GERSHOM AND THE COMPASSION OF THE PATRIARCH

 

When I was ushered into the room, I was transfixed by his gaze immediately. Two pairs of large, pitch black eyes, poring into the innermost recesses of my being. At least that is what I was told later. For, whenever faced with a situation that could prove daunting, I automatically resort to pilot mode, placing myself mentally at some distance from that particular circumstance, for preference, within the reign of Byzantine Emperor Nicephoros Phocas, recalling and listing the dates of his deeds. Yet this was no ordinary situation. No amount of Phocas could assist me in my own meeting of the Fokkers, for here I was about to meet my prospective father-in-law, for the first time. As he apprised me silently, I braced myself for the inevitable questions, formulating answers in anticipation: “What work do you do?” (Anything that redounds to the glory of the August Roman Emperor Nicephoros Phocas). “How would you support a wife?” (I suppose with a little pressure under the arm while crossing a busy street). The silence lay so thick and cloying upon the room that it could have been mistaken for baklava syrup. “Who invented baklava, the Greeks or the Assyrians?” (I refuse to answer on the grounds that I may incriminate myself).

When he did speak, the first words that came out of his mouth, delivered in precise, formal English, were these: “Did you know, I have actually met your Patriarch?” He signed, gestured for me to sit net to him and began to tell me the story of how he was forced to leave his homeland. Much of it I already knew from his daughter, but I discerned in his voice, the same timbre of pain that I had already to come to identify in the voices of my own people, who recalled their dislocation and final uprooting, their words perennially hovering above them unanchored, ceaselessly searching and finding no respite.

He recounted how he and his family abandoned their home “like thieves in the night,” leaving behind all their possessions and precious memories, lamenting especially the loss of photographic albums that serve as aides-mémoire. He kept me spellbound too as he regaled me with tales of hiding up in the barren Kurdish mountains, being led by Kurdish guides who would stop ever so often and threaten to abandon them there unless they handed over more of their money and it was only because of my father in law’s knowledge of the Kurdish language that he was able to shame them into upholding their end of the bargain. I was enthralled as described the desperate trek through wetlands covered in reeds, of endless walking in absolute silence, knowing that should they be apprehended, they would be shot on sight. On the crossing of the border into Turkey, of being provided with filthy blankets and foul and rancid food and water he did not dwell, but his voice quivered as it conveyed his fear and adject despondency, being completely unaware of the whereabouts of two of his sons who had made the escape prior to his own and his concerns about the future.

“You cannot imagine what it is to be an indigenous person, being treated as a second class citizen by the conquerors of your homeland,” my father in law grasped my arm. “The simmering resentment that you belong to your land and that it belongs to you but still you are considered illegitimate. That is how we Assyrians felt in Iraq. And when we got to Constantinople and saw everywhere the marks left on the city by your people, this feeling of resentment became worse even as we felt relief. Why relief, you ask? Simply because in the traces your people left behind, we realised that we are not alone, that others have suffered just as we have, that there is someone out there who understands us.”

My father in law’s family found lodgings in Therapeia, once an important centre of the Greek population of the City, now largely bereft of its Greek inhabitants. He described how they planned their movements carefully, rarely going out except to purchase necessities for if they were caught by the police they would be beaten, robbed, taken to the Iraqi border and sent over the other side where only death awaited those who left without permission during the time of Saddam. Once in a while, with whatever meagre savings were left to them, they would pay people-smugglers to attempt the crossing over into Greece and freedom. Each time, they would be apprehended and thrown back across the border.

Destitute and desperate, their only solace was attending a Greek church they managed to find after seeing the flames of some candles through a window in a room below street level in their neighbourhood. “This church was almost completely empty, except for two old ladies wearing black. I would go there, pray for my sons, pray for my family, pray that we would soon get out of that place.”

On one day, to his surprise, the normally empty church was filled with people. “I realised that they were local Greeks because they would speak Greek inside the church but as soon as they would emerge into the street, they would switch to Turkish. A bishop was conducting the service. Even though the church was full of people, I could see that he was looking at me and my family intently. When the service concluded and we lined up to obtain a blessing, he gestured towards us to come up to him. “Who are you?” I asked him in English and he answered, “I am the Patriarch.” He asked me where I was from and upon learning that I was an Assyrian refugee from Iraq, he asked me where I was living and if there was anything he could do for me. Most importantly (and here my father in law’s eyes began to grow glassy and he paused to wipe the tears from his eyes), he asked  me how I was feeling. I will never forget this moment. How I was feeling… What could I tell him? That I didn’t know where my boys were, that I had no idea what would happen to us, that our money had dwindled away to nothing and that I did not know how long we could afford to eat. I told him: “I feel like Gershom. I am a stranger in a strange land. I feel like a refugee who has lost everything,” and the Patriarch nodded in understanding and embraced me. He told me to continue to attend the church to come to him if I needed any help.” “I’ll be praying for you,” he told me, as we parted.”

