Diatribe

Many years ago, when first invited to eat at Goody’s, I was enraptured, labouring as I was under the misapprehension that in fact, I was being conveyed to a BBC ‘Goodies’ themed restaurant, where cardboard representations of Tim Brooke-Taylor, Graeme Garden and Bill Oddie would greet me with the slogan: "We Do Anything, Anytime, Anywhere," one which resonated with me, as I was a perpetually hungry student at the time, and possessed of a surprisingly similar world-view.

As I walked through the streets of Ioannina, salivating, I mentally re-imagined various Goodies episodes to fit in with my environment. In particular, I recall daydreaming that the entire black population of South Africa had emigrated to Ioannina to escape apartheid. As this meant that the white South Africans no longer had anyone to exploit and oppress, they in turn, introduced a new system called "apart-height", where short people (being the entire Greek migrant population) were discriminated against. The scenario ended in classic Goodies’ fashion, with the short Greeks migrating to New Zealand and reconfiguring the haka to the beat of the tsamiko, as the whole of the North Island sank within the Pacific Ocean, under the weight of their egos.

Goody’s at Ioannina was nothing like that, neither was the Athenian Goody’s I compelled to patronise a week later. Indeed, I was incensed to find out that at no Goody’s I entered then, or ever since, had anyone ever heard of the real Goodies, their denial of any and all knowledge of the aforementioned giving rise within me, to reasonable suspicion that the forces of evil had in fact, as part of a Goodies episode, immured the three Goodies within the walls of the establishment, and were now nonchalantly feigning ignorance. Somewhere between the “extreme clubs” (a fascist metaphor if I ever saw one), and the Pita Goody’s, which is something I suspect, would be the result of a Goodies steamroller rampaging through any given franchise, lies the truth.

Having frequented all of the Ioannina eateries purveying delectable ῾φαγητά της ώρας,᾽ such as giouvetsi and giouvarlakia, which are as close to home cooking as one could possibly purchase publicly, replete with thick sauces that could be mopped up with the unlimited slices of bread provided, I was not particularly impressed with the diminutive ᾽κλαμπ σάντουιτς᾽ that was placed in front of me.

Furthermore, there was something reassuring about the old lady doling out the giouvetsi a my favourite haunt asking me: ᾽Τι να σ᾽βάνω μωρ᾽ μάνα᾽μ; and tapping my shoulder exclaiming: ῾Φάε παshά᾽μ φάε,᾽ as I reached for my third basket of bread. At Goody's by contrast, back in those times, all we received was a barely audible grunt from the cashier, whereas in my last Goody’s foray, I received a dazzling white smile, so forced in its intensity that I marveled that the heavily foundation layered cheeks that had delivered it, had not cracked, nor that the ᾽Kαλή σας όρεξη,᾽ enunciated with the enthusiasm of a Subway television commercial extra, did not turn into ash in both our mouths.

Nonetheless I raised a dispassionate hand to grasp my glorified sandwich while my host looked upon me with horror. Through gritted teeth, he spat, sotto voce: “You do NOT eat club sandwiches with your hands. Where do you think you are? This is Goody’s. Use your knife and fork.” The next time I visited Ioannina, we steered well clear of Goody’s, to which, my friend determined, I was decidedly unsuited. In its stead, he pointed me in the general direction of a patstzidiko and, ever since, replete with memories of tripe and garlic, I remain eternally in his debt.

Having reconciled myself to the fact that Modern Helladic Greeks tend to lack appreciation of the subtle art of nonsense that would render the Goodies intelligible to them, my next memorable Goody's foray took place in Athens, where, seated among a group of people who proclaimed themselves intellectuals, I was treated to a fascinating discussion about Goody’s, being a Greek-owned company, representing the forces of local resistance against the evils of globalization and multinationals. One particularly eloquent member of the symposium, carefully removing the frilly toothpick from his ᾽κλαμπ σάντουιτς᾽ in order to carefully, methodically and in full view of all his friends, attend to the void between his teeth, went so far as to opine that in this day and age, when it is not in the interests of the plutocrats to assert themselves through wars, economic resistance was the only way in which to oppose the Western juggernaut. This was of course, prior to the second invasion of Iraq.

Had I known then, what I know now, that is, that the Goody’s franchise has not only managed to dominate the Greek market at the expense of other multinational behemoths, that it has not only been the subject of New York-style hostile corporate takeovers, but it has also carefully, and cautiously extended its sway into such countries as Cyprus, Albania, FYROM, Mayotte, Australia and soon, the break-away state of Kosovo and Saudi Arabia, thus indulging in a little of that globalisation my interlocutors so denounced, I would have pointed this out to all present in tones as strident as the potato chips and the eye-wateringly delicious burger stuffing my mouth would have permitted me so to do. As it stands, globalisation is, for the modern Greek ideologue, a terrible thing, unless we are doing it, in which case, we are merely fulfilling our destiny. Look at Alexander for instance.

Scintillating discussion aside, that particular Goody’s experience was notable as well for the foray into the store, of some particularly ebullient Greek –Australians who proceeded to make such comments in inordinately voluble English as: “Shoulda gone ta Macca’s,” (prompting one of our party, who was an English teacher to ask me if I knew which language they were speaking,) trying to recite the ingredients of the Big Mac, “Two all beef, patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese….” before lapsing into a rousing chorus of “Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, Oi, oi, oi.” I cringed, culturally of course before exiting the premises with them, onto Omonoia, where I harassed, for their amusement, a hapless policeman with the question: “Excuse me sir, can you tell me where Omonoia Square is?” When he replied “here,” I responded with indignation, pointing to the decrepit roundabout before us: “Come on man, this is a circle, how can it be a square?” Much majesty arises therefore, in the trivial outcomes of the marriage of Goody’s and Greek-Australians.

Now that Goody’s is made manifest among us in the heart of our own Greek-Australian community, let none deride it as a mere western imitation. Let no one ask how its Angus burger range, which include the ‘Texas BBQ’ and ‘Red Hot Chili Burger’ (affectionately known among Greek-Australians from Northern Greece as the ‘boukovo,’) are in any way connected with Greece. Goody’s cuisine notwithstanding, is the personification of Greece in ways subtle and unsuspecting. It even reflects the demography of that country and its phenomenon of mass migration to the cities, with seventy-two of its one hundred and seventy two Greek stores being located in Athens. Its very name precludes negativity and directly refers to the Ancient Greek quest for beauty: το καλόν. It, like Ancient Greece itself, is an ideal, and thus occupies a exalted space far beyond the decay of this chthonic world.

More importantly, rather than aping the western culinary and marketing traditions of corporate entities that in reality constitute a vanguard for global domination by rapacious, capitalist world powers, Goody's represents something profound and exciting. It is, by its very existence, Modern Greece's riposte to the west for appropriating Ancient Greek culture, with all its constituent ingredients (theatre, democracy, philosophy, history……(to be recited with the same tune as “two all beef patties”) and culturally trademarking them, so that they in turn, market them back to us, and dictate to us the terms in which we will receive (and pay for) them.

Now, at long last, we in turn, millenia later, have, through Goody’s genius, been able to appropriate aspects of Western cuisine, assimilate them within the Greek zeitgeist and make them so much our own, that to consider a Modern Greek state without the institution of Goody’s would be unfathomable. I can almost hear my Greek ideologue friends of yore crow triumphantly: “Take that, evil westerners, ye of the memoranda, the troika, the usurpers of Bretton-Woods, unspeakable fiscal water-boarders of the IMF quagmire from which you were filthily spawned, your burgers are ours!”

Put simply, it is the patriotic duty of every single Greek-Australian to get their Greek on and tweak the nose of our oppressors by purchasing not one, but two κλαμπ σάντουιτς from Goody’s. And I eagerly look forward to the day when, to paraphrase Charles Kuralt, we can navigate our way through this most Greek of cities, using Goody’s burger establishments, as a navigator uses the stars.

DEAN KALIMNIOU.

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in Neos Kosmos on 3 September 2016

“What thou seest, write in a book, and send it unto the seven churches which are in Asia; unto Ephesus, and unto Smyrna, and unto Pergamos, and unto Thyatira, and unto Sardis, and unto Philadelphia, and unto Laodicea.”

The Seven Churches mentioned in the Apocalypse of St John no longer exist. They were methodically destroyed in a campaign of genocide lasting several decades but culminating in the Apocalyptic conflagration of Smyrna in September 1922. Greeks call this, the Asia Minor Catastrophe. Seemingly inexplicably, they traditionally distinguish between this “Catastrophe” and the Pontian Genocide, even though they form but parts of a broader plan to acts committed by the Ottomans and later, nationalist troops and irregulars with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, the Greeks of Anatolia by (a) Killing (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm; (c) Deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the Greek’s physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births by the Greeks of Anatolia; (e) Forcibly transferring their children to another group, that of muslim Kurds an Turks.

The aforementioned acts, of which were committed against the Greek of Anatolia fall within the definition of the crime of genocide, as adopted by the UN General Assembly in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in 1948.

The perpetrators of course, and their successors, have denied that any genocide took place. Instead, they have been able to form the framework of the narrative, one that sees a modern secular Turkey emerge from a backward past, emancipating itself from the shackles of colonialism and imperialism. According to this narrative, the genocide of the Greeks is downplayed by the orientalist west as collateral damage arising out of an internecine squabble between Middle Eastern groups, or anachronistically considered a bit of tit for tat, for what is deemed to be the Greek “invasion,” of Anatolia, which is ridiculous and inordinately hurtful, considering that this particular genocide commenced decades before the Greco-Turkish war.

Consequently, it is instructive, in the face of Modern Turkish denial, in concert with their western apologists, to consider the thought processes of the perpetrators themselves. Talaat Bey, Minister of the Interior and one of the ruling triumvirate of the Young-Turks who created the constructed and implemented a policy of genocide in the Ottoman Empire, had this to say in 1914:

“It is urgent for political reasons that the Greeks living on the coast of Asia Minor are obliged to evacuate their villages and to settle in the vilayets of Erzeroum and Chaldea. If they should refuse to be transported to the places indicated, you will like to give verbal instructions to our Moslem brothers, in order to oblige the Greeks, by excesses of any kind, to emigrate themselves of their own accord. Do not forget to obtain, in this case, certificates stating these immigrants leave their homes of their own initiative, so that later political questions do not result from it.”

Greece was not an initial belligerent in the First World War. In fact, one of the major reasons why the king of the time wished to keep Greece neutral was because of his concern that the slaughter and forced removal of the native Greek population of Asia Minor, already well underway while Greece was at peace with the Ottoman Empire, would increase in scope and severity, as a result of Greece’s entry into the war.

There seems to have been some sort of apocalyptic sense of a necessary and urgent final showdown among Ottoman officials and policy makers which informed the perpetration of genocide. As far back as 1909, just a year after the Young-Turks proclaimed the equality and brotherhood of all races and creeds within the Ottoman Empire, General Mahmut Şevket Paşa, the Ottoman Commander-in-Chief, told the Ecumencial Orthodox Patriarch Ioakeim III: "We will cut off your heads, we will make you all disappear. Either we will survive or you."

Talaat Bey also mirrored these ‘final solution’ type sentiments in his own utterances, commenting in January 1917 (again prior to Greece’s entry into the First World War): "... I see that time has come for Turkey to have it out with the Greeks the way it had it out with the Armenians in 1915."

Rafet Bey, a prominent member of the Young-Turk movement, informed Dr. Ernst von Kwiatkowski, the Austro-Hungarian consul in the Pontic city of Samsounta in November 1916:"We must at last do with the Greeks as we did with the Armenians...” Two days later, he informed Consul Kwiatkowski: "We must now finish with the Greeks. I sent today battalions to the outskirts to kill every Greek they pass on the road." According to the London Post on 5 December 1918, he was if anything, efficient: "Rafet Pasha, the late Governor of Bitlis, was sent to Samsoun with express orders to become a scourge to the Greeks. He did the work thoroughly. Over a hundred and fifty thousand were deported in this district and in Trebizond."

Damad Ferid Paşa the Ottoman Turkish Grand Vizier, was one of the few official to describe Turkey's policy of extermination against the Christians in June 1919 at the Paris Peace Conference as crimes: "... such as to make the conscience of mankind shudder with horror forever." Nonetheless, regime change meant that his solemn and sensitive admission was discounted and later explained away as a product of western compulsion.

For the genocide did not cease with the fall of the Young Turk movement and the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in the Second World War. Instead, old perpetrators, rebaptized as Kemalists, continued their heinous crimes under the guise of a newfound patriotism. The American Stanley E. Hopkins, an employee of the Near East Relief, wrote on 16 November 1921:

“… the Greeks of Anatolia are suffering the same or worse fate than did the Armenians in the massacres of the Great War. The deportation of the Greeks is not limited to the Black Sea Coast but is being carried out throughout the whole of the country governed by the Nationalists. The purpose is unquestionably to destroy all Greeks in that territory and to leave Turkey for the Turks. These deportations are, of course, accompanied by cruelties of every form just as was true in the case of the Armenian deportations five and six years ago.”

By this stage, Greece had occupied Smyrna, at the behest of the Allies. Greek Prime Minister Venizelos sought territorial concessions in Asia Minor, which were granted on a conditional basis and with grave misgivings by the World Powers, for they doubted the Greek State’s capacity to police the areas under its control and maintain stability. It is important to note that the plight of the Anatolia Greeks barely rated a mention in anyone’s considerations. Poorly resourced and unable to quell Turkish unrest in the areas under Greek administration, the Greek army was forced to march deeper and deeper into the Anatolian hinterland in order to quash the Kemalists. The World Powers formally abandoned their support for Greece after a democratically achieved change of government in that country and Kemal’s army emerged victorious, sweeping the Greek Army out of Asia Minor, and committing depravities on the native Greeks of Anatolia who were also compelled to leave their homelands.

Kemal was subtle, a brilliant tactician and a masterful politician, which, despite the ruthless manner in which he stifled democratic dissent among his own people, is why he is seen as such an attractive figure among western historians and politicians. For them, the fact that he created a supposedly secular Turkey and “modernized the alphabet” (restricting future generations from access to their past) is seen as praiseworthy and massacres of opponents or the fate of the Christians of Anatolia, are either discounted, denied and explained away. Thus, while French military colonel Mougin, may claim that on 13 August 1923 in the Turkish Grand National Assembly, Mustafa Kemal declared: "At last we've uprooted the Greeks ...", in an interview with Swiss journalist Emile Hilderbrand, published on Sunday 1 August 1926 in the Los Angeles Examiner under the title "Kemal Promises More Hangings of Political Antagonists in Turkey", Mustafa seems to express outrage at the fate of the Christians: “These left-overs from the former Young Turkey Party, who should have been made to account for the lives of millions of our Christian subjects who were ruthlessly driven en masse, from their homes and massacred, have been restive under the Republican rule.”

Almost one hundred years after the Holocaust of Smyrna brought to an end over 3,000 years of Greek civilization in Anatolia, realpolitik has seen the World Powers, shift from a position of openly condemning the genocide, (Winston Churchill in his memoirs wrote: “... Mustapha Kemal's Army ... celebrated their triumph by the burning of Smyrna to ashes and by a vast massacre of its Christian population...”) to blatantly not seeking to disturb Turkey with any mention of this terrible crime against humanity. The legacy of such a policy has been to send the message to other genocidal regimes that despite the rhetoric of the United Nations, crimes of this nature can and will go unpunished.

Proof of this is that while the US has recognized that the current crimes against Christians perpetrated by ISIS in Syria and Iraq are tantamount to genocide and indeed, are merely just another more recent continuation of the genocide commenced by the Ottomans, they did nothing to prevent it from taking place.

In a world where modern Great Powers wreath their rapacity or self-interest in buzz-words, little peoples and their plight are still given as short shrift as those that suffered in Anatolia so many years before, and we can cynically pick and choose which perpetrators to punish, and which ones we can protect, in exchange for their oil, their bases or their influence. Yet the unwillingness of those Powers to confront such crimes, condemn them and bring pressure upon the perpetrators and their successors to accept responsibility, is a major threat to world peace today and a blight upon the legacies of the innocent Greeks slaughtered in the Catastrophe of the Anatolian Genocide.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday, 10 September 2016

“I need to change my will,” the old man said, his eyes glistening. “I’ve just come from Thymio’s funeral.
In my experience, there is nothing like the loss of a friend to make one consider, not only mortality, but also the legal practicalities of life’s leave-taking.

“What do you want to change?” I asked, pretentious fountain pen at the ready.

“I want you to draft my will so that my properties won’t go to my son and daughter if they don’t give me a proper Orthodox funeral. If they bury me like a pig in a sack, as we say, they get nothing.” He tapped his fingers on the desk as if to drive home the point: “Nothing.”

“This is a problem,” I replied. “You have gifted all your properties to your kids seven years ago so that you could receive the pension. A gift is a gift. Your properties no longer belong to you and you no longer have any say in how they are disposed of.”

The old man frowned, his lips trembling: “Rubbish, they are mine. I still pay the mortgages. I don’t want to be thrown onto a fire like a barbeque. I struggled for those kids. I made sacrifices. I am entitled to some dignity. Not like poor Thymio.”

“What happened to Thymio?” I asked.

“Weren’t you at the funeral?”

I didn’t learn of Thymio’s passing until the day of his funeral and thus could not attend it. He was the only octogenarian that I have ever called by his first name, simply because he was too refined, too glamorous to be addressed as “barba” or “theio,” like the other elderly gents of our local community. With his sensitive, feline eyes, his aquiline nose and his immense height, he exuded the cosmopolitan air of the true Alexandrine.

On a weekly basis, I would run into him at our local shopping strip, impeccably dressed in suit and tie, choosing fruit with the distracted tragic air of a Byronic hero. Upon entering his field of vision, he would emit great yawps of triumph: “It’s Σερ Ουίλκινσον!” he would cry and promptly commence quoting verse after verse of Cavafy’s poem “A Byzantine Nobleman in Exile Composing Verses”: “The frivolous can call me frivolous. I’ve always been most punctilious about important things. And I insist that no one knows better than I do the Holy Fathers, or the Scriptures, or the Canons of the Councils.”

Apparently, as he once explained to a bystander, I was as phlegmatic and emotionless as an Englishman with a title, hence my sobriquet, and he should know, for in Alexandria, he had known plenty.

