KOLOKOTRONOCLASM

 

It is a phenomenon as old as the world itself. The Vikings knew it, which is why all their myths coalesce around Ragnarök, the last battle in which the gods would be vanquished and the world broken. The Hindus knew it, and they awaited Shiva to destroy the world in order for another to be forged in its place. The Greeks however, could not foresee the end of the usurping Olympians, though they were happy to dethrone them, desecrate their temples and trample over their statues and built triumphant new edifices proclaiming their adherence to a new set of beliefs.

Yet it was not us who invented iconoclasm, the action of attacking or assertively rejecting cherished beliefs and institutions or hallowed personages. The archetypal iconoclast can be found in the arch-heretic pharaoh Akhenaten of Egypt who had the temerity to reject the anthropomorphic gods of the Thebaid, only to worship the sun-disk as sole deity. To this end he caused his officials to carve or scratch out all references to the old gods on the temples and public buildings of his land.

The Jews of old too were iconoclastic and this was a Divine imperative. In Numbers 33:52 God commanded that they “drive out all the inhabitants of the land from before you, destroy all their engraved stones, destroy all their moulded images, and demolish all their high places.”

Some Orthodox icons proudly depict the smashing of ancient statues. Some statues still survive of the goddess Aphrodite, rendered suitably harmless by the large cross carved on her forehead. Yet for all that, ancient statues, particularly the good ones, were revered in Byzantium, repurposed as works of art.  According to the Patria of Constantinople, the statue of Aphrodite outside the brothels reputedly set up by Constantine the Great in Constantinople was used as a touchstone for chaste women and virgins who were under suspicion. Those whose chastity were under question would be made to approach the statue. If they were chaste, they would pass by unharmed. However, if the opposite was true, a “sudden apparition would confuse her and reluctantly and against her will, as soon as she approached…and lifting her dress in front of all, she would show her genitals before all.” Onward Christian Soldiers indeed…

When it came to Byzantium, iconoclasm arose out of feelings of insecurity and vulnerability. The adherents of aniconic Islam had swept into the traditional Byzantine territories of the East and were making conquest after conquest. This caused many to reflect upon the perceived shortcomings of their own society, ascribing Byzantine losses not to it being significantly weakened by incessant prior wars against external enemies, internal strife, and a lack of manpower (that would have been too complicated) but instead to the Byzantines veneration of icons. Perhaps the only way forward was to smash, deface or destroy the scapegoats of one’s shortcomings.

Of course it didn’t work. One hundred or so years later, the icons returned and they have been with us ever since, in unaltered form, standing silent vigil during that time, as our people lost the known world, remained in darkness, and then, in 1821, forged their world anew. Along the way, they found new icons, whose likenesses, in the form of statues, busts and pictures, adorn classrooms, kafeneia, public squares and textbooks. Kolokotronis, Papaflessas, Athanasios Diakos, Georgios Karaiskakis were and remain the new icons: impenetrable, unassailable, completely unsurpassable. Until now that is.

Recently, the pedestal of the statue of Theodoros Kolokotronis, the so-called “Old man of Morea” outside of the Old Greek Parliament was defaced with graffiti. The slogans spray-painted upon it in livid red angrily proclaimed: “Dead Men Cannot Rape,” and “Queer Rage.” Cries of shock and shame immediately emanated from all quarters. How dare they? How ungrateful! How indicative of the decline of a society which far from progressing is turning upon itself to consume itself!

In Victoria, Marty Sheargold was recently cancelled for permitting himself to perform a similar form of iconoclastic blasphemy against the Australian women's national football team. His transgression was flippant and in poor taste and the reaction it provoked indicates how deeply people feel the need to idolise their betters and just how beyond reproach or indeed critical analysis they want them to be. Kolokotronis and his like are no different. They occupy a plane above the reach of mere mortals. Their achievements are superhuman, so their moral virtues must also touch the Divine, lest or whole belief system come crashing down on our heads.

We know for instance that Kolokotronis could be rather blunt when in search of funds. In 1822, he wrote to Ignatios, Metropolitan of Ungro-Wallachia, a man who selflessly and single-mindedly devoted his life to raising money from Greeks Abroad, in order to fund the Greek Revolution, seeking money to repair the fortress of Nauplion. He wrote:  “You're to send it to me without fail. If you don't, I'll be at war with you, war without mercy, war without end, and I'll leave it to be carried on by my descendants." So much for friendly camaraderie.

In 1823, when Alexandros Mavrokordatos was elected head of the Legislative Body at the Assembly of Epidauros, the Bishop of Arta was sent to Kolokotronis to break the news. As he sang the praises of Mavrokordatos, Kolokotronis drew his yataghan and started waving it in his face. The horrified bishop protested that the whole Legislative Body would have no choice but to leave the Peloponnese if threats like this continued. Soon after, they did so. Soon after, Kolokotronis as Vice-President of the Executive summoned Alexander Mavrocordatos, and told him that unless he resigned his office at once he would mount him backwards on a donkey and have him chased out of the Peloponnese with whips.  Mavrokordatos, the only man in Greece who at the time wore a European frock-coat and thick rimless spectacles, a polymath and speaker of eight languages, resigned in the face of this intimidation, proving that democracy is all well and good, but being a warlord who governs by fiat, was far more persuasive.

This man was a staunch fighter for freedom. He was also a sworn enemy of whoever harmed his interests, no matter where he was from or what beliefs he espoused. Under his leadership, the massacre of Tripolitsa took place, where innocent Muslim and Jewish civilians were massacred and raped, despite promises of protection and safe conduct. Perhaps this is what the aggrieved iconoclasts are seeking to draw our attention to, with their defacement of public property.

