THE WHITE HOUSE

 

Sarkel means the “White House” in the extinct Khazaric Language. Sarkel the name given to the fortress constructed in 833 to fortify the north-western border of the Khazar state, owing to the whiteness of the limestone bricks used in its construction. In order to bring about such an amibitious construction programme, the Khazars, a Turkic people who espoused the Jewish religion, requested assistance from their ally, Byzantine Emperor Theophilus, who sent his chief engineer, Petronas Kamateros, to build the fortress. In return, the Khazar khagan ceded Chersonesos and several other Crimean territories to Byzantium, which, in the guise of the Principality of San Theodoro, remained the last of the Byzantine territories to fall.

No one really know the exact reasons for the construction of such a formidable fortress on the Don River. It is generally believed that the expensive building project was prompted by the emergence of a powerful regional threat to the Khazars. In his magisterial De Administrando Imperio, Emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus tells us that the Khazars requested Emperor Theophilus to have the fortress of Sarkel constructed for them. He connects this request to the emergence of a new enemy, the Hungarians, something which is corroborated by tenth century, Persian explorer Ahmad ibn Rustah, who noted that the Khazars felt the need to fortify themselves against Hungarian attacks.

Similarly I do not know why the structure I affectionately termed “the White House,” which was perched on top of a hill in my local area, assumed the guise of a house in the Greek islands, its walls whitewashed with lime and its doors and window-frames painted a bright blue. Was it to fortify itself against the ravages of assimilation? To safeguard against dreary suburban conformity? To impose its uncompromising Hellenism emphatically upon the landscape? To immure within it, memories or dreams of a long-lost homeland?

I do not know the answers to these questions. My people come from a land of stone where the sky is as leaden in the cooler months as it is in Melbourne and the houses assume the same hue, for they will bear no white-wash and yet every day, especially in summer as I would drive past the White House, and spy it gleaming in its Bavarian blue and white tones, I could never repress the broad smile that signalled affection and affinity. Similarly in winter, when the rain would drip down its walls, staining its course in greys and blacks along the way, it assumed the guise of a giant iceberg, brooding, the vast majority of it under the surface, waiting, I never knew what for. Surrounded by an equally white-washed brick fence, I could also never tell whether the White House was meant to be defensive. One thing was certain, however, it was far from offensive. Like most of our people who live in the area, it just unapologetically, was what is was.

A few years ago, the garage was pulled down and its carefully tended garden began to vanish under an onslaught of weeds. Paint began to peel away from the gutters and the render began to crumble. Nonetheless, when I would drive past with my children in the car, they would point at it gleefully calling it «το ελληνικό σπίτι», asking me whether all houses in Greece looked like that as well as why other Greeks homes in Melbourne do not espouse the same aesthetic. The other day however, when I drove past expecting to see its overgrown olive trees peeking above the fence, I noticed the White House was no longer there. In the place of our local Hellenic Axis Mundi, reaching for the skies, providing a pathway between Olympus and Earth, was a block of flat earth, as dark the Melbournian clouds that loomed ominously low above my head. The White House was gone. Nothing remained.

 

Had I wanted to, I could have mused over the dialectical process of signification that reaches to the societal processes in which people participate and to the structures and institutions that people produce, as a way of lamenting a vanished aesthetic, or seen the demolition of the landmark, as Lipsitz did, as a deconstruction of a white spatial imaginary as a “privileged moral geography of the properly-ordered, prosperous private dwelling … of exclusivity and augmented exchange value.” Viewed from the perspective, the White House was inevitably doomed to fall because for all its semblance of individualism and ethnic exuberance, for its aspirations merely adopted wholesale the values of a ruling class that legitimises its violent assumption of sovereignty of the land upon which we live, via implication, through the act of making us landowners. It was bound to crumble because, beholden to the social forces that dictated its erection in the first place, its architectural physiognomy became a superseded discourse, replaced by one that values conformity and effaces difference even as it lauds itself for its tolerance its inclusivity and its supposed embracing of “diversity,” at the same time that no less an august personage than a former Australian Prime Minister can discuss the process as follows: “In order to try and make it look less hideous, part of the work that [he] was to do was to mortar it and put pickets on it ... to try and stop it looking quite as Greek, dare one say.’’

We have stopped looking quite Greek for a while now. Gone are the solid brown brick constructions, the brown tiles, the concrete ornaments that are so revered by comedians Sooshi Mango and Facebook groups such as “Ethnic Homes and Gardens.” Their contents, lovingly treasured bijoux, crystal glassware and dinner plates, untouched for decades, now reside in dumpsters and the interiors of opportunity shops, the important furniture for the saloni, never sat upon, now purveyed on Facebook marketplace for not even an eighth of the price for which it, and respectability was purchased so many years ago. Instead, we favour clean lines, stark corners, Manichaean dualities of white and black with fifty shades of grey bourgeois self-assuredness in between, all pre-planned, largely identical in image, with a permutation or two to reinforce our own sense of individuality.

Yet in some streets in my area, some of those who dare to be Greek linger, long after their friends have gone or have been relocated. On our evening walk, my children and I recently traversed a street we had never entered into before. Immediately in front of me the familiar geography; an olive tree on the nature strip, a lemon tree and a camelia in the front of the brick veneer home. “This is a Greek home,” I told my children. “How do you know?” my daughter asked. “It could be Italian, couldn’t it?” To the untrained eye, possibly and yet instinctively I knew, something about the positioning of the pot plants and the garden border, maybe, something about the smell of livani wafting from within, a deep sense of kinship and shared memory that must be lived and cannot be put into words.

«΄Ελληνες είστε;» a voice came from the open door. The old lady was seeing off her carer and gravitated towards the sound of the Greek in a way which was only natural not so long ago. We set off for home a little while afterwards, bearing a bag of lemons and each of my daughters holding a camelia flower, a gift from her garden. «Να ξανάρθετε, να ξανάρθετε,» she exclaimed and pleaded simultaneously, waiting at her gate until we were out of sight, and we promised that we would, «τώρα που βρήκαμε το δρόμο…», a landmark and a waypoint as we navigate our own reality.

Two days after I registered the loss of the White House, my evening walk took me past the old woman’s house. There were lemons strewn on the ground, for there was no one to relieve the tree of its burden. Grass had grown over the concrete path and a For Sale sign was prominently displayed on the front brick fence. And it was then that I remembered seeing a familiar face in the death notices in Neos Kosmos a few weeks earlier but not being able to place it. It was then that I recalled another old neighbour I knew in my childhood, who referred to her grave as her “White House,” a place that she expected would house her bleached bones. Her house, a few streets away from where my grandmother lived, is no more, having been pulled down by her descendants, subdivided and sold. Two grey conglomerations of units which are referred to as modern townhouses stand in their place and the apricot tree that stood in the front yard, from which she would pick fruit for us in the summer abides only in our memories.

The White House is gone, and we not longer look quite as Greek. We linger, we slumber, we remember lost landmarks, lost aesthetics, knowing that sooner or later………………

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 14 September 2024