My father in law looked into my eyes and grasped my hand. He wanted me to understand that the Ecumenical Patriarch’s words and the manner in which he showed he cared were like balsam to his soul, infusing him with the courage and confidence to hope and to fight, at a time when he was teetering on the brink of giving up. When I told him that I too had met the Patriarch and had been the recipient of his kindness, his face lit up and he embraced me excitedly. That was when I knew I was in.

 To his dying day, my father in law would speak of the Ecumenical Patriarch in loving terms, marvelling at his humility and his humanity and expressing his most ardent hope that he would play a decisive role in the reunification of all the churches.

The last conversation I had with my father in law took place in his bedroom as he was to sick to join us for lunch. “Do you speak to your Patriarch at all?” I informed him our communication was sporadic. “I doubt he will remember me,” he rasped. “But if you ever speak to him, tell him that an old stranger, in an even stranger land, across the other side of the world says thank you. Thank you, from the bottom of his heart.”

It was only a few days later that he left us and some time after that, that I discovered, among his personal effects, an old dried flower and net to it a small, pocket sized photograph of the Ecumenical Patriarch, inscribed with the date of their meeting. I have treasured it ever since.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 12 October 2024

ANZAC: THE GREEK CHAPTER

War documentaries often seek to propagate or reinforce a national myth. When this happens, it is difficult for historians and veterans alike not to act as performative agents, showcasing power or espousing a certain narrative in front of the camera to legitimize themselves.

War documentaries thus form part of a broader documentary conflict, where images, information, and emotional engagement can often be weaponized. This in turn may serve to construct a symbiotic relationship where both historians and veterans collaborate to cultivated a mediated portrayal of the conflict in question, addressing the historian’s quest for control over the narrative, as well as the veterans’  need for recognition. This dynamic reveals both the harsh realities of conflict and but also the overarching predominance of an overarching discourse, portraying veterans not just as soldiers but as architects, albeit forgotten, of a new order, complicating the perception of war and its practitioners as violent and destructive.

Peter Ewer and John Irwin’s fascinating recently released documentary:  Anzac: The Greek Chapter thoughtfully addresses the aforementioned conundrum by their nuanced treatment of their subject matter. Narrated by journalist Barry Cassidy, whose father took part in the campaigns mentioned in the documentary and supported by a number of Greek community organisations, it purports to tell the story of the ANZAC contribution to the defence of Greece during World War II.

This in itself, forms part of the foundational tradition of the post-war Greek community in Australia. While our presence here predates the formation of the Australian state, mediated and controlled as it was by a dominant class that usurped sovereignty from its native inhabitants, it is widely disseminated in our community that the bonds connecting Greece and Australia were forged in the conflagration of conflict and somehow, our esteem in the eyes of those who allowed us to come here, derives from our conduct towards them during the Second World War.

In the documentary, this tradition is analysed via extensive interviews conducted of veterans. Indeed, these interviews comprise most of the documentary, ostensibly permitting the veterans to tell their own story, while also facilitating the viewer to establish an emotional connection with them. All of them describe the Greeks in glowing terms. They are “noble,” they “share food,” old ladies give them “pieces of chicken,” they provide ANZAC troops with a “royal welcome,” they display “typical Greek bravery.” Their generosity is so great that often the veterans narrating their experiences break into tears and cannot continue their narrative. One Greek lady featured in the documentary describes how her mother, risking the execution of her entire family, fed, clothed and bathed a paraplegic ANZAC soldier in a Cretan cave for over two years. She, like the veterans, portrays her mother as a selfless hero.

Both veterans and Greeks therefore seem to collaborate to adhere to a narrative that serves the ideological needs of both parties. While no archival footage or interview attests to the fear of the Greeks, the burden on their families or any resentment felt at having to hide or feed the ANZACS, the directors of the documentary subtly allow the interviewees to interrogate, analyse and ultimately question their own prevailing discourses. Some of the veterans for example, cast their relationship in terms of reciprocity. Greek hospitality was offered because the Greeks were “grateful the [ANZACS] were defending their country.” In this light, the Greek’s brave and selfless care of the ANZACS, while no doubt appreciated greatly, was considered recompense for the bravery and selflessness of the ANZACS themselves. Another veteran couches the relationship within the context of necessity: “They trusted us. They had to trust us.” Is this then a relationship and a subsequent admiration that developed out of a lack of choice? Possibly but this is not at all certain and is refuted by the veterans’ recounting of so many acts of sacrifice by the Greek populace. All of the veterans interviewed express surprise not at the fact that the Greeks cared for them, but at the magnitude of that hospitality and the intensity of the emotional connection they displayed towards them. On the other hand, the veteran who recounts how he witnessed from his hiding place, the execution of over twenty Cretan villages, subverts the narrative of reciprocity. This is after all, the raw reality of war.

