Diatribe

The montage accompanying this diatribe is doing the rounds of social media these days. In juxtaposing the veiled Catholic and Orthodox nuns, along with manifestly Muslim women wearing the burka against the parade of nubile, healthy young women clad in what purports to be the ancient Greek style among the ruins of Olympia, the monteur is attempting to both hold up the ancient Greek tradition as one of progressive enlightenment, worthy of emulation, while dismissing modern Abrahamic religious traditions as being dark, reactionary and oppressive; all the conditions precedent for making the imposition of a sumptuary injunction upon female adherents to wear the veil. The monteur of course assumes that the viewer, consciously or subconsciously accepts that the veil is a garment closely associated with female subjugation and oriental "otherness." In short, it is not 'Greek.'
Of course, the monteur, for the purposes of his argument, completely disregards the fact that the religious ritual he has captured his desirable ancient Greek caryatids in the process of performing is a complete fabrication, created in order to add colour to the modern Olympic Games. Furthermore, in deliberately choosing to associate ancient Greece with the absence of the veil, the monteur is ignoring an extremely important fact: that the veil was widely worn by ancient Greek women since Homeric times. In the Odyssey for example, Penelope is referred to as wearing a veil, on no less than five separate occasions. A reading of the Homeric epics leads one to draw the conclusion that in the early archaic period the veil was the prerogative of elite women and their personal attendants. Iconographic evidence suggests that exclusive use of the veil by elites came to an end in the late archaic period and points to a broader adoption of the veil in democratic Athens and even more widespread use of the veil in the Hellenistic world.
Scholars maintain that the wearing of the veil by ancient Greek women was a component of a prevailing male ideology that endorsed female silence and invisibility. While women who veiled their heads subscribed to this ideology, the act of veiling did not simply entail female powerlessness in the face of male authority. Instead, veiling allowed women a certain degree of freedom of movement and provided them with opportunities to comment on their social standing, their sexuality, and their emotional state. If these arguments sound familiar, it is because they also appear in modern debates about the use of the veil within Islam and its relationship with the western world.
Just as in the Islamic world, a variety of words and definitions for the veil exist in the ancient sources, further demonstrating that the veil was a familiar and important garment in the ancient Greek world. A plethora of archeological evidence exists to prove the prevalence of veil wearing in ancient Greece. In surviving statues and vase paintings, some of the women merely have their hair covered. In others, the women have drawn the veil across their mouths in a manner reminiscent of Islamic usages today, a style which scholars such as Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones consider to have become fashionable in the late classical period.
The dichotomy between the literary evidence of veiling and artistic depictions of women uncovered and on display can be explained by the fact that except in the case of the late fifth-century terracotta figurines of veiled women and the occasional representations of veiled women on vases the veil appears to be absent in many female-related artistic compositions. Nonetheless, scholars have convincingly shown that Greek vase-painters often created scenes that allude to the veil by means of a variety of elements, including female veiling gestures and the presence of garments such as the pharos or himation, which could be used as veils. In particular, much is made of the "anakalypsis (unveiling) gesture." This gesture in Greek art is usually performed by a female who raises part of her veil in front of her face, or simply touches the veil. This gesture, which seems to accord with the abundant textual evidence supporting the habitual veiling of women, when out of doors, appears to be a motif reminding the viewer of Greek art of the female figure's aidos without obstructing the view of her physical beauty.
Proving that certain attitudes can become entrenched for millennia, veiling, like sexual separation, was employed to preserve the Greek female's chastity, thus ensuring both the legitimacy of her husband's offspring but also, the highly valued honour of her menfolk. As in modern Islamic cultures, when the woman emerged from her home and the protection of her male guardians, the veil rendered her both socially invisible and sexually inviolate and marked her as the property of the male whose honour was reinforced by both her invisibility and chastity. It is important here to consider the ancient Greeks' view of the veil as a barrier against women's naturally dangerous miasma and uncontrolled sexuality, both of which posed serious threats to the social order. The veil shielded males from the female's dangerously sexualized gaze and controlled her sexually enticing hair.
Llewellyn-Jones has shown that the veil would first be worn by girls who had reached puberty and had experienced menarche. Evidence for this is found in the fifth-century stone-inscribed catalogues of textile dedications to Artemis Brauronia on the Athenian acropolis and the fourth-century clothing inscriptions from Miletus and Tanagra, where young women dedicated their veils to the goddess.
Confining women and on the other hand creating a "safe" domestic" space for them in which to operate, the veil's seemingly contradictory ability to both control and liberate women also assists in explaining the counterintuitive appearance of the face-veil known as the tegidion in the Hellenistic world, in an era marked by increased participation by women. Scholar Llewellyn-Jones argues that the tegidion, by making the female even more socially invisible, allowed women correspondingly more freedom to go out in public. Increasing female freedom of movement and the growing control over female sexuality were thus intertwined in ways again eerily reminiscent of the practices of the Islamic world.
Proving again how ancient women negotiated the male ideology of veiling and found ways to express themselves and gain control over their movement and status in the male domain, veiling could be used to express a wide gamut of emotions. The rendering of the veil could be used to express anger or grief, while it could also be used to accentuate sexuality, in a manner akin to the Orientalising movement of the nineteenth century.
Making use the veil as the symbol of the enlightenment of 'Greece and the West' compared with the darkness of the 'East,' is thus unhelpful, as well as historically inaccurate. Instead, the tradition of female veiling, with all its ancillary issues of sexual mores, gender relations, and the construction of personal identity, must be placed within the ancient Near East and Mediterranean world, which includes ancient Greece.
Re-evaluating the place of the Greek veil within Greek history and society (and there appears to be a diachronic continuity since the veil was present also in Byzantine and Ottoman times, right up until the present, under differing conditions but largely using the same rationale), is to view a complex cultural icon in its proper historical and social context. Such a perspective, rather than obfuscate issues of gender repression under an imagined and unrealistic illusion of a past based on equality or intellectual superiority, will serve as one of the necessary steps in identifying the historical roots of misogyny within Greek society, and one would hope, lead to their excision.
DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@Hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 16 April 2016

The Coptic Orthodox Church of Saint Mary in Kensington is holding a public breakfast, open to all members of the community, in honour of Anzac Day. This is a beautiful gesture which shows how a community, of Middle Eastern origin, that has ostensibly at least, no historical ties with one of the most enduring and hallowed of Australian commemorations, can integrate itself within the context of that commemoration, in a respectful and meaningful way, proving that one does not need to be of the same race as those who underwent the severe trials of Gallipoli, in order to pay tribute to the eternal human virtues of courage, loyalty and self-sacrifice. Our community institutions have much to learn from the Coptic approach which, at its heart is truly multi-cultural.

The word ostensibly is used above because the Copts do have a link with the ANZACs, one that like so many others is generally glossed over by an official public narrative that had until recently emphasized the role of certain key participants such as the British, the Australians, New Zealanders and Turk and is only now, gradually coming to acknowledge the role of other minor protagonists. One of these are the Copts, the native, non-Arab people of Egypt. As a Christian minority that had been relegated to the inferior status of a dhimmi (non-Muslim) people under Islamic rule, the Copts felt a natural affinity towards the 'Christian' west and avidly supported Britain's appropriation of Egypt in the latter part of the nineteenth century. With their western orientation and superior education, they were able to achieve important bureaucratic positions within the British administration.

Thus during World War I, Coptic community of Egypt held many fundraisers in order to assist the Allied war effort. As well, Coptic public servants played a key role in co-ordinating supplies, provisions and accommodation for ANZAC soldiers billeted in Egypt on the way to the front. Such a task was not always easy. Egyptian Nobel prize laureate Naguib Mahfouz describes in several of his works, the difficulty faced in controlling the rowdiness of Australian ANZAC soldiers, with their tendency to get drunk and become overly friendly with the local women, in violation of Egyptian social codes. Furthermore, vocal Coptic support of the Anzacs directly defied the call for jihad against the Allies, issued by the Ottoman sultan, who was also the caliph of Islam. Egypt was still technically a part of the Ottoman Empire and much of the muslim population of Egypt was sympathetic to the Sultan's call. The fact that a subjugated minority had the temerity to defy this call and actively assist the perceived enemy did not go unforgotten or unpunished and Copts have over the years paid a terrible price for what is perceived to be, their western orientation

It is hoped that the Coptic contribution to the ANZAC cause becomes more widely known and more broadly studied in years to come. In the meantime, local Greek community activists, including former members of Parliament Lee Tarlamis and John Pandazopoulos, along with the indefatigable military historian and honorary Greek Jim Claven, through the Lemnos Gallipoli Commemorative Committee have, after years of hard work, managed to raise increased awareness the Greek contribution to the ANZAC cause, especially with regards to Lemnos. This is of immense importance, as Lemnos was the major base of ANZAC operations, the place where the Anzacs practiced the landings, where the Australian nurses and medical staff established their hospitals, where the sick and injured soldiers returned for treatment and where the soldiers returned for brief periods of rest. It was also where the war that began at Gallipoli in 1915 ended in 1918, with the Armistice of Mudros, a bay of Lemnos. Joy Damoussi, in her recent book, Memory and Migration in the Shadow of War: Australia's Greek Immigrants after World War II and the Greek Civil War', writes just how instrumental shared experiences of war were, in forging links between Greeks and Australians.

Furthermore, historians such as Panayiotis Diamandis in Sydney have, through their research, also highlighted the terrible human cost suffered by Greeks as a result of the ANZAC campaign. An estimated 15,000 native Greek inhabitants of the Gallipoli peninsula were forcibly removed and or ethnically cleansed by the Ottoman army, in their bid to secure the gateway to the Dardanelles. As well, he argues convincingly, that the order to intensify the deportation of Greeks and Armenians within the Ottoman Empire, which is considered to have constituted a genocide, was made as direct reaction to the ANZAC landing at Gallipoli. The Greek Australian community is thus inextricably woven into the warp and the weft of the ANZAC legend and we can and must do more to explore and commemorate that involvement and historical presence within the broader context of Australian ANZAC commemorations.

One aspect of Greek involvement in the ANZAC legend is generally overlooked sits in parallel with the Coptic experience. During World War I, a relatively large, wealthy and politically significant Greek community was resident in Egypt, especially around Alexandria and Cairo. The connection of that community with the ANZACs in a fascinating one because its wealthy leaders, industry and property magnates with political interests in Greece, variously aligned themselves with the royalist (anti-war) or Venizelist (pro-Allied) factions within that country, polarizing the Greek-Egyptian community in the process. Works of literature such as Dimitris Stefanakis' epic 'Days of Alexandria,' («ΗμέρεςΑλεξάνδρειας»), portray just how riven by internecine strife the Greek community was at that period, with one half actively supporting the British, the wives of wealthy Greek businessmen holding fundraisers for the ANZAC troops and seeking to organize entertainment for them, (and indeed, some female members of the Greek-Egyptian community formed attachments of love with ANZAC soldiers) while the other half of the Greek community embroiled themselves in numerous arguments with their compatriots, dissolved friendships and on occasion, found themselves at odds with the British authorities as a result of their opposition to the Allied cause. It would be fascinating to study the considerations which led the Greeks of Egypt to actively support or oppose the ANZACs for in doing so, a microcosm of contemporary Greek society is revealed while contemporaneously providing one more link between our community and the ANZACs. Sadly, no such attempts have been made here in Australia to date and it would be of great benefit if the various Greek-Egyptian-Australian organizations that operate here, could turn their minds to such an important task. In the meantime, we should also do more to raise awareness of and celebrate the contributions of the small Greek-Australian community at the time, to the ANZAC effort.

One doesn't have to be an Anglo-Australian to honour or appreciate the ANZAC legend. Nor does one have to be an imperialist, colonialist, or nationalist. One cannot help but admire the courage, steadfastness, loyalty and resourcefulness of the young Australian soldiers, who were placed in the most horrific of circumstances but nonetheless remained committed to sacrificing their lives for what they believed to be the greater good. There's is a very human achievement, that reminds us that even in a place of utmost evil, love and friendship can endure. That the Greek people both within Greece and outside of it, and others, stood beside the ANZACs, cheered them on, tended to their wounds, fed them, provided them with comfort and held their hands as they died is something our community can be inordinately proud of. In all of these ways, ANZAC day is of vital importance to the Greek-Australian community. It is OUR day, not only as Australians, but as Greeks as well and judging by the large number of Greeks attending my local RSL's pre-Anzac day commemoration, these are sentiments which laudably, are shared by the majority of the Greek Australian community. On the 25 of April this year, and on every day thereafter, we the Greeks of Australia will remember them, and because we are an old people, with incredibly long memories, we will never forget.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 23 April 2016

"I don't get it. If Macedonia is Greek, how come the Macedonians don't speak Greek?" the elderly Assyrian man asked. I launched for the third time, into a detailed historical account of the history of Macedonia, from times ancient, through to Byzantine, Ottoman and beyond. Half an hour later, the elderly man smoothed his luxurious moustache and asked: "So the Macedonians are not Greek. Then why are you Greeks saying that Macedonia is Greek?"
Explaining what Macedonomachs around the world term "historical truths," should not be so difficult. It was time to change tactic. "Put it this way," I answered. "What if I told you that you are not Assyrian, but rather a Chaldean?" My aged interlocutor turned various hues of purple. I was convinced that even his white moustache had turned a darker shade. "What?" He spluttered. "That's garbage! There is no such thing as a Chaldean people! There never was. This is an identity that was made up in order to divide our people! Look at the history.."
Scholars generally agree that historically, there was no such thing as a Chaldean people, just as most scholars agree that the ancient Macedonians were not a people, but rather a sub-set of broader Greek tribal confederations. Yet tell the approximately 700,000 Syriac-speaking people that identify as Chaldeans that they are in fact Assyrian and tell the millions of Slavonic-speaking people that identify as 'Macedonians' that they are in fact Bulgarian and pandemonium ensues. It seems therefore that we are not the only people struggling with what we term, 'historical distortions,' or in Greek: «πλαστογράφηση της ιστορίας.»As is the case with many people whose origins lie in western Macedonia, theoretical discussions of identity are keenly felt within many Assyrian and Chaldean families, who are compelled to 'choose sides,' providing useful parallels with our own "name dispute," but also making such choices all the more sad and poignant.
Variously described as Syrians or Assyrians in ancient Greek texts as far back as Herodotus, ( I derive perverse pleasure out of telling Assyrian friends that it was we Greeks who put the Ass into Ass-yrian), the modern day Assyrians who, up until the Assyrian genocide perpetrated by the Ottomans, the genocide of Simele perpetrated by the Iraqi army and the genocide perpetrated by ISIS, resided in the lands of Mesopotamia shared between Turkey, Syria, Iran and Iraq, trace their ancestry to the ancient Assyrian Empire. Conquered by the Persians, who subjected them to immense persecution for their religious beliefs, conquered in turn by the Muslims who unleashed even more vicious persecution upon them, theirs is a story of survival despite overwhelming odds. Along the way, they played an immense and now largely uncredited role in preserving ancient Greek civilization, for it was the Assyrian monks who translated key works of the ancient orders for the benefit of their Arabic masters, in time for these to be appropriated by the Crusaders and brought to the West. Furthermore, up until the 17th century, the primary liturgical language in the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch, was Syriac, the language of the Assyrians and saints such as Saint John of Damascus and Saint Ephraim the Syrian, were native speakers of Syriac.
The Syriac-speaking peoples have entered into the twenty-first century not as one but as three distinct peoples. Their identities have been largely created by those that have ruled over them and reflect religious, rather than ethnic or linguistic differences within an otherwise relatively homogenous people. Syriac speaking adherents of the Nestorian Church of the East, once widespread from Byzantium to Mongolia, as well as former members whose ancestors converted to Protestantism, generally identify as Assyrian. They can point to a long, documented history of a continued presence in their ancestral homelands. Interest in them and fascination with their links to ancient Assyria emerged in the nineteenth century when British missionaries and archaeologists 'discovered" them, along with ancient Assyria during their excavations in the area. In many respects then, the western reconstruction of the Greek and Assyrian identities has followed surprisingly similar paths.
Whereas up until the nineteen thirties, the members of the Monophysite Syriac Orthodox Church identified themselves as Assyrian, due to pressure from Syria's Baath party, they began to refer to themselves as Arabs and lately, as "Arameans." In Sweden, where a large Syriac Orthodox expatriate community exists, the community is split down the middle, with one half supporting the Assyriska football team (and hence stating their affiliation with the Assyrian identity), and the other half, the "Aramean" Syrianska football team, in a manner reflecting similar debates about ethnic identity in the early history of the Heidelberg United soccer club here in Melbourne.
It is the Catholic Syriac-speakers who identify not as Assyrian but as Chaldeans. This is because the Chaldean Catholic Church was founded as a Uniate church for Assyrians, in Cyprus, in the sixteenth century. In choosing the term Chaldean, the Catholic church sought to link the Assyrians with the lands from which Abraham came, according to the Bible. Most members of this church are descendants of Nestorians who converted to Catholicism en masse in the late nineteenth century in the hopes that adherence to a 'western' church would save them from persecution. As such, their former affiliation should be almost within living memory. Indeed, the late Patriarch of the Chaldean Church, Raphael Bidawid, commented in 2003: The name 'Chaldean' does not represent an ethnicity... We have to separate what is ethnicity and what is religion... I myself, my sect is Chaldean, but ethnically, I am Assyrian." Nonetheless, apart from a few exceptions, Chaldeans today are convinced that they are not Assyrian, instead drawing their heritage from the (ethnically similar) Babylonians who, paradoxically enough differ from the historical Chaldeans. Indeed, most will react with anger or incredulity when taken through the historical evidence indicating that their chosen identity does not accord with history or ethnography, citing spurious folklore or discredited history in defence of their claim. It is quite amusing to sit in on a heated debate between a Chaldean and an Assyrian about the ethnic origins of Nebuchadnezzar, until it becomes disquietingly apparent that the same vitriol, the same appeal to emotions rather than to logic and the same distortion of historical sources takes place as in an argument between an Greek, a FYROMIAN and an Albanian about the ethnic origins of Alexander the Great and his Adidas footwear.
Patriotic Assyrians lamenting the sundering of their diverse tribes cannot understand why the world, and especially friendly countries such as Australia which play host to both communities, allow the Chaldeans to persist in their historical delusions, much as deeply perturbed Greeks find it strange that despite constant re-hashings of the historical evidence, the world continues to indulge those who ethnically identify as 'Macedonians,' their fantasies, even joining in, by agreeing to call them by their desired names. In the meantime, while Assyrian and Greek uber-patriots become enraged each time the mainstream media refers to 'Macedonia' (ie. FYROM) or the Chaldeans, these appellations are so widespread that even Greek politicians are now referring to FYROMites as Macedonians and then excusing themselves as having made a 'gaffe.' Whereas enlightened Greeks offer 'Slav-Macedonian' as a compromise solution, enlightened Assyrians refer to an 'Assyro-Chaldean' identity, in an effort to bridge the gap, an effort, the majority of Chaldeans reject, primarily because they have no need of an Assyrian identity and possibly, because the 'Assyro' is placed here before the 'Chaldean.'
The fact of the matter is that ancient history used as an anachronism to imagine a nation, is not the only determinant of ethnic or national consciousness. Politics too plays a major role as can be evidenced by the existence of a German, Austrian, Swiss German, Luxembourgish and Liechtensteinian national identity, for a multitude of German speaking peoples, or a separate Ukrainian, Belarussian, Rusyn and Russian ethnic identity for speakers of dialects of the Russian language. Similarly, of late, we are witnessing the possible birth of a "Cypriot" ethnic identity, with more and more Cypriots distinguishing themselves from 'Greeks,' especially in the diaspora. As such, while there may not have been a 'Macedonian' or Chaldean ethnicity or consciousness in the past, it cannot be doubted that one exists now, valid or otherwise, because the world has deemed it expedient to allow its creation and millions have subscribed to it and have lived within it, for at least three generations, enough time to allow historic delusion to become overlooked and the comparative reality of living with a manufactured identity to become history itself. Indeed, if Malcolm Turnbull's smug asides are to be taken seriously, Australia is a haven for all those fleeing the conflict arising from such delusions.
While naming or shaming those who make slips of the tongue is fruitless and counter-productive in the face of the inexorable grind of the steamroller of delusion, both the Assyrian and the Greek communities will fight the good fight, for morally, they can do naught else, continuously hoping for "historic justice," as one fervent patriot put it recently, as the world and the new ethnic identities that are constantly being formed, constructed, dissolved and re-imagined, pass us all by.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@Hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 30 April 2016