It is a debate worth having. In his own memoirs, Kolokotronis records how sicked he was by the massacre committed by the troops under his command: "Inside the town they had begun to massacre. ... I rushed to the place ... If you wish to hurt these Albanians, I cried, "kill me rather; for, while I am a living man, whoever first makes the attempt, him will I kill the first." ... I was faithful to my word of honour ... Tripolitsa was three miles in circumference. The [Greek] host which entered it, cut down and were slaying men, women, and children from Friday till Sunday. Thirty-two thousand were reported to have been slain. One Hydriote [boasted that he had] killed ninety. About a hundred Greeks were killed; but the end came [thus]: a proclamation was issued that the slaughter must cease. ... When I entered Tripolitsa, they showed me a plane tree in the market-place where the Greeks had always been hanged. I sighed. "Alas!" I said, "how many of my own clan – of my own race – have been hanged there!" And I ordered it to be cut down. I felt some consolation then from the slaughter of the Turks. ... [Before the fall] we had formed a plan of proposing to the Turks that they should deliver Tripolitsa into our hands, and that we should, in that case, send persons into it to gather the spoils together, which were then to be apportioned and divided among the different districts for the benefit of the nation; but who would listen?"

It is not at all clear whether Kolokotronis participated in the massacre. It is likely that, as he candidly states in his memoirs, that he did not, but allowed his troops to run riot, as this was the ordinary practice during the warfare of the age. Similarly, one can assume that we would have been mystified by the moral outrage that actions of this nature would cause in the present time.

Do we do wrong, if we take down the icons of those we revere once in a while, give them a good dusting, and after the cobwebs are clear and scrutinise them anew, debate whether they are still worthy of veneration? Do we do wrong, if in accordance with Queer Theory, we seek to analyse the manner in which Kolokotronis’ deeds and character is portrayed as establishing a set of gender norms? Certainly not. Today’s heroes are tomorrow’s enemies of the people, as the ostracisers of ancient Athens knew and civilisations will discard heroes they no longer have use for and replace them with others, despite our conviction that immortality can be purchased through word or song or deed. For those who need to worship still, no amount of historical research, interrogation and conversation will convince them of their idols’ defenestration. For their brethren, who prefer a more nuanced and spherical view, continued debate and research can only serve to flesh out a more complete picture of a personality, which was just that, a human being, albeit an outstanding one, with all his foibles and accomplishments.

The slogans on the statue of Kokokotronis are suggestive of an absence of such a process of dialogue: when one departs from the realm of hagiography only to embrace daemonography. And while these questions are worth discussing over a glass of something pungent, after a particularly heavy dinner in congenial company, a single plea becomes pertinent: Please be gentle.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 22 March 2025

FROM THE BRINK: REVIVING GREEK VIA HEBREW

It is, perhaps no coincidence that Φάρος, the Greek word for lighthouse and thus a beacon to guide one to safety and ensure their survival, rhymes with Χάρος, the shady mythological figure whose job it was to guide the souls of the no longer living across the Acheron River, into the land of Hades. Sooner or later, despite the best efforts of the former, an encounter with the latter is inevitable. To exhaust the death motif to its ultimate tortuous extent, if sarcophagy describes the process by which flesh is feasted upon and is decomposed, then glossophagy denotes the manner in which one language is slowly subsumed by another.

We are living in the era of the palliative care of the Greek language in Australia. Linguists consider gradual language death to occur when the people speaking that language interact with speakers of a language of higher prestige. This group of people first becomes bilingual, then with newer generations the level of proficiency decreases, and finally no native speakers exist. One by one, despite our best efforts, Modern Greek Studies courses disappear from the tertiary syllabus and those that remain, do so on life support. We scratch our heads and wonder why after twelve years of Greek school classes, our progeny cannot construct a coherent sentence in that language that does not include the words souvlaki, Mykonos and rezili, all the while pondering why, in a community that has so many resources and numbers over a hundred thousand, only182 students studied Modern Greek at VCE level in Victoria.

Meanwhile, the lingua franca of our community, the one in which our press releases and media posts is conducted in, is now predominately English and not Greek. Beyond the pretty photos, the printed propaganda, the carefully crafted adulatory and self-congratulatory stage-managed gatherings and panegyria, this is the ugly truth of the precipice we are perched upon. We don’t like it. It makes us feel as uneasy and self-conscious as when we are forced into a situation where we have to speak Greek because we have no choice and there is no escape. Somehow, and we can’t fathom why, we feel personally responsible for the loss of a language which many of us know, but don’t really want to speak anymore, even though we all agree it is such an important part of our identities. On occasion, when we wax lyrical about the size and vitality of our community, our thought processes begin to take us down the path of trying to calculate how much time and money has gone into creating and maintaining our Greek language schools, and how better off we would have been as a community instead if we had taken those funds and allocated them towards property investments instead. But then again, we are supposed to be a nation of entrepreneurs, and we banish those thoughts within seconds.

There are many reasons for our failure, and the solutions we from time to time come up with in our fora, our conferences and our discussions, don’t seem to be working. Throwing money at the problem doesn’t work. Amalgamating Greek schools doesn’t work. Glossy calendars and photos of smiling students learning Greek dancing doesn’t work. Yet for some reason, up until now, our focus has not been on the examples of languages brought back from the brink of, or indeed, of total extinction.