Similarly, the country of Greece is described or rather idealised by the veterans, especially after their harrowing service in the deserts of North Africa, as a “paradise,” a “utopia,” or a “heaven.” Words such as “primitive” and “crude” appear to portray a Greece as a colonial backdrop to an imperialist endeavour. This is another area where a discourse forming narrative takes place. The documentary through extensive archival footage, provides valuable broader context as to the Greek campaign: how it came about, why it was necessitated and for what reason ANZAC troops participated. In the considered view of the directors, the ANZAC presence is a type of re-run of Gallipoli: British Prime Minister Winston Churchill did not tell the Australian and New Zealand Prime Ministers that Greece was indefensible and thus the ANZACS were dispensable, sacrificial lambs to his wider strategic concerns.

The directors of the documentary could have weaponised it so as to portray Australian soldiers as virtuous heroes, fighting and giving up their lives so that the preferred order, that of democracy and the rule of law would prevail. They chose not to do so. After all, such an ideological slant is not supported by the testimony of the veterans themselves, who present themselves not as lofty idealists but rather as reluctant heroes, or carefree larrikins, going off to war, for a sense of adventure, to see the world or because it is preferrable to fruit picking. Even here however, the documentary allows for alternative perspectives to emerge, with Aboriginal veteran, the late Reg Saunders poignantly stating: “We have been fighting wars ever since the Whites came.”

Allowing the veterans to narrate the campaigns provides immediacy as well as emotional intensity. From Vevi in the north we follow the ANZAC troops with bated breath south as they valiantly but futilely attempt to arrest and ultimately flee from the Nazi onslaught, our hearts leaping both at their successes and almost predetermined reverses. In Gallipoli, ANZAC troops were placed in a position where they were mere cannon fodder. In Greece, we learn, not only were ANZAC troops not told that their commanders believed that there the prospect of success was non-existent, they were also underequipped and not supplied with the necessary kit to make it through, among other challenges, the harsh Macedonian climate. Learning from veterans that they were forced to did trenches with their tin hats because they were not issued with shovels causes us to feel even more admiration for their steadfastness and their indomitability of spirit. Having already accepted that the overwhelming superiority of Nazi soldiers and materiel doomed the Anzac campaign from the outset, and learning as we do, that the Nazi parachute landing on Crete was completely unexpected, the implication however, is that on an equal playing field, “our” boys would have prevailed and that by enduring privation, displaying the courage that they did under fire, the ANZACS of the Greek Campaign have earned their place in the national myth as equal to the ANZACS of Gallipoli. The veterans’ narrations make it exceedingly hard to argue otherwise.

The documentary’s conclusion is inspired: There is moving footage of the descendants of veterans make pilgrimages to Greece in order to honour their ancestors’ sacrifice, and impliedly, co-opting the Greeks of Greece to do the same. The wreath laying and erection of plaques and monuments has become a common vocabulary between Greeks, Australians and Greek-Australians for the enshrinement of memory and the formation of mutually acceptable rites in which to celebrate and commemorate a particular form of martial valour and inter-ethnic solidarity. Thus two significant purposes are served: Recognition is afforded to soldiers whose particular contribution is no longer fashionable or highlighted adequately in their national narrative while contemporaneously, Greek-Australians who have largely been left out of that prevailing national narrative, gain enough purchase to attempt to entrench themselves within it, legitimising their presence and making claims of validation upon the dominant class.

 “Anzac: The Greek Chapter,” is a thoughtful, sensitive, multi-faceted, well-paced and exciting documentary that provides valuable insights both into our common history but also the formation of our modern identities. A feature of the 2024 Melbourne Greek Film Festival, it should not be missed.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 5 October 2024

ΔΙΕΘΝΕΣ

 

Once a year, just before Christmastime, we would make an annual pilgrimage to the Lonsdale Street. After stopping at Salapatas to buy a record, my father would take us to Diethnes International Cakes in order to eat a «πάστα» which had nothing to do with pasta per se but everything to do with the height of epicurean ecstasy. Not being in the habit of eating cakes regularly, we would envision the exact form of the πάστα for weeks before, while its taste would linger on the tongue months later, coming and going in moments unsuspect, in a litany of craving and longing.

