ANCIENT ARSE COUNTRY

- Τι είναι η Ελλάδα; the old man enquired, his bushy eyebrows raised in indignation, flecks of spittle flying from his dentures. Μια κωλόχωρα είναι.

I am not aware of any other people who refer to their homeland as an arse-country except for the Greeks, save of course, former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating, who characteristically referred to our sunburnt country as the “arse-end of the world.”

For some reason, we Greeks are obsessed by arses, and this obsession provides a singular lens through which we see the world, anally.

- Και το κράτος, τα υπουργεία, σκέτο κωλοχανείο, the old man slammed down a gnarled hand, missing a forefinger, on the table for emphasis.

I am perennially entranced by the prospect of an inn that specifically accommodates individual body parts and it says much about our perspective that we can envisage an inn for arses, but for not for limbs or other sundry appendages.

-Και πώς τα βλέπεις τα πράγματα στο κωλοχώρι σου; I asked, seizing the opportunity to extend the motif to its utmost extent.
-Τι λες βρε κωλόπαιδο; the old man spat. Γιατί, πού γεννήθηκες εσύ Σε κανένα παλάτι;

So there are arse-countries, but not arse-villages, (if they are our own), although there are apparently arse-children, and according to the old man, I am one such arse-child. This is in keeping with the old Epirot curse, directed towards particularly excremental children: «Ου να σ᾽είχε κάν᾽η μάνα σ᾽ σκατά καλύτερα». Consequently, we form a singular tribe of our own, classified according to  geography vis a vis our emergence from the same commonly located fundamental orifice. Our great national hero Theodoros Kolokotronis is also a member of the tribe, though contrary to common belief, rather than being stone-arsed, he is actually arse-stoned, a state of being that must have something to do with the manner in which vaping traditionally took place in the wilds of Messenia.

Yet our attachment to arses is so ingrained within us as a people, that in ancient times, we even worshipped a goddess for the symmetry of her posterior. Aphrodite Callipygos, literally, Aphrodite the nice-arsed, depicts a partially draped woman, raising her light peplos  to uncover her hips and buttocks, and looking back and down over her shoulder, perhaps to evaluate them. Even back then, the objectification of body parts was sufficiently advanced so as to give rise to the Olympian an insecurity that has endured ever since: “How does my arse look in this peplos?”

It is a question that can, if handled sensitively, lead to a happy ending. In his “Deipnosophistes”, Atheneas unfolds a narrative involving two Syracusan Greek girls arguing over which of them had the shapelier arses. Not being able to come to an agreement, they accosted a young passer-by to have him judge them. They showed their relevant parts to him and he decided in favour of the older sister. Unsurprisingly, he became smitten with her and fell ill with love-sickness. Learning what had happened, the man's younger brother went out to see the girls for himself, and in a re-match, fell in love with the younger sister. Thereafter the brothers refused to consider any other brides, so their father arranged for the sisters to come marry them. The citizens of Syracuse gave the sisters the soubriquet "Callipygoi" ("nice-arsed) and they in turn, celebrating their luck, for they had married into a wealthy family, dedicated a temple to Aphrodite, calling her Kallipygos, thus creating a deity, in their own image. I am reliably informed by an unqualified etymologist, that the word was adopted into the ancient Armenian tongue as Kardashian.

Other ancient Greeks were not so extravagant in their understanding of things pygian. There existed an old proverb coined to emphasize the importance of frugality: «τρεῖς εἰσιν ἱκανοὶ πρωκτὸν ἀπομάξαι λίθοι,» which roughly translates to “three stones are enough to wipe one’s arse.” The Romans in turn, made use of a sponge on a stick, something abhorrent to the frugal Greeks, for whom sponges were intended solely for the export market, presumably to Rome, after use and suitable repurposed. 

Not only female arses were appreciated in ancient Greece. One of the great demi-god Heracles’ many epithets was «μελάμπυγος», or black-arsed, this attribute being held to signify strength and manliness, a motif employed by the great master of comedy Aristophanes in Lysistrata, to denote Heraclean fierceness:  «τραχὺς ἐντεῡθεν μελάμπυγός τε τοῑς ἐχθροῑς ἅπασιν,» (he is a tough black-arse ie. a veritable Heracles, towards his enemies). For the writer Archilochus, encountering such a black-arsed man, was fraught with danger: «μή τευ μελαμπύγου τύχης» (ie beware the black-arsed man, for he is more powerful than you). Conversely, one had nothing to fear from a λευκόπυγος, a white-arsed man, for the term was used to describe a coward, this of course being before tanning salons and skin cancer had been invented.

