Girl Gone Greek

by Hall, Rebecca

  “Don’t you worry about me,” Dad reassured me.

  We made our way to the café that prepared homemade moussaka daily at the bottom of my street. At least this was open today and we intended to buy two big pieces so we wouldn’t starve before midnight.

  After another afternoon siesta, Dad arrived at my flat at six o’clock, gently nudging the next-door neighbour’s cats aside as he entered. We tucked into our re-heated mousakka and washed it down with a cup of

  Tetley. I turned on the TV and the weather girl greeted her audience in her usual outfit (or lack thereof).

  “She’s supposed to be attractive Dad, is she?” Dad merely snorted with laughter, indicating that he’d never seen anything so ridiculous in his life.

  “I’ve never seen anything so ridiculous in my life!” he confirmed, “and I’m still a man with blood pumping through his veins.”

  “Okaaaaay, enough of that I think.” I switched off the TV, mentally shaking away the images. “Let’s head into town.”

  “The number of times I’ve navigated this hill of yours in the last couple of days, I’ll be super fit.” We’d returned about eleven p.m., and after freshening up, we went back to Mrs Stella’s house.

  “Sit, sit,” she flapped as she bustled us to the dining table in the middle of the room. Already perched in a chair was an old lady—Mr Ioannis’s mother, and Vasiliki, who stood to envelop me in her arms and shake Dad’s hand.

  “Watch she doesn’t spit at you,” I whispered, lifting my chin slightly in the direction of Vasiliki.

  “Oh, but that’s a compliment, love.” I regarded Dad quizzically. “It means they think you’re beautiful, and want to ward off the ‘evil eye’ or jealousy from others. So they do something negative, like spit at you, which turns out to be a compliment. You’re obviously worthy of jealousy from others.” I remembered my arrival into the village though; so that’s why Vasiliki had greeted me like that! And I’d been worried about cleanliness…

  “And you know this because…you were spat at when you came to Greece on business?”

  “Oh no, not me. But when you came with me sometimes when you were little, you were always spat at, don’t you remember?” Er, no…obviously not. Dad smiled as I pulled an incredulous face as I digested this piece of information.

  “That’s disgusting! So I’ve been subjected to Greek spittle since I was a kid?”

  “Yes, but like I say, it’s a compliment. Now come on, let’s not be rude—come and sit at the table.”

  Once everyone had sat down, Mr Ioannis’s mother launched a barrage of questions that seemed like the Spanish Inquisition at Dad, who was of a similar age to the old woman. The most prominent one concerned his age and how he kept so young looking and healthy. Mrs Stella scrambled to translate.

  “You see? He’s the same age as you, and yet how different you look,” Mrs Stella observed, rather cruelly I thought. “You need to make the effort to get some exercise, Mama.” Mrs Stella didn’t bother to translate this remark into Greek and actually, ‘Mama’ didn’t understand a word of English and seemed quite content, sitting there gazing at my Dad, occasionally reaching out to pat his hand. She’d better not spit at him.

  Out came the food. What was that floating in a clear liquid? It looked like a long squiggle of colon! I jokingly observed this out loud as I decided to at least try it. “It probably is,” Mrs Stella stated nonchalantly. “Let me see? Ah yes, this is magiritsa, made from lamb offal. We eat it now to break our fast, after forty days of not eating meat. Tomorrow everyone will be eating lamb on the spit, we need to gently prepare our stomachs tonight for this.”

  I stopped mid-slurp, shot Dad a horrified look, but he in turn was dealing with his own feelings about this, especially as he claimed to be a vegetarian. We both tried hard to not look disgusted and ate as much as we could. It actually didn’t taste too bad—like a watery chicken soup—but knowing what it was didn’t help and I just couldn’t bring myself to finish it, especially when I was sure I saw an eyeball, but elected not to check if it was my over-active imagination, for fear it might not be.

  “This has been a great experience, thank you.” We politely made our excuses and left. We were looking forward to the next day’s festivities, and besides, Mrs Ioannis Senior seemed to have taken a rather exhausting shine to Dad and kept trying to force more soup his way.