To view Diethnes’ display counter, featuring a vast array of confections in a multitude of shapes and sizes was a transfixing experience, one that four decades later still evoked astonishment. Here touloumbes co-existed with galaktoboureka, abiding in harmony with bougatsa and baklava, at total peace with the kok, also known as the yo-yo, the ubiquitious cake of choice to be offered when visiting friends and relatives. The sweet smell of sugar was overwhelming. It invaded the olfactory nerves and flooded the synapses almost to the point of swooning.

In those days, Mr Vasilis Batzoyiannis, one of the proprietors told me during my last visit, people would think nothing of making orders of sixty or seventy baklavadakia, to be served at nameday parties. “You couldn’t do that now of course,” he reflected. “Firstly, the cost alone is prohibitive. Secondly, no one celebrates namedays any more. We are not the people we used to be.”

And yet my contention was always that as long as Diethnes occupied its end of Lonsdale Street when all the other Greek shops of the precinct had been consigned to oblivion, that we are the people we have always been. In my student days, many were the NUGAS meetings that were held at a packed Diethnes, which could host up to four or five parallel meetings of committees of other community organisations contemporaneously, many are the plots that were hatched within its walls to depose community leaders, and many  were the partnerships that were forged around its tables, business and personal.

Diethnes was my daily lunch destination when I graduated and started working in the city. For starters, it was the only place where I could get a decent Greek coffee, not being a fan of the cappuccino, the latte not yet having become popular. No matter what the weather, you could guarantee that you would always run into someone you knew either in the shop, or just leaving it and it was the daily conversations and interaction with Diethnes’ patrons that made me appreciate just how complex and diverse our community was. From Diethnes’ shop front, you could almost time the comings and goings of the constituent parts of that community. In five minutes, GOCMV president George Fountas would stride past, peering through the window to see who was about and affording a cursory nod of recognition. In the other direction, Laiki Bank employees strutting confidently up the footpath in search of the next deal. From the RMIT Greek Centre, Mimis Sophocleous would emerge, smiling, as he offered a well-considered thought and a suggestion for further reading. Immersed as you were in the centre of the circulatory system of the Greeks of Melbourne, you didn’t realise until you felt a heavy hand on your shoulder and a gruff voice stating; «κερασμένα» that Christos Tsirkas had entered the shop and had picked up your bill.

This was a place in which everyone had a place and to which everyone belonged. It was also a place where you could run into visiting politicians, singers or artists from Greece for before Oakleigh, Diethnes was an obvious choice to make the statement that we so often seek to impart to our visiting Helladic brethren: that we are just as Greek as they and what is more, we have the confections to prove it. Friends visiting from interstate would also be taken to Diethnes where they too would marvel at our communal Hellenicity and lament the paucity of similar establishments in their own locale, while scoffing a chocolate waffle.

Every year in the cold Sunday of July that the Cyprus demonstration would be held, Diethnes would provide warmth and sustenance to the mostly elderly demonstrators packed within. As with the Antipodes Festival, one entered to try to locate a friend at one’s own peril, for the loss of at least one of one’s dimensions, was a real risk.

Mr Vasilis Batzoyiannis, in highlighting that his was a family establishment, jokes that single Greeks would take their coffee at Medallion but once attached, would frequent Diethnes and I nod in agreement. Over a year-long succession of coffees at Diethnes, I painstakingly convinced my wife that I was an acceptable prospect for a spouse. The location was her choice, for unlike other options, Diethnes was clean and smoke-free.

My own children were introduced to Diethnes quite early as well. Every Saturday, after dropping off the eldest at Greek school, I would invariably gravitate to Diethnes where I would procure for my youngest two, bowls of the creamiest rizogalo. They have climbed onto its benches, spilled sugar upon its tables and enjoyed more hot chocolates than I will ever admit to their mother. They have also basked in the broad smiles of the establishment’s proprietors. After each of them in turn, commenced Greek school, I still persisted in frequenting Diethnes, Neos Kosmos in tow, relishing the opportunity to ruminate over community affairs with friends. A good many Diatribes have been written from its tables, and yet I noted that even though on such Saturdays, when the city would be filled by Greek parents, most of them recently arrived, taking their children to Greek school, very few would deign to patronise Diethnes. There was something about its aesthetic that was inimical to the establishment of a connection, whether this was the Christmas decorations perennially left upon its walls or its famous men’s toilet door with a chunk cut out of it so that it could open past the toilet bowl. It was almost as if this place was too old, too full of history to belong to anyone other than the ghosts of the past and yet it was a great favourite with the broader community, with online sales of cakes skyrocketing after the advent of the socially levelling Coronavirus.

