GRECOPHONES

 

We had just completed an almighty sandcastle with crenelated ramparts with which I intended to demonstrate to my children the Siege of Amorion, when the earth began to shake. Minutes later, the castle was trampled into the sand whence it came as a horde of excited children ran across it, leaving nothing in their wake standing, as they plunged into the sea.

Their grandfather looked at them wistfully, remarking to his wife, ‘“Thalassa or Thalatta?” channelling Rose Macauley’s ‘Towers of Trebizond.’ “The latter,” she responded, as she spread her beach towel on the sand and settled down with a well-thumbed copy of Herodotus’ History, Xenophon presumably, being last season.

In the frenzied melee, our sandbucket, shovels and rakes had gone missing and I scraped the sand desultorily with my toes, seeing whether I could recover any of these implements. «Αλέξ’! Είδις καθόλ’ του μπαγκράτς;» I called out to my son. At that moment, I spied a young girl liberate our rake from the former remains of Amorion. Her father, a formidably large gentleman with piercing blue eyes, sporting a long beard and no moustache, snatched the rake from her hands and strode towards me purposefully, kicking up sand as he approached. «Αυτό δικό σου;» he asked. I responded in the affirmative, assuring him that his daughter was welcome to use it.

«Ευχαριστώ πολύ» he responded slowly and then asked: “Can I ask? I know you are Greek but I’ve never heard anyone speak like that before. Where are you from?” I explained that I was speaking in a regional dialect. He nodded in comprehension, going on to tell me that he before migrating to Australia from Turkey, he would holiday in Greece every year, which is why he had picked up some of the rudiments of the language. An hour or so later, he returned again with the rake, wishing me «Στην υγειά σου». Considering I had just been floored by a wave of unexpected force and swallowed a mouthful of bay water, this pious hope was particularly apt.

A few weeks earlier, I was traversing our local shopping strip with my parish priest. Every so often, he would be greeted by storekeepers and passerby with the greeting: «Καλημέρα πάτερ! Καλή Χρονιά!». While our area has a large Greek population, none of these well-wishers were Greek. Instead, they were Assyrians who, upon fleeing Iraq, lived in Greece for a time before migrating to Australia. They learnt the language and now seek any opportunity to practise their skills. The running joke we have is that the local Assyrian priest is more fluent in Greek than most of our Australian-born priests, even if it is a form of Greek heavily inflected with nineties colloquialisms. In seeking to maintain their connection to Greece, some of these Hellenophones have been drawn to our community in other ways: find their partners from within it and it is still a source of wonder for me when conversing with such partners, to witness them struggle for a Greek word, only to have this readily supplied by their non-Greek partner.

Matthew has been born in Australia of Jordanian parents and has never been to Greece. Yet he speaks to my children in rather coarse Greek for he is apprenticed to some Greek tradesmen and in spending time with them, has picked up more than a smattering ofour ancestral tongue. There is something inordinately endearing about having greet you cheerfully, only to exclaim: «Θέλω έναν καφέ, μωρή!» I have taught him the expression «Με όποιο δάσκαλο κάτσεις, τέτοια γράμματα θα μάθεις», but he hasn’t yet able to appreciate the reason as to why I find this amusing.

Interestingly enough, his cousins have sought fit to name their son Leandros. They know nothing of the mythological hero of this name, of his nightly swims across the Hellespont to be with his beloved Hero, nor indeed, of his untimely demise halfway through his swim, when a strong winter wind blows out Hero's light, causing him to lose his way and drown. Instead, they were strongly possessed by the desire to give their firstborn a Greek name. I express the desire that he grow to become a stronger swimmer than his namesake and caution against naming their second child Meandros, lest his meandering attitudes cause him to seek a career as a lawyer, but they smile nervously, and merciful fail to grasp the point of the jest.

Over the years, I have encountered a number of people who have limited or no connection to Greece and yet have mastered the language. Some of these people came to the language through a love of Greek music or trips to Greece and a desire to remain in contact with the people whose culture they are so enamoured of. One of my friends, of Jewish heritage, mastered Greek on his own in order to circumvent the objections of his prospective mother in law, to his union with her daughter. Ultimately, the object of his affection chose a different life partner, but he maintains his enviable fluency in Modern Greek, peppered as it is by the most fascinating expletives, all of his own invention, by which he demonstrates the immense malleability of our language.

Others come to Greek though the kindness or companionship of Greek neighbours and friends who include them from a young age in their social circle. From the elderly Australian woman I once encountered in South Melbourne who told me in Greek that she attended Saturday Greek school as a child in order to spend more time with her friends,  to Meron, a multi-lingual Ethiopian prodigy I had the honour of teaching years ago, who at the age of eleven, decided that Greek was an important community language that she would like to learn, to Shahnaz, whose parents’ nostalgic accounts of a pre-Iranian Revolution trip to Greece caused her not only to seek the company of Greeks upon her arrival in Australia but also to learn their language and, amazingly to teach it to her children, to Khalil, a Syrian Orthodox refugee who prefers to attend the Greek church and has taught himself Greek because he believes that the Greeks of Antioch form part of his national identity, to Bledi, an Albanian who has migrated to Australia and religiously attends Greek festivals and social events, there is out there a significant corpus of non-Greek, Greek speakers who exist integrated within or upon the margins of our community.

One could pose the obvious question, a timely one given the current Greek school enrolment season: If they can do it, why can’t we? But to do so is misconceived. As far back as Isocrates, it has commonly been acknowledged that there is no “us” nor “them,” when people speak your language. The very fact that a shared language exists between people creates an unparalleled intimacy which can also lead to unparalleled hurt, something that Bulgarian nationalist Grigor Parlichev who won awards for his Greek poetry understood, until his efforts were derided by Greek bigots, and indeed Albanian national poet Naim Frashëri, whose Greek works of literature are astoundingly beautiful. For along with those who embrace Greek as a matter of choice, other communities of Greek speakers exist alongside us, their origins stemming from liminal spaces within Hellenism, where identities, ethnic and cultural are fluid or contested: Grecophones of Macedonia who espouse a Slavic identity, and Greek-speaking Turkish Cypriots to name the most prominent examples.

A more apt question therefore is what we do with this seldom-recognised and unutilised linguistic capital. It remains unrecorded within Census statistics which do not acknowledge multilingualism as a phenomenon in Australia, compelling us all to declare only one language other than English spoken at home, when many of our citizens have many. We most often ignore or fail to connect with communities of Greek speakers, even when the majority of these consider Greek to be a language of prestige and we seem unable to mobilise or to utilise their goodwill in ways that would benefit and be appropriate not only for ourselves but for the broader fabric of multicultural society.

When our culture is embraced by others, partaken of, interrogated, examined and deconstructed, it emerges stronger and more viable as a result, something which a whole period of our history, the Hellenistic, attests to. Two thousand years ago, Gallo-Roman Hellenist Favorinus noted that he espoused “not only the voice but also the mind-set, life and style of the Greeks.” Consequently he maintained that he had developed an outstanding quality, that of “both resembling a Greek and being one.” In multilingual and multicultural Melbourne, we would do well to remember that we are not the only ones who can claim this privilege, albeit for now.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 1 February 2025