  I awoke to the acrid smell of something burning, jumped out of bed, and raced to the kitchen. Nothing was on fire in there. I opened the shutters and understood—the skies were black with smoke from countless barbeque fires that had been lit to roast lamb on spits.

  “So, Kaliopi hadn’t been exaggerating when she told me the skies turn black,” I opened the door to let Dad in.

  “It’s like London during the Blitz!” he exclaimed.

  “You’ve settled rather quickly into the Greek habit of exaggeration.”

  In the small patch of garden by my infamous orange trees, the family had set up their own spit, and Mr Ioannis was busy poking a long metal rod through a whole lamb. I turned away—I’d expected a kebab shop style skewer, not the whole animal.

  “For God’s sake, you can even see the poor creature’s eyelashes,” I whispered.

  “Well, one thing’s for sure—the Greeks know how to prepare meat properly. They don’t mess about and become all ‘precious’ about the issue,” he responded. “And they don’t waste meat either. Look at what was used last night—the whole lamb’s being eaten.”

  By midday the meat was cooked and then slowly sliced. We all took a small plateful, as well as Greek salad, and sat around munching and chatting. Mr Ioannis and

  Dad seemed to be engaged in yet another discussion about football. Villagers passing by would drop in for a small plateful of food as well. When we took our leave later on for a walk through the town, we discovered this was the norm.

  “Ela, come here, eat, eat!” yelled the man from the oil shop. He was coming towards us with determination, and this time managed to drag my father and me into his back yard where we made our introductions to his wife and older daughter. I was once again spat at, this time by the older lady, but I took it well. Dad barely managed not to laugh.

  “I am Evdoxia,” the daughter extended her hand. Luckily she didn’t spit at me. “My father is always talking about the new English teacher up the hill. It is a pleasure to finally meet you.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “Please, do not be alarmed at my father’s insistence on you joining him to drink tea, he gets lonely in his shop all day.” It was nice to meet this man’s family finally, and we spent a pleasant hour eating his lamb and nodding along to the conversation, Evdoxia translating occasionally.

  “Dad, I don’t think I can stomach too much more—as hospitable as everyone is, I’m going to burst. Let’s have our siesta now and I’ll see you later.” We’d not managed to make it to the river…at least two other people who I vaguely recognised as the supermarket check-out lady and the baker had pulled us into their gardens for yet more lamb. It didn’t seem to matter that we weren’t close friends or relatives; such was the hospitable nature of these village people.

  There was another church service that evening. This time the cry from the loudspeakers was much more cheerful—today was a celebration. But Dad and I decided not to attend, we had a train to catch early the next morning, to Meteora.

  “Shall we just take a taxi?”

  “OK,” I agreed. “It’s too cold at this time of morning anyway.” We were standing by the bus stop in town, waiting for the shuttle to take us to the train station. Having observed the quaintness of this rural train station before, I’d become blasé about it, but it was a first for Dad.

  “Look at this place.” He looked around him as the taxi dropped us off. “It reminds me of the countryside stations when I was evacuated as a kid.” At this early hour, the only other noises came from the man behind the ticket counter, who was chatting on his mobile phone. There were no other passengers on the platform; they�
��d probably all left earlier in the week so as not to have to travel on Easter Monday. Any passenger traffic would come later in the day—people returning to start work the next day. Luckily, working for a school meant I had the whole week off.

  Leaving Dad on the platform, I went to purchase the tickets. The station master seemed to be deliberately ignoring me, ‘busy’ with his phone call. It wasn’t until I exclaimed very loudly “signomi” [Excuse me] that he turned to me with a bored expression. I decided to treat us both to first class.

  “And we have a whole compartment to ourselves! This really is like the old-fashioned trains,” Dad continued his admiration of the Greek rail experience once the train squeaked to a halt and we boarded.

  “And you wouldn’t believe how much the tickets were, Dad…only twenty-five Euros each, first class.” I decided not to share the experience with the station master with Dad, not wanting to tarnish his ideal of the journey so far. I marvelled that the journey would take us about three hours, and compared that to the price of a three-hour journey in first class on a UK train. There was no comparison, really.