 

On my purported last visit to Diethnes, I brought with me the same book of Cavafy’s poems that I used to annotate in the same shop a quarter of a century ago. I sat on the same seat I always prefer and stroked the faux marble table top as if trying to absorb its memory with my fingers. My coffee arrived without me having to order it: they know what I like and how I like it and I sat with the proprietors reminiscing about all those people that have come and gone for so many years. “In the beginning,” Mr Vasilis mused, “all we could think of was how to make this a success. And we worked so hard. It is only later that you look back and start considering that all this means, what effect it had on our community.”

In the beginning…. you don’t generally think about the end. You live, you experience, you strive, and you try to delude yourself that the work of your hands will defy oblivion, that they will achieve some permanency. We are no longer at the beginning. When Diethnes closes its doors at the end of the month, I will no longer feel that I have a place in the heart of Melbourne that I belong to and which belongs to me. A whole way of life, an intricate web of connections, a beating heart will cease to exist. In the beginning, you don’t think about loss. That comes later. When things disappear and you live half within a world where the places you belong to no longer exist and half within a world of ghost and memory. Then, when you have ample time to look past success, you begin to contemplate life as a shade.

A few hours later, having collected my children from Greek school I returned to Diethnes and ordered them a rizogalo each. There were none available and they settled for a hot chocolate, accompanied by some freshly baked biscuits, complements of the open-hearted Mr Vasilis. “I want you to remember this place,” I told my children. “I want you to remember how we used to come here and eat rizogalo when you were younger. And I want you to remember this day, because the next time we are here, this cake shop will no longer be here.”

They slurped upon their beverages and looked at me puzzled. They cannot comprehend endings because they are still at their beginning, nor can they yet appreciate my own topography of loss, the ever-growing map of lost or missing buildings that occupies my own internal orientation. I squeezed the vinyl on my seat and took one last look around. Then we set off for home, walking past Rekaris’ old shoe shop which is now being re-modelled into something else. We did not look back.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 28 September 2024

ΣΤΕΦΑΝΑ

There are a number of euphemisms to describe getting married. One can get hitched, be wed, tie the knot, walk down the aisle, or exchange vows. In Greek, one can “dance Isaiah’s dance,” or “be crowned,” (στεφανώνομαι) referring to the stefana, or wedding crowns that form an integral part of the Orthodox wedding ceremony. These days, you don’t have to get married in a church to get to wear stefana for enterprising Greek-Australian wedding celebrants offer a “stefana service” where the emphasis is placed on the penultimate syllable, and where a helpful information booklet advises that you can pronounce them as “steph-arna”. Just a few years ago, such a service was invaluable as a means of convincing hysterical aged grandparents that their grandchildren could legally be married in a park, and thus secure their attendance and cash wedding present, for the crossing over of the stefana, no matter who performs the cross, or the double-cross, confers a legitimacy  upon proceedings like no other.

My favourite stefana are the Ethiopian ones. Bright, shiny and bulbous, they are exuberant as well as aspirational, for they are almost exactly identical to the mitres worn by Orthodox bishops. There is a certain irony in this, for bishops are not allowed to be married, but their crown is not exchanged, but rather bestowed. The golden, impossibly tall wedding crowns of the Indian Christians of the Syro-Malabar tradition are my next favourites, reminiscent as they are of lofty pagodas. In the Slavic tradition and traditionally in days of old in Greece, mitre-shaped metal wedding crowns, often extremely ornate and indistinguishable from the crowns of royalty are also employed. Unlike modern Greek usage, those crowns are not personal to the bride and groom but instead belong to the church and are used to crown all those who would be married within it.

That the wedding crown tradition predates Christianity can be evidenced by the fact that some early Christians opposed crowning in marriage, with figures like Tertullian expressing disapproval as to its pagan origins. Nevertheless, the practice eventually became accepted as it came to be linked with Biblical and Christian ideas of triumph. Paul the Apostle mentioned a "Crown of Righteousness" in his Second Epistle to Timothy as the eternal reward for the just, while John Chrysostom saw the crown as a symbol of victory over "uncontrolled sexuality." Generally however, the crowns are considered symbols of authority for the new domestic church formed by the creation of a new family. 

Unlike the wedding crowns of other traditions, with the exception of royalty, Greek wedding crowns have, for at least the past one hundred years, devolved to comprise a circlet, often studded with items resembling pearls, or a wreath and these are personal to the married couple, and thus cannot be used by anyone else. A number of customs arose over the years, relating to the use of stefana after the marriage ceremony. Some couples would frame their stefana in what is known as a stefanothiki and hang them over the conjugal bed in order to remind themselves of the sacredness of their commitment to each other. For similar reasons, others would hang them on the family iconostasis. When I was young, I discovered my parent’s stefana in an impossibly heavy, pink frosted glass case that I am convinced had it be hung anywhere it would have taken chunks of plaster out of the wall, in their wardrobe. They remain there to the present day. My own stefana are secreted in a more modest satin lined box at the back of our wardrobe as well, similarly awaiting discovery.