During Holy Week, Thymio was never in church like the rest of us. Instead, we would find him, walking down the main street, holding the service book of the Great and Holy Week in his hand, weeping ecstatically. “Behold, the bridegroom is coming,” he would proclaim, as I walked past him, shoving the service book under my nose: “Today he who hung the earth upon the waters is hung upon a Tree/ He who is King of the Angels is arrayed in a crown of thorns./ He who wraps the heaven in clouds is wrapped in mocking purple./ He who freed Adam in the Jordan receives a blow on the face.” Grasping the lapel of my jacket for emphasis, he would cry: “Such poetry, such a language! In all of the seven languages I know, no other can convey sweet sorrow in such a poignant way. We even have a word for it, χαρμολύπη. What beauty there is in sadness.”

The local Greek old men, hardened by adversity and age, would shake their heads in incredulity. “What is he raving about now?” one would ask. “If you ask me, he is a poofter,” another would respond. “Have you seen his garden? It’s overgrown with weeds. He is completely useless. Can’t even grow a tomato. His brain is only good for talking rubbish.” Taking me aside, they would advise: “Son, stay away from that man. He is not like us – he doesn’t come from a village and understands nothing about life. There is nothing you can learn from him. If you hang around him, you will get a bad name.”

"Scum, all of these Alexandrians, scum," another would pronounce, meticulously divesting his ear of wax with the overgrown nail of his little finger. "They all became foremen and ratted on the workers for the bosses because they spoke English. Class traitors all of them."

Nonetheless, even they were in awe of Thymio, because as they told me, he was an architect. it was common knowledge that all architects were Freemasons and as a result had powerful and malevolent connections. "Keep away, son, keep away," they enjoined.

Yet how could I stay away from someone who, upon one’s approach to his home, could hear him on the back verandah singing in his rich baritone, Mozart’s Aria from the Marriage of Figaro? “Non più andrai, farfallone amoroso, notte e giorno d'intorno girando…” Or remove myself from someone who had autographed copies of first editions of the works of famous modern Greek poets and musicians stacked casually upon stacks upon stacks of books, LP’s and periodicals lining the walls of his study, all the while threatening to topple onto his desk, as regaled me with apocryphal stories about their erotic proclivities?

Thymio would push away the authentic Ancient Egyptian shabtis lined up fastidiously on his desk as he selected a disc and placed it on the gramophone. Invariably, the voice of Egyptian singer Oum Kalthoum would emerge, saturating the room in its musk. Thymios, eyes closed, seated in his armchair in a dressing gown, would stroke his goatee and be transported: “Kollina, Kollina fi ilhobi sawa wilhawa, ah minno ilhawa Ilhawa, ah minno Ilhawa, ah minno Ilhawa, aaah minno Ilhawa…” he would croon.

“Shut up dad, I need to practice,” a boyish voice coming from the next room would interpose itself upon his cadences, and the sound of an oboe would begin to seep through under the door.

“All of us, all of us are in love all together, and passion, ahhh from the passion, ahhh from the passion, ahhh from the passion,”Thymios would translate, chortling at his attempts to transpose his faultless English to the rhythm of Oum Kalthoum’s Arabic.

«Πήγαινε να κόψεις το χορτάρι έξω που έχει φυτρώσει ως το μπόι σου και άσε τους έρωτες,» κυρά Θύμιαινα, would cut in abruptly, mop and bucket perennially in hand, accompanied by an unchanging angry expression.

“Alf Layla W Layla,” Thymios would exclaim, “One thousand and one nights, or one thousand and one years with this woman. But what a woman she was in Iskenderiya! What a woman! Χαρμολύπη σκέτη!”
“Go and cut the grass Thymio!” κυρά Θύμιανα’s voice would achieve a shrill scream, of an intensity that Munch would be hard pressed to emulate, and I would know it was time my visit was ended. As I would walk away, I would cock my ear, so I could hear Thymio chant, as he attempted, always unsuccessfully to start the mower, the ninth ode of the Akathist Hymn: «Άπας γηγενής, σκιρτάτω τω πνεύματι λαμπαδουχούμενος· πανηγυριζέτω δε...» (“Let every mortal born on earth with festive lamps in hand, in spirit leap for joy.”)
The vicissitudes of life somehow found a way to interpose themselves between Thymio and I in the years that followed. No longer present at the fruit shop, it was rumoured among the local old ladies, that his wife had thrown him out of the house, among the local old men that he had found a Vietnamese gay lover and had moved to South Yarra, and among others, that his reclusive wife had died, he had become afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease and had been placed by his children, unable, or unwilling to tend to him in his illness, in care.
“You don’t understand,” the old man shattered my revierie. “Do you know what they did? They burnt him. Like a pile of wood. No priests, no chanting. Πήγε άψαλτος. Even puppies get a better burial. And then his shameless children, who should have been strangled at birth, went to a restaurant with their friends. Apparently this is what they do now. Go to a restaurant and eat, and remember the dead and then they sang his favourite song.”
“What was it?” I asked.
«Ξέρω εγώ;» he responded. “Something called Amazing Greece. Doesn’t even make sense, he was from Alexandria.”
“You probably mean Amazing Grace,” I corrected him, vainly attempting to stifle a chuckle.
“Are you mocking?” the old man snarled. “I won’t be made fun of. Not by you, nor my kids. I don’t want to go like that. Write in the will that I want a proper funeral so I can meet my maker like σαν κύριος, όχι σαν γυφτο-αιγύπτιος. I won’t be farewelled with lattes and chardonnay. I want my people to cry over me in my grave. If they don’t give me that respect, they lose everything.”
“Look,” I assumed my most emollient air. “I’m not making fun of you. But you need to know that it is you who have nothing, having given them everything. Unfortunately, you are in no position to dictate terms.”
“And this is funny?”

“No, I wasn’t laughing at you. I was just thinking how ill fitting Amazing Grace is for Thymio. Now, if I could have it my way, at my funeral, as my pagan children throw logs upon my pyre and my soul begins to smoulder, I would ask the Lord to bring Thymios back solely to sing me away with the Non più andrai Aria he so loved: “You shall frolic no more, lustful butterfly, Day and night flitting to and fro; Disturbing ladies in their sleep/ Little Narcissus, Adonis of love.” I shrugged. “Maybe then it would be somewhat bearable.”

«E, τέτοιος μαλάκας σαν κι αυτόν είσαι κι εσύ,» the old man spat and stormed out of the room, slamming the door behind him, twice, for emphasis.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 17 September 2016

Dearest mainstream journalists who posit that ‘wog’ is a term of endearment,

One of the first “wogs” I met, was my father, who at the tender age of six was ordered off a Melbourne tram, along with his father, for having the temerity to speak to him in the only language he knew, Greek, in this fashion: “We speak English in Australia you bloody wogs. Get off.” At that time, my family had only been in Australia for two years, so the endearing intent behind the injunction was lost on my father. Similarly, in high school, when his classmates fulminated against the “f....g wogs,” only to modify their position upon being the recipients of his fists, with an: “but you’re alright,” he criminally failed to appreciate the jocular, endearing way in which this was intended. Incidentally, to this day, my father refuses to watch the epic film “Lawrence of Arabia,” because of the scene where T.E Lawrence walks into the ‘no-wogs’ bar (again, that is meant in the nicest possible way), and announces he has taken Aqaba in the following terms: “We’ve taken Aqaba... the wogs have.” Regardless of how much I try, I am unable to convince him that the British army meant the word as a term of affection for the Arabs, whose countries they would go on to appropriate for themselves. Funny that.

In his memoir, “Call me Emilios,” His Honour Justice Emilios Kyrou of the Victorian Supreme Court of Appeal, also vividly describes how he failed to realise that the constant beatings and name-callings he endured at his school for being a “wog,” which resulted in him changing his name in an attempt to efface his ethnic identity, were merely the effusions of the generosity of the Australian spirit. In a sense, His Honour should be profoundly grateful for the privilege of being called a ‘wog’ and being roughed up as a result, for it gave him the motivation to seek to defy the contemporary preconceived notions of a wog’s proper place in society and become of the keenest legal minds of his generation. I extend, unsolicited, my thanks on his behalf.

Likewise, in her recent maiden speech to Federal Parliament, Greek-Australian Liberal MP Julia Banks describes her own special relationship with the word ‘wog,’ and how she sought its meaning in a dictionary: “Incredulously, I read the definition over and over: “Someone of dark skin who is foreign to the land on which he lives.” I was hurt more by the tone of the word and less by its definition. I felt ugly, scared and very alone.” Notice a pattern here dearest mainstream journalists? We “wogs” seem unable to understand the unique Australian communication of affection. Julia Banks in a case in point, because in more recent times, mysteriously contemporaneous with when “wog” became a term of endearment, as a junior lawyer, her car was attacked by unionists who in her own words: “They threw my car, rocked it backwards and forwards and slammed their faces against the windows as they called me a wog.” For some reason, Julia Banks seemed sufficiently moved by this outpouring of tolerance and inclusiveness that she also chose to relate this love story in her maiden speech.

Furthermore, dearest mainstream journalists, when I, born and bred in Oz, wear the Greek national costume for the Greek Independence Day march to the Shrine of Remembrance, which has taken place in Melbourne for over four decades, I will be invariably be accosted by well meaning Sunday strollers with the words: “F......g poofter wog. Why don’t you go back to your own country?” When I do return to my ancestral homeland, which is the municipality of Moonee Valley, in which my family has resided for sixty two years, I usually reflect upon how the expression of such terms of endearment create an unprecedented sense of intimacy and connectedness with the broader Australian zeitgeist. I suspect this has something to do with how well my bestockinged legs look in a skirt and suspect them, that I asked for it. Similarly, I am always astounded at the level of affection displayed when discussing the merits of Australian political parties with my parents on the way to the polling booth on election day, well meaning citizens diligently remind us: “We speak English in Australia you b....y wogs.” I had the honour of witnessing a gentleman also direct those same loving words of endearment at my then two year old daughter at last year’s local ANZAC Day festivities, proving that age is no boundary to lapping up the type of love you so celebrate.

Dearest mainstream journalists, I applaud you for celebrating just how endearing the word ‘wog’ is in the mainstream print media. Finally, pronouncements such as “all wog parents are strict, wog parents don’t give their kids enough freedom, (from psychologists,) wogs shouldn’t speak their wog languages because it confuses them when they speak English, (from teachers) wogs are experts at rorting the system (from a centrelink employee), ‘geez you wogs smother your kids in clothes (from a doctor) and I love wog food, (almost anyone invited to our homes)” all fall into perspective, though I confide in you that I am yet to comprehend what a “chocko wog” is. This is important, because apparently, I am one. I’m sure it’s something exceedingly beautiful, just like me in my ‘wog’ skirt.

Imagine how ecstatic I was to learn that the term ‘wog,’ was first noted by lexicographer F.C. Bowen in 1929, in his Sea Slang: a dictionary of the old-timers’ expressions and epithets, where he defines wogs as "lower class Babu shipping clerks on the Indian coast.” This makes me happy, both because I have an abiding fascination in the cultures of the Indian subcontinent, and because a Second World War veteran who was hidden by Greek villages in Crete at the risk of their lives during that war, once told me, after a passenger on the tram derided me for daring to read a book in ‘wog,’ that ‘wog’ was a colloquial expression for a disease, and I’d rather be a Gujarati-speaking bureaucrat than syphilis, any day. I was going to go with the common cold here, but I assure you, there is nothing common about us ‘wogs.’

What is especially endearing about applying the word ‘wog’ to us, dearest mainstream journalists, is that the love is spread so far and wide. Indeed, the broadness of its application is breathtaking. It is efficiency itself. Instead of having to differentiate between Italians, Greeks, Maltese, Turks, Croatians, Serbians, Bosnians, Albanians, Turks, Kurds, Armenians, Persians, Lebanese...etc, one collective noun is all that is required to speed your love from your lips and into our hearts, decimating the differences in language, culture, religion and gender between us and re-casting us in one, easily accessible, Aussie-forged image, all the better to relate to us with, similar in fashion to how in 1949, British MP George Wigg said of Winston Churchill: “The Honourable Gentleman and his friend think they are all ‘wogs’. Indeed the Right Honourable Member for Woodford, thinks that the ‘wogs’ begin at Calais.” This is instructive because I’ve always wondered where the borders of Woglandia begin. As well, for some obscure reason, I’ve been brought up to be proud of my Greek heritage. I feel now, that this is a grave mistake. Had I been brought up to be proud of being a ‘wog,’ I would not have missed out on appreciating all that love. And sometimes, that’s just all you need.

The archetypal ‘Wogboy’ himself seems to agree with you dearest mainstream journalists. Nick Giannopoulos once commented: “I think by defusing the word 'wog' we've shown our maturity and our great ability to adapt and just laugh things off, you know... When I first came [to Greece] and I started trying to explain to them why we got called 'wog' they'd get really angry about it... But then when they see what we've done with it—and this is the twist—that we've turned it into a term of endearment, they actually really get into that...”

Certainly, there is great comedic release in ‘wogs,’ saying the word wog, for after all the best type of comedy is that which arises from a release of tension, in this case, the realisation by the coiner that his term registers as one of endearment to the intended recipient, just as the ‘n’ word is used in the United States. In a conversation I had some time ago with another archetypal ‘wog,’ George Kapiniaris, we mused over just how mainstream and metrosexual the descendants of the ‘wogs’ that they portrayed with such acclaim in the eighties have become, to the extent where their forebears would neither recognise them or relate to them.

This engenders in me feelings of deep disquiet. For disturbing evidence appears to suggest that while the members of the communities referred to collectively as ‘wog’ are slowly evolving, not only due to their acculturation in this wide brown land of y/ours, but also as a result of increased ability to maintain links with the rest of the world. I fear that we members of those communities are gradually morphing and melding into something that no longer resembles the traditional image of the ‘wog’ as historically defined by Australian society and hallowed in ‘Kingswood Country,’ ‘Home Sweet Home’ and ‘Acropolis Now,’ but rather has a weird and warped dynamic of its own. And herein lies the rub: I’m not so sure I can live up to the image you are so enamoured of, but I’m dead as hell sure I cannot live without your love. And so, dearest mainstream journalists, all that I ask of you is this: If I cannot be the wog you so desire me to be, will you still love me tomorrow?

Yours stereotpyically,

A wog (of the chocko sub-species).

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE online on Saturday 1 October 2016

“Within the dark of anguish/ I inhabited your footsteps/ these you told me/ are the yeast of resurrection.”

The above lines could easily have been written by Saint Isaac the Syrian, John of Dalyatha or any of the desert fathers of the Thebaid. The “Noted Transparencies” a collection of poems, the majority of which were revealed Muhammad-like, to the poet Nikos Nomikos in a nocturnal vision and only written down decades later in the Antipodes, are not just imbued with the desert tradition, they are sodden in it. That vision, is not an easy one either to behold, or to record. It is just as painful as that granted to John of the Apocalypse, and just as cryptic: “I saw a towering lord-like man, with a parchment spread across his chest, I tried to read it, but strange were its words, and it reminded me, of an old happy world, in which I had once lived.” Unlike that of Saint John, Nomikos’ Apocalypse is comprehensible, (albeit barely), but does not appear to lead to any discernible resolutions, save for the affirmation of the palimpsest of his own memory.

Most notable is the sparse, arid, apophthegmatic quality of Nomikos’ revelations.

The words of desert fathers are few but their meaning are as manifold as the grains of sand that comprise their home. They need to be, for time is of the essence: “…and he told me, look on the calendar, nigh are its hours, the definition of silence and do not worry, tomorrow I sail, with the morning line.” Typical of the Orthodox conception of time is the manner in which Nomikos conflates it, confounding any modern perspective of its linearity. This vision is of things that have passed, are currently passing and are yet to pass, all in one. In all of this, there is an incredible amount of waiting: “I am sitting on the bench, along with others, waiting for my turn to be called, to the feast of the apocalypse, just as they had told me.” There are therefore, apocalypses and apocalypses of apocalypses and we slowly begin to understand the aptness of the title: “Noted Transparencies.” The desert fathers aspire to theosis, union with the Godhead. On that day, the earthly raiment of the corporeal shall be shed in favour of the ineffable and the aethereal and spiritual paradoxes such as that of the “itinerant musician…just playing his guitar so deftly, never mind that he was one-handed,” shall be superseded.

We place Nikos Nomikos among the desert fathers of the diaspora, however reluctant, for he is that rare thing, a diasporan by birth, even before arriving at the Antipodes, a source of wonder, even for the poet himself: “In any case, no matter whom I asked, nobody knew to tell me, why they invited us, to this different land.” Born in Alexandria to Greek migrants, his conception of Hellenism is that not of the exile, but of the outsider. Living in the same neighbourhood as Cavafy, and later going on to inhabit the same workstation as Nikos Kavvadias, a following in the footsteps of the fathers, if there ever was one, Nikos Nomikos’ poetry is remarkable (and mercifully) devoid of the palindromic but ultimately stultifying nostalgia for place and time that has so characterized the poetry of his generation.

His tradition, as opposed to that of many of his peers which appears to have frozen in time upon their arrival upon these shores, is a living one, which can thus facilitate the poets’ effortless spiritual navigation through millennia of the human condition, without becoming anachronistic, or stale, all the while encouraging us, to ascend or descend to the sublime, at will, upon a ladder with him and his teachers: “The alarm clock howled beside me, at days reveille, with all the sensitive demands, of the spiritual person, and I remembered my teacher, not Saint John of the Ladder, him I never had the privilege, he only left me his ladder, freshly painted, as a memento, but the Alexandrine, originally from Corfu, Ioannis Gikas…”

The juxtaposition of Saint and exiled teacher here is not coincidental. Saint John Climacus is known as an ascetic who abandoned the world for the monastery of Saint Catherine in Sinai, there to pen the Ladder, a manual that describes how to raise one's soul and body to God through the acquisition of ascetic virtues. Incidentally it is in the Ladder'that we first hear of the ascetic practice of carrying a small notebook to record the thoughts of the monk during contemplation. In similar fashion, the poet Nikos Nomikos views his toil as being best ascribed to that of the ascetic, even referring to his workspace as his ασκητήριον. Thus in a poem that appears to converse intertextually with his neighbour Cavafy’s ‘The Afternoon Sun’ («This room, how well I know it.») he states: «The room is quite small, three by three, but with vast ascetic dimensions, full of fires and passions, which whatever we say, outlast distant measures of time, and their word, is heard deep, in the hearing of lovers, the decency of spiritual light.»

