PETER JASONIDES AND EPIRUS

 

My first conversation with the late Peter Jasonides relating to Epirus took place at a Pontian «παρακάθ’». The traditional Pontian song «Τρυγόνα» was playing and we were comparing lyrics, as there is also an Epirotic version.

“Let me explain the song for you,” Peter offered, his face flushed in pride. “The turtle dove (which symbolises a beautiful girl), is in the forest, gathering wood. She is described as wearing an apron and socks and is likened to a crown, which probably denotes that she is of marriageable age and also acts as proof that Pontians consider their women to be royalty.”

“Fascinating,” I replied. “In the Epirotic version, the turtle dove is just that. A woman asks the turtle dove, since she can fly and perch on high, whether she has seen her husband. The turtle dove replies in the affirmative, confirming that she spotted him just yesterday lying in a field, with black birds pecking at his eyes.”

“Oh my god,” Peter exclaimed, choking on his drink. “Can you Epirotes be any more morbid? What is it with you people?”

It is a question I have always asked myself and I told him of my long held belief that Epirotes are obsessed with dead owing to the fact that the entrance to Hades was traditionally held to have been at the region’s Acheron River, by classical accounts, including Pausanias  and later Dante's Inferno, with Charon ferrying the souls of the dead across it. According to folk etymology, the word Acheron meant “joyless,” which is exactly how the uninitiated describe Epirotic music. Proving that Epirus occupied a liminal space where the boundaries between life and death are blurred, close by near Parga, is the Necromanteion, or Oracle of the Dead, where the living would go to speak to their dead ancestors.

“That would make sense except for one thing,” Peter responded. “We Pontians also had a Necromanteion. It was in Pontoheraclea, and we are still not as morbid as you are.”

“Actually,” I corrected him, “Pontoheraclea was in Bithynia, so it really isn’t a part of Pontus at all”

“Yes it is.”

“No it isn’t…”

When Peter was firmly convinced of something, it was exceedingly difficult to disabuse him of his misapprehension. He attributed this to his «Ποντιακό κεφάλι» a form of unique psychological brachycephaly that did not easily permit the permeation of ideas that challenge one’s world view. I believe that he was extremely disappointed when I informed him that the Epirotes talk of «Ηπειρώτικο κεφάλι» and he spent the next hour trying to identify the nuances that would distinguish between the two afflictions, only stopping to give me a death stare when I had the temerity to utter a Pontian joke: Γιατί οι Πόντιοι έχουν μεγάλο κεφάλι; Γιατί τα παίρνουν στο κρανίο». I never repeated the same mistake ever again.

One of the reasons that Peter was drawn to Epirus was because like Pontus, it is situated on the margins of Hellenism, the regions that in Greek we call “Acritic” which is just another way of saying extreme. Both of us espoused extreme forms of Hellenism and he was particularly enthused that members of the same Byzantine imperial family, the Komnenoi, established the Despotate of Epirus in the West and the Empire of Trebizond, in Pontus, in the East. Often he would call me to compare the parallel trajectories of both entities, both struggling to assert a variant form of the Romaic identity, both sandwiched between aggressive powers that wanted to call them their own. It was this idea, of being away from the centre of power and yet established an alternative narrative of one’s own that intrigued him, not in the least because he could appreciate how a similar process could be developed in Australia, which is about as far from the cultural centre he paid homage to as you could go.

It is also for this reason that he was immensely proud of his relative, Leonidas Jasonides, who was present at the declaration of the Autonomous Republic of Pontus in Batumi in 1919. My argument, that this fledgling state could never have been viable owing to the inability of Greece to defend it, the competing interests of foreign powers and the demographics of the region he brushed off derisively. When he learned of my fascination with Autonomous Epirus, a state that was declared in the face of Albanian repression in Northern Epirus in 1914, he studied it closely, comparing its armed struggle with that of the Pontic Guerrilla movement and lamenting at how, according to him, the motherland betrayed the aspirations of both. The only difference between the two entities in his mind, was that when we commenced these discussions, the Greeks of Northern Epirus were still largely to be found in their ancestral homes whereas the Pontians were not. As the years progressed, the Northern Epirots began to migrate en masse to Greece and elsewhere, leaving Peter shaking his head. “Why on earth would you leave your country?” he would shaking his finger at me accusingly. “We were forced, we had no choice. But you guys do.” His voice then assumed a plaintive tone: “Why would you leave your country?” I said nothing. A few weeks later though, I was woken in the middle of the night by a telephone call. Peter was on the other end sobbing. He had stayed awake all night, reading an account of the suffering of the people in Hoxha’s Albania and the destruction of their religious and national identity.” It’s a form of genocide he repeated over and over again.

We campaigned together for many years for official recognition of the Pontian Genocide. During that time, I was able to convince him that it was not only a Greek Genocide, given that its scope was broader than just the Pontian region, extending to Christian populations in Asia Minor in general. One evening, while in a meeting discussing the reliability of statistics as to the victims, he interrupted the speaker, looked over to me and said: “Did you know that when the Romans conquered Epirus, they took away 150,000 Epirote slaves with them?”

“Yes, and the population of the region never recovered,” I agreed.

“Well, that is a form of Genocide. Why is this not recognised by anyone? I move that this meeting recognise this event right now. Genocide is something that should concern the Panhellenion, not just the affected regions.”