The only language that has come back from the dead has been Hebrew, in Israel, after over a millenium. Dispersed far from their ancestral homelands, Jews adopted the dominant languages of the countries in which they lived, or adapted these to their purpose, while retaining Hebrew as a revered holy language. However, towards the end of the nineteenth and in the early twentieth century, a movement began for the revival of the Hebrew language that reached its apogee after the Holocaust and the establishment of Israel. What kept the memory of Hebrew alive, was its liturgical use and the conviction of those who revered it, that even if they did not understand it, its memory was worth preserving. What ensured its revival was pure ideology and nationalism: a burning conviction that a people should speak their own tongue, one that would express their history, their aspirations an unite them. Remarkably, this endeavour worked, with Yiddish and Ladino, the erstwhile tongues of the European diaspora, now becoming endangered.

While the Jewish experience is unique and cannot be compared to our own, there are lessons and parallels to our own history that can provide inspiration as we try to drag our language back from the brink: Firstly, sheer willpower and the absolute belief that speaking the tongue is necessary. In the eighteenth century, Saint Kosmos the Aetolian traversed western Greece, exhorting, cajoling, pleading with and demanding that the local inhabitants speak Greek to each other and their offspring, instead of Vlach, Arvantic and the other idioms that they had adopted. That this is a slow and painful process is beyond doubt. When Eliezer Ben-Yehuda who wrote the first modern Hebrew dictionary and was responsible for creating much of its vocabulary began his attempts to convince his compatriots to speak solely in Hebrew, only four families could do so. Yet in the fullness of time both of these visionaries had their dreams for language revival fulfilled.

There are flaws in seeking to follow this approach to the letter. Both revivals are a corollary to a national project that is pertinent to the people who reside in the countries created by those projects. Significant state resources over a long period of time have been allocated so as to ensure public knowledge of Greek and Hebrew in those countries. In Australia, however, the dominant class does not share our linguistic history and the experience of the diaspora is different. Of the 99,956 Australians who identified as Jews in the 2021 Australian census, 10,844 or just one ninth stated that they spoke Hebrew. In contrast, in the same census, of the 424,750 Australians identifying as Greek, 229,643 or approximately one half stated they spoke Greek, the extent of their fluency being unknown.

There are also other differences. While the Greek identity has been centred largely around Greece and its language throughout its historical discourse (and of course, the Greek language has been spoken continuously within its homeland for the past four millenia and in its peripheries), the Jewish identity developed by necessity in a centrifugal fashion with more diverse points of reference. Nonetheless, the fact remains that sheer willpower, an almost missionary zeal facilitated the revival of a defunct tongue. It is this imperative for re-genesis, that could provide a source of inspiration for our own community. Before we do so, however, we would have to face the elephant in the room. For all our lip service to the key role of Greek civilisation in humanity, we have already adopted the language of those we subconsciously accept are of higher prestige. The inhabitants of Israel chose to embrace a language that gave them prestige. Our relationship with our identity in this country, is a more ambiguous one. Regardless, the Hebrew experience also teaches us something else that is value: the contexts in which, if language loss is to occur, a selection of ingredients can be preserved, to form the seeds of revival in the future.

There are other languages which, although never extinct, have had their decline arrested: Welsh, Hawaiian and Basque to name but a few. In this case, such a revival came as a consequence of state intervention and language policy. Once upon a time, our community was heavily invested in language policy in this country, but as the definition of multiculturalism has evolved over time, this no longer seems to be of priority. Perhaps it is time this changed.

Whatever the future may hold, we cannot, like the Bourbons before us, continue on as before, having forgotten nothing and learnt nothing. If we are serious about language retention, let us study the success stories and learn from them, drawing upon the strengths of our own cultural memory. The time is now.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 15 March 2025

ΚΡΙΜΣS ΑΓΑΙΝΣΤ ΑΛΦΑΒΣΤS

 Some things get my goat like no others. One of the major ones, are persons who misspell their parents’ names on their tombstones. Tombstones are civilisation’s lame attempt at a final stab at eternity. The person buried beneath them may no longer be gone but their name is supposed to endure, at least for a little while, so one may as well get it right. For some reason however, many Greek-Australians are oblivious to the fact that the consonantal cluster ΚΣ can ably be represented by a letter known as Ξ, and that ΠΣ can more efficiently be rendered by the letter Ψ. Similarly, the progeny of many a dead Greek appear blissfully unaware of the fact that the letter, not the watch brand, Omega, according to one tradition, was invented by lyric poet Simonides of Ceos and its use became established in Ionia by the sixth century.

In 403BC, at the urging of Eucleides, the Athenians voted to replace the old Attic alphabet with the Ionian one, making the omega official. Someone obviously forgot to inform the Greeks of Melbourne, many of whom universally employ O instead of Ω, and criminally on occasion, Φ. Given that they probably don’t use this alphabet anywhere else, possibly what we are witnessing is the emergence of a unique script which in the future, archaeologists shall term Tomb Script. The ancient, endangered script of the Chams, a linguistic minority of South East Vietnam and Cambodia, is so integral to their identity, they must learn it before they can go to the afterlife. We on the other hand, don’t learn ours, so that our progenitors may stay with us forever.

Alphabetic liberties are taken on a daily basis in our community. From the undertaker who uses a V to write the word Vεκρώσιμη on his premises in Bell Street, thus burying the Greek alphabet as well as his clients for good measure, to the church in the western suburbs that proudly uses the equally and fittingly western Greek alphabet to inscribe upon its entrance: IERA ARXIEΠΙΣΚΟΠΗ, with linguists contending that the said R should be pronounced as it is in English, giving the Greek an Irish tinge, in our hands the alphabet is a pliable instrument, with every single letter being as negotiable as a cheque before the banking reforms of 1908.

