UNA RAZZA UNA MUSICA

 

The Calabrian word for bagpipes is zabogna, from which the Greek islanders derive their own term for the instrument, τσαμπούνα. Ultimately, the word is descended from the Greek συμφωνία, which is exactly what the sound of the bagpipes denote: a coming together of various sounds or voices.

The coming together of Calabrian musicians at Philhellene Restaurant recently, can also be described as a symphonia, entailing the melding of sounds that are merely eastern and western versions of the same melodic tradition. Accompanying the edgy but exuberant Project Rustica, (imagine if a Greek band dated to call itself “the Χωριό Project”) was a Greek, the multitalented Joseph, who played the bagpipes. Tony, on the other hand, of Calabrian descent, played the pear-shaped lyra, an instrument that Greeks ordinarily associate with Crete, the Eastern Aegean islands, or Constantinople. The Calabrian lyra is referred to by the Calabresi as “lira” and scholars consider that it is a descendant of the Byzantine lyra. Tony makes reference to another Calabrian friend, who, unable to receive instruction in the traditions of the Calabrian lira, travelled to Crete and sought instruction from the masters of the art there. As a violinist, I admire the immense girth of the Calabrian bow. In this aspect at least, theirs is bigger than ours.

We may be “una faccia, una razza” as the Italian expression, which is mutually unintelligible in the Greek «μία φάτσα, μία ράτσα», but our experience of our own cultural traditions in this country, where our communities have mingled closely for almost a century, differs immensely. When I was growing up, I knew of few of my own people who did not attend Greek school. All of us knew at least one, or two Greek dances and along with the lyrical stylings of Kazantzidis which formed a type of musical lingua franca, we were all generally familiar with the musical traditions endemic to our parents’ region of origin and subjected to the depredations of dance teachers who all aspired to be our life gurus. This justified our mystification when we discovered that our Italian classmates generally did not attend Italian school, struggled to speak Italian in complete sentences and seemed to be convinced that Italian traditional music comprised the Chicken Dance and the croonings of Dean Martin and Tony Bennett (who by the way is of Griko origin, his parents being from the village of Podargoni,  a term that originates from the Greek expression Podargos (πόδαργος) which means ‘swift-footed.’)

Tell Emilio Greco as I ventured once to do, that his ancestors must have been Greek and you would cause a playground fracas that could only be resolved by the mediation skills of a neutral, in our case, Turkish classmate. Advise the same infuriated and unable to calm down Emilio that his surname, meaning “the Greek” ranks tenth among the most widespread surnames in Italy and the business unresolved by Mussolini’s elite and swift-footed (in reverse) troops would re-commence. Yet we have always known that which many Calabresi in Australia have chosen to forget and we smile indulgently at the European pretensions of our vivacious descendants, our visage sometimes hardening to a frown of jealousy as we consider that we could have been as effervescent as our progeny, had it not been for a litany of disasters, invasions and genocides. There is a darkness within us that we feel is not shared by our ostensibly happy-go-lucky Italiot brethren, that is until we listen to such anguished songs as the Griko ‘Andra mu Pai,’ and we realise that heart-break is underwritten by our DNA, wherever we may have ended up.

The more knowledgeable about us refer to Magna Graecia with a proprietary air, forgetting that it was the Romans that referred to the lands to their south, colonised by our people in the eighth century BC as Greater Greece and that it is their encounter with one of our tribes, the Graecoi, that gave us the name by which we are identified by and in turn identify with, in the West. We also forget that the greatest Greek speaking city of late antiquity was Rome itself.

