Writing Journal, Third Week

Writing Journal, Third Week

Monday, 10^th September

The autumnal slide to cold was a false start, and Saturday was considerably warmer. By two or so we had crawled out of bed and were ready for the day. Or, rather, I should say I had crawled out of bed: Saskia had been up for several hours already, steeped in the joy of quadratic equations and of reviewing high school trigonometry, so that (having merely an Oxford MPhil with distinction) she might go to America for grad school. “What do you remember about the Pythagorean theorem?” she asked. “Not much, except that he didn’t eat beans and was very particular about how he put his shoes one.” I donned one of my better shirts (of dark brown linen) for our date to the island, though with blue-jeans beneath. Because of the latter, Saskia forbade my wearing proper black shoes and I put my grayish running shoes on instead. I don’t remember what she wore; I only remember her face, which made the weather warmer. We walked down to the “harbor” (which is a mighty word for a dock with two boats) just as one vessel was setting off. We were not allowed to jump, so we waited for the next.

There was a new batch of excited kids this time; plus three young fellows, one of them with a black mustache that fell, 1970s-style, over the sides of his lips. Not many people can carry that off. The aquaria were still on the island’s quay, still filled with dark writhing eels, whose existence we pitied. We asked if people ate the little turtles and were told (to our relief) they were just for decoration, though the ribbiting froggies were very much on the menu. “We’ve just eaten,” we told the owner, “though perhaps later.” He assured us they had vegetarian dishes as well. After the Ali Pasha museum, where we pet a gentle triad of kittens, we decided to leave the community of 500 and escape the offers of bracelets and liqueurs, ascending a dirt road up to the coniferous heights. We came to a small cemetery and let ourselves in. (Cemetery is a Greek word, meaning “the sleeping-place”: the English word is graveyard.) We considered the dead and looked at their photos. We laughed at one woman’s name, which was Elefthería Paghotoú, as this means—not really, but almost—“Free Ice-cream”.

The pathway upwards was not a proper path, but I have always been, despite a lack both of skill and motivation in most activities athletic, rather a good little mountain-goat when it comes to inclinations and rocks. We went up and up and at the top was a church. Just a small one, locked, with a copse of yellow-green six-foot-tall plants on one side (which the afternoon sun dripped through), and on the other, a tree with an iron bell hanging from a branch, about the size of a bread-box or so (not that I’ve seen many breadboxes). This was more or less the island’s summit and the fragrant trees obscured the view of the grey-roofed houses below. After exploring the grounds, we just sat on some modern construction of unknown use and enjoyed the breeze and the smell. I told Saskia, before we left, I had something important to say. I took her near the bell, looked her in the eyes and got on both my knees. She saw what it was I wanted and silently let me ask it her. She said yes and she hugged me; she pulled me up and we hugged; we kissed and then we hugged some more. “Ah, I’ve got something for you” I said withdrawing my wallet. I pulled a little pink envelope out, with faux-snakeskin design, and in it was the three-euro silvern ring I’d bought her. She laughed and kissed me and we hugged once again. I picked up a hand-sized stone and rang the bell thrice and then we were officially engaged.

We walked hand-in-hand down to “the People-Person Monastery” (ἡ Μονὴ τῶν Φιλανθρωπινῶν). We popped in, not sure if it was the monastery, and surprised a little old deaf woman all in black who was doing her laundry. “Sorry to disturb you like this, ma’am.” She pulled a key out and walked us over to a chapel, without a word. The church is famous for its wall-paintings. The first one one sees is of a mighty serpent’s tongue, about eight foot long, being pierced by archangels’ swords. Others are smaller, neatly-lined-out panels showing the tortures and deaths of various Christian martyrs. The man being skinned alive made me think quite lucky the ones being beheaded. There are also the Twelve Patriarchs, with Jesus, Israel (né Jacob, ladder in hand) and his twelve sons. Throughout, most if not all of the eyes and mouths have been chipped away. Whether this iconoclasm was committed by the painters’ fellow-Christians in the Middle Ages, or by the Mahometans later, I don’t know. More recent visitors have made their own additions, scratching in their names and such; one guest made a nice etching of a horse, another a less polished representation of a man’s genitalia. I did not see any soccer-teams there, but would not have been surprised by it. (I can’t say I’m particularly touched by the temptation to deface, though one tries to be forgiving and one remembers that even Lord Byron, that foreign-born hero of Greece and most iconic of Philhellenes, added his own name to Neptune’s temple at Cape Sunium.) The little old lady, all of about four foot four, read my lips and responded. “Get well soon,” I said when she mentioned her deafness. “I won’t get well down here, only up there” (she looked heavenward); “they have good doctors up there.” Among other images of ascetics were two of stylites (including the famous Symeon). The stylites stood upon pillars: this was their shtick, like people in trees today, except they were much tougher than hippies named Butterfly and they weren’t facing off with logging-companies but with sun and ice and hunger, and with demons, which were very real to them (and still are to you and me). This was something like the fourth century or so, long long before my time (the twelfth-century Comnenian era). “Such treasures,” the old woman lamented (with a wearily routine lamentation), “they’re abandoned and nobody cares about them.” In one part of the church is the Secret School, where Greek children during the Turkish rule went by moonlight to learn letters, and a crypt for them to hide in case the authorities came.

Tuesday, 11^th September

Saskia went yesterday to the 28^th October Street to buy a lamp, leaving me at home to work. I’ve been doing translations of twelfth-century Sicilian documents for Oxford’s Oriental Institute. The Saracens had been there for a long time, though the Byzantines—they called themselves “Romans”—were beginning to take the island back, and the Normans were also an important force. The documents are in Greek, which very few of the institute’s Arabicists are in a position to deal with. One is a petty land-grant by a certain King Roger and another a clarification of land-division, full of impenetrable Saracen names. There are also some funeral dirges for George of Antioch, his mother and wife. An example follows below. George’s mother Theodulë became a nun sometime after his birth, and when she died her soul was “born by angels’ hands / As a spotless bride, worthy of her Master, / The pure Bridegroom, who leads his brides to their new home.” (I am intrigued by this Orthodox (and Catholic) polygamous Jesus and wonder where it originated.)

After several hours of the above, and our usual dinner of salad and bread, we were in desperate need of diversion and found some of the more improving kind. Though not on the order of Shakespeare and the King James Bible, the works of P.G. Wodehouse are a must for any English-speaker who cherishes his language and loves to see it played with. The 1990s filmed versions of Jeeves & Wooster, with Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, are an excellent introduction: the acting is impeccable and the sets lavish and they reward repeated viewings year after year. To get all of the words of the master himself, one can do no better than the simply perfect audio-recordings by Jonathan Cecil, which are (and this is a rarer trait than one might hope) laugh-out-loud funny. (Magdalen College, Oxford, by the way, Oscar Wilde’s alma mater among others, claims Wodehouse’s creation Bertram Wilberforce Wooster as one of its old members, the only fictional character to my knowledge to be so claimed by any Oxbridge college.)

We have two university-age girls living upstairs from us. One beats the drums and they play rockin’ tunes like “Walking on Sunshine” and “Hit the Road, Jack” and heavier, less defined compositions. I think I’ll request some Led Zeppelin. They knocked on our door at 1:30 in the morning, drunk, as we were ending our second episode of Jeeves. The invitation was a friendly (if ill-timed) one, but we thought it best to take a rain-check. We started another episode, partly as an excuse to be busy, and an hour later Saskia fell straight into Sleep’s temporary death. I put my shoes on and headed to the internet café, to send my translations off and to read the bad news of the world.

