Dinner with Persephone

by Patricia Storace

  Unlike the Lourdes Virgin, Panagia Tiniaka does not teach and offers no message to the world. What she does is perform miracles in exchange for offerings. There is a folk votive verse that people repeat when she is beseeched, varying the person prayed over: “Oh Panagia Tiniaka of the many lamps/watch over the sailor and I will give you thousands more.” The Lourdes Virgin is a shimmering apparition who appears like a sudden reflection of heaven on the face of the world; the Tinos Virgin, like so many Greek icons, comes from the underworld, buried in the earth or the sea—she does not descend to earth, but is resurrected from out of its dark depths, evidence of Greece’s eternity, and of its divine genealogy, of the mysterious presence of gods under its earthy surface. She is in some way Greece’s modern dream of coming back to life, since she was discovered in 1822, just one year after the Greeks rebelled against Ottoman rule and fought to make themselves what they had never been even in antiquity, a nation. Saint Pelagia, who was canonized in 1971, dreamed of a beautiful woman, dressed like a queen, who ordered her imperiously to dig for a miraculous icon of the Annunciation in a certain place on the island, and to build a church to house it. That it was an icon of the Annunciation linked it to the War of Independence, whose outbreak is celebrated on Annunciation Day. The festival here became even more politically charged in 1940, when an Italian submarine torpedoed the Greek battleship Elli in the Tinos harbor on August 15, the Virgin’s festival, an event which is commemorated in Tinos on this day as Pearl Harbor is by the Americans. What it touched off in the Greek imagination, this prelude to the Italian attempt to conquer Greece for the Axis powers, appears in the many popular songs that commemorated the event, in which the attack is a reliving of the struggle between the Greeks and the Romans to dominate civilization, in its modern version an attempt by the Roman Catholics to possess the Orthodox Virgin, the true goddess of Christianity, who despises them for desecrating her feast, and proves her contempt by guiding the ill-equipped Greeks to their miraculous victory over the invading Italian army.

  I would have liked to have seen the Panagia Tiniaka, the icon that emerged from a dream, as so many icons did after the theological victory over the iconoclasts, when images that had been buried or concealed in caves suddenly surged back into consciousness, like so many repressed dreams. This dream of the Virgin Mary is one of the most common dreams of modern Greece; all over the islands and the mountains, tiny chapels and imposing churches have emerged from this vision of the Virgin’s ordering the building of a house for her image, architecture of the dreamworld. I would have liked to see the great silver harvest of the tamata, the votive offerings hanging from the golden lamps in the church—they have something to teach about modern Greek art. There are silver ships and plaques decorated with silver grapevines, heavy with grapes, dedicated by sailors and vineyardists. There is a silver miner’s lamp with a message thanking the Virgin for saving a miner who was lost in the silver mines of Lavrio, those mines that in antiquity helped fund the Peloponnesian War. There is a silver bucket draped with silver leeches, given by a pharmacist whom the Virgin told in a dream to use the leeches in treatments. There is a model of the public market of Athens, built in the 1880s, with a message of thanks from someone who survived the collapse of an upper floor of one of the market buildings. There is a silver house marked Chios 1881, probably from a family who survived the devastating earthquake of that year. There are silver cows and sheep; and according to records, there was a silver model of a wineshop donated by wine merchants whose building was saved from a fire, a silver plaque from a butcher, sculpted with animal entrails and butchers’ implements, a silver pistachio nut from someone who nearly choked on one, and even a silver fountain from a Cretan Turk named Mustafa Aga, who was cured from paralysis in 1845 after a vow to the Virgin, and left his own version of a thank-you note to divinity. They are all part of a very Greek notion of art, art as propitiation, and as magic charm.

  The television coverage of the feast is very full, three or four hours, followed by a program of folk songs and dances from all over the country, specifically celebrating the Panagia. The bishop celebrating the liturgy is dressed regally, swathed in satin, holding a golden staff. The presence of the navy is strongly marked, with close-ups of lines of sailors kissing the miraculous icon, and crisply jacketed (rare in this climate) officers. The icon has even made occasional trips, most recently being taken on a ship across to Athens to work a cure on the dying King Paul, father of the deposed Constantine.

