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