II. Another, on the Tomb of George the Emir

What man were by his nature so hard-hearted,
Forging his bowels⁽²⁾ with so chill a flame,
As not forthwith to empty streams of tears⁽³⁾
In this so weighty case of our misfortune?
The Panhypersebastus⁽⁵⁾ of great merit, 5
The tagmatarch⁽⁶), earth’s brilliant morning-star,
Majestic plant, a graft of Antioch,
Delightful ray of light in Evening’s Lands⁽⁸⁾:
George—the wonder of the world of men
And Heaven’s light⁽¹⁰⁾ unto the Christian folk, 10
The bellows’ blast which flamed the heathens’ burgs
And held in hand the might of land and sea,
Incinerating, virile like the lightning;
For those who stand agape, the common haven,
The scales of Justice, pushed to neither side, 15
To all a generous patron, never grudging,
To th’ Emperor a lamp and his heart’s joy
And to his crown, a pearl of greatest price—
Now lies (alas!) by this stone casket decked
And dead (what woe!) it seems, despite our hopes. 20
Oh men’s Salvatrix, Mother of the Word,
Receive him to thy heavenly abodes⁽²²⁾,
Who died and here is laid, hard by thy house,
The year six-thousand having passed us by,
In even hundreds reckoned, and therewith 25
Quinquennia ten and a single nonary.⁽²⁶⁾

² The seat of mercy and compassion.

³ Cf. Iphigenia Among the Taurians 1106 (a lyric section). There may however also be a play here with the previous line’s temperature and forging, as λιβάς, the “stream[s]” of this line, can also be a “vessel that drips when under the influence of heat, a rudimentary thermometer” (LS-J, s.v. 2).

⁵ A Comnenian title.

⁶ The leader of a τάγμα, a (large) division, a legion or brigade.

⁸ I.e. the West (cf. German Abendland).

¹⁰ The same word is used in Genesis for the sun, moon and stars.

²² Cf. John 14.2 (“In my father’s house are many mansions...”). Also, this and the previous line have in their vocabulary and grammar some small but distinct echoes of Homer.

²⁶ This makes, as written, 6,059. The “hundreds” of line 25 (ἑκατοντάσιν) should be emended to the metrically equivalent “six hundred” (ἑξακοσίοις) and the “in even” (ἴσαις) to something meaning “along with” (σὺν καί, etc.). This would make the date 6659 from Creation, or A.D. 1151.

Wednesday, 12^th September

Internet here is not like internet elsewhere. My brand new laptop has easy wireless capabilities. But scan as it may, it finds nothing. I looked into getting a connection from ΟΤΕ, the national telecommunications company, but that required a phone-line, which required a tax form, which required a residence permit, which I haven’t got because I’m technically a tourist. And all that hassle would have been for dialup (!), meaning connectivity à la AOL circa 1995. So I go to one of the three internet cafés in town. One is large and airy with blurry screens and no proper USB portals. Another plays passé rave and eurotrash trance and, though there’s no smoking upstairs, there is smoke upstairs. My poison of choice is right up a chain of streets from my house. It’s the smallest by far of the three and when the door is closed the air is thick blue gray and heavily nicotined. When I go home and take off my shirt it smells like a cheap cigarette-butt. I wash my hair in my curtainless shower and fumes come out as from an inspection-failing factory; the water drips off like acid rain.

One wonders if the Greek people will ever stop smoking. They have the lowest alcoholism rate in the EU and quite possibly the highest smoking-rate. Kids smoke, lots of them, and unashamedly; it’s their right. In the West smokers go outside for their smoke; in Greece it’s the non-smokers who have to go outside for fresh air. One wonders, could Brussels ever dictate a tobaccoless zone in Greece? Impossible! It might work in Ireland, with their late enthusiastic adoption of a European identity, and possibly even in England, where the Guardian’s readership longs to be progressive. But in Greece this New World smokeable plant is as tightly adopted as the potato and tomato. It’s grown all over the country; and the valleys (to name an example) of Patroclus’ sometime home are now covered over with this wide and attractive leaf, which is green in the fields, brown on the drying-racks, grey in the ashtray and black in the lungs. And I expect it will stay in the lungs of the Greeks until after I—and a great many of them—are ashes in the ground.

Thursday, 13^th September

I keep terrible hours, even by Greek standards. Greeks are known for staying up late compared to Europeans, but by three a.m. the party is usually over and everyone is sound in bed until six o’clock, when they get up and go to the bakery. The rest of one’s sleep is during the siesta (τὸ μεσημέρι) from between 1:30 or 2:00 and 5:30-6:00 pm. This afternoon snooze is, as an English friend of mine put it, “so very civilized”, and not only do I avail myself of one even in the cold weather, but I’m absolutely unable to resist it during the Summer, when, if one eats anything greater than a single stuffed vine-leaf, one is immediately summoned, will one or nill one, to a midday meeting with Morpheus. After the siesta shops may or may not be open, so the safest thing is to buy anything you want before 1:00pm, which is usually about when I’m awaking. I am never quite sure when a shop will be open in the post meridiem: I’ve seen some that advertise “open early evenings Tuesday & Thursday” and then be open that time on Friday, while there have been others I was quite certain would be available for my pressing need, only to show up and have my urgency answered with vacancy and silence. I have been looked at as though a madman on occasions and told “you can’t get that on a Monday”, “...on a Wednesday”, “...at this time of day” or “...during the month of August!” I have nearly given up trying. Just last week we saw the evening avenues bustling with shoppers on a Thursday around nine, while the following Friday the same place was a ghost-town. I remember reading somewhere long ago (I think it was in Plutarch) where the Athenians sent a terribly urgent embassage to the Lacedæmonians requesting help in repulsing the powers of the Persian Great King. The Spartans answered “we’d love to come and help, but we’re celebrating some lunar festival now and can’t come to you until the moon is full” [or new or something]. By the time the Spartans finally arrived, the Athenians had already taken care of things themselves and beaten the Persians without them. Though I’m hazy on the details, the kernel of the story has occurred to me on many an occasion while trying to find (say) a blanket, book or cooking-pot.

Friday, 14^th September

I have since high school been a rather nocturnal bird and comfortable sleeping when others roam abroad. My nine months working “graveyard” suited me extremely well and I was happy to accept extra pay for something that seemed so natural (even if my nature was not the norm). The only all-night people I know in Joannina are those who work at (and a choice few who frequént) the internet café I go to. The proprietor is a short and gentle man named Aristophanes. (Yes, that is really his name.) He is of the cool and relaxed disposition needed for working 9pm to 9am and is, to boot, a perfect example of the northern Greek L (a heavy mid-tongued way of pronouncing lambda, caused by Slavic influence and resembling the dark L in many Irish words). I have often gone up at four in the morning and left after Aristophanes.

It’s a matter of rhythms: I am out of sync with those of my own culture, let alone those of another (which often leave me baffled). There is a time for rising and a time for retiring, a time for arriving and a time for taking one’s leave. I for my part would be happy to spend all day with a “do-not-disturb” sign hanging from my doorknob, lying on the sofa with my feet higher than my head and reading novels or popular history: taking no notes (just the occasional nap) and answerable to no-one: reading Ecclesiastes but paying no mind to the seasons.