Whereas I tended to be excoriatingly critical of the motherland, Peter’s love for it was all encompassing. One of his greatest sources of pride was his tremendous command of the Greek language and the fact that he could generally not be distinguished as an Australohellene while on many of his sojourns to the home country, largely because he was a linguistic magpie who could assimilate all the latest jargon and patois into vocabulary. He believed it was his ability to establishing a rapport with Greek politicians by speaking to them on their level and register that allowed him to campaign effectively on issues relating to Pontian Hellenism and he castigated me for being antagonistic and excluding them from our calculations and field of action altogether, for his was a broad and generous view of Hellenism.

“Be that as it may,” I responded. “Your situation is different to ours. The motherland has gathered your people unto its bosom and has made them into voters and tax-payers. Our people across the border are neither of those things.”

“What they need to do is rise up,” Peter determined. “Did you know that there are one million crypto- Pontians in Turkey ready to assert their ethnic and linguistic rights?” I dismissed this form of wishful thinking, telling him the story of the mullahs of the village of Of, who in the nineteenth century, petitioned the Ottoman government not to allow the Ofites to register themselves as Greek, as they had only recently converted. “But that is it!” he enthused. “They have never forgotten! They are ready to rise up!”

Peter died and there still is not a Pontian state. He was right about the national awakening, though. A good number of the current inhabitants of Pontus are embracing their heritage, displaying an interest in learning Romeika, the Pontian language and preserving a purer form of it than that spoken in Greece, or the diaspora, as it lacks the permeation and influence of Modern Greek. Having taught himself the Pontian dialect, he would often call me to discuss the differences between Romeika as spoken in Pontus, and the dialect he knew. On most of those occasions, the conversation would end when he would hang up the phone, incensed at my maintaining that a term which he swore was ancient Greek, was actually a Turkish loan-word. Nonetheless, it was his concern that the linguistic diversity of Greece was dying out that encouraged me to write literature in the Epirote dialect. One of those stories, which he was the first to read and critique, is now an act in a play that is currently touring his beloved motherland.

The last time I spoke to Peter was a few days before his death. He called me excitedly to inform me that he had read somewhere that itinerant Epirote stonemasons were responsible for the construction of many of the bridges of Pontus in Ottoman times. For a person that spent his life building bridges between communities, the past and the present and the chasm of political and ideological divides, I thought this to have been eminently fitting. Then for some inexplicable reason he turned the conversation to the Epirote custom of playing a funereal lament on the graves of the dead, usually on the clarinet. It was only as I saw his Greek flag draped coffin emerge from the church and inch closely to the hearse, when the kemenche began to rasp its lament and a hundred Pontic voices joined in unison to send him on his way that I understood. He had the soul of an Epirote.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 20 July 2024

THE ISLAND OF MISSING TREES: THE TRAGEDY OF CYPRUS

 

In Turkish author Elif Shafak’s 2021 novel: “The Island of Missing Trees,” the trauma of the division of two communities is highlighted through the discovery of her hybrid past by Ada, whose father is Greek and mother Turkish. The main protagonist’s name immediately denotes a nuanced, polysemic identity: It can either be short for Ellada, a popular name in Cyprus at one time among the Greeks, or ada, which means island in Turkish. Regardless of emphasis, one thing is certain: her name encompasses a multitude of affiliations relating to her country of origin, including instead of excluding its complex and many facets.

Elif Shafak’s characters navigate an intensely traumatic past where even the natural world, symbolised by the fluctuating state of health of a fig tree growing at the place where Greek and Turk first fell in love with each other. Significantly, this is a fig tree that is given a voice and afforded a character of its own, for that tree is the island itself. The choice of the fig tree is fraught with symbolism. Mentioned in the Quran, it also symbolises the loss of innocence, as exemplified by Adam and Even choosing to cover their shame with fig leaves upon eating the forbidden fruit. Jesus in the Gospel of Luke used the fig tree to hint at the end times: “Look at the fig tree, and all the trees; as soon as they come out in leaf, you see for yourselves and know that the summer is already near.” At the same time, in the Gospel of Mark, He cursed the fig tree that bore no fruit. This arguably, is the Cyprus of today, an island divided by a deep slash of hatred, perpetuated by the invader’s belief that in the twenty first century, two civilised peoples cannot live together as equals but rather, must only co-exist in parallel with each other, in a form of ritualised apartheid. This truly is a fig tree that is cursed, for it grows in poisoned soil. That poison, the poison of prejudice, fear of the other and a complete refusal of those holding the fig tree hostage to view all of its figs as its legitimate constituent parts has stunted its growth, rendered it sickly and non-viable. It is a withering, dying, twisted thing, perverted from its true course.

In the novel, Kostas, Ada’s father, manages to ensure the survival of the fig tree and the memory of his beloved, by taking a cutting and removing it altogether from its blighted soil. Even though the climate of his adopted country, England, is inimical to the survival of the fig tree, through a careful burying of the tree during the harsh Britannic winter, he is able to find a way to make it endure. It is this cutting, the author possibly implies, that conveys and perpetuates the true essence and vitality of its mother and is able to carry on, even as its progenitor plant, mired in disease, withers and fails. This element of the novel is both hopeful and deeply troubling. On the one hand, the author suggests that removed from the context of the bad blood, the hostility and the violence, the very essence of Cyprus, life itself, can thrive. In like vein, she may possibly be suggesting that the human cuttings of Cyprus, its exiles and their descendants, transplanted throughout the diaspora are best placed to propagate the true meaning of all that Cyprus signifies, for they are doing so on soil unblighted by trauma.

