ODISHO'S CHRISTMAS ODYSSEY

Even before I reach Odisho’s front door, my ears are assailed by the sound of Giorgos Dalaras’ voice emanating from beyond threshold: «Μες το μαχαλά, πέφτει κουμπουριά…» Then, the sound of shuffling and a heavy voice struggles to be heard over the music: «Εντάξει, περίμενε ρε φίλε, σού ανοίγω τώρα,» aspirating the s.

As the door opens, Odisho’s broad white grin is blinding. He bears in his hand a bottle of ouzo. «Χρόνια πολλά βρε φίλε! Έλα να πιεις ούζο.» Being led down the hallway and into the dining room, I note the conspicuously mounted Greek souvenir plates, the statues of the Greek gods on the buffet and a bouzouki hanging nonchalantly next to an unremarkable print of a non-descript blue and white church on some non-descript Greek island, all of which populates many a Greek home in Melbourne and which should not cause the eyebrow to be raised here, save that Odisho is manifestly not Greek, but Assyrian.

Every year, close to Christmas, Odisho and his nostalgic Assyrian friends, who lived in Greece in the late seventies and early eighties, prior to their emigration to Australia, get together to have a pre-Christmas dinner. The sole purpose of that dinner is to reminisce about a Greece that is inextricably linked to their lost youth. They mouth Greek phrases and speak to each other in nineteen eighties Greek, all the while drinking ouzo and playing the music that was popular in Greece during the time of their sojourn there, in order to evoke that era. My sporadic presence at these Poseidonian rituals, in some bizarre way, legitimizes them, for as a speaker of broken Assyrian, and as a Greek-Australian who did not experience Greece in the period in which my convivial diners were there present, I lend the solemn proceedings, a modicum of ersatz authenticity.

Tonight is different from other nights, however, because as Yiannis Parios’ «Να μ’ αγαπάς τώρα,» is allowed to play out its final grace notes, Odisho finally reveals to us how he got to Greece in the first place, in time to celebrate his first Christmas there:

“It was 1976. I wanted to leave Iraq to go to Greece, and I was a student. I went to the passport office and in those days, the forms were so complicated, that there were professional scribes with typewriters set up outside the office to assist people with their applications. I approached one and he asked me: 
“What do you do?”
“I’m a student,” I responded.
“That’s not good. They will never let you out if you are a student,” he shook his head knowledgeably. “Do you do anything else? What else can I write?”
“I don’t know, you are the professional. You write whatever you think is necessary,” I replied, in turn.

He wrote something on the form and told me to take it in to the passport office, where I would be interviewed. For some time I waited in the office, until an army colonel marched up to me briskly. 
“Follow me, young man,” he ordered.
I stood to attention and saluted him, as was the custom and gave him my papers. He pored over them diligently, his brow growing increasingly furrowed as he scanned down the page. Suddenly, he stopped.
“What is this? You are unemployed?” he asked.
“No, sir, I am a student,” I responded, still standing to attention.
“A student, do you say? Then why have you written that you are unemployed?”
“I…..”
“Go and tell the idiot who helped you fill out this form to change this to ‘worker’ and come back here at once,” he barked.

I did as I was told and returned a half an hour later, submitting the amended documents to the colonel.

“Ah, see that’s better,” the colonel beamed. “Now when you go abroad, the foreigners will have respect for you and for Iraq. Who would respect a country full of the unemployed? Bon Voyage.”

As it turns out, I did not make it to Greece at that time. In those days, visas were issued on the day of travel by the Greek embassy and a series of mishaps intervened that resulted in me missing my flight. At the commencement of the Iran-Iraq War, travel restrictions were instituted and I could not get out. As things worsened in the country, I left Iraq illegally through Turkey and stayed in Istanbul. From there I tried on seven separate occasions to cross into Greece over the Thracian border, but each time, we would be caught either by Greek or Turkish border guards. However, you will find my last attempt interesting.