In earlier times of communal agriculture, the seasons were dictated by Nature and Nature had not been so tamed by man that she could not withhold her fruits. Man had to adapt (v.i.), not adapt (v.t.). There must surely be some vestiges of those patterns today, but (except for the obvious example of vacating the cities during the August heatwave) they are difficult to discern. In Greece today we use the Western, Roman months, some of them poetic (like “Two-Faced”, our first month, or “War-Month”, the Romans’ first), a couple panegyrical (the autographs of two colossal men of history), and some downright prosaic (September through December). In yesterday’s Greece however these months were known by what realities they brought in store. A few of the names include the following.

January: Coldy, Midwinter, Cat-month1	July: Thresher
February: Lame, Short, Threshold2	August: Big-eater4, Fat-fly, Figgy
March: Planter, Springy, Stake-burner3	September: Grape-harvester, Quail-month
April: Rose-month, Complainer	October: Rainer
May: Cherry-month, Flowery, Green	November: Sower, Shadowy
June: Harvester	December: Christmassy

This is not entirely unique: cf. our American word Fall for the Autumn (when foliage is shed, in some places still called “the Fall of the Year”). The Germans call Autumn Herbst, which cognate with our English harvest.⁵ I am far too insensitive to detect in the modern din actual patterns to the traces of what was once far more explicit. But here and there are whiffs. A famous Greek island-song goes in part as follows:

This earth upon which now we tread
We’ll enter in when we are dead;
This earth of green, of plants and grass,
Will eat up every lad and lass.
Dance! Dance! Take joy in youth!⁶

1 This is apparently the time when cats do their mating.

2 (Of Winter & Springtime.)

3 Nothing to do with heretics: this is so called because the cold returns and one has to burn one’s garden-stakes for warmth.

4 Because of the harvest’s abundance.

5 The Goths, who lived in the warmer southern Balkans and so had their harvest nearer to Greek-time, called Summer asan. This is the un-rhotacized cognate of the German word for “harvest”, Ernte (and of our English word earn, which has a similar root meaning).

6 «Τούτ’ ἡ γῆς ποὺ τὴν πατοῦμε, ὅλοι μέσα θενὰ μποῦμε,
Τούτ’ ἡ γῆς μὲ τὰ χορτάρια τρώγει νιὲς καὶ παλικάρια.
Χορέψετε, χορέψετε, τὰ νιάτα νὰ χαρεῖτε...» (My translation.)

Escher's Childhood Work

Week Two Journal

Writing Journal, Second Week

Monday, 3^rd September

I don’t know how Greek bakers stay in business. There’s one every couple of blocks and the baker-to-customer ratio can’t be a large one. The sweet scents rub my nose as the bakers are starting the day and I’m ending mine, walking home from the internet café, myself reeking like the ashtray that was so dirty the cleaning-lady refused to touch it. When the city’s air is clean and all else are sleeping but a few symposiac Socrateses sitting around last night’s outdoor dinner-table, the baker (or “furnace-man”) has been up for some time, his pans clattering into the oven, the loaves plopped into wooden displays. The one three doors from my house makes excellent boughatsas and milópites. The latter (deceptively translated “apple pies”) are rather more like croissants, but stiffer, oilier and flakier, around a hot apple-and-cinnamon filling. Though the former word comes ultimately from Italian focaccia, it is in fact another pastry, with a filling like custard but thickened with semolina. For one euro, fifty and hot, they’re a deliciously bad way to start the day.

But still, how does one compete? How does one get enough business? Though some bakers are better than others and each has his specialty, you will find largely the same things at each one: standard crispy white loaves, slightly heavier rustic ones, and whole wheat once or twice a week (each just 70 cents). Some big loaves sold by the kilo; some weekend ones for church, baked over a mold with religious symbols; oil-less ones during Lent. Lovely pastries with feta cheese (tyrópites) or with cheese and spinach (spanakópites), and not-so-lovely ones with ham or sausage. Here in the North, they make the above boughatsa with “cream” and also a savory one with cheese. There are candied fruits in syrup, a refrigerator with juices and milk, some icons of saints on the wall and various dryish cookies or cakes. Not infrequently the baker will also store a mini-mountain of powder, hiding chunks of Turkish Delight.

It is unknown to me what kind of Turkish Delight the White Witch was giving Edmund Pevensey. I do know they sell some pretty inauthentic stuff in current-day England, gooey chews in cheap milky chocolate. Real Turkish Delight (Turkish lokum, in Greek λουκούμι), is very out of place besides Mars Bars and Cadbury’s. It is very old fashioned, very eastern. The most usual flavor is rose, which is not what the kids are eating today. It’s not covered in chocolate. Even the powdered sugar it does come in is unusual, a different texture from ours and scented with rose-water. In Greece people still eat it for pleasure (a sweet job or sinecure is called a λουκούμι), but if you had it in America, it would be to try something unusual, to uphold tradition, or for a romantic escape into the past. It tastes of the 19^th century, of exotic treats in Old West towns, and would go along well with the perfume-sweets my grandmother kept (little candies with once-liquid centers and the aromas of perfumes, some of them soapy and some of them sweet, which were fun to eat for novelty, but not actually to our 20^th-century taste, as were the now-defunct Blueberry Nerds). In its proper setting, however, there’s something immovable and proud about the taste, like some old women I’ve met from once-great noble houses, who live in obscurity among memory-soaked, dust-covered tapestries and dolls, clinging to a name which no-one nowadays knows. Cavafy has a piece about a Palæologan coronation, where the royal house is too impoverished (the ruins of the Roman empire crumbling around it) to buy actual gems and pearls for the ceremony. They therefore use costume jewelry, which the poet sees as a defiant gesture against wicked Fortune. I think Turkish Delight would perfectly have fit the reception afterwards.

Tuesday, 4^th September

There is a square promontory jutting into Lake Pamvotis, three of the sides facing the lake and one the city, and here the king of old built the castle for his nereid-bride. One wonders about the tactical value of having it down by the shore. This is, after all, not a sea or an ocean but a lake: any siege-engines or invading armies will of necessity be coming by land (and only in the direst of circumstances could the inhabitants consider the lakewater potable). Perhaps it were better to build in the high part of town, so that offenders would be forced to attack at a disadvantage (the grade, admittedly, being not particularly steep). No, it’s obvious that the reason for choosing this spot was its ease of access to the midnight dancing of the nereids. Its strength however lies largely in its walls, which are about as thick as about seven cars put side-to-side (or ten European cars). There’s a battlement on each of the corners and they were high enough to keep the Dog-heads out, which shows their effectiveness. They are not exactly sheer, but scaling them would be extremely difficult. Saskia & I, walking along their base, speculated what one might throw down to repulse invaders. (Boiling tar was at one point mentioned.) The rock is craggy and not the kind one would want one’s head smashed up against. In many places, branches of tiny trees can be seen growing out from the stones, a triumph of poetry over prose wherein I take particular delight.