Polymnus, a shepherd living near the reputedly bottomless Alcyonian Lake, one of the entrances to the Underworld, was a real pain in the arse. When the god Dionysus sought entry into Hades, in order to rescue his mother Semele, Polymnus offered to row the god to the entrance, in exchange for being afforded the right to enjoy his posterior. When Dionysus returned to earth by a different route, he found that Polymnus had meanwhile died. Being an Olympian, Dionysus kept his promise by carving a piece of fig wood into the shape of a phallus and used it to ritually fulfil his promise to the dead shepherd, while seated on his tomb. This, it is said, was given as an explanation of the presence of a fig-wood phallus among the secret objects revealed in the course of the Dionysian Mysteries, which pagans must not castigate me for divulging, as our source for this legend, are the early Christian authors, Hyginus and Clement of Alexandria.

Athenaeus, in his “Deipnosophistai,” also provides valuable information as to the dimensions of the rears of the Achaean heroes who fought in the Trojan War, stating: «οἵτινες πόλιν μίαν λαβόντες εὐρυπρωκτότεροι πολύ τῆς πόλεος ἀπεχώρησαν ἧς εἷλον τότε,» ie. “After taking a single city they returned home, with arses much wider than the city they captured.”

As for Arses, the twelfth Achaemenid king of Persia from 338 BC to 336 BC, the less said the better. More than anyone, he was deserving of what Greek enlightenment scholar Adamantios Korais referred to, during those heady, pre-Internet times, in his «Άτακτα» as a «κωλοράβδιον,» that is, an arse-spanking rod.

On the website: greekamericangirl.com, it being assumed that Greek women possess what is referred to as the “Hellenic booty,” which the site goes on to define as a “bigger than average behind,” an Oxford study is quoted that suggests that women with generously proportioned posteriors, are more intelligent than their more streamlined counterparts. According to the study, this is because: “People who have more weight in their thighs and backsides often have a higher level of intelligence because they produce more Omega- 3 fats which contribute to brain development.” Does this then offer a completely new and revolutionary interpretation of the well-worn lament of every Greek mother wheresoever situated upon the planet: «με τον κώλο σου έκανες αυτή τη δουλειά;» A clue lies in the ethnicity of the author of the study, lead researcher, Konstantinos Manolopoulos, whose  observations may indicate that it is in fact the arses of Greek women, that the seeds of Hellenic greatness lies “Evidence shows that the fat content in a mother’s breast milk comes from her lower half of the body, which includes her thighs, buttocks, etc. This means that the high amount of Omega 3’s becomes a part of the baby’s balanced breakfast…. “The high amount of Omega -3 storage may be an evolutionary way of ensuring successful children, and men have a biological imperative to produce intelligent offspring.”

In contrast, in times Byzantine Greek appreciation of arses was not limited to one’s own race. In his 'Histories' («Χιλιάδες»), Ioannes Tzetzes includes a letter he wrote to a monk Heliopolos, who left Constantinople for the land of the Paeonians (an archaizing term for Bulgaria), as Tzetzes maintained, in order to check out the beautiful buttocks of the Paeonian women and appreciate them from close proximity.

He then wrote him the following poem:

“On Paeonian daughters who adorn their buttocks:
Hesiod said to his brother Perses:
- Don't let an arse-decorated (πυγόστολος) woman deceive your mind.
There are two ways in which she may be called pygostolos.
Either because she adorns her arms and forearms (πυγών),
and so is called pygostolos for putting on bracelets,
or because she adorns her buttocks (πυγή), by her hind-quarters,
with broad girdles done up with tassels and fringes."

Incontrovertible proof, if ever such was required, that arses pre-existed Kim Kardashian.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on 30 November 2019

JIM CLAVEN'S "LEMNOS & GALLIPOLI REVEALED"

There is an arresting photograph in historian and long-time Neos Kosmos contributor, Jim Claven's recently published book "Lemnos & Gallipoli Revealed" that encapsulates the spirit of the work like no other. On page20, we are presented with a pencil drawing of a youth which evokes the classical aesthetics of ancient perfection. A young nude Apollo gazes into space pensively. This is no languid erotic god however. The sketch is fraught with tension, as the youth, his muscles strained, grasps at his lower leg, as if to restrain himself from further action. He is right to do so. Two years later, this Apollo, god of the sun and of music will be cut down in his prime, near Anzac Cove, at Gallipoli, in the darkness and dissonance of war.

