THE SPIRIT OF BYRON

 

“Lord Byron’s portrait on the wall

And the cast iron statuette

With folded arms and eyes bent low,

Cocked hat and melancholy brow.”

Pushkin, Eugene Onegin

 

Only the initiated are possessed of the knowledge that when I write the Diatribe column in Neos Kosmos I summon up the spirits of Lord Byron to expunge superfluous cantos and Theophilus to subtract hyperbole. I have been obsessed with Byron from the time when as a child, I saw his portrait in a Greek history book and realised that he is the only Westerner who can plausibly pull off wearing the foustanella. Time and further reading have not served to dissuade me from my original conclusion.

 

How can one not love such a polyvalent, mercurial and ultimately tragic human being. My appreciation of him only grew when I discovered that in the notes to the second canto of 'Childe Harold' Lord Byron wrote of the modern Greeks that:

"they suffer all the moral and physical ills that afflict humanity... They are so unused to kindness that when they occasionally meet it they look upon it with suspicion, as a dog often beaten snaps at your fingers if you attempt to caress him."

 

When I read those lines, I was certain that he must have visited the organised Greek community of Melbourne and taken extensive sociological and anthropological notes.

 

The Hellenic Museum’s recently launched “The Spirit of Byron” exhibition, is the only exhibition in Australia to mark the bicentennary of the death of Lord Byron.

It is comprised of the collection of Byron aficionado Dr John Robertson and is also the fruit of a lifelong love affair with the poet who was perhaps the greatest popstar of the Western world in his time. Significantly, the exhibition encompasses both artefacts concerning Byron and the reconstruction of Greece in the Western mind. This is an important dichotomy which emerges via the expert curation of the collection by Dr Sara Princa, in collaboration with art historian Dr Spiridoula Dimitriou. There is Byron and then there is the idea of Byron and the exhibits, comprising of travel journals that reference Lord Byron’s sojourn in Greece, etchings, original editions of Lord Byron’s poetry as well as artwork inspired by him serve as tesserae, coalescing to form a broader narrative about a man who defies stereotypes altogether.

 

 

Two British Philhellenes have swum the Hellespont: Lord Byron who did so when he was twenty-two and considered it his greatest achievement and Patrick Leigh Fermor, when he was sixty nine. Both have served as poster boys for Philhellenes in their respective eras and it is this semi-mythological aspect to Lord Byron’s legend that the various exhibits subtly highlight.

 

Take for example the exquisite etching of Lipparini’s “Lord Byron’s oath on the tomb of M Bozzari in Missolunghi.” More ancient hero than nineteenth century freedom fighter, the allusions to Greece’s classical past (which were necessary to make the freedom of the Balkan Greeks more palatable to western tastes) artfully obscure the fact that when Lord Byron arrived in Messolongi he hired himself a bodyguard of five hundred Souliotes as a private army and entourage. They were so obnoxious and made such a nuisance of themselves that after repeated complaints by the inhabitants of the town, Byron was forced to disband them.

 

The exhibition juxtaposes the deification of the hero with contemporary satirical sketches, in books such as “Pug’s Tour Through Europe, Or the Travell’d Monkey” of Europeans like him travelling through Greece, though while espousing fashionable causes of liberty, beating a retreat at the slightest whiff of danger. Lord Byron himself was amused by the phenomenon of well-heeled Europeans with nothing much to do, adopting liberalism and philhellenism as a fashion and trotting over to Greece in search of martial glory, writing in 1820:

"When a man hath no freedom to fight for at home,

Let him combat for that of his neighbours;

Let him think of the glories of Greece and Rome,

And get knock'd on the head for his labours.

To do good to mankind is the chivalrous plan,

And is always so nobly requited;

So battle for freedom wherever you can,

And, if not shot or hang'd, you'll get knighted."

 

 Incidentally, it is from Lord that we learn that the American exclamation used to express triumph "Booyah!" actually comes from the Souliote War Cry "Boowah!" and we have Lord Byron's poem "Song to the Suliotes" where he faithfully records this exclamation to prove it.