  We settled into our seats, closed the sliding outer door to our carriage and gazed as the train cut through mountains and sped past shepherds’ huts, the occasional shepherd tending to his sheep, arm raised in greeting as our train snaked past him. There were decidedly fewer lambs in the fields. I guess they’d all been eaten by now.

  “There’s hardly anyone on this train,” Dad returned from the buffet area with a Styrofoam cup of coffee. “For a state-run enterprise, I’d say these trains are better maintained and cheaper than the privatized ones back at home.”

  “Well, privatized or not, one thing doesn’t seem to change—the toilets,” I’d just had the privilege of visiting one. Yes, suffice to say that Greek and British toilets on trains remained equally disgusting; irrespective of the fact we were the only ones using them in First Class.

  I fell into a doze, just as the train slowed to approach Kalampaka, where we were due to get off. Peering out, I glimpsed great monoliths—the Meteora pinnacles. They looked ethereal, especially with banks of low clouds shrouding the summits.

  Arriving at the guesthouse, my Dad once again tested the firmness of his bed.

  “At least my back won’t hurt too much. This mattress is much better than the one in the village hotel.” We were sharing a twin room, something I hadn’t done since I was a child. I hoped his snoring hadn’t worsened over the years, and congratulated myself on the fact I’d packed earplugs, just in case.

  “I might have to lob a sock at you in the night if your snoring’s worsened.”

  “Me snore? Ha! We’ll see about that.” I didn’t have the heart to remind Dad that one of the cited reasons in the divorce of my mum and Dad, for unreasonable behaviour, was ‘snoring so much at night so as to inhibit basic daily functioning due to excessive tiredness.” Maybe if Mum’d worn ear plugs…oh well, no point in going down that route now.

  Having tested the bed and unpacked, we made our way into the town. We were surrounded by the ancient, towering rock pinnacles, which managed to look both majestic and eerie.

  “It’s beyond comprehension that they were created over sixty million years ago.” I was struggling to get my head around it.

  “It says here they were sculpted by wind and earthquakes,” Dad read from a local guidebook. “Yes, they are indeed amazing.”

  After a simple lunch in a taverna in the town square we decided to explore further. The guesthouse was set amongst some of the rocks and a path cut its way through them. Scattered around were the small houses of Kalampaka, and before long we came across a small Orthodox church.

  “I don’t think this is one of the monasteries,” I said. It wasn’t; those were perched atop the rocks themselves. More than twenty had been originally constructed, dating back to the fourteenth century. However, only six remained today—four inhabited by monks and two by nuns.

  “We’ll visit the monasteries tomorrow,” I said as we made our way back to the guesthouse, a little yapping dog following us most of the way. He’d appeared from behind the church to play. We stopped to play for a while…he looked like a little spaniel and was quite happy to roll onto his back to have his belly rubbed.

  We fell into bed, exhausted from the day’s travel and looking forward to visiting the monasteries the next day.

  Mum hadn’t been exaggerating when she cited Dad’s snoring in the divorce. I’d stopped myself at one point last night from chucking one of Dad’s slippers at him, the noise was so loud. Don’t forget, you’re glad he’s here I kept repeating as I lay there, earplugs firmly planted in my inner ear. I finally managed to sleep about two am.

  “You snore too loudly,” I couldn’t help myself grumbling as we bundled into the taxi. We’d negotiated a good price with Nikos, a local taxi driver to drive us up to, and around, the six monasteries. A trek by foot from the guesthouse to the top of the rocks would’ve been strenuous, plus it was drizzling. Besides, I was too tired from lack of sleep.

  “I love you too, sweetheart” Dad said. I smiled, despite myself. In the warmth of Nikos’s Mercedes cab, we rode up and arrived at the first, the Holy Monastery of Varlaam.

  “It’s the second-largest monastery, inhabited by monks,” Nikos told us. Leaving him at the base, smoking a cigarette out the taxi window, we scrambled up the staircase cut into the rock to reach the entrance. Access to these monasteries was originally made very difficult due to fear of occupation, requiring either long ladders or nets to haul people and goods up the sides. Finally in the seventeenth century, staircases were cut into the rocks. “Good job too,” remarked Dad. “You wouldn’t get me sitting in a net to be hauled up, not with my back.”