A few weeks ago, the intrepid restauranteur and collector of ephemera John Rerakis was browsing in a second-hand shop when he came across the stefanothiki depicted in this article. The wood laminated stefanothiki with its dated icons harkens back to a superseded aesthetic prevalent in the sixties and seventies. Indeed, the nature of its construction, slightly asymmetrical with its ornamentation apparently executed by a jigsaw, are consistent of the ethos of a people who did not have money to spend, no access to traditional products of the land they left behind and were forced to reconstruct their own customs using local materials as best they could. It is plain, commonsense, moving in its simplicity and abounding in its authenticity. It looks and feels old.  In contrast, there is a youthful exuberance exuded by the stefana within the case, with their plastic white flower decorations and similarly plastic mint leaf. They suggest that while the couple that wore these crowns may age, the love they share, and the meaning of all they have experienced together, will not fade, or diminish, but will endure for ever, or at least, for as long as it takes for the synthetic material they are constructed from to degrade into microplastics.

This is all for the good, for the presence of the stefanothiki in the store suggests that the couple to whom the stefana belong are no longer with us, and this most personal relic has found its way into the marketplace via a process of kin discarding or clearing out their personal effects after their demise. John Rerakis felt compelled to rescue the stefanothiki from oblivion, as he does so many other artefacts that he chances upon that reference our historical presence in Melbourne and did so at a price of $4.75. The sharing his find on social media elicited a number of responses from commentators expressing emotions ranging from distress to disgust at the fate of the stefana, a common sentiment being disapprobation towards the descendants of the deceased for being so heartless as to dispose this most personal of items.

Yet being so personal, the stefana themselves denote something ephemeral and the finite nature of all they represent is underlain by the customs concerned with their fate at the end of the marriage. According to some, each person takes to the grave the stefana worn by them on their wedding day. Others maintain that both stefana should be buried with the last surviving partner for it is only with their death that the marriage is deemed over. Others deride this as a custom that arisen outside the authority of the church. Instead, some priests advise, the correct procedure, which also applies in the case of divorce, is for the stefana to be returned to the church where they were blessed, there to be disposed of respectfully, or for them to be burned with due reverence so that no possibility exists for them to be desecrated.

The intensity of the reaction accompanying the purchase of the discarded stefana thus seems to be intermingled with a profound sorrow and indeed guilt at the demise of an entire community and way of life. We cannot plausibly accumulate the combined stefana of all of our ancestors, we are not asked to do so and yet somewhere, somehow, we feel that we should, that just like their dictates while we were alive were often a burden to many of us, so too must we unconsciously accept that their memories should also be a burden to us, to be preserved without question, without critique, without evolution, in stasis, forever. And where we fail to preserve our own kin’s ephemera, the next best way of perpetuating the burden is to attach ourselves to the jettisoned story of someone else: finding and purchasing from an op-shop an old suitcase belonging to a deceased Greek migrant, with his address in Greece and destination in Melbourne hopefully inscribed on the front, or securing a glory box, despite the fact that we found the whole concept of the μπαούλο ridiculous in the eighties and nineties, that our progeny have absolutely no idea what we are talking about and that all these grave-goods consume all our storage space.

Despite the vitality of the migrant ethos, there has always been a strand of nihilism woven around it, one that calls into question our aspirations and hopes for future continuity, even as we attempt to lay down its foundations or perpetuate it as a community or as members of a family. In this, I liken our stefana as an ouroboric personification of ourselves: forever chasing our tail, only to devour it, but brilliantly so,  a symbol of cosmic harmony, eternity, and the cycle of birth and death, which is the lot of all of us and from which there is no escape.