As a boy, I was entranced by Gerald Durrell's description, in his brilliant account of his idyllic childhood in Corfu "My Family and other Animals," of how he came to name his coracle-shaped boat the "Bootle," only to have appended onto it, the word "Bumtrinket," at the suggested of his brother, the famous author, Lawrence Durrell.

My first car was similarly roundish in shape and beetle-like. By that stage, personalized number plates were no longer a novelty of the rich or the petrol-headed but were widely in use. The "Bootle-Bumtrinket" being much too long to fit on a Victorian license plate, I wanted to acquire to the plate: "Bizdouno," a word that I felt carried phonetically beetle-like connotations. The fervor of my youthful enthusiasm was quickly doused by my horrified mother. "You can't call your car 'Bizdouno,'" she exclaimed. "It's the name your aunt uses to refer to one of her neighbours. She will find out and think you've set out to offend her." Apparently the lady in question was given a nickname that referred to her place of origin, Bizdouni, in Epirus. My motor vehicle on the other hand, originated in an assembly line in Geelong, a considerable distance away.

Unperturbed, I insisted upon my chosen name, or by way of compromise, "Bitsoulas" being a contraction of "Glymbitsoulas" a fictional bogeyman used to scare children, having been told that my driving has similar properties. I was all set to register a plate bearing this name, when I discovered that "Bitsoulas" was the name of an extremely popular discotheque in the Athenian suburb of Glyfada, in the nineteen eighties. In the end, having also rejected other options such "Freno" (to remind me to apply the same in a timely fashion) and "Zhaba" the local word in my maternal ancestral village for a large fat female toad (which is exactly what my car looked like), I finally settled upon a license plate bearing the word KAPO, which is good Greek-Australian for motor-vehicle which is why, I believe, my father surreptitiously consulted Vicroads and obtained personalized license plates n my behalf, bearing my Greek initials, KK. Now, whenever I pull up to family or community functions, I am invariably accosted with the question: "Hey KK, what happened to the E?" referring to the fact that the abbreviation of the Communist Party of Greece is KKE in Greek. "I'm a member of the Communist International," I always reply, "We believe the Revolution will sweep away borders which are bourgeois constructions created in order to dominate workers and thus have no need for the E (which stands for Greece)." This exposition is enough to permit my interlocutors to move on to the next topic.

'Greek' license plates in Victoria are fascinating as they provide a unique insight not only into how their owners view their identity but also, how they choose to express this down the generations. Whereas Anglo-Australians may choose to put their names or nicknames on their plates, the first generation of Greek plate holders have invariably sought to place on their vehicles, their place of origin. Thus, I have throughout the years, beheld plates proudly bearing the words Samos, Sparta, Kalamata, Epirus 1 (whose owner drove on the freeway in front of me, at the same tempo as an Epirot funeral dirge,) Fteri (a village in Achaia), Korinthos, Kriti, Lefkada, Lamia, and countless others. As His Honour Justice Emilios Kyrou outlines in his book "Call Me Emilios," such public assertions of identity can often be liberating for those who have had to suppress aspects of their ethnic origin for whichever reason. The owner of the license plate 'Kosma,' could certainly relate to this.

Proving that one's region can supply a way of expression of one's personal identity, driving around Melbourne, one can come across Pontos, Pontus and even Pontia, to describe the female of the species. With such plates, one has to be careful however. The owner of Assos, turned out not to be a Greek claiming that he was the best at everything, but rather, a Turk from the homonymous town, on the Asia Minor coast opposite Lesbos. The owner of the license plate Coglan (meaning young boy or catamite), from which the Greek word τσογλάνι (scoundrel) is derived, was also Turkish. This license plate is a menace to society as I almost smashed into a tree when first I noticed it.

Interestingly enough, just as some personalized number plates display affiliations to community groups such as football teams, (there are numerous Greek Australian license plates bearing versions of Greek football team names, 'PAOK' and 'AEK' being the most common,) members of our community often feel so proud of their local clubs or brotherhoods, that they choose to brand their cars with their names. Thus, in the previous decades, there was a spate of members of the Pontian Association "Pontiaki Estia" obtaining license plates such as 'ESTIA 1,''ESTIA 2' and so on. Such persons still continue to drive among us, displaying a dedication to their club that members of the Greek Orthodox Community of Melbourne and Victoria have not. I am fully in favour of an alteration to that organisation's constitution in order to compel its president to drive around with GOCMV 1 license plates, or in the alternative 'Chief' or its Greek equivalent 'Tsiftis,' though I am reliably informed that the latter has already been taken. The Greek Orthodox Archdiocese is possessed of numerous number plates bearing the initials GA. Furthermore, I would love to see how the president of the Benevolent Brotherhood of Kolindros, Pafsilypos would devise a number plate for himself.

Further than ascribing to their cars, their place of origin, Greeks also give them labels denoting abstract concepts, as in the case of 'Agapi,' unquestionably the 'Love Bug' of Greek Australia and paradoxically enough, 'Oneiro' for a motor vehicle that does not appear to be particular expensive, leading the viewer to muse whether in fact the owner is dreaming of a better car, or, whether, owing to limited means, his current mode of conveyance represents the extent of his capacity to dream. I regularly see driving around in my local area an 'Aetos,' though how the vehicle can fly like an eagle given the proliferation of speed humps in our suburb, is anyone's guess. 'Telios,' could well be as described, though evidently he cannot spell, and as for 'Alitis,' the less said about him, the better.

Finally, driving around Pascoe Vale a few days ago, I came 'Atheos,' meaning Atheist. The fact that someone felt so deeply about denying the existence of a Creator, that they were moved not only to state this in an utterly most public way, but also in Greek, made a profound impression upon me. In years to come, scholars may view this as a public manifestation of the debate that perennially rages within the Greek pages of Neos Kosmos as to the desirability or veracity of Christianity. My own view is that this license plate has been painstakingly calculated so as to elicit the response: «Πω, πω, αυτός δεν έχει το Θεό του.» Incidentally, my parish priest swears that Atheos is often to e seen parked outside the church, for its owner often pops in to light a candle..

As the Greek Australian community becomes assimilated, fewer of its members are choosing to employ Greek upon their personalized license plates, considering such a phenomenon to be outmoded or too 'woggy.' Those that do, often attempt to employ words in their wrong context, such as an acquaintance who attempted to register 'Komvio' because in Google translate, this was provided as the equivalent of 'Stud,' showing how the phenomenon can be used to trace our community's level of understanding of the Greek language and its accompanying cultural connotations and express these in an intelligible form. Yet for Komvio and for others, such as the owner of 'Romios' (literally meaning Roman but referring to a Byzantine/Orthodox identity) the personalised license plate is still a powerful and emotive medium for asserting one's identity within the context of a multicultural society. Historians and sociologists would do well to study this phenomenon, outlining the social and psychological reasons for its existence as it provides a novel yardstick for the acculturation of our community, prior to its inevitable demise.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@Hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 7 May 2016

Just over a month prior to the recent conflagration which caused untold damage to the Annunciation (Evangelismos) Church in East Melbourne, Athena Giankoulidis undertook an extensive mission to photograph almost every inch of that church accessible to the laity. Her actions were prescient, as the community is now possessed of an archive of photos that could prove invaluable as guides to restoration, should it be determined that the church be restored to exactly the same condition or style as it was prior to the fire, or at least, bear historical witness to the décor of the church and the manner in which the restoration diverged from it.
Of course, much of the interior is irreplaceable. Granted, much of the iconography was executed in the hyper-mannerist, super-baroque Romanesque, cringeworthy style of the late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds, still to be found in a multitude of Greek island churches and beyond. It is neither rare nor important from an art-historical point of view. Yet when I view Athena’s photograph of the now destroyed icon of the Nativity in the church, I cannot help but choke back tears. For the inscription below the icon informs us that this was a donation by Sophia, the mother of the first Greek Orthodox priest in Melbourne, Athanasios Kantopoulos, way back in 1902. The prayers of this pious woman, whose gesture, was made at a time when iconography was extremely costly, in support of a community she knew nothing about and her son’s mission in a completely unknown land have finally come to an end.
Being an old people, we Greeks have a strange, almost contradictory relationship with time. Centuries of history can be conflated into minutes so that the Fall of Constantinople or the Battle of Salamis can be treated in the popular consciousness as if they took place only recently. Conversely, time can also be surprisingly telescoped. The Macedonian struggle of 1908 or the Asia Minor Catastrophe of 1922 are treated by many Greek-Australians as current events, (especially on facebook), but when it comes to our consciousness of our own community’s history, the year 1900, being when the Evangelismos Church was founded, is felt to have taken place aeons ago and is shrouded within the obscurity of the temporal nebulae.
Thus, while many Greek-Australians can identify with an imagined past of at least three millennia prescribed by a modern Greek historical narrative, there appears to be no analogous identification or sense of continuity with the founders of our community, a mere century ago. Rather than inherit a corpus of anecdotes or local lore, there seems to be an almost complete disconnect of knowledge or identification between successive Greek-Australian generations. For most of us, our Greek-Australian community creation myth begins with the arrival of our parents of grandparents on these shores, and it is their values rather than their deeds and those of their peers that are idealized and passed on.
Consequently, the works and deeds of our early pioneers are left to be discovered in the works of dedicated historians such as Hugh Gilchrist, which is where, incidentally, I first came to appreciate the significance of the Evangelismos Church, as a teenager. Prior to that, Evangelismos featured dimly in my own familial tradition as a place my grandparents and father had to travel an inordinate distance in order to celebrate Easter, prior to the erection of our own local church, which is when my own Greek-Melburnian temporal consciousness begins, though it intersects strangely with that of its first Greek priest, with whom being of Samian descent, we all sympathized as a compatriot.
Originally well regarded, Father Athanasios Kantopoulos of Samos, gradually alienated himself from the Greek parishioners of Evangelismos via his insistence upon ministering to the Arabic-speaking members of his flock (for contrary to our version of the founding myth, the Evangelismos was founded as a multi-cultural church for all Orthodox Melburnians, including the Lebanese, Syrians, Russians and Bulgarians) and not excluding them from church governance, despite the insistence of local Greek bourgeois powerbrokers. As a result, Father Athanasios was expelled from the church, along with the Arabic-speaking faithful, who eventually formed the parish of Saint Nicholas a few blocks down, in the same street, in 1932. It is therefore the height of historical irony, but also a lovingly symbolic act of absolution that the descendants of these same exiles from a community that was happy to take their money but not to respect their ethno-linguistic diversity, will house the faithful of Evangelismos in Saint Nicholas, until such time as Evangelismos is liturgical once more (pun definitely intended). In such cases, historical amnesia maybe for the best though sadly, the icons dedicated by the Syrian members of Evangelismos have been destroyed, erasing physical witness to their contribution to this church forever.
No amount of new iconography can bring this, or the fervent prayers of Sophia Kantopoulou back and perhaps the community could look into publishing a photo memoir of the church in its undamaged state in order to act as a point of reference for the future, for I feel that the burning of this church marks a historical watershed in our community, to which the historians of tomorrow will return.
The fact is that despite the rhetoric, Evangelismos was largely neglected and unloved by the majority of Greek-Melburnians. Caught between an ugly and ultimately useless turf war between the Community and the Archdiocese for decades, it remained a reminder of the type of strife celebrated only by the most fervent of partisans on either side. In the meantime, as everyone else built their local brotherhoods, in opposition to or complete disregard of the GOCMV and founded largely architecturally-challenged churches in suburbs close to home, Evangelismos was allowed to lapse into obscurity, the defacing of its foundation stone being symbolic of our lack of historical consciousness and continuity.
In this way, the past tradition of ecclesiastical strife as embodied by Evangelismos arguably constitutes a burden, especially for younger members of the Greek Orthodox Community of Melbourne and Victoria, who question why their institution should be tasked with overseeing matters of religion and indeed, no longer view the terms ‘Greek’ and ‘Orthodox’ as inextricably entwined. Symptomatic of this, is the recent tacit dropping of the word ‘Orthodox,’ from that entity’s informal communications, hinting that a new direction away from the traditional, is being considered. If so, then the burning of the most significant symbol of the perceived fetters of the past, grants the casting of that new direction, immense bittersweet poignancy.
Nothing ever goes on as before and the real chord struck in the hearts of most of us at the devastation of our community's foundation point, is that it constitutes evidence that the constant niggling feeling we have, that our communal works and deeds will prove to be ephemeral, is now palpable. Yet this does not have to be so. Already the leadership of the GOCMV, with the surprising energy and deep respect for the past that is so characteristic of it, has secured the devastated premises and in consultation with the Archdiocese, is planning its restoration. In doing so, it can tap into the immense groundswell of community sympathy and support it has been able to garner through its astute management of its other projects, as well as the residual and now, in the aftermath of the fire, resurgent attachment to Evangelismos church.
Regardless of the form that such architectural restoration takes, or of the future ideological and religious direction of our institutions, if we can as a whole, memorialise and celebrate the history of Evangelismos, granting it a unique and viable (rather than tokenistic) role within the Greek community, as well as restoring it to its rightful place as the fundament, not only of our own but of all Orthodox communities in Melbourne, making it a place of pilgrimage and a multi-cultural touchstone of identity for all ethnicities that played a role in its foundation, then we have its ensured its relevance and justified the prayers of its donors, if not for eternity (Orthodox conception of time is even more otherworldly than Greek), then at least for the considerable future.
DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@Hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 14 May 2016

There is a reason why Greek men are constantly at war with their fathers,” my obsessed with Greek mythology friend once told me. “The ancient Greeks knew this, which is why it appears in the ancient myths. Gaia, in her quest for emancipation from her husband, Ouranos, gave her son Cronos a sickle, and made him cleave off his father’s genitals. Rhea, Cronos’ wife, gave Zeus the knowledge to defeat his father. The Titanomachy can thus be explained as the struggle for emancipation by a younger Greek generation, against their fathers, who are bent on oppressing them and preventing them from growing up.”

There can be no doubt that in ‘Fathers from the Edge,’ a recently published compendium of narratives examining the complex and multi-faceted relationship between Greek-Australian writers and their fathers, examples of latent and sometimes not so latent forms of progenitoral aggression are manifest. As the editor, academic Helen Nickas, for whom this book is a companion to her much acclaimed ‘Mothers from the Edge,’ states: “While there is much affection in the depiction of fathers, these are not from an idealized perspective. The writers don’t seek to romanticize their fathers but to understand them, especially as time has mellowed and matured their feelings about family relationships.” This ‘warts and all’ (from the offspring’s perspective) portrayal of Greek fathers has as its aim, to provide a glimpse of the manifold ways in which life lived within two cultures can impact upon a familial relationship, paving the way to understanding and ultimately compassion.

In many respects, the above mythological analysis is an apt one. In most of the twenty-four stories comprising the collection, fathers are portrayed as remote, unintelligible and Sphinx-like figures, impossible to comprehend. Such relationships as are formed between such fathers and their progeny, rather than a meeting of minds, are based on delineation and demarcation of boundaries. Fathers are left to battle their own impenetrable demons, most of which have to do with the trauma of dislocation and relocation to another country, war, or family breakdown, often appearing selfish and thus subverting the Greek-Australian stereotype of the selfless all-providing father, while their Australian-born or reared children look on incomprehensibly and with increasing feelings of resentment and dislocation, a resentment that was often mutual. As Despina Michael writes in ‘The Orange Grove:’ “Dad loved us, but resented us at the same time. We had colonized him. He could never leave.”