It was Christmas Eve. We three, [he points to another two of our fellow diners] had just crossed the border just after midnight and as the people smugglers had taught us, we were inflating a rubber dinghy which we were going to us to cross a river. We managed to get all of our party across safely when the guards found us. They took us to an outpost. On the way, they questioned us about our nationality and our religious affiliations. I pulled out my cross and showed it to them. “Jesus, Christmas,” I told him.

Taking me aside, one the guards whispered: “Look, I recognize you. You’ve tried to come this way before. I’m sorry but I have to take you to my commanding officer. Just be wary of one thing. If he asks you where you came from, do NOT, under any circumstances say Istanbul. You say Κωνσταντινούπολη. Can you say it? Say it with me slowly. Make sure you don’t forget. It’s important.”

When we arrived at the outpost, there was no one on duty. Instead, we could hear the radio blaring and a lot of voices singing. The guards were having a Christmas party and were blind drunk. We were taken before the commanding officer, a squat, bald man with a thin moustache. Teary eyed, cheeks flushed crimson with alcohol, he shouted: 

“What animals are these?”
He staggered off his chair, and poked his swollen face into mine. Reeling even closer towards me, he coughed:
“Where did you come from?”
“I…iii”
“Λέγε. Where did you come from?”
“Ist….”

I had a mental blank. I could not remember how to pronounce the word the guard had told me and was terrified we would be beaten and sent back.

“Tell me now you animal,” the commanding officer screamed.
“ K,,, Kostadinopoli,” I stammered, finally.

“Of course you did palikari,” he crowed triumphantly. “You came from our city but those filthy Turks have taken it from us. But the time will come when the city will be ours and the Turks will be sent back to the Red Apple Tree….” He walked away, only to turn back and command indifferently: “Let them go. It’s Christmas. Χρόνια πολλά. Ο Θεός μαζίσας.” That was the first time in my life that I could celebrate Christmas openly. I was alone, but ecstatic.

I celebrated six wonderful Christmases in Aegaleo, and was the last of my friends to leave Greece. When I arrived at Melbourne Airport, just before Christmas, they all came to greet me, all of these guys sitting around the table here today. But what type of welcome do you think I received? As soon as I walked through the doors, they started yelling at me: “What are you doing? Are you crazy? Go back! Greece is far better.” And it is true. There is no place like Greece. The years we spent there are golden.”

We listen to some of Mitropanos’ early songs and they ask me whether I am familiar with the type of music a certain group of Greek musicians used to play at the Retreat Hotel. I gasp. “You mean Apodimi Compania? How do you know them?” Odisho and his band of Greek nostalgics then reflect upon how important the rebetiko outfit “Apodimi Compania” was in making them feel at home and adjust to their new life in Melbourne. Week after week, they would visit the Retreat Hotel, listen to Apodimi play and contextualise their own experience of double ξενιτιά. I extract an early Apodimi Compania CD from my car and begin to play it. I am unsurprised to note that they know all the words by heart. For this is Apodimi's greatest achievement: to manage to touch the hearts of all who heard them, regardless of ethnicity and to help them find, in their interpretation of rebetika, a common human denominator.

As his friends attempt to execute a rather wobbly zeimbekiko to the strains of a karsilama, I help Odisho to wash the dishes. One slips out of his hands and smashes on the tiles below. Immediately, the dancers whoop: «Σπάσ’τα! Σπάσ’τα!» One of the revelers, looking distracted for a moment as if he had lost his car keys, tentatively offered: «Γούρι;» When I nodded, he beamed at the affirmation.

It was only when Thanos Petrelis’ «Θυμίζεις κάτι από Ελλάδα,» made itself manifest upon Odisho’s playlist that I determined it was an opportune time to leave. I farewelled the party in Assyrian, and they responded to me in Greek. «Αχ βρε φίλε,» Odisho sighed. «Η Ελλάδα είναι μόνο μία. Καλά Χριστόυγεννα. Και του χρόνου στην Ελλάδα» And we both turned away, so that his tears could not be seen.
DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 23 December 2017