  We gazed around in silence at this great place, built in 1541. Neither of us had any words as we looked out over the great courtyard to the sweeping views of the fertile plains of Thessaly below. There was no sign of any monks, however.

  Next stop was the Holy Monastery of St. Stephen, which sat atop a flat plain, not one of the ancient rocks. Fewer than ten nuns lived here. We went up to pay our entry fee, and an elderly nun pointed to my trousers, then a sign that proclaimed “Women must wear skirts to cover their legs” in various languages.

  “But my legs are covered” I stated, reasonably I thought, until Dad nudged me hard in the ribs and smiled benignly at another nun who was handing me a sarong.

  “I am afraid all the women must where the skirts and not the trousers. It is offensive for women to dress as men. Please wrap this around your jeans,” she smiled. The nun looked about the same age as me, if not younger.

  “So, if I came in wearing a miniskirt, I’d be allowed entry, but not in trousers?” I was determined to get to the bottom of this warped logic. I could see Dad covering up his embarrassment.

  “No,” replied the nun patiently. “They must also cover the legs with these items,” she indicated the basket of skirts. “They must just not to wear the trousers, it is too manly.” I tried to probe further, it just didn’t make sense. “Why...?” I started. But Dad was gently but firmly pulling me along, nodding at the growing queue of Greek tourists behind them.

  “Sometimes, love, you have to just accept religious and cultural differences and stop asking ‘why.’ You wonder why you used to constantly get detentions at school? Well, your desire to question teachers all the time got too much! Come on, let’s accept, let go and enjoy this place.” I grudgingly backed down as I wrapped the awful piece of sarong material around my waist. It just about brushed my ankles and upon spying a brown stain at the front, I stopped myself from trying to imagine how many other people had worn this before me.

  Peering over the edge of the courtyard, we stood in awed silence yet again and gazed at the rope ladder that spilt over the edge from a small hole in the monastery’s wall, another example of how people used to get supplies up to the place. “I wonder if anyone’s fallen trying to get up to these places.” Dad’s question echoed my thou
ghts exactly.

  Our third stop with Nikos was the Monastery of the Holy Trinity, inhabited by monks and used in the 1981 James Bond movie “For Your Eyes Only.” By the time we came out, Dad had decided he was all monasteried out for the day. Besides, the weather had deteriorated from a light drizzle to a steady rain.

  “Malakias (bullshit)” Nikos swore under his breath. As we were driving back, we rounded a corner, only to be confronted by a goat herd and his shepherd. Dad and I didn’t mind having to slow down, it was a great photo opportunity. Nikos had his window open and one or two goats stuck their heads in, making Nikos swear even more.

  Finally we arrived back at the guesthouse for a shower, change of clothes and last meal in Kalampaka before heading to Athens the next day. Dad would spend the night with Stamatis, me with Kaliopi, before Dad flew back to the UK and Kaliopi and I returned to the village.

  Lying in bed one Friday morning, I reflected how—only three weeks earlier—Dad had been with me and we’d experienced the delights of a Greek Easter and the Greek countryside. He’d arrived back in the UK safely, after a night with Stamatis doing God only knows what—there’re some things a daughter is best not knowing about her parents. Embracing me hard at the airport, he’d then held me at arm’s length:

  “You look fantastic, love. This country is doing you some good. It’s not just the food, I see a change in you, a sort of mellowing. See? I told you Greece grabs you and takes you in.” I waved a slightly tearful goodbye to him, looking down at myself and realising that yes, I had had to make another notch in my jeans belt to tighten it. I’d lived off spanakopita and gyros, which probably accounts for my weight loss.

  Kaliopi was most disappointed she’d missed Dad, and insisted on hearing all about Meteora. “Hypocrites, that’s what those nuns are,” she stated when I told her my skirt story. “They are men-haters, that’s why they’re nuns—don’t want women to wear trousers because they look like men—huh!”