Gikas, on the other hand, «with his all white beard, his monocle, and the black cloak of intellectualism, that whenever I saw him my skull shuddered from his spirit, and I would sit for hours on end, listening to him...» is just as capable of imparting those things needful in the diaspora as any metropolitan Hellene. Spirituality aside therefore, Nomikos’ alternative vision of the Greek diaspora, that of a community completely emancipated from its cultural cringe of ersatzness, self-confident and capable of manipulating its past heritage and current conditions in order to formulate and articulate a world view of its own, is an exciting and overwhelmingly relevant one, if only we have the noetic insight to follow in his footsteps, for the search for topos is eternal and transcends itself: «From then I began designing the winters of the future, on sorrowful canvases, in the gallery of the soul, with faces full of incurable dreams, of the golden Homeland, which are never-ending.»

It is perhaps fitting then that «Noted Transparencies» has been translated from the original Greek by diasporan scholar and poet George Mouratidis, who, despite being born in Athens, culturally belongs to the second diasporic generation. Mouratidis’ translation is careful, considered and unobtrusive, rendering the desert father Nikos Nomikos’ Apocalypse, with all the faith, respect and discernment that it compells of his disciples, hence his admission that: «every one of my conversations with Nomikos is a lesson...Nomikos, both in his art and life, is a world unto himself, one into which he himself disappears, taking the reader with him.»

«Noted Transparencies,» is the only collection by Nomikos to appear in English. Published by Owl Publishing, the imprint of Greek academic stalwart Helen Nickas, who has devoted much effort in disseminating the works of Greek diasporan poets to the broader mainstream, it is more than a monument, in the words of Lucy Van, to the ruptured flowrings of time: intimate, beatific and sad. Instead, it is the entire sublime paradox of existence, to be «celebrated with choirs and high floods of light.» For each of us, all it could take to be granted the vision of this humbly transparant desert father, could be: «that poem, with the gilded dove on its breast, which spoke of syllables of the soul, on the open sails of the ineviable journey, with a closed mouth of sacrament.» And in the meantime, as the noetic prayer of poetry is rendered faithfully into the English idiom through the ascesis of Mouratidis for the edification of us all, «tonight the wind is blowing and it is raining heavily, in the ascetic’s face.»

The English translation of Noted Transparencies was launched at the Collected Works Bookshop on Friday 30 September 2016.

DEAN KALIMNIOU
kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 8 October 2016

The revelation that the members of my tribe were possessed of a certain renown with regard to the resonance of their voices, came to me early in my youth. An exogenous friend from school was over, and we were trying to solve a puzzle while my maternal progenitor was on the phone, speaking to her respective maternal progenitor, in the fabled city of Athens.

In those heady days of international telephony, the ominous blips that heralded the imminent reception of an overseas call had their own protocol. Upon the sounds manifesting their presence upon his auditory nerves, it was incumbent upon the lifter of the receiver to firstly yell: “Ελλάδα, Ελλάδα!” most probably as an invitation to the rest of the members of the household to gather around the telephone, as well as an exhortation to be quiet, a pious hope, considering that the telephone receiver would be fought over by all members of the family, in their attempts to speak to their loved ones in Greece.

Having claimed the receiver, hallowed rubrics prescribed that the would-be interlocutor had to yell “shhhhh!” to the rest of the family, who in turn were obliged to shouting “τι λέει, τι λέει;” in the staggered unison of an ancient Greek chorus, as they attempted to wrest the phone from his grasp. Extricating himself from the tangle of outstretched arms, entwined phone cord and a cacophony of voices, holy tradition dictated that the interlocutor must then shout triumphantly: “Αλάου;” followed by a litany of “μ᾽ακούς, μ᾽ακούς;” while the rest of the family interposed with antiphons of: “χαιρετισμούς” and ”φιλάκια πολλα!”

In homes such as ours, possessed of such modern and heretical of devices as a wall telephone, the whole typikon was typically performed as an akathist.

“Geez your mum has got a loud voice,” my friend exclaimed, having been treated to a truncated version of the above described telephonic liturgy.

“No, she’s speaking to Greece,” I responded, unconsciously translating into English, the Greek phrase: “Μιλάει με την Ελλάδα.” (In those days leaving out the article was inconceivable).

“What?”

“She is speaking with my grandmother in Greece,” I elaborated.

“So why does she have to shout?”

“Well, Greece is such a long way away,” I heard myself saying.

Despite the advent of new rites that have, in their quest for global conquest, swept away the old rituals, along with their adherents’ unique conception of a relationship between volume and distance, some of us remain, as solitary Zoroastrians marooned within the wastelands of Yazd, faithful to the diptychs. Refusing to be initiated into the mysteries of Viber with the vehemence of a Jacobite recusant and viewing Skype with the incomprehensibility of a South Sea Islander gazing upon a crucifix for the very first time, to this day, when I call Greece, I, an Old Believer, perform the old observances, shouting down the mouthpiece of the telephone with as much fervor as I can muster.

Such fervor is of course, that of the lapsed pagan who, though converted, perennially lacks true faith. Somewhere, deep below my idol-worshipping veneer, I doubt the ability of the electromagnetic gods to convey messages via means supernatural and verily believe that the more I shout in the general direction of climes ancestral, the further my voice will carry. After all, did not Saint Kosmas the Aetolian prophesy the coming of the telephone when he envisaged: “you will speak here and they will hear you in Russia,” or according to another version “you will cry out here and they will hear you in Russia?” I’ve called Russia on a few occasion in my time and have been gratified by the fact that being a country of like faith, the shouting is reciprocal. Furthermore, in my zeal, I display the same propensity to uplift my voice for calls local. Oh Telstra, hear my prayer. Silence. Oh Optus, - Yes.

Though not quite. For it was a non-Greek colleague that pointed out the inconsistencies in my implementation of received dogmatic technology. “Did you that I can tell when you speaking to an Aussie? Your voice becomes low and nasal. I can also tell when you are speaking to a Greek. You get agitated and start shouting. Why are you guys always fighting with each other?”

Such sentiments have also been echoed by non-Greek family friends witnessing a Greek-Australian discourse:

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, why?”

“You guys are fighting.”

“We aren’t fighting.”

“Yes you are. You are shouting at each other.”

“Are we?”

“Yes.”

“No, we are just talking. That’s all.”

“So why are you shouting at me now?”

“No I’m not.”

“You are, you are shouting at me as we speak.”

“I’m not shouting. I’m raising my voice for emphasis.”

According to some deep thinking members of the tribe, our propensity to be louder than all of the other inhabitants of this planet has more to do with evolution then faith and ritual. At least that is what one armchair philosopher of a local Greek community organisation revealed to me when I observed that at general meetings, shouting seems to be the main item on the agenda: “You can’t blame them my boy. Of course we shout. The Turks are to blame. The ancient Greeks were very dignified people and shouting was considered bad breeding. You would never see Socrates or Pericles shout for example. The Byzantines were a very solemn people, always chanting hymns and praying, so there was no time to shout, except towards God when they shouted: “Lord, I have shouted unto Thee, hearken unto me,” (which seems to describe perfectly, my relationship with the telephone). When the Turks came, however, they push us all into the mountains. And how we were going to communicate with each other across deep mountain valleys and impassable ravines? Why, via shouting of course. We have gotten into the habit and we can no longer shake it off. Go to any φρουτομαρκέτα these days, and you will see Greek calling Greek like mastodons across primeval swamps.”

A sociological explanation was once offered to me by an Athenian theologian who was at that time, moonlighting as a municipal waste disposer (better money and hardly any work to do considering that they were perennially on strike). According to him, the Byzantine model is the ideal from which we have fallen: “Orthodoxy if anything, is structural. You cry, God listens. Similarly, when the Word of God is spoken, you listen. But in modern Greece, everyone shouts because they have lost the skill of listening. Because listening means thinking. And we Modern Greeks talk so we don’t have to think. Nonetheless, since times ancient, we have remained a competitive, adversarial race. This is why Modern Greeks do not believe in whispering. If anything, the main task in a discussion between Greeks is to achieve a decibel level higher than your interlocutor. The louder you are, the more right you are. Haven’t you seen the Greek morning talk shows?”

This exposition troubled me, not because it purported to reveal to me my true identity but rather because that identity has been prophesied by Saint Kosmas to be compromised when the world is ruled by the “άλαλα και μπάλαλα,» that is, those who neither speak, nor hear. Consolation, is taken where it an be found, in the multitude of the Modern Greek songs that attest to the inimitability of shouting to the Greek identity. Take the Cartesian Φωνάζω, for example, where it is categorically stated: Ελπίζω άρα υπάρχω... Φωνάζω άρα ζω...Δε θα σωπάσω ούτε λεπτό, or even Giannis Ploutarchos, Το Φωνάζω, which proves that even in our most tender and intimate moments of eros, shouting is a prerequisite for our understanding of reality: ‘Tο φωνάζω. Με καμία δε σ'αλλάζω. Σ'αγαπάω στο φωνάζω.’

Giannis Kalliris drives the point home further and reveals the ultimate truth about ourselves when he croons: “Γιορτάζω, γιορτάζω μ’ ακούτε που το φωνάζω…” Thus, if he does not shout it, we would not know that he is celebrating. If we do not shout, no one knows that we exist and we begin to doubt our own corporeality. It was for this reason then that in the Beginning there was the Word, and only later did in become Flesh.

Secure then in the knowledge that my decibels shield me from oblivion, I fear only, like the proverbial tree in the forest, my hypostasis, should I shout and there be no Greek there to hear me, which I think, is why the Byzantines turned to God in the first place. Till next time then, when it is my shout.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 15 October 2016

Whereas in the Poseidonians, the Greek poet Cavafy portrays a group of Greeks on the verge of assimilation aping old customs without knowing exactly what they signify, (an immensely strong metaphor of the apodemic condition) in his poem, “Of the Jews” (50AD), Cavafy paints the picture of a beautiful male, in the Wildean sense, not so much caught between two cultures, as in the process of feeling guilt for adopting one, new, exciting and catering to his sense of aesthetic, while discarding that belonging to his ancestors. That process is not without guilt, as can be seen below:

“Ianthes, son of Antonius, was beautiful like Endymion;

a painter and a poet, a runner and a thrower of the disc;

of a family with a leaning for the Synagogue.

“My noblest days are those

on which I forego the pursuit of aesthetic impressions,

when I abandon the beautiful, yet hard, Greek life

with its dominant attachment

to perfectly shapen and corruptible white limbs.

And I become, what I would wish

always to remain, a son of the Jews, of the holy Jews.”

Very earnest, this assertion,

“always to remain a son of the Jews, of the holy Jews”.

But he did not remain as such at all.

The Hedonism and the Art of Alexandria

had in him a devoted son”

Here we have a Jew of Alexandria, a Greek colony in Egypt with a large and important Jewish community, in an advanced state of assimilation. His name is Hellenised, while his father’s is Roman, reflecting a state of affairs that could be paralleled to the Greek-Melbournian experience of a second generation Greek-Australian named, let’s say Dean, for the sake of argument, naming his third generation son, Brian, in order to facilitate his ingress and egress within the mainstream culture.

Ianthes’ pastimes also do not conform to the Jewish stereotype. Though he is of a religious family, his interests lie in the Hellenic pursuits of athletics, poetry and the arts, much as a third generation Greek Australian, albeit a scion of a family that is heavily involved in “Greek” pursuits such as attending festivals, dances, church or concerts, much prefers to spend his time watching football and going for a run, rather actively being involved in the collective pursuits of his own community.

Yet despite his apparent devotion to the “beautiful” Greek life, Ianthes finds it a burden. His noblest days are those in which he abandons the search for the aesthetic – suggesting that though he may absorbed by it, it is something foreign and unattainable. Instead, Greek life is deemed by him to be “hard”, just as a complete and utter submission to the Australian religion of sport is also hard, requiring, if one is to navigate its multiplicity of doctrines and disciplines, the ability to process and assimilate an innumerable array of statistics, the display of blind uncritical faith towards Australian athletes and one’s team and an adamantine commitment to a training regime that punishes the body and completely dominates any and all free time.

This Anglo-Australian pursuit of the body beautiful, was, for the average Greek-Australian migrant, mystifying and to a great extent, culturally incompatible with their own social practices (unless it could be used to make money). It did however provide the key for entry and ultimately acceptance into the mainstream, which is why, when the AFL seeks to laud itself about the catholicity of its communion, it points to the existence of Greek, and other players of a multicultural background within its ministry. Ianthus also perceives sport in the same way. The Greek aesthetic, as expressed through sport, is fixated upon ‘whiteness,’ albeit of corruptible limb. The inference here is that Ianthus is not ‘white’ and that despite his delight in delving into the depths of the hunt for the elusive aesthetic, he is fully cognisant of the fact that his very race disqualifies him from more than an impressionistic dalliance with the subject of his fascination.

Ianthus’ therapy for his ontopathology, being a Jew who however hard he tries, believes he can never become a Greek, is to resolve, neither to adapt his Jewishness in order to confirm to the Greek aesthetic, or indeed, to jettison it altogether. Instead, like many Greek-Australians of Melbourne, he determines to “become what he wishes to remain, a son of the Jews.” Does this mean that his guilt and sense that he is truly not being accepted by those who he aspires to become are causing him to abandon his philhellenism and ersatz aestheticism for the stark asceticism of his own people, who are fixated upon the incorruptible?

There is much irony in that sentence. For why should Ianthus become something that he already is? If he is a Jew, why does he need to become a Jew? Further, it is significant that he does not call himself a Jew, but rather the son of the Jews, casting the authenticity of his own sense of belonging to his ancestral people into doubt. Quite possibly, Cavafy here has Ianthus qualify his being the son of the Jews, with the words “of the holy Jews,” in order to underline how an identity can become a hallowed doctrine of belief. Here, Ianthus finds his counterpart in the practices of many Greek-Australians, myself included, constantly seeking to find ways, through history, dance, folklore, sport, literature and music to augment their understanding of their parent’s identity, in order to make it their own, for it is sacred. Legion are those among us who seek to transform their understanding and search for Hellenism into an all-encompassing worldview. We too then, here in the Antipodes, in a city colonized, though not founded, as in the case of Alexandria, by Greeks, are the sons of Greeks, the sons of the holy Greeks.

Yet, if we are to take Cavafy at face value, Ianthus’ ontopathological battle appears to have been a momentary blip on the radar of his conscience. Despite his stated desire to return to his own people, the soft ways of hedonism and Alexandrian art (which hitherto appeared ‘hard’ to one schooled in the single-minded monotheistic devotion of those who once left Egypt and embraced the desert) appear to have caused Ianthus to embrace assimilation and abandon his ancestral ways.

As an exploration of how one is invariably led astray from one’s dedication to a cause of a belief by the allurements of pleasure, Cavafy’s poem still resonates today, as Helladic Greeks and diasporan Greeks point to the often depraved allurements of Western culture and their people’s uncritical adoption of these as a key reason for a perceived ‘loss of authenticity’ or erosion of their ethno-cultural identity. Yet the city in which Hellenism triumphed over Ianthus the insecure Jew is no longer Greek speaking. Neither did the Hellenise Jews triumph over those Jews who remained attached to their ancestor’s ways.

This, I believe, is the significance of Cavafy’s dating of his poem at 50AD. For by that time, the Hasmonean revolt that had seen the Hellenistic kings driven from Palestine, as a reaction to their intolerance of Jewish ways, was already a century old. That revolt caused a reassertion of the Jewish religion, partly by forced conversion and reduced the influence of Hellenism and Hellenistic Judaism. Some sixteen years after the date of the poem, another Jewish revolt would break out, one which would be brutally crushed by the Romans and would result in the expulsion of the Jews from their ancestral homeland, converting their culture to a diaspora culture. Arguably, the fall of our own great bastion of Greek civilisation, Constantinople, a millennium and a half later, placed the erstwhile triumphant Hellenes in a similar position.

Cavafy did not live to witness the establishment of the state of Israel. However, he would have been aware of the remarkable survival of Jewish culture throughout the European and Near Eastern world, including in his own city, Alexandria, where a Greek colony of migrants was also re-established and had reached its apogee during his time. He also did not live to witness the expulsion of both communities at roughly the same time. Perhaps then the irony of Ianthus’ final lapse, is to treat anything as final, And just perhaps, Cavafy is making a more than strong hint that in cultures co-existing and being permeated by others, guilt and pleasure are insurmountable dualities that must be embraced, not fought against, so that the guiltiest of pleasures lies not in exclusion, or puritanism but rather in tasting the comingling of the heady juices of the entire process of Apodemia, while stirring languidly, the multicultural melting pot.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 22 October 2016

In 1960, Warren Cowgill theorized that the strange, un-Indo-European οὐχί, from which the modern όχι is derived, stems from an early form of proto-Greek: “ne hoyu kwid,” a double negative like the French “ne….pas..” meaning: “not in this lifetime.”

The Greek attitude to the negative is thus subtle and nuanced, given than it confers a temporal quality to the absolute; it is given a duration, whether this is the span of a person’s life or beyond. As such, the Greek OXI, by its very nature, proclaims that it is by no means immutable, and is subject to change and review, depending on seasonal availability and a host of other factors affecting supply.

This is the reason why, during the crucial points in Greek history in which a negative was offered, it never actually took the form of the word OXI. Take for example, the exhortation by the invading Persians to the Greeks to lay down their arms, just before the battle of Thermopylae. Rather than a straight negative, Spartan King Leonidas, offered instead, an aorist active participle in the perfective aspect: Μολών Λαβέ, meaning, Peter Russell Clarkean fashion, “Come and Get It.” The Persians duly did so, proving Leonidas right in a manner that could not have been possible, if his response had been a mere OXI.

A similar Μολών Λαβέ was offered to British colonial troops by EOKA second in command Grigoris Afxentiou, when, cornered in his hideout near Machairas Monastery in Cyprus, he was asked to surrender. The civilized British proceeded to set fire to his hideout and roast him to death, corroborating Afxentiou’s assumption that they would not take a mere ‘no” for an answer.

