I leaf through the monk’s book while keeping an eye on the clock, since I am going to walk over to the Marble Stadium, the 1896 Olympic site, to see the reception for the Greek gold-medal winners, a ceremony to which all Athens has been invited. My eye is caught by an admonition. “Three things the modern Greek must get clear: First: There was illumination not only in ancient Greece, but afterwards, also in Byzantium, in 1921 and 1940, and in contemporary times, with Greece’s Nobel Prizes, her shipping, and the Greek colonies all over the world. Second: New archaeological researches and other historical evidence are bringing to light that Greece was advanced for a long period of time before all other civilized peoples through her immediate pre-Hellenic Aegean ancestors. Third: The current geographical borders of Greece do not represent the country. The great powers have pinned us down. The recovery of the lost fatherlands is and will be the perpetual goal of Greece.” I flip to the last page—there is a faint photograph of a map with the caption “And our Cyprus, like our northern Epirus and our Asia Minor, is Greece.” It is the old claim of the Great Idea, the dream of a Greece as it had momentarily been under Alexander, the idea that so many Greeks died for in the twenties, appearing again in a book published in the nineties. It was never an idea, though, but a dream, beyond the reach of thought. No matter where I travel here, I am traveling in dreams.
At the stadium, on this hot late-summer night, the Greek policemen on duty for the event wear short-sleeved pale blue shirts. Two large video screens are placed in the center of the stadium, flanking a dais draped in the Greek colors, Aegean blue and white. The dais is crowded with ten or so chairs for the athletes and dignitaries who have yet to arrive. The screens are playing again and again the triumph of Pyrros Dimas, the weight lifter, raising his barbell to its full extension and shouting “Yia tin Ellada! For Greece!” Every time the video reaches this point, the crowd bursts into applause. Braziers where vendors are selling grilled corn are set up at the entrances to the stadium, and vendors clamber up and down the aisles selling small Greek flags and pasatempo, the time passer, which are pumpkin seeds in small bags. “Pasatempo, paidia,” the vendors shout out, habitually addressing groups of Greeks as “children,” as is the custom here. “Oriste, paidia, pasatempo.” Across the stadium, a huge banner draped over the railing reads “Northern Epirus is Greece.” The national anthem is struck up to fill the time, and a tiny girl on her father’s shoulder waves her flag in time to it. At intervals during the wait for the limousines, the anthem, the “Ode to Liberty,” is sung at least four times, the gentle nineteenth-century melancholy of its melody conflicting with the violence of its lyrics, in which the figure of Liberty is recognized by the terrible edge of its sword, and is drawn from the sacred bones of the Greeks. The words are the words of the national poet, Solomos, a contemporary of Byron’s. Byron of course is the model of the heroic foreign philhellene, a district of Athens is given the Greek version of his name, Vyronas, and there is a monumental romantic nineteenth-century statue of him downtown, dying in the arms of Mother Greece. Oddly, I can call to mind a bust of Solomos in Athens, but no full-length statue. The image of Byron overshadows Solomos, the stories of Byron’s adventures and last days in Greece are familiar as Solomos is not. And yet, Solomos made an epitaph for Byron in what for me is one of the exemplary scenes of nineteenth-century romanticism. When he heard in 1824 of Byron’s death at Missolonghi, he is supposed to have leapt onto a table in a taverna and improvised a new stanza for the poem I have just heard sung as the national anthem: “Liberty, for a moment, leave the battle, drop your sword,/Come to this place now and mourn/on the dead body of Lord Byron.” There always seems to be an imbalance of memory here, whether the angle of vision is from inside or outside—Greece distorts memory, like a flawed telescope.
Children wearing sashes in the Greek colors chase each other through the tiers of seats, as the athletes arrive and are conducted to the dais, where a gold-robed priest blesses them, and politicians make speeches about their achievements. A video of the actress Irene Papas dressed in white classical robes standing in front of the Acropolis plays, and more parallels are drawn between these athletes and the great Olympians of Greek antiquity. They kneel on the steps of the dais and are crowned with green wreaths, which have, I think, been made larger to be visible to the crowd, and have a saladlike overtone. Groups of dancers draw the athletes into dances from the Pontus and Epirus. In the morning when I pass by the stadium, the grounds will be littered with the green husks of corn.
I have decided to take an accelerated conversation class for a few weeks, before I go to the islands of Thasos and Naxos to write a magazine story—a few days ago I received an obscene phone call and decided that my halting response was less than effective. The telephone had rung, and a man had said that he was calling from the local police station, and that he was making a routine check to obtain certain pieces of information about new residents in the neighborhood. So I started out in the spirit of polite cooperation, and by the time the shade of his questions changed, and I figured out that this was not the standard practice of neighborhood police, I was flailing. It must have been as strange for him in a way, like trying to make an obscene telephone call to an extraterrestrial, whose delayed responses and careful searching for correct vocabulary and grammar across the intergalactic borders of language must not have been what he had in mind.