Peter Rados, of Artaky, an ethnic who fled the Ottoman Empire and migrated to Australia was immortalised in his prime by Olive Muriel Pink, in Sydney, in 1913. The notation on the sketch, which is the only likeness we have of this obscure historical figure, currently held by the University of Tasmania Library is brutally laconic: "A Greek who enlisted and was killed on Gallipoli." He is in fact the only ethnic Greek digger to be killed at Gallipoli and yet he exists outside the Greek-Australian and broader Australian narratives that unfold themselves around this seminal point in the foundation of the Australian identity. In his ground-breaking book, Jim Claven likens Peter Rados to the homeric Protesilaus, the first of the Greek warriors to land upon the shores of Troy, not so far away from Gallipoli, and in fulfilment of ancient prophecy, the first to die. There is a certain amount of poignant irony in Jim Claven's parallel. Protesilaus achieved lasting glory, and he was so missed by his wife, Laodameia, that the gods, taking pity on her, brought him up from Hades for her to behold one last time. Peter Rados, in contrast, was not missed. He was forgotten, only for his image to be retrieved from the shores of Lethe one hundred years after his death and brought before us to behold, through the researches of Jim Claven. It remains to be seen whether he will become, like Protelisaus before him, a cult figure or an object of veneration by a Greek Australian community eager to gain purchase in Australia's chief national myth. Regardless, he constitutes a compelling metaphor for the absence of a multiplicity of perspectives in mainstream conceptions of Gallipoli.

The prevailing myth weaves itself around the warp and the weft of a framework that would see the valiant ANZAC's fighting, far from their own shores, to keep the world free and safe, against a tough but magnanimous foe, the Ottomans. In this polarised conception of the conflict, there has been afforded little room for the stories of the peoples whose lives were affected by the ANZAC's campaign. In particular, there has been scant mention anywhere of the ethnic Greek villages in Gallipoli that were cleansed in order for the Ottomans to fortify the Peninsula and there has also been little mention of Lemnos, which was where ANZAC troops practised their Gallipoli landing, where the Allied hospitals were established and where sick or injured troops were returned to convalesce. It is also widely believed that the iconic Simpson's donkey came from Lemnos. As historian Dr Peter Ewer recently remarked, one simply cannot understand the Gallipoli campaign in its entirety, without appreciating the central role played in it by the island of Lemnos. It is this lacuna in the narrative, that Jim Claven's recently published book, seeks to fill.

The lavish publication, both a detailed narrative and pictorial history, evokes wartime Lemnos by means of a vast array of photographs garnered by Jim Claven from a large number of local and overseas sources. He has spent countless  hours performing fieldwork on the island itself, hunted down the descendants of locals who assisted ANZAC soldiers and scoured the diaries and service records of soldiers who were billeted on the island. What emerges in the ensuing text is a sensitive account, delivered in firm and muscular prose, devoid of triumphalism or  the glorification of war, of a newly liberated from the Ottomans island, already struggling to find its own sense of identity (historian Peter Charamis of Rutgers University, who was born on Lemnos, recounts that when the island was liberated in 1912, some of the island children ran to see what Greek soldiers looked like. ‘‘What are you looking at?’’ one of the soldiers asked. ‘‘At Hellenes,’’ the children replied. ‘‘Are you not Hellenes yourselves?’’ the soldier retorted. ‘‘No, we are Romans,’’ the children replied, tellingly), enmeshed in the throes of the National Schism that saw Greece divided between a royalist administration in the south which wanted no part in the war and the Venizelists in the north who actively pursued involvement on the side of the Allies, still managing to embrace, assist and establish lasting relationships with the 50,000 Australian soldiers that passed through Lemnos during the Gallipoli campaign. "Lemnos and Gallipoli Revealed," exhibits a large number of important and rare images that capture the fraternisation between the two peoples but most importantly, offer us a window into the social history of this most important to the history of Gallipoli, island. By focusing on the personal stories of individual soldiers, such as Corporal George Knight of Albert Park who died in Lemnos, as well as accounts  of the island recorded by Australian nurses serving there selflessly, we gain a unique insight into both the horror of the campaign but also the important role Lemnos played as a psychological and physical place of sanctuary for ANZAC soldiers. For the period of the campaign, it became their home away from home and the people of Lemnos became their family.

The remnants of this association are enduring. One hundred and forty eight Australian soldiers lie buried in the soil of Lemnos. The geography of the island includes an Anzac Street and an Australian Pier along with an Australia monument, a counterpart to the Lemnos memorial that can be found in the city of Port Philip, Melbourne. All of these testify to the forging of a bond between Greeks and Australians that pre-dates the post-Second World War phenomenon of mass migration to Australia and even the ties created through fighting side by side against the Axis in mainland Greece and Crete.