  It is odd, this convergence of the miraculous technology of the television camera close-up with the delicately bitter features of the miracle-making face of the Panagia. Ships in the harbor, like life-sized votary offerings, flutter with blue-and-white-striped Greek flags. The television commentator mentions the political and business notables at the service and the camera lingers on them. The minister of trade, the minister of the merchant marine, the undersecretary for the Aegean … Andreas Papandreou and particularly, I hear, the voluptuous third Mrs. Papandreou, buxom Dimitra Liani-Papandreou, favor the Assumption festival on Tinos—Mrs. Papandreou during Papandreou’s worst health and political crises is said to have pleaded with the Virgin for his recovery.

  The icon is borne down the church steps in a miniature jeweled pavilion, carried by an honor guard of the Greek navy, while the television commentator recites some of the miracles that have been ascribed to it: cures for blindness, lameness, madness. A military band begins to play a thumpy march during the recession from the church, while the bells make their lovely music, like children’s voices heard over some limitless playground. The festival is a glimpse of the survival of an element of medieval economy, and even of the economy of the antique world, in which public cults of gods, and discovery of artifacts connected with them, brought tremendous infusions of cash and prestige to insignificant little towns.

  As the icon passes on its route through the crowds, pilgrims struggle to get close enough to touch the pavilion, running their hands ardently over its sides. Women walk toward it on their knees. Hundreds of these pilgrims have waited all night in the courtyard of the church, hoping for dreams of the Virgin. Families who want a favor from the Virgin often designate a female member to come to Tinos and crawl to the church on her knees up the main street, while motorcycles and cars speed around her. The shots of the women performing this act make them look like amputees, as if the logic of this beseeching forces them to impersonate the disabled in order to be healed.

  After the liturgy, the dignitaries board one of the navy ships and sail out of the harbor to throw a wreath on the spot where the Elli sank. Tinos is a fascinating theater where different aspects of power enact the drama of their relations to each other—politicians always haunt places associated with sacred symbols, to show themselves as incorporated into some ultimate, final power structure, to evoke a sense of their wills and their acts as part of a supreme moral authority, the most elaborate of the costumes with which naked power comes onstage. Just before I left Greece altogether, after Papandreou was elected prime minister again, there was a chance to see the baroque political masque of his pilgrimage to Tinos, in which the power relations between church and state, official and party, man and woman, public figure and journalist were all touched on, although with different emphases by some of the players. Unlike ordinary pilgrims, the Papandreous were specially greeted by the presiding archimandrite, who chanted their particular supplications to the Megalokhari, the Lady Great in Grace, acting as a kind of personal interpreter. The couple and their entourage were conducted to the miraculous icon to make their reverences, and afterward taken to a small reception room behind the church for refreshments of water and the famous loukoumi (known in certain circles as Turkish delight) from the nearby island of Syros. After the prime-ministerial couple left the church, teams of members from his Pasok Party cheered them vigorously while he applauded them in turn. The Papandreous made statements to the crowds. He said: “We came to beautiful Tinos to make a pilgrimage to the Megalokhari
as we do every year, because she gives us vitality and faith.” She said: “A time-honored and never to be neglected obligation to the First Lady of the Universe, the Holy Virgin.” The Papandreous departed by helicopter, the First Lady clutching bottles of holy oil and water from the church, in an effective display of folkish solidarity and exclusive power, whose contradictions are in themselves an evocation of power. Even what is considered opportune to photograph by the Greek press on occasions like this is revealing: the newspapers ran a picture of Mrs. Papandreou with intricately coiffed blond hair, kneeling in a sexy summer dress before the miraculous icon, while Papandreou stood beside her, looking as if there were nothing he found more moving than a blonde kneeling at his feet.