 

The interplay between Byron’s own writings, historical records and blatant propaganda set pieces in the exhibition’s narrative is important because it highlights the ambivalence of a historical figure’s use as a symbol of Philhellenism. After all this is the same man who while dying in the cause of Greek liberty, was initially sceptical about the whole enterprise, writing in 'Childe Harold' (the exhibition’s copy has been loaned to the Musum by Roula Rozakeas):

"A thousand years scarce serve to form a state;

An hour may lay it in the dust; and when

Can man its shatter'd splendour renovate,

Recall its virtues back, and vanquish Time and Fate?"

 

Rather than having in Byron a staunch and uncritical advocate of all things Greek, in Byron, we are compelled to see beyond the foustanella, to the titled member of the nobility, with all the biases and prejudices of his class and ethnicity. Thus, in October 1823, Lord Byron visited a landslide in Mataxata, Caphallonia, where a dozen road workers had been buried. Spectators declared it was not worth digging them out as the ground may be unstable. Byron, outraged at the lack of compassion shown by the Greeks, “ordered his valet to get off his horse and thrash them soundly if they did not get to work.” He also seized a spade and began to dig furiously, no doubt to show those effete orientals how it is done.

He later wrote that though he had come to the Ionian islands prejudiced against Britain's tight government of the Greeks: “I have now changed my opinion. They are such barbarians, that if I had the government of them, I would pave these roads with them.” Tough love, after all, is true love.

 

The exhibition fittingly displays a number of etchings of the Parthenon and other ancient ruins, causing us to appreciate Byron’s love of Greece’s classical past. Unlike other westerners, who sought to appropriate that past, Byron’s key aim, expressed through his poetry, was its mere preservation. It is in this vein that he wrote:

“but molest not yon defenceless urn:

Look on this spot – a nation’s sepulchre.”

Accordingly, Lord Byron could not be but scathing when contrasting his own stance on the Greek antiquities with those of Lord Elgin. In his 1811 poem “The curse of Minerva” he immotalises Elgin’s desecration of the Parthenon thus: “England owns him not: Athena no! thy plunderer was a Scot,” and this even though Byron was half Scottish. In Childe Harold’s Pigrimage, the second canto is also devoted to the atrocities of pillage: “Dull is the eye that will not weep to see/ Thy walls defac’d, thy mouldering shrines remov’d/ By British hands.”

 

While the exhibition does not directly confront the orientalistic approach to Greece of Lord Byron and other Philhellenes, it does hint at it rather artfully. In keeping with Edward Said’s contention that the West has fashioned a narrative that feminises, or demeans the East in order to dominate it, prominently displayed are beautiful contemporary etchings of Greece as a woman in need of rescue, of vulnerable women that personify Greece in similar stances, such as Charles Lanseer’s “The Maid of Athens” and even Delacroix’s (also the artist of the highly sexualised painting: “The Massacre of Chios”) illustrations of Byron’s own “The Bride of Abydos” written after he had swum the Hellespont between Abydos and Sestos in imitation of Leander. The inference is clear. The West will only love Greece and hasten to her aid if it can woo her, make her beholden to it and ultimately possess her.

 

The exhibition thus causes us to consider that Byron's depiction of the Orient in works like “The Giaour,” “The Corsair,” and “Don Juan” (on display) often presents a romanticized and exoticized vision of the East, filled with lush landscapes, sensual pleasures, and mysterious allure. This portrayal reflects the Orientalist tropes prevalent in European literature and art of the time, where the East was often depicted as a place of sensuality, exoticism, and danger.

 

However, Byron's Orientalism cannot be reduced to mere exoticism or Orientalist stereotypes. He also demonstrates a keen awareness of the political, social, and cultural complexities of the Eastern societies he portrays. In works like “The Siege of Corinth” and “The Giaour,” Byron criticizes European colonialism and imperialism, and he often sympathizes with the oppressed and marginalized peoples of the Orient, such as the Greeks fighting for independence from Ottoman rule.

 

What emergers from the inspired curation of the exhibition, is that Byron’s Orientalism, is polyvalent in that it encompasses both the exoticized fantasy of the Orient and a more nuanced engagement with its realities. It reflects the ambivalence and contradictions inherent in Romantic Orientalism, where fascination and critique coexist.