This is the enduring value of Jim Claven's magisterial "Lemnos and Gallipoli Revealed." Through its masterly focus both on the interaction and the very human stories of ANZACs and locals on Lemnos, as well as the significance of the island in general in the broader campaign, Jin Claven postulates a truly multicultural approach to the Australian national narrative from its very inception, one which affords Lemnos an indisputable place both in the Gallipoli and broader Australian identity discourse. The stories of Lemnos, our stories, are Australian stories and he presents them accordingly.

Gallipoli looms large in the national myths of Greeks and Australians.  According to legend, the Nymphs planted elms on the tomb of Protesilaus on Gallipoli, elms that grew to a size almost commensurate with the size of the importance of Gallipoli itself to modern Australia. When their topmost branches saw far off the ruins of Troy, they immediately withered, so great still was the bitterness of the hero buried below, so great was the catastrophe visited upon the land by war. Protesilaus, and our own recently exhumed hero Peter Rados, would be consoled by these epic verses, by first century poet, Antiphilus of Byzantium:

"a long age shall sing your praises,

Of the destined dead at Troy the first;

Your tomb with thick-foliaged elms they covered,

The nymphs, across the water from hated Ilion.

Trees full of anger; and whenever that wall they see,

Of Troy, the leaves in their upper crown wither and fall.

So great in the heroes was the bitterness then, some of which still

Remembers, hostile, in the soulless upper branches."

With Jim Claven's remarkable "Lemnos & Gallipoli Revealed" as our guide, we will maintain out anger and bitterness at the depravity and soullessness of war, but will continue to sing the praises of the valiant ANZACs, Australian nurses and their Lemnian companions for long ages to come.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on 23 November 2019

MEDUSA, A CLASS VICTIM OF WOMEN ENABLING THE PATRIARCHY.

“When Medusa looks in the mirror, she sees the Lady of Sorrows”  Mason Cooley.

“In mythology the Medusa can petrify people with a look – which is a good thing, I think. But the Medusa is a unique symbol – something strong. It’s about going all the way.” Donatella Versace.

In ancient Greek, the word Medusa (Μέδουσα) signifies a guardian, or a protectress, the first of many ironies surrounding her existence, In an ode written in 490 BC, the ancient poet Pindar speaks of "fair-cheeked Medusa." Originally an archetypal monster, daughter of the primordial sea god Phorcys, grand-daughter of Pontus, (yes, Medusa is Pontian by descent), by classical times, it was considered that Medusa was once inordinately attractive. Indeed, Medusa's crime was that she was fair-cheeked enough ("the jealous aspiration of many suitors," as Ovid writes) to attract the interest of the new sea god on the block, Poseidon. Possibly to cement his own power as the new lord of the sea, over that of the superseded Phorcys, Poseidon rapes Medusa, the dethroned sea god’s daughter, in the temple of Athena. 

As a result of her rape, Athena, instead of punishing the perpetrator, an entity of the same class as her, and with whom she already had an antagonistic relationship, arguing over patronage rights in Athens for instance, chose to punish the victim, a powerless and vulnerable girl, already dispossessed of her primordial birthrights by the upstart Olympians, ostensibly because the act of rape desecrated her temple. She thus inflicted retribution upon Medusa for having the temerity to be violated within Athena’s domain, by  transforming Medusa's beautiful hair into serpents and making her face so terrible to behold that the mere sight of it would turn onlookers to stone. As Medusa’s sisters, Stheno and Euryale were standing with their sister when the rape took place and thus bore witness to it, they too were punished by Athena in the same way, save that unlike Medusa, who was mortal and could thus expect eventual relief from suffering, the two other Gorgon sisters were immortal, meaning that their suffering would endure beyond the end of time.

In Ovid's version of the story, Perseus describes Medusa's punishment by Athena as just and well earned, because, as Thucydides and Varoufakis observed, the weak endure what they must.
Caused to dwell in the hell of the margins in the land of Cisthene, (which scholars identify as Kydonies, modern day Ayvalik), as a reviled monster, Medusa endures further punishment for her hideousness, by being beheaded by the demi-god Perseus. Indeed, Athena provides Perseus, whose name derives from the verb πέρθειν ("to waste, ravage, sack, destroy") with step by step instructions and the logistical support necessary for him to kill the hapless creature, firstly because she is hideous and secondly, because this will enable Perseus to retain control over his mother, Danae, the repository of his own claims to temporal power, and her sexual activity. This is the second irony in the fate of the hapless Medusa: that she is killed by the son of a woman who has also been imposed upon sexually – by Zeus, who had his way with her by transforming himself into a shower of gold – and that she is so killed because Perseus wants to prevent his mother being imposed upon sexually a second time, by the king Polydectes.