These titanic fathers, are often figures of childhood terror. Dmetri Kami writes of his father in ‘The Fisherman from Tenedos’: “Although I forgive him for striking his wife, I am haunted by the screams and sobs that put my sister and I to sleep for the first years of our lives.” In ‘Those Three Words’ Dimitri Gonis gives voice to his own Titan, a father formidable and gigantic, whose dimensions can only be appreciated and reconciled with the passage of time and the utterance of the magic words ‘I love you:’ “The truth is, we kids feared my father, We’d hear him turning the key and instead of running to the door, we’d run away from it.” Such intimidating fathers, problematic as they are, (Vrasidas Karalis opens his story ‘The Age of the Father’ thus: “When he died, they all sighed with relief; he had been a problem for years”) also remain an obstacle in their children’s own maturation, for their impenetrability, causes their children to be unable to identify with them and cleaves a rift of culture, time and personality between the generations. Until that rift is healed, it remains as a wound, rendering all before it dysfunctional. “For the son, he remained an enigma,” writes Karalis. “An indecipherable palindrome.”

Some authors, such as Nick Trakakis, attempt to render their fathers effable by resorting to classical history, geography and literature. In ‘Of Blood and Spirit,’ Trakakis makes the following observation in his quest to understand his father: “But there is something else, something more remarkable, I have found. My father, as I said is Cretan. And what are Cretan renown for? Love of freedom: fierce independence. Nobility…” It is almost as if a return to the fundamentals, that of ancestral place of origin, provides the key to our viewing of our Titans in a more humane perspective. It is not without coincidence then Dmetri Kakmi defines his father primarily as being ‘from Tenedos.’ As Tina Haralambakis writes in ‘Offshoots:’ “My life-long obsession with my parents’ homeland most likely began in early childhood, while listening to my father strum his guitar and sing along to his old recordings of Greek tangos.” She makes an important point. As progenitors, our fathers defy and transcend temporal classifications. They are both past and present, suggesting that our present with them must in subtle ways, be qualified by the past. Such an idea is taken up by Helen Nickas, when she feels to ask her father in: ‘A Belated Letter from a Daughter ‘Down Under’: “How do I feel about my homeland? Is it still home for me?”

On the other hand, in Victoria Kyriakopoulos’ brilliant piece: ‘KISSmania,’ the life-rejecting negativity of the protagonist’s father stems from his geographical background which does not permit him to come to terms with his new environment, and impedes his offsprings’ engagement with their world: “No was her father’s standard, inflexible response to anything alien and threatening from the outside world. Helen was expected to respect his authority, his better judgment, no questions asked.” In that world, dethronement of the Titan is personified in a supreme act of resistance: Attending a KISS concert in defiance of the father’s prohibition.

The inability of fathers and their children to find a common language within which to articulate their relationship is often expressed as a possible impediment to its natural progression within the stories. Dmetri Kakmi, for instance asks: “Would things be different if he and I spoke the same language? Would we be able to share intimate thoughts and feelings, or does he belong to a generation that has no place for such shilly-shallying?” In Justice Emilios Kyrou’s story: ‘Yiannis Kyrou, a courageous spirit,’ such questions are turned on their head, as is the relationship of provider/protector, beneficiary/suppliant, as Justice Kyrou uses his knowledge of the English language in order to shield his parents from experiencing racism. Justice Kyrou’s story is to be distinguished from most of the other contributions as, even though he was made to feel ashamed of his origin, it is apparent throughout the text that he not only fully understood his parents’ perspective, but also shared their values and aspirations. As such, the only gap here, was one of education and considering that in obtaining this, Justice Kyrou was fulfilling his father’s expectations, this in no way impinged upon the maintenance of a close and loving relationship.

When I was asked for a contribution to ‘Fathers from the Edge,’ I was unsure as to how to proceed. Unlike Dmetri Kakmi, my father and I do have a common language in which to articulate our relationship: English. Unlike many of the other authors, I have no use or need to seek recourse to history, geography or a grief-stricken past to explain my father to myself, for he arrived in Australia when he was four and has no memory of Greece. Our values, aspirations, attitudes and level of education are commensurate with each other and I revel in no one’s company more than his. Furthermore, how do I put into words my admiration and love for my own creator, friend, advisor and guide, a person who to this day, constitutes my ultimate male role-model, being possessed with a nobility of soul and plethora of attributes that I continue to aspire to attain, despite the flaws in my own character?

Ultimately, I decided to attempt to provide an account of what happens when the gods descend from Mount Olympus, assume human form and choose to walk among us, as equals. My story, “Coming out Greek,” is therefore a tale of how my father and I grew up together, seeking to embrace a common ethnic and cultural identity, while reconciling the disparate strands of a linguistic, historical and social melting pot, which we discovered side by side. The act of emancipation that forms the climax of the story is not my own, but rather my father’s, in coming to terms with the same type of racism faced by Justice Kyrou in his own past, but resolving its effects in a radically different way.

Helen Nickas’ publication of ‘Fathers from the Edge,’ is timely given how many of our fathers and custodians of the foundation myth of our community are now slipping way. Now is the time, if not to reconcile but at least to analyse and appreciate the complexities of a relationship that forms the social and psychological background to the entire history of the Greek community in Australia.

Fathers from the Edge will be launched on Tuesday, 24 May at 6:30pm at the Greek Centre, 168 Lonsdale Street, Melbourne.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

First published in NKEE on Saturday 21 May 2016

I was fifteen when I was taken to Kandanos. I had no idea of the history of that place, nor why I was being taken there. It was a cold, wintry day. The leaden clouds hung low in the sky, as if assailed by an unbearable burden that had seeped into the ground and was somehow dragging them down to it. When I entered the village for the first time, I was overwhelmed by an inexorable sense of dread and despondency. The hairs of my arms began to stand up as if they had been charged with electricity and I broke out into an uncontrollable sweat. I too felt as if I was being dragged, by cthonic forces I could not explain, into a tomb. Somehow, I knew that in this place, ineffably terrible things had taken place. It was a feeling that I would come to recognise again and again, upon subsequent visits to Kondomari in Crete, Kalavryta in the Peloponnese and Lingiades in Epirus yet I will never forget the first time I smelt the earth of a land steeped in bad blood.
I didn't need to be informed by my travelling companions that Kandanos had been completely razed and its inhabitants mercilessly slaughtered. Despite the reconstruction of the village and the prominently displayed eerie Wehrmacht signposts commemorating the destruction of the village at the local memorial, proclaiming: "Here stood Kandanos, destroyed in retribution for the murder of 25 German soldiers, never to be rebuilt again," the sense of overwhelming brutality was and I imagine, still is palpable. It is right that this is so, for the destruction of Kandanos constitutes one of the most atrocious war crimes committed during the occupation of Crete by the Nazis in World War II.
Much is made during the month of May, of the Battle of Crete and the heroic resistance of the Cretan people against the Nazi forces. Lately, Australians have in the media, afforded increasingly greater prominence to the Battle of Crete as heroic ANZAC soldiers fought side by side with local Cretans, despite almost non-existent Allied planning, to provide Allied soldiers with enough time to evacuate the island. Rather than abandoning the Cretans to their fate, a considerable number of ANZAC soldiers remained behind to assist with the Cretan resistance. As a result, instead of being the expected proverbial walk in the park for Hitler, the airborne German invasion of Crete was a disaster, requiring the diversion of further troops and the application of extreme repressive measures in order to cower the local population.
In effect, Kandanos, which had been bombed during the first days of the Nazi attack, was punished for resisting invasion. Three days after the commencement of the battle of Crete, on 23 May 1941, the inhabitants of Kandanos confronted and fought against a motorised German detachment that sought to pass through the village. On the following day, they set an ambush for the advancing German troops of the 5th Gebirgs Division. Being vastly outnumbered, the locals were forced to retreat in the mountains and the Nazis continued their advance to the strategic location of Palaiochora.
By 31 May 1941, Crete surrendered and it was ostensibly all over for the Cretans. A legend was about to be born, one that synthesised the famed recalcitrance of the Cretans with their love of country, worship of freedom, deep sense of cultural identity, a unique sense of machismo and the ability to make the ultimate of sacrifices in order to preserve the aforementioned. Rather than be cowed by the numerical and logistical superiority of the Nazi forces, rather than being subjugated by their increasingly criminal reprisals, the Cretans refused to accept the violent occupation of their land. Extending guest friendship and protection to the few allied soldiers that remained behind, the Cretans fought on, sometimes with nothing more than their bare hands and they paid a terrible price for doing so.
For the Germans, steeped in their own perverted notions of military conduct and racial superiority could not view the resistance of the Cretans as a logical and necessary consequence of a people defending their homes from an invasion. According to them, only professional soldiers could be extended military courtesy and in effect, the locals were naught but pernicious vermin that had to be punished for having the temerity to resist and oppose the devastation and domination of their lands and, exterminated. Thus, temporary commander General Kurt Student issued an order for launching a wave of brutal reprisals against the local population, to be carried out rapidly by the same units who had been confronted by the locals.
Consequently, on 3 June 1941, a day after the execution of locals in the village of Kondomari, German troops from the III Battalion of the 1st Air Landing Assault Regiment, led by Oberleutnant Horst Trebes arrived in Kandanos. They slaughtered one hundred and eighty of its people and all their livestock, symbolic both of the manner in which for the Nazis, the Cretans were less than humans and the fact that despite their sense of cultural superiority, the Nazis descended to a level lower than that of a beast.. After its destruction, Kandanos was declared a 'dead zone' and its remaining population was forbidden to return to the village and rebuild it. They only did so, after the war was over.
For me, more than any gun toting, bandana wearing, heavily moustachioed Cretan, or the quite correct celebrations of the bonds between ANZAC's and Cretans forged in battle and resistance, it is the massacre of Kandanos that encapsulates both the true significance and the magnitude of the horror of the Battle of Crete. Its destruction tells an all too terrible a tale of what can happen when people are dehumanised, either by an ideology or a society. Stripped of dignity, totally devoid of empathy or compassion, the murderous Germans considered the wholesale massacre of innocents a completely ordinary consequence of their opposition to their overlord's violent appropriation of them, and thus, were able to kill them without the slightest bit of hesitation. Sadly, this is a scenario repeated again and again throughout Greece and Europe during the war and it appears from subsequent conflicts that the world has learned nothing from the grievous fate of Kandanos, nullifying its sacrifice.
This is ever more so because despite being captured by the British after the war and coming before a military tribunal in order to answer charges of mistreatment and murder of prisoners of war by his forces in Crete, General Karl Student was never extradited to Greece, the Allies refusing Greece's request for him to be tried by the nation he so blighted. Instead, the unspeakable Student was found guilty of three out of eight charges and sentenced to five years in prison. However, he was given a medical discharge and was released in 1948. It goes without saying that Student was never tried for crimes against Cretan civilians and one must ask whether this was because the Allies, despite the protection and Cretan lives lost in order to preserve their soldiers from harm, saw the Greek people through the same dehumanising lens as those who perpetrated the genocidal crime at Kandanos or at least saw it as of less consequence than the London Blitz. Many other perpetrators of similar crimes in Greece also remained unpunished, on occasion, Greece being threatened by the emerging West Germany with economic or other sanctions if she continued to press for claims of justice.
In fact it could be argued that Kandanos is but a mere strand in a longer thread of genocide crimes in which Germans had active involvement, either inplanning, aiding or abetting, including that of the Herero and Namaqua peoples of Namibia between 1904 and 1907, and the Assyrian, Armenian and Greek genocides, where the forced reolcation of Christians from strategic areas and the death marches were carried out with German complicity. The highest-ranking member of Germany’s military mission to Turkey, General Bronsart von Schellendorf, for example directly issued orders for the round up and deportation of Armenians. Crimes of this nature remained unpunished and it is precisely for this reason that in the Second World War, Nazi military leaders felt unrestrained both by the force of the law or the morals of humanity in perpetrating them again and again, especially in Crete.
Kandanos therefore remains as a poignant memoir of the futility of conflict and the precarious nature of human existence. The resistance of its inhabitants did not stop the occupation of Crete, just as Kandanos' destruction did nothing to halt the Cretan resistance. What it does do, is to endure as a stark reminder that we must seek out and actively condemn all crimes of racial violence, wherever and whenever these occur, making sure that the perpetrators are truly punished so that the aforementioned crimes are never committed. Sleep easy victims of Kandanos. The earth continues to rail against the depravities visited upon you and will continue to do so as long as the world endures.
DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@Hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 28 May 2016

The dolorous news that Northcote High School will gradually phase out its Modern Greek (and Italian) program has caused great consternation within the Greek community. This is especially so given not only that this is one of the more ancient public school Greek language programs in Melbourne, having been in operation for some four decades, but also because some 120 students are currently studying the language at the school. In their stead, Chinese and French will be taught.

This should not surprise us. Victorian educators aware of this matter have commented that ever since deregulation, principals have been empowered to make requisite decisions in order to attract students (principals’ pay being dependent upon numbers). The new and lucrative market of full fee paying foreign students is relevant to such decision making. School policy is thus aimed at marketing towards full fee paying foreign students (hence the inclusion of Chinese as a language) and upper middle class students as a target demographic in hipster town, that will give the school the grades so that it can market itself effectively (hence the prestige language: French). In this paradigm, Greek as a language is divestible.

It is not known whether the Greek community at large is cognisant of such considerations. Nonetheless, in the meantime, yet again, the Greek community is called upon to enter campaign mode and mobilise in order to prevent this calamitous event from actually transpiring.

Such campaigns are deemed to be effective, especially given the propensity of public schools to attempt to divest themselves of Modern Greek studies of late. Some years ago, a concerted community campaign to 'save' Modern Greek at Wheelers Hill Secondary College ensured the continuation of the program, at least until the present. In the case of Wales Street Primary in Thornbury however, where similar campaigns to preserve Greek were successful, earlier this year, Greek was discontinued after a democratic vote, despite the school having a large Greek student base. Since 2011, the study of Greek has also been discontinued at Fairfield Primary, Bentleigh High and Westgarth Primary School and it is rumoured that it is under threat at Balwyn High as well.

It appears then that at least for the past two decades, a pattern of decline has been established vis a vis Greek language studies wherein, rather than establishing a strategy for expanding the number of students, we are content to sit idly by, paying no attention to the diminution in enrolments or the decline of fluency standards until such time as any given programme is threatened with termination. It is only then, in order to forestall the inevitable, that we spring into action, largely ignoring and seldom addressing the root causes behind this disturbing phenomenon.

Apparently, one of the reasons cited for this tendency to discontinue Modern Greek Language programs from public schools, is that the Greek community is already serviced by its own private or community educational facilities and therefore there is no need to burden the public purse. Conversely, proponents of Greek being taught in public schools maintain that as taxpayers, we have a right to demand that Greek be taught in such public schools. This is a deep seated belief that has been widely held by our community ever since the formal institution of multiculturalism as government policy.

Nonetheless, it appears that our right to demand, does not correlate to an actual right to have the language taught. Various stakeholders have pointed out that when Greek was introduced to the public curriculum so many decades ago, the Greek community was one of a few that comprised the multicultural fabric of Victoria and was electorally significant. Now, though numerically significant, it is one of over a hundred ethnic groups, all of which vie for their place in the sun and a slice of the funding pie. Many of these groups can be trusted to vote en bloc in a particular way, in a manner which the largely assimilated Greek community no longer does. Therefore the need to placate the Greek community politically is seen as less acute than it may have been in years past. Put simply, there is a section of the powers that be, that consider that we are insisting upon the maintenance of privileges that are archaic and bear no relevance to the real state of our community and its needs, simply because this feeds our ego and makes us feel important. The maintenance of such privileges is a burden on the public purse, preventing distribution of funding to emerging migrant communities that have greater need of it. Furthermore, some of them argue, in a society where economics drives politics instead of the other way around, given the continuous decline in enrolments, funding programs for which there is no manifest demand is inefficient, leading to poor 'outcomes.'

We must pay homage to the committed first generation migrants who fought hard to have modern Greek language classes instituted in public education. Theirs is an unprecedented, historic achievement, effected at a time when there was dire need for such programmes. Yet we must admonish the broader community for resting on its laurels and not realising that regrettably, in the modern world the term 'policy' is not synonymous with 'rights,' that policies can and will change over time, according to expediency, social evolution and political considerations and that it is an exercise in futility to expect that the interests of the State will be in sync with those of the Greek community perpetually, without any diversion whatsoever.

As a community, we should have looked forward to a time when the maintenance of modern Greek language studies in public education was no longer in the interests of the State Government and planned accordingly to address such a happenstance, prior to its arising. Our experience during Ottoman times, when privileges afforded by Sultanic berat were rescinded and had to be re-negotiated every generation should have made us more cognisant of the transient nature of all things political. Our insistence, even now, upon illusory rights as taxpayers or citizens shows a wilful and concerning blindness on the part of our community with regard to the way it negotiates with government and plans for the future. While our political consciousness is stuck in the eighties, our demands will become either quaint or incomprehensible to those who purport to legislate on our behalf.

Blaming the abolition of public Greek language programs on the prevalence of private or community Greek schools therefore represents the height of cynicism and an attempt to distract us from government abandonment of a commitment to community language education. It is common knowledge that very seldom do foreign language students in the public sphere obtain functional fluency in the languages they study. Scores of studies have attested to intrinsic problems with the effective teaching of foreign languages in Australian public schools, indicating that even where such language programmes exist, their actual rationale and aims may diverge alarmingly from community expectations as to standard. This is something the Greek community has never addressed. On the other hand, schools run by the community for the community ideally have the freedom to tailor their language teaching to reflect values and aspirations relevant and particular to that community.

The underlying problem with our community's overall stance to Greek language education is not defencelessness in the face of cynical government shifting of political positions on substantive multiculturalism but rather a perennial inactivity to come together to articulate exactly what we want out of modern Greek language education in Victoria. In short, our community has no language policy of its own. Our institutions have developed independently and often in opposition and conflict with one another, with ideology or profit often displacing fluency as a priority and no uniformity of curriculum. No study of the changing demographics of our community and in particular the effect of mixed marriages, or the bourgeoisification of the latter generations, on language learning have been undertaken. Consequently, we can neither plan, nor co-ordinate our endeavours so as to manage the challenges of the future. Criminally, there exists no mechanism for review or evaluation of any of our Greek language learning providers.