I live right outside the castle gate, on Neoptolemus Street. No, not that Neoptolemus—not Achilles’ son Neoptolemus Pyrrhus, the one who killed King Priam (in one version using Priam’s own grandson as a club to beat him to death). This one is named instead for a king of the Epirus who lived many generations after those other castle walls in Troy had long since fallen down and Achilles had gone to the Isles of the Blest to live as Helen’s Husband N^o Five. The architecture is mixed, from the sharp and new (which was drafted on computer and could feature in a glossy magazine) to a few houses where it’s uncertain whether anyone still lives there. The place behind one gate I thought was probably abandoned, till I saw the gate open on one afternoon and a cool verdant garden within. At the bottom of the lane is an empty house with a Star of David on the side, a remnant of Joannina’s once-thriving, now extinct, Jewish community. At the head of the street is the early-opening bakery. An old man there asked me where I was from. When I told him my girlfriend and I were Philhellenes, here to improve our Greek, his face inflated into a smile and he put two flour-covered hands out to shake mine.

My own place, at the top of the street towards the castle, is a modest but respectable one at ground-level, a studio apartment or “garçonnière” (γκαρσονιέρα). The door enters into the kitchen. There is a sink and some shelves and room for where a table should be (but isn’t). There’s no refrigerator, so one has to buy things fresh and consume jam within 48 hours. Also no cooker, so one’s staple is bread. (I may buy a gas camp-stove.) To the right is the bathroom, with douche on one side of the sink and toilet-bowl squeezed into the other. In typical Greek style, there is neither shower-door nor curtain: one simply gets the floor wet and lets the warm weather dry it. The window by the toilet is important. To the left of the front door is the bedroom-cum-salon. It’s about eight-by-twelve foot, which is so much larger than the monkish little cell I had back in England that I hardly know what to do with myself. My desk is in one corner; kitty-corner is the kitchen table as a secondary desk. Internet have we not. I have a real closet (not a wardrobe), that’s filled with papers and clothes, and by the radiator I keep my bedding, which I spread out each night over the lacquered pinewood floor. The high ceilings are white and the walls a light crème-de-menthe color. Saskia says it’s the kind of color one likes upon first seeing but then soon grows weary of. I for my part, after over a fortnight, am still quite fond of the hue. It’s very Greek. There’s a large, modern window that looks out on the lane and everything here is perfect. All except for one thing.

Wednesday, 5^th September

The only annoyance on my street is the Italian restaurant opposite the baker’s. It’s called Il Forno (“the Furnace” or “Oven”, source of the Greek word φοῦρνος “oven” or “bakery”) and the fare there looks to be rather standard southern Italian tomato-sauce-and-mozzarella. The Greek relationship with Italy has been a mixed one. In the 16^th century, at the beginning of the four-century Turkish rule (or “Turkocracy”), you have the budding Veneto-Cretan Renaissance of the poet Cornaro and playwright Chortatzis and their circles, Crete having not yet fallen to the Ottomans. At the other end, in the early 19^th century, you have Solomos (author of the national hymn, which at 100+ verses is the longest anthem of any country in the world) and the poets of the Heptanese, also held by the Venetians and the only part of Greece the Turks never took. Both groups (on Crete and in the Heptanese) were comfortably bilingual, their intellectuals often studying in Italy (usually Venice) and sometimes even composing pieces in Italian as well as Greek. Throughout the Turkish rule, material published in Greek was almost exclusively printed in Italy, whether the ancient classics (now rediscovered by the West) at printing houses such as Aldus Manutius’, or the delightful demotic pieces such as the anonymous Alexander the Great romances based on pseudo-Callisthenes or Lukanis’ retelling of the Trojan War based on Constantine Hermoniacus (who in turn was based on the great John Tzetzes), or the numerous vernacular texts without an ancient theme. There also continued, despite the printing-press, to be much manuscript-production, especially in the many Greek-speaking communities of southern Italy and Sicily (traditionally known as Magna Græcia), where many Greek scholars had fled with their libraries after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. The Greek debt to Italy has been enormous.

That debt is however canceled out by the long and continuous history of evil dealings by the Italian people, from the time the Romans needlessly sacked Corinth in the second century BC, leveling the city and hauling all her treasures to Rome, to when the ruthless Doge Dandolo and Italian-led Crusaders sacked Constantinople in 1204, raping her women, defiling her churches and hauling all her treasures to Venice. (They are still there in the Church of St. Mark.) Greeks are proud of their grandfathers’ resistance to Mussolini and celebrate each year the time when he demanded passage through Greece and the Hellenes told him “no!” (Ὄχι). Fighting in the Balkan mountains, his men by themselves could not defeat the Greeks and he eventually had to call on Hitler for air-support. Italians are known as μακαρονάδες, or “pasta-heads”. As one overworked kiosk-owning lady from the Piræus told me, “they don’t even try to speak Greek. They just hold up what they want and arrogantly ask ‘quanto?’.”

My problem with Il Forno does not stem from Mussolini or the Crusades (as touchy a subject as that latter one still is for me). It is their method of making deliveries, which is done by men on motorbikes who congregate outside the restaurant’s side-door on Neoptolemus Street. I have called our street a “lane” and it is narrow enough to spit across. The buildings have no space between them and are two to three storeys high. One hears everything that they say. Everything: their shouts, their arguments, their calling each other μαλάκα (which, if taken by the card, would be an accusation of self-abuse). Twice in the last two days their kerfuffles have nearly come to blows. (Greeks punch with their words and I have never seen a Greek come even close to throwing a fist, though many of these are non-Greeks, whose natures have been otherwise nurtured.) Recently they’ve added a staticky little television to their outdoor table, which shouts out commentary on current events, while the delivery-men shout out commentary on one another. Yet worst of all are the bikes themselves. The cheaper they are, the louder. No smooth Harleys these, they start up like chainsaws run through a hard rock distorter, a quick and aggressive belching that sounds lethal, or worse. I’ve been told that some people actually drill holes in their mufflers to make their bikes louder. I once spent a semester on a corner with three frat-houses and I lived for four years on an Air Force base, with Tactical Air Command and C-5 transports landing next to my house; but never have my conversations, my music, my trains of thought been so rudely interrupted as here by these obnoxious, loud-mouthed, pasta-headed, wheelie-popping pizza delivery-men, who seem utterly oblivious that they’re doing their thunderous business on a street where people live. Yet the worst of all is the smell, the thick black exhaust which fills the tight street up like gas in the trenches or dark grey motorized farts, coming in through my window and into my lungs like an implacable evil spirit, like sin. Though we are high in the mountains, in a small lakeside town surrounded by thousands of acres of forest, yet for us on Neoptolemus, between four p.m. and midnight, the hills are alive with noise and with smoke, and relaxation is impossible. It mads one, it sads one, and I am this close to walking out there and standing my ground, athwart the alleyway with my palm towards their face, and telling these fascists of fumes in adopted Greek patriotism a “ye shall not pass”: an ὄχι!