Nonetheless, it becomes apparent that a condition precedent to such survival or renewal is the act of “burying” the fig tree. To what extent does reconciliation depend on an agreed or mutual ‘burial’ of the past? Can targeted amnesia or a tacit agreement to gloss over controversial aspects of Cyprus’ history truly constitute a feasible pathway towards a ‘solution’ to the island’s current problems or does it in fact exacerbate and feed already existing resentment and paranoia? Given that this process of renewal in the novel takes place upon the soil of Cyprus’ erstwhile colonial dynast, is Elif Shafak implying that the wounds that have afflicted Cyprus are so deep that there is no hope of recovery and instead she should be allowed to die a natural death, with the very best of her legacy to live on in climes and countries that played a large part in creating her woes in the first place?

Main protagonist Ada’s place in the novel belies such an approach. Neither Greek, nor Turkish, exposed to none of the history that has shaped her parent’s lives, she experiences deep existential angst and mental anguish when she is unable to place her mother’s death in context. However, her slow and painful rediscovery of the past does not seem in any way to effect any meaningful change on the island that was responsible for her existence. Instead, it helps her to come to terms with herself, on another island, where all are free to choose their own identities, remember or forget, in relative peace and safety.

Significantly, the climax of the novel comes in the realisation that Ada’s dead mother’s spirit has merged with that of the Fig Tree. The girl’s mother is at one with Mother Cyprus, and it is this consubstantial identity that we are compelled to consider: one that is able to transcend borders, natural and man-imposed barriers and imbue its children with support, warmth, guidance and inspiration wherever they may be.

There are many things missing in Cyprus. Trees, people, memories, an order and way of things that seems impossible to re-acquire. But there are also things that are being found. Just recently, some of my fellow-parishioners discovered the bones of their brothers, missing persons since 1974. Others, returning to their homes in the north for the first time, re-discovered photo albums or precious household possessions, retained by those who came to occupy their homes. Greeks and Turks travelling to and from the occupied north and democratic free Cyprus are re-discovering that despite the propaganda by those who wish to legitimise violence as a means of keeping their illegal regime in power, both peoples are united by infinitely more things than divides them.

A case in point, is the Cypriot diaspora. In countries such as Australia, both communities have shown that they can live side by side with each other, engage with each other, debate and dispute each other and befriend each other in a climate of mutual respect and friendship. By “burying the fig tree,” that is, being sensitive to each other’s trauma and avoiding hurtful and impolite behaviour, the soil of pain is gradually healed, allowing such collaborations as the one I enjoyed with the late lamented Fahri Kiamil, in assisting with the organisation of the Melbourne Harmony Festival. In his accountant’s office in Brunswick, he sang me songs of his homeland Cyprus, in Turkish, and I sang him songs of my grandfather’s ancestral place of origin in Tralles, now known as Aydin. We never could agree on who was to blame for the invasion of Cyprus. The only thing we did agree upon was that war and violence are unacceptable and that all involved were diminished as a result.

It may be that Cyprus will never be re-united. If so, this would be a tragedy. While we, the transplanted ones, have the luxury of burying Elif Shafak’s fig-tree from a place of safety, far removed by time and position from the scene of the crime, those still living in a land blighted by invasion and kept apart by a military regime deserve a just resolution, one founded upon International Law and the principals of Human Rights. Until that time, we can only pray that the spirit of Cyprus, whether mediated through a fig tree, memory, or lethe, maintains in all her children, an imperishable love for their island of origin, one that will ultimately enable them to surmount their hurt, their trauma and their pain, to overcome their curse and bring them together once more, flourishing, and bearing fruit for all to savour.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 13 July 2024

THE OTHER OLYMPICS

 

According to the International Olympic Committee’s homepage, the ancient Olympic Games ceased their operations in 393AD. The various neopagans that punctuate our paroikia blame Christian intolerance for this and in particular a purported decree by the Emperor Theodosius II, even though evidence exists to indicate the Olympics were held after this date, and that the Games were declining in popularity even before the Christianisation of the Roman Empire. The court poet Claudian then refers to the Olympics in A.D. 399, after the demise of the emperor who supposedly banned them.

Indeed, scholars now contend that it is more likely that the flooding and earthquakes that extensively damaged the sporting venues of Olympia and invasions by barbarians are what caused the Games terminal decline, a fire that burned down the Temple of the Olympian Zeus having dealt the final coup de grâce.

What is generally overlooked however is the fact that there was not one but several Olympic Games throughout the Greek speaking world, including those of Aegae in Macedonia, in existence in the time of Alexander the Great, those of Alexandria, those of Anazarbus in Cilicia, Attalia in Pamphylia, in commemoration of which coins were struck, Cyzicus in Mysia, Cyrene in Libya, Dion in Macedonia instituted by Archelaus I of Macedon, lasting nine days, corresponding to the number of the Muses, at which Euripides wrote and presented his play the Bacchae, Ephesus, Magnesia and Nicopolis in Epirus.