  I switch channels on the television and find the evening news. The announcer begins the broadcast by wishing many years and a happy name day to all Marias and Panayiotis, names associated with the Virgin. There is coverage of the gold-medal runner Voula Patoulidou being presented with an exact copy of a miraculous icon of the Virgin of Soumela, the Virgin sacred to Pontian Greeks, whose picture was transported from Turkey to Greece in 1951, when masses of Pontian Greeks were uprooted. There are Pontians from Greece, America, Canada, Sweden, Australia, Georgia, playing the Pontian lyre, dancing, and wrestling—they are a people famous for athletes and wrestlers. Voula has dedicated a candle of her own height to the Virgin of Soumela, and looks solemn when she is presented with the icon and told she is an incarnation of the Pontian soul. The people of Pontian descent speak different languages, they are scattered, they change places and costumes, they die, but their athlete Voula has been entrusted with an image they must always keep the same. The announcer reads the tally of the traffic accidents, always intently followed in Greece, celebrated in Europe for its high-risk driving: 112 wounded, 27 dead so far over the weekend of the Dormition of the Virgin.

  Idly, I let the television stay on while I write letters and bring my journal up to date. A dating game show begins, and the hostess, a sixtyish woman with Rapunzel-like curls and the shortest skirt I have seen here so far, emerges to the theme song, stretches her arms out in a symbolic embrace of the audience, and wishes everyone a Happy Panagia Day. “May the Virgin grant the prayers of every one of you,” she says. The Virgin strikes me as an odd patroness if the object is to meet a lover, but when the bachelor who will ask questions of the three possible dates comes on stage, he kisses the hostess on both cheeks and hands her a wrapped package—an icon of the Virgin. I am fascinated by the distinctive patois of the hostess, who melds a dizzying number of English, Italian, and French phrases onto a Greek substructure. When she is greeting the girl contestants, she touches the hair of one of them and says, “Agapi mou, your hair is so dama, so femme fatale, so plaka, yes do it do it.” There is an undercurrent of complaint always in public discussions about the xenomania of the Greeks, their craze for the imported manners and phrases and objects, the glamour of foreignness to them. But the hostess’s hybrid patter reminds me uncannily of nineteenth-century descriptions of the speech of people from Smyrna—it is the speech of a shipping people, dealing in imports and exports and in constant contact with a transient foreign population. Rural Greek doesn’t have this magpie quality, but it is exciting to think this speech has roots, not in xenomania, but in a way of using words natural to a busy port and a trading people.

  The bachelor perches on his stool behind the wall that keeps him from seeing the three girls. The hostess asks him what his professional goals are, and he tells her his ambition is to be a bio-mechanical engineer. She crosses herself. “May the Panagia grant it to you,” she says.

  He begins asking the contestants his questions. “Girl number two,” he asks, “if you had to choose between being Penelope or Circe, who would you be?”

  COLD SHOULDER

  I seem to have hurt my shoulder shifting furniture or boxes. The pain has been more than impressive and worsening over several days, bad enough, I have to admit, to need a doctor. Besides, I need to be able to carry my suitcase when I travel, and I am going to the islands in a few days. So I call a friend of mine who like me is stuck in Athens over the holiday period and ask if he could refer me to a doctor. “What’s the problem?” he wants to know, and after my description, he is satisfied that I don’t need a doctor. “You don’t want a doctor,” he says firmly, “you have a cold. A cold in your shoulder. Probably it got chilled when you were driving in a car with open windows. Just put hot compresses on it, and it will be fine. You don’t want a doctor.”

  I wish I didn’t, but I do. The pain is severe enough to be occupying nearly all my attention now, and nothing eases it. Kostas is in Brussels, Leda and her fiancé are on Andros, no one I know well enough is in town to ask, so I decide to call on the couple downstairs who collect the common fees of the tenants, and are for the time being the chairmen of the building. They invite me in and give me coffee, and Mr. Mylonas, whom I had run into at the celebration for the Olympic athletes, waxes eloquent about the ceremony. “You know,” he says, “I had begun not to care about the Olympics after we lost the hundredth-anniversary games. It just seemed big business and dirty politics to me. But when Voula and Pyrros won, suddenly the Olympics existed again. The ancient Greek spirit was resurrected for us Greeks. And the feeling that we will one day be what we were again, that miracles are still with us. And that it should be done by a little Pontian girl, and a boy from northern Epirus, where the Greeks live like slaves in the so-called Albania. And the ceremony, didn’t you find it moving? You know when the ancient Greek athletes won great victories at the Olympic games, their towns would tear down their walls when the victors returned. I tell you I had tears in my eyes, and I’m not ashamed to say so, when they gave our children their crowns, just like the ancient athletes got. It must have been a wonderful sight for a foreigner like yourself to see, coming from a place with so little history.”

