The other leaflet that catches my eye is one for a paidikos stathmos, a day-care center—in literal Greek, a children’s station, as one would use the term “first-aid station.” Buildings with signs identifying them as children’s centers are ubiquitous, since now that Greek women often have salaried jobs outside their homes, nearly one in eight Greek children are looked after by either private or state-run child-care centers. This one is a school, with credentials from the Department of Education, and its assurances are revealing, and touching. The rarity and value of parks and gardens in Athens underlies the eager declaration, “Our two buildings are immediately opposite a garden—they are sun-drenched because they are not adjacent to tall apartment buildings, and we have yards with real earth and sand!” The school asserts that it possesses a wealth of contemporary educational material for children, an important claim in a country where some schools are so overcrowded and badly equipped that their students go to school in shifts, and often rely on frondisteria, private schools offering lessons in special subjects, for their most intensive academic training. And finally, this school offers English, to be learned, it asserts, within games, and not in formal lessons. “In no case,” the school guarantees, “will the English language function at the expense of or to the detriment of Greek.” Reading these claims makes me think of the bittersweet nature of promising. How defensive these promises are—against overcrowded urban life, against irresponsible unqualified centers that mishandle and exploit children, against encroachments on national identity. There can be abundance and joy in making promises, but there is also an element of tragedy in a promise, a gate locked against some threat or danger. The mixed elements are acutely present in the common form of the Western marriage service: the great inner freedom and generosity of the promise to love, which is however made in the face of danger, the external threat of death.
I run down Spyro Merkouri street for a downtown trolley—I am to meet Leda at Mignon, the signature department store of downtown Athens, and then keep an appointment for lunch, via letters of introduction, with a journalist. It is amusing to be running down a street named for the actress Melina Mercouri’s grandfather, who was a beloved mayor of Athens, or “mayor of the Athenians,” as the office was known in the early years of the century. Her own international fame as an actress and spokesman for Greece obscures for outsiders how deliberately she is sustaining a legacy, a legacy with modern roots, not antique ones. Reminiscences of Spyros Merkouri give a tinge of color to the monochrome picture outsiders have of Athens as it entered the twentieth century. His office was run like a reception room—hung with portraits of War of Independence heroes in foustanella kilts, and populated with peasants in regional costumes and Europeanized businessmen sweltering in black coats, communally following the Greek-Ottoman tradition of doing business through personal petition. Spyros Merkouri christened babies all over Attica, as modern Greek politicians continue to do, where the godfather relationship is a canal of trade and mutual advantage, and a stronger method of vote getting than bribery. Mayor Merkouri was said to be keenly conscious of his position as an advocate of Hellenism, ellenismos, that mysterious sense of national mission whose essence is a source of conflict to any table full of Greeks; and he had the modern Greek’s sense of the work of archaeology as patriotism, convincing the Athenian citizens to fund the restoration of the famous “Treasury of the Athenians” at Delphi.
Mignon reminds me of nothing so strongly at first as of local department stores in southern towns like Jackson, Mississippi, or Mobile, Alabama. It must have once seemed a high-storied proof of urban sophistication, a place where people would come in from the country to buy winter coats and have city outings—it even has a floor with a book department, tables piled with coffee-table books about Macedonia, and many-volumed collections of the lyrics of the Greek rembetika songs, a fusion of Turkish and Greek music and themes something like the blues, that came to life here when the Ottoman Greeks were driven out of Turkey in the twenties. There are illustrated children’s books with stories from Herodotus and Aesop, and a book about the Gulf War, an imaginary letter written by a dead Iraqi child to “George Bush, Chief Zionist.”
On the way to the appliances section, we pass a cafeteria where high school students come after school to hang out and play computer games. The whole place has an old-fashioned feel—in the dress department again, I am reminded of the rural South—what is impressive about the clothes is the racks of them, the glamorous abundance of the factory-made, industrial milk and honey. The dresses try at once to be appealing, through flowered prints, and chaste, through sheer ugliness of cut. When we get to the appliance floor, Leda tells me she will buy a hair dryer for me, since civil servants and their families and students get automatic fifteen percent discounts here. As the saleslady writes up the purchase, Leda fumbles in her wallet. “I have the wrong set of cards,” she tells the saleslady. “My brother is a policeman, but I don’t have the card with me.” The saleslady shrugs and subtracts the discount anyway. I am curious to see everything, so we wander down to the floor for personal and corporate gifts—all icons, for a range of possible namesakes, as heavily ornamented with silver and gilt as if they were Byzantine royalty, and shelves and shelves of good luck charms, brass evil-eye charms, gleaming horseshoes, blue glass cloves of garlic, plaques embossed with the images of sailing ships, papiermâché pomegranates dangling from strings of blue beads, a world of wishes made visible, ropes of beads to cling to in a world of accident, stacks of lucky icons to be dealt like handfuls of cards in a sacred game of chance.