Thursday, 6^th September

The change in the weather has been abrupt. When we came to Greece a few weeks ago, it was radiating heat everywhere, a far cry from the exceedingly mild Summer we’d left behind in Oxford. In humid Thessalonica (and smoggy Athens was surely worse) the heat was everywhere and everywhen. One drank water all day and never peed. One got suntanned in the shade. Forest-fires on Attica and the Peloponnese could be easily seen from space (and even made the Drudge Report). We were looking forward to coming up to the cool of the Pindus mountains. But, after a chilly air-conditioned bus-ride, we found ourselves in a dusty section of a hot thin-aired town. Saskia watched the oversized bags at the station, its shelter from the ’50s, thick oil-drippings on the dingy cement. I ran out to find a hotel. Gamma-class was too expensive, but I found a delta-class place for thirty euros a night, the dirty Sovietesque bathroom out in the hall. African immigrants simmered a tomatoey stew in their bedroom and every morning we closed the rolling shutter to keep the relative cool in for our siesta. I’m not sure what thirty-eight, forty Celsius makes in good Christian Fahrenheit, but it certainly is hot.

The dip was immediate. The night before last it was suddenly chilly. Yesterday afternoon, a rich mist danced on heavy tiptoes on the mountain-tops opposite. In the evening, I even wore a jacket! I came home late from the internet café. Saskia was sleeping under a sheet and a towel, leaving the thin blanket for me. I opened the window before bed and curled up under my blanket. An hour later I woke from the cold and closed the window again. I shivered and turned till day. My pea-coat’s on its way; I may have to buy a space-heater if this trend continues through January. A book came out a few years ago on classical studies in England, called Greek in a Cold Climate. One can forget that many Greeks see snow every year. It’s therefore not surprising that part of traditional Epirot dress is a shaggy shepherd’s overcoat with long thin white woolen dreadlocks, like those on a Komondor mop-dog. You would never, ever, wear that in the Argolid!

Friday 7^th September

I was going to take Saskia to the island today. When she finally succeeded in waking me up, it was overcast outside and raining lightly. She had already been out to the baker’s and decided she wanted to spend the rest of the day at her desk, studying for the GRE. “What fun!”, I said, as I took my wallet and keys and headed out the door. “Where are you going?” she asked. “Oh, nowhere.” “When will you be back?” “Oh, before too long.”

I had only been in the very front of the castle before. There are some silly graffiti on a wall and some streams of practically standing water. It doesn’t look very nice, and it’s mostly the idea that it’s inside a castle that appeals. But, as I went in further, instead of seeing the musty monument to entropy and decay which I’d expected, I saw something neat and clean and bright and lovely. The place is known as a “castle”, but it would be fairer to speak of it as simply a walled-off section of town, where people from the surrounding area could come during an invasion. There was once a synagogue here, Turkish baths and a library. The area is today full of tidy, fresh-painted houses around winding ways strewn with stones like cobblestones, but lighter, rectangular and easier to walk on. The place is like a suburb planted in the middle of the town, like a residential garden. Indeed, the ideas are by nature connected: English town, German zaun (“fence”) and Dutch tuin (“garden”) are all cognates. You plant a wall around a place and make it suitable for life. Ideally it’s Eden (which is paradise lost, for the innocent), or Zion (which is paradise regained, for the experienced). Norse-derived toponyms (like Saxby) end in –by, signifying “cultivation, building, farmer, boor”, or in –garð, cognate with our English words garden and yard. “Middle Earth” is the Miðgarð, the place fenced out between heaven and hell for man to live (it is encircled about by a great serpent swallowing his own tale, a symbol of eternity); and the Varangians knew green Constantinople, the New Rome and New Jerusalem and at that time the largest city of the world, as Miklagarð, literally “Greatburg”. (Burg, like Zion, means a “fortress”, and is cognate with Greek πύργος “tower”.) In Xanadu “twice five miles of fertile ground with walls and tow’rs were girdl’d round”.

In the southeast corner of Joannina’s “castle” is the larger of the city’s two acropoles. It is in fact higher than I’d previously realized and would not after all have been without defensive merit. This citadel is encircled by an interior wall, so that it is a walled section within a walled section, giving an additional layer of protection against invaders. Though not quite the palace-complex of Mystra, the spot provides room for everything needful during a siege during Byzantine or Ottoman times. (The Turks were not forced out of the Epirus until 1913!) There are trees and grass here and storage-facilities, places for administration and for sleep, places to keep water. Most important though is the view over the lake and to Pindus’ snowy peaks. Swallows, with their characteristic tales, easily leap with innocent mock over the defenders’ walls, then back to the trees and the water below. Some of the buildings are now no higher than the ground, just floorplans in stone. One still standing, originally for cooking for men unsure of how long they’d live, is now turned into café. Another houses treasures in silver. Another is a small mosque, where Ali Pasha is buried. There is a new building in the center, carefully placed (as the Greeks are skilled at doing) so as not to interfere. This is the museum. Behind it are canons facing the lake. The collection is small, but a good one. There are silvern and brazen coins and columns from the early Christian period. There are 18^th-century printed books (“On Duty, by the most reverend, pious and learnèd sir, Mr. so-and-so...”) and 19^th-century one-shot pistols. There’s a nice fragment of mosaic with Judas kissing Jesus, a collection of mediæval dishes and various religious icons. After 120 seconds, I get bored with looking at icons unless they can feed me some palæography. But there are some charmingly “naïve” ones here at the Joannina Byzantine Museum, plus two outdoor ones which they are particularly proud of. These latter images, glazed ceramic and apparently unique, were formerly affixed to the outside of a church, up high where they could only be seen by archæologists and angels.

I chatted with various people in the museum: first a fast-talking tour-guide eager to show me as much as she could before she had to run and pick her children up. Then with two younger guides, who told me about mediæval spoons and old grandmotherly words for “boil”. We were joined by some Nauplians, who overheard me mention the Argolid, and got into a conversation about Classics and the sorry present state of public education. Later I spent about 75% of my knowledge of Dutch on an elderly foreign couple, and then spent far far too long talking with an overenthusiastic autodidact. When he mentioned the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, I had to tell him outright that such was a malicious forgery and, simply put, σκατά. When he tried to convince me that Greeks had discovered America before the Vikings and that many American Indian words were actually Greek, I contented myself at expressing a certain friendly skepticism and leaving it at that. Having finally disengaged myself, I took my new little guidebook down the hill, through the “castle’s” streets and out the walls, home to my own garçonnière and back to my beautiful Saskia, at whose arm I spent most of the rest of the day. I shall try again tomorrow at getting us to that island.

Week One Journal

Writing Journal, First Week

27/28^th August, 2007

I must start with an admission: I’m not writing this on Monday but very very late on Tuesday night. Technically it’s not even Tuesday anymore; it’s that late/early. Much of Tuesday I spent in a loud and smoky internet “café” full of preteens hurling the foulest of abuses at the mothers & deities of the video-game characters they were struggling against. I for my part was trying to figure out what on earth I was supposed to for this course in pedagogy I’m taking from the University of Texas (you may have heard of it) and whether I could even manage it. I had wondered for some time why I was getting so little in the way of correspondence, only at last to realize that they were going to an e-mail address I didn’t know I had. So I only knew to add this writing-exercise when Monday was already dead and cold. But what I write now, I had planned to write then (in a different context), so I’m counting it if you do.