Byzantine OXI’s on the other hand, are incredibly long winded, being full of sentences that self-embellish, only to break themselves upon the shores of their own classical allusions as their contrived structure irrigates the placid fountains of their syntax. Thus, when enjoined by the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II to surrender Constantinople to him, the last Emperor of Byzantium, Constantine XI Palaeologos, deigned not to answer monolectically. Instead, where a simple OXI would have sufficed, the Emperor responded: “Giving you though the city depends neither on me nor on anyone else among its inhabitants; as we have all decided to die with our own free will and we shall not consider our lives.” Some historians posit that the Empire gained an additional two days of existence as the Ottoman dragomans attempted to decipher just what it was that the Emperor meant.

Equally loquacious, but infinitely more poetic, was the form of OXI offered to the Turks by the hero of the Greek Revolutionary War Athanasios Diakos. By the time of his martyrdom, Diakos was already as seasoned naysayer, legend maintaining that he responded to the amorous proposals of a Turkish officer, visiting the monastery in which he was serving, not with a simple ‘no,’ but rather, by the physical act of killing him. Thus, when captured and encouraged to spare himself by embracing Islam, Diakos, instead of a dry “OXI,” was able to immediately offer up a negative of Palaeologian length, in perfect 15-syllable demotic form, without even flinching: “Go, get lost, you apostates and your religion. I was born and Greek, I shall die a Greek.”("Πάτε κι εσείς κ΄ η πίστις σας μουρτάτες να χαθείτε. Εγώ Γραικός γεννήθηκα, Γραικός θέλ΄ αποθάνω....) Significantly, he chose not, in his final hour, to call himself, as is the fashion among Melbournian Greeks anxious to prove their patriotic credentials these days, a Hellene. Now if being Greek is good enough for someone who can compose poetry in perfect meter while being roasted to his death, (led to the instrument of his martyrdom, he remarked, again in meter, “Look at the time Death chose to take me, now that the branches are flowering, and the earth sends forth grass” -a powerful metaphor for the regenesis of an enslaved nation) it is certainly good enough for me.

Greek Dictator Ioannis Metaxas’ purported OXI, which the Greek people commemorate in Australia every 28 October, through the ritual mocking of the physical, sexual and mental prowess of Italian Australians, (going so far as to make gross generalisations about the Italian race altogether, which is counterintuitive, given that Greek-Australians generally consider all Italian-Australians to be lapsed Greeks, as encapsulated by the maxim: μία φάτσα, una razza), was, following established precedent, not monolectic. In a marked departure from hallowed tradition, it was not even Greek. Instead, when the Italian envoy presented a thoroughly disgruntled, pyjama-clad Metaxas with Mussolini’s demand that Greece surrender to him, various militarily strategic positions, Metaxas chose to respond in French, with a not so resounding: “Alors, c’est la guerre,” (So, its war).

Undoubtedly, it was the retouching of this simple statement into a brief but indomitable OXI (facilitated by the fact that the technology of the time did not permit the Italian envoy to a) video Metaxas’ reaction with his phone and b) upload it onto youtube), that galvanized an entire nation into a remarkable fight for freedom and inspired them to achieve the impossible: the repelling of the invader. In such a retouching, a powerful myth was born, one whose legacy endures to the present day.

Consequently, it was the power of this myth, the myth of the grand negative, that Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras sought to subvert to his own ends, when, last year, he called the Helladites to referendum. Flipping the legacy of Constantine Palaeologus on its head, it was not the answer, but the referendum question, which assumed an uncanny Byzantine form: “Should the agreement plan submitted by the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund to the Eurogroup of 25 June 2015, and comprised of two parts which make up their joint proposal, be accepted?” Again, in a radical break with millennia of Greek history, the suggested responses to the question neither included: “Oh well, its war,” nor “Come and Get It,” nor an admonition to prepare the barbeque, the rumour that former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis offered to submit himself to fiscal waterboarding on behalf of the Greek people, while simultaneously offering economic witticisms in meter to an ecstatic, self-lubricating Phillip Adams on Late Night Live, if only the Troika would let Greece breathe, having only just recently been debunked. Instead, the Helladites (and their apodemic cousins, living moments of similar grandeur via facebook and puerile protests in the cities of their abode) were led to think by their leader that they must partake of a Metaxas moment and vote OXI.

Thus, sixty-one percent of the Helladites, conflating Greece’s desperate hours with those of 1940, voted for an OXI of their own. Soon after, Alexis Tsipras and his government, completely ignored that OXI, signaling their adherence to the memorandum they had asked their people to reject.

This marks a historic watershed in the history of Greek negatives. For it suggests that Greek negatives can be rendered non-existent through non-recognition. Consider the impact of Diakos’ sacrifice, if, upon having delivered his poem to his captors, excoriating them and their religion, the Turks had, instead of taken him at his word, responded, “well you’re a Muslim anyway.” Quite possibly, this is the reason why the prudent Greeks of yore avoided using the term OXI in the first place, anticipating the semantic reforms of Tsipras, as arguably, did the Lord in the Gospel of Matthew, when he stated: “But let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No,’ ‘No.’ For whatever is more than these is from the evil one.”

In imposing his semantic progression upon the diachronic linguistics of the Greek language, is Tsipras, in rendering OXI redundant merely adhering to a hidden clause within the Bailout Agreement that provides for the eradication of dissent and thought? Further, is Tsipras, in fact, the Troika’s Orwellian O’Brien, tasked with the elimination of all words from the Greek language that inhibit compliance with lending criteria, starting with the most potent, the most enduring, OXI?

“Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thought-crime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it…Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller…”

When all is lost, salvation appears in the form of Sabaton, the Swedish Heavy Metal Band, who in their song “Coat of Arms,” seek to remind the Greek people, of the glories of negativity as well as the fact that while the enemies, of yesteryear charged from the hills, today they charge from behind the counter, in the form of bank fees: “At dawn envoy arrives, morning of October 28th/"No day" proven by deed/ Descendants of Sparta, Athens and Crete/Look north, ready to fight/Enemies charge from the hills/ To arms, facing defeat/There's no surrender, there's no retreat.”
Until next time then, OXI, and we bloody mean it.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@Hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on 29 October 2016

In his masterful foray into the theatre of the absurd, Ὁι Νταντάδες" (The Nannies), Giorgos Skourtis casts the everyman as defenseless prisoners of a thoroughly degraded society, which is so morally, politically and socially flawed, mired as it is in falsehood and injustice, that they are compelled to inhabit a refuge in a cul de sac of threadbare ideologies and nonsensical constructs, much like the buzzwords of today, all the while being forced to deny the duality of life and death as being able to offer a means of escape, given that what the system offers to its inmates are fraudulent survival options and substitutes for real life itself.

Answering an advertisement for a twenty-four hour babysitting position, the two protagonists of the play soon find out that they are required to look after a hideously disfigured corpse. Not content with his charges watching over the corpse, their employer demands that they lament over it and exhibit genuine grief over its condition, much in the same way as we today in the corporate world are expected to display inordinate amounts of pre-orgasmic excitement about our companies’ success and as a corollary, express the appropriate amounts of grief and contrition as we undergo Maoist self-criticism sessions when confronted with a non-compliance with key performance indicators. As the play progresses, we learn that the corpse, which all along we expect to be a metaphor for society, is not even a corpse, but rather, a loathsome papier-mâché construct. What is disturbing, is not that the fact that the society in question is not real, but rather, that in certain poignant points in the play, the protagonists lament, based on self-interest, the promise of remuneration and fear of punishment, IS decidedly real.

Recent Greek media commentary over the funeral of the Old Calendarist Orthodox Metropolitan Bishop of Fthiotis Kallinikos, reveals an unnerving Dadaesque preoccupation with his corpse. During the funeral service, the late bishop was sat upon his hierarchical throne before being carried out of the church at the conclusion of the rite, to his burial. Almost immediately, a media furore erupted, with various pundits opining as to the barbarity and retrogression of such a ritual, equating it, in one orientalist instance, to the religious customs of the Shiites of Iran and ascribing the keeping of this strange (in the eyes of the punters) custom with all that is wrong with modern Greek society. One particularly poetic commentator posited that the presence of the late bishop’s corpse upon his throne, symbolized the Church of Greece, which, as he put it, was a living corpse, a thing, neither living or dead, robbed of its vitality, merely going through the motions while compelling all those around it, believers and the state, to prop up its illusory and irrelevant existence.

The shock displayed by the mainstream media is thought-provoking and mystifying, given that the bishop in question does not belong to the canonical Church of Greece, but rather a small, rigorist splinter group. Furthermore, the Greek Orthodox have conducted the funeral services of their hierarchs in this fashion, in a rite that persists unchanged for more than a millennium. In fact, the installation of the deceased hierarch upon his throne, is a practice that has and is still followed by the millions of adherents of the Coptic Church in Egypt, the Ethiopian Tewahedo Church, the Syriac Orthodox Church, the Assyrian Church of the East and the various Eastern-Rite Churches of the Indian subcontinent, in an unbroken cultural continuum, unsundered by doctrinal differences, from the Balkans to Lake Victoria and to the Himalayas. One wonders why then, the Greek media did not express similar sentiments of outrage when exactly the same practices were followed at the recent funerals of Coptic Pope Shenouda, or Syriac Orthodox Patriarch Ignatius. Most probably, because in the minds of the indignant, the adherents of those churches, who are culturally indistinguishable from us, are oriental, and are thus prone to such ghastly forms of sentimentality. We, it is to be implied, are made of sterner, European stock, and such incomprehensible practices are obstacles to the achievement of our aspirations, which ill behoove us.

The outraged indeed have short memories, though their bewilderment can be partially excused that the Church of Greece, which enjoys a light tinkering with Orthodox ritual now and again, (notably replacing the words βασιλεύσι, from the hymn Σώσον Κύριε, because it offends anti-royalists, even though in this context the word refers to rulers and has nothing to do with the Greek political system) has discontinued the practice of enthroning their dead bishops during their funeral service over the past fifty years, though prior to that, in 1951 for example, the Metropolitan of Thessaloniki was buried in exactly the same way.

The reasons why the hierarchs, in the Eastern Tradition, are propped up upon their perch, are Dadaesque. One the one hand, they are, as hierarchs, presiding over a service and leading the faithful one last time. One the other hand, much as Skourtis’ corpse in the Νταντάδες, while the faithful perform their leave-taking, their hierarch is no longer there, and in a sense, is not real, his essence having departed (one hopes) for a rest sublime. The presence of his corpse is thus a reminder of the futility of clinging to the chthonic things of life, a powerful man, ensconced upon his throne in death, being a potent symbol of the fleeting and ultimately illusory nature of that power, in which we invest so much importance. Similarly, in the crypts of the St Catherine’s Monastery on Mount Sinai, one comes across the skeletons of abbots clad in their cassocks. The experience is a confronting one, but then again, so is death itself. One may not agree with the aesthetics of the practice, and in fact, some Orthodox clerics find it disturbing, (one of these commenting: "it displays an ungodly fearlessness in the face of the impending judgement and a frightening disregard for the humility required even to appear before the Judge who is both a God of love and a God of justice,") but it cannot be doubted that as a symbol of the absurdity of all man-made pretensions, the corpse of the hierarch is an exceedingly powerful one.

It is not clear what makes this tradition any more or less ludicrous or barbaric than the disposing of any given hierarch in a cardboard box. What is clear however, is that in pouring scorn upon the inoffensive rituals of a traditionalist Orthodox group and seeking to use these to denigrate the Church of Greece, which no longer continues the practice and which has over the past few years devoted itself to a tremendous grass roots endeavour to alleviate the plight of impoverished Greek people and refugees, the disingenuous, self-righteous commentators and harbingers of progress, have unwittingly assumed the role of the employer of Skourtis’ Dadades, abrogating to themselves the right to dictate to us the system we are to worship, all the while prescribing and proscribing the forms in which that worship will take. They do so, completely oblivious to the deep cultural and historical context from which the proscribed practice arose, and in complete ignorance of the manner in which Greece, a country culturally and geographically on the cusp of two great civilisations, having given of itself freely to both, has been able to synthesise and conflate past, present and future, in a fashion uniquely its own. Instead, in their onto pathologic self-loathing, they accuse others (a marginal group within the broader Greek societal sphere) of being irrelevant to the modern zeitgeist, all the while displaying a complete ignorance of the foundations of that zeitgeist, which are more polyvalent and multi-faceted then they would like to admit.

Rebranding a corpse makes it no less a corpse and says more about the cultural complexes of those who would not afford to the departed, the respect they would have appreciated, within they context that they would have understood, than about those who, reared in that tradition, instinctively follow it. Nor is the late bishop Kallinikos a metaphor for the putrescent and rapidly decomposing dreams of economic greatness and first-world acceptance of Greece as an equal. In seeking out and deriding such simplistic scapegoats, we are participating in our own theatre of the absurd, grieving over a papier-mâché parody of an aspiration that was never entirely real, long after its final exhalation has taken place. May its memory be eternal.
DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on 5 November 2016

Ὁ αετός πεθαίνει στον αέρα, ελεύθερος και δύνατος,’ crooned Notis Sfakianakis. In that, the year of our Lord 1998, Sfakianakis’, name was so holy that it could not be pronounced in full, being truncated instead to the tetragrammaton ‘Sfax.’ Indeed, it was the year of tetragrammata, since the wall I was leaning against structurally supported a temple that bore the name Kivotos, which, in like fashion, was referred to by patrons during times profane as “Kivo,” as this was the ark of all dances sanctified to the old gods of neohellenic music, the cult of the Dark Deity Phoebus who would dethrone them, still lurking ominously in the shadows of its infancy.
The lanky youth with the purple microfibre shirt and the square sideburns extended his arms as if to emulate an eagle, executed a turn with a flourish, and concluded with a jump meticulously timed so that he was to be found perched upon his haunches as the final beats of the liturgical canticle faded away. Then, being raised by a coterie of admiring friends all dressed in similar fashion, he wiped the sweat glistening from his exposed chest, simultaneously grasping the Cosmopolitan that was thrust into his hand by a gushing female admirer. He downed it nonchalantly, evidently proving he was more than manly enough for it. He was, I was informed, a Greek bar promoter, a perfectly plausible profession of limitless opportunity, in those heady days.
Yet almost immediately as his sun reached its zenith, its brilliance was eclipsed by the intrusion upon the dance floor of a vast monolithic sculpture of a man, bulging in places titillating and unimaginable. Σὠμα μου, the great god Sfax crooned, σώμα μου φτιαγμένο από πηλό... As he danced, the monolith slid his impossibly fleshy hands languidly and sensuously over the ripples of his muscular torso. Here we were in the processing of witnessing, not the execution of another zeimbekiko but rather the birth of a form of auto-Dirty Dancing, one that I believe cannot and will not ever be replicated. Female and male patrons alike remained transfixed as they beheld this remarkable display of neohellenic self-love, remarking in hushed tones that the dancer was a body-builder.
“I wonder if he realizes that this song is about drug addiction?” I mused. “Or that to have a body made of clay is symbolic of the fragility of the human existence?”
Monolith was so entranced by his theosis with Sfax’s godhead that he ended his cycle of terpsichorean innovations with a stamp of the foot on the downbeat, a full bar after the voice of the deity had been silenced. He remained immovable on the dance floor, bellowing ῾Δεν πάω πουθενά πουθενά, εδώ θα φύγω,῾ at the top of his voice, eliciting the acclamation of his peers, no doubt appreciating in the artful and subtle way in which he had subverted Vasilis Karas’ manifesto so that it became a poignant expression of the existential crises of modern man, unable to escape, unwilling to leave.
Μαλάκα, τἀχω παίξει παντελώς, he exclaimed, to no one in particular, as he finally lurched towards the bar. Apparently, he had picked up this expression, which, as he readily admitted during the brief conversation I had with him, he did not really know the meaning of, while on a recent holiday in Mykonos. It was there apparently that his epiphany took place. Having been hand-reared on stories of the village in Melbourne, his understanding of the Greek identity involved working out which suburban deli sold the cheapest olives per kilo and compiling copious lists of which relative owned which investment property, while trying to deduce the source of income that made its acquisition possible. In Mykonos, among the cocktails, the ethereal beauties and the music that became the soundtrack to his life, he discovered true Hellenism and thus was born again.
“You know re,” he emphasized. “The Greek culture is so powerful. There is a Greek song to cover every single situation. Even saying goodbye. Modern Greeks say it like Alkaios: Με δυο μαρμάρινα φιλιά και πέτρα τώρα την καρδιά σου λέω αντίο να΄σαι πάντα καλά.”
“That’s also got to do with the Parthenon Marbles, how we had to say goodbye to them,” a gum chewing university student interrupted, looking invitingly at the monolith from under her fake eyelashes. Monolith instinctively clenched his biceps, paraphrasing, in the heavily accented Greek of the Melbourne-born, Christos Dantis’ epic poem, thus: Κάποιος μ᾽αγαπάει, είμαι εγώ,᾽ a provocative paean to modern narcissism if there ever was one. “Oh my God, παίζεις με τη φλόgα,” she responded. They both looked at each other and in that sharing of lyrical Greek passwords, a code was unscrambled and a connection made so strong that it could break out of the seventh circle of Dante’s Hell.
It was at this stage that my fearsome leather clad, grey-eyed companion grabbed me by the arm and marched me briskly to the door. “Seriously,” she exclaimed. “I’ve had enough of these Danti-loving troglodytes. I can’t take it anymore. What the hell is wrong with them?” Sotiria too, was a born again Hellene, but her anabaptism had taken place not in the fleshpots of Diogenis Pallas but rather among the puddles of Exarcheia in Athens. “When I breathe that air, which is laden with history, (I always thought it was carbon monoxide pollution), I am immediately at peace,” she was often given to repeating at almost every given opportunity, more to convince herself than anyone else. As Sotiria embraced a Hellenism that entailed reading “alternative literature” and listening to a type of music that she termed “entechni” and which bore no relation to techno whatsoever.
By the time we reached Rebelos, a few doors down from Kivo, my arm was aching from the pressure she had exerted upon in. I did not want to enter. Last time I had done so, I had laughed out loud while a long haired denizen grabbed me by the shoulders, sending alcohol fuelled cadences of Vasilis Papakostantinou’s: Χαιρετίσματα λοιπόν στην Εξουσία, mistakenly down my olfactory nerves, this almost resulting in my immediate defenestration. This time, I restrained myself through the conversations of the uniformly black-wearing patrons ending every single sentence with ναι μωρέ, or σώπα μωρέ. Infuriatingly for Greek Australians, they refrained from mixing their Greek with their English, did not employ the term re, and furthermore, would, while sitting in silence with expressionless faces for over fifteen minutes, listening to modes of music that had reached the apex of popularity in Australia two generations previously, would mutter by way of a mantra: Καλή η φάση.
Having been previously instructed so to do, I attempted to fit in by wearing a black skivvy. However, it was my question as to whether Lavrentis’ Machairitsas’ lyrics: Ζηλεύω το μικρό σου το γατί, are just a euphemism for the innate westernophilia of the Greek pseudo-socialist coupled with a musing as to why the establishment did not play Mixalis Sogioul’s Ο Τραμπαρίφας, which includes the word rebelos in the following form: ‘Απόψε που την έβγαλα τη μπέμπελη, γουστάρω νύχτα δροσερή και ρέμπελη,’ which finally betrayed my heretical tendencies
“Who are you calling a bebeli, ξενέρωτε;” came the furious voice of Sotiria. “You are just like all those other chauvinist Marios. Get lost. Το έτερον σου ήμισυ δεν το᾽χεις σε εκτίμηση.” This for me was mystifying as I was unaware up until that point that I was considered to be her other half, and sought clarification upon that point. The dim memory I still retain involves me being pushed out of Rebelos by a horde (probably one of two) of enraged patrons. I had not the heart to tell Sotiria that bebeli is a Slavic derived form of nineteen fifties Greek slang that simply means that it is very hot. From what I have been able to ascertain, for we never spoke again, Sotiria fulfilled her life-long dream of relocating to Greece, where she is happily married and trying desperately to convince her husband to migrate to Australia. To this day, I am inordinately proud of the fact that I managed to conceal from her, in ways dark and nefarious, that my appreciation of Greek music is decidedly non-born again Hellenic, consisting as it did and still does, of demotic songs with a heavily sprinkling of rebetika and Tolis Voskopoulos thrown in.
Ι avoided Pegasus bar, for just as I strolled past it I heard the accusatory voice of Natasa Theodoridou enquiring: ᾽Πού περπατάς;᾽ choosing instead to enter Zenith just as Sakis Rouvas was lamenting: ῾Τώρα αρχίζουν τα δύσκολα.῾ At that time, patrons were preparing themselves for a long night ahead. As I was informed, Apocalypsi, on adjacent Lonsdale Street, was about to «go off.» Invited to join my interlocutor therein, I excused myself by saying that I was feeling unwell, whereupon she unnervingly launched into the most gravelly, deep and frighteningly accurate impression of Vasilis Karas: ῾Τηλεφώνησέ μου,῾ I had ever heard. I bolted.
We, the epigonoi of the first generation migrants were kings back then and ruled our limitless world. Exulting in what we beeived to be our rediscovery of things Hellenic, our sway extended down Russell Street, into Lonsdale, all the way down to the Colonial Hotel on King Street, which we rebaptised, the “Ellinadiko, Ennea Mouses.” Truly we believed that our time upon this earth would never end and that we, the Hellenistics, would continue to imbibe from a font of culture constantly refreshed by the importation of the latest Bigalis CD by Caras Music or a cruise of the Greek islands, oblivious to the existence of the non-Hellenes around us, seeking to delight in, breed and converse, only with ourselves. Yet slowly and inexorably, one by one, the barakia shut their doors on us forever, leaving us, the diet-Coke of the Hellenistic nineties, unfulfilled, disgruntled, and eternally melancholy, even before the demise of the Gamma Bar.
Last time I walked past where I remembered Kivotos to have been, I was surprised that I could no longer remember its exact position, it having been subsumed by a redeveloped architect designed tower, much as archeologists today debate the questionable sites of Alexander's colonies. I continued along my way, sullenly whispering, without being able to stop myself: Αμά δεις τα παιδιά, πες ένα γεια.᾽