Perhaps the greatest Olympic Games however in late antiquity were those of Antioch, which, during late Hellenistic and Roman times was one of the largest, most vibrant and multicultural cities of the world. Proving that the trade in sporting rights, teams and franchising is not a modern phenomenon but has its roots in hallowed antiquity, in 44AD, the citizens of Antioch, whose games were originally called the Daphnea being sacred to Apollo and Artemis, purchased from the Eleans of the original Olympia, the right to call their games Olympic as well. While considered historically part of Syria, the region around Antioch, now known as Hatay, was These Games were under the control of the Syriach, the chief priest of the Roman province of same name and the Alytarch, who as leader of the Olympic police was charged with the responsibility of ordering the rabdouchoi, rod-bearers, and the mastigophoroi, scourge-bearers, to administer punishment to athletes who didn’t obey the rules, providing a distinct dimension to the definition of the term Games, and all this, aeons before latex was invented.

Far from the Olympics being banned for religious reasons, as late as 465AD, some seven decades after the supposed abolition of the Games, Emperor Leo passed an edict directing that curiales, that is, well to do citizens who were expected to procure funds for public building projects, temples, festivities, games, and local welfare systems could no longer serve as alytarchs but rather, that this role had to be played by the Comes Orientis, the Count of the East instead. Prior to that, in 430AD, Antiochos Chuzon, praetorian prefect of the East and consul, who was also a key figure in the compilation of the Codex Theodosianus, personally provided an endowment for the convening of the Games. This suggests a level of state sponsorship and interest in the Olympic Games of Antioch that belies simplistic interpretations as to the demise of the institution in its entirety.

Just as everything is bigger and brighter now under the AFL than it was under its small-town predecessor the VFL, so too were the Olympic Games of Antioch. According to Byzantine chronicler John Malalas, a good deal of money was expended not only in renovating existing infrastructure but also in constructing new facilities for the multitude of sporting events to be hosted at the Games, including a number of wrestling pits, a monomacheion for combat sports, a hippodrome and a large palaestra called the Plethrion which, it is believed, occupied thousands of square meters in the centre of the city. The main Olympic stadium was situated in the sacred grove of Apollo and Artemis at Daphne on the outskirts of the city, and the pagan sophist Libanius, teacher of Saint John Chrysostom tells us that it was referred to by the populace at large as the «στάδιον Ὀλυμπικόν».

Not only the sporting events themselves, but the associated entertainment accompanying them seems to have drawn the ire of Christian preachers of the time, especially in relation to the various processions that took place through Antioch towards the Olympic Stadium, indicating that the Christians of Antioch, a city in which the new religion was dominant, were heavily invested in and willing participants of the Olympic Games. The Monophysite prelate Severus of Antioch for example, felt the need to compare the metaphorical athlete Athanasius to the violent athletes of the Olympics, who had arrived in the city from all the realms of the Greek world. In one of his homilies, he invites his flock to compete in his Christian arena, rather than in the one at Daphne “which is madly anticipated,” acknowledging the hold that the Olympics had over the Christians of that era. In particular, he fulminated against the excessive amount of depilation his Christian flock undertook and the skimpy garb they wore, when participating in the Olympic procession, imploring them to understand that this was tantamount to giving glory to Zeus.

It appears that entreaties of this nature fell largely on deaf ears, so entrenched were the Olympics in the culture of Antioch. Saint Palladius the Hermit describes his church as virtually empty during the Olympic festival of 404, as all had flocked to Daphne to watch the Games. In 408, he referred to the Olympics as “Heracleian,” evidencing the manner in which their pagan origin existed in parallel with the emerging Christian world. In vain did the sermons of the Antiochene clerics admonish people to consider all facets of their existence in terms of their Christian affiliation. The reality was much more nuanced, as the citizens also identified with kin, their professions and their social networks. Standing above religious differences, the ten kilometre Olympic procession elicited an identification with the city and with citizenhood, that no amount of preaching could compromise.

While lasting until 521AD, some 128 years after the supposed abolition of the Elean Olympic Games, the Olympic Games of Antioch finally came to an end via Imperial Edict by Justin I. This was not due to any religious consideration or the need to enforce Christian conformity. Instead, there was a temporary blanket ban on all games in the Empire of any description, in reaction to the riots of the Blues, supporters of one of the rowdy horse-racing factions of Constantinople. A subsequent riot of similar nature a decade or so later, would see the destruction of the first Saint Sophia. After the ban, it was not an easy matter for the Games to be reconvened. A terrible fire swept through the city in 525AD. There were catastrophic earthquakes in 526 and 528 and funds that would have been utilised to the repair and rebuilding of sporting infrastructure were sorely needed to aid the afflicted citizens and were applied to general reconstruction instead. Further calamities ensued. In 540, Antioch was sacked by the Persians and 300,000 of its citizens were deported to Mesopotamia. A year later, there was the advent of bubonic plague which wiped out the majority of the city’s remaining population.

Although Antioch would remain in Byzantine hands for another century, it was constantly subject to the depredations of the Persians and then the Arabs and it never recovered its former glory. In 637, it was taken by the Arabs and by the time it was reconquered some three centuries later by Nicephoros Phocas, it remained a frontier town, valued as part of the overall Byzantine strategy of maintaining the integrity of the eastern borderline after the Seljuk conquest of Anatolia. By that time, Antioch’s Olympic legacy, beyond the writings of the chroniclers, had long been forgotten.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 6 July 2024

ROAD RAGE

My tresses having acquired the consistency and style of an over-excited hedgehog, it was that day that I chose to traipse down to the Russian hairdresser near my office, only to be brusquely informed that she is no longer accepting appointments: “Be like Tolstoy,” she growled. “Grow a beard. Write a novel.”

“I prefer Zoshchenko,” I opined.

“Zoshchenko Soviet rubbish,” she snapped. “No facial hair.”