Nonetheless, it cannot be disputed that the Greek alphabet forms a major part of our identity. We are inordinately proud of the fact that the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter is represented by the letter π regardless of the fact that the Babylonians were the first to make a written approximation of it centuries before Archimedes’ calculations. We are also extremely proud of the fact that we “gave” our alphabet both to what ended up being the Latin West and the Slavic East, forgetting that we adapted it from the Phoenicians, according to Herodotus. This, we have difficulty in accepting, except for the Cretans of Melbourne, who still use the Linear B script (the Cretans of Sydney prefer Linear A) and the Cypriots who still use the ancient Cypriot syllabary with an extra two ideoglyphs to represent koumbaroi and shetalies,  leaning more likely to the more facile and elegant solution of the polymath Patriarch Photius who attempted to explain away the reason why the ancients referred to our alphabet as  Φοινικήια γράμματα in the following way:

 

“The Lydians and Ionians [report] that letters came from Phoinix the son of Agenor who invented them. But the Cretans report differently that they were developed from writing on the leaves of palm trees (phoinikes).

Skamon, in the second book of his Inventions, says that they were named for Aktaion’s daughter Phoinike. The story goes that he had no male children, but that he had daughters Aglauros, Erse, and Pandrosos. Phoinike died still a virgin. For this reason, Aktaion named the letters "Phoenician" for her, because he wished to give some honour to his daughter.” We did after all, invent everything, including invention itself.

 

Type the words “Ancient Macedonian alphabet,” in Google and a number of Glagolithic and Cyrillic Scripts emerge upon the page. This is of course nonsense, for the ancient Macedonians used the Greek script, but substituting the letter X for Ξ, which is why Social Media Warriors and Defenders of the Faith who secretly lust after Colin Farrell gush over a historical figure they refer to in writing as ΜΕΓΑ ΑΛΕΧΑΝΔΡΟ, pronounced in like fashion to the object of Lady Gaga’s lament:  “Don't call my name, don't call my name Alejandro…”

 

It is this history of license and abuse which cause me to recall possibly the best verse of poetry ever written, by Greek-Australian poet Tina Giannoukos, in “Bull Days:” “The mellifluous alphabet of pain...” It is a pain intensified by another insidious phenomenon: that of the reckless and insensitive abuse of the Greek alphabet by foreigners, especially Westerners. This is not by any means a new phenomenon. College fraternities have appropriated Greek letters for their so-called “Greek Organisations” as far back as the foundation of the Phi Beta Kappa society at the College of William and Mary in 1776. At least those initials stand for the ancient Greek phrase Φιλοσοφία Βίου Κυβερνήτης, signifying: “Love of wisdom, the guide of life.” The Chi Phi fraternity at Princeton I am reliably informed by initiated members of the Tierra Del Fuegan chapter of AHEPA, stands for Χέστηκε η Φοράδα στο Αλώνι, which is demotic Greek for when one is up a particular creek, sans paddle. Mysteriously, while we are rightfully enraged when our Slavic cousins appropriate our identity, we seem not to mind when frat prats have the temerity to autoidentify as Greek. This is something, I humbly submit, the international copyright experts employed by the Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs should look into, and perchance, pursue compensation.

 

I am by persuasion, as anti-Goebbelsian as the next socio-economic entity, but I freely admit I can go the full Savanarola and seek to stoke the pyre of my rage by consigning to it such excremental publications as the prurient Sαlly Griffyη who dares to entitle her “book” on Stone Circles and Sacred Paths: Sαcrεδ joψrηeyξ. Such crimes against alphabets must only be dealt with by condign punishment: the suspension of one’s year four pen license and re-education through labour, self-criticism and failing that, immolation by barbeque.  Similarly, when American property developer Phil South begins to advise you that ΩΗΑΤ ΩΕ ΛΣΑςΣ ΒΣΗΙΝΔ ΦΣ...and the words begin to become as garbled as the time in 1992 when theia Maritsa had a stroke after her daughter brought home a boyfriend who she mistook for an Indian even though he hailed from Rhodes, your rage must be tempered with sympathy, as you recall your Aussie neighbour who goes about his business with the word ΦΡΕΕ emblazoned upon his arm and you recall that in the mid to late nineties when personal computers were still a prestige novelty, countless younger members of Greek-Australian organisations were convinced that if you composed a newsletter in Times New Roman English, highlighted the text and transposed it into Symbol font, the text would magically translate itself into Greek, although you would still have to add the accents in ballpoint pen, Kilometrico for choice. Here then, we transcend the mundane and enter the realms of faith. Just as how Marx never fully explains how the State will wither away, so too are we never to know just how Symbol will convert any alphabet into Greek. You just have to believe.

 

It is for this reason therefore, that try as I might, and egged on by my Neos Kosmos guru, as polymathic as the Patriarch Photius who is his namesake, Fotios Kapetopoulos, I can experience no frenzy and fit into no pique, at the revelation that the divine Queen B’s premier offering to world scholarship “HOMECOMING: A film by Beyoncé (I’ve come to Netflix relatively late in life) is rendered in the promotional material as HΘΜΣCΘΜΙΝG, because I suspect that it either critically treats an imminent delivery of Hommus, or rather, showcases her musical stylings within the context of “black Greek life,” which I understand, refers to African American fraternities and sororities who are federated in an umbrella organisation which has been known as the National Pan-Hellenic Council as far back as 1930, decades before our own Australian Hellenic Council was but a glint in founder Costa Vertzayias’ eye.