THE HELLENISATION OF CHRISTMAS IN MELBOURNE

It began when an outraged friend called me. “Have you seen the thing that purports to be a Christmas tree that the municipality has erected in Ioannina?” she spluttered. “It’s a cubist nightmare.”
As a matter of fact, I had seen pictures of it just minutes before and was enthralled. Comprised of sundry steel bars juxtaposed against each other so as to imply the branches of a Christmas tree, it was more of a constructivist’s erotic dream, eerily reminiscent of the sweeping curves caused by the geometric shapes, in its evocation of Vladimir Tatlin’s design for the Petrograd Monument to the Third International. Sadly, Tatlin’s Monument was never built and soon after, the Bolshevik aesthetic turned from the avant garde to the socialist realism of Stalinist neoclassicism. Inversely, in Ioannina, an Ottoman town, boasting Byzantine buildings, neoclassism was now being rejected in favour of soviet constructivism. I found this process breathtaking, and said so.

“You know it serves them right,” my friend’s diatribe continued, unabated. “These Greeks of Greece have lost all of their traditions. The Christmas tree itself is a western import that fits ill with the Greek psyche. No wonder that they take absurd artistic liberties with its form. They should display a boat, not a tree, at Christmas.”

If there is one part of the motherland where a Christmas tree is more fitting that a boat, then surely that is mountainous northern Greece. If the Epirots were to feature a Christmas boat, then surely it would have to be one of those low-riding canoe-cum longships, depicted by orientalist artist Louis Dupré that were once used to convey the infamous and prone to reclining Ali Pasha through, not Lake Pamvotis, as most inhabitants of Ioannina believe, but rather, Lake Lapsista, which no longer exists, as it has been drained. The Ioannitans generally deny that Lake Lapsista ever existed, which is cited by my friend as evidence of the historical and cultural dementia of the modern Greek. The Ioannitans, like all other Greeks, also seem to believe that the Greeks of down-under celebrate Christmas by the beach, a source of ever-lasting wonder to them.

Dementia or no, the village Epirots still retain tree-themed Christmas customs, generally involving parading through the streets bearing lit tree branches which crackle and sizzle, scaring the kallikantzaroi and the municipal fire brigade. In Ioannina, the populace would carry bay leaves to throw into the fireplaces of those to whom they sought (literally) to convey Christmas greetings. 

Having learned about this charming custom after spending my first Christmas in Greece, the Greek equivalent to bringing one’s own supply of beer to an Australian Christmas party, I resolved to transport it to Australia. None of us had fireplaces, it was the height of summer and when, adapting to local conditions, I threw a heap of bay leaves on my great-uncles’ barbeque while he was cooking chops, I earned a prodigious clout on the head, for though he was from Samos, a place where Christmas customs are not unknown, he had long forgotten them and concentrated instead on his superpower, which was, the ability to sense when a relative was coming to drop in unannounced at Christmas half an hour earlier, and to manage to have the barbeque lit and the chops cooking five minutes prior to their arrival.

“But that is the point,” my friend argued when treated to my reminisces. “We make conscious efforts to retain our customs in this country. The dehellenised Graeculoi of Greece do not.” 

When my father was a boy, growing up in Melbourne in the fifties, Christmas comprised of my grandfather taking him via the tram to the Sidney Meyer Music Bowl, to listen to the Carols by Candelight. Going to church was inconvenient owing to a paucity of public transport and so did not feature in the migrant celebrations at all, which consisted, primarily, of a barbeque. My grandmother, an epicurean who held strong convictions about denying oneself none of the pleasures of life, would make kourabiedes throughout the year. By the time I arrived on the scene, these progressively became so dry that eating more than one seriously placed one in peril of having all of their bodily fluids sucked out of them, just the thing for a hot Australian summer Christmas.