In his Sportsman's Sketches, Russian literary giant Ivan Turgenev deliberately subverted the ancient Greek pastoral genre in order to make scathing commentary about social inequality in Russia. He had taught himself Greek as a child and was fluent in the language. His beard, I observed, while not as long as Tolstoy’s was luxurious and perfectly coiffed.

“Turgenev western decadent rubbish,” she snarled. “Come back when you have beard and book.”

Searching my brain for a response, I was interrupted by a telephone call, which illustrated to me why thinking in Greek and translating in English when your significant other derives her origins from outside the tribe, can lead to infinite misunderstandings:

 “I’ve arranged for you to give your aged aunt a lift to the doctors. She is waiting. Where are you?"

"I’m sure you haven’t told me.”

“You should already know. She has an appointment every Thursday.”

“How was I supposed to know? By smelling my fingers?"

What?"”

Θα μυρίσω τα δάχτυλα μου, actually comes from the Olympic Games and the Greek precursor to the TAB. Punters betting on the outcome of certain events would seek tips from Oracles. The priests would did their fingers in laurel oil and smell them in order to inhale the fumes. They would then fall into a trance and predict the outcome of the event, a practice only discontinued when Plutarch wrote: “Seeing a Greek of nowadays trying to emulate his noble ancestors is ridiculous, like watching a little boy trying in his daddy’s boots and putting on his daddy’s garments.” This is because Plutarch never met my good friend, pagan archpriest Savvas Grigoropoulos.

Hellenisms constantly impinge upon my spoken English. Many is the time when my wife will turn to me and say:

“I want to go to the shops.”

“No stress. Do whatever you want. Cut your throat.”

What?"”

«Κανε ό,τι θες, κόψε το λαιμό σου,» sounds a lot more innocuous in the village Greek that constitutes my mother tongue, as does « Πέταξες την πορδή σου» instead of “You threw your fart,” (or you cast your fart, for increased dramatic effect), «Είσαι ανάμεσα στα πόδια μου», instead of “You’re in between my legs,” and «Ο κόσμος το ‘χει τούμπανο κι εσύ κρυφό καμάρι,» instead of “The world maintain it as a drum and you as a secret pride.” In like fashion, when seeking to indicate that something that has just been uttered causes you to care not a jot, use of the literally translated “I will make my cat cry,” (θα βάλω τη γάτα μου να κλάψει) does tend to diminish the dramatic intensity of the situation and exposes one to the risk of having the RSPCA called upon one. When all is said and done, it is best not to open up one’s mouth at all, lest one be labelled uncouth, boorish and downright barbarous.

Two choices immediately presented themselves to me. I could attempt to bribe my way out of my transgression by the offering of weregild, compensation for murdering my wife’s painstakingly constructed impression of my reliability. The Emperor John III Doukas Vatatzes once presented his wife with an imperial crown purchased via revenues generated from the imperial chicken farms.  Though my temperament does share an affinity with that of my fowl friends, I am possessed of insufficient means to husband their resources to such glorious effect.

My favourite Byzantine Leo Choirosphaktes, on the other hand, whose name means pig-slaughterer, an official, scholar and writer, who rose to high office under Emperor Basil I the Macedonian and served as an envoy under Emperor Leo VI the Wise to Bulgaria and the Abbasid Caliphate, was the first Byzantine official to exploit his position in the public service in order to open up a lucrative side trade in gourmet cumin and fennel sausages which cornered the Byzantine market, introducing ἀγρόν to τρύβλιον or χωράφι to πιάτο centuries before Neil Perry was even a twinkle in his Varangian ancestors’ eyes.

Sighing, I raced to the car, hoping against hope that I could beat the traffic and make it on time without causing an accident. Oedipus Rex of course is the first recorded story of a tragedy caused by road rage. Productions of Sophocles’ “Oedipus Rex” were of course banned in England until 1910 on the basis they might “prove injurious” and lead “to a great many plays being written... appealing to a vitiated public taste solely in the cause of indecency.” Spectacular pile-ups in which chariots were destroyed and the charioteers and horses were incapacitated were known in ancient times as a ναυφραγία, (a "shipwreck"). There was no danger of that happening on my route, given that our elected dynasts’ explosion of infrastructure construction has resulted in slowing anything moving within their jurisdiction, to a languid crawl.

It was while remaining stationary in my vehicle for over twenty minutes that I received notification of my success in securing a rare book I have been seeking for an age in order to complete my compulsory annual Continuing Professional Development Accreditation: a French 1714 law book intended for edification on the juridical aspects of impotence, along with an assurance that I had entered the process of imminent delivery. Emitting a triumphant ululation, I decided to share my good fortune with my wife who, listening in silence, curtly referred me to Lucian of Samosata and to the poet Mnesimachos, before urging me to make haste as my aged aunt had begun to open all the drawers in the saloni, ostensibly as part of an offer to cpolish our non-existent silverware.

In his: “On the Ignorant Book-Collector,” Lucian had this to say about people of my own ilk:

“Once a dog has learned to chew leather it can’t stop. Another way is easier: not buying any more books. You are sufficiently educated, you have enough wisdom. You have all of antiquity nearly at the top of your lips.

You know all of history, every art of argumentation including their strengths and weaknesses and how to use Attic words. Your abundance of books has given you a special kind of wisdom and placed you at the peak of learning. Nothing stops me from messing with you since you enjoy being thoroughly deceived.”