Sensing in my chest but not quite realizing in my mind the urgency of the need to whack through the electronic forest of syllabuses and guidelines, and my girlfriend two time-zones away in the Netherlands and unable then to comfort me, I betook myself this weekend to my pile of linens on my hardwood floor and to the comfort of pleasure-reading. Well, not only this: I spent several hours bleaching my eyes before my computer-screen, doing my job of rekeying a rather boring catalogue of musical MSS from the Greek National Library for a woman who foolishly used a non-Unicode font. I finally realized that, even if I sped through it at the very fasted I could go, I could only make about £2/hr., which isn’t much. So I sent them what I had and told them there was no charge but they’d have to find someone faster. (They may write me back and quadruple the offer, but I’m not going to hold my whatsit.) The Oriental Institute on the other hand is giving me five hundred quid to translate eleven pages. My creditors will be happy! I hope I can work for them again. I also hope my loan-check comes soon. I hope my old rental deposit’s returned before the new rent is due. I hope my girlfriend comes home with some of the money I lent her. I hope I can do some tutoring. For cash. Good hard tax-free euros.

When I despair, I retreat. I grew up with Nintendo and the ability to press “New Game” at will. But this game keeps going on and on. Books make for a good retreat, a room up over the canal, where I can peek at the Nazis if I want to, but they can’t see me. (Yet.) With all of this money-trouble and uncertainty floating around my head, I laid myself down beneath such smoggy clouds, upon the aforementioned bedding, which I have shoved against the wall to keep them from sliding around. The bare bulb hanging from the ceiling is rather a nuisance; I must go buy a lamp (or read in the day), but in the meantime I can lie on one set of ribs or the other.

So I settled down with some some New Testament and a translation of Herodotus. The Herodotus was a little gift from an old friend, to thank my girlfriend and me for showing him around Oxford, a tour I can now give with my eyes shut (should the need ever arise). The translation is by Aubrey de Sélincourt, which was an unintended felicity, as he happened to be an old member of my own college. It reads in a swift flow. The book, which is part of a popular series and which is in fact only selections of his Persian War, does not mention Greece’s struggle with ancient Iran at all. Instead, it is a collection of the many traveler’s tales and footnotes which make the Father of History (as Cicero called him: the Germans called him the “Father of Lies”) so suspect with modern historians and so popular with the more romantic of us. There was nothing there from Herodotus’ fantastic first book (the only one I’ve read in Greek and thus the only one I know at all well), with Solon’s visit to Crœsus or Pisistratus’ dressing the tall northern girl up as Minerva so she can proclaim him Athens’ rightful ruler.

This collection, given the appropriately sensational title of Snakes with Wings and Gold-digging Ants, focuses on Persian & Egyptian history, their nature of their countries, their customs and their wars with one another. The focus is on the foreign (i.e. non-Greek) stories because, being far from the author’s homeland and center, they can become the wildest and strangest. Not a single page fails to please: houses in the Sahara built of salt (which is okay, because it never rains), the dog-headed Cynocephali and the men with no heads but faces on their breast. Cannibalism and necrophagy and bizarre Egyptian embalming. Oracles, fratricide and the madness of kings. Wise Ethiopians with their Table of the Sun. There is an important discussion of whether “Helen of Troy” (actually Helen of Sparta) ever even made it to Troy, or whether she was in Egypt, as Euripides seems to believe. Also, Herodotus notes that those Persian names denoting virility or bravery end in the sound of the Dorian letter san. Now, since such names would include Cyrus (which in Persian is something like Kooroosh) and Darius (which is something like Daroosh), it seems likely to me that the Dorians thus had the “sh” sound, which is not elsewhere attested in ancient Greek. But however that is, one finds in this little book free love, funerary customs, conjurations, deadly struggles for power and nature checkmated by nurture. What a very fine way to keep the creditors out!

Of the New Testament, there is only one thing that particularly struck me from this reading. It is that Jesus becomes amazed. Now, whatever one thinks of this or any other book claiming to be sacred, one must take it on its own terms at least during the reading of it. To understand the New Testament, you must be a Christian at least while you read it, as you must become a Hindu, if just for an hour, while reading the Rig Veda; a pagan while reading the Edda and a child again when reading the Brothers Grimm. There is a set of lenses—an acceptance of conventions—for each work, and through which one must read that work. And reading the New Testament through Christian lenses, I found it striking that the hero, though Son of God, is able to be amazed. But what I found particularly interesting is what it is that amazes him. Others are amazed by his miracles, which he seems to do almost casually. Healing lepers and the blind amazes others. But what amazes Jesus is the faith he finds in certain individuals. He offers to come to a centurion’s house and heal his son; the centurion, knowing what it means to give orders, tells him simply to say the word and it will be done. And Jesus is amazed.

28^th August

The move to Greece has not been easy. I don’t mean emotionally difficult, though it is a bit frustrating to realize one’s tongue is so rusty and that it will take a good long while and lots of olive-oil to get it purring smoothly again. I mean that it’s been logistically difficult. Suitcases of Atlantean weight. Were it not for my girlfriend, I would despair and expire. We met on our first day at Oxford, in a meeting of new Byzantinists at Exeter College. She was gorgeous, a smile to scatter armies! But, besides having a big German boyfriend, she was (and is) about two inches taller than me, eight years younger, and a hundred times better looking. And yet, somehow Saskia became mine! Her language is solace. She artlessly calms the fire.

She was offered a place at the University of Thessalonica. It’s the largest university in Greece, in the second-largest city. In the Middle Ages Thessalonica was second to Constantinople and produced a stream of saints and scholars. Now it’s a stylish, yet relaxed, mass of a million friendly souls on the northern coast of the Ægean. There are are some très chic cafés by the shore, just south of the “White Tower”, and even the Athenians call it “Beautiful Thessalonica”. We excitedly booked hotel and flight, hoping the offer would be made even sweeter by the grant of a government scholarship.

It was (we found out right before flying), but...to a different city! “A spanner in the works”, as the British say. Our plans of staying with friends were gone. We had no address to send our mountain of things to, things we just couldn’t possibly part with and which are currently being held at a Mailboxes Etc. in England. We had at any rate hardly any money at all, but five days of hotel in Thessalonica paid for with no house-hunting to do.

Not that we were too bothered by a little vacation, living out of suitcases that we were afraid to open too much, having sweated and groaned to get them shut. We visited churches, the Roman rotunda, the palace of Emperor Valerian (he was kind to the Christians). We found a place with excellent ice-cream, which we frequénted twice daily, and an air-conditioned bookshop by the cafés. We spent most of one day in the marvelous Byzantine museum, where our epigraphy training stood us in good stead. Afterwards we got some more ice-cream. What a splendidly delicious city! Did we really want to leave it? For any place? For...Joannina?!

29^th August

Saskia was surprised at the modernness of the Thessalonica bus-station. I was surprised one could still get a taxi there so cheaply. I bought a Greek magazine about Julian the Apostate and Saskia listened to a CD of Puerto Rican music I’d forgotten I had made her. A very persistent fellow tried to sell me an imitation of some name-brand cologne for twenty euros. He went down to ten for a while and then back up to twenty. Eventually I bought him a spanakópita to eat and told him “no more”. When we got on the bus and another man offered us pens for whatever price we thought best, trying to feed his family, I was more than happy to help. In his face was not entitlement but gratitude.

The road goes up and up, and is far from the beaten tourist track. It’s the old Via Egnatia from Late Antiquity, which runs from Dyrrachium to Joannina to Thessalonica to the Queen of Cities Constantinople. How many armies have traveled this same route, now growing New World crops like corn and tomatoes and tobacco—Romans, Byzantines, Normans, Bulgarians, Turks! I myself had gone through a bit of it once, when I’d rented a car and driven to Delphi and up to the Kingdom of Hades. My conquests were more meager.