 

And it is for this reason that I eagerly await the arrival of the latest version of the filmic medium’s treatment of the Homeric Epic that is being touted as ΤΗΣ ΘΔΨSSΣΨ, which was exactly the same exclamation that I emitted whilst moved to ecstasy the last time I beheld Efi Thodi in concert in Trikala, way back in 2006, when I was still being weaned off the Symbol font. That is to say, I am not so much flattered as confused, for while Odysseus is most definitely described as πολυμήχανος by our Blind Bard, there is nothing in the versions of the text that I have read that refer to Odysseus having ever founded a college fraternity, and I am dying to know more, for I am in the process of preparing my doctored dissertation on Greek-Australian Brotherhoods as frathouses, where according to Grimm’s law in linguistics, the Proto-Indo-European "p" sound evolved into an "f" sound. And after all, we Greeks are not the only victims of Alphabet appropriation. My Russian friends are heartily sick of the letter Я being usurped as either an R or an A, whenever anyone wants to reheat the frozen leftovers of the Cold War. Я is supposed to be pronounced “ya,” which means that yiayia in Russian would be ЯЯ, efficient, cool and eminently inscribable upon a tombstone at a fraction of the cost, to boot. Be thus not dismayed and rejoice,  MY FRIENDS. WE SHALL MAKE GREEK GREAT ΑΓΑΙΝ.

 ΔΕΑΝ ΚΑΛΨΜΝΙΦΨ

Φιrστ ΡθβλισΗεδ ον ΣατθrδαΥ 11 ΜαrcH 2025 

LOOKING FOR THEMIS

 

“I rule in favour the plaintiff,” the judge pronounced. I barely suppressed a whoop of triumph. Being a relatively newly minted lawyer, this was the first case I had undertaken without supervision and my opponent, a compatriot, was a seasoned veteran, prone to provide such sage advice as “Never try to out-bullshit a bullshitter” (which considering the size of his ample posterior, was an eminently proportionate caution) and: “No matter what the outcome of this case, I still get to send my kids to a private school,” an aphorism whose wisdom, only decades later, with offspring of my own that demand to be educated, I have finally come to appreciate. Nonetheless, at that moment, I was eminently enamoured of myself. I had been suave, I had been debonair. I had enunciated my consonants with flair. I had established a rapport with the judge and had gently in cross-examination led the defendant down a path of logical obstacles and contradictions to his testimony. Now was my winter of discontent turned glorious summer by a combination of diligence and over-emphasis. The path of my legal career appeared before me like a wnding, twisty-turny thing….

My client a diminutive elderly man with spare white hair and a luxuriously groomed moustache drooping down from his sunken cheeks glared at the judge with his yellow flecked eyes and shrugged his shoulders.

“It means you’ve won Mr Prapalapopoulopou….. I’m I pronouncing it correctly?” the judge continued.

The old man stuck his thumbs in his blue serge suit that looked as if it had last seen use at his daughter’s wedding some twenty years ago and was emitting an acute odour of expired mothballs and said nothing.

“Aren’t you happy? You should be happy that you’ve won?” the judge asked. Turning to me, he directed: “Mr Kalimniou, perhaps you might like to explain to your client that he has won,” before dismissing us.

-Νικήσατε, I said to my client gently. Αυτό σας λέει.

-Να τον χέσω τον τζάτζη και τους νόμους του και εσείς τους δικηγόρους και τη δικαιοσύνη σας (I excrete upon the judge and his laws and upon you lawyers and your justice) he spat and stormed outside the courtroom.

Hastily I gathered the papers of my file as I set out after him, as my colleague, still ensconced in his seat at the bar table guffawed: “Ha, typical! That’s how the old shifty Greeks are my friend. They create a fuss so that they use it as a pretext not to pay you. If you want my advice, stay away from the Greeks. Gone are the days when you can make money from a Greek. And when they come to your office they smell of garlic and χωριατίλα. Its not a good image. Instead, what you need to do is find yourself some corporate clients. Solid payers, not like these pensioner γύφτοι…”

Outside, the elderly gentleman was pacing up and down, visibly irritated. Slowly, I approached him and offered to buy him a coffee. At my offer, he softened.

“You buy me a coffee, my son? I should buy you a coffee.”

We sat down and he took out his komboloi and began to flick it with his fingers, the amber beads clacking as they hit each other again and again. He slurped his coffee with a sense of urgency that can only be found in those who have been denied sustenance at some stage in their lives and fear that those times will inevitably come again.

“This is some profession you have chosen for yourself,” the old man observed as I went through some final details with him. “Like marionettes in a puppet show, each being controlled by invisible strings. Actually no, like that cricket that these Australians are so crazy about. That was not a courtroom. That was not justice. That was a game of cricket that you people played, with assigned roles. Your turn to bat, your turn to bowl, well played sir, wow you hit a six but nothing to do with people’s lives. We, are completely ignored.”

I looked at him thoughtfully.

“Listen,” he said, grasping my arm tightly. “I came to this country when I was eighteen years old. An orphan with three sisters back in Greece to look after. I came here so that I could make enough money to be able to feed them and provide for their dowries. The things I saw and experienced, you will never be able to know or understand. The injustice of being denied a place in the sun, simply because you are destitute and here in Australia, to be laughed at and considered a second-class citizen every time you open your mouth. Oh, I’ve seen things. In the cane fields in Queensland, in the farms up in the Mallee and in down here business. Do you know what it is when you don’t have enough money to buy milk for your kids and the landlord is telling you that if you don’t pay the rent he will through you and your family out onto the street? That was how I lived my life. But as hard as people were with me, I was always honest and gentle in my dealings with others. I never asked and I never took a cent more from anyone in business. If someone needed help, to the best of my ability, I helped them. And I never told a lie or gossip about anyone. That is who I am, at the core of my being.”

