IN A TOWN OF OSROENE

My passionate Armenian friends are wincing. I am relating to them the story of a half Iranian, half Armenian friend who, being of mixed ethnic and religious heritage, was ostracised by both communities and ended up learning Greek instead. 

“I can see how that could happen,” one friend, whose grandmother still lives in Constantinople, remarks. “Marrying a non-Armenian is not something that is done in our community.” 

“No way,” another friend, a prominent lobbyist agrees. “That is how you lose your culture. It is the beginning of the end of everything.” This friend, who has arrived from interstate, is staying with his Greek-Egyptian grandmother, in the suburbs. Moments earlier he was expressing his incredulity at the Greek-Egyptian club EEAMA, which according to him, refuses to admit any Greek who is not from Egypt as a member. “It makes no sense,” he protests. “Especially since all these Greeks from Egypt were migrants from somewhere else anyway. Why should you restrict your horizons?” Apparently, his father’s cousin is the mayor of one of the smaller Aegean islands and he shares anecdotes about his father’s ire whenever his cousin, in the course of his mayoral duties, engages in contact with our neighbours across the water. 

“Once you marry out, you can kiss your culture goodbye,” Vartan, another community activist, declares solemnly. Vartan’s mother is Austrian, and while he is fluent in Armenian, enjoys speaking to members of the Armenian community resident in Germany, in German. 

Aram nods slowly. His wife is Greek and he has just returned from a holiday in her village. Noting his unease, I quote the Armenian mother in the SBS television series, “Marry Me, Marry My Family:” “a dog cannot marry a cat.” He chokes on his wine and I glance meaningfully at Ninos, the Assyrian in our convivial group, with whom I converse in Greek, he being fluent in that language since he lived in Greece for a few years prior to coming to Australia. He mentions that he taught his wife, a Greek-Australian, what he terms “proper” Greek, relating that when he first met her, she couldn’t carry on a conversation in that language further than a few village expressions. He then launches into a detailed account of Sara Khatun, a lady of mixed Assyrian-Armenian parentage, who being fabulously wealthy, donated a vast expanse of land in the environs of Baghdad for the re-settlement of Assyrian survivors of the Genocide, saving them from disease and starvation. 

We have come together to discuss ways in which we can work together to further the cause of Genocide recognition. We engage in a full and frank exchange of views, prompting the other Greek in our party to paraphrase the oft-cited quote of the great Rhigas Pheraios: “Whoever thinks freely, thinks as a Greek.” Our histories are distinct but also inextricably intertwined, so much so that our national narratives, when examined side by side, resemble each other both in their fervour but even more so in their internal contradictions and their ironies. I am reminded of Cavafy’s poem “Epitaph of Antiochos, King of Commagene,” where it is the local Assyrian population that demand of the Ephesian sophist Callistratus, a Greek epitaph in memory of their departed king. Extolling his virtues, Callistratus, according to Cavafy, writes: 

“He was the provident governor of our country.
He was just, wise, courageous.
And he was moreover that best of all, a Greek-
humanity has no more honourable quality:
those beyond are found among the gods.” 

The irony of course is that Antiochos was only half-Greek, feeling more attached to his and his wife’s Persian roots being related to the kings of Parthia as well as the Macedonian Seleucids, styling himself the “just, eminent god, friend of Romans and friend of Greeks,” and ruling over a hybrid multicultural and multilingual polity, which although initially Hellenised,  experienced a resurgence of Persian culture, intentionally supported by Commagene in order to highlight its ancient ancestry and refute competing Seleucid, Parthian and Roman claims over the area. Cavafy’s poem seems to imply that concepts such as ‘Hellenism’ are fluid and negotiable and that “others” can interrogate them and their boundaries at will. 

A further irony is contained in the local Assyrians’ utilisation of a Sophist to posthumously Hellenise their king. According to Plutarch, sophist are those who develop a discourse that is apparently philosophical but does not spring from their experience, and who do not try to connect it with their way of life. A construct devoid of vitality, for a ruler who is no longer extant. 

A similar discourse runs through Cavafy’s poem “In a town of Osroene,” a multi-ethnic Hellenistic kingdom centred around the Aramaic speaking city of Edessa, made famous by its king Abgar, who according to legend, wrote a letter to Christ offering him sanctuary and receiving, the Mandylion, a cloth miraculously imprinted with an image of Christ’s face. In his sensuous poem, Cavafy’s narrator suggests various approaches in which diversity in ethnic background, can be appreciated, declaring that his group constitute a «κράμα», an alloy, or a mixture: 

“Yesterday, around midnight, they brought us our friend Remon,
who’d been wounded in a taverna fight.
Through the windows we left wide open,
the moon cast light over his beautiful body as he lay on the bed.
We’re a mixture here: Syrians, migrated Greeks, Armenians, Medes.
Remon too is one of this kind. But last night,
when the moon shone on his sensual face,
our thoughts went back to Plato’s Charmidis.” 

 

Here it is the Syrians who are the natives and the other populations are migrants and yet this “mixture,” of ethnicity coalesces around other points of reference. Their mutual admiration of the body of Remon, in the moonlight is what brings them together, causing the narrator to liken him to the classical Charmidis, the object of Socrates’ passion in the Platonic dialogue about the meaning of sophrosyne, or self-control, where Socrates declares: “I saw inside his cloak and caught on fire and was quite beside myself.” 

 

Rather than extol the virtues of Hellenism, Cavafy’s narrator here appears to establish ethno-cultural diversity as a value equal to the classical ideal. At the same time however, the homosexuality of the young men referred to in the poem does not serve to efface the significance of their origins: their alliance appears to be strategic, expressed within the norms of the Hellenic discourse, but establishing them as a distinct group, juxtaposed against hostile “others,” 

 

In the town of multicultural Melbourne, as we engage in vociferous disputation, indulging in Armenian delicacies that have their exact counterparts in the cuisines of all the erstwhile denizens of Osroene, our exclusionary discourses continue to construct the self as a performative action. In the process, as we attempt to advance or transform ourselves within our narratives the concept of preserving and being Armenian or Greek, becomes as fluid, changeable and poised upon the precipice of merging into one another as the juices of the delectable lamb khashlama we are simultaneously devouring. At that moment, we all revel in the barbarous nature of our imagined Hellenicity, realising that we, just like Cavafy’s heroes, are a «κράμα» of peoples, histories, memories and desires. 

«Παπούτσι από τον τόπο σου, κι αςείναι μπαλωμένο,» Ninos remarks, quoting his father in law’s advice to his daughter, as we take our leave of each other. I revel in the irony. For the word most commonly used in Greek for shoe, is ultimately, of Persian origin. 

 

DEAN KALIMNIOU 

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 15 October 2022