In the Orthodox Funeral Service, Saint John of Damascus provides the basis for our ennui: “Vanity are all the works and quests of man, and they have no being after death has come; our wealth is with us no longer. How can our glory go with us? For when death has come all these things are vanished clean away.” “Crowned in glory and honour” as all of us are, we hastily remove our wedding crowns in order to hasten to the park for photos,  and to the reception for the benefit of the videographer, at the end of our wedding ceremonies, even though it is tradition for the Stefana to be worn for seven days after the wedding, a special prayer existing within the Orthodox tradition for the removal of the wedding crowns on the eighth day: “Bless them, as we dissolve these crowns, and preserve their union undissolved.” And as we purchase their effects, as we agonise over them and as we preserve them, and as our descendants discard ours and theirs, ours will be a union undissolved, even as our memories will dissolve.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 21 September 2024

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

COMING OUT GREEK

 

And coming in from fifty metres, it’s Van Der Haar! Van Der Haar is going to chance it. Yes! Van Der Haar has kicked a goal! Ten points the margin…’

It was always impossible to obtain the requisite amount of quietitude that would facilitate the completion of Greek school homework on a Saturday. Football commentary emanating loudly from an old transistor radio in the garage would invariably meld with the sound of my father’s drill to form a melisma of distraction sufficient to render even the most earnest attempt to complete an essay, for example, fruitless.

‘Baba, how do you say overheard, in Greek?’

My father, not removing his gaze for a moment from the planks he was ritually disemboweling with a circular saw, would answer firstly: "αφουγκράζουμνα" and then when I would ask the follow up question, which language he was speaking he would shrug: ‘Dunno. Ask your mum.’

‘How about border-guard?’

‘I dunno. Ask your mum,’ my father would mutter, removing a fat builder’s pencil from behind a saw-dust covered ear, in order to scratch some runes on a piece of 2x4.

‘How about surveillance?’

‘What are you writing, a spy novel? Go and ask your mum!" 

At a time when most of my friend’s parents could not speak English and where thus mercifully not privy to their offspring’s performance or lack thereof at school as evidenced by their monthly reports, my father was that rare thing, a crypto-Greek and thus, able to decipher all manner of codes pertaining to my lack of scholarly application. Arriving in Melbourne at the age of four, his only memory of his birthplace was being given a toy windmill by my grandmother when the ship that conveyed him to the Antipodean shores berthed in Kalamata. As such, quite apart from perennially being incapable of assisting me with my Greek-school homework, he displayed symptoms of non-Greek behaviour on a regular basis.

For one thing, whenever we were out in public, he would never speak in Greek. Holding my hand, his face contorted in an expression of absolute horror at my constant questions delivered at the top of my voice in the patois of his ancestral village, he would variously provide terse, monosyllabic responses in English, or ignore his interlocutor altogether.

Driving with the windows down while listening to Greek music in the car, one of my father’s greatest pleasures, also had its own arcane ritual. For whenever we pulled up at a traffic light, the second my father spotted another motor vehicle in close proximity, also with windows down, he would immediately either switch off the radio, or wind up the window. This ritual, which continues to the present day, has now been termed the ultra-fenestration of the Monaro, though the canary yellow Monaro in which it arose, has long been divested of my father’s mastery.

At the same time, my father was also a crypto-Aussie. Unlike my Greece-raised uncles who loved nothing more than to argue vociferously on such vital topics as whether ‘turbo,’ is properly pronounced ‘tourbo’ in English (they eventually all agreed that it was so), or which side should have won the Greek civil war, my father was content to sit out the discussions in silence, laconically delivering devastating one-liners, most often in English and always with the pursed lips of the true Australian, that were pitched high above my uncles’ egos in subtlety. For some unhellenic reason, he never saw the need to prove that he was right, or was indeed the font of all wisdom revealed and unrevealed. To all Greek-speakers that crossed his path including myself, this was disconcerting.

My father preferred beer to wine and was never to be found either at, or discussing the soccer. On Saturdays he watched the football and I dreaded summers, when he would watch test matches for days on end. In my late teens I attempted to explore the possibility of extending the father-son bond by way of jointly attending football matches, yet my propensity to ask him inane questions in Greek, cheer in the same language and make Mediterranean hand gestures at players whose skills I could not appreciate since I had no knowledge of the game, would make my father grimace in pain; thus my attempts were discontinued.

Though my father was an avid gardener, a skill that was over the years, passed on to me by way of compulsory re-education through labour, most years he neither had a κήπο, nor a μπαξέ. Instead, he betrayed an uncommon and, in his peer’s eyes, disturbing predilection for planting flowers and ornamental shrubbery and in the furtherance of this pursuit, would often consult Yates’ Garden Guide. The only redeeming feature of this activity was that over the years, one by one, he felled the significant number of eucalyptus trees that once grew on the family property, a powerful metaphor, if there ever was one, for re-hellenisation.