DEAN KALIMNIOU
kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on 12 November 2016

“Seriously, the way you Greeks carry on about inventing everything!” my Italian school friend observed. “But you haven’t invented anything that people actually like. Look at us Italians. No we didn’t invent geometry, or theatre, but we invented fashion and of course, pasta. Everyone over the entire world eats pasta. Not everyone eats souvlaki.”
This conversation took place when I was in year 9 and I had available to me no counter-arguments by way of riposte. My own inordinate love of pasta was the subject of family mirth and it was widely accepted that I must have been an Italian in a previous life, it being accepted without question that pasta was of Italian provenance, given that a rebetiko song observes: « Έλληνας φασολάς, Ιταλός μακαρονάς.» As a last resort, I reverted to the tried and tested schoolyard Parthian shot: “I don’t know why you are so proud of the Italians. You are from Sicily, therefore you are actually Greek.” This earned me what was in those days termed, a sconing.
Years later, while at university, I was invited by a pneumatic, in the Huxleian sense, Italian classmate, to her home where she demonstrated to me how home-made pasta was produced. Feeding the dough into a ruby red pasta machine, with slow, considered movements, she flicked back her flowing locks and glancing over her shoulder in what could only have been described as a Nigella-like flourish, save for the fact that Nigella had not yet been invented, she glided her long, sinuous fingers across the machine languidly, purring: “Don’t you just love its smooth lines?”
I didn’t. There seemed something perversely self-indulgent about a machine that reminded me of an ancient Greek water organ extruding lengths of self-indulgent dough from its multifarious orifices, yet I held my peace. For it was only much later that I discovered that according to Greek mythology, the great god of all artificers, Hephaestus invented a device that made strings of dough. His then, is the earliest reference to a pasta maker, suggesting that pasta, a foodstuff synonymous with Italy, is in fact Greek.
Or then again maybe not. Hephaestus’s forges were said to be located underneath Mount Aetna, in Sicily, so it is probably safer to speak of a Magna Grecian provenance for pasta, rather than a broader Greek one.
As Greeks, we generally don’t use the word pasta, except by those culturally suspect Heptanesians who have introduced us to pastitsio. Yet the Italian word, meaning dough or a pastry cake, is, according to scholars, a latinisation of the Greek παστά, being a form of barley porridge. Instead, as early as the works of the 2nd century AD Greek physician Galen, we find mention of the word itrion, signifying homogeneous compounds made of flour and water. This word must have been in use in Sicily right up until the Arab conquest for it passed into Arabic as “Itriyya,” in turn giving rise to “trie” in Italian, signifying long strips such as tagliatelle and trenette.
By comparison, the Greek word referring to pasta in all its manifold forms, is μακαρόνια, appearing also in Italian as maccheroni. Yet this seemingly Latin word also attests to the usages and customs of the Greeks of Magna Graecia, that is, of Southern Italy, who settled there as colonists in ancient times. For academic consensus supports that the word is derived from the Greek μακαρία a kind of barley broth which was served to commemorate the dead, much as Orthodox Greeks make kollyva to commemorate their dead in memorial services today. Makaria, in turn, is held to derive from μάκαρες, meaning "blessed dead", which is the word used to describe them in the Orthodox memorial service and ultimately from μακάριος, collateral of μάκαρ which means "blessed” or “happy,” which is exactly how I feel when I consume said μακαρόνια, especially alla puttanesca, which is always the source of saucy and imaginative conversation around the family dinner table.
Italian linguist Giorgio Alessio has looked further into the provenance of the world. He traces it to the Byzantine Greek μακαρώνεια, which was a funeral meal, comparable to the rice-based dish served at funerals in Eastern Thrace until modern times, which was known as μαχαρωνιά. Consequently, Alessio posits the term would be composed of the double root of μακάριος, meaning "blessed" and αἰωνίος meaning "eternal," always in keeping with Orthodox funerary customs.
Enough evidence exists however, to suggest a much older provenance for pasta and in particular, believe it or not, lasagna, which is about as Greek a dish as it gets. We know that lasagne has been eaten in Italy since Roman times, as a dish similar to the traditional lasagne called lasana or lasanum ( which is Latin word for "container", is described in the book De Re Coquinaria by Marcus Gavius Apicius, one of the oldest ever cookbooks. It also appears in the first century writings of Horace, as lagana, described as fine sheets of fried dough and as being an everyday foodstuff. Nonetheless, scholars hold that the word has a more ancient origin and is derived from the Greek λάγανον a flat sheet of pasta dough cut into strips. Other theories hold the Latin to be derived from the Greek λάσανα or λάσανον meaning a “trivet or stand for a pot" and it is postulated that Romans used the Greek word to refer to the dish in which lasagne is made and gradually, the name of the food took on the name of the serving dish, in the same way as Middle Easterners refer to a dish roast vegetables as «ταψί».
Greek rhetorician and grammarian Athenaeus of Naucratis, in his second century work “Deipnosophistae,” or “Dinner-table Philosophers, ” provides a mouth-watering recipe for lagana which he attributes to the first century Chrysippus of Tyana: sheets of dough made of wheat flour and the juice of crushed lettuce, then flavoured with spices and deep-fried in oil. The word lagana, of course, is still used in Greek today to mean a flat thin type of unleavened bread baked for the Clean Monday holiday, at the beginning of Lent.
Somewhere within the mists that shroud our history, the Greek people lost their macaroni making propensities. This is a great shame, as we were nowhere to be seen when the Italian pasta eating craze took over the world by store and were thus, unable to profit from it, our cuisine losing the sexiness that it might otherwise have had. This, it should be emphasized, took place through no fault of our own, but rather, as a result of Roman commercial aggression. Athenaeus described the Greeks of Italy as having created the first patents . According to his “Deipnosophistae” in 500 BC, in the Greek city of Sybaris in southern Italy, there were annual culinary competitions. The victor was given the exclusive right to prepare and sell his masterchef signature dish for one year. This is a practice that obviously was discontinued after the city was taken over by the Romans along with all intellectual property therein. Nonetheless, there is something truly comforting in knowing that our kitchen ruled aeons before George Kalombaris was assembled by the Australian television networks. Had we been able to cling to those patents and preserved them, chances are the Magna Graecian resturants of today, would be purveying Spaghetti alla dolmadaque, fettucini γιαχνί, ravioli γεμιστά and making an absolute killing. After all, while watching two star crossed lovers commence sucking at opposite ends of a strand of spaghetti in order for their lips to meet in the middle, witnessing two erotically charged Greeks gulp down chunks of souvlaki, tzatziki dripping ominously onto their chins, in order to achieve the same effect, is downright ridiculous.
Patents aside, the enduring Hellenic affiliation to pasta is best expressed by the late lamented Thanasis Veggos, in the movie: «Ο παλαβός κόσμος του Θανάση». Hired το participate in an advertisement for spaghetti, he cannot contain himself and gorges himself on the entire plate, all the while signing the jingle: «Τρώτε μακαρόνια, τρώτε μακαρόνια, είναι μια απόλαυση υγιεινή! Τρώνε οι παππούδες, τρώνε και τα εγγόνια, είναι μια απόλαυση σωστή!» Move over then Elgin Marbles. It’s time we reclaimed our heritage. We are hungry for it.
DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 19 November 2016

My three and a half year old daughter’s favourite bedtime story goes something like this: There was once a little girl, paradoxically enough sharing the same name as her, who, in contravention of her father’s instructions, ventured into a deep, dark wood. As she inched further and further into the wood, it became progressively darker. The boughs of the trees bent lower and lower, the ivy grew thicker and more tangled, the wind picked up, becoming ever the more forceful and icy, strange sounds could be heard emanating from the gaping hollows of the gnarled tree-trunks…. «και μετά, ήρθε ο μπαμπάς και πήρε το κοριτσάκι από το χέρι, και το πήγε σπίτι του,» mydaughterinvariablyinterjectsafteraboutfiveminutes.

On the odd occasion, I tell her, «όχι ακόμη,» continuing my narration of an ever darkening, ever cooling, increasingly claustrophobic and lonely world. This rarely lasts for more than a minute before she interjects repeatedly and with increasing urgency, insisting: «και μετά, ήρθε ο μπαμπάς.» At this stage in her development, it is vital for her to know that μπαμπά will always be there, to clasp her hand and lead her out of the dark. This is how she consoles herself. It is also why her favourite story, is a παραμύθι.

In modern times, the words fairy story and παραμύθι are considered to be synonymous, yet in antiquity, the Greek term had decidedly different connotations. Used as a verb by Plato, (παραμυθησόμεθα) it meant to encourage or exhort, while in Herodotus and Thucydides, (παραμυθοῦμαι) it has the meaning that has persisted among traditional communities until now: to console, or to relieve, or to abate. Thus in the Deipnosophistae, Theophrastus, was held to have said that: «Παραμυθεῖται γὰρ ὁ οἶνος καὶ τὴν τοῦ γήρως δυσθυμίαν,»meaning that wine relieves or consoles, the melancholy of old age.

Similarly, the city of Paramythia, in Epirus, is, at least according to some, named thus, not because its inhabitants are particularly adept story-tellers (though I consider Paramythia to be a perfect name to give a Greek equivalent of Disneyland), but rather because its towers provided aid and safety to the local inhabitants from marauding barbarians of diverse descriptions, throughout its war-blighted history.

In his melancholy 1847 painting, also entitled «Παραμυθιά,» Greek painter Theodoros Vryzakis depicts a mother consoling her daughter on the loss of her beloved, on a backdrop of the Acropolis. The luminous folk costume of the grief-stricken women far outshines that of the ancient marbles, which loom above them, distant and disconnected and is juxtaposed against the darkness of their mourning. It is almost as if Vryzakis is insinuating that the old myths that supposedly exist to offer us guidance and consolation, are too remote and peripheral to provide us with anything remotely relevant or useful to apply to our contemporary predicament, which eerily enough, is perennially the same, throughout the ages.

Though I have been fascinated by Vryzakis’ painting from a very young age, I harbour vague childhood memories of the first time I learned of the connotation of solace to the term paramythi. These involve black-clad, harsh-browed, windswept old women visiting relatives during a time of loss and overtly handing over packages of coffee, «για παραμυθιά,» as they would say. Between the weeping, the lamenting of their fate and the inevitable gossiping that would ensue, I was incensed to come to the realisation that no fairy story was forthcoming, save maybe those myths that we weave about ourselves to convince, or rather console us, that our lives have especial meaning. Perhaps I unwittingly understood Vryzakis after all.

It was my daughter’s favourite παραμύθι as well as Vryzakis’ painting that came to mind during an exchange over coffee, with a couple of friends who revel in the newfound Hellenism of their ethnicity. “We are a race of warriors,” one proclaimed proudly, extending his inordinately muscular forearm, upon which the Star of Vergina was painstakingly tattooed, in order to place his short black into his custody. “Look at the Spartans. They are an enduring example for all Greeks.”

“Why?” I asked. We were at Degani, specifically chosen by my friends, because, as they advised, Oakleigh excepting, Degani is where they go when they want to “get their Greek fix.” This particular Degani was in a “white” neighbourhood. It did not purvey Greek coffee, which is my beverage of choice and as a result I was compelled to do penance via the sipping of a soy latte, because, as I opined, we are all σόι. This remark received the scant attention it deserved.

“Re, the Spartans are the bodyguards of the Greek nation,” the Spartan-lover with the corrugated iron abdominal muscles responded, with an immediacy that implied that the events he was recalling had transpired just a few days previously. “They fought for the safety of all the Greeks and got rid of the Persians. They were a lean, mean fighting machine who stood up against tyranny and gave freedom to all of us.”

“You think?” I replied. Having downed my soy latte, I proceeded to turn the glass upside down, distributing the coffee dregs around it in an anti-clockwise fashion until they had dried along the sides. Picking it up, I scrutinised it carefully, for within, lay my future. I was, after all, at Degani. “Except that Sparta, if you believe the stories, was run as a military camp. Weak babies were killed, and really, save for a few key battles, history teaches us that Sparta was mostly interested in preserving its own freedom rather than that of Greece and indeed, during the Peloponnesian War, sought to enlist the assistance or arbitration of Persia against Athens. As for them fighting against tyranny, it was the Spartans who removed democratic regimes from Greek city states and imposed oligarchies, in order to make the Greek world safe for aristocracy. They even hired themselves out as mercenaries for a Persian contender to the throne during the time of Xenophon. Furthermore,” I continued, gasping as I noted the design of a stunted, chromosome missing double headed eagle in my latte glass, “the whole of Spartan society was based on their subjugation of the Messenians, who they enslaved and used like animals. So much for freedom fighters.”

My interlocutor’s biceps twinged nervously as he considered the implication of my words. Briefly, we mooted what would happen if the Laconian Brotherhood of Melbourne, inspired by the historical precedent of its ancestors, decided to conquer the nearby Pan-Messenians, seizing their club-house and subordinating its committee and members to the status of B-class members, the ones who constitutionally may join and pay a fee, but have strictly no voting rights.

“Anyway, we are the greatest people that has ever walked this earth,” our second companion interjected. Besuited, in one of those bespoke, ultra slim fit, cuffs above the ankles numbers that masquerade as serious men’s fashion these days, resplendent with thick black-rimmed glasses, immaculately spiked hair reminiscent of Superman’s polar hiding place and possessed of a dazzling smile, he was the intellectual of our parea, having read all the important Positive Thinking books, such as “Rewire Your Brain,” “Think and Grow Rich” and the classic “As a Man Thinketh,” which he derides as modish and outdated. “Look at Alexander the Great. At such a young age, he created the greatest empire in history. He willed it and it happened. He united all the Greeks. Now that’s the power of positive thinking. Now there is a model for modern Greece to follow.”

This white Degani did not serve chips with oregano and feta cheese and I felt dirty as I ordered a calamari salad. As I relinquished hold of the menu, I mentioned how Alexander, who he idolized, was paranoid to the extent that he felt it necessary to murder his friends and star employees. Far from uniting the Greeks, he not only destroyed the city of Thebes, but also ordered the deaths of Greeks whose ancestors had colonized a city in Central Asia a century prior to his arrival. By most Greek city states, used as they were to running their own affairs themselves, Alexander was a tyrant, not a liberator or a leader. Furthermore, Alexander’s Empire, was slightly smaller than that of the Persians, whose Empire he basically appropriated, and nowhere near as large, or as organized as that of the Romans, or indeed the Mongols, whose empire was not only the largest, but also, when they weren’t killing those who resisted them, the most religiously tolerant. And why, I asked, in these times, was it necessary not just to idolise a person, but consider him worthy of emulation, simply on the basis that he took over more of other people’s homelands than any one else?