Joannina (pronounced yo-AHN-i-na), is a city of sixty-something thousand, nestled on large Lake Pamvotis (the “All-nourishing”) in the middle of the Pindus Mountains. There are villages scattered all around and low-sunk rich soil on the Southeast of the lake. By the castle is a mosque still standing from Ottoman rule with most of its minarets intact. A boat will take you for one euro, forty to the lake’s island, which I’ve been told is the only lake in the world of any size with an inhabited island. I don’t know if that’s true. If so, then I suppose Mexico City no longer counts.

The city was the seat of Ali Pasha, known as the Lion of the Epirus. He was a very rich, very powerful, very fat and very cruel ruler, an Albanian nominally ruling as a satrap under the Turks, though eventually they themselves sent an army after him and put his head on the end of a pole. Long before that, it was the capital of the Despotate of the Epirus. When the Catholics sacked Constantinople in 1204, the ruling families of their fellow Christians scattered: some to Asia Minor, where they founded the Empire of Nicæa (which by dumb luck took The City back towards the end of that century); others to the Epirus (eh-PIGH-rus) and here to the city of John the Evangelist. They later married with some Italian nobles, who were eager to prove their Greekness and patronized some very bad (but very interesting) Greek poetry. Earlier still, Pyrrhus lived further south (the one with the “victory” we still call pyrrhic). And there have been people here since long before the Greeks, probably long before the Pelasgians. We’re talking the palæolithic era. Attica and the Peloponnese belong to history, the Epirus to pre-history.

It is a mistake to think of Greece as Mediterranean. Her cuisine is Ottoman, her thinking eastern. People tell you casually they’ve never been “to Europe”, and staying in the North one is reminded how much this is a Balkan country. This is a world away from Naples and Marseilles, though both were originally Greek colonies (Neapolis & Masilia), long long long ago. Here there was no Renaissance. There began to be one on Venetian-held Crete, contemporaneously with Shakespeare, but it crumbled when the Ottomans invaded. Greek letters were arguably at their height when Mahomet II finally took Byzantium, as the Thessalonian Atatürk would some four and a half centuries later. Here the fairies reign, though not with their former splendor.

Once upon a time, a young king here in Joannina fell into inconsolable longing. There was only one woman he wanted, and he could find her nowhere but his dreams. He revealed his problem to a wise old slave, who told him that the only solution, if he durst do it, was to kidnap one of the fairies, a nereid, when they go onto the banks of Lake Pamvotis to dance. He must not let them catch him, or terrible things would happen, but must rather catch one of them. The way to do it was this: when they dance, they put their gossamer scarves aside. He must steal one of the scarves—it didn’t matter which—and run off with it as fast as he could. Whoever the scarf belonged to would follow him and would never leave without it. So he grabbed one and ran—he ran and he ran—until he got back to the palace, just as the bakers were baking the bread. As the nereid was approaching he cast it into the fire and she became his for ever. They baptized her Christian and christened her queen; he loved her with all his being and she came to love him dearly as well. But she also pined for her sister-nereids and when he asked her one day what was troubling her, she expressed her desire to him. She did not want to leave him, but she wanted to see and dance with her sisters. “So he called in the workers, ten thousand or more, who built her a castle, down on the shore.” In just three years they built the castle, and there she lived in happiness, spending her days with her husband the king and her nights with her sisters dancing. For several years they lived like this, day and night following day and night. Until was heard from the edge of the kingdom the approach of the dog-headed armies. Mighty muscley men, with dog-heads on their shoulders and fangs in their mouths, who conquered whoever they fought and ate whoever they conquered. All fled before them; who could stand against them? The queen stayed in her castle by the lake, while the defiant king with his army went out to face the Dog-heads. Mighty was their struggle and brave were their hearts, but they too fell before the Dog-heads. The queen was distraught and the Dog-heads knew she was inside, but the walls were so high they could not scale them. They scratched and they growled and sometimes they barked, but they couldn’t get to the queen and so eventually went on their way. She lived there with her sisters. For many years she lived there, for a hundred or two hundred or more. But eventually history came to the city, and when history comes not even a fairy can live for ever. The queen is now just a tune in the breeze at sunset, but her castle stands tall to this very day.

30^th August

Down by the castle is the main waterfront area. For some reason, it’s known as Môlos. I find this strange, because in Homer môlos means “moil”, as in “the toil and moil of war”. (The truth is, I’ve never used or even come across the words môlos or moil except in Homer, but it’s clear what it means in context.) I must ask some people what it means, and see how many different explanations there are. There are a number of large outdoor restaurant-cafés which are far more chic than one would expect for a traditionally rough and rugged place like this. One of them has fans way up high by the ceiling with water vessels behind them that release a light mist over the whole group of diner/drinker/chatters. (I wonder, is there a collective word for such people, as we have singular audience and citizenry for other groups? Perhaps the customariat.) At any rate, Greeks under the age of fifty love this sort of thing. They love to show how international they are, how this is no big deal to drink four-euro iced coffees in an outdoor palace of glass, because they do beeznes and marrrketeen, have seen the world and have seen how “well organized” («καλὰ ὀργανωμέοι») the English & Germans are. Just don’t let them hear you chuckling at them!

After my typical late lunch of salad and bread (salads in Greece don’t have lettuce in them), I went down to the shore and took a boat out to the island. They leave every 30 minutes and are essentially aquatic buses, though rather more fun. There were a number of children on it today, for whom the ride was obviously outside the routine. There was a very fat bearded man in the back, with a nice-looking wife and three wide-eyed young sons with “Athens 2004” baseball-caps. I wondered if such were my future as well, as I am also bearded and fat. The wife spoke to the boys in Greek and they answered in English. I saw them later while wandering around and mentioned that I didn’t hear such perfect American accents very often around here. It turned out he was an Orthodox priest on the East Coast (of the U.S.). I let them go their way and I went another; on the ride back he questioned me about my studies, did I know so-and-so or whosit.

I was looking for a place to ask my girlfriend to marry me. I went to the museum because someone told me they had maps of the island there. They didn’t, but it was only 80 cents to go in, so I did. This was the place where Ali Pasha hid from the Turkish armies sent to dethrone him and they place where they took his head from his shoulders. There are colored lithographs of him on the wall, including the famous one of him in a boat, smoking a pipe while the rowers toil; and a massive painting of his receiving, before losing his own head, that of someone else. On a mannequin behind glass there’s an outfit belonging to Basilica (Vasilikí), his Christian Greek wife and an engraving of the beautiful Euphrosyne’s fate. Some say the latter earned his displeasure by refusing to join his harem, others that she had an affair with someone else or was involved in the Greek independence movement. Whatever the cause though, they took her and some dozen other young women out into the lake around the island, tied stones to their feet and threw them in. As I walked round the island, I looked at the lake and the opposite shore and wondered where he skeleton lay. (It’s been around a hundred years; might it still be there?)