 

Consequently, “The Spirit of Byron,” is fittingly not content to confine itself only to the romanticising element in Byron’s character. Contemporary reports of his activities also reveal beneath the layers of the dashing hero, the louche libertine and the valiant freedom-fighter, engaged on a more physically strenuous grand tour than most, a hard pragmatist, willing to transcend the boundaries of class and nation in order to give the right advance when needed. Thus, responding to news of the Civil War between the Greek captains and the politicians during the Revolution, Lord Byron wrote to Alexandros Mavrokordatos presciently:

“the great Powers of Europe, of which none was an enemy of Greece, and which seemed favourably inclined to agree with the establishment of an independent Greek state, will be persuaded that the Greeks are not capable of governing themselves and will arrange some means for putting an end to your disorder which will cut short all your most noble hopes.”

We went on to say that Greece had to choose one of three possible courses:

"either to win her liberty - or to become a dependency of the European sovereigns or a Turkish province. .. But civil war cannot lead to anything but the last two.”

 

Dr John Robertson’s extensive collection would have been augmented by mention of the fact that the first Greek woman to arrive in Australia Ekaterini Plessas, from Epirus, was the daughter of Vasiliki, wife of Muhtar, son of the notorious Ali Pasha of Ioannina.

During her long and fascinating life before she arrived in Australia in 1835 after marrying English officer James Crummer, she actually met Lord Byron at Messolongi , highlighting the Australian connection.

 

Alexander Dumas may once have been moved to comment upon the death of Lord Byron:

“The great man had no notion that, in dying for the Greeks, he was only dying so that Europe, as the duke of Orléans once expressed it to me, might have the pleasure of eating sauerkraut at the foot of the Parthenon.” The Spirit of Byron, however, now showing at the Hellenic Museum, invites us to explore the multi-faceted nature of legends, stereotypes, critiquing identity constructs and deconstructing national narratives, politely articulating counter-narratives, discretely offering pathways for discussion and enthralling the visitor. It must not be missed.

 

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on 27 April 2024

TSINTESA

 

Theia Tsintesa was not anyone’s auntie but try telling her that, when she fixed you with her penetrating green eyes and twirled the hairs on the mole that adorned her left cheek. Six feet tall with biceps that put those of the most inveterate gym-junkie to shame, she did not saunter, or stroll, or shuffle but rather bound towards you, encasing your hand in her vice-like grip which has the consistency and texture of coarse sandpaper as she dragged you towards her, an acrid smell of moth-balls and coffee scroll emanating from her personage.

None of us knew her real name. When I was very young, she was referred to as a νταρντάνα, a term derived from the Italian tartana, a fishing boat, but employed in Greek to denote a large, well proportioned woman, and sometimes as an «ανδρογύναικα», a man-woman. It took many years to find out that Tsintesa, which I took to be her surname, was actually a colloquial term in her region, which meant giantess.

True to her name, her voice resembled the boom of a grandfather clock, and it was always ten decibels higher than the level of the noise around her. It both resounded upon one’s ear drum, nudging closer and closer to the threshold of pain, only to collapsed upon itself, propelling you to do her will. The reason for the increased volume was that she completely deaf in one ear and only partially able to hear in the other, meaning that she would respond to all answers to her questions and her persistent habit of forcing you to eat copious quantities of the driest cake ever to come out of an oven, with the exclamation: “Eh? Eh?”

Despite the deafness and her forbidding countenance, an invitation to enter her home, usually after being yelled at from a distance of a block away, could never be passed up, simply because it would never occur to any of us that this was in any way, an option. Pushing the rusting gate aside secured on its decayed hinges by elastic ropes, we would traverse a front garden that she would call her Volkswagen, because as she would collapse into booming laughter, what should ordinarily be in the back, is at the front. A hedge of capsicum plants of all sizes and levels of hotness fringed the path. By the fence, tomato plants catching the sun and in the centre, where ordinarily the lawn should have been, cucumbers, zucchini and broad beans. Waiting in front of the open front door, the titaness would wait, a Talos, surveying her wards, her immense brown, liver-speckled hands full of freshly picked zucchini flowers.

From the gloom behind the door, like wolf cubs emerging from cave, little faces would peep out. There was Zlatko, who called her Tetka, causing one of us in a careless moment to attempt to establish a reputation as a bit of a wag by daring to call her “Titka” an enterprise that was crushed by one withering look from behind her thick Tito-esque reading glasses. Zlatko was her neighbour’s son, and she would look after him, making him a meal and keep him company until his parents finished their factory shift. Benny and Jackie however, replaced in succession by Benjamin and Kylie, Tisha, Theo and Russell, were her foster children and it was understood that whenever we accepted her primeval call to enter her lair, we would eat without protest the fried zucchini flowers and sandpaper cake and then, keep her wards company.