The makeup of the class is amusing. A French girl engaged to a Greek boy, a half-Greek Swede, a half-Greek German, a Spanish classicist, a wealthy Mexican who spends part of every year here on romantic homosexual pilgrimages. This is a phenomenon so familiar that it is frequently satirized on Greek comedy shows—I saw one the other night in which an actor Kostas knows played an Englishman with dyed golden hair who flirts with a Greek policeman—“Which way to Mykonos, darling?” he asks, and failing with Greek men, tries his luck with Greek women as a last resort.
The door opens and everyone falls silent for the teacher, but Elvis Presley walks in, with sideburns, tight jeans, boots, and a white T-shirt. His eyes are red-rimmed as if he’d had a long tavernaki evening the night before, and when he introduces himself his Greek is a fantastic hybrid, its great polysyllabic mouthfuls lapping up and down in the slow currents of a Georgia accent. “Con su permiso,” the Mexican mutters appreciatively under his breath.
Elvis tells us he is from Savannah, but has no time for details because our teacher arrives with copies of the newspaper article we are to discuss. Her mouth is set sardonically as she slides photocopies of an advertisement for Coca-Cola down the table. The picture shows the Parthenon propped on Coke bottles instead of columns, an ad which has run in Italian newspapers and been reproduced here, to cries of indignation. She has invited an advertising businessman she knows to participate in the discussion, and it is clear that this morning’s instruction will not only be in language, but in politics.
“What do you think of this?” she asks the group, and outlines for us the reaction of the Greek government. The minister of culture will be asked by the Central Archaeological Council to raise the issue with the EEC. The mayor of Athens has commented that the ad is unacceptable and must be withdrawn. Melina Mercouri has remarked that Coca-Cola bought the Olympics, so now it is trying to buy the Parthenon as well. There are demands that the Coca-Cola Company publicly apologize. “Do you think,” the teacher asks, “that such an ad shows the proper respect for our ancient heritage?” The advertising man answers coolly that the ad is part of a series that has shown the landmark buildings of other nations, including the Empire State Building, with Coke bottles forming some element of their architecture. No one else objected, he says. “Besides, is that image any worse than these?” He passes around an assortment of ads—the Aphrodite of Milos is posed next to a washing machine, and groans, “I’m jealous.” A computer is juxtaposed against the columns of the Acropolis to show how durable it is. Another one, he says, provoked a similar scandal: it is an ad for shoes, showing a model stepping freely away from the marble women upholding the Porch of the Maidens—presumably they can’t come to life or leave their work of supporting the temple because they aren’t wearing the brand of sandals she is. But it is hard to work out why one ad is offensive and another is not. Why was this ad withdrawn on the initiative of the Union of Advertising Companies in Greece but some of these others ignored? “We must not vulgarize the symbols of antiquity,” the teacher says. “It is for us to set an example for the younger Western cultures which are based on ours.” The advertising man tells us that the company that made the sandal ad defended it on the grounds that it served to remind the Greek people of the missing caryatid, stolen away from the Parthenon, that it was an image that evoked appropriately patriotic feelings. The teacher calls on different students and asks them to explain their opinions of such advertisements. I am glad not to be called on, and glad to see from the wall clock how close we are to the end of the class. The teacher reads a section of the Greek code of advertising from a Xerox she is holding. “An advertisement must not trade on subjects of national importance, sacred objects, the national, cultural and spiritual heritage, national failings, religious doctrines …” The notion of filotimo, the hunger for honor and prestige, reaches even into advertising, whose very practice, some might say, is evidence of national failings. And there are those who would say that filotimo itself, which acts as a kind of unofficial national and personal censorship of critical thought, is a national failing. I notice the teacher is wearing a small gold charm of the Parthenon on a bracelet. She looks challengingly in the direction of the advertising man, who stares back with a look of affected dissipation and pulls his trump card out of his brief case, a bottle of ouzo in the shape of a classical temple. “Which you can buy duty-free at the Athens airport,” he says mockingly. “Many would say we have nothing else to sell with. I say, let’s all have an ouzaki before lunch.”