Sometimes, when we are in a boastful mood, we proudly remember the words of Horace to the effect that: “Captive Greece took captive her savage conqueror and brought the arts to rustic Latium,” creating a civilisation that lasted for a millenium and which, transposed to the Greek East, caused us to refer to ourselves as Romans, an interesting inversion of our current propensity to call our Calabrian, Apulian and Sicilian cousins, Greek. Mostly however, we prefer to forget the fate of the Poseidonians, assimilated Greeks doomed to a half-life of tropes and cliches as they substitute authenticity for arid re-enactment, no matter how insistently the Cavafys of the world seek to remind us of them. In the coffee shops of Oakleigh and Thornbury, in the souvlaki shops of Preston and the patisseries of Templestowe, when we fetishise the ritual objects that confer Hellenism upon us, simultaneously reminiscing about partying on Mykonos, we are more like our Magna Graecian relatives than we know.

Joseph plays a traditional Thracian tune on the lyra and Project Rustica joins in, beating a lively Calabrian rhythm on the tambourine. The result, far from being dissonant, is remarkably melismatic and the Italian patrons rise from their seats ululating and linking hands, begin to dance. Some of the Greeks in the restaurant smirk at each other with raised eyebrows. After all, in our consciousness, ululation is a barbarous custom that belongs to the Middle East, since we have forgotten that the very word is derived from the ancient Greek αλαλαγμός. It is only in concelebrating our common ancestry with the Italiots that they joyously remind us who we are.

One of the revellers gleefully tells me how proud he is that dishes that have become synonymous with the idea of Italy are of Magna Graecian origin: lasagne deriving from the Greek lazanon, or pizza from pita. As the Joseph’s Thracian tune winds and wends itself around the jingle of the tambourine and the occidental strumming of the guitar, I tell him that macaroni comes from μακαρώνεια, a funeral dish, which still finds its counterpart in the Eastern Thracian μαχαρωνιά, from the Greek μάκαρος (blessed) and αιωνίως (forever). He is eager to impress me with his Greek credentials, mentioning that his grandparents, who came from Martanu, spoke Griko to each other. I, on the other hand, am eager to impress upon him my Roman ties, my maternal grandfather’s native language having been the Latin-based Aromanian, also known as Vlach, possibly a linguistic remnant of the Roman colonists in Greece. I tell him that it is the scant Italian that I picked up in the playground that enabled me in my attempts to decode Aromanian and he ripostes that he wishes his identity was as straight-forward as that of a Greek. His grandparents spoke Griko, his parents speak Salentino and although he picked up a smattering of formal Italian during holidays to Italy, he feels most comfortable speaking in English. Faced with such a linguistic smorgasbord, questions of identity become vexed. How does he resolve them? Through dance.

According to another dancer, who waves his arms enthusiastically to the strains of the partisan song “Bella Ciao,” there is only one Italian dance school in the whole of Melbourne, a fact that I have no way of verifying. He reveals to me his belief that traditional dance is an extremely powerful means of creating or preserving identity. Consequently, he is involved in a project to expose as many Victorian schoolchildren to the tarantella as possible and to this effect has arranged the import of two hundred and fifty tambourines from China, thus ensuring maximum participation and enjoyment for all. I am completely charmed by his ardour, thinking of how many of our own youth maintain links to their own culture almost exclusively via the medium of dance but how few seek to share it with others.

The Rustica Project begin to sing in Modern Greek and the modern Greeks in the restaurant struggle to accompany them for they do not know all the words. “Oh, that was my grandmother’s favourite song,” one of the patrons beams as she hastens to join a conga line.

I am too infused with Balkan ennui to surrender myself to the unbridled levity of the conga and politely refuse the fervent entreaties of those comprising the train of ebullience that weaves its way out into the street and back again. Within the warmth of Philhellene, exuded by philhellenic hearts beating and dancing as one, a Calabrian, suddenly solemn, wonders for how much longer such musical strains will be heard in the suburbs of Melbourne. I rise and take my leave of him, singing an Aromanian song from Epirus:

“Scoal capitan, di somnul acel dit muarti,

s’ vini uara se futsim sn’cem  tu loclu anostru..”

Rise o captain, from this sleep of death

it's time to leave and go to our own place.

 

“Sorry,” he grimaces apologetically. “My Italian isn’t very good.”

 

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 1 July 2023