More often than not, there would be other ladies there, generally younger ones, and they would always be sad, sometimes with tears in their eyes, which on occasion would appear to be dark, as if their mascara had smudged and Theia would hold their hands and raise her upper lip scornfully, muttering under their her voice, which meant the whole room could hear, dark maledictions in Greek and in another language which we did not understand, against all those who would deign to visit evil upon others in this world and then the shadows in the room would lengthen and it was as if in the dusk as if figures black and vengeful would appear, only to be dispelled by a wave of her hand.

Sometimes these ladies would be fearful and Theia would place her hand over their heaving breasts in order to feel their sobs, for she could scarcely hear them and then she would become a Cerberus, barring entrance to her world, even if on the odd occasion, someone would be hammering at her door, demanding entry in the most angry and violent way possible and threatening dire punishment. Theia would be unfazed, dismissively telling us and her terrified guests to pay the would be intruders no mind, because, we concluded, she was deaf and thus could not hear the horrible things that were being promised to her, which presumably, is also why her composure was not at all lost when bricks were thrown through her windows, she being unable to hear them shatter, nor that afternoon when she came home from the shops to find her shed smouldering, a tell-tale empty can of kerosene thrown at the backdoor, nor indeed that time when in a moment of forgetfulness, she left the back door open, giving access to an enraged intruder who rushed at her with a hammer, only to find himself, if the local gossips at the shopping centre were to be believed, trussed up in rope like a kokoretsi around the Hills Hoist in her backyard and alternating between yelling expletives and calling for his mother.

Theia was impervious to all this, because Theia couldn’t hear. One cold winter’s night, in a village high up in the mountains on the other side of the world, her father staggered through the snow after a heavy night of drinking with his friends. It was all he could to drag himself up the stairs into his home and when he tottered through the door and saw the expressionless faces of his wife and young daughter, he decided that it was not commensurate with his status as father and head of the household to be greeted after yet another carousal with a stony look of judgment. He set about beating both his wife and daughter with anything her could find: smashing chairs over their backs, throwing the pots and pans at their heads and when finally, almost exhausted, he ran out of implements to cast in their directions, he dragged them to the door and threw them down the stairs, into the snow, where the remained all night, until he sobered up. On her way hurtling down, seven year old Theia caught her head on the edge of the stair once, and then again on the other side and could never hear properly again. There were other beatings, increasing in severity  as she grew older and it was only when her father determined to marry her off to his best friend’s son that she came to hope for respite. They were going to have a new life together, in Australia, as far away from her father as possible.

The people in the neighbourhood who whispered these stories to each other do not know what became of Theia’s husband. When they came to Australia, they found her here alone, for she had arrived before everyone else. Some of the older women would hint obliquely at deeds so terrible that they did not bear mentioning: “especially in front of the kids,” and they would greet her passage along the street with sighs, the clucking of tongues, the shaking of heads and deep exclamations of sympathy, mixed in with admiration and awe.

Theia had no children, something to do with the dark secrets of her arrival in this country and so all the children in the neighbourhood became her children. She had no protector and so she became the protector of all the women in the area who were being mistreated by their husbands, ripping to pieces the shroud of silence and shame that was usually cast over them to blanket their suffering and visiting retribution upon their aggressors. Scores of foster children found in her a secure embrace, a kind, if thunderous word and the fiercest of loves, of the type that can only be given by those who have ben betrayed in love and trust it not at all.

Theia never received an award, or any formal recognition. Her photograph was never posted in any article or journal along with the most influential or important women of her time. When they found her, lying in her bed, she must have been dead for a week. By that stage, her foster children had grown up and gotten on with her lives, her neighbours were mostly dead and their offspring moved away. It was only as they went through her things, trying to find the contact details of any relative who may need to be contacted, as she lay before them, her heart broken, that they found an old, long expired passport that gave up her final secret: her name was Anastasia.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 20 April 2024

NICK VISITS THE ACROPOLIS

 

In Athens, Nick is visiting the ruins of the Acropolis for the very first time. Well, not really, for there exists a dog toothed photograph of him being held in his mother’s lap, she perched precariously upon a reclining column in front of the Parthenon. His miniscule right foot is dangling so that the heel touches the fluted marble. Nick has taken his mother’s word that it is in fact he in the photograph; the picture has been retouched by a hand so expert in symbolism that his image has been stripped of all distinction until it generically represents the approximation of an infant. But he remembers the cool of the marble on the heel of his foot, though he could not have been more than two years of age at the time – a last foothold upon his motherland before the voyage to Australia.