Mnesimachos is responsible for my favourite expression to denote would-be, know it alls with delusions of grandeur: «φασιανὸς ἀποτετιλεμένος καλῶς», that is a well plucked-pheasant. I began to crave roast pheasant, a dish that I have only ever seen in Robin Hood movies, speculating as to what artifices must be employed in order to prevent it from drying out in the oven. The trick, as in everything that pertains to the organised Greek community, must be in the basting.

Of course, I ascribe the inability to express joy at such a fortuitous happenstance to envy, a multi-faceted emotion, given that the divine Aristotle distinguishes between multifarious models of the product:

τὸ νεμεσᾶν is the pain felt at someone's undeserved good fortune.

φθόνος is the pain we feel because someone possesses something good, not because we necessary want that thing but because they have it. Ἐπιχαιρεκακία on the other hand, comes not from pain but from pleasure felt at another's misfortune.

It could be worse of course. Envy is one thing, but downright malice quite another. Take Hecuba of Troy on Achilles after the death and desecration of Hector, as narrated in the Iliad:

“I wish I could set my teeth in the middle of his liver and eat it.” This is one Greek expression that loses nothing in translation and one that I was close to appropriating for myself when I finally arrived home after an hour, only to be informed by aged aunt that the appointment was actually for the week after next, but not to worry, we have all had a lovely time.

“Some guy came to the door with a package.  A book or something,” she informed me. “But I sent him away. He was probably a burglar trying to gain entry. Never let a ξένο into your home.”

I glanced at her enormous hands, clasping her souvenir Koala key chain from the Sydney Olympic Games, remembering that Koalemos, son of the goddess Nyx was the Greek god of stupidity and foolishness.

«Τρεις λαλούν και δυο χορεύουν,» I muttered, as I sat down to write, toying with the idea of penning a Greek version of Crime and Punishment, only to dismiss it sure in the knowledge that my Russian hairdresser considers Dostoyevsky a dissolute reprobate.

“What did you say?” my wife asked smiling.

I did not bother to translate.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 29 June 2024

HYBRID MARGIN-DWELLERS: IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF DIGENIS AKRITAS.

 

It was on the fringes, where the legends of the hybrid hero, half-Romaic, half Saracen Digenis Akritas survived, for in the “heartland” he had largely been forgotten. His memory lingered in the marginal areas, the liminal spaces where our identity was forged in relation to the Others. On Pentadaktylos mountain in Cyprus, which according to legend, Digenis grasped in his gigantic fist in order to make an imagination-defying leap into immortality. On Mount Psiloritis of Crete, where his foot made an indelible imprint upon the rock after landing, (and we remember of course that the presence of deities in the pagan Near East was traditionally depicted by a footprint) bards twisted his feats into verses and wove them into song. On the mountains of Pontus, where he fought and made love to Amazons in their traditional homelands, his war cries mingled with their death throes and pants of ecstasy in the drone of the kemenche, marking the uttermost extent of Hellenism. It is from them that tales of the Hybrid hero’s exploits were passed down to us, alloyed with long lost tales of the Trojan War, of Heracles, the Argonauts, Thebes, that were never truly forgotten.

Significantly, is the son of the Syrian Emir Mousour and the Cappadocian princess Irene who will become the quintessential Romios and paragon of our race. It is he, Digenis, who once threw a large rock across Cyprus in order to keep off the invading Saracen ships. The rock was hurled from the Troodos mountains and landed in Paphos at the site of Aphrodite's birthplace, known to this day as Petra Tou Romiou (the Rock of the Romios). In this way, it is the legendary hero’s dual identity, his hybridity, that renders him the archetypal Romios, the poster boy of Romiosyne, who fears no one, constitutes an elemental force, fights and defeats dragons, subverts the prescribed social order by abducting the daughters of his betters, earns himself a depiction in Saint Catherine’s church in Thessaloniki where he is depicted fully armed tearing apart the jaws of a lion and condescends only to grapple with Death as his ultimate foe, “on the marble threshing floor” to whom he gives a run for his money and who has had form, having already defeated Heracles, the tale inspiring a Russian bylina or folk ballad about Anika the Warrior.

 Most likely, it is because he is the personification of our early emerging identity that fittingly, he chooses to end his days, not in the lands where Greek is spoken, but rather, in his father’s country, building for himself a luxurious palace on the Euphrates, again a liminal space, in the land of the two rivers, Mesopotamia. Hybrid heroes such as Digenis have no ghetto mentality, nor the need to flock to the like-minded or the blinkered conformists for protection and validation. They can articulate and defend their identity wherever they are, to whosoever they encounter. They are both the prototype and the ultimate of the Modern Greeks.

Save for the songs, it was only in the nineteenth century that manuscripts containing the entire Digenis epic were discovered, again on the margins of Hellenism, the first being in Panagia Soumela monastery of Trapezounta in Pontus in 1868 and the oldest surviving manuscript being retrieved from Grottaferrata monastery in Italy, a home of Greek learning where Greek hymnography flourished there long after the art had died out within the Byzantine Empire and whose affiliation with Rome propagated an alternative version of Hellenism.