Elvis has a small car and is in the mood to run up to Mount Pendeli for lunch. He is clearly homesick, and his eyes light up when I offer him one of the boxes of grits I brought. “That would be great,” he says, “they just have koulouria, the sesame bread, and coffee for breakfast, and I can’t live on that until lunch.” We head first for the monastery of Kaisariani, on Mount Hymettus, and the traffic is not so bad, because the city has emptied for the death and funeral of the Virgin, the second great festival of the Greek year, in its way as important as Easter. As at Easter, people try to go home for August 15, dekapende Augustou, to their villages or islands, or to make special pilgrimages to churches associated with the Virgin, a lady who has often been sighted here, although she also never set foot on Greek soil. The neighborhood of Kaisariani is still known as a leftist, working-class neighborhood, and there is a Communist Party office with a prominent banner in its central square. It was a heroic center of anti-Nazi resistance, and its streets were named nostalgically after towns in Asia Minor by the refugees who settled it in the twenties. The monastery of the same name (and as is often the case in Greece, nobody knows the provenance of the name, so folklore is free to breed its own origins) is a popular Sunday refreshment for Athenians, the urban equivalent of a country outing—on the grassy plateaus of the mountains, Athenians picnic, play soccer, and gather the olives the signs strictly forbid them to pick. The Kaisariani monastery made such a cherished Athenian expedition that it was nicknamed “Seriani”—stroll—and found a place in a couplet about the three monasteries on the edge of Athens that all Athenians can repeat: “In Seriani, strolling—and in Pendeli, honey—and cold water that angels drink flows in Dafni.”
On the walk up the slopes to the monastery, an eleventh-century foundation, I try to imagine the nyfopazaro, the “bride bazaar” that was set here well into the 1930s and maybe beyond, depending on whether the person you talk to finds the memory embarrassing. Eligible young women would be strolled up and down the green paths by their parents, getting together afterward to discuss whose eyes met whose with the most significance. That bride bazaar, as many women of refugee descent will tell you, was not just an offshoot of sexual conservatism, but an arena for desperate maneuvers. The refugees were in an odd social position to begin with, often held in contempt by the “autochthonous” Greeks, who had in their turn felt held in contempt as provincials by the Asia Minor Greeks, who viewed themselves as cosmopolitan. Many of the refugees too were in the schizophrenic position of blaming the government which was giving them shelter for the disaster which had brought them here to begin with. The refugees were considered suspicious, possibly disloyal to Greece, undesirable social connections; and to complete the chaos, the dowry system on which marriage was based was completely shattered because the refugees had lost all their property in Turkey, burned or appropriated, while their prospects for compensation were indefinite. In a world in which marriage was the only future for a woman, and a woman without property was virtually unmarriageable, the situation of the refugee girls was abysmal. Kostas sent me in the mail the other day copies of two popular songs from that era, from a collection a friend of his of refugee descent has made. They are tragic pop songs, in a way you get used to in Greece, where people dance and sing for pain as much as for pleasure. In one, a rich boy marries a prosfigoula, a little refugee girl, and his mother is so angry that she fries two snakes and feeds them to the girl, poisoning her. The second one is the most nakedly cruel song about marriage I have ever encountered, sung by a potential bridegroom—“If your mother doesn’t give me promissory notes and cash, then we’ll have clashes,” he sings in one verse. “If your mother doesn’t give me a house and a car, you’ll never have me for a husband. If your mother doesn’t give up her own house to me, I’ll marry someone else.” And if her mother succeeded in bringing off the marriage? I wondered on this beautiful late-summer afternoon, in this serene oasis overlooking the mass of Athens out to the Saronic Gulf. These landscapes are as full of hidden events as people’s daily lives are full of hidden dreams.
“To teras,” Elvis says, “the monster,” looking out over the jumbled white buildings of the city—it looks like something breeding under a microscope, chains of molecules making unpredictable new connections. Exactly as if the city didn’t exist, a donkey is standing impassively in front of the view, while a man loads the baskets on its back with olives. Elvis and I look at the monastery kitchen and baths, and listen to the finale of a tour group’s lecture inside the church—a group of retirees who have different outings every month, they smilingly tell us. “So you see,” the guide concludes, gesturing toward a fresco showing the myrrofores, the three women bringing aromatic oils to anoint the dead body of Christ, “Byzantine art is just as good as Renaissance art, only different. I hope you will remember that as you continue to learn more about the treasures of Byzantine art, which is the true fruit of the ancient Greek heritage.” The group applauds. I see a striking icon of a scene I don’t recognize. It is a picture of the Virgin Mary holding the baby Jesus, sitting in a womb-shaped fountain raised on a column. The fountain is pierced so that four streams of water flow into a kind of pool below her—it is an icon of a type which represents Mary as the Zoodokhos Pygi, the Life-Giving Fountain. There is a special feast day to celebrate this aspect of the Virgin, and apparently this kind of image is linked to a particular medicinal spring outside the walls of Constantinople, and often with other healing waters too. It is a jarring image, this Christian Aphrodite, who is not rising from the sea but is enclosed in a cramped basin she can’t even stretch out full-length in, in water to which she has no physical relation—she is not rising in naked splendor from infinite water, but squatting in a kind of birdbath. And she perches in her water fully clothed, so heavily draped and veiled that her only visible flesh is her sober face.