Nick is accompanied by his teenaged son Harrison. Harrison’s head is shaved except for a long top-knot and his blonde features and dark complexion make him a confluence of Mongol and Viking. He displays little interest in Nick’s grand homecoming upon this rock. In order to render the occasion solemn and spiritual, Nick has purchased the services of an expert guide – the archaeologist Mr Petros Malavanis, whose green eyes peer at them behind thick round glasses, as if in astonishment that thee exist kinfolk so estranged, so far across the seas willing to seek meaning in the stones that litter the rock. He twists the sparse amount of graying foliage that still adorns his scalp as he speaks.

Mr Malavanis begins with the premise that nothing is coincidental in this world. Destiny is all and the Greeks were destined for greatness. He offers mathematical proof by way of the fact that measured at the base of the stylobate, the dimensions of the base of the Parthenon are 69.5 metres by 30.0 metres. He adds that the cella was 29.8 metres long by 19.2 metres wide, with internal colonnades in two tiers.

“Shit Dad, do I have to listen to this? I could look it up in Wikipedia instead of getting roasted by the sun,” Harrison complains, digitally manipulating the screen of his telephone.

Nick doesn’t answer. He can relate to stylobates. His father was one. His mother brought him up also, to be, as she said, the “stylobate of your own house.” Everything rests upon a stylobate. Even ruins and the ruins of ruins.

Mr Malavanis is not perturbed by Harrison’s exclamation either. He continues his exposition unabated, for he is one of those few custodians of history that genuinely wish to impart upon their field of expertise, value for money, for their patrons. Thus Nick learns that on the exterior, the Doric columns measure 1.9 metres in diameter and are 10.4 metres high. He is told also that the Parthenon had 46 outer pillars and 23 inner pillars in total.

Nick is a builder by trade and will not accept anyone’s measurements without first checking them with his laser spirit level and tape measure. His father on the other hand, could measure a length just by looking at it so Nick is willing for the sake of argument, to concede that Mr Malavanis’ specifications are correct. Mr Malavanis is now postulating that celestial beings created the universe according to a geometric plan which is why the Parthenon is so perfect. He reveals that Plutarch held that Plato said that God geometrizes continually.” Nick can read a plan better than most, but he cannot conceive of a need for Sacred Geometry.

Nick looks at his son, playing Clash of Clans on his telephone. Mr Malavanis, oblivious, proceeds to divulge that the structural beam on top of the columns is in golden ration proportion height of the columns.  Each of the gridlines is in golden ratio proportion to the one below it so that the third golden ratio grid line from the bottom to the top at the base of the support beam represents a length that is pi cubed, .0236, from the top of the beam to the base of the column.

All this has to be taken at face value, for it would be hard for Nick to assert otherwise. He is too timid to ask whether the gridlines Mr Malavanis is referring to are those denoted by the scaffolding covering the face of the building, for they are the only lines that he can see. But it makes sense. The ancient Greeks were an ingenious people, far above us in intelligence. There is no way we could ever hope to understand their deeds or motives. And the apotheosis of their genius is this remarkable edifice, the image of which Nick has gazed upon every day of his life, in the form of a blue ceramic dish first hanging in his parent’s living room and now in his garage, decorated in low relief, depicting a foustanella-clad evzone blowing his trumpet at the Parthenon, as if rallying its’ still intact columns for an assault upon the present.

With his words, Mr Malavanis evokes an image of the great gold and ivory statue of Athena, sculpted by the genius Pheidias. In Greek, it forms one word, chryselephantine, as if gold and ivory, well not really ivory, but rather, a substance pertaining to and deriving from an elephant, merge together to from one substance, commingled, perfect marble and perfect ivory, without confusion, mutation or separation. Nick is unable to see the statue; Mr Malavanis cannot tell him with absolute certainty whether it was positioned outside, or within the temple. Although Nick suspects that the main purpose of the statue, if it really existed, was the same as the first house with the six bedrooms and five bathrooms he lived in before his divorce – to shock and awe, Mr Malavanis is not able to advise him with certainty, what is was for.