I had heard these stories from so many people of that generation and my countenance must have betrayed my thoughts. “This is important,” the old man increased his grip on my arm and looked me straight in the eyes. “I’m telling you thing so you can learn. I am a man of honour. I wanted the judge to know this. I wanted to look into the judge’s eyes, the way I am looking into yours now and tell him what is in my heart. I wanted him to understand who I am, where I am coming from, what kind of character I have, as a man to a man. Most of all, I wanted him to understand that I am not the type of person that takes others to court, for him to know that for me it is a terrible thing. That I had no other choice but to take my best friend’s son, my best friend who was like my brother ever since I arrived in this country so many decades ago….I had no choice. The κοροϊδία was too great. It wasn’t about the money. I needed the judge to understand this. He needed to know that I’m not a greedy person. It was about the betrayal. He was like a son to me. It was not right what he did, it was the αδικία.... He didn’t let me say anything about this. None of you allowed me to speak what needed to be spoken.”

There were tears in his eyes and I felt uncomfortable that such a proud and dignified man was weeping in my presence. “What I wanted to tell the judge that in memory of my ancestors, no one ever took anyone to court. But what could I do? If I am to remain destitute in my old age, so be it, but it wasn’t right what that boy did, I merely wanted the judge to understand it wasn’t right. I wanted him to know that I agonised over my decision, that I gave the boy so many chances to make things right and for him to make the boy understand that as well, but…. I was denied justice. The judge was not at all interested in me, or my story. He was not concerned about getting to know me or my motivation. Instead, it was all about the money. The money, the money, the money, as if there is nothing else important in this world, as if people and their relationships count for nothing. So yes, I’ve won. What exactly? Humiliation and the loss of my friend’s esteem up there in heaven. English justice.”

Carefully, he removed a painstakingly ironed, monogrammed handkerchief from his pocket and wiped one eye after another. “You know once I was told that the English word Justice comes from the Latin word Ius which means law. But the Greek word δικαιοσύνη means fairness. There is a big difference. A lot of truth is hidden in words. But of course, for the ancient Greeks, there was a goddess of Justice, Themis. Justice is part of our religion. And I also remember hearing that in the Byzantine conception of Justice, she is not blind. Instead, she sees all, for context is everything.”

He stood up and reached out his hand. As I extended mine, I felt something cold and hard pressing against my palm. “I wish you every success in your career,” he farewelled me. “But take this komboloi as a memento of our meeting, and remember an old man who tried to teach you the difference between law and justice.” That was decades ago and yet I have carried it into each of my court appearances, ever since.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 1 March 2025

THE MANY FACES OF THE BOURBAKI

 

Years ago, I caused to be posted on social media, a copy of a painting depicting a foustanella clad gentleman crossing the Sturt Desert. In the accompanying caption, I informed the viewer that the painting, by Antoine Dufresne, depicted the lost 1830 expedition of the hapless Ioannis Voidoulis of Imia, who perished during his ill-fated crossing after failing to heed John Oxley’s recommendation to jettison the stores of retsina he had brought with him. The revelation that our community could thus partake in Australia’s  colonial history was met with jubilation in some quarters and inundated as I was with requests for further information, I was able to furnish inquirers with facsimiles of his diaries, other paintings recording his time in the desert and also a brief chronology as to the circumstances of his arrival in Australia.

This of course was all nonsense, with the original painting recording a crossing of the Egyptian desert by the Albanian bodyguard of Mehmed Ali and only the divine Vrasidas Karalis was able to discern the artist I referenced was actually the main protagonist in the movie: The Shawshank Redemption.

Such pranks, apart from indicating that their authors possibly have too much spare time on their hands, sink under the weight of their internal contradictions and pretensions to farce. Sometimes however, they have unintended consequences. Take for example the Nicolas Bourbaki, the name of a collective of French mathematicians who under that name, published a series of works dealing with set theory, abstract algebra, topology, analysis, Lie groups and Lie algebras and was also instrumental in the creation of what is known as the “New Math” which has plagued generations of schoolchildren ever since.

Like Voidoulis, whose name is an approximation of Oxley, Bourbaki is based loosely on a real person. Member of the Bourbaki Group André Weil remembered a student prank in which a senior student of the École Normale Supérieure posed as a professor and presented a bogus “theorem of Bourbaki.” It took a while for the ruse to be discovered and the mathematicians gleefully adopted the name.

Both the student and the mathematicians would have been conscious of the fact that they were appropriating the name of Franco-Greek general Charles-Denis Sauter Bourbaki, who fought with distinction in the Crimean War and the Franco- Prussian War, meeting a tragic end. He was the son of Greek Revolution freedom fighter Constantin Denis Bourbaki, who hailing from Cephallonia with Cretan ancestry, became aide-de-camp to Joseph Bonaparte, fought in the Battle of Waterloo and made various attempts to secure the Greek throne for Louis, Duke of Nemours, son of the Duke of Orléans. Having failed in this endeavour, he recruited a body of eighty men and placed himself under the command of Vasos Mavrovouniotis and Panagiotis Notaras. Captured at the battle of Kamatero, he was beheaded in 1827.

Back in in France, Charles-Denis, on the back of his father’s influence, after receiving a military education, rose to be aide-de-camp to King Louis Philippe. Noted for his valour during his service in Algeria, he became brigadier-general of the Zouaves and commanded the Algerian contingent of the French troops during the Crimean War, in Alma, Inkerman and Sevastopol.

The fall of the Bourbon dynasty in no way damaged his career prospects, succeeded as it was by Napoleon III, who esteemed the Bourbaki family highly. The following years would find Bourbaki in Italy, fighting for France to remove the Austrians from the peninsula and leading to Italian Unification. His successes were deemed significant enough for him to be touted, at least in France, as a candidate for the Greek throne which had become vacant after the removal of Otto I. It is no certain what the trajectory of Greek history would have been had Bourbaki not declined the proffered honour. According to one apocryphal story, when asked why he would not assume the Greek throne, he is said to have scoffed: “And meet the fate of Kapodistrias?”