“No, no, no!!!” my friends cried in unison. “How can you say that about Alexander? He is the last pureblood Greek king!”
“Really? I asked. “Then why is it that both Plutarch and Libanius mention that his grandmother, Eurydice, was actually Illyrian?”
“No! Lies!” they pleaded.
“And why is it so important that he be a pureblood Greek anyway?” I asked. The answer of course, was that everything is Greek culture was pure and existed ab initio. We owed nothing to anyone and we, the pure-bloods, maintain the same germs of genius within our DNA today.

In the heated exchange that followed, which took the form equivalent of that extended the dark forest path which my daughter traverses in her own paramythi, I showed my friends how archaic Greek sculpture had its origins in that of the Egyptians and the Assyrians, how Persian religion was just as rich and possibly more theologically sophisticated than that of the contemporary Greeks and, of course, how a good sprinkling of both ancient Greek deities and ancient Greek heroes were, even in their own time, considered to have been of foreign origin. The more I delved, the more violent the reaction came until such time as I felt it was time we were out of the forest.

“Re that was funny, you being the devil’s advocate and all that,” Spartan-lover patted me on the back as I paid the bill. “You had me going there with that Eurydice thing,” Positive Thinker guffawed. “But everyone knows that Eurydice is a modern name. Couldn’t have been Alexander’s grandmother. Imagine what we would do if we had a modern equivalent today. A corporate takeover giant. There is one in all of us. The Greek business genius is second to none….”

“What an Empire needs is muscle,” Spartan-lover mused. “That’s why within the DNA of every Greek lies the discipline of the Spartans. This is why neither the Germans, nor the Turks will keep us down…But wait till we get access to those pools of oil under Thasos. We are sitting on the largest oilfield in the world. Then they will see.”

«Και μετά, ήρθε ο μπαμπάς..... » I whispered, as I walked away, lamenting that for my people, there is no Balm in Gilead, merely coffee, in diverse cups, by way of παραμυθιά.

DEAN KALIMNIOU
kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on 26 November 2016

The inscription goes further to say that the purpose of the Zosimas brothers’ sponsorship is to ensure that the book, which is a philosophical treatise summarizing the major currents of thought prevailing in Europe at that time, is distributed among Greek youth free of charge, for the purpose of their edification and the cultivation of their souls.
The breadth of the Zosimas brothers’ vision is breathtaking. Having made vast fortunes in Italy and Russia, they and many other Greek pre and post-revolution merchants and businessmen living abroad, most of whom came from Epirus, arguably the most impoverished region of the Greek world at that time, set about securing the necessary infrastructure that would ensure the viability of an emerging Greek state.
Thus, Evangelos Zappas, from Lambovo in Northern Epirus, provided the necessary funds of the revival of the modern Olympic Games. He also founded Greek schools in several Greek-populated villages and towns, all over Northern Epirus. In Constantinople, which until 1955 had a large Greek population, he also founded a complex of nurseries, primary and secondary schools, which were collectively known as the Zappeion Institute. Quite apart from funding the modern day Zappeion building in Athens, he also was deposited a large amount of money in the National Bank of Greece to provide scholarships for Greek agricultural students in order to conduct postgraduate studies in Western Europe.
George Sinas, from Moschopolis in Northern Epirus, who became chief director of the bank of Austria in turn, financed the construction of the university of Athens, a number of medical and archaeological institutions, as well as the Athens National Observatory.
Apostolos Arsakis, from Hotahova in Nothern Epirus, who at one time served as interim Prime Minister of Romania, provided large sums of money for the establishment of a female educational institution in Athens, housed in a luxurious mansions at the city center and known as the Arskeion School.
George Averoff, from Metsovo, Epirus, founded of the School of Agriculture in Larisa, funded the construction of the Evelpidon Military Academy, donated to the Athens Conservatory, and provided for the refurbishment of the Panathenian Stadium where the first modern Olympic Games were held. He also funded the completion of the National Technical University of Athens and provided a donation for building the Averoff flagship of the Greek Navy.
Christakis Zografos, from Kestorati in Northern Epirus, donated an enormous amount of money for the erection of middle level schools in Constantinople, one (the Zographeion Lyceum) in the district of Pera in Constantinople and another, a girl’s school in Yeniköy on the Bosporus, as well as sponsoring the rebuilding of a Greek library in the city. At the Universities of Munich and Paris he made an 1,000 Franc endowment for awards in the fields of Greek literature and history. He also founded a teachers college, known as the Zographeion School in Epirus.
Similarly, George Stavros, from Ioannina in Epirus, founded the National Bank of Greece and served as its first director. At the same time, he, like most of the other great Greek benefactors, provided ample funds for the construction of institutions to serve the Greek communities abroad in which they lived and thrived.
Ioannis Pangas, from Korytsa, Northern Epirus, provided the most extreme form of philanthropy yet. Not content with building schools in his hometown, on 16 August 1889, he donated his entire fortune to the Greek state and all of his possessions, as an act of philanthropy to aid the rebuilding of Athens and the growth of the panfully emerging Greek state. He retained only 1,000 drachmas per month in order to lead a decent life.
A common thread can be perceived in all the above-mentioned benefactor’s activities. They all believed that it was vital, if the Greek nation was to be liberated and stand upon its feet in the modern world, that the Greek people were educated, understood the context and zeitgeist of the region in which they lived and able to play a significant role in the broader global community, as they had done, in the countries to which they migrated, George Sinas for one, being responsible for the founding of many of Vienna’s beautiful buildings. This then is the reason why the Zosimas brothers felt it necessary to distribute philosophical treatises to the book-starved youth of Greece, for free. True emancipation, in their view, had its starting in the mind and soul and not in the physical. True liberation would be achieved only when the book worked in concert with the sword and of course the moneymen. In order to achieve this lofty goal, the book would have to be given precedence, something which along the way, the feuding hoplarchs, oligarchs and politicians of modern Greece seem to have forgotten.
For it is trite to mention that without commerce and industry and without the active involvement of its practitioners in the founding of Modern Greece, it is unlikely that the said state would have been able to get up off the ground, let alone endure as a going concern. Their example that of planned, ideologically driven but methodical benefaction, is one we here in the Antipodes could emulate and it is for this reason that community groups that have been founded and exist to celebrate Greek involvement in commerce and industry provide exciting scope, not only for organized involvement with the current cultural, social and welfare activities of the broader Greek community, but also in setting the foundations for a future.
Henry Ford was prescient when he opined: “If money is your hope for independence you will never have it. The only real security that a man will have in this world is a reserve of knowledge, experience, and ability.” However, undoubtedly, being able to target and fund endeavours that fulfill perceived needs without having to constantly go cap in hand to various government agencies and navigate the ever changing swirl of policies and priorities that dictate grants does offer a modicum of independence to a community whose current community institutions are, in their majority, outmoded, and failing their members.
Though the Greek communities of Constantinople and Alexandria have been decimated by the vicissitudes of politics and fate, their welfare is still being provided for to the present day by the generous and far-sighted donations of the Epirote benefactors over a century ago. That in itself speaks volumes as to how a Greek community, could, in partnership with commerce and industry conduct its affairs so as to independently plan its future as a coherent and cohesive whole, where as many people as possible are provided for.
Discarding the already well-worn ethos of pat on the back social clubs for wealthy Greeks that have made it, let us all embrace Greek commerce and industry community institutions that a) can provide or facilitate vocational training for young Greeks within the businesses of the community b) can mentor promising or needy young Greeks throughout their schooling or early professional life c) can identify key areas of communal need such as aged care, child care, kindergartens and Greek schools and set up coherent funding strategies, via peer funding and d) identify key areas of expansion to meet the needs of the future such as credit co-operatives, programs facilitating enhanced contact with Greece, and e) fund those engaging with and assisting newly arrived members of the Greek community. The fact that our current commerce and industry community institutions appear willing to engage in this way, with a community in transition, is as invigorating as it is inspiring. For time is of the essence…

I have in my collection, an 1805 book by the great scholar of the Greek enlightenment and bishop Evgenios Voulgaris, entitled “What Philosophers Prefer.” On the cover page, there exists an inscription informing readers that the costs for publishing this book were borne by the Zosimas brothers, wealthy businessmen from Ioannina in Epirus, who among other things, financed the construction of the Monetary Museum of Athens, the National Library, of Adamantios Korais, one of the major contributors of the Greek Enlightenment movement, the Zosimaia college in Ioannina, and an orphanage in Patmos, as well as donating significant sums to the Philiki Etaireia for the purposes of carrying out the revolution.
DEAN KALIMNIOU
kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 3 December 2016

The last time I saw the august leader of the opposition, Bill Shorten, I was just tucking into a feast of roast lamb at the glorious Philhellene restaurant in Moonee Ponds. In he walked, and a barely concealed gasp was emitted from the mouths of most of the patrons. “Hey that’s Bill Shorten,” one elderly lady seated a few tables away from me gushed. “Let’s go and say hello.” “Leave the poor bugger alone,” her husband said. “He has enough on his plate without having to deal with the likes of us, interrupting his tea. Still, good of him to support businesses in his electorate.” Quite part from the fact that I appreciated immensely the husband’s subtle play on the word plate, I was quite taken aback by what next ensued. Bill Shorten sat down with his companions and ate, unmolested and uninterrupted by journalists, patrons, autograph hunters or client’s seeking favours, as would have been the case in our ancestral homeland. This made be proud to be Australian.
Try as you might, you can’t ignore the Greek presence in the Federal Seat of Maribyrnong. Though not in one’s face, and not prone to congregate in large, noticeable numbers, except around the local shopping centres, (notably, the coffee and cake shops purporting to be Greek are awful, though the restaurants, Philhellene, Meltemi, Lindos and Nobel, a novel name for a Greek restaurant if there ever was one, are local landmarks)nevertheless the Greeks are there, their existence denoted often by the presence of olive trees in the front yard, or a brief whiff off incense emanating from a given home, as one drives past. In the summer, nine out of ten leather-tanned, white singleted, blue-shorted and leather sandaled elderly men driving around the streets of the electorate with a multitude of salvaged timbers in their trailer, tend also to be Greek. Our own family legend holds that we were the second Greek family to settle in Essendon, the heartland of the electorate, in 1954, though I have no way of proving this.
What having deep roots in one’s local area does do, however, is give you an enhanced sense of community, and of history. As I traverse the streets of my homeland, a myriad of family and village connections assume the form of an interconnected web in my mind. There on the right, my cousin’s house. Further down the street, the homes of people from either my mother, or father’s villages, continuing a social network of support and mutual assistance that transcends both time and borders. Here, the home of a friend from Greek school. There, the home of our local priest. On the main road, the local branch of the Delphi Bank. In the new estates now currently being built up with hideous box like constructions, lay the paddocks from which I would help by grandfather gather χόρτα. Up the road, the Child and Maternal Health Centre, which as built by the Greek community of East Keilor as a local club, until internecine squabbles caused the council to confiscate the building and put it to better use. Furthermore, in our electorate, there are four significant Greek Orthodox parishes: Panagia Soumela East Keilor, Saint Dimitrios Ascot Vale, Agia Paraskevi St Albans and Apostolos Andreas Sunshine. The City of Moonee Valley, in which the first two aforementioned churches are situated, where my grandparents settled, my parents grew up and into which I was born and introduced into a Greek speaking community, is without a doubt my πατρίδα. Without it, my sense of my own identity, both as a Greek and as an Australian would be markedly different to what it is today.
It is for this reason, more than any other, the almost total identification that the electorate of Maribyrnong Greeks have with their local community, that Bill Shorten’s failure to include Greek among the languages in which he expressed his Season’s Greetings in a card sent to his constituents, appears to have incensed the Greek community so much, as well as mystified it, for by all accounts, Bill Shorten has established a close relationship with the local Greek community of his electorate and has consulted widely and often with its leadership.
Granted, considering that we have been present in the electorate for over sixty years, one could argue that Bill Shorten, in omitting Greek from the other languages appearing in his card, these being Vietnamese, Maltese, Chinese, Italian, Korean, Spanish, French, Croatian, Arabic and Turkish, is paying us a backhand compliment, in that he is considering us so part of the fabric of the electorate, that no further effort is required to ‘accommodate’ us. The presence of an Italian greeting on that card would contradict such an assertion. The Italian community’s arrival to the electorate precedes our own and given the rate of language loss within its community, it is arguable that Greek is more widespread as a spoken language. Certainly, the Greek language is taught in over ten schools within the electorate, suggesting it is a major language within the electorate. Visiting the local cemetery, one notices that approximately a quarter of the gravestones are inscribed in Greek. Our ethnolinguistic roots within the electorate are thus more than merely superficial and its Greeks have not been able to understand why their elected representative would take the trouble to offer greetings in French or Korean, languages that few speak within the electorate and not the language of a major ethnic group that has contributed so much to the evolution of the electorate of Maribyrnong, and which for a matter of fact has been a constant en masse supporter of that elected representative’s party.
As the Greek language declines in use, (and certainly within the electorate of Maribyrnong, the Greek inscriptions or public signs that were once placed in the shop fronts of old Greek business, giving the area a cosmopolitan atmosphere are almost extinct, as the latter generations explore other employment opportunities), it is logical for the Greek community to become defensive, or possibly even hysterical about each perceived slight or insult, that is seen to diminish its importance or impugn its existence. Bill Shorten’s paralepsis however, does not give rise to hysteria. Instead, the Greeks, both of Greece and Cyprus, in his electorate are well justified in feeling affronted because after the passage of so many decades, it should have been axiomatic that Greek was a language to be included in any multilingual communication emanating from any member for Maribyrnong’s office, simply because the Greek people feel and they are right to do so, thatthey are inextricably interwoven within the history and social make-up of the area. For them, Greek is one of the native languages of the electorate.
When confronted with complaints by local Greeks at the omission of such an important electorate language from the card, myself among them, Bill Shorten’s staff seemed genuinely distressed at what they stated to be an ‘oversight’ and were extremely apologetic. What this episode teaches us however, is that we cannot and should not rely upon or assume as a given, any validation of our ethno-linguistic identity by a mainstream whose interests in this regard are not always the same as our own. The fact that omissions of this nature can take place, omissions that the Greeks of the electorate broadly felt, served to efface their existence as a social entity, even after more than half a century of active involvement within the local community, teach us that we must look inward, strengthening our own community institutions, engaging more with each other and finding meaningful ways to articulate a Greek-Australian identity not as prescribed by policy makers or by grant-givers, but rather for and of ourselves, if we are to persist as a viable, cogent and relevant entity to multicultural Australia, whether or not, we are the recipient of Season’s Greetings.

In this, Bill Shorten, who in a follow up letter to the parish priest of Saint Dimitrios in Ascot Vale commented, "The Greek Community has had an integral role in shaping the identity of our country and the electorate of Maribyrnong, and we are richer for this experience," before wishing him: "ΚαλάΧριστούγεννακαιΚαλήΧρονιά," has the final word.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on 10 December 2016

drive past the Nisyrian Society club building on Sydney Road, Brunswick at least once a week. On its be-curtained door, a sign proclaims forbiddingly, “Members Only.” This, I find interesting, because in the two decades that I have been driving past this imposing edifice, not once have I seen droves of aroused non-members lining up before this mysterious portal, in an attempt to penetrate the Nisyrians’ inner sanctum. Indeed, come to think of it, I have never actually seen the door actually open.

Nonetheless, it is interesting how we Greek-Australians identify or self-identify our own sub-cultural groups with reference to their buildings. Quite simply, in the common consciousness, if one does not have a building, one does not manifest themselves in any meaningful way within the broader Greek community, hence the resistance, especially of the older generations to any change in the real asset base of any given organization. Thus, much more focus is expended in maintaining or paying off unproductive assets, than in actually doing that which our regional brotherhoods were founded to achieve in the first place, which is to link people of the same background together and create cohesive micro-communities.

My own club, the Pansamian Brotherhood of Melbourne, has recently found this out of itself. Despite the Iphigenias of doom and destruction prophesying oblivion ensuing the sale of our clubhouse in Brunswick, we still meet and hold the same functions as we did before, as the exploration of the connections between people, is the main aim, realizing that a clubhouse, though admirable in many respects, is not the organization itself. When it becomes a carapace, excluding others and ossifying practices that are no longer relevant to the change face of the community, the clubhouse can actually become, an agent of a club’s destruction.

In the municipalities of Darebin and Moreland alone, there exist over twenty Greek regional clubs, most of whom own a clubhouse but none of whom until now have ever co-ordinated their efforts. Yet when one drives past or enters these structures, one thing becomes striking: Though these clubhouses and the clubs themselves are in their municipalities, they are not of their municipalities. That is, though rate-paying, that have little if no involvement in their broader communities, contributing nothing substantial to them. Rather than being an expression or reflection of the Greeks residing in those municipalities, their doors serve as portals to an isolation chamber, whose sole purpose is to hermetically seal its members from anything taking place “outside,” even when they are operating as social centres for the local elderly, as many of these clubs now are.

The reason for this is simple. When we Greek-Australians refer to our “regional” clubs, the word here does not denote the regions of the city in which we live, but rather, the regions in Greece from which we derive our ancestry. Consequently, “local” or “regional” clubs are anything but what they imply, purporting to serve instead, the needs of a geographically widespread population of Greeks with the same region, many of whom have little or no emotional, economical or social concerns or attachment to the area in which their club building is situated.

This is of concern because it is the area in which we live, the people who we see in our everyday social interactions that play a large part in the formulation of our personal identity. Where there exists no structure or forum within which a native Australian Greek local community can arise, one in which the Greek identity of emerging generations can be explored with the context of their everyday life, their relationship to their local environment and most importantly their relationship to other Greek-Australians in the course of their daily life, then such paltry networks as the topicistic brotherhoods provide become stale, rarefied and irrelevant to the point where the descendants of their members no longer identify with them and cease to attend them.