Groups of corpulent bespectacled tourists, bulging in shorts and florid yoga pants circle the building devoutly. From the length of the shorts of their menfolk and their ramrod straight bearing, imbued with the kind of optimism that derives only from the possession of capital, as well as their pronunciation of the ultimate o in their Greek names as oh, this Spirohs, Nick knows them to be American-Greeks. One holds up his arms to the Sun and intones some sort of hymn to Apollo.  There is a darkness on the side of the temple now, and its columns cast a sinister shadow that remind Nick of a cage, or worse still, a jail. Save for the temple itself, and the hymn chanter, it is empty.

“We aren’t quite sure what the sculptures in the Parthenon frieze actually signify,” Mr Malavanis continues. “Generally, it is believed that they depict an idealized version of the Panathenaic procession from the Diplylos Gate in the Kerameikos to the Acropolis, to honour the goddess Athena with a new peplon.” Nick is looking at Harrison, who is standing at the Propylaea, watching tired and hot tourists march labouriously up the twisting path, bearing drink bottles like votive torches. He is conversing nonchalantly with a nubile South American girl, both of them feigning disinterest while sizing up each other’s potential.

Like Nick, most of the frieze sculptures have been removed from the Parthenon. He remembers seeing them in the British Museum while on a trip to England with a party of well to do friends. Nick recalls his friends exclaim in ecstasy when confronted by the teeming mass of marble in the room, whereupon, they all simultaneously shed a tear. He sat and observed them impassively. The only time he was ever moved to tears was when he chanced upon a private garden on the Isle of Capri, separated, delineated, grid-like and traversable with wooden planks, just like that in his parents backyard in Fawkner. He was not sure what these statues meant.

“Other archaeologists theorise that the frieze is based upon Greek mythology,” Mr Malavanis, resumes. “They say that these scenes depict the founding myth of Athens, the sacrifice of Pandora, youngest daughter of Erechtheus to Athena. This was a sacrifice Athena demanded  in order to save the city from Eumolpus, king of Eleusis, who was poised to attack the city. But in actual fact, we don’t really know what it means.”

Nick follows the American tourists with his glance. They are exhausted now and hanker after the creature comforts of the Athens Hilton, having abandoned their search for meaning among the metopes. It makes perfect sense to Nick why his ancestors of old would depict imaginary battles in their buildings. The interplay of interpretation, the multiplicity of allegorical readings, all these things serve to justify, obscure and coerce people to acts of violence that would otherwise be too nauseating to contemplate. Nick muses that he would be unsurprised if it was discovered that the metopes were installed weathered and chipped from the outset, in order to obfuscate the curves of meaning. Conversely, they are also atropopaic, intended to turn away harm of evil. After all they were not Christian and the evil eye had not been invented yet. “She was a good woman, Soula,” Nick laments. “She did not deserve what I did to her. I am a dog.”

In Nick’s mind, Soula, his first wife, assumes the form of a Caryatid, the one that in the architecture of the Acropolis in his mind, is missing from the Parthenon and Nick is disconcerted to learn that his consciousness has conflated the Parthenon with the Erectheion, when he circumambulates the Parthenon and realizes that the Caryatids are not there. They should be. The Erectheion is such an ungainly building.

In response to his question as to who put the Caryatids there and why, Mr Malavanis hastens to reply: “Some say the Erechtheion was built in honour of the legendary hero Ericthonius. Others maintain that it was built in honour of Erectheus, the king of Athens who is mentioned in the Iliad.” Nick muses about the relationship between the Iliad and a restaurant by that name back home which has been open for thirty years and yet never has any customers. “As for the Caryatid porch, some people claim it was built to conceal the giant fifteen foot beam needed to support the southeast corner over the Kekropion, but in terms of the Caryatids themselves, we don’t really know what they mean.”