The Franco-Prussian War of 1870 found Bourbaki commanding the French Imperial Guard and defending the city of Metz. While there, he fell victim to an elaborate ruse staged by the Prussians, whereby he was called to England, supposedly to seek instructions from the Empress Eugénie about an imminent peace treaty. He arrived only to find out that he had been hoodwinked and upon his return to Metz, was refused safe conduct into the city by the besieging Prussians, who went on to take it and raze its fortifications.

After the capture of Napoleon III at the battle of Sedan and the fall of the Second French Empire, Bourbaki offered his services to Léon Gambetta, founder of the Third French Republic. Provided with inexperienced and hastily recruited troops, he failed to raise the siege of Belfort, instead, being pursued towards the Swiss border. The parlous conditions and lack of provisions devastated his army. Of 150,000 who set out to cross the border, only 87,000 survived the crossing into Switzerland. The Swiss received the beleaguered soldiers, fed and clothed them but ultimately after six weeks, repatriated them, the scene being immortalised in the circular panoramic painting known as the Bourbaki Panorama, which purports to celebrate Swizz neutrality and hospitality, and still exists in Lucerne to the present day.

Rather than face the dishonourable prospect of having to surrender to the Prussians once back on French soil, Bourbaki attempted suicide, shooting himself in the head. However, as he later recounted, the bullet “flattened as if against a cast-iron plate” and he miraculously survived. His defiant gesture in preferring death to surrender profoundly moved the demoralised French who were experiencing the humiliation of Prussian occupation and it is in this context that “Bourbaki” became a household name, seized upon in later decades by the mischievous mathematicians in search of fractals and high farce.

Bourbaki went on to become military governor of Lyon. He attempted to run for the French Senate a few times but was unsuccessful and was retired owing to his outspokenness in 1881. Dying in 1897, he is commemorated in a number of Rue Bourbaki all around France, from Rouen, to Toulouse.

A proud man, Bourbaki was not to know that a number of textbooks would be attributed to a purported and non-existent member of his family, Nicolas. To further the ruse,  André Weil encouraged Indian mathematician and Marxist historian Damodar Kosambi to publish a scathing article against the theories of a certain Bourbaki, who Kosambi insisted was Russian, and had been killed during the Russian Revolution entitled: "On a Generalization of the Second Theorem of Bourbaki” in the Bulletin of the Academy of Sciences of the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh, Allahabad. The collective continued to publish articles in his name, even inventing a sister for him, the alter ego of Weil’s sister, Simone. So intent was the group of mathematicians upon maintaining the existence of Bourbaki, that when American mathematician Ralph Boas and editor of the journal Mathematical Reviews publicly questioned whether he  was real, he received via mail, a scathing letter, signed by Nicolas Bourbaki, stating: “Miserable worm, how dare you claim that I am not real….”

In 1950, an application made in the name of Nicolas Bourbaki to the American Mathematical Society was rejected on the basis that the Encyclopaedia Brittanica contained an entry according to which such a person did not exist. Soon after, the editor of the Encyclopaedia, Walter Yust, received a letter from an angry Nicolas Bourbaki, asking how it was possible for the Encyclopaedia to maintain he did not exist when he had published so many works and had entered into correspondence with him.

The Bourbaki still exist today, although their publishing activity has become sporadic over recent decades. Across the other side of the Atlantic, a real Nikolaos Bourbakis a Greek academic and computer scientist at Wright State University, is editor of the  International Journal on Artificial Intelligence Tools, at least that is, until proven otherwise….

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 22 February 2025

ON SECONDMENT

 

Widely debated in our community of late, is the news that the Greek government, through an initiative by the Minister of Education, Religion, and Sports, will send 600 clergy on a three-year secondment to Greek-speaking Patriarchates. While the government spokesperson clarified that the goal of the initiative is to provide Greek communities with priests from Greece and to support the ancient patriarchates, the Minister for Education commented further that through this act, the government is “supporting Hellenism worldwide…in all Greek-speaking Orthodox Churches around the world.”

One immediate benefit of the scheme, will be that as the wages of the priests will be paid by the Greek government, this removes financial pressure from diasporan churches. The ensuing glut of priests in such churches could also conceivably free incumbents from their parishes so that they could engage in community outreach or missionary work.

What is not defined however, is the term: “Greek-speaking Orthodox Church.” Would this include the Patriarchate of Jerusalem, which although Greek in liturgy, is primarily made up an Arabic-speaking population? How would such clergy minister to the needs of this distinct Orthodox demographic? What about the Patriarchate of Alexandria, a missionary church which, while its Patriarch is Greek, ministers to the whole continent of Africa in the languages of its people?

Quite possibly, the aim is to strengthen and assist diasporan churches in Europe, America and Australia and it is in relation to these regions that the government’s initiative has given pause for thought. Do we consider America, with its primarily third, fourth and fifth generation migrant congregation, and its English liturgies, a Greek-speaking church?

In Australia, where church services are only now beginning to switch to English, and where at least in theory, lip service is paid by the community to the importance of the Greek language, it is arguable that an infusion of clerics from Greece, if in fact this is intended, and we can only speculate at the present time, will provide the church and the community with the requisite tradition, language and practices that the Greek government obviously believes are sorely lacking.