It was my mother, and my uncle, later arrivals who, upon marrying into the family and having respectively spent their first Christmases with the (to their horror) no-frills Kalimnioi, set about re-hellenising Christmas. My uncle constructed a wood oven in his backyard. All of a sudden, the traditional Samian Christmas fare of stuffed lamb shoulder made its presence upon our table. My mother introduced the family to melomakarona, (and Christmas fried rice) and my cousins and I introduced the compulsory singing of the generic Greek Christmas carols we learned at Greek school. As this custom proved to be quite lucrative, my uncle decided to put our show on the road. For a few years, we would spend Christmas Eve in the back of his van, driving around town, being trundled out at Samian households in order to perform the generic carols, (my grandmother tried to teach us some native Samian carols, involving Saint Basil being barred from entering a village because he couldn’t give the countersign, but for some reason the other Samians kept interjecting with their own lyrics) thus raising much needed capital in order to pay off the Samian Brotherhood’s clubhouse, which was sold recently. After a while, my cousins and I realised that our material was stale and at a general meeting, resolved to disband before we lost our coveted artistic integrity. I don’t think my uncle has ever forgiven us.

Nonetheless, my childhood Greek-Australian Christmas Day mainly consisted of: Opening presents under the Christmas tree, taking the obligatory calls from Greece, going to relatives’ houses to eat barbequed meat and then, while the adults went torpid in the aftermath of their feeding frenzy, and playing cricket in the backyard.

“Yet we still maintain the richness of our traditional heritage,” my friend insisted.

Somewhere along the line, we began to attend church on Christmas Day, and were seen as dangerous innovators. Moreover, we began to fast in the lead-up to the feast and also attended the epic traditional Greek Carol extravaganza staged annually by the Archdiocese. From somewhere, I procured a model ship, festooned it with small lights and this, juxtaposed against the Christmas tree, is the mother-ship that brings the Kalimnioi out of the Christmas season and ushers in the New Year. I decorated it with the flag of the Autonomous Republic of Northern Epirus, a short-lived state that never had a navy, at least, not until I came along. 

With the corporeal manifestation of my own progeny, I began to learn the specific carols particular to my places of origin, intoning these sonorously a month prior to Christmas so that said progeny could learn them by osmosis. I objected strenuously to the practice of eating turkey, championing instead, the ritual consumption of parts of the pig and cast out from my place of abode those well-meaning Greek-Australians who sought to defile my Hellenic Christmas by pestilentially proffering a panettone. By way of atonement, I sought out and learned to make the traditional Χριστόψωμο, which, viewed from a variety perspectives, is a more eastern version of the panettone, which is why I abjure the use of raisins. There is a profusion of reindeer, elves and Santas in our home this time of year. I allow them, as the Soviets allowed Christmas trees, by way of magnanimous compromise, until such time as Communism arrives, and the State, (or in my case non-Greek Christmas customs) withers away.

At my daughter’s Greek school Christmas party recently, the children sang the «Σπάργανα,» traditional carols of Epirus. One of the mothers, recently arrived from Greece asked me what these were. I explained that traditionally, the women of the village would get together, heat a hot flat stone on the fire and make pancakes on it while singing the carol, employing the pancakes as a symbol of Jesus’ swaddling clothes.

“See what I mean?” my friend exclaimed, when I related this to her. “She is an ‘off the boater’ and like most modern Greeks, she knows nothing about our traditions.” All I could see, on the other hand, was a person desperately missing Greece, facing the prospect of spending Christmas in a strange place, away from friends and family, trying valiantly to cling on to vestiges of lore that have suddenly become relevant in a way never before expected, and seeking information about them from someone who has never experienced them and only read about them in books. I, on the other hand don’t miss Greece. Instead, I fear missing the intrusion of any other tradition that would render my Christmas, any less Greek. 

I emerged the other day from the garage bearing a geometrical, spiral type contraption made out of garden wire, invoking, as I have been told later, Tatlin’s design for a Soviet suppository. 
“What is that?” my wife asked, incredulously.
“This? It’s a traditional Ioannina Christmas tree,” I replied.
“Are you sure?”
“Well it is now. Where shall I put it?”
“Next to the model dug-out canoe,” she suggested.
“You think?”

My wife, absorbed in her internet search for Russian Christmas bread designs that could render our projected Χριστόψωμο more aesthetically pleasing, did not reply.
«Σπάργανα,» I broke the silence.
“What?”
«Σπάργανα. Let’s make σπάργανα this year. It will be good.”
My wife looked up from her screen thoughtfully. “Well there is a hot plate on the barbie….”

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 23 December 2017