 “There are caves under the Acropolis, dark places where the ancients revered their gods,” Malavanis tries in vain to maintain Nick’s evidently fading interest by introducing a spooky timbre to his voice. “Why would they need caves to worship their gods when they spent the entire contents of the Delian League’s treasury on temple bling?” Harrison asks smugly, for once, engaged. For Nick, the answer is self-evident. The Acropolis is just like his parent’s home in Fawkner, with the good toilet and kitchen for guests and the outhouse and garage kitchen for daily use. “Certain mysteries were performed in these caves,” Mr Malavanis whispers reverently, “But we aren’t quite sure what they mean.”

As the sun dips lower over the hazy city, casting the marbles in ochre, Nick looks for the overturned column upon which he rested before leaving the land of his birthplace, ostensibly forever. It is not there. But for the photograph he has in his hand and his memory, he would be convinced that it never existed.

“Was there a column lying on its side just about here?” Nick points with his foot. What did life, death, the thread of succession, the delineation of shape mean to a stone? The continuous passage of rocks from outcrop to temple, to church, to watchtower, to mosque, to ammunition store, to fetish object of civilization? Which of them morphed into icons, which came together to form a mihrab, which of the metopes relocated themselves into the wall of the Acropolis to buttress a tottering fortification from attack? Which of them pressed themselves against the heel of a two year old boy in valediction? Nick instinctively knows the need to adore objects, to imbue them with significance and gift them a tongue, to move from one phoneme to another and create words, to recite their names and carve them into a litany of contradictory analogies, as points of colour upon a broader pietra dura. To articulate place, to draw meaning from place, to be stone in place – that desire is irrepressible.

Nick can no longer see Harrison, but he is thinking of the bluestone wall he helped his father to construct in the early eighties on a searing hot summer’s day, with bluestones purloined from the lane-ways of inner-suburban Melbourne, when the answer comes.

“A column lying on its side, here? Possibly, but I don’t understand what you mean?”

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 13 April 2024

THE OTHER TWENTY FIFTH OF MARCH

The Twenty Fifth of March, the day in which the Greek people celebrate the re-genesis of their nation should be a day of jubilation. Regardless as to whether chooses to commemorate the Greek Revolution on 23^rd March, as the Kalamatans do, or on the 24^th of February, when Alexandros Ypsilantis proclaimed the Revolution at the Three Holy Hierarchs Monastery in Iași, Moldavia, or as the vast majority of Greeks do, on the feast day of the Annunciation, one thing is certain: without the principled stand our ancestors took, at great risk, for freedom, equality and tolerance, it is arguable our people would not exist today, save as shadowy remnants of an ever diminishing past.

Yet for me, even as I attend the many ceremonies organised to commemorate the event, even as I ritually dress myself and my children in national costume to participate in our annual national day parade, my sense of pride is invariably tinged with ennui, a sense of uneasiness and deep disquiet. I have been carrying this sense of loss all my life, as if searching for a missing part of me, one that lurks in the background, only to remind me of its absence every March the twenty fifth, by jarring my soul.

I must have been there, that twenty fifth of March, and every twenty fifth of March prior to that, although as far as I know, I was never the recipient of the “aleph,” the mystical document created by a family member and then handed down, written in mystical codes for the purpose of warding off the wiles of Lillith, Adam's first wife.

I must have been there, from the beginning, when my dust was kneaded into a shapeless husk, an unfinished human being, incapable of speech, when the aleph from the word of truth incised upon my forehead was removed, bringing about only death, so that I was unable to hear the command: “Arise, go to Nineveh the great city and cry against it, for their wickedness has come up before Me.”

I must have been there, a leaden seal verifying the privileges granted to them by Emperor Andronikos II in 1319, by way of a chrysobull, for on them was set the seal of approval.

That Pesach, there was no hyssop to be found to daub the blood of a slaughtered sheep on the lintels and door posts, so that the Angel of Death could pass over them, for one among the many betrayed them.

On 25 March 1944, the day of Greek Regeneration, the Annunciation which in Greek translates literally as “the giving of the Good News” and of the onset of Jewish Passover, the 2,000 Jews of my mother’s city of Ioannina were gathered by the Nazi occupiers in the town square. Debates had been raging in the community for a while now. Should they take up arms, as some of them had already done so, joining the ranks of the guerillas in the mountains, or did safety and salvation lie, as it had always done, for centuries uncounted, in strict adherence to the law?