As my father worked, he constantly whistled or sang. His collection of contemporary Greek records was sizeable, comprising mostly but not limited to the Holy Tetrad of Yiorgos Dalaras, Yiannis Parios, Xaris Alexiou and Glykeria’s ‘Omorfi Nyxta,’ the only album in which both he and I know every single song by heart. Yet nestled beneath the Greek LPs underneath the record player were LPs by other artists that at least in my lifetime, have never been played by him: Little Richard, Simon and Garfunkel, Cat Stevens, Bob Dylan and Boney M. My discovery of these in my early teens, coupled with constant auditory repetition of the Holy Tetrad’s repertoire have formed the foundation of my musical aesthetic. Nonetheless, I know not the reason why my father abjured English-language music, though his steadfastness in doing so can be juxtaposed against the suppressed anguish he expressed when I once taped Maria Farantouri singing Yiannis Ritsos’ Lianotragouda over his ‘The Platters’ Greatest Hits’ tape when I was fifteen.

Since my father’s conversational Greek was limited in my childhood, comprising a smattering of village Greek phrases, we grew up learning Greek together. Endlessly inventive and possessed of the decidedly unhellenic disposition to engage in word-play, my father’s Greek utterances, augmented week by week as he listened to me trying to complete my Greek-school homework became linguistic tapestries of a true virtuoso. This was nowhere more evident than in his interpretation of Greek songs. Not always comprehending the lyrics, my father would replace them with words of his own. Thus, Kostas Smokovitis’ Θα τον τρελάνουμε τον ήλιο, as adapted by my father, became Θα κατουρήσουμε τον ήλιο, in which form, I took it upon myself to perform for my Greek school class one year, fully convinced that this was the true and original version. My Greek-school teacher, who was an overly passionate supporter of the Greek Socialist Party, for whom this was the theme song, disabused me of my misapprehension, by way of corporal punishment. My father’s only response, when blame was ascribed to him for my predicament, was to remark drily that being persecuted for one’s political beliefs was  un-Australian.

Despite friends and family terming my father an Aussie, he seldom socialised or mixed with Anglo-Australians outside work. On the odd occasion when I brought home an ‘Australian,’ friend, I would feel an almost imperceptible feeling of unease emanating from the frequency of his power tools, noisily making his presence manifest in the garage. When he did finally emerge, he displayed an uncharacteristic reluctance to discuss the footy. One friend, perceiving a neglected tarnished trophy on my father’s bookshelf one day remarked: ‘Wow, your dad was a Lacrosse champion for Essendon Technical School.’ When I asked my father, in my friend’s presence, how it was that he came to embrace such an exotic sport and why indeed he had never mentioned it before (I had never noticed the trophy), he merely shrugged and dismissed me laconically, for the first time ever, in Greek: «χαζομάρες.»

I was too shocked to seek further clarification, save that my father looked at my mother in a knowing fashion the next day, when I returned home to report that my friend, who had been the recipient of my family’s hospitality and whom my father had driven home, had come to school telling all and sundry that the furniture in our home was ‘so woggy,’ and that our front yard was ‘full of concrete,’ a manifest lie. ‘I told you, they never change,’ my father whispered, believing he was out of earshot.

Years later, my father and I were walking to our local polling booth on election day. ‘Who do you think we should vote for?’ I asked him in Greek. Even before I could sense his lips tighten for the inevitable response in English, the crusty drawl of an old man cut in: ‘Hey you, we speak English in Australia.’

My father swirled around. In the nano-seconds he took to respond, as he confessed to me later, a multitude of deeply embedded and hitherto unrevealed memories assailed his consciousness: being kicked off the tram by the conductor for speaking Greek in the fifties, dealing with teachers and classmates who constantly denigrated his ethnicity and surname, abiding with snide comments and subtle racial slurs throughout his career, such as being asked to provide quotes for services in drachmas and of course, listening to his team-members in Lacrosse, the sport he loved more at that time than anything else, sanctimoniously exclaim: ‘Those frigging Greeks, oh, but you’re alright,’ and then dump him from the team. Then there was the mystifying experience of seeing my father being approached in the supermarket by a strange lady who looked at him through squinty eyes and then exclaimed: “I know you, you’re Pill aren’t you?” “No, I’m not. You’ve made a mistake,” my father replied before shuffling away. It was only now that he was able to reveal that all ‘wogs’ were referred to as ‘Pill,’ at his school, as it was common knowledge that wogs were ‘hard to take.’

When the riposte came, it was by means of a phrase enunciated through the pursed lips of the true Australian, short, solecistical, and it sent the old man away reeling: «Δεν πας να γεμιστείς, κωλόγερε.» With tears in my eyes I embraced him. ‘Dad,’ I exclaimed. ‘You ‘ve finally come out. I’m so proud of you.’ Public displays of physical affection are also old-school, un-Australian. «Άσε με, βρε,» he responded, simultaneously pushing me and the person handing out how to vote cards for the Australian Greens out of his way. ‘We’ve already had enough ρεζιλίκια for one day.’

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 7 September 2024