“Let’s go on up to Drosia, where they make good peinerli,” Elvis says, adding more ragged edges to the world by talking Turkish (peinerli, Turkish for bread and cheese, is a kind of French bread pizza, brought here by Asia Minor refugees) and Savannah at the same time. I want to have a long look at the Pendeli monastery, with its exhibit of materials from a “secret school” which operated intermittently under Ottoman rule, teaching Greek and the principles of Orthodoxy, often under cover of darkness. Depending on who is telling you, they were either the stratagems through which the Turkish aim to render the Greeks illiterate slaves was outwitted, or hotbeds of sacralized nationalism—the view of them probably differs from region to region, too, since the relationship between the local Turkish and the Greek populations differed from place to place. But in any case the folklore image of the secret school, with its tender-faced boys tracing Greek letters by candlelight under the tutelage of a wise priest, is the one conjured up when people say the phrase, and matches the famous Greek children’s song about them: “My dear little glowing moon, shine so I can walk and find my way to school, so I can learn my alphabet, the letters and the other lessons, and things about God.” I heard two famous Greek poets, both known for their wit and the number of their lovers, launch into this once after a winy dinner, both in startlingly piping boyish voices, as if they had recovered their childhood pitches, both changing the last line so it ran “and how to kiss girls.”
Elvis is starving and hurries me out of the monastery into the car—on the way out, I notice stacks of books for sale by Mr. Angelchild’s hellenizing monk. We find a restaurant with a pine-scented garden and peinerli and Elvis tells me why he is here. “It’s kind of surreal,” he says. His father is Greek and divorced his mother when Elvis was a teenager. His mother was devastated and lost custody of her son when she started drinking too much. He stayed with his father, but when his father married a French tourist passing through Savannah, and they began to have babies, Elvis was shipped off to his Theia Eleftheria—his Aunt Freedom—in Greece, who was overjoyed that her brother’s marriage had failed, but furious that she was saddled with Elvis. Elvis hoped his Greek blood would make him wanted here, that the whole nation would turn out to be a family, but he came back as a teenager when adolescent social structure is as highly organized as insects’, and he couldn’t find friends comfortably, with his poor Greek and strange childhood, so his poor Greek took much longer to improve. His girlfriends have been older women, friendlier to him than the teenage girls who don’t want to take romantic risks with a boy who has no clear prospects. “Theia Eleftheria curses me every day to my face, and has since I was fifteen. I’m a tembelis, a lazy bastard, I go with older women, I drink too much wine. I’m a pervert—anomalous, she says in Greek, which sounds pretty funny when you’re drunk. But nobody could live with her and not get drunk. Every day I say please don’t give me potatoes with dinner, and every day like clockwork I get them. So I don’t eat them. Because I hate them. Then even more, it’s pervert, ungrateful shit, stinking drunk, stray dog. The neighbors can hear her fine. Last night she screamed at me, ‘When will you go to work, you drunken scum? You can’t dye Easter eggs with farts! You have to have money for the colors!’ She rapes me—that’s how women rape you, with words, they rape your whole life. And she knows I have nowhere else to go. I’m thinking of joining the Greek army—they have like divisions or something for diaspora boys with not great Greek, and afterwards you get a passport, and maybe the connections for some kind of job.”
I ask him if he thinks about going back to the States.
“I’m scared to,” he says. “I’ve been here seven years now, and I don’t have anyone there at all. It’s too big there not to have anyone at all. Here at least there is someone who hates me. Do you like poetry?” he asks me.
I tell him I do, and he pulls out a clipping he cut out of the newspaper about Cavafy, a reminiscence by someone who knew him in Alexandria. “When he got older, he used to have visitors come by candlelight so they wouldn’t see his wrinkles. And he served raki in pink glasses. And always held a sprig of jasmine to smell. That’s something I like about here. That this would be in the newspaper, just a human interest item. I saw another one the other day, a little headline that said ‘Persian poet in traffic accident; condition stable.’ That’s something nice. In America they have journalism; here the newspapers are more like personal letters about what happens. I think about doing that, if I can get my Greek good enough. Or maybe I’ll join the army and then be a poet. I’m in the ideal situation—like Solomos. Or Cavafy. His first language was English. It’s practically a requirement here that Greek be a second language for the national poets. It’s like they have to make themselves into Greeks. So maybe I’ll end up a poet. And a Greek.”