It was cold that day, a biting wind picking up the damp of the great lake of Ioannina, a vast brooding repository for the bitterness of the ages, subsuming and sequestering all evidence of man’s ability to be brutal to his own kind within its toxic mud, arising through the reeds that fringed its shores only to throw itself upon the townsfolk’s faces, marking them out as victims. One by one they were torn from their slumber, and given the news, as Esther Stella Cohen remembered:

“I go downstairs, open the door and there was a gendarme. “Read it!" he says. In two hours you are leaving. I close the door on him and go upstairs I knock on my brother's door crying. He gets up, opens the window and that scream is heard, those laments, those knocks on the windows on the doors, the people were deflated, in two hours they had to chew everything they had, what could they take, what could they take?”

Snow was on the ground as they dragged themselves to the square, like lambs to the slaughter. How does one pack up a life within a space of hours? Which memories, what intensity of feeling is shut out and left behind arbitrarily at the last moment, when the suitcase of resolve is deemed overflowing and barely able to shut? Which baggage, cultural, religious or social is deemed worthy of remaining a continuous burden as one looks down at the bed which framed one’s dreams and out at the window that has framed one’s hopes, for the very last time and then passes through the door frame, forgetting to touch the mezuzah, not looking back, never looking back, out into the cobblestoned streets with ice like steel repositories of hatred lurking between their crevices, towards the slaughter-yard? Which prayers, which lamentations, which expositions of law and lore serve to ward off evil as the icy wind penetrates all human endeavour and renders it completely futile?

On that day, 25 March 1944, the Jews of my mother's home-town of Ioannina were herded into the town square and from there, onto trucks where they were transported to Larissa. After a week of privation and suffering, they were forced onto cattle-cars and sent to the death camps of Auschwitz. They arrived there on 11 April 1944. The vast majority, upon arrival, were sent directly to the gas chambers.

My great-grandmother was there on that day, and she couldn’t stop them taking away her friends, our people.  We were all there that day. We shrug our shoulders, lift up our palms skywards and offer condolences, regret the suffering and offer up excuses. What a terrible thing to happen. If only we could have done something. But what could you do? The enemy was too powerful, too terrible.  Of course we should commemorate them, it is such a dark mark upon the copybook of humanity, not outs of course, we weren’t responsible, but how horrific it was. And some of us remember the words of Kolokotronis: “When we decided to make the Revolution, we didn't think about how many of us there were, or that we didn't have weapons, or that the Turks were besieging the castles and cities,…. our desire for our freedom fell upon all of us like rain…and we all resolved  to  this purpose… and made the Revolution,” and others remember the time he said: “People called us crazy. If we were not crazy, we would not have made the Revolution, for we first would have considered the question of munitions,” and we shrug and say “That was different.”

And I remember a young, sickly bespectacled poet, Joseph Eliyah who mercifully died before all this came to pass, writing by flickering candlelight in a room overlooking the field of Death in a poem about Purim:

“Your son won’t be bringing you candles or flowers from shul tonight, mother.  And if your crying is bitter, don’t lament too deeply.  My Fate has been decided, and poverty — poverty, mama – has no feel for sympathy.”

An image of a young woman's outpouring of grief of has haunted me most of my life. Taken by way of historical record by a methodical Nazi, it is housed in the German Federal Archives. She carries nothing with her. Instead, her hands are crossed as she emits a cry of fear and despair. All my life I have contemplated the terrible things that she must have experienced and have agonised over how she met her end.

Just recently, I learn that the girl in the photo has a name: Fani Haim and she was nineteen on that last day. Happily, she was one of the few who survived. Alone of her family, she survived the death camps and returned to our town. Fani married, had children and grandchildren before dying in 2008. If memory serves correctly, she lived near my great-aunt’s house, in the Castle of Ioannina, around the corner from where  Jewish inscription, a revenant of a past that is refused rest, was clearly visible until about a decade ago.

There is a hole in Ioannina and in our hearts, the size of all those who were uprooted and transported to their deaths. They are always with us, for they refuse to leave us, and we cannot forget them. Every twenty fifth of March, Joseph Eliyah appears before me, his book of unfinished poetry wide open:

“It’s Purim tonight!  The thrill and joy of the great feast!

Light in our souls, and a smile on the lips of all.

And I, my orphaned mother, the refuse of exile

Waste away in a chill joyless corner.”

 

There is no other kaddish.

 

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 6 April 2024