 Having caused the death of she who defiled her temple by her violation and the world by her hideousness, Athena then takes the head she transformed by way of punishing the victim and weaponises it, placing it on her shield, the Aegis. As Jane Ellen Harrison argues: "her potency only begins when her head is severed, and that potency resides in the head; she is in a word a mask with a body later appended..."

It is a potency that, has seen Medusa, over the ages, seek to subvert interpretations of the myth that seeks to place the male, Perseus, at its centre, blameless and heroic. Author Sibylle Baumbach in viewing Medusa as a “multimodal image of intoxication, petrifaction, and luring attractiveness," suggests that this potency is ultimately subversive, and unnerving for those who would uphold the patriarchy.

According to Elizabeth Johnston, in “The Original Nasty Woman,” Medusa is possessed of a puissance that: “has since haunted Western imagination, materializing whenever male authority feels threatened by female agency….. In Western culture, strong women have historically been imagined as threats requiring male conquest and control, and Medusa herself has long been the go-to figure for those seeking to demonize female authority.”

Used as a symbol of female rage, feminists such as Elana Dykewomon in her 1976 collection of lesbian stories and poems, ‘They Will Know Me by My Teeth,’ employed the image of Medusa on her front cover. The ostensible purpose was to act as a guardian for female power, keeping the book solely in the hands of women. In doing so, she harks back to the archaic apotropaic function of the head as a cultus object.

In a 1986 article for the magazine ‘Woman of Power’ entitled “Gorgons: A Face for Contemporary Women's Rage,” Emily Erwin Culpepper, wrote that: "The Amazon Gorgon face is female fury personified. The Gorgon/Medusa image has been rapidly adopted by large numbers of feminists who recognize her as one face of our own rage."

Surely the head of Medusa is replete with the cultural currency afforded her by all of the aforementioned and so many more thinkers, her body having been violated and through the hideousness of the head, nullified, and thus not worthy of existence. It is for this reason that the violated Medusa will never produce offspring through normal procreation. She is rendered a non-woman. Instead, the blood of her severed head will engender Pegasus and the giant Chrysaor, mirroring the irony in the birth of her tormentor, Athena, springing also from her father’s head. It thus needs to be appreciated  that the punishment of hideousness reflects, not so much Medusa’s rage, for we are never, in the myth, provided with an opportunity to gain insight into her own thought process, given that she is denuded of her humanity, but instead the calculated rage manifested by an entitled upper class woman, so jealously guarding her privileges, in the form of property rights, power and influence, that she is unable to feel any sympathy for a vulnerable and ravaged ‘sister’.

Medusa is not ‘strong.’ She is never in any ‘authority.’ She does not seek to kill people out of rage or revenge.  Instead, even in the form of a hideous, fearsome and lethal monstrosity, she is an object of complete subjugation. Rather than through her own agency, men MUST turn to stone when they witness her second violation for the same reason that her sisters had to be transformed into monsters when they witnessed her first.  Viewed from this perspective, Medusa is completely degraded and rendered entirely impotent by privileged female members of the ruling class, enabling and legitimising the patriarchy and its depredations, in their own pursuit of the maintenance of power and privilege. Beth Seelig provides an interesting, Freudian analysis of Medusa's punishment, arguing that punishment of the crime of having been raped rather than having consented in Athena's temple is an outcome of the goddess’ own unresolved sexual conflicts with her own Olympian progenitor. This too constitutes Medusa a victim worth fighting for.

Whereas in Modern Greek, a μέδουσα has come to denote a jelly fish, a sea creature that drifts aimlessly but carries a powerful sting, in traditional Greek lore, Medusa the Gorgon, has given her name to the γοργόνα, the Greek mermaid. Romaic legend is kinder to the poor girl than the ancients were, restoring to her, her beauty, and a fish tail, in memory of her ancestry as a daughter of the original lords of the Sea. Yet as beautiful as she is to behold, the Romaic incarnation of Medusa is demented and in denial, unable to accept the death of her “brother” Alexander the Great. Nonetheless, unlike her ancient counterpart, she wields power of her own volition and can choose to drown sailors in a fit of pique at having her delusion destroyed, or smile wanly at being told a lie. Given that in the Romaic world, sisters, albeit gorgons are doing it for themselves, there is power and restitution in myth after all.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 16 November 2019