THE TRUE LIGHT
Trucks equipped with loudspeakers are roaming around the neighborhood of the journalist I am to have lunch with, Kyrios Angellopaidi, whose name translates to Mr. Angelchild. Many Greek surnames grew out of village nicknames and contain buried fragments of village lore, local reputations, or local mockery. You come across people named Mr. Been to India, Mrs. Adopted Child, Mr. Little Fairy Tale. As I skimmed the newspaper this morning, a wedding announcement for Penelope the Barefoot caught my eye. The trucks are portable shops, advertising their wares over loudspeakers, selling fish, firewood, chairs for children and adults, flowerpots and furniture for the ubiquitous Greek balcony. I have arrived during the vacation of the neighborhood electricity, and Mr. Angelchild greets me downstairs, carrying a candle wrapped in tinfoil, and apologizing that we will have to climb five flights up because of the stilled elevator. His two clear-eyed children arrive home from school for lunch before our ascent, and they clamber after us, blushing excruciatedly over their father’s proudly goading them into displays of school English. Upstairs, Mrs. Angelchild has been interrupted in the preparation of our three-course lunch, but she assures me we only have ten minutes to go until the strike moves over to the next neighborhood. When the lights come back on, I find that I am sitting on a red velvet sofa covered with plastic tarping, facing an enormous glass coffee table resting on the supports of four huge brass mermaids, four brass Barbies with fishtails. There are various diplomas and certificates hanging on the walls, an icon representing Constantine, the emperor who made Byzantium the capital of the eastern Roman Empire, and his mother Helena, and a lithograph of Kolokotronis, “the old man of the Morea,” who fought the Turks in 1821, and was a son of Mr. Angelchild’s own region. Mrs. Angelchild goes off to the kitchen, refusing all offers of help, and her husband brings out a bottle of wine. “You see what wine I am giving you?” he asks. It is a Macedonian rosé. “Come and look at the view,” he says, and I obediently go to the window. The neighborhood is a dusty outskirt, now frantically turning into a suburb. There are a few villas down the road, and an unfinished high-rise across the way. “And yet there is traffic, constant traffic, even here”—Dora Bakoyiannis, the prime minister’s daughter and a cabinet member, lives down the way, with an entourage of bodyguards and a flow of famous visitors. “I see many celebrities,” he says in a taxed tone, as if he is barely able to fulfill this responsibility along with his many othe
rs. He pours me a glass of wine. “That is a pretty necklace you have—it is Greek?”
“It is from New York.”
“I thought it must be Greek because of the finesse of the gold work. Because, I will tell you, since you are here to learn about our manners and traditions, the most important thing about us is that we are light—Hellenism, ellenismos, is light, like spiritual gold. We know that terrible antihellenic propaganda is spreading now both in the West and in the East, that the West wants us to be inferior, and the Muslims are surrounding us like a noose in the East, and want us again to be their slaves. The West has no culture or history without us, yet we know they now denigrate classical Greece, just as they have abandoned Christianity and now worship Science. But they will realize too late they need our light to exist, as they always have. And we know that in the East, they are lusting to say that their cultures were superior to ancient Greece, that we imitated them. But let me show you something all Greek children learn in school.” He tears a piece of paper from a legal pad and draws on it an Egyptian-style column and a Doric column. “Look. You see how top-heavy the Egyptians’ columns were, how elaborate the capitals? Now look at the Greek column. What supports it has the mass and the power, not what is on top of it—their columns were the architectural expressions of monarchy, ours of democracy. They made mummies, we made statues. Their culture was preoccupied with death, their art an art of death, but ours is of life, our statues with their kinesis surge up from the world of the dead into life—theirs is the art of slavery, ours of freedom!” Mr. Angelchild has made it clear that only a hater of Greece, a tool of vicious international propaganda, would remember that classical Greece is considered the first true slave society in the West. I have read that one in three inhabitants of classical Athens was a slave; in fact, there is evidence from various sources, including vase paintings, that slaves staffed the workshops of the master carvers who produced the magnificent Greek sculptures. To say nothing of women, whose free labor and lack of legal status was more insidious, considered an organic rather than a political condition. Since no legislation was required to enforce their subjection, it was unalterable. They were not people, as male slaves were, but elements of men’s lives, like hands or feet. Slaves could be freed, women could not—the dispositions of men were taken to be the fates of women, rather in the way that in the 1970s, American federal judges rejected claims of hostile sexual harassment in a case called Come v. Bausch … Lomb Inc., on the grounds that the supervisor’s handling of his female staff “satisfied a personal urge.”