There are a number of questions that arise from this approach, if Australian will form part of this initiative, the first relating to the way the Greek government appears to regard our institutions. Last year, we celebrated the one-hundred-year anniversary of the foundation of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese. Now, in its one hundred and first year, is it somehow being somehow suggested that we cannot make it on our own, that our existing structures and “native” personnel are not entirely adequate and assistance by means of Greek speaking priests is required? Assuming that we will be the recipient of the largesse of the Greek government, are we now to understand that one of our most important and long-lived institutions appears not to be considered by the Greek government to be soundly rooted in the fabric of the land in which it has implanted itself for a century and instead, as a “colony” that must be re-hellenised, or indeed, that cannot stand on its own two feet and requires arbitrary external intervention?

This is significant because increasingly, our dwindling congregations are becoming monolingual and Anglophonic in nature. The socio-linguistic complexity of the Australian church, coupled with the in inexorable process of assimilation and the rapid secularisation of the broader Greek-Australian community presents multi-faceted challenges for the future. It is not at all certain that these challenges can be comprehended, let alone addressed by the Greek government, at a time when we ourselves are struggling to appreciate the magnitude of the task we have before us and all the social factors that are fashioning us into an entity that defies definitions and stereotypes of language, class and creed.

Ours is a church rooted in tradition, with a singular relationship with the passage of time and the human condition. In Australia, it abides within a climate of modernity that is progressively more aggressive and inimical towards organised religion. To some extent, this discourse has been absorbed by large sections of our community. We are in dire need of people who are capable to enter into that discourse and articulate our unique perspective, if we are to have s stake in the great social movements and debates of the age. It is not known whether it is envisaged that our potential new arrivals will be possessed of the skill-set to do so, or will be able to facilitate others to do so, or indeed whether the Greek government identifies this as a priority at all.

That is not to say that we are, should the scheme commence, to expect a tidal wave of Grecian priests flooding our shores. After all, they would have to fulfil the visa requirements of this land, which are exacting and not always easy to meet. Further, their wages would be paid according to Greek law, which means that they will struggle with the cost of living in this country, the way that Greek teachers on secondment do. The task of assisting them may fall to us after all. Nonetheless, it has to be said that the Greek priests that have been already received from the motherland into our communities have been universally embraced, fully integrated and they have made positive contributions to the parishioners to whom they minister and are loved by them. Perhaps the role of the new batch of seconded priests will minister to the first generation, allowing “native” priests to minister to the subsequent generations. It is unclear how this will provide the infusion of Hellenism for those generations that the Greek government manifestly thinks is needed. We do not know, for the Key Performance Indicators for these priests, or even the Success Criteria of this initiative have not been disclosed.

The second question arising from the initiative is the manner in which it seems to be linked to education and the Greek language. This is understandable, for traditionally, it was the church and its clergy that were the guardians of Greek letters and here in Australia along with other, secular organisations, one of the key fields in which the church has always been active, has been in Greek language education. It is fair to say however, that Greek language education is collapsing. In Victoria, a state which prides itself on its large and vibrant Greek community, only 181 students chose to study Modern Greek and VCE level. Greek schools are haemorrhaging students, as other activities such as sport are given greater priority by parents. The proficiency of those enrolled is often questionable and as a community, we lack the courage to ask: what do we expect of Greek language education for our children, and are we in fact achieving it? Greek priests can and have served in our community as inspiring and charismatic teachers and many Australian-born priests today continue to make valuable contributions in this field, but the vast majority of those potential applicants for secondment are not trained in this discipline, nor would they have a grasp of the state of the Greek language among the latter generations in this country. We can only hope that, assisted by the rest of the community, they will learn quickly.

Along with the priests, who are most welcome, the Greek government should consider sending us the expert Greek teachers which as the influx of teachers from Greece in the wake of the Crisis has proven, have the potential to revitalise the teaching of the language. They are not doing this for two reasons: firstly, because the system of secondment allows only for five year appointments on Greek wages, and an extension of five years without pay, meaning that such teachers would have to be paid by the community or find other means of employment. If they do not return to Greece upon the expiration of the extended period, they are fired. It was this illogical system which completely ignores the realities on the ground of diasporan communities, that compelled gifted educators like Manos Tzimpragos to up sticks after an inspiring era of language re-genesis and return home, leaving their important work in its infancy. Secondly, whether it is because of distance, or cost, last year, no Greek teacher applied to be seconded to Australia or New Zealand. In all of Greece, only twenty-one teachers applied to be seconded to other countries around the world. At a time when the Greek government and the very people who we need to assist us, teachers, appear to have given up on Australia, how will this new initiative achieve anything different?

The point should be made for it is an important one, that the wishes or needs of Greek-Australians do not seem to have been canvassed when this decision was made. No fact-finding mission was sent here to confer with key community stakeholders, no public meetings held, no calls for submissions made. Instead, the Greek government took it upon itself to unilaterally determine what is best for us, regardless of the fact that we are Australian citizens, with our own complex, competing and often contradictory views on what our needs and priorities are, and with our own internal historical narratives and discourses. Owing to our psychological attachment to our ancestral homeland and our emotional identification with it, we sometimes neglect to remember that Greece’s interests, perceived or otherwise, and those of the Greek diasporan communities, do not always align and it is incumbent upon the party that has an interest, to further it by whichever means best it can.

One of the great things about our community, is that despite any internal debate we may have about the appropriateness of the Greek Government’s infrequent and spasmodic attempts to nurture diasporan communities, we always welcome our compatriots from overseas warmly and induct them within our community enthusiastically. We grow to love them and they grow to love us and we ought not to forget that it is the successive waves of arrivals here as a historical process that provide layers of culture and perspective that inform, challenge and ultimately enrich us. What we cannot do, is to rely on the Greek government to cover our shortcomings, to address our needs, or to plan our future. That task, is solely our own.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 15 February 2025