy, philosophy, history……(to be recited with the same tune as “two all beef patties”) and culturally trademarking them, so that they in turn, market them back to us, and dictate to us the terms in which we will receive (and pay for) them. 

Now, at long last, we in turn, millenia later, have, through Goody’s genius, been able to appropriate aspects of Western cuisine, assimilate them within the Greek zeitgeist and make them so much our own, that to consider a Modern Greek state without the institution of Goody’s would be unfathomable. I can almost hear my Greek ideologue friends of yore crow triumphantly: “Take that, evil westerners, ye of the memoranda, the troika, the usurpers of Bretton-Woods, unspeakable fiscal water-boarders of the IMF quagmire from which you were filthily spawned, your burgers are ours!” 

Put simply, it is the patriotic duty of every single Greek-Australian to get their Greek on and tweak the nose of our oppressors by purchasing not one, but two κλαμπ σάντουιτς from Goody’s. And I eagerly look forward to the day when, to paraphrase Charles Kuralt, we can navigate our way through this most Greek of cities, using Goody’s burger establishments, as a navigator uses the stars.

DEAN KALIMNIOU.

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in Neos Kosmos on 3 September 2016