It is therefore fitting that the “Educational Institute Hellenism of Anatolia: from the Aegean Sea to Pontus” saw fit to hold over the past weeks, an extensive exhibition entitled “In the Footsteps of Digenis Akritas” in what is now arguably the most geographically marginal extent of Hellenism: Australia. The brainchild of passionate educators Yiota Stavridou and Simela Stamatopoulou, the Institute has a two-fold aim. The first is to ensure that the rich and diverse history, culture and traditions of Hellenism in Asia Minor, whose physical presence came to an end with the tragic events of 1922, survive and are not forgotten. Rather than being an obscure undertaking, attempting such a task from the remoteness of the Antipodes makes absolute sense, if one considers that Hellenism in Asia Minor developed in dialogue with other cultures, linguistic and religious traditions, drawing its vitality from its hybridity and its receptivity to adaptation and mutual exchange, much in the same way in which our own people in multicultural Australia have developed a convivial version of Hellenism that is at its best when it is outward looking, all embracing and inclusive. The sheer diversity in experience of our people within the various regions of Asia Minor exhausts stereotypes and defies generalisations, providing subtle instruction in how to resist the efforts of those who would preside over us to typecast and compartmentalise our very existence. In the study of Asia Minor, therefore, are the keys for our future.

The second aim, is, having drunk deeply from the bottomless font of Asia Minor memory and tradition, to be able to draw the requisite lessons that will enable us to fashion a version of Hellenism that is in communication with that of the Motherland, but which is also comfortable in its own skin, able to converse with and contribute to other discourses within a shared cultural tapestry while creating its own relevance and asserting its own identity.

Viewed from this perspective, the Institute’s focus on Digenis Akritas, is inspired. Cappadocia, his maternal homeland, is the place where centuries later, his descendants, the Karamanlides would articulate their identity in their own unique way. Having lost facility in the Greek language, they consciously chose to render their language, Turkish, in Greek script. At a time when fluency in the Greek language is rapidly declining within Greek communities in Australia, when intermarriage with other communities is common, when academics and community leaders throw their hands up and proclaim “the end of the Greek community as we know it,” and propagate linguistic, racial and other criteria for membership into an ever diminishing fold, it is through the study of the experiences of those who have been there before that we discover the tools for our own survival and the construction of an identity narrative that can graft itself onto its surroundings and thrive.

All these things were furthest from my children’s minds as they returned from their school excursion to the exhibition. Instead, I was treated to tales of treasure hunts, of dances, of a superhero who could leap tall islands in a single bound. We chuckled as they tried to remember the lyrics of the Cretan lay of the Death of Digenis, which their teachers had taught them, collapsing into laughter as I attempted to teach them the Cretan pronunciation. Next, they endeavoured to recreate that song on their violins. But it was only when my eight year old daughter, whose mother was born by the banks of the Euphrates, turned to me and said: «Μπαμπά, είμαι κι εγώ διγενής,» that I was able to appreciate how profoundly significant “Hellenism of Anatolia’s” exhibition actually is.

“We all are διγενείς, Akrites following in the footsteps of Digenis,” I responded. “Every single one of us.”

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 22 June 2024

 

EXILES

 

It was while driving to one of the outer suburbs in order to visit a client, marvelling at the extraordinary spread of the urban conglomeration that is our city, narrowly dodging a kangaroo that bounded across the road, and admiring all the MacMansions dotting the horizon, gleaming white like teeth in the cranium of a dead man, registering surprise at the one proudly flying a PAOK flag from its balcony, that I recalled the verses of Constantine Cavafy’s poem, “Exiles.”

“It goes on being Alexandria still.

Just walk a bit along the straight road that ends

at the Hippodrome

and you will see palaces and monuments

that will amaze you.”

I have similar feelings while walking down Lonsdale Street, which is never the Lonsdale Street of today, but the one in which Antipodes restaurant, where I would sit for hours over a bowl of avgolemono soup discussing Greek current events with friends and passersby, is open for business, a mushroom cloud of tobacco smoke is billowing from inside Medallion Café, smiling students are cascading down the stairs of the RMIT Greek Centre, elderly members of the community are shuffling towards Hermes Travel Agent, in faux protest at the fact that they are being somehow forced to book flights for a six month stay in the motherland, and the same customers, clutching their bank-books tightly and looking around nervously are walking into Laiki Bank in order to ascertain how much interest their bank balance has earned them since yesterday. In those days, it took a good half hour to walk from the Russell Street end to Swanston Street, on account of all the people one would meet along the way. Now, the walk is markedly brief in duration, and yet:

 

“Whatever war-damage it has suffered,

However much smaller it has become,

it is still a wonderful city.”

 

I am able to point to the exact spot where I stood twenty years ago, when spontaneously everyone rushed to Lonsdale Street in order to celebrate Greece’s victory in the European Cup. The next day, I took my books and my files with me and spent the day working from Medallion, intermittently glancing up at the television screen in order to observe the interminable long triumphal procession of the bus conveying the victorious Greek team from the airport to the centre of Athens, stopping only to answer the questions of other dozing denizens such as: “What are you reading?” and “How do you see the future of the Greek community.”

 

“And them, what with excursions and books

And various kinds of study, time does go by..”

 

These at least have not faded with time. Open social media, or consult the print media and one will find a plethora of announcements and advertisements for plays, lectures, wreath laying ceremonies, and other cultural events. Their quantity seems to have increased with time, even as the number of attendees decreases. One attends and greets the same people as last time. The elderly among them shrug their shoulders: “Eh, we came to pass the time. Δεν βαριέσαι, it gives us something to do. I haven’t seen so and so for a long time. Do you think he is ok? Strange that he is not here. He always used to come.” The interstitial time loop we appear to be trapped in is set at one minute before the end. We attend and augment our knowledge and out studies time and time again, believing always that this time, may be the last.

