UNA FACCIA UNA RAZZA MEETS DIMITRIA: THE MOONEE VALLEY GREEK STREET FESTIVAL

 

A Greek festival with an Italian name may appear incongruous if not for the fact that the Italian expression: One Face, One Race, has made it into the Greek language as spoken in Australia. Consider also that my grandfather, who settled in the environs of Moonee Valley in 1954, never learnt English, owing to the social norms of the era, when non-English speaking “New” Australians were largely excluded from participation in the broader community, and instead, ended up speaking Calabrian instead, for his workmates and neighbours were all Italian.

It is for this reason that elderly Greek and Italian ladies are called and call each other “signora” in their day-to-day dealings at the local shops, this having evolved as an acceptable form of address for Greek ladies ever since the fifties. In almost every street in the municipality, you will find Greek and Italian homes, many espousing the traditional architecture of the seventies and eighties, with a lemon tree in the front yard, broad beans growing by the front fence and an olive tree on the nature strip. You can also identify the Greeks by their number plates. “Apsalo” the name of a village in Macedonia, lives a few streets down from me, as does “Aetos” and also “Atheos,” who often parks outside our local church on Sundays, waiting to collect his mother at the end of the liturgy.

We are an old community, and unlike other Greek communities in Melbourne, we shun the limelight, preferring to associate with each other outside of institutions, associations and brotherhoods. In the eighties, we dominated Moonee Ponds Market, and it was impossible to spend less than two hours shopping because the shopkeepers were all friends and family, as were the shoppers themselves. That market no longer exists and the sense of close-knit community it fostered has gone with it, but the old ways remain: eyes, ears and hearts are everywhere as they should be within a community in which all of my close relatives still live within a three kilometre radius from my home.

More than a community, we are a conglomeration of villages. My grandfather came here first and found a smattering of Zakynthians, who had arrived before. One by one he sponsored the migration of his family and fellow villagers from Samos, including the late priests Fathers Stelios and Yiannis Aivaliotis, the latter being the first priest of the second Greek church to be constructed in Moonee Valley: Panayia Soumela. Most of the descendants of these migrants from Mytilinioi, Samos, still live within the municipality. When we get together, though we were all born here, we imperceptibly slip into the old dialect of our parents and grandparents and laugh when we consider that it is an idiom that is no longer spoken in the village. It only makes sense here, in Moonee Valley.

In the sixties, my mother’s people started arriving. There are now just as many people from the village of Perama in Ioannina living in Moonee Valley as there are in the village itself and the two halves, though separated by distance, still operate as an organic whole, all of us having been brought up on village lore and enmeshed within the neural networks of the collective hive mind.

It is our collectivity that has mitigated against us developing the coffee culture of Oakleigh which the first generation of our community considers indulgent and dangerously decadent, for according to the prevailing social mores, there is no time for coffee, for the right-thinking man. This is why on the rare day that I absent myself from the office, should I be found walking down the local shopping strip, I will invariably be accosted by a well-meaning θείοor θεία, who will pop out of nowhere to ask: “What are you doing here? Shouldn’t you be at work?” That being said, our municipality is home to the best Greek restaurant in Melbourne: Philhellene, defying the stereotypes applying to Greek cuisine by purveying homely, authentic provender and providing a haven for performers of quality Greek music, patronised by celebrities and politicians alike, being my home away from home.

Because we are an ancient community, we are tinged with ennui and nostalgia. I drive around its streets and remember those who once lived in houses now renovated and changed forever. Most importantly, they also remember us. The year before last, my grandparents’ home was put up for sale for the first time since it was sold by the family after their death. Filled with longing for my childhood, I attended the open for inspection and admitted to the agent that I was the original owner’s grandson and merely wanted a look around. “I think you should come here,” the agent replied, and tugging me by the sleeve, took me into the backyard. There waiting, were descendants of my grandmother’s neighbours, reminiscing about her generosity, her ebullience, the abundance of her garden and her legendary kindness. That part of our family and community had become their family lore, treasured as carefully and lovingly, as our own.

The epicentre of our little community is the church of Saint Dimitrios which, my late grandmother maintained, was named after her local parish in Samos. Once upon a time it sat at the end of a street populated almost in its entirety by Greek homes. Those homes were compulsorily acquired and in their place, the Taxation Office was erected, a neat as well as dread dichotomy between God and Mammon if there ever was one. This is the church in which I was baptised, married and in which in turn, my children were baptised. It is also the church in which I have farewelled every single one of my departed loved ones. When I am there, I am in the presence not only of the Deity, but also of every single person who has ever mattered to me. It is not only my chief geographical reference point but also that of the rest of the members of our community, including those who remain outside smoking, waiting for the liturgy to end of a Sunday, because they are too cool or too crimson in persuasion to pass through its doors. It is also the reference point by which we are rendered intelligible to those who purport to benignly rule over us, our local council, our state and federal members of parliament. Because we have been here a long time and are secure in our tenure, we have no need to venture, cap in hand to their doors, in search of grants and favours. Instead, they come to us.

It is in celebration of our long history in the area and our deep ties with our sister Italian community that the Moonee Valley Una Faccia Una Razza Street Festival has been conceived. Taking place in Gladstone Street, Moonee Ponds, outside Saint Dimitrios Church, the Festival, the first of its kind ever to have been held in the municipality, aspires to highlight the complexity of the multicultural fabric of the area, providing a platform for the sharing of a multiplicity of stories relating to the migrant experience in Moonee Valley, through song, dance, cultural exhibitions and the purveying of street food.

Importantly, the festival will feature traditional Italian music, handicrafts and opera performances, exemplifying how cultural traditions meld, morph and adapt to an ever-changing demography, as well as an exhibition of nineteenth century Greek costumes and jewellery supplied by yours truly. Musicians from Greece have been co-opted to enthral the crowds, along with the renown Demotika Band and local exponents of the rebetika genre Anatreptix, who have a long history of performing in Moonee Valley, and whose guitar player, the Greek-speaking Wayne Simmons is living proof of what happens when cultures relate to each other and share. As the Festival ends the week in which the feast of Saint Dimitrios takes place, his legacy and all he means to Macedonian Hellenism is augmented by partnership with the Pan-Macedonian Association, providing a particularly Moonee Valley feel to the institution of the Dimitria, while the Florina Aristotelis Dance Group will illustrate the connection between Moonee Valley, Saint Dimitrios Parish and Hellenism’s northern extent through the medium of dance. For much of its existence, the Central Pontian Association “Pontiaki Estia,” was headquartered in Moonee Valley and it still plays an important role in the cultural life of the area. Its dynamic participation in the Festival, via rousing Pontian dance, is a given.

Writer Giannis Delimitsos mused that “The world, and we as a part thereof, are the carnival mask on the face of Nonbeing.” We on the other hand look to Psalm 149 for our inspiration and as a guide to our own exuberance, as we celebrate at the Moonee Valley Una Faccia Una Razza who we are, just how far we have come, looking forward together to the brightest of futures: “Let them praise His name in the dance: let them sings praises to Him with timbrel and psaltery,” remembering that whatever our face, whatever our race, we are all, one.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

 

The Una Faccia, Una Razza Moonee Valley Dimitria Festival will be held on the street at St Dimitrios Church, 1 Gladstone Street, Moonee Ponds, on 29 October 2023 from 12:00pm to late.

First published in NKEE on Saturday 21 October 2023