There is immense folly in our approach. If we could, even now articulate a common approach to modern Greek language teaching, we could then, as a community, co-ordinate our activities in such away as to ensure that Greek is taught by a multitude of institutions, both public and private, in a meaningful way, aimed towards fluency and functionality, rather than a bureaucratic ticking of boxes reflecting the achievement of illusory outcomes. Such a co-ordinated body, properly invested with authority by our community would then emerge as the key stakeholder in any conversation with the State in matters of language policy and be able to enter into effective dialogue with it. Yet until such as the necessary conversation within our own community takes place, we will be doomed, as deluded Lotus-eaters, to sail between each linguistic Scylla and Charybdis, tacking to any wind Aeolus may send our way in the hope of salvation, all the while paying heed to the seductive song of the political Sirens, who continue to inform us that we matter. Aux armes, citoyens.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 4 June 2016

It has been foretold by Saint Kosmas the Aetolian: “The blonde race will provide assistance and the City shall be given to the Greeks.” Saint Paisios also confirmed this, stating that “the blonde race shall intervene from the North and everything will transpire as is contained in the prophecies.” An inscription of the sarcophagus of Saint Constantine the Great is reported to read: “the blonde race shall vanquish the agents of Ishmael.” Agathangelos, the supposed prophecies of the Rhodian monk Ieronymos Agathangelos, which were actually written by the archimandrite Theokleitos Polyeidis, predict that the “blonde race,” will rise to attack the Turks and save the Greeks.

All this is a prelude to the ultimate prophecy, made by the Byzantine Emperor Leo the Wise in his collection of Oracles about the Fall of Constantinople: “With regards to the legendary, poor and chosen king, who is well known and yet unknown, who lives at the edge of the geographical area of the Byzantine empire. The true king, whom people have chased from his abode… will be revealed at the time when the end of the Ishmaelites approaches… It will be on a Friday, in the third hour of the morning when he will be revealed… He, who is to be revealed, will be identified by means of celestial signs. While he is sleeping, he will hear a voice and see and Angel who will appear like a royal servant dressed in white; the Angel will take him by the hand and will tell him: you, who are sleeping, get up… Jesus Christ will be with you. It is your calling to lead a chosen people; and the Angel will add: you, who have been concealed, do not hide yourself any longer, many are asking for you… and furthermore, the Angel will give him plaques of stone upon which are etched two commands: Punish the evil doers and rule justly over your defeated enemies.”

The problem is for centuries, the Greek people have not been able to figure out just exactly who the blonde race is. In 1750, when the prophecies of Agathangelos were first published, readers automatically assumes that the blonde race were the Russians, as the prophecy clearly describes Russian encroachment upon Tartar held territory in Ukraine and the Crimea, territory to which Greeks were invited to settle and given a remission of taxes for a decade by Catherine the Great. When Rigas Feraios published the prophecies of Agathangelos in Vienna in 1795, he implied in his introduction that the blonde race must be the French, under Napoleon. This is despite the fact that one of the prophecies reads as follows: “O Frenchmen, where are you going? The new king leads you to the slaughterhouse, and you shall leave your lives upon the high mountains; and your enterprises shall be manifestly abandoned.”

Publishers of the Athenian 1838 edition on the other hand pointed in the direction of Otto and the Bavarians. During the Second World War, on the other hand, readers of the Agathangelos in Cyprus interpreted the prophecies in such a manner as to have the Germans as the blonde race. Supposedly, they would liberate the island from British rule and restore it to its former glory. We all know how that went for them and the Cypriots ought to have bene a bit more careful considering that apparently, Agathangelos said the following: “Germany, Germany, why are you so proud? You will be divided into two.” Ever since that time, generations of idealistic millennial Greeks have been painstakingly scouring the Agathangelos, along with the various dubious additional fabricated prophecies that are created to suit all occasions, in search of clues.

Gentle readers will therefore take comfort to learn that the search is over and the true nature of the blonde race has been revealed. It turns out that it is after all, the Russians. It makes sense when you think about it. Russia is to the north (a prerequisite), it is, in its present manifestation, to all intents and purposes, a pious orthodox country and even though Greeks are commonly aware that the Rus in Rus-sian means ‘the red ones’(it actually doesn’t, it comes from the old Norse word ‘rods’ meaning ‘the men who row’) their leader, Putin is fair and blonde. His sallow features remind one of Tsar Ivan the Terrible riding his destrier in the great medieval icon of the Church Militant, an allegorical representation of the conquest of Kazan. Not only is he a judo champion of repute, a muscled and agile all-round sportsman, jet flyer and racing car driver, tranquilizer of polar bears and shooter of whales, he is also the leader of the largest country in the world. Further, it is widely rumoured that Putin is descended from the royal Tverskoy family and in particular, from Mikhail of Tver, the Grand Prince of that principality. I cannot think of anyone suited to be an agent of the cosmic forces that will return the Emperor to his throne in Constantinople.

The monks of Mount Athos think so too, which is why they recently enthroned Putin on the despotic throne, during his brief visit to Mount Athos, to the fury of the president of the Hellenic Republic, Prokopis Pavlopoulos, who despite being the nominal ruler of the region, was not offered even a sub-throne at Putin’s side. Then again, there is nothing contained in the prophecies about a white haired Professor of Administrative Law with the countenance of a person sucking a lemon in any way saving the Greek people.

The enthronement of Putin should have come as no surprise. There were signs and portents everywhere. A week before his arrival, countless articles were posted on Facebook, proclaiming that Putin had threatened the leader of the Ishmaelite horde with the conquest of Constantinople, should he choose to persecute the Greeks. A night owl, flying over Saint Sophia was heard to screech the song of the Volga Boatmen before crashing into a minaret and its GPS mysteriously vanished and could not be recovered for analysis. Did not the righteous leader prove his suitability for his pre-ordained role, by acknowledging, while ensconced upon the bishop’s throne, that “a very important and necessary att is undertaken on Holy Mount Athos. This act is about the preservation of the moral traditions of our society. To a considerable degree, you are a source of this well-being and grace?” Did he not state that the Athonites are “fighting for the faith,” thus implying that he would also do so? Most tellingly, did he not, not-so obliquely hint at the unity that is to come by stating: “I am confident that Russia’s ties with Holy Mount Athos and Greece as a whole will continue to strengthen, and spiritual kinship and trust will continue to set the tone of our traditionally close and friendly relations?” Truly then he is the chosen one and all that remains is to locate who is the poor and chosen king who Putin will install upon his throne. Those monks who have seen in Alexis Tsipras’ inability to afford a neck-tie, some type of correlation, have been excommunicated.

Οἱ μισοῦντες αὐτόν, which is good imperial Greek for the haterz, are incensed for various reasons. The more religious-minded of them maintain that the bishop’s throne upon which Putin is installed represents the teaching authority of a bishop and should not have been usurped by a secular leader, no matter how gifted, and that this episode represents the way monks, who should be concerned with things spiritual cannot resist the temptation to meddle with the chthonic matters of this corrupt world. The Byzantine Imperial party, on the other hand, refute this, arguing that the true throne of the bishop is in the apse behind the holy altar. This location is referred to as the "high place" and represents the presence of Christ presiding over the services, even when the bishop is not present and therefore an icon of Christ is often placed above the bishop's throne. The throne located along the southern wall of the church, on the kliros, in which Putin stood, is just an elaborately carved monastic kathisma or choir stall on steroids which has no liturgical significance save that during the divine liturgy, the deacon ascends to this throne to read the gospel, facing west. This was traditionally where the Byzantine Emperor stood during church services in the Great Church of Saint Sophia and it is the bishops who have actually, in their use of that seat, actually usurped a throne that properly belongs to the Emperor and must remain vacant until his return. The fact that in the Russian tradition, there is no kathisma and instead, there i a large square platform set in the very center of the nave, with a removable chair or faldstool placed on it, a remnant of the ancient bemah or amvon, borrowed from the Jewish synagogue, which stood in the center of the church in ancient times should provide perspective as to the full extent of this usurpation. According to the purists therefore, Putin is an upstart, an anti-Emperor who will lead the righteous astray, clad as he is in improperly given, ecclesiastical authority. Then there is Prokopis Pavlopoulos, who stubbornly maintains that he should have been the one enthroned, but his supporters number himself and his neutered cat and thus does not deserve further mention here.

Nonetheless, those aggrieved can have their consciences put to rest. Putin is a mere throne warmer. For the chronicles state that it is the Emperor St John Vatazes who is rumoured to return after Putin’s exertions are over. When he was exhumed, the dead emperor appeared as if he were sitting upon a royal throne, without any darkening, without any odor, without any signs that he was dead. He appeared as if made of marble. It is he who shall arise at the appointed moment, to re-mount his throne, pushing aside any bishops or presidents who happen to be in his way.

These are dark and troubled times pious readers. The Greek people are languishing under a kleptocracy forseen by St Kosmas: "There will come a time for your enemies to take even the ash from the fire, but do not change your faith like others will." Perhaps, mired in the quagmire of their own misery, they cannot recognize their savior when they see him. Quoth St Kosmas: "There will come once a foreign crowd who will believe in Christ. But you will not know it.” Yet salvation truly is at hand. Just as St Kosmas predicted a way of the μνημόνιον: "They will impose you a huge and unbearable tax, but will not catch up," so too did he see the coming of the blonde ones. "The great battle will be in the City. There, all nations will gather, and so much blood will be spilled as for a calf to swim in. The victor will be the blonde race. We will be with the blond race". Brace yourselves therefore good people. The battle for Middle Earth is beginning.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 11 June 2016

ΦΑΝΑΤΩΣ ΤΟΥΣ ΠΡΟΒΟΤΕΣ! proclaims a recent comment on a social media post by an Australian-born EΛΛΗΝΑΡΑ. If, Professor Higgins-like one was called upon to geographically place the said patriot by reference to his phonology as attested to by his post, then one would invariably hazard a guess that his place of residence is Northcote, pronounced Norphcote, though the p is generally silent, among those Australian-born hoplites of Hellenism who have particular difficulties with voiceless fricatives.
There is a funny thing about these Ellinarades. Despite the fact that some of them chose to intone the chant "Έξω οι Τούρκοι από την Κύπρο" at the recent Australia-Greece soccer match (and one would wonder why they chose to do so given that the chances of either Ban Ki Moon, Recep Tayyip Erdogan or indeed any other Turk who is fluent in Greek being present and being sufficiently moved by the aforementioned verse in order to do something to end a four-decade long injustice are rather small) they are nowhere to be seen during the annual Justice for Cyprus march organised by the Cypriot community.
Similarly, despite the fact that some of them have become enraged by what they consider to be the racist prohibition of the display of the flag of Vergina at the Australia-Greece soccer match and the ejection from the game of one particular flag-bearer, despite their enthusiastic participation in the "Ελλάς, Ελλάς, Μακεδονία" chant (again it is important to note that neither Skopjan leader Gruevski, nor United Nations negotiator Matthew Nimetz were present at the game, unless the chant was directed at undercover agents of Skopjan name appropriation), said Ellinarades are strangely absent from all of the activities of the Pan-Macedonian Association, the United Villages of Florina, the Aristotelis Association or even the Australian Institute of Macedonian Studies.
In like fashion, at the recent commemoration of the Battle of Crete, the Ellinarades were nowhere to be seen. Indeed, despite some of them chanting: "Τούρκος καλός μόνο νεκρός" at the Australia-Greece soccer match, the Ellinarades were conspicuously absent at the annual events commemorating the Pontian genocide. This is mystifying. If the Ellinarades are so imbued with the love of their motherland and so hurt by other's abuse of her that they require the slightest opportunity to express their love and air their grievances, (hence the pre-match chanting of “Greece, I love you and I will follow you as long as I live,” by ther Lonsdale Street Ellinarades) it appears illogical that they should choose to ignore an event that protests against the massacre of some 350,000 of their innocent compatriots and/or ancestors. Maybe on that day, they were just hurting on the inside.
You won't see the Ellinarades at any events that have to do with Greek language preservation or education. In fact, a good many of them, despite the fact that their cup of love for all things 'Hellenic' (they reject the word Greek as being unhellenic even though both words, Graecos and Hellenas refer to two ancient tribes in Epirus) runneth over, can hardly speak the language, as can be evidenced by their heavy use of the Google translation function when they seek to render their social posts in the mother tongue in order to display their patriotic credentials to their like-minded contacts in the motherland. When this is pointed out to them, they will often argue that speaking the Greek language is irrelevant to the Greek identity. What is important is to have undying love for Hellas, accept its superiority uncritically, rail against the rest of the world which, recognising that superiority, is involved in a conspiracy to degrade and humiliate the Hellenes, punishing them for their brilliance and rooting out all Helleno-traitors who, being in thrall to the Germanic Zionists (figure that one out), are legion.
Ellinarades are conspicuously absent from fund-raising functions for Greek welfare and aged care facilities such as Fronditha and Agapi, or the various Church-organised philoptochos poor relief endeavours. They do not activate their social media networks for the purposes of cajoling their friends to donate generously for the preservation and assistance of local Greek clubs or dance groups. And yet the funds that some of them expend to purchase their blue and white regalia, or execute their scotch-infused, rose-petal strewn zeimbekiko at the ersatz bouzoukia around town would go a decent way in assistance those groups that really ensure the cohesion of our community.
Some of these Ellinarades are on the dole. Others are on carer's pensions. Many have attended government funded public schools and many others have graduated from university by availing themselves of the Australian government's HECS scheme. Most have been born or have lived the vast majority of their lives in Australia. It is therefore perplexing and deeply disquieting that some of them chose, at the recent Australia-Greece soccer match, to boo the national Australian team and the Australian national anthem. In fact, it represents the height of ingratitude both to the country, the community that nurtured them and the Greek Orthodox Community of Melbourne and Victoria which lobbied so hard and overcame numerous objections in order to secure the transfer of the match from Newcastle to Melbourne.
As such, the antics of the Ellinarades should not be dismissed as mere youthful exuberance, especially given sections of the broader Australian community have always questioned the commitment of migrants and their Australian-born offspring to this country. As enthusiastic Australian citizens, our communities have achieved a praiseworthy equilibrium between preserving and evolving our ancestral cultures while at the same time integrating ourselves meaningfully within the broader social context. This has been achieved in partnership with government. We can ill afford the antics of the uncouth to disturb that golden mean. Nor can we tolerate those largely disconnected from the Greek community, with a limited and perverted understanding of the Greek tradition imposing upon us their pernicious view of their identity and by corollary, inviting our fellow citizens to view us as cast from the same mould, simply because they lack any other means to "Get their Greek on."
Granted, simian chest-thumping and jungle-cries are part and parcel of the sporting experience regardless of how much they may make us cringe. Justifying anti-social and illegal behaviour by reference to a deification of anti-social antics in Greece which have nothing to do with tradition and everything to do with a society in the process of disintegration, is quite another. The Ellinara who stated: “Flares are all a part of football. You can take it back centuries, it’s all a part of the atmosphere,” is a case in point and we would all be fascinated to learn whether, in 1816, lighting flares at the soccer was a hallowed tradition in his grandmother's village.
In the aftermath of the match, sundry Ellinarades are crying racism at the manner in which the Australian media chose to emphasise the actions of the unruly few and exaggerate the disorder they created before and during the match. In his study ‘The Wogs are at it Again’: The Media Reportage of Australian Soccer ‘Riots, ’John Hughson argues that the Australian soccer stadium has become an arena of contestation, not for rival football teams, but for warring ethnic groups, who use the terraces and playing field as a ‘battleground’ to settle ‘long standing political grievances’. He argues that the commercial media is largely responsible for this perception and that the media treatment of soccer has constituted a form of institutional discrimination that serves to reinforce attitudes hostile to the broader acceptance of multiculturalism, suggesting that the media is not a passive reproducer of social attitude, but, rather, is a producer or co-producer.

Hughson, as well as George Vasilacopoulos and Tina Nicolacopoulou who have in their study From Foreigner to Citizen: Greek Migrants and Social Change in White Australia 1897-2000," written broadly about the migrant as an eternal subversive element in the eyes of the mainstream are certainly valid points of references in seeking to analyse unsavoury mainstream media motives for focusing on the Ellinarades and yet the same people who deride the Australian mainstream media for doing so, often accept uncritically, the mainstream Greek media's propensity to act in exactly the same way when portraying the often unsavoury nationalistic antics of ethnic groups within Greece. In this, the Ellinarades mindlessly play into the hands of those whose agenda vis a vis all community groups, is well known.

As a community, we need to explore what are the deep seated cause of our insecurity that compel us, to politicise the most simple of events and make them a cause of controversy and strife or at least, regard them as intrinsic to our ethnic identity. Why do we consider the Star of Vergina (a symbol that, despite its ancient provenance until the nineties appeared on no Greek flag anywhere and is thus not a traditional cultural artefact) or indeed the sickening white supremacist, ultra-right wing flag borne by one Ellinara, appropriate objects to take into a field where a bunch of grown men kick an evolved pig's bladder to each other? Why do we invest so much emotion and importance in the outcome of such a game as if our collective and individual dignity depended on it? And finally, we need to determine how we can prevent the neanderthal ersatz, hateful and often racists Hellenes from sullying our reputation, community and thus jeopardising our legitimate and vibrant cultural activities. Maybe by demanding that they finally grow up and take their place in our community as responsible and useful constituents.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 18 June 2016

Though I am not of Pontian descent, and lack the decidedly Pontic features of the bowed legs and prominent nose that serve as readily identifiable markers for all those who would be members of the clan, Pontiaki Estia has always been part of my life. The Central Pontian Organisation: Pontiaki Estia was founded one year prior to my birth and its first club rooms were in my neighbourhood. They exercised an intense fascination upon me during my early days as the lettering adorning the looming yellow and black edifice: ΠΟΝΤΙΑΚΗ ΕCTIA, was the only public Greek signage in my immediate area, upon which I could test my Greek literary skills. Furthermore, the existence of what appeared to be an English C in an otherwise Greek title, was a source of wonderment to me. Long before, I knew precisely what Pontians were, I learned, from them, the Byzantine alphabet.

I became obsessed with the clubrooms and would create stories in my head about what would go on there. Finally, after much nagging, my parents consented to take me to a function. I was very young and dimly remember the prevalence of black chairs and a multitude of people. What did manage to inextricably etch itself into my memory, was the sound of the music that assailed my ear drums. I had never hear anything like it, and just having started to learn to play the violin, I was entranced at the way in which the Pontic kemenche is used almost like a percussion instrument in the Pontic tradition. At that time, Pontian music had melded with the local Macedonian musical traditions found by Pontic refugees in their places of refuge and it was difficult to separate their disparate strands and locate the authentic tradition beneath, something that Pontiaki Estia has, over the years become expert at. On that day, I resolved to a) acquire a kemenche, something that I did almost twenty years later, a flimsy, balsa wood construction from an impoverished Russo-Pontian at Omonoia, and b) find out more about these mysterious, marginal and yet fascinating Pontic beings. This last strand of my resolve, I completed hand in hand with the good people from Pontiaki Estia.

Estia of course, in Greek, now denotes a home but in ancient Greek, it signified a hearth, fireplace, or altar. It is also no coincidence then that the ancient Greek goddess Estia, was the virgin goddess of the hearth, architecture, and the right ordering of domesticity, the family, and the state. Over the four decades of its existence, Pontiaki Estia has provided just that function. Countless people have been warmed at the hearth of its members fervor for Pontic culture in all of its diverse and manifold forms, or have been illuminated by the light of the fire burning within some of it more intrepid members as they went on their own journeys of self-discovery, learning much about some of the more obscure of dark chapters in their ancestor’s history, and so many others have worshipped at the altar of togetherness, solidarity and communalism that best exemplifies the culture of Pontiaki Estia. Defying the trend of Greek organisations that gradually become more insular and seek to exclude ‘others,’ whether by ideology or background, Estia has extended its guest friendship to the wider community, absorbing dancers, thinkers, historians and countless others, which is how I came to find my home there. So closely have its members begun to identify with Pontiaki Estia, as their Estia, way from their own estia, that they have even placed the words “Estia” on their number plates, in a profound and telling statement of identity.

At the recent function commemorating the fortieth anniversary of the foundation of Pontiaki Estia, the dance floor was filled with youth from the various dance groups, all sporting versions of their diverse national costume. I commented that there were more dancers than some Greek brotherhoods currently have members. A young woman who was sitting beside me launched into a lengthy and learned disquisition into the regional variants of the Pontic costume, which can be distinguished by time, marital status, class and geography, all of which have been carefully and painstakingly preserved by the youth of Pontiaki Estia, I was amazed and heartened, though the extent of her erudition should not have come as a surprise. In a club that is now run by its younger members, (a transition that took a decade of conflict to achieve) these second generation Pontians have, to employ the buzz-word, taken “ownership” of their traditional culture. There are to be found within its ranks, specialists on Pontian song, dance, (of late they have been experimenting with new fusions, exploring common threads with Cretan music, showing how a tradition does not have to be oppressive but rather can be teased, explored and transformed into something entirely novel) costume, traditional lifestyle, cookery and of course the Pontian Genocide.

These embracive rather than prescriptive qualities of Pontiaki Estia are perhaps the key ingredients of its brilliance. One finds on of the stultifying, officious parochiality of other Greek organisations here. Instead, I have found, through my involvement in the Genocide Awareness Workshops, pioneered by Estia and the means by which awareness of this tragic event has been disseminated to the broader community, a desire to embrace the unconventional, to seek new and novel ways to get the message across. While some of these efforts bear more fruit than others, it is this willingness to experiment, to try out new approaches without fear of recrimination or keeping them in thrall to undercurrent strategies in fractious endo-community squabbles, that the true value of Pontiaki Estia lies. Thus, in regards to the genocide, Pontiaki Estia has over the years, approached elements of the Turkish community in order to celebrate commonalities of culture, rather than just focus on death, sought to honour those righteous Muslims who protected Christians during the genocide, rather than merely demonise all Ottomans, pioneered a co-ordinated approach to genocide recognition in concert with the Assyrian and Armenian communities (and as such Pontiaki Estia remains one of them most multi-cultural, outward looking Greek organisations in Melbourne), used the media of drama, song, dance, theatre and film in order to tell its story and has now gone entirely mainstream, currently engaging with the City of Ballarat to erect a monument to George Devine Treloar, a savior of the Pontian people, in that city. Their immensity of scope is as breathtaking as it is remarkable, and considering the multifaceted means employed to express their identity, historically important.

Even more important is Pontiaki Estia’s harnessing of local resources in the furtherance of their aims. While they remain an inseparable part of the world wide organized Pontian movement and sponsor visits by overseas artists on a regular basis, they also foster the growth and development of their own musicians, teachers, artists, activists and thinkers, in a way that some other Greek organisations who are still emotionally tied to Greece via a strange and complex inferior complex do not. What we are witnessing emerging in Pontiaki Estia is a particularly Australian development of Pontic culture, one to which all Australians, regardless of ethnic or cultural background, are welcome to participate in and are in fact, actively encouraged to do so.

There were tears in the eyes of many of the attendees of Pontiaki Estia’s fortieth birthday function, not only for those who have departed, carving their mark on the organization but also for those who now follow, or rather dance, in their footsteps. Yet for all of the radical innovation and the exciting new directions forged by a most uncanny, and to many Greek-Australians, marginal group, some challenges remain. The Pontic dialect is being lost and most emerging youth now have diminished facility in the modern Greek tongue. How they will negotiate and contextualize their Pontic identity within a superimposed Greek-Australian one remains to be seen. Nonetheless, they have tremendously inspiring precedents to draw from and immense reserves of positivity to sustain them. And some things, such as the dances that enthralled me almost four decades ago as a child, remain, as a touchstone, a staff and a guide, through the uncertain times that are to come. They, like the Pontians, show us how to transcend time itself.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on 25 June 2016

It is perhaps trite to mention that Story-telling is just possibly, the most ancient of ancient Greek professions. Whereas in other cultures, the powerful or the violent may be glorified and thus lust after immortality, our heroes are characters that exist within a story expounded by story-tellers, so revered, that they assume a position of startling immediacy within the modern Greek consciousness. In the case of Homer and his near contemporary, Hesiod, the web of accounts woven in order to place accounts of the genesis of the world, the succession of divine rulers, the succession of human ages, the origin of human woes and the origin of sacrificial practices within a human context, could be said to constitute the foundation of the Greek identity. Indeed, such is the power of these story-telling archetypes, that their words have ever formed sacred texts for the Greek people, being continuously studied, critiqued, and routinely pillages for themes, characters and even words, throughout antiquity, the Byzantine period and beyond. When one considers that Herodotus, the compiler of stories with the aim of telling us who we are and why things came to be, put the story into Hi-story, only to be surpassed by Thucydides, who made sure it stayed there, and from there, to remember that in Athens, attendance at public story-telling by way of theatre, was compulsory, to contend that we are a nation reared upon stories and are natural story-tellers, is merely, to enunciate the painfully obvious.

That stories shape and mould our identity is beyond doubt. Within them are encoded a vast quantity of attitudes, values and unique thought processes and perspectives, all of which constitute culture and if passed down, ensure the continuity of that culture throughout the generations. This is never more so evident than in the works of the ancient historians. As they tell their tales, they try to define who the Greek people are. Some two and a half thousand years later, we are still trying to do the same, weaving our own strands upon the warp and the weft of the tapestry they so expertly began for us.

Here in our community, we have created a multiplicity of stories and narratives and actively create opportunities to tell them or to pass them on to others. Whether this takes place in the form of the written word through books and the print media, through theatre and traditional dance, education (which again provides a story within a story), or through religious observances, (which are after all the story not only of who we are but also of who we should be), we all generally have a highly developed sense of who we are based on the stories that have been passed down to us and to which we identify.

Given the above, it is thus mystifying that the basic formal art of Greek story-telling appears to be entering a decline within our community, with regard to the later generations. Gone are those halcyon multicultural days when a kindly Rena Frangioudaki could manifest her voice upon public radio and even on one memorable occasion, commercial Australian television to televisually tell stories to Greek-Australian children, in the Greek language. Nowadays, just a decade after our community reached its cultural peak, our children get their Greek stories, if at all, via an English-language filter, losing in the process, much of the linguistic context within which their true genius, and valuable codes of continuity, are encoded.

It comes as no surprise then, that the Olympian Society, (those of Olympia rather than Olympus) decided to commence their story-telling sessions for children last Saturday, with the story of Icarus, the boy who flew close too close to the sun. Alternately a cautionary tale about hubris or (I suspect in the Greek-Australian context), about the necessity of listening to one’s parents. Entering their premises in Thornbury, unsuspecting off-spring were immediately submerged within the Icarian Sea, via master story-teller and early learning specialist Konstantina Mastoropoulou’s dexterous arrangement of pillows and a cloth of blue velvet. A few minutes later, seated along the shores of that wide and tempestuous sea, the children were carried away by the sheer magic of Konstantina’s words. Their eyes were visibly uplifted as they followed Icarus’ heady self-confident ascent towards the heavens, the story-teller’s hands almost having grown the wings that withered and caused his terminal decline. As Konstantina’s words sent the tragic insubordinate youth hurtling to his death, the children unconsciously moved back along the velvet, almost as if in order to give Icarus the requisite room for him to plunge into the debts. Remarkably, though the story-telling took place in Greek, the children present who were not confident in that language, neither complained or lost their concentration. Later, while colouring in pictures of Icarus or reviewing the English version provided to them by Konstantina, one could hear such words as «Δαίδαλος» and «Λαβύρινθος» escape their lips, culminating in almighty «Ικάριο Πέλαγος,» as they bounced up and down upon the pillows comprising the virtual death sea, in order to check out its fatal propensities for themselves.

The brainchild of Olympian Society treasurer and educator John Vithoulkas, Saturday Story-telling has a two-fold purpose: firstly, to provide a facility in which the old and traditional stories can be passed on to the latter generations. Most importantly however, this is being done in the local, suburban, easily accessible, laid-back and friendly environment of a club building. While many Greek clubs jealously guard themselves from the egress of strangers and are thus sinking under the weight of their own introspection (one club in the vicinity, whose doors are never open bears a sign demanding: MEMBERS ONLY), the Olympian Society has realized that if suburban clubs are to remain relevant in the future, they will need to make themselves accessibly to local needs. Story-telling thus provides the glue that will permit these children to construct and give form to their own identities. The premises of the Olympian Society, will serve as the frame in which such a construction can take place.

In an increasingly diversified and fragmented Greek community, in which a considerable number of second and third generation Greek-Australians are disengaged from the organisations that purport to represent them, and in a zeitgeist within which collective and communal activity has been replaced by more individualistic pursuits, Saturday Story-telling provides a unique opportunity to re-establish a sense of community from the place it should always have been created: the grass-roots. It is hoped that while imbibing the stories that form the foundation of our ethno-linguistic consciousness, the story-hearers will develop social ties with each other, learn the value of associating with each other as Greeks and, as a result, project the ethos of mutual assistance and solidarity that characterises the Greek community when at its best, far into the future.

None of these considerations would have been at the forefront of the children’s minds as they waxed lyrical (if one pardon’s the pun) over Icarus’ questionable choice in waxed air gear. As they chased each other and delighted in each other’s company and their newly discovered world of Greek myths, they rolling their tongues over their newly found vocabulary, their Daedalus, the artful Konstantina was visibly moved, as she prepared for next month’s tale.

The final word to the story, if there ever is one, belongs to my three year old daughter, who arriving home from story-telling clutching a drawing of Icarus, proceeded to re-tell his tale to her non-Greek cousins in surprising detail. Upon being requested to furnish them with details of said hero’s provenance, she reflected for a moment and then stated with confidence: “From my father’s village, I think.” How is that then, for total and utter identification.

Saturday Story-Telling takes place one Saturday a month at the Olympic Society, 317 Victoria Road, Thornbury. Details can be found on the Olympic Society’s Facebook page.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 2 July 2016

“The future came and went in the mildly discouraging way that futures do.” Neil Gaiman

Ἑ ρε γλέντια῾ Karagiozis

It is an incontrovertible truth of the human condition that all things change and nothing ever remains the same. Thus, some members of our community still remember the Oakleigh Greek Glendi in its previous manifestation, the panegyri of the Unmercenary Saints Cosmas and Damianos (that’s Agioi Anargyroi to the rest of us), a decidedly Orthodox Festival. As one member reminisces: “I remember when we had chicken and potatoes in the Church hall and after Father Nicholas Moutafis blessed the food, he talked about the saints and what miracles they still performed for the sick.. Everyone knew that apolytikion back to front inside out...”

There is not much unmercenarism to be found among the businesses of Greek Oakleigh these days. Instead, the Oakleigh Greek Glendi, removed from its original religious context has evolved to the point where it is seen by most Greeks of Melbourne as an expression of ethnic exuberance, a carousal of Antipodean conviviality and celebration of all that we have come to believe make us who we are, in the heart of the area in which dynamic Greek forces have demographically coalesced. Thus when the Greeks of Oakleigh indulge in their glendi, one of the key events of the Graeco-Victorian calendar, they do so with an infinite amount of joie vis a vis their own collective and particular vivre. That is to say, they take great delight not only in celebrating their own Greekness but also making that sense of identity manifest within the framework of a multiethnic polity. The Oakleigh Greek Glendi thus constitutes a powerful manifesto of the role we believe we occupy as an ethno-cultural entity within Australia.

It is for this reason that the recently updated Oakleigh Glendi logo has caused consternation within sections of the community. The word “Greek” which hitherto was prominent is excised and underneath the words Oakleigh Glendi can be found the qualifying words “Food, Music and Culture.” What can we read into such a ‘re-branding and in particular what if anything is significant about the deliberate (if it is such) discarding of the ethnic identifier ‘Greek’?

One should note from the outset that the loss of ethnonyms from the title of festivals should not necessarily be deemed as an attempt to resile from the culture of their organisers. The long running Lygon Street Fiesta, never contained the word Italian in its title yet there was absolutely never any doubt in the minds of attendees, as to the ethnic provenance or character of its organisers. Similarly, the Antipodes Festival, now known as Lonsdale Street Glendi has never contained the word “Greek” within it and yet there can be no mistake about it being the peak Greek cultural festival of Melbourne. That Glendi’s recent name change can be distinguished from the Oakleigh one by reference to the fact that Antipodes is actually a word employed in English as a fancy way of saying “Down-Under” whereas by its renaming, the whole Lonsdale precinct, the historical heartland of the Greek community is being showcased and celebrated within that Festival.

Like Fiesta but even more so, the word Glendi in and of itself denotes the ethnic group to whom the language belongs. In this manner it could be argued that the inclusion of the word “Greek” is a pleonasm and its removal makes good syntactic sense. On the other hand, the removal of the word Greek from a Glendi that can be mistaken as nothing else than Greek seems to many to be superfluous, an unnecessary act within which is encrypted a great deal of uneasiness either about the way we see ourselves or how we believe others see us within the multicultural paradigm.

Many have posited that the removal of the word can be linked to a desire to make the festival more accessible to other members of the community. If this is so, one must ask why it is felt that the retaining of the word Greek inhibits the participation of others in multicultural activities. Indeed, what does this say about the way contemporary multiculturalism operates, if the very terms employed to denote the various cultures that comprise the multicultural construct become causes for intimidation and exclusion rather than inclusion? Furthermore, assuming that this is the rationale for the word “Greek’s” removal from the festive diptychs, what representations or prevailing societal indicators could caused the organisers to feel that by stating their ethnicity, they were actively or passively alienating other Australians?

As a corollary, various Oakleigh Greeks speculate that the name change is being made at the request of government funding bodies, in the interests of fostering “inclusion” and “diversity.” There appears to be no means by which to verify such speculation. If it is correct, then possibly we are witnessing an important waypoint in the development of Australian multiculturalism; its evolution from a mosaic, in which all self-contained and self-proclaimed cultures in and of their own right are autonomous tesserae within a broader picture, to that of a melting pot, where the vital ingredients of each culture are dissolved and melded into something new and unrecognisable in the quest for social cohesion. As such, do we therefore proceed to rebrand the Chinese New Year Festival simply the New Year Festival in the interests of homogeneity, or is it a case that while within the melting-pot, all cultures assimilate, some assimilate quicker and better than others?

The Chinese New Year Festival forms an interesting parallel because here, the ethnic identifier does exclude the other south Asian nations that also celebrate that festival from acknowledgment. In this case, then, rather than making statements about our own identity, are we in actual fact conforming to unconsciously accepted stereotypical expectations of the dominant culture as to how our own ethnic and cultural expressions shall be manifested. The Oakleigh Glendi logo is a case in point. The ancient-like font employed much like Chinese character-like English font, employed in the relevant marketing paraphernalia conveys a sense of Hellenism to the non-Greek viewer. As mentioned previously, the Festival is physically and semantically underscored by the triad: “Food, Music and Culture.” (In years past the underlying buzzwords were “Unity through Diversity”). The triad’s order possibly is not coincidental, as it is provender, followed by the aural apparition of the muses, rather than an appreciation of the history, mentality or other important characteristics of a people, that are cited by the dominant culture as the key methods according to which they can appreciate the existence of other ethnicities. If marketing is the means by which the purveyor may find a common language with which to entice the consumer then certainly it will be the consumer who will dictate the manner in which the merchantable entity is conveyed. Possibly the same applies to the removal of the word Greek. As one critic mentioned somewhat acerbically:

“Terms like "inclusiveness" and "diversity" are a one way cultural current, and have always been: an attempt to please a bunch of appropriating plunderers who want to feel less guilty about their position of cultural dominance by stuffing their gaping bearded maws with loukoumades and embracing our lowly provincial rustic earthy culture with their arrhythmic dancing.”

As an aside, it has been suggested that ensuring that the Festival is given no ethnic name is but a marketing gimmick by the homonymous No Name Greek restaurant, though of course, we can give this highly imaginative conspiracy theory short shrift.

Quite possibly all or none of the abovementioned considerations inform the decision of its organisers to divest the Oakleigh Glendi’s title of the word “Greek.” Nonetheless, that decision has caused ripples of disquiet throughout a community that is very sensitive about the way it is perceived as well as how it constructs those perceptions in turn. Whatever the motivation behind the dehellenisation of the title of the Oakleigh Glendi, one this is certain, where there is a Glendi, there are reveling Greeks, keen to unselfconsciously project their identity through the haze of the expected souvlaki smoke, amidst the cadences of the klarino or the laouto, over the rooftops of Oakleigh and beyond, proclaiming to all Melburnians, named or not, the vital zest, earthy compassion and elemental harmony that is at the core of what it is to be a Greek. And like all elemental forces, they defy description.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 9 July 2016

In his interesting recently published book “In Praise of Forgetting,” David Rieff questions the utility of remembering or commemorating terrible historical crimes such as genocide, ethnic cleansing or massacres. He wonders whether remembrance ever truly has, or indeed ever could, “inoculate” the present against repeating the crimes of the past. Instead, argues that rubbing raw historical wounds—whether self-inflicted or imposed by outside forces—neither remedies injustice nor confers reconciliation. If he is right, then historical memory is not a moral imperative but rather a moral option—sometimes called for, sometimes not. Collective remembrance can be toxic. Sometimes, Rieff concludes, it may be more moral to forget.

Such a stance is therefore directly relevant to the work of the Justice for Cyprus Co-ordinating Committee (SEKA), which, for the past forty two years, has been campaigning for the liberation of Cyprus from its Turkish occupiers and/ or the granting of Justice to Cyprus, under the slogan “Δεν Ξεχνώ” (‘I don’t forget’). Though David Rieff’s questions are directly mostly towards events that are no longer within living memory, and the invasion of Cyprus was only four decades ago, the fact that embarrassingly few members of Melbourne’s large Cypriot community can now be bothered attending the annual ‘Justice for Cyprus’ rally outside Parliament suggests that either, the vast majority of Melbournian Cypriots have read and agree with Rieff’s argument that it is futile to perpetuate bitterness over a de facto reality that appears unlikely to change, or, having re-made their lives in Australia and being quite comfortably therein, the past no longer has immediacy, and while possibly it is not forgotten in the SEKA sense, it no longer inspires the feelings of outrage that once it did.

This is possibly because, over the course of the four decades since the invasion and occupation of Cyprus by Turkey, the nature of it has gradually been transformed. From an invasion of a sovereign nation and thus a criminal act condemned by United Nations resolutions it has gradually become a ‘dispute’ that requires ‘resolution,’ or a ‘problem’ which requires a ‘solution.’ And of course, when the victims of the erstwhile’ crime do not agree to a ‘solution’ concocted by a United Nations that no longer sees the aggressors as criminals but rather as victims of a face-saving international non-recognition of their pseudo-state and in fact legitimizes the original invasion, then those victims who seek ‘Justice’ become the oppressors and the aggressors themselves.

This was no more evident that in western outrage at Cyprus’ rejection of the infamous Annan plan in 2004, a plan which rewarded, rather than punished, the invaders of the island. Suggestive of the fact that maybe we should forget all about ‘justice’ when it comes to the United Nations and the world powers is this disturbing comment by Baron Hannay of Chiswick, the British architect of the unjust Annan Plan:"If the Greek-Cypriots say 'no' to the Annan plan, we will take them to a new referendum, until they say yes." Indeed, one of Cyprus’ EU partners, the Austrian foreign minister at the time, Benito Ferrero-Waldner, had this to say: “The fact that the referendum resulted in a positive vote on the Turkish side of Cyprus should be appropriately honored by the international community."

In other words, because the Turkish Cypriots, which includes the 25% who are settlers from Turkey, voted in favour of a western imposed plan that legitimises the ethnic cleansing of 450,000 Greek Cypriots from northern Cyprus and prevents them from returning home, they are rewarded by those self same powers by a tacit lifting of sanctions that were imposed to ‘punish’ them.

Seeking ‘Justice’ from a United Nations and an international polity that is fundamentally flawed is a process to which the comment “ξέχασέ το” would be apt. Former United Nations high ranking official and human rights expert Alfred de Zayas, had this to say about the UN and the world’s efforts in attempting to impose an unjust resolution in Cyprus: “It is so incompatible with international law and international human rights norms that it is nothing less than shocking that the organisation would bend to political pressure and political interest on the part of my country of nationality [the USA] and Great Britain, in order to cater for the interests of a NATO partner.... I think it is not salvageable, quite honestly. I think it cannot be saved, and if it were saved I think it would be a major disservice not only to the Cypriot people but a disservice to international law; because everything that we at the UN have tried to build over 60 years, the norms of international law that have emerged in international treaties, in resolutions of the Security Council, would be weakened if not made ridiculous by an arrangement that essentially ignores them, makes them irrelevant or acts completely against the letter and spirit of those treaties and resolutions."

Former Director-General of the Israeli foreign ministry and professor Shlomo Avieri stated: "It appeared that the UN and the EU were bent on legitimising at least some of the consequences of the Turkish invasion of 1974, because the EU wanted to take the Cyprus issue off the table in order to facilitate negotiations on Turkey's accession to the EU... Greek Cypriots would not have freedom of movement in their own country. In a way, the Greek Cypriots would have been ghettoised."

Further showing the perfidy of the powers invested with resolving the tragedy, and the manner in which tragedies can be exploited in order to achieve other geopolitical aims, according to former British MP Christopher Price: “Urged on by the EU and the US, Annan accepted the proposal that Turkish troops remain in the island in perpetuity. This concession was calculated to smooth the path of Turkey towards EU membership and to demonise the Greek Cypriots as scapegoats if a political solution did not materialise.”

Since 2004 which marks the last major effort to ‘resolve’ the Cyprus tragedy, other tragedies have taken place, none of which the World Powers and its institutions have been able to prevent or mitigate and all of which have shown the United Nations for what they really are – a bankrupt, League of Nations doppelganger, a velvet glove encasing the iron manipulative fist of powerful nation-puppeteers, in order to delude the meek of the world that mechanisms to effect justice do exist and that the global system, though capable of flaws, will ultimately correct itself.

The existence of 65 million refugees in the world (based on UN estimates) in which the displaced Cypriots of the criminal invasion must be included, is a savage indictment upon humanity and justifiably should erode our belief in the efficacy of the post-world war institutions that were supposedly created in order to prevent or resolve violent conflict. Cyprus stands no longer upon the proscenium of world concern and a litany of other iniquities, such as those visited upon the hapless people of Syria, Iraq, Libya, and Yemen, take precedence in waiting upon the world to fail them as well, as humanity lurches from one organized mass murder to the other. If we are then to maintain our misplaced belief in humanity and its ability to achieve a paradise of peace upon the earth based on its own endeavours, then perhaps David Rieff is right and by inference, we must forget Cyprus.

Yet when the mothers, sisters and daughters of the slain Cypriots agonise their way to State Parliament on Sunday 17 July 2016, their eyes read and the horror they have witnesses etched indelibly upon their countenances, their cry for Justice will not be directed towards the hypocrites masquerading as saviours, nor against the criminals who have managed, through their adept manipulation of their geopolitical position, to rebrand themselves as ‘partners’ in any ‘solution.’ Nor will it be directed towards the Greek neophytes who would castigate them for their recalcitrance in refusing to forget. Instead, that almost silent, lonely (for want of any significant participation from the Greek community) yet immensely dignified cry, is the most poignant cry of all – a cry of desperation towards a world that has failed them and all of us, a cry that compels all of us never to forget the enormity of the crimes visited upon humanity by the powerful, nor the sickening manner in which the sycophants seek to cover them up.

And it is because unlike David Rieff, I believe that the moral imperative is never to forget the tragedy of Cyprus or the perfidy of its minders; that to forget that the ineptitude, collusion and/or willful blindness of the world powers and its collective institutions permitted them to abandon the people of Cyprus to their pain, is to allow them to evade responsibility for all the misery of the conflicts that have since followed, that I will be there, at the silent grey steps of Parliament on Sunday 17 July 2016, to shout, with the few Cypriots and their Greek compatriots who refuse to forget: “Δεν ξεχνώ.”

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday, 16 July 2016

I always feel uneasy around Nelly’s photographs. Being black and white, I am enthralled by the way she is able to juxtapose, reconcile or set the absolutes of light and dark at odds. Given that her most famous photographs are portraits of muscular scantily clad or nude men and women among ancient ruins, the way she manages to distill and interpret the cliché of «το Ελληνικό φως» (the Greek sunlight) onto paper is fascinating. For a person who dealt in absolutes, the disquiet she manages to imbue her photographs with through the ambiguous chiaroscuro interplay of light is thoroughly engrossing. It is as if she is either making a confession and retracting it simultaneously, or despite her evident belief in totalitarian ideals, subconsciously revealing her own misgivings about them. Similarly, while her photos at first glance feel lithe, graceful and full of life, subsequent glances evoke feelings of titanic solidity and lifelessness. If anything then, Nelly’s is the master of the art of visual contradiction.

Nelly’s, the soubriquet of Elli Sougioultzoglou-Seraidari was born in Aidini, now Aydin of Asia Minor in 1899 and was related to the great Greek composer Mihalis Sougioul. Prior to the Asia Minor catastrophe, she went to study photography in Germany under Hugo Erfurth and Franz Fiedler, who initiated her into a new approach in photography and European Neο-Romanticism. Settling in Greece in 1924, having lost her home, she opened her first studio at Ermou street in Athens and her lens captured important personalities and themes of that time, such as the famous dancer of Opera Comique Mona Paeva dancing nude in the Parthenon, the Delphic Festival, Eva Sikelianou, and Dimitris Mitropoulos, principal conductor of the Metropolitan Opera of New York. It is not known to what extent the trauma of losing ancestral homeland or the training she received in Germany during the heady days of the Weimar republic, when German society increasingly became polarized and more willing than ever before to embrace absolutist political theories influenced her worldview, but upon her arrival in Greece, Nelly’s appears to have adopted a naive nationalistic and conservative approach to her work.

Such an approach, in particular seeking to portray statuesque modern Greek models amidst stark ancient ruins, as if to underline not the continuity but the unchangeability of the Greek people since times ancient, appealed to various Greek governments, who wished to develop an idealized view of Greece and the Greeks, for export to the West and the promotion of tourism. In this way, Nelly’s can be viewed alternatively as the first Greek national image-maker or, regime propagandist, especially after her appointment as official photographer of the newly established Greek Ministry of Tourism.

In 1929, her avant-garde pictures of the nude Mona Paeva on the Parthenon, published in “Illustration de Paris” shocked Athenian society and her work was defended by intellectual Pavlos Nirvanas in his column in Elefthero Vima newspaper. ''I imagine on the one hand,'' he wrote, ''the beautiful priestess, unfastening her girdle in front of Apollo, throwing all the robes covering her divine nudity and bathing in the light, a body like a statue and a rosy complexion like the smile of dawn. And on the other hand I see respectable gentlemen sitting around a table, scratching their heads and writing about desecration. Desecration would occur if, in the throes of archaeological enthusiasm, they happened to throw off their clothes on the Parthenon marbles and pretended to be Hermes of Praxiteles...''

In the picture, typical of her work, a nude Mona Paeva, entwines herself around a veil as sinuous as the snakes in the famous ancient statue of Lacoon and his children. Her fluid jumping form is in stark contrast to the forest of perpendicular and massive columns of the Parthenon behind her. In her work Nelly’s uses artificial light, leaving one part of the form in the dark, while the background remains empty, as a reference to the Great Masters of the Renaissance. This is supposed to symbolize the search for the spiritual element, a poetic atmosphere and the demonstration of the form’s most profound essence.

I think it is Nelly’s removal of backgrounds elements by focusing her attention on the theme, resulting in a reversal of the normal references of orientation, so that the final image to be formed is a mix of realistic and abstract types that creates the most disquiet in me. Somehow, Nelly’s manages to incorporate the spectator’s wonder as an element of the image and as a result I become indignant at this attempt of violation of my perspective, so that in order to relieve the tension, I begin to hope that somewhere underneath her monolithic aesthetic, lurks a subversive satirical picture poem.

I remain eternally hopeful. On occasion, Nelly’s was referred to as "the Greek Leni Riefenstahl." This is because in 1936, she photographed the Berlin Olympic Games, where she met Leni Riefenstahl, accompanied her to Olympia and assisted her during the filming of the Nazi propaganda movie "Triumph of the Will." It is not easy to discern who influenced who. Leni Riefenstahl displays a similar attitude to light as Nelly’s and the people that populate her works are very similar to Nelly’s – classical profiles, thin, wiry, statuesque bodies powerfully affecting ancient Greek attitudes. The new man of tomorrow, for Nelly’s and the Nazis, would certainly be, in Hitler’s words: “slim and trim, swift as a greyhound, tough as leather and hard as Krupp steel…” Consequently, Nelly’s models would not look out of place upon the pediment of the New Reich Chancellery.

Nelly’s collaboration with the Metaxas 4th of August Regime, of which she was one of its most prolific photographers seems to be in keeping with this world view though how it is that the “new man” would emerge from the “Third Greek Civilization,” when that new man was expected to assume the form of a very old archetypal man is a question left unanswered. Nonetheless, for Nelly's and Metaxas, there is no room for the ambiguous fusion of Orient and Occident within the Greek. All historical elements not conforming to the official stereotype of rational, powerful, disciplined, logical and of course obedient Greek are to be excised from view. This is, in my opinion, the true reason for the starkness of the background in Nelly’s photographs. Apart from directing the spectator’s gaze through the lens of the camera and that he will identify with her position, and accentuated the awe felt by viewers in reading her image in a double way in relation to the earth’s horizon, Nelly’s is removing all historical, cultural or social impediments that would impede the viewer from accepting the premise and parameters of the new fascist ideology. Nonetheless, there is a sense of tragic melancholy in her photos, a tremendous sense of loss and wistfulness that is not present in the works of Riefenstahl, possibly because her assertion of identity is one of aspiration, retrogression and not triumphal dominance.

One could therefore hazard that the ruins in her photographs are always symbols of the ruins of Greek Aidinio. The background is stark and empty because there can be no return. The figures, however much they hearken back to an imagined past, no longer belong in that landscape. They are as foreign and anachronistic as she is, as a refugee. I feel more comfortable with this form of analysis.

Considered more than trustworthy, in 1939, she was commissioned with the decoration of the interior of the Greek pavilion at the New York's World Fair, which she did with gigantic collages expressing in an extremely selective manner the physical similarities between ancient and modern Greeks and attempting to prove their racial continuity. Nelly’s chose to settle in the United States and thus was spared the horrors of the Second World War.

To focus solely on her “ancient Greek,” work would be to portray only one part of Nelly’s sensitivities. She also dealt with the wounds of her old homeland, creating a unity entitled 'The yearnings of the Refugees', depicting the refugee settlements of the Athenian neighbourhood of Kessariani. Furthermore, fascinated by her neighbourhood in Plaka, she prepared a series of sixty photographs; a guided tour, historical and emotional, through the cobbled roads of modern Plaka, and its houses with the small yards built in the shadow of the Acropolis. These photos were printed by the Bromoil method where, through appropriate chemical treatment the paper becomes relief and the photographer, using paintbrushes and oils, intervenes so that the outlines and the gradation of the tones are softened. The result is the appearance of the eerie figures that mark the last aspects of the Romantic Movement, their transitory feel inducing further unease and melancholy.

When Nelly’s returned to Greece in March 1966, she lived with her husband Angelos Seraidaris at Nea Smyrni and gave up photography, mercifully not using her arts in the service of the Junta, whose leaders were artistic philistines. She died in deep old age in 1998, venerated for her prowess, her ideological predilections largely forgiven, for her photos helped shaped the visual image of Greece in the Western mind and conversely, the West's visual image of Greece in the Greek mind. So powerful is that visual image and so poignantly was it rendered by Nelly’s that it endures to the present day.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 23 July 2016

He was born to be a leader of men; his chiseled jaw and stern brow, coupled with shoulders of a breadth that would be the envy of Atlas, left no doubt that this was so, especially among the coterie of fifty-something Greek-Australian women that surrounded him. He twisted his tapered torso like a discobolus and a muscular forearm, emerging from a shirt, cling-wrapped around his body, extended in my direction. Sections later, he was enveloping my hand in a crushing, vice-like grip, one replete with its own developing contradictions as he went on to caress his latte glass with the tender, loving affection that can only derive from the sensitivity of the true connoisseur.

“I’m going to be gentle with you,” he pronounced with the self-confidence of an Old Testament prophet, “because you are both ignorant and uninformed. You are laboring under a delusion of self-hate with regard to your Hellenism. In one respect, you are to be forgiven for this because you were born here and know nothing about what true Hellenism is. Being born in a colony of an imperialist power that is the puppet of evil forces, you are kept in the dark and made to feel inferior. The secret is to understand that you are part of the superior race. Even Hitler acknowledged this when he said: “For the sake of historical truth I must verify that only the Greeks, of all the adversaries who confronted us, fought with bold courage and highest disregard of death.”

Now, I have a problem when it comes to using Hitler as a form of endorsement for things Hellenic. For one, I believe it says much about our own sense of insecurity when it comes to our identity that we need the affirmation of a genocidal maniac in order to feel good about ourselves, and I lost no time in informing my interlocutor of this. In fact gratuitous praise of any kind, whatever the source, leaves me cold, even if it comes from Einstein, who stated: “The more I read the Greeks, the more I realize that nothing like them has ever appeared in the world since.” In fact, I mused, as the leader fixed me with his steely gaze, is not our obsession with garnering praise a symptom of the deep-seated inferiority complex he had just described?

“Not from Jews,” he snarled, pushing up his sleeve to reveal a strange tattoo, comprised of a Janus-paired epsilon. “We don’t need their praise, or anyone’s praise. We are the oldest race in the world and you should be proud of that. 50,000 years ago, the first King Minos ruled in Crete. 25,000 years ago, the Greek King Magias ruled in South America…”

“And in 20,000 BC, the Greek King Mangas set off from Piraeus to set up a kingdom in Japan, whence came the song: Μάγκας βγήκε για σεργιάνι, and manga comics,” I interjected.

The leader’s brow furrowed. “You make jokes because you are so mired in Jewish anti-Hellenic propaganda designed to keep our people down and disunited, that you are incapable of feeling pride for your people’s achievements. Divide and rule, that’s their strategy. There were 100 million Greeks, 10,000 years ago. Where did they all go? Remember, before the Jewish religion destroyed ancient Greek civilisation, the Greek race was strong and united. No one speaks about the Jewish genocide of the Greeks.”

“Which Greek race was united?” I asked. «The Macedonians and the Asia Minor Dorians who made alliances with the Persians? Or the Spartans and the Athenians who almost destroyed each other during the Peloponnesian War? And let’s not forget how the Epigonoi of Alexander fought each other for centuries, paving the way for Roman domination,” I riposted.

“Exactly!” muscle-man pounded his fist on the table, sending his admirers into a swoon. “They ruled over the Middle East where the people were Semitic. What does Semitic mean? It means Jewish. These people made the Greeks fight with each other, because they could see the greatness of Alexander and they knew that they had to destroy the Greeks if they were to dominate the world. We were the only people standing in their way. So they destroyed our unity.”

“Seriously?” I spluttered, incredulous at what I had just heard. “It does not take much to rupture any illusory unity of the Greeks. Look at Attalus III of Pergamon, who preferred to bequeath his kingdom to Rome, rather than to any other Greek ruler. What do you have to say about that? So much for ancient Greek unity.”

“Who is this Attalus?”

“The ruler of Pergamon, one of the most vibrant Hellenistic kingdoms.”

“And who told you he gave his kingdom to the Romans?”

“It’s well attested in the works of the ancient historians.”

“Garbage, there is no concrete evidence. How do you know their words haven’t been twisted? These are all lies intended to destroy Hellenism. Look at how they have made you their mouthpiece. You are a stooge and you don’t even know it, you and all the other Αυστραλογεννημένα κωλόπαιδα, who worship a Jewish God and hate your own kind. No wonder the Greek Australian community is such a joke. You are not Greeks, you are graeculoi. A man with no pride, is no man at all.” He grunted masculinely as if to drive his point home.

Silence reigned for a short time, as I mused silently about the viability of a rendering of the above listed pejorative as ‘Australian-born arse-children,’ further wondering if this could be the appropriate title to an award-winning independent Australian film. Then, I asked: “What exactly am I supposed to feel proud of?”

“Are you that ignorant?” the fearless leader exclaimed, as his companions tittered mirthfully. “Be proud of the superiority of your race. The fact that nothing good in this world has not come from the Greeks. That ours is the mother of all languages. All the rest are distortions from lesser races that couldn’t cope with pure Hellenism. History, philosophy, technology. Did you know that the ancient Greeks had robots?”

“Really?” I enthused. “I had no idea. But then again, I know that they had wireless, because none of the archaeologists have found any wires whatsoever in any of their digs.”

“See!” he flashed a dentally reconstructed smile as he reached for a cigarette.

«Kαφές χωρίς τσιγάρο, Τούρκος χωρίς πίστη, as they say,» I reflected.

“Who says?” he snapped. “Forget about the Turks. When the time comes they will be annihilated. You know we could get rid of them just like that, but it’s the Jews who are propping them up. Their time is coming. We are going to regain our dominance. That is why we have to be ready and why we need to teach the Greeks of Australia the truth about their history. Εγγύς γαρ ο καιρός.”

“I think you mean: ὁ καιρὸς γὰρ ἐγγύς ἐστιν. It’s from the Book of Revelation. It refers to the signs of the return of Jesus.”

“Lies. They stole that from the ancient Greeks like everything else. And Jesus is a fictional character designed by the Jews, to make weak Greeks believe in him so they can destroy us. Why do you have to worship a made-up Jew? Why can’t you be proud of your own people?”

“Like who? Alexis Tsipras?”

“Not that weak runt. He is of Jewish origin anyway. Of the 250 members of the Greek parliament, 212 are actually Jewish.”

“I think there are 300 members in the Greek parliament actually.”

“No, its 250. What would you know? I’ve lived there all my life up until now. Be proud I say. Be proud of Alexander.”

“What about Alcbiades?”

“Him too. He saw the light and realised that Athens was decadent. Too much trade with the Middle East. Papadatos writes in his book that Jews introduced the plague to Athens during the Peloponnesian War. But Alcibiades could see the faults in Athenian society and embraced true Hellenism.”

“So you see ancient Sparta as an acceptable and preferred model for modern Hellenism?”

“Of course, how can you not? This is a war for dominance and there is no room for the weak. They will be swept aside. We are warriors for Hellenism, on a quest to regain our rightful inheritance. But our first task is to teach our people what it means to be Greek and how to be Greek. Those who follow will achieve glory. Those who stick to their Jewish lies will be swept aside.” He grabbed his crotch as he sat, his eyes half closed, mesmerized at the sight of his future triumph in his mind’s eye.

Many words of indignation flowed from my lips in this musing’s aftermath. I informed my interlocutor that as a scion of a family that had been here for the past six decades and yet, had managed to maintain its ancestral language and identity, I did not need instruction from any neophyte as to how to be Greek. I castigated him for seeking to introduce into the disaffected and the vulnerable of our own vibrant and inclusive community, which is facing enough challenges of a social and cultural nature as it is, an unnecessary, racist and divisive narrative, imported wholesale from the meanest and most dysfunctional sector of the Greek discourse.

As the leader spurned turned various shades of porphyry and turned to leave in disgust, I gave him these parting words of advice: “Being told to love or feel pride in one’s race because it is superior, is like being told to love one’s parents because they are richer, smarter, more powerful, more attractive, or more successful than anyone else. In actual fact, we love them, not because they are better, but because they are our own. Ultimately, it is the Beatles, who offer the most relevant guidance: “All you need is love.” And with that, he spat at my feet upon the Oakleigh pavement, gathered his entourage to him and marched away.

DEAN KALIMNOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in Neos Kosmos on Saturday 30 July 2016

As he cradled her dead body in his arms, μπάρμπα Νάσιο crooned softly: Ήσουν καλή, η καλύτερη, before embarking upon a heart-rendering soliloquy about how much he loved her. My great-aunt lay still and silent, her eyes disconcertingly half-open, as if she was still observing our behaviour from beyond the boundaries of this life.

Θειά-Ρήνα’s eyes were the first thing you would notice about her, for they were tremendously black and piercing. The inexorability of that gaze was framed by an almost constant frown that has been inherited and passed down among five generations of our family. On the surfance, it rendered her fearsome and awesome, yet that frown’s ferocity represented a fierce attitude towards the vicissitudes of life, towards those who lacked decency and especially, to any obstacles standing in the way of family cohesion. Her ferocity was thus an imperative to kindness, a tough, all consuming love of mankind that can only be understood and appreciated by those who have lived within the legacy of the Epirote saints. Sometime after her father was shot during the Occupation, she found her calling. She would be the family protector. It was in this calling that she wore her frown as military stripes and a badge of honour, for her responsibilities were great and she assumed them without question or complaint. And it was only when I noticed that her visage no longer bore the frown we all bear, upon her deathbed, that I finally accepted that she had gone.

The next thing you would notice about my great-aunt was the girth of her forearms. Hard as steel and almost three times the size of my own, these were the tireless arms that lifted countless bales of hay and innumerable bundles of wood as she went about her work in the village fields. These indefatigable arms would come to roll an infinite number of dim sims upon their arrival in this country, her skill and speed becoming so legendary that it was spoken of in hushed tones of awe among the dim sim manufacturers of Flemington. Again, it was with these arms that she insisted upon hand-washing her family’s clothes well into her eighties, for she never possessed a washing machine. And it was also with these arms that my formidable great-aunt struck a blow for feminism: As the village nurse, she would rise from her bed at all hours of the night in order to administer injections, saving scores of lives over the years. During one of her nocturnal journeys through the village, she was accosted by a misguided male, who delivered a smut-filled greeting. Two seconds later, the hapless individual lay flat upon the road, having been floored by a back-hand sweep of my great-aunt’s arm. Long before Christos Tsiolkas, in an Epirote village far, far away, θειά-Ρήνα invented ‘The Slap.’ No one ever dared question or contradict, let alone harass her, ever again.

Well into her seventies, θειά-Ρήνα ‘s hair was long, black and lustrous, reaching well below her waist, for in keeping with traditional custom, she never cut it and being immensely proud of it, would tend it carefully, combing it lovingly into a long, thick plait of the same thickness as my wrist. As she walked, always briskly and decisively, for she was seldom idle, her almond-shaped eyes encased in a frown, her golden prosthetic teeth flashing, grasping her plait in one hand, she looked like Manchu royalty and I would call her the Dowager Empress, always behind her back, for to make light of our family protector, was inconceivable, inviting unimaginable and yet never ever delivered, wrath.

This is because despite her fearsome, imposing countenance, θειά-Ρήνα was unfathomably kind. As a child, I was certain that she was the veritable Cornucopia of chocolates, soft drinks and fifty dollar notes, for these would be dispensed with unfailing regularity among all of her grandchildren, grand-nieces and grand-nephews upon our frequent attendances at her court. As she sat, ensconced upon her arm-chair with the regal air of the Dowager Empress Ci Xi, she would dispense artfully created quince spoon sweets. To refuse such bounty was unthinkable and unwise given that they, along with her γαλοτύρι and Easter soup, in which she would melt a 250 gram pat of butter, have achieved the status of hallowed culinary lore within our family and were remarkably comforting.

Unbeknownst to me at the time, a considerably larger pool of people was a recipient of her largesse. Over the years, tales emerged of struggling Greek families in her local area, as well as friends and relatives back in the village, and even local business being discretely financially assisted by the determination of a woman, only marginally better off than them, resolved to extend her role of protector not only to her own family, but all of mankind, given that in her selfless giving, the entire communion of humanity is sanctified. This is especially so given that in my local church, we receive communion from a chalice that she donated, upon the church’s foundation.

The sharpness of θειά-Ρήνα’s tongue, the quickness of her temper and her custom of calling things as she saw them meant that one could neither prevaricate, hide nor dissemble in her presence. To do so was to deliver an insult to a lady who had your welfare as her utmost consideration. When invited in jest by one of her daughters in law to assume the role of a docile old grandmother that could easily be managed, she riposted triumphantly: "Έχω τον Νάσιο μου εγώ." This is because the last seventy years of her long life comprised one of the most passionate and moving love stories I have ever known. A couple brought together during the tragedy of war, my saintly, ever-patient μπάρμπα Νάσιο and my querulous, passionate, generous θειά-Ρήνα were absolutely devoted to each other, relying upon each other in everything, and in turn, receiving the love and respect of all around them. Delivering my great-uncle home from church on Sundays, I would find her waiting outside her home, her immense arms folded across her chest, gruffly asking why we late, her eyes betraying her unspoken fear that something had befallen her husband on the return journey, for she could not bear to be separated from him, even for the briefest of moments.

To perform a great-uncle drop off was unthinkable. I would be ushered into the kitchen where I would be seated at the table and asked to relate my news and run through my plans with her, which I would do, as she listened intently, bidding my great-uncle make some coffee and ply me with cake. Then, having force fed me and processed the information provided, she would deliver, in the form of a Manchurian decree, amazingly pertinent and practical advice, of facile application, always ending in the words: “Honour, but don’t listen to your parents. Make your own way in the world.” Such was the force of her counsel and the intensity of the concern that informed her guidance that I always adopted it, almost unthinkingly, wholesale.

As the years passed, the delivery of such advice became difficult. A number of strokes rendered my great-aunt struggling to communicate. “I know what I want to say but I can’t remember the words,” she would complain to me, her frown turning into a sob. We witnessed her, this monolith of vitality, slowly lose her power of speech and almost turn to stone, which is why her brief moments of lucidity, when she would look at us and her eyes would flash a smile of recognition, meant so much to us. And through all of those years that she remained in thrall to the degeneration of her faculties, my great-uncle remained at her side, tending to her, speaking to her , holding her hand and loving her more intensely than ever before.

Baucis and Philemon, the archetypal ancient loving couple of Ovid’s 'Metamorphosis' entertained Zeus and Hermes unawares and as a result, were afforded protection from destruction, longevity and a great boon: to be permitted to die together. Upon their death, the couple was changed into an intertwining pair of trees, one oak and one linden, standing before their home. Such a boon has been denied to my intensely Christian great-aunt and great-uncle, who is now entering his nineties, for the first time in seventy years, alone. Yet in the place of trees, this loving couple, has sired a legion of descendants, some with the tendency to frown and others not, all of whom are imbued with a fierce love of humanity and a thorough disdain for the petty and mean-spirited things of the world. This too, is truly a blessed legacy.

As I light the lamp before the icon θειά-Ρήνα gave me on my wedding day, her words: Ἱf you have an opportunity to help someone, do so. Like Lot, you never know if you are entertaining angels unawares, resound within my mind. I shed a tear because our Queen-Protector is dead. In her passing, our Greek-Australian lives are much diminished, for the time of Queens is past. We shall have no others.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in Neos Kosmos on Saturday 6 August 2016

I am unsure as to when I precisely learned that the Greek word ρουφιάνος had dual meaning, one innocuous, the other anodyne, but I believe my epiphany came in my first year of Greek school. Our newly arrived teacher from the motherland was inquiring as to our fathers’ professions, having assumed of course, that our mothers were not possessed of same. This was an easy question to answer, since my grandmother had already apprised me of the fact that my father was an εντζιουνίας and therefore, I enthusiastically imparted this knowledge to my educator. Having spent ten minutes upbraiding me and the entire Greek-Australian community for my Gringlish, she moved in to the next boy in class. Quoth he enthusiastically, ᾽Κυρία, ο μπαμπάς μου είναι ρουφιάνος.᾽

- Τι; She exclaimed in horror.

- Ρουφιάνος, κυρία. Φτιάχνει ρούφια.

During the next quarter of an hour, through which our teacher cursed our collective Vlach ancestry and our manslaughter of the beautiful Hellenic tongue, I was finally able to make sense of my aged uncle’s mutterings when they collected at γιορτές and relived times past. According to them, there were many ρουφιάνοι, during the Κατοχή. Now I knew why. Obviously many bombs were dropped upon the homes of the hapless Greek people during the war, requiring an army of skilled ρουφιάνοι in order to render them water-tight once more. In my youthful eyes, the ρουφιάνοι were therefore as heroic as the women of Pindus who lugged ammunition to the soldiers up sheer cliff faces.

There seemed however to be a preponderance of ρουφιάνοι in our local community, because all the older Greeks I knew seemed to consider most of the people they knew, either as ρουφιάνοι, or as τομάρια, which according to my limited understanding, had something to do with hides and leather. For this reason, it took me a long time to make an auricular connection between the word ρουφιάνος and ruffian, which in fact are derived from the same Italian word: ruffiano, meaning a pander or a pimp. From the fifteenth century onwards, this word was introduced into English and gradually came to signify a boisterous, brutal fellow, capable of committing any crime. In Greek, its sense remained extremely close to the original Italian from whence it came.

My uncles’ ρουφιάνοι, were neither brutal, nor boisterous. They were the sly, slimy, insidious creatures who ratted on their friends and family’s activities and political beliefs, first to the Nazis and then to the government of the day. As a result of their denunciations, many Greeks lost their lives, while thousands of others were exiled, or denied the employment of their choice, and indeed any prospect of career advancement, in the aftermath of the Civil War. Indeed, many prospective migrants to Australia were forbidden from emigrating until they had formally renounced the political ideas, which according to the ρουφιάνοι, they espoused, in humiliating ceremonies of abjuration.

Unbeknownst to me however, was the fact that in some cases, the relocation to Australia did not necessarily mean putting the ρουφιάνοι and all that they stood for behind them. Instead, for many Greeks, the Civil War was not over and continued to be fought in various ways, cleaving our community in two, as Greek consular authorities sought if not to dictate to Greek migrants what manner of political and social convictions were acceptable, at least to classify them in terms of ‘loyal’ and ‘disloyal.’ In an era where mainstream Australia was terrified of the existence of reds lurking under the bed, anecdotal evidence suggests that the Greek consular authorities shared with the relevant Australian bodies, details as to which Greek migrants they considered to be subversive, that is left-leaning, pro-democracy, or anti-monarchist. As a result of such ρουφιανιές, on the part of the representatives of their homeland, some Greek migrants were denied the right to Australian citizenship for a considerable period of time.

And the source of their epic ρουφιανιά? Why, other Greek migrant ρουφιάνοι of course, who, out of political conviction, coupled with sheer spite, thought nothing of defaming their fellow Greek community members to the consular authorities, as unreliable and dangerous influences. Our own Aussie-Greek ruffians therefore, translated a long-standing tradition of Helladic grassing, upon these Antipodean shores, along with Greek dancing and long-winded poetry.

Enter an elderly gentleman from Northern Greece, who I had the honour of meeting recently. As he related, he has been here since the sixties. Of a particularly enterprising nature, he operated several successful businesses and thus was able to travel to and from Greece on a regular basis, seeking to make improvements to the public amenities of his village as well as to construct various buildings on family land. Somehow, all his efforts, in obtaining the relevant permits were frustrated by the various municipal and prefectural authorities and he eventually abandoned his grandiose plans, returning once more to Australia on a permanent basis.

In the eighties, he suffered immense pangs of homesickness and despite his previous experiences, decided to try to realize his dreams once more. This time, when ensconced deep within the bowels of his prefectural offices, a bored bureaucrat opened a file, read through it nonchalantly and then, uncharacteristically, gave a gasp of shock as his features assumed an almost human expression.

“What is it?” the man asked.

“Is so and so known to you?” the bureaucrat enquired.

“Of course, he is my koumbaro. Why do you ask?” the bewildered man replied.

“A fat lot of a koumbaro he is. According to this file he reported you to the Consulate in Melbourne in the seventies as being a prominent member of the Communist Party, a known communist agitator within the Greek Community of Melbourne and a man of base and suspect morality. See look. His name appears here and this notation is signed by the Greek Consul-General.”

“But I’ve never been a member of the Communist Party. I have never been involved in politics in any way,” the man tried to explain.

“At any rate, that’s all over now, it means nothing,” the bureaucrat shrugged, going on to explain that though the man had come to the correct office, he had not had the appropriate forms stamped by the municipality, so he would have to go back, obtain the forms, re-attend to have them stamped, take them back to the municipality to have them verified and…. “By the way, be careful of your friends. Not that it matters now. We have heaps of files just like this. You should see your faces you Australians…”

Thus through no fault of his own, a person he considered his closest friend, the archetype of the true ρουφιάνο, acting, in a fit of pique, in conjunction with the representatives of the Greek state, in an organized collaborative ρουφιανιά, saw fit to defame him, and ensure that basic rights and freedoms were taken away from him. It is probably for this reason then, that ρουφιάνοι and τομάρια go together.

It is unknown just how many Greek-Australians were unknowing victims of Consular ρουφιανιές, as the evidence for these is anecdotal Certainly it beggars belief that a Consulate-General traditionally renown for being unable to service the needs of the Greek community in anything approaching a timely and professional manner was able to allocate the appropriate time from its commitment to being as inefficient and dysfunctional as possible, in order to methodically indulge in the recording of ρουφιανιές against members of the community. As the Stasi files of East Germany have been made open to those to whom they refer, perhaps, in the interests of history and sociology, Consular authorities could do the same, assuming of course that these exist, or, that they can be found, or that the relevant persons can be bothered retrieving them. Assuming that they are capable of addressing the issue and confirming the existence of such practices, surely an apology, however belated, is in order.

Cretans express a belligerent view of ρουφιάνους in their mantinades, which should now be the motto of our entire community, for though the incentive is gone, the tendency remains the same among some, especially considering the slowly evolving polarization of the Greek people into political extremes: “Ρουφιάνοι να προσέχετε βαστώ καλό τουφέκι, να μην με ρουφιανέψετε σε τούτο 'δω το στέκι.” Sadly, a more realistic approach is that provided by Loudias, who has the final word, in his homonymous 2004 song, Ρουφιάνος: «Εγώ είμαι ο υπάλληλος που ξέρουνε οι πάντες/ Κοιτάζω τους εργάτες αν χτυπάνε τις κάρτες/ Τους βλέπω αν δουλεύουν ή αν ξύνουνε τους όρχεις/Το ρουφιάνεμα είναι ταλέντο, ή το `χεις ή δεν το `χεις.”

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in Neos Kosmos on Saturday 13 August 2016

In a sermon circulated among the Greek colonies of the Crimea in the early 1800s, referring to the Islamic poll tax or haraj paid to the Sultan, the following rather startling anarchist opinion was stated: “Ο κήνσος είναι δόμα και σημείον υποταγής,” that is, the κήνσος, a direct transliteration of the Latin word census, is a sign of subjugation. In the Bible, the word κῆνσος is used to signify a Roman imposed poll tax, being the reason why the counting of a population was conducted in the first place. The Romans conducted censuses every five years, calling upon every man and his family to return to his place of birth to be counted in order to keep track of the population and to determine the available amount of manpower that could be drafted into the army. The census thus played a crucial role in the administration of the peoples of an expanding Roman Empire, providing a register of citizens and their property from which their duties and privileges could be listed.

Also in the Bible, we are able to find the modern Greek word for census, which is απογραφή. The most famous απογραφή of course is that which caused the Holy Family to move from Nazareth to Bethlehem where Jesus was born, not because wifi was more readily available there, all the better to complete the census form online, but rather because as was the custom in Greek elections until recently, one had to return to their place of birth in order to be counted: “Ἐγένετο δὲ ἐν ταῖς ἡμέραις ἐκείναις ἐξῆλθε δόγμα παρὰ Καίσαρος Αὐγούστου ἀπογράφεσθαι πᾶσαν τὴν οἰκουμένην.” Fittingly, for the King of Kings, Jesus was born during a census that Caesar Augustus ambitiously wished to extend to the entire oecumene, or at least, the Roman part of it.

Yet before we dismiss the census as method of collating information about subject populations for the purpose of better fleecing them, (William the Conqueror certainly took a leaf out of the Romans’ tablet when commissioning the Domesday Book, all the better to denude the Anglo-Saxons of their property), it is important to note that censuses have been divinely sanctioned since Exodus wherein the Lord commanded the Israelites to conduct a census of themselves, ensuring or course “that that there be no plague among them, when thou numberest them”, in order to levy a tax for the upkeep of the Tabernacle. Indeed an entire book of the Old Testament is based on a Census, the Book of Numbers, which basically records a number of stocktakes of the Israelite population after the exodus from Egypt.

On occasion, Biblical censuses have more nefarious purposes. In Samuel we learn that “Once again the anger of the LORD burned against Israel, and he caused David to harm them by taking a census... So the king said to Joab and the commanders of the army, "Take a census of all the tribes of Israel--from Dan in the north to Beersheba in the south--so I may know how many people there are.” As this census was done for capricious reasons, the Lord insisted on a punishment, letting King David chose between seven years of famine, three months of fleeing from enemies, or three days of severe plague. David chose the plague, in which 70,000 men died. It is rumoured that persons claiming not to have completed the Australian 2016 online census because the site crashed or their computer was running a system, will be offered a similar choice of condign punishments.

David’s son, King Solomon as we learn in the book of Chronicles, had all of the foreigners in Israel counted, it is this aspect of the Australian census, the manner in which the character of ethno-linguistic groups within Australian society will be recorded that has exercised the attention of the Greek community which broadly believes, anarchist discourse about government as repression notwithstanding, that the Australian Census was a unique opportunity for our community to declare its ethnicity, language and religion. Accordingly, Federal and State government utilise the information contained in the census in their planning for ethnic communities and the provision of services for them. Regardless of the fact that we Greek-Australians are a diverse and mixed lot it was broadly felt that it was important that we all ensure that we, pardoning the pun, stand up and be counted on Census Night.

Yet in all aspects dealing with ethno-linguistic minorities, the 2016 Australian Census suggested that its creators lack the capacity to appreciate the complex relationship between ethnic communities, the mainstream and other ethnic communities. Instead, they tend to view ethnic communities such as ours, as a monolithic bloc of homogeneity, ignoring or rather not realizing the diversity of experience, sub-identities and intercultural relations that increasingly form the norm within most integrated ethnic communities.

For starters, the Australian census assumes that there is no such thing as multilingualism, requesting that the population only declares ONE language other than English spoken. It therefore ignores or does not address the possibility that in many ethnic communities and families, a number of languages other than English, and not just one, are used on an equal basis. Many Middle Eastern and Balkan Australians, where functional multilingualism is the norm were thus unable to record this on their form. Families hailing from Florina, where Greek and the Slavic idiom of the region are both equally spoken were unable to have this linguistic complexity reflected in the Census and had to arbitrarily chose one. Furthermore, such a blinkered view of language fluency completely ignores the phenomenon of minority language acquisition and use as a result of mixed marriages. The members of my household speak three languages other than English on a daily basis and yet only one of these could recorded. While such a phenomenon may not be common, it exists and it is precisely these types of instances of diversity that a Census sensitive to recording the true nature of linguistic and cultural multiculturalism should capture.

Further, no provision was made for people who cannot speak a language, such as infants, or the disabled. Thus, the good people of the Census asked me which language by three month old daughter speaks and I was compelled to respond.

A similar dearth of appreciation of the manner in which ethnic communities self-identify was also displayed in relation to the ancestry component of the Census. How will the ancestry statistics be used and/or interpreted? If someone is half Greek half Italian for instance, will he be numbered both among the Greeks and the Italians or will there be a separate category for Greek-Italians, Greek-Australians, Greek-Chinese, Greek-Lebanese etc and every other possible combination among all the ethno-cultural communities. Furthermore, what if one is only a quarter Greek? No provision was made for composite ancestries. Furthermore, it is difficult to see what purpose answering such a question on its own would serve. It would have been more incisive and useful to include a question about a person’s cultural affiliation, that is, how they identify themselves which often differs to their ancestry or language spoken. For example, in most cases of mixed relationships, many progeny end up identifying primarily with one, rather than both of their ancestral cultures. Others marry into a culture and embrace it entirely. In the case of persons hailing from Florina, or the ongoing debate within the Syriac speaking community as to whether they espouse an Aramean, Chaldean or Assyrian identity, identity becomes a vexed question and questions as to ancestry do nothing to address composite or conflicting identities within the one individual. These are important elements of multicultural Australia which are not reflected in the census and are of concern since it becomes apparent that our statistics gleaners and by inference our government may not understand the true complexity of the mosaic and melting pot of our multicultural community.

The listing of Greek Orthodox on the census form in the religion section is also problematic because while it may feed Greek vanity in that it singles us out as prominent, it allows other Orthodox communities to qualify their Orthodoxy with an ethnic affiliation, thus fragmenting the true number of Eastern Orthodox adherents in this country in the statistics. Thus the census does not take into account that Greek Orthodox refers to jurisdiction, not religion and that the religion that should have been recorded is “Eastern Orthodox” with a space, if required, to record the necessary jurisdiction. It is of concern that after one hundred years of a dynamic presence in this country, the powers that be appear not understand the basic nature of the churches within it.

Some members of the Greek community lament the fact that Australian Censuses are invariably conducted in August when a large proportion of the Greek-Australian community is lapping up the Greek sun, thus resulting in their diminished numbers in the Census statistics. Yet the quantity is not so much relevant as understanding the changing nature of our community, both in how it sees itself as a whole and in relation to broader Australian society. And in this, apart from the Biblical trials and tribulations faced by the populace, especially the elderly and those unable to speak English, the Census has been tied and found truly wanting.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in Neos Kosmos on 20 August 2016

That day the leaden sky was as low over the lake as the ceiling in my freezing ancestral home. I counted each of my nocturnal breaths etched upon the windowpane as I descended the steps and proceeded down to the lake lapping at the village entrance. It was dawn and in two hours I needed to be across the border in Argyrokastro, from where I was to find my way to Tirana, there to attend as an observer, the annual conference of the Union for Human Rights Party.

I could not see my reflection in the ashen lake. Instead, its own reflection could be found in the sky and as I wandered along its deserted shores, I wondered how many aeons of human futility and dashed hopes lay submerged under the quagmire within, along with Kyra Frosyne, drowned upon the orders of Ali Pasha not so far from where I was standing, and my mother's wooden doll, lost in these waters forty years previously.

In the solitude of the rushes fringing the great silence of the lake, I availed myself of the stillness in order to answer a call of nature, musing as I prepared to do so, upon that unique sense of sweet sorrow, that which the inhabitants of Constantinople term hüzün, but which here at Ioannina acts as a great drain with the plug removed, dragging everyone, slowly, imperceptibly but inevitably into its watery sink of oblivion.

Poised, primed and ready to relieve myself, I gazed distractedly at the ground below, only to discover, coiled at my feet, within striking distance of my vital appendages, an enormous black water snake. One of the most vivid Greek expressions used to denote terror literally translates as: "My spleen was cut," and I bear living testament to its aptness. Backing away from the serpent with much care, I forgot to complete the primary task I had undertaken to perform, which would have easily foreseeable consequences later.

All the auguries were awful, compounded by a developing migraine wherein each revolution of my taxi to the border’s wheels assumed the form of a circular saw, cutting its way into my skull in iambic tetrameters. In my delirium, in which snakes featured prominently, I retained only a dim recollection of crossing the border checkpoint into Albania and my bladder felt as pressed as John Proctor in The Crucible, as my taxi driver to Argyrokastro tactlessly and enthusiastically explained that he came from the village of Bistritsa, which was Slavonic for a “gurgling stream.”

The plan was to find in Argyrokastro, the bus terminal whence passage could be obtained for Tirana. Subordinate to that was the locating of a public convenience in which I could, the threat of ophidian beasts notwithstanding, achieve bodily release. Yet as soon as I alighted from my taxi, I was dragged under the arm by a waiting friend, who pushed me into a worn, but surprisingly sturdy BMW. “You are not getting on a bus,” he stated in a tone that brooked no argument. “Anything can happen between here and Tirana and your Albanian is cringeworthy. I’ve arranged for you a lift with these gentlemen. They are all delegates to the conference, and the man in the front seat is the eparch of the Greek village of M. You will have plenty to talk about. You are late, off you go.”

As the door slammed shut behind me (the Greeks of Albania share none of their Helladic brethren’s aversion to being assertive when it comes to closing car doors), I was greeted by long, expressionless glances by the young men seated in front and beside me. “Here, you are the skinniest, sit in the middle,” one of them offered, moving aside. They would have been only five years older than me and yet their faces were furrowed with lines and wrinkles, in contrast to their painstakingly coiffed hair, granted structural integrity via immense quantities of bryllcream.

“So you are Australian?” the eparch asked, turning to me with a smile.

“Yes. I’m much interested in your views as to the constitutional efficacy of the new minority laws…”

“Do you know Elle Macpherson?” he interrupted.

“No, I haven’t had that pleasure but I’m wondering from a human rights perspective whether…”

“I’d love to do her. Είμαι καυλωμένος κάργα.»

«Κάργα!» came a chorus from the boys in the backseat.

“What about Jessica Hart?”

“Huh? Who is she?”

“You live in Australia and you don’t know who Jessica Hart is? Η ομορφούλα η κουτσιοδόντω μωρέ.”

“Sorry, I’ve never heard of her.”

“I’d do her, gaps in her teeth, or no gaps.”

“Ok, but how do the restrictions on private schools affect the status of Greek education in…”

“Είμαι καυλωμένος κάργα,” the eparch exclaimed, clutching at his crotch.

«Κάργα!» the boys in the backseat diligently echoed.

“Now listen and repeat,” the eparch instructed. «Τα βόδια σύρονται.»

“So?”

«Και τα πρόβατα μαρκαλιούνται. Say it.»

“Ok. Τα βόδια σύρονται και τα πρόβατα μαρκαλιούνται. What of it? Is this a folksong or a line from some demotic poetry?”

Howls of laughter ensued as the boys in the backseat started chanting «Τα βόδια σύρονται και τα πρόβατα μαρκαλιούνται,» in manner akin to a soccer chant, but with greater and more refined attention to phrasing.

“These are the words we use when bulls and sheep mate,” the eparch explained. "Each animal does his business in a different way.”

“What about humans,” I ventured. “Can we employ different terms for them, or is it the same across the board?”

The eparch considered this for a moment before remarking dismissively, as if it should be painfully obvious even to a foreigner like me: “No, humans are humans, naturally. Except,” he added as an afterthought,” for those humans who are βόδια. Human βόδια μαρκαλιούνται. You will find plenty in the villages around here.»

Peals of laughter ensued from the backseat as the boys once again took up their chant.

“Have you slept with Sarah Murdoch? She is Australian,” the eparch enquired.

“No. I can’t say that I have.”

“Why not? If I was living in Australia, I would,” the eparch commented. “Beautiful women, kissed by the sun with no hair on their lips, their legs, or their pudenda.”

I confess that at that time I had no idea who Sarah Murdoch was and was having trouble keeping up with the conversation, let alone steering it in the direction of minority rights, which was the purpose of my trip. Furthermore, my bladder ached with urgency and I pressed my legs tightly together. Seeking a further way to contribute, I offered: “The Albanian writer Ismail Kadare laments the modern taste for depilation as a key to sexual attractiveness…”

“Bugger Ismail Kadare, he is probably gay anyway. I’m talking to you about a blonde beauty and you… I’d do her any day. Είμαι καυλωμένος κάργα.»

«Κάργα!» the boys in the backseat dutifully repeated, clasping their crotches.

“Do you know what I’d do to Sarah Murdoch if she was sitting here?” the eparch continued.

“No but I’m sure I can guess. Can we make a stop here, by the creek? I’m dying to go to the toilet.”

“Yeah, good idea. We can all take a leak. It will give us a good idea as to what size Australians are.”

We stopped under a tree and I ran as fast as I could, away from my fellow travellers who were sniggering behind me. Ensconced safely between some rocks on the banks of the creeks, I began to unburden myself.

“Watch out, there are snakes here. Decent size by the way, though I was expecting something a lot more heavy duty, if you are to take on the Australian woman.”

To this day, I do not know how the eparch, who when last I looked was approximately one hundred metres away, attempting to “cross streams” with his friends and giggling like a schoolgirl, found himself at my side, his arm resting protectively upon my shoulder as he viewed my nether regions appraisingly. “If Elle Macpherson was here right now…” the eparch intoned before abruptly interposing another thought. “You know,” he mused, “It’s strange. Your skin is very smooth. Like a woman.”

My flow immediately shut itself off midstream and I walked to the car, my hands in between my legs. I am unable to fathom how I endured the next two and a half hours in which the eparch duly recited the diptychs of all American supermodels, past and present, revealing to all and sundry that he was καυλωμένος κάργα, the refrain of κάργα being unstintingly intoned by his entourage. All the while, I felt like the little Dutch boy of legend who was compelled to place his fingers in many dykes, a subject also canvassed by the versatile eparch, in order to stop an imminent flow that would flood the entire Netherlands, pun probably intended. When upon our arrival in Tirana I was able to enclose myself in the protective custody of a lockable lavatory, I felt a liberation of a magnitude that can only be conveyed by a Cecil B DeMille dramatisation of the Lord smiting Pharaoh with the gushing waters of the Red Sea.

I’ve not kept in touch a great deal with the eparch, single and living at home with his parents, but still fighting the good fight on behalf of the Greeks of Northern Epirus over the years and I was surprised to receive an email from him the other week, in which he enquired as to the prospect of him emigrating to Australia. I furnished him with answers to his queries, attaching as a coda to my response the following: "Τα βόδια σύρονται και τα πρόβατα μαρκαλιούνται." He effected not to know what I was talking about.

DEAN KALIMNIOU
kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in Neos Kosmos on 27 August 2016

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