 

“In the evening we meet on the sea front,

the five of us (all, naturally under fictitious names)

and some other Greek of the few still left in the city.”

 

One can only carry with them throughout their life a sense of ennui about the fact that they use their baptismal name and the proper Greek version of their surname as a pseudonym, while an Anglicised bastardisation of both is registered as an “official” name. Nonetheless, we sit, my friends and I, of diverse interests and walks of life, united only in the metamorphosis of our names and our propensity to converse with each in Greek in Port Melbourne, ruminating over inherited memories of ships arriving at these shores, spilling our collected ancestors on the quayside. The eldest among us remind us of a time when Greeks abounded in the area. Their traces are still there, behind walls and closed doors, at the pharmacies and the supermarkets, if you look closely, if only cared to look.

 

“Sometimes we discuss church affairs

(the people here seem to lean towards Rome

and sometimes literature.

The other day we read some lines by Nonnos:

what imagery, what diction, what rhythm

And harmony!”

 

Among us is what can only be described as an Orthodox fundamentalist. According to him, we are all papists because apparently the Patriarch and all who serve him are in thrall to Rome, which as we all know is a harbinger of the Antichrist and a sign of the End Times. Another of our brethren, though Orthodox, has had his children received into another denomination so as to ensure their continued enrolment in their local high school, which matters not, since its all the same and the differences between the rival franchises all revolve around money anyway. We shy away from discussing the key players of the day, because it is urgent that the Monophysite controversy be resolved in our lifetime.

 

When we do read literature, we argue to what extent literary works written by Greeks in English can be considered “Greek.” We engage in disputation as to whether it is the cultural constructs imposed by the dominant ethnic group in our country that inform the manner in which the narratives of ethnic minorities such as our own are created or whether they are an authentic expression of the communities from which they have arisen. Nonnos, a native of Panopolis absorbs us as he did Cavafy, not only because like us, he was born in a region that marks the southernmost extremity of Hellenism in his day, but also because he wrote what is possibly the last great epic of late antiquity, the Dionysiaca, consisting of 48 books at 20,426 lines in Homeric Greek and thus looms large as a powerful terminal point, or at least as a Metabole, which coincidentally is the title of his poetic paraphrasing of the Gospel of Saint John, into an entirely different age.

 

“So the days go by, and our stay here

is not unpleasant because, naturally,

it is not going to last forever.

We’ve had good news: either something

is afoot in Smyrna, or in April

our friends are sure to move from Epirus.

So one way or another, our plans are

definitely working out,

And we’ll easily overthrow Basil.”

 

Scholars tend to agree that Cavafy set his poem in an Alexandria that had ceased to be dominated by the Greeks, was Arab-ruled and in which Greek cultural influence, was waning. It is a topos of decadence and of decline. The exact historical period still invites argument, with some contending that it is set early in the reign of Basil I of the Macedonian dynasty, a few years after he murdered the Emperor Michael, around the time of the Photian schism, hence the reference to Rome, around twenty years after the Arab conquest of Egypt. This Alexandria then, would still have retained its Greek cultural characteristics, even as they would begin to erode under the city’s new rulers, and the exiles’ admission that life is not too bad would make sense since they were able to live a similar lifestyle as that to which they were used to at “home,” can thus be paralleled by newly arrived members of our own community whose exile from the motherland is softened by the commonalities in the elements of life style within our portion of the Diaspora.

Other scholars contend that the poem in fact is set in the 1330’s during the reign of Basil of the Empire of Trebizond, the mentions of Smyrna and Epirus referencing the time after the Latin sack of Constantinople in 1204 which resulted in the emergence of three rival versions of Byzantium, the Empires of Trebizond and Nicaea, as well as the Despotate of Epirus. Basil purged high ranking nobles from his court, hence the possible need for exile.

Viewed from this perspective, the exile seems gratuitous and far-fetched. The exiles could have easily escaped to a closer successor kingdom, to Georgia, or to the West. Instead, they have deliberately chosen to settle in one of the furthest and at that time, culturally most foreign to them, regions of their world. One cannot help thinking that this is a self-imposed exile, that its rigours and sadnesses actually bring pleasure and that there is a masochistic element to Cavafy’s sarcasm of all of those who maintain that they are compelled to live on the margins but would never tear themselves away from them, when the right opportunity arises. Nostalgia, the pain of desiring a return is the opposite of what seems to be happening here. Rather, this is Nostophilia, when the desire for return, with all of its exquisite contradicitions, brings pleasure.

 

My own grandmother’s intention was to remain in Australia for five years, work hard and then return to her village. She never did, even though her entire mental world continued to revolve around that village until the day she died. One of our brethren, not able to endure the prospect of dehellenisation, resolved to abjure his comfortable lifestyle, return to his parents’ village, enlist in the army and then carve a life out for himself among his own people. He lasted a month.  As for me, who in my youth contrived time and time again to seek out opportunities to relocate to Greece, a country my father does not remember, only to pull back at the last minute, I eke out my existence, entrench my realities in a language that is ceasing to be spoken, ensconce myself in the sweet pleasures of the books and poems of my exile and bide my time awaiting the overthrow or the overcoming of all our fears, anxieties and neuroses. For as Cavay reveals in his last line: “And when we do, at last our turn will come.”

 

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

 

First published in NKEE on Saturday 15 June 2024