In fact, to call classical Greece, an ethnically based androcracy, a “democracy” is just a little more meaningful than calling China a “people’s republic.” The word “democracy” in classical Greece has the air of a demagogue’s coinage, a persuasive flattery of the governed by their governors. However, it is Kyrios Angellopaidi’s passionate stake in idealizing the legend of classical Greece that interests me—it is sacred to him, a holy precinct where any but worshipful approaches defile. It is sacred as even his own children are not, since he could not do the crucial work of bringing them up if they were; what a different matter it is to be idealized than it is to be loved.
“Theirs is the art of darkness, with their pyramids and tombs, ours is the art of the sculpture, the column, and later, the dome, when the light of classical Greek reasoning joined the radiant light of the Logos, the truth, the absolute, when the Parthenon was revealed in Agia Sofia of Constantinople. For the word of God came to the world in Greek. It was given to us to create Christian civilization as we had created classical civilization. It is no accident that all of Jesus’s teaching was recorded in Greek, but a divine mystery. He only says one Aramaic phrase in all the gospels, and that is an expression of anguish, of betrayal. The Jews say they were chosen by Jehovah, but it is we who were chosen by Christ. Christ is incarnated in Greek.
“Our whole history is a cycle of miracles. It cannot be understood with reason—and I don’t say this out of nationalism. Who can explain how the Cyclopean walls of Mycenae were possible, the perfection of the Parthenon, which we built before you had a language, the sublimity of Agia Sofia, so beautiful that it alone converted the savage Russians, the women of Zalongo, who danced off cliffs to their deaths so the Turks could not capture them, or 1940, when we almost with our bare hands defeated Mussolini’s soldiers with their beef and their overcoats and their imitation civilization? Greece will never die, no matter how much people who hate our light would like to snuff us out.”
Kyrios Angellopaidi has written some poems about Greece, and he reads me one while his wife is setting the mezedes on the table. They are full of golden suns, and crystalline architecture and motion in marble and perfect truth.
Lunch is ready. This is still, particularly in summer, the most substantial Greek meal, whose heaviness acts as a pre-siesta hypnotic, and I don’t linger long afterwards, since it is clear that the Angelchilds are longing for their nap. It seems to me that Greeks are not truly at peace with the enterprise of sleep unless they can fall asleep and wake up while it is still light. The whole nation seems to resist going to sleep in the dark, as if they are afraid they won’t wake up. Before I leave, Mr. Angelchild gives me a book by Fotis Kondoglou, a modern neo-Byzantine painter whose work I can see in various churches and buildings in downtown Athens. It will help me understand Byzantine art, he says, and he also gives me a little book which he says has a great deal to say about Hellenism. It is called Greece, Light of the World, Go Forward! and is written by a monk who seems to be associated with the monastery on Mount Pendeli, the mountain known in antiquity for its marble. On the cover of the book, under a garishly blazing sun, is a photograph of the famous Hellenistic bronze sculpture of a boy jockey riding a horse galloping full-tilt, a statue that was recovered from the sea off Cape Artemision in 1926. “That,” Mr. Angelchild says, “is the spirit of Greece, never in stasis, in eternal motion, racing forward.” I wonder if he realizes that the boy urging the horse forward has long since been identified by scholars as a portrait of a black African.
I SEE ELVIS
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 wh
ere 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.
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