From the middle of the island you can look down at the houses and see the grey stone roofs so typical of the Epirus. About five hundred people live on the island in charming white houses with gardens. It is much more rough-hewn than the style of the Cyclades, but comfortable and homey and I imagine it’s a good place to grow up or retire. The air is good. Most of the interior is covered with conifers and there are several churches and monasteries. I went up a bit to see what was there (and to have a sneaky pee); there was a chicken-coup and the view. When I came down by another way, a very large black dog in a settlement below barked most menacingly at me. I picked a large rock up, just in case; some people looked at me as though I were mad. I finally put the rock down and made the circuit of the island. On the side of the road about a quarter mile from town was a high tree with small purple figs. They tasted like big sweet ripe strawberries.

The vendors are more aggressive than on the mainland, though their wares are much the same: silver (the city’s specialty), fine replicas of historical guns, beads, books, whatsits, doodads, knickknacks, paddy-whacks &c. One girl tried to get me to buy a silvern bracelet; I told her I didn’t wear jewelry (that’s for chavs and spivs) and was upbraided for my protestations. She then tried a necklace, “for your girl”. I said I’d think about it and she replied “don’t think about it, just buy it!” Another woman asked if I’d like a hookah. I said I didn’t smoke and she said it was just as well. A third woman had some very nice swords. I unsheathed one which was heavy and sturdy and asked if it were “for use”. She muttered something I couldn’t understand and then said they were replicas of ancient and Byzantine swords. (I think my Byzantine Congress t-shirt put the latter word into her mouth.) When I asked which particular sword this was a replica of, she answered, “the sword of, uh... Hercules.” Perhaps I’ll go buy it later, but by this time I already had the one thing other than ice-cream I needed to buy. Right off the boat I bought a very nice ring with which to plight my troth. It’s round and shiny and made from the local silver. It’s elegant, not gaudy. And it cost me three whole euros, with no change back. But it’s well worth it for my baby.

31^st August

There was a Gypsy wedding the other day. I’ve never attended one, but I imagine they’re quite a show. A car and two trucks were riding triumphantly up George Papandreou Road, which runs along the shore past the “Big Atlantic” supermarket towards the Via Egnatia. They could be heard from quite some distance away, the music heralding their approach like a happy banshee calling from the heart of Central Asia. The men were smiling, while pretty girls with dirt in their hair waved colored scarves with bubbling jollity.

One’s contact with Gypsies is limited. One sees them begging, where they ply passers-by with a well-practiced earnestness. I’ve heard (but can’t confirm) that they maim their own children to garner sympathy. I was once long ago sitting on a bench in Athens when two Gypsy boys of around seven accosted me. I relented and gave one fifty drachmas, because he said he had no shoes. The other made his demand in turn, and when I said they could share the fifty, he told me “he won’t share with me.” Being too much of a softy, I reached back in my pocket, and all I had was a hundred. They walked off satisfied and when they turned the corner I followed them to watch. The shoeless boy immediately pulled two shoes out and put them on his feet, and then they started dividing their haul. I couldn’t believe it (though really I could). I went up to them in feigned indignation, told them they shouldn’t lie, and demanded my 150 drachmas back. This was obviously something new to them and they looked up at me with great “does not compute” expressions. Finally the wiser of the two said “give him his money” and I told them once more before leaving that it was a very bad thing to tell lies. That was over a decade ago; one wonders what they're doing now.

A happier encounter took place several years later in Sparta. There one finds the temple of Artemis-Orthia (the local goddess Orthia, later identified with the Panhellenic Artemis). It was here, at the age of twelve, that the future “Helen of Troy” was officiating when she was abducted by Theseus, the first of her five husbands. Behind the temple is a Gypsy camp. I had already met some Gypsies that day. They asked me for money and I told them I’d buy them some food if I could take some photos of them. (How strange, these Westerners!) I consider these my best portraits. They are a strikingly beautiful people. The Gypsies, or Romany, have their name because they once claimed to have come from Egypt. In actual fact they came from India, in around the 16^th or 17^th centuries, and speak a Sanskritic language.

After visiting the temple (there’s not much there: one simply looks at the floor-plan, scratches one’s head and says “shucks, imagine that!”), I started walking back to the center, planning to try some of the local cuisine. I saw two little girls playing in the street, hid behind a car and started taking photos. After a couple, they saw me and I was busted. But far from being shy or self-conscious, they were filled with excitement and struck a hundred different poses, thrilled when I showed them the result on the back of my digital camera. A boy came and joined and I bought the three of them ice-creams. They were ten years old and adorable. One of them in particular had such a bright shine in her eyes, I remember wishing I could adopt her, take her away from begging and illiteracy and give her the advantages of school and society. They took me to their camp and I met various mothers and fathers, one grandmother (who hit me up for money) and an older girl of incredible beauty. They had no glass in the windows, but a very nice stereo-set. The kids swarmed about me when I went back to the temple, each wanting countless photos of himself or herself. When the disc was all full (over two hundred photos!), I asked them a question.

Gypsies have a rich set of folklore, but they know very little about the cultures they live among. I asked them if they knew anything of the ruins they were playing in. They had no idea. Artemis? Never heard of her. I told them the story of Actæon and they ate it up. When I asked them their names, the one I wanted to adopt answered “Helen”. I leaned my head and chest back at the happy coincidence and asked her if she knew about her namesake. She didn’t; none of them did. So I told them the story (with a few small alterations.)

“Once upon a time, right here in Sparta, lived the most beautiful woman ever, and her name was Helen. She lived here with her husband, the brave Menelaus. One day while her husband was gone on a business-trip to Crete, she was visited by the evil Turk Paris. Paris wanted to take her back to Constantinople and put her in his harem, and they called him Paris, because he came to take her.¹ So he put her in his ship and sailed away and left. All the Greeks were angry, so they got together and had a Great Idea², to fight the Turks and take her back. For ten long years they fought and they fought, such was the beauty of Helen! Then finally, by might and y by main and subtle craft, they captured the city and rescued fair Helen. Then she and Menelaus came back to Sparta and lived happily ever after.”

The children’s attention was rapt. Helen asked me ecstatically, “are they still here?!” No, I said with a chuckle, they now live far away in the West, past many waters, on the Islands of the Blest.

As I was walking back to town, there came into my mind something that Aristotle says in the Poetics. He’s speaking of good drama and what makes a tragedy successful. He says, among other things, that one should use what we today would call the canonical stories. The word he uses is literally “known”. (It is not out of respect for tradition that one chooses such stories, but for their intrinsic worth and their power to move.) He says, and the above demonstrates, that the “known” stories are in fact known but to a few, “yet pleasing unto all.”

1 This only works in Greek («τὸν λέγανε Πάρη γιατὶ ἦρθε γιὰ νὰ τὴν πάρῃ») and isn’t at all true. It works however as a felicitous paretymology and the children all nodded their acceptance. I must boast that I thought it up myself, while telling the story.

2 Another fun anachronism: the Great Idea was a political movement around the turn of the century that wanted the unification of all Greek-speaking lands, particularly Asia Minor. I’m sure the children didn’t know this, but it brought me pleasure to add it.

Picture: My Herculean Effort on the Internet (Διαδίκτυο)

Hello to kith, kin and whatsits! My sister Emily has long encouraged me to start a web-logue and I have put it off ("cumpie buvvud", as the English say). But now I'm taking a course from the University of Texas where we have to keep a journal of our writings, and I thought I might kill two birds with one stone by adding my entries here. Hope you're happy, Em!