  I agreed that it was, already knowing from the process of paying my rent, which requires roughly two hours of preliminary conversation, that you don’t go directly to the question here. But I find the moment, and ask if the Mylonases know a doctor who could have a look at my shoulder.

  “You don’t need a doctor, my love,” says Mrs. Mylonas. “You have a cold in your shoulder. Don’t go to a doctor.”

  “She’s right,” says Mr. Mylonas. “The doctors here fatten themselves off of the sick. You must give them an envelope under the table after the examination, in addition to the fee they say they are charging. And our hospitals are infernos. If you get sick here, you get on a plane and go to England or Switzerland if you can afford it. I will personally drive you to the airport. You don’t know what chaos is until you have seen a public hospital here. Dogs and cats roam unchecked through the corridors, begging from the patients at mealtimes. Clean sheets aren’t supplied—that is the patient’s responsibility. There may be no oxygen, they may be out of rubbing alcohol. Treatment orders may not find their way to the staff. Treatment happens wherever there is space for it—I read a newspaper article not long ago that said that chemotherapy in one hospital was being given in a staff office, because there was no other place to put the equipment. Sometimes you can’t even get into a room unless you pay the nurse or doctor; there are even wings whose space is controlled by political parties. Of course I can’t prove it; where is there a witness when a sick person lying on a stretcher is told to pay thousands of drachmas or lie in the hall? Even I, who believe there would be no world at all without my country, must warn you about our hospitals. We are cruel to sick people.” Listening to him, I remember an anecdote from William Miller, one of the best social historians of modern Greece, who lived in Greece during the Belle Epoque. He told a story about the queen of Greece, who asked that a bed be found in a Piraeus hospital for some acquaintance who needed care. She was, according to Miller, “informed that the bed in question formed part of the private preserve of that local political party to which the patient did not happen to belong … the two parties had made
a compact, dividing the hospital between them.”

  “And the scenes.” Mrs. Mylonas shook her head. “The sick people pushing and hitting each other to reach the doctors first, their relatives screaming. My love, you are too quiet, no one would take care of you. Anyway, you don’t need doctoring for a cold in the shoulder.”

  I ask for the name of a doctor anyway, just in case, but promise to use the ointments they solicitously give me to cure my shoulder’s cold. Climbing back upstairs as I habitually do instead of taking the elevator, I am trying to trace the feeling of déjà vu the popular diagnosis is giving me. This mosaic sense of the body as broken into guilds, not so much a unified organism, but a collection of tesserae fitted together, which have independent vulnerabilities and strengths, seems to me to be pushing me beyond the borders I am used to, into medieval territories, that medieval world of intense stratification in which specific angels guarded churches, altars, cities, individuals, nations, and even the intellect functioned in strict division—students studying literature had to perform separate exercises in comparison, in character sketches, in the proposal of a law, in the descriptions of places and objects. Kostas has often told me how profoundly he feels the West was formed by the Renaissance and how profoundly Greece has been separated from Europe by not experiencing it, but it occurs to me for the first time that what he means by this is not just abstract, but a direct shaping part of daily experience. I have caught a glimpse of it oddly, in taverna evenings, where the diners share food from central dishes brought to the table. You can see this pattern of eating in Byzantine medieval paintings of the Last Supper, where there are fewer bowls and glasses on the Apostles’ table because the guests ate from them together. The individual place setting is a development from the Renaissance, and sitting in tavernas with friends, I am eating in a past remoter than I am used to. And now, I have been having to struggle to get a referral to a doctor, because my body is being perceived through a medieval prism. Perhaps this sharpens the sense here of being in the Middle East, where popular culture preserves great intact fragments of medieval ways of thinking and feeling. It is a strange sensation to feel your body transported to an era which you thought was populated by no living bodies at all. In traveling here, I seem to have discovered there is a gravity of time as well as of space, and I am coping with the effects of weightlessness in time, as astronauts cope with weightlessness in space. In order to get medical treatment, I am going to have to find someone who can approach my body with a twentieth-century imagination.