A corollary to this, is the fact that our community is primarily organized around such insular brotherhoods and not having as a criterion, the local areas in which Greek-Australians reside, contributes to language and identity loss. For if we live in our local communities disparate and unable to co-ordinate social activities with the Greeks of our own area, then our involvement in our brotherhood has and will continue to take on a tokenistic flavor, where the Greek language and the Greek identity, rather than being integrated into the warp and weft of mainstream society as a community language and a constituent identity of the broader Australian social fabric, is relegated to the margins as an isolated and irrelevant ancestral idiom, that has nothing to contribute to our daily endeavours as Australians and is thus taken out for a time and aired sparingly, after which time, it is generally discarded.

What is astounding is the fact that after a sojourn of a little more than a century in Victoria, we are yet to articulate a viable Australian Greek identity, one that is pertinent and germane to our experience in this country and which could provide a unique perspective and point of reference, in a truly multicultural society. By enclosing ourselves almost exclusively within the carapace of our brotherhoods, we have not only lost an opportunity to engage and add value to the mainstream: we have, by refusing to integrate our identity within the broader discourse, ensured the irrelevancy and ultimate failure of Hellenism as a discourse within Australia, altogether.

It is for this reason, that Hellenism Victoria, an initiative primarily of brotherhoods and clubs of the Darebin and Moreland municipalities must succeed. Its proponents simply cannot fathom how such a large agglomeration of with a few notable exceptions, stagnating and insular, Greek organizations has had little or no impact not only on the local municipality but also upon the Greeks living within it. They point to second generation, generally time-poor parents who cannot make the trip to Oakleigh on a regular basis “to get their [ersatz] Greek on” and lament the fact that their children are growing up disconnected to the Greek families in the neighbourhoods and streets around them, without access to Greek language childcare or even local non-Greek-place of-origin activities, which could instill a sense an intrinsic sense of belonging to something other than a mere institution – a community and a way of life. They comment that the existing clubs are cold, forbidding and irrelevant to those who do not derive from the area in Greece they represent, or whose parents are not on the committee of management and their sphere of action is, at any rate, quite limited. They also point out that the centralization of Greek endeavor within the CBD, while valuable, is not a panacea and can in no way replace pursuing organized Hellenism on the suburban, daily level.

Hellenism Victoria is therefore an endeavor to transmute the raw elements of Hellenism into something relevant to the place in which we all live. It is an attempt to provide some sort of cohesion in the face of the alarming unravelling of the structures of mutual obligation and recognition that have hitherto characterized our community, dispensing with a tribal framework which is fast becoming obsolete.

The manner in which Hellenism Victoria seeks to achieve the localization and revitalization of the Greek identity in the municipalities in which its constituents exist, is by co-ordinating a joint approach to issues of integration, socialization and manifestation of one’s identity via interested pre-existing clubs, in a spirit of mutual co-operation. Rather than being a “club for clubs” as some have commented, it represents the commencement of a concerted effort to rethink the parameters and structures of Australian Hellenism, without discarding, excluding or disparaging existing community stakeholders, but rather by including them in and making them responsible a bold and exciting new initiative where their own histories and tribal affiliations are left intact, but liberating them sufficiently to allow them to cater to the needs of the broader, local and tribally unaffiliated Greek community, through competitions, joint events and most importantly, festivals that will see local Greeks who live close to each other being able to relate to each other as Australian Greeks, and not as members of an obscure tribe whose arcane rites have been discarded even in its place of origin.

This remarkable attempt at rebooting our community by Hellenism Victoria deserves our support and is historically significant as it represents the first time in our age that hitherto hidebound structures are attempting in concert, to radically reposition themselves in order to address the huge demographic and sociological issues that will challenge the existence of a coherent Greek community in Melbourne in the future. Whether or not, as an experiment, Hellenism Victoria will succeed depends, largely on the breadth and clarity of its proponents’ vision, the ability of existing community groups to work together but ultimately, on us.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday, 17 December 2016

«Καλά δε νιώθς; Μη μ’ βανς ομελέττα, αφού δεν αρταίνουμι».
My grandmother placed the pan on the table and stared at me in horror. If looks were capable of parakinesis, then that stare would have had me lifted from the kitchen table, packed, despatched to the airport and bundled onto the next available flight back to Melbourne. This was due to the fact that since my arrival in the motherland, there to spend my Christmas on Mount Penteli with my maternal grandmother, she had been continuously lecturing me about my hideous (according to her) Samian accent.
“You are supposed to have been educated,” she would ponder. “How is it possible that you are still speaking in that horribly perverted way? How did they let you graduate high school?”
According to my grandmother, given the right factors, accents were transmutable. Thus, once one had completed high school, any rural accent they may have had the misfortune to have inherited by birth and geography would immediately and seamlessly transform into Athenian. My defence, which was that we all spoke Samian at home and didn’t know any Athenians was thus deemed invalid, since there was no doubt that I had finished high school, the fact that I had done so in Melbourne, rather than Athens, apparently having no appreciable effect upon the expected dialectic transformation.
“We have a certain standing in this neighbourhood,” my grandmother informed me, almost immediately after I had settled in. “You will NOT walk these streets speaking that vulgar tongue. I will not have our named shamed. If you must indulge your perversions, at least do so discreetly only within these four walls.”
Speaking Athenian was tough. Samian is economical, methodically removing all unnecessary and probably most necessary vowels. The cluster of ensuing consonants that the tongue must hurdle gives one time to pause and consider exactly what it is they are communicating. Not so with Athenian, which spurts from the mouths of its native speakers with the exuberance of a water fountain, spraying all those in the vicinity with an unrelenting lexical word jet.
Then there was the matter of vocabulary. Try as I might, I could not get the local fruiterer to understand what I meant when I spoke learnedly and enthusiastically about the cultivation of μπουρνέλλες back home, because δαμάσκηνα, the word Athenians employ to denote the plum, was unknown to me at the time. By that stage, I had lost any credibility I may have had with the fruiterer anyway, as, in fulfilment of my grandmother’s wishes that I complete her Christmas shopping, I made my debut in the shop by dutifully asking for κρεμμυδάκια, expressing incredulity when the fruiterer produced what I knew back home to be σπρινγκάνια. In my mind, and to this day I maintain that it makes logical sense, κρεμμυδάκια should be that which they proclaim: small onions.
The look of horror my grandmother gave me that fateful Christmas Eve was thus motivated by sheer exasperation. Not only was her antipodean grandson a Samian-speaking yokel, untouched by the benefits of education and western civilisation as a whole, now he was proving that there truly are no limits to the depths of his depravity, by uttering aphorisms in the manner and style of her own native and long-suppressed patois: the dialect of Ioannina.
“How quaint, he’s trying to speak Greek” my grandmother’s neighbour remarked, as she angled her aquiline nose into her coffee cup. “What is he saying?”
At that time, the film “Basic Instinct” had just been released in Greece. I had not seen it, but had been told that it involved a particularly murderous icepick. As I observed the camber of the neighbour’s nose, it assumed the sheen of steel in the gloom of the Pentelic kitchen. I had visions of detaching it from her face and using it to crush some ice of my own.
I despised her for two reasons, for the first of which she bore no blame. For in a manner deeply disquieting, she looked exactly like Victorian Premier Jeff Kennett, with the same furrowed brow and cheeks, even down to the stiff wiry hairstyle and the slightly slanted, yellow flecked, Stalinesque eyes.
Indeed it was those eyes that caught my eye and my ire earlier that day. After spending days ensconced in my grandmother’s kitchen mulling over times past, receiving sage advice and preparing for Christmas, I was bored. So bored in fact, that I offered to weed, prune and cultivate my grandmother’s garden, which was displaying signs of advanced rebellion from her authoritarian rule, this having been a particularly mild winter on the mountain. My grandmother too, Ι supposed, must have been bored, for she consented, even though this meant that I would be exposed to the linguistic scrutiny of the entire neighbourhood. Not having anticipated that a spot of gardening would be on my itinerary, I had neglected to pack suitable clothing, which is how I found myself in my grandmother’s front garden dressed in my grandmother’s lilac tracksuit, with matching lilac and white tiger print fleecy top and a pair of her wooden τσόκαρα, wielding a hoe with the determination of a boy who knows that he is so extremely comfortable with his sexuality, that he hath no need to protest too much. I proceeded to pull, heave, hoe and plough with gusto.
When Jeff Kennett spoke, she did so in the same rasping, reedy tones of her Melburnian doppelganger: «Μέσα είναι η κυρά σου;» I realised at once that I had been weighed and found to have been the help. Furthermore, from her superior tone, I deduced that I was considered to be the help of Albanian extraction and resolved to play the part, if anything, to enhance the standing of my maternal progenitor’s progenitor among her peers, as a lady who could and would, command help, when the need for such help arose.
“Është brenda,” I gestured towards the front door, adding in lisping broken Greek to add verisimilitude: «Κυρά μέσα είναι.»
As I completed my pruning, I wondered whether a Greek Jeff Kennett would nationalise Albanian domestic servants, just so that he could have the pleasure of privatising them. With that, having showered and adorned myself in garments of a less offensive hue, I hastened to the kitchen for the selamlik.
“This is my grandson, Kostas,” my grandmother announced with the poise of a dowager Sultan.
“But isn’t that the Αλβανάκι you’ve got digging for you outside?” Jeff Kennett asked.
“Please say that the Αλβανάκι is a different person, so I can go out and pretend to be him and thus confuse and confound Jeff Kennett,” I prayed, looking at my grandmother pleadingly.
My grandmother caught my eye and I saw the corner of her spirit levelled mouth fight to suppress a smile. Yet such indulgences as those I craved were not to be entertained.
“No, this is my grandson. He is over from Australia, to spend Christmas with me.”
“Oh, maybe that’s why I couldn’t understand what he said. I could have sworn he was Albanian. Mind you, these Albanians….Oh get off me Kari, stop being a Christmas pest,” Jeff Kennett shouted angrily as she attempted to shoo my eponymously named grandmother’s dog who was snuffling her feet.
I burst out laughing.
“What’s funny,” Jeff Kennett snarled.
“Well," I said, "It’s just that Kar is Albanian for penis,” I informed her.
“I don’t get it,” she frowned. “Are you an Αλβανάκι, or are you the grandson from Australia?”
It was at this point, that my grandmother attempted to interpose an omelette between myself and my interlocutor, eliciting the blast of Ioannite phraseology that so incensed her.
«Δεν αρταίνομαι,» means that I’m fasting,” I explained to Jeff Kennett. “It means the same thing as «νηστεύω.» I’m fasting for Christmas.”
“Really?” Jeff Kennett marvelled. “In Albanian? Do you Albanians fast too? But of course, it makes sense. Only Albanians go to church nowadays anyway.” My grandmother rolled her eyes, albeit with grace and dignity.
When Jeff Kennett finally withdrew her presence, my grandmother treated me to the longest and most impassioned stream of Epirotic pejoratives, uttered in the heaviest of accents I had ever heard. “Stupid old toad,” she finally concluded. “With her superior airs. Do you know her son has been supposedly studying dentistry in London for the past ten years?”
“Well, I came all the way to Athens to escape Jeff Kennett,” I replied. “A ten year sojourn in London to escape the same Jeff Kennett seems perfectly reasonable to me.”
That Pentelic Christmas formed a watershed in our relationship. Notably because it was the first of many Christmases spent with one of the most linguistically complex, fascinating and loving people I have ever known. But even more so because from that time, until the day she died, some two decades later, every single one of our Christmas greetings was prefaced by the following: «Φύγε από πάνω μου Κάρυ, μη μ’ενοχλείς Χριστουγεννιάτικα.» And it is in that expansive spirit that I extend to all, the greetings of the Season.
DEAN KALIMNIOU
kalymnios@hotmail.com
Saturday 24 December 2016

The diminutive old man with the care-worn, drawn cheeks and the aquiline nose kneels rhythmically as he lovingly lowers his ear over the mouth of the clarinet. Then, slowly, his eyes half closed in ecstasy, he takes an inordinately deep puff of his cigarette, the type that only the Greeks can describe as σέρτικο, sensuously drawing the smoke deep into his lungs at the same time that he draws the sonorous notes of the clarinet from its mouth, deep into his soul. With a flourish, this sprightly octogenarian allows a great sigh to escape from the abyss within him, and immediately leaps up, beating the dust from his τσαρούχι, as if banishing his cares and woes forever, twirls around and, without losing time to the inexorable beat emanating from his chest, loses himself in the epic masculine majesty of a tsamiko that is as much from the heart as from the clarinet itself. Indeed, it is impossible to distinguish one from the other.

If a single man could personify the region of Epirus, then undoubtedly that man is the late Giorgos Konstantinidis, whose loss, just before Christmas left the Greek community of Melbourne so much the poorer. Small and lean, with a physique toughened and forged in the bleak, minimalist mountain landscapes of Konitsa in Epirus, there was no pleonasm of flesh or feature about him, save for his luxurious, upturned moustache, the likes of which would turn Stalin green with envy. Here indeed was a man, who, though cast in the mould of privation, was possessed of an inexorable zest for life.

A founding member of the Panepirotic Federation of Australia, I knew him from my childhood days, marching with him at the annual Independence Day march to the Shrine. Back then, he would march proudly at the helm of a group of youths that included his daughter, nieces and nephews. He continued to do so throughout his life, showing no sign of slacking, as he marched proudly in step, turning his head sharply to the right, in order to greet the officials, one year resplendent in his foustanella, the next, in the μπουραζάνες that comprise the daily traditional costume of the Epirotes, the one constant in an ever-changing world. When we wanted to obtain an impression of what a traditional Epirot looked like or gain a few tips as to how the traditional Epirot comported himself, Giorgos Konstantinidis was our constant point of reference. After the death of my great-grandmother, when the pain of loss became too great to bear, I would seek refuge in his conversation, for he, like her was one of the last authentic repositories of the riches of the Epirotic dialect, the words falling of his tongue as mellifluously as the notes of the clarinet which he so adored. Giorgos Konstantinidis’ speech was chthonic. Having its origin in the land that according to legend was held to lead to the underworld, his speech emerged from the infinite chasm of the primieval Epirotic tradition, careful, considered and unconsciously idiomatic. It was the kind of speech that compelled silence and introspection, tying our generation, imperceptibly but inexorably, to the generation that came before. As such he was and even beyond the grave, still remains, a stalwart of the past, persisting in the present, in order to propel us forward to the future.

Ensconced every year since 2004 within the cultural tent of the Panepirotic Federation of Australia at the Antipodes Festival, surrounded by the various accoutrements comprising the re-enactment of a traditional Epirotic home, Giorgos Konstantinidis looked and felt at home, every part the image of an Epirot shepherd. Cheerfully treating passersby to some home made tsipouro, every so often he would grabs his klitsa and ring the cattle bells hanging from the tent emitting shepherd’s whistles and cries as he did so. Those who passed by, especially tourists, would view this wonderful phenomenon in natural habitat, that was, by virtue of his capacity to transcend time, in no way anachronistic, with awe and delight. Most were sufficiently moved so as to request to be photographed with him, or to drag their most often reluctant progeny, kicking and screaming, also to be immortalised with him in digital clarity. Within a few seconds of having his arms around them, they became calm and happy for this doting grandfather had a remarkable way with children.

A few minutes later, the indefatigable Giorgos Konstantinidis would once more be on the move. The traditional Epirot musicians would arrive and he, naturally, would be called upon to lead the dance, doing so with remarkable gracefulness of poise and noteworthy agility. Artfully placing a cigarette in him mouth, he would throw his skoufo down onto the ground disdainfully, as if expressing his complete and utter unattachment to the accoutrements of this world and dance around it, a titanic, elemental Kazantzakian figure, if there ever was one. Moments later, he would cast a side glance at me, a bespectacled ersatz anachronism masquerading as an Epirot, that glance conveying a mute command for me to follow his lead.

Satisfied that everything was then in order, his roving eye would scan the enthralled crowd of onlookers. Ultimately, he would zoom in on one Asian lady with a bemused and nervous expression on her face. Before she had time to realise the fact, the tsamiko predator had already pounced and instantaneously lured her into the labyrinthine circle of the dance, a potent symbol of life itself, there to be instructed by a true master of the art.

As a beloved and instantly recognisable figure at the Antipodes Festival, the unassuming and completely unselfconscious Giorgos Konstantinidis well deserved the appellation of Festival Mascot. If one was to put words in his mouth, then it is quite possible that he would rationalise his motivation for spending forty-eight hours straight in a plastic tent on Lonsdale Street every year, as a desire to exemplify and thus pass on tradition. Yet this would only be partially correct. He is did not set out to re-enacting a dead tradition. Instead he constantly endeavoured to find a way to articulate harmoniously, a way of life that he believed, forms the basis of our identity, which lived within him. As one of the few living links with that authenticity, he was a Festival highlight and was cherished as such, especially by those who half in horror, half in glee, sought to evade his roving klitsa, as well as his bespectacled sidekick.

This year, the spirit of the indefatigable Giorgos Konstantinidis, who was accompanied to his grave by the laments of the Epirotic clarinet he so loved, will imbue everything that will transpire at the Epirus Cultural Tent at the Festival and in all endeavours of the Epirot community in Melbourne, for we cannot understand our communal life without him. Though without his corporeal presence we are much diminished, it is in the keeping of his values, his love of tradition and family which he understood to embrace the entire community, that we must seek to ensure his, along with so many irreplaceable others like him, place in posterity and so retain our sense of self, generations into the future.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 14 January 2017

When I was a lad, the way we distinguished the inner circle from the outer, was by discerning people’s ability to speak in the Greek tongue. Once in a while, we would come across a strange phenomenon, especially at school: Peers whose parents were Greek and yet they had no facility in their mother tongue. In our binary way of looking at the world such ersatz “Greeks” were a conundrum, for they defied classification. Our identity was therefore enclosed within the syllables of an arcane tongue, enunciated mostly within earshot of English speakers (otherwise we generally spoke to each other in English, which would invariably elicit, from our elders at Greek functions, the following command: ῾Μιλήστε ελληνικά,῾ sometimes suffixed with the appellation κοπρόσκυλα), thereby proclaiming to all and sundry, our perceived ties of kinship and cultural affiliation.

Several decades on, it cannot be disputed that the primary language of discourse among second generation and increasingly, many first generation Greek-Australians, is English. Similarly, increasing numbers of second and third generation Greek-Australians have little or no fluency in Greek. Despite earlier generations considering the maintenance of the Greek language to be one of the key pre-requisites to perpetuating a “Greek” identity, it appears that quietly and over a long period of time, subsequent generations have managed to develop their own ideology of identity, to which lack of knowledge of the language of the mother culture is not inimical.

Thus, in Melbourne it is de rigueur to consider oneself a passionate Greek, even when one does not use or is not fluent in the Greek language. According to this view, what takes precedence over prescribed cultural, religious and linguistic criteria as determining Hellenism, (which give rise to innumerable questions as to: 1. Who determines these? 2. Can they be changed to reflect changing values or experiences? 3. Why are these the criteria of Hellenism and no other?) is how one personally feels about their own individual ethno-cultural identity. Proving that the task of defining Hellenism has been a work in progress since times ancient, without any clear resolution, are the endeavours to establish the Hellenism of the Macedonian Kings in order for them to take part in the Olympic Games. In those times, religion and language, were the key determinates. Cavafy’s Poseidonians, on the other hand, occupy a middle position between the archetypal two approaches. Having lost their language, and not comprehending the significance or meaning of the traditions they had preserved, they still clung to these, regardless of the fact that their ostensible irrelevance caused them angst, because they still felt that they comprised part of their identity. Here, it is not language but consciousness, coupled with the perpetuation of practices, that formed the Poseidonian conception of being Greek.

For me, there is something counterintuitive in the widely and deeply held “Hellenism without Greek” approach to identity emerging within Greek communities of the Anglosphere. After all, language encodes unique cultural practices and perspectives in a singular way. In the case of the Greek language, it provides an unbroken continuum wherein three millennia of shared thought and experience that be expressed in a manner that can only be approximated by translation in other tongues. While it cannot be denied that non-Greek speakers can identify as Greek, it follows logically that such an affinity hangs of the tail end of the Greek speakers they have come in contact with or grown up around and is not plausible beyond a generation, simply because the lack of the ability to receive and communicate information in the language of the ethnic group to which identity is claimed, eventually inhibits participation and an understand of that group. The lesson we learn from Cavafy’s Poseidonians therefore, is that while they “felt” Greek, however burdensome that “feeling” was, that feeling did not endure and they were eventually completely Romanised.

It is in this context that Greek deputy foreign minister Terence Quick's recent controversial comments to Greek Americans in Tarpon Springs should be understood. At a recent gathering, he expressed his disappointment at the fact that all of his hosts were using English instead of Greek, despite the fact that the aim of the gathering was to seek the Greek government’s aid for Greek to be taught in schools in the region: “The Greek language should be a powerful reference point for the Greek Diaspora, as is Orthodoxy. Here in the US we have now reached the fourth and fifth generation, and Greek is fading. If you, the parents, and grandparents do not support the Greek language in your own gatherings, then Greek will be extinguished…. So, despite all the previous Greeks who spoke in English, I will speak in Greek, which is the mother of all languages. "

There is a certain irony in a person by the name of Quick chiding expatriates for not speaking Greek and exhorting them to do so. It goes without saying that Quick's own ethnic background would challenge many Greek-Australians’ conception of what it is to be Greek.

Quick’s contention, that it is ridiculous to seek assistance from a beleaguered Greek state for Greek language education while at the same time displaying a non-commitment to the perpetuation of that language and its relevance within a multi-cultural society by not using it in diasporan social contexts, seems logical and could equally be applied in Australia as well, where though much lip service is paid to the importance of maintaining the language, as an ideology, daily practice indicates other priorities. Quite possibly, the mere act of seeking Greek language education when one is not prepared to use the language, should be seen as yet another Poseidonian ritual. However, as a representative of the Metropolis, Terence Quick’s placement of the Greek language at the centre of his conception of the Greek identity, seems to suggest that what is Greek is truly in the eye or the consciousness of the beholder, or stakeholder for that matter. His revealing comments seem to suggest that we are entering a Meta-Greek era, an era where, given the increased distance and time spent away from the motherland, our experiences, priorities and attitudes towards our mother culture have diverged to such an extent that old constituent elements are being discarded and new identities formed that bear marked differences to the culture that spawned our original cringe. For example, among various Greek-Australian sub-cultures, such as the Pontian or Cretan, it is arguable that dancing has taken centre stage as the key component of ancestral identity.

In inclusive multi-cultural societies where a multiplicity of social realties exist concurrently but in reality the Anglo-Saxon one predominates, ethnic languages have proven to be the casualties of such identity reformation, coming as this does, off the back of postmodern cultural relativism. It will be interesting to see to what extent the anglophone Greek identity which has already emerged, will be considered as "Greek" by the denizens of the motherland, not known for their inclusive outlook, for a number of factors, language and geography chiefly among them, already preclude such an acceptance. It will be fascinating, to gauge as to whether or not such an identity assumes the form of a watered down, de-hellenised Greekness that is the penultimate state to total assimilation or can actually articulate the Greek-Australian experience plausibly down the generations and be the jumping off point for an entirely unique identity in its own right.

Rather than pontificating to the Poseidonians about their parlance, thus cutting them to he Quick, Terence Quick would do well to study the social and psychological conditions in which language loss came about in the first place. Further, if Global Hellenism, a concept that the Greek State has propagated, is to be plausible, it has to be sufficiently broad and sophisticated as to encapsulate the multi-faceted fabric of the societies in which it has arisen and respectful of the people whose daily lives are its constituent elements. It is a coalescing of historical processes that cannot be driven by the Greek state alone. Such a task requires a little less grandstanding and a good deal more introspection and collaboration, for in this game, that of maintain and developing unique Greek identities, there are no quick fixes.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on 21 January 2017

“One of the worst things about being a young refugee in Greece, is the knowledge that your life has suddenly been paused, as if God is holding an immense remote control,” Nineveh, who in her early teens was a refugee in Greece in the mid-nineties, confides. “I went from being the top student in my class in Iraq, to just sitting around, waiting for nothing to happen. My parents could not work and I could not go to school. Every morning, I would watch the children in Peristeri, where we lived, go to school and I was insanely jealous of them. I spoke little English and very poor Greek and could find nothing to read in my own language.
To tell you the truth, Ι was bored out of my mind and completely demoralized. All of a sudden, my life no longer had any purpose or any structure. When you are at school, your whole mindset concerns the future: learning new things, progressing to new tasks, adding to what you already know. As far as I knew, not being able to go to school, I had no future. Not only that, not having anything to do makes you focus almost obsessively on things you would rather forget: the frightening experiences we had in Iraq, the traumatic way we left and of course, the terrifying passage to Greece in which we almost lost our lives. I had nightmares continuously.
Nonetheless, it was only when we arrived in Australia and I finally returned to school that I realized the full extent of the damage caused by two years of scholarly inactivity in Greece. I was extremely behind in all my subjects, had forgotten a large portion of what I knew and was no longer used to the discipline of study. Not a few of my friends, in the same situation gave upon on study altogether and went looking for menial jobs. Therefore, to deny someone schooling for even a short period of time is, quite plausibly, to compromise their future altogether.”

Despite these negative memories of scholastic deprivation, Nineveh, who has gone on to enjoy a successful career in the sciences, waxes lyrical about the Greek people per se. “They were all so friendly and so sympathetic. We established lasting friendship and felt completely at ease with our neighbours, all of whom took a genuine interest in us.” A lasting legacy of the compassionate treatment meted out to her and her family by the Greeks of Peristeri, is Nineveh’s innate Philhellenism. In Australia, she deliberately sought out Greek friends so that she could preserve her rudimentary knowledge of the Greek language acquired during her sojourn and regularly attends Greek events of interest to her. She maintains a love of Greek popular music, or at least she thinks she does, for she deifies Notis Sfakianakis and fervently believes that his name is not semantically, the antithesis of what we understand to be music, altogether. In short, though not all of her experiences in Greece were positive, their sum total, where the compassion and basic humanity shown her outweighs the lack of opportunities afforded to her, has shaped Nineveh into a lifelong friend, both of Greece and the Greek community of Melbourne, as is evidenced by the fact that, by her own admission, she recently berated an Italian grocer for recommending Turkish dried figs over Greek ones. I didn't have the heart to tell her that I prefer the Persian ones. Incidentally, she also has the unfortunate habit of berating those of her Greek friends who choose not to send their children to Greek school.

The demented Golden Dawners who recently stormed into a school in Perama, Piraeus to disrupt a meeting being held by teachers and parents regarding the education of refugee children in that facility, would do well to cast aside their troglodytic primal urges and take heed of the stories of people like Nineveh. Though said Golden Dawners are fond of proclaiming their adherence to what they consider to be “pure” Hellenic values, it would be of benefit to point out to them, that one of the basic values that underpin Greek civilisation since the time of Homer, is that of Xenia, better known to the modern Greek as φιλοξενία, one of those terms for which, as the Ellinarades rejoice in telling us, like φιλότιμο, no exact equivalent exists in any other language.
Xenia, as ritualised guest friendship, thus embodies the ancient Greek concept of hospitality, providing a structure for the generosity and courtesy to be shown to those who are far from home. Accordingly, guests are to be provided with succour and protection, and even provided with a present when they leave. By reciprocation, a guest had to be courteous and also offer his host something by way of a gift. (Of course it was understood that the guest relationship was of temproary duration). That Xenia was central to Greek society can be evidenced that one of the greatest ancient epics, the Iliad, revolved around a violation of guest-friendship, when Paris abducted his host, Menelaus' wife, Helen. The Greeks therefore were required by duty to Zeus to avenge this transgression, which, as a violation of xenia, was an insult to Zeus' authority. Memories of Xenia could even create precedents that were a pretext for peace in such a world and transcend the generations. In the Iliad, Diomedes and Glaucus meet in No Man's Land. However, Diomedes does not want to fight another man descendant from the Gods, so he asks Glaucus about his lineage. Upon revealing his lineage, Diomedes realises they are guest-friends, as their fathers had practiced xenia with each other. They decide not to fight, but to instead trade armour to continue the ties of their guest-friendship. Similarly in the Odyssey, the Phaeacians, and in particular their princess Nausicaa stand out for their immaculate application of xenia, as Nausicaa and her maidens offered to bathe Odysseus and then led him to the palace to be fed and entertained. After sharing his story with his hosts, they even agreed to take Odysseus to his home land.

The latest Golden Dawn antics thus seem to underlie the ambiguity of the word ξένος, which, having been in use at least since times Homeric, can be interpreted to mean different things based upon context, signifying such divergent concepts as "enemy" or "stranger", a particular hostile interpretation, to host, and all the way to the hallowed "guest friend." For Golden Dawners, it seems, not only refugees but the vast majority of the population of Greece who do not support their world view seem to be classified as "ξένοι." All the more reason to afford them the courtesy prescribed by the ancients say I.

Ιn their plurality, the Golden Dawners have up until now, lived a comfortable life, in peace and relative affluence. They are in no position to appreciate, let alone comprehend the terrible psychological and physical toll of being uprooted from one's country, witnessing slaughters and losing loved ones, nor the travails of braving rapacious people-smugglers and attempting life-threatening journeys across perilous borders. They have not been sexually harassed or robbed in refugee camps, nor have they, like Nineveh, had to face the prospect of a completely pointless, paused life, owing to an inability to go to school. Instead, by begrudging young, traumatised refugees the opportunity to regain hope and meaning through some type of schooling as they wait to rebuild their shattered lives and by seeking to intimidate those who would proffer them such an opportunity, the Golden Dawners display the worst facets of Modern Greek society: exclusion, suspicion, racism and bigotry. In doing so, they directly contravene the hallowed ancestors who they supposedly hold up as their example.

The flip-side to xenia is that it is reciprocal. It creates strong emotional ties that endure. In the case of Nineveh, it created a passionate advocate for all things Greek and there are many others like her in Melbourne alone. For Nineveh, and thousands like her, her sojourn in Greece was a temporary aberration, and her family had no intention to remain in Greece. This is important to note, because Germany jhas ust announced it will be returning thousands of immigrants and refugees to their point of entry (thins being Greece) starting March this year, and Greece is already hard pressed to deal with its own social and economic issues. However, providing young refugees with dignity and compassion, in the form of the chance to learn and dream where it is possible to do so before they move on, given the limited means Greece has at its disposal, not only transforms their lives, providing them with an outlet from their daily uncertainty that could be channelled otherwise towards anti-social behaviour; it creates a relationship of friendship and gratitude that has the capacity to transform each and every refugee student into a potential ambassador for Hellenism. If this is not possible, then at least let us not intimidate them. Brutish discourtesy, as practised Golden Dawn in their 'raid', reinforces prejudices about the West within the already laboured minds of war-stricken refugees and creates lasting bitterness and enmity that benefits Greece not at all.

Ultimately, Xenia had at the heart of its philosophy, the idea that the gods walk among men and then to refuse hospitality to a god, would be the height of blasphemy. It is high time that we embraced such a humanistic and benevolent conception of mankind, affording each other the respect and mutual regard we all deserve, consigning the thuggery of the simian Graeculi who ape Hellenic attitudes without having the foggiest idea what they entail, where it belongs: The dustbin of history.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 28 January 2017

Talented photographer Ari Hatzis once related how, on a trip to Antarctica, he took with him a Greek flag. His plan was to unfurl the flag once on the icy continent’s surface and take a photograph of it, in order to immortalise the incongruity of that flag used to flying over a sunny land, now being located in the world’s most extreme icy wastes. No doubt he also wanted to send the message that Greeks crop up in the most unlikely of places. Sadly, in his excitement to follow in the path of the Hypernoteians, he left his flag on the ship and the coveted photograph was never taken.
It is in this vein that I view the latest controversial photograph that has so vexed Greek public opinion within that country, both in Greece and abroad. A group of Greek soldiers, of Albanian ethnicity, allowed themselves to be photographed in their military uniform. All of them have linked their outstretched hands in such a way, that when first viewing the photograph, I thought that the defenders of the fatherland were either very bad at affecting raper attitudes or performing the children’s song: ῾Μια ωραία πεταλούδα.᾽ However, I am reliably informed that they were in fact, forming a representation of the Albanian national symbol, the double headed eagle and it is this that has incensed and outraged the Hellenes.
Demands for the Albanian-Greeks court-martial and deportation abound. Apparently, forming the symbol of the double headed eagle is an act of treason, because it indicates that the soldiers’ loyalty is not to the country in whose army they serve. Pundits lamenting the state of Greece go further and opine that this type of heinous behaviour proves that multiculturalism in Greece does not work – that Greece must belong to the Greeks and that one cannot become a Greek, they must be born a Greek, simply because these so-called “Greeks” of diverse descent, cannot be trusted to have the best interests of Greece at heart, especially when they try to make images of avian endothermic vertebrates with their hands.
It is worthwhile wondering if the level of outrage and bile would have been any different, had the soldiers in question been of Serbian, Montenegrin, Russian or Karnatakan (in India) descent, for all those cultures use the double headed eagle as a national symbol. I would venture to say that it would not be. The real problem here, lies not, as the infuriated would have us believe, with soldiers of any race displaying an inability to cleanse themselves, by means of psychosocial colonic irrigation or otherwise, of their ethnic affiliations, this compromising their ability to serve the Greek state, but specifically with cultures or ethnicities that are perceived to be ‘enemies’ of Greece and thus, their presence within the Greek army is deemed to be a security risk and they themselves, as potential fifth columns. As such, despite the fact that they may be Greek citizens, their position in the Greek armed forces is considered untenable.
There is ample historical precedent to support such a view. The modern Albanian state was created, out of a form of Albanian nationalism that aped and was largely a reaction to Greek nationalism. Its creation compromised the right to self-determination of a large population of native Greeks in the south of that country, sparking the Northern Epirus issue, which is yet to be resolved, as successive Albanian governments pursue largely hostile policies towards the Greek minority. Further adding fuel to the conviction that Greek trained Albanians represent a fifth column, is the knowledge that most of the leaders of the Albanian independence movement were educated in Greece, specifically in Ioannina, and it was these leaders who went on to curtail the ethnic expression of the Greeks of Northern Epirus. Add to that the persistent irredentist policies of Albanian governments who have claimed as their own, territories comprising the entirety of Greek Epirus, the appalling manner in which the collaborationist Albanian government and the Cham Albanians, who were Greek citizens, firstly annexed Greek territory in Thesprotia and then proceeded to commit genocidal acts against its Greek citizens, the appropriation of Greek history in that, according to Albanian historiography, the ancient (and modern) Epirots are ethnic Albanians, and the fact that the Albanian government actively assisted Serbian Albanians to commit treason against their country of citizenship, violently rebelling against their government and creating the state of Kosovo in the process and one can begin to appreciate the roots of Greek paranoia.
Of course against these incontrovertible facts, one must balance many others: That Albanian speakers have existed within the bounds of the Greek state for at least a millennium, that Albanian speaking revolutionaries all over Greece fought as hard as any other fighter for the liberation and continued freedom of Greece, and that at least until the middle of the nineteenth century, serious consideration was given by all interested parties in the creation of a federal Greek-Albanian state. These examples however, serve only to illumine the sources of fear and suspicion where they exist. They do nothing to allay them.
It is quite plausible that many Albanians living in Greece harbour prejudices against Greeks commensurate to those harboured by Greeks against Albanians, created either by ‘history’ or by their experiences living within Greece. Some of those prejudices, related to me by them, appear eerily similar to those harboured by first generation Greek migrants against Australians. What the Australian experience should teach us however, is that petty prejudices of this nature seldom, if ever, translate to anything more serious. But then again, the Australian multi-cultural paradigm is built on a myth of its own, that of terra nullius, whereby all nations have the right to co-exist here, (as long as they acknowledge the ascendancy of the dominant Anglo-Saxon culture) because there were no competing nationalisms to contend with the ruling culture in the first place, Aboriginal cultures being conveniently effaced from the discourse. The success of the Australian multi-cultural model thus stems from the ability of the dominant culture to control and define the cultural narratives of the minorities it has permitted to settle within its sovereignty. This is markedly different from the experience of Albania, Greece and other Balkan states where nationalisms compete, collide, contend and overlap, continuously. It is of no benefit to gloss over the fact of this acrimony.
I don’t think we will ever know the motivation of the young men who assumed the butterfly position in the now infamous photograph. Were they, as I suspect merely highlighting the incongruity of men of Albanian background serving in the Greek army, given the known historical background of Greco-Albanian relations? Were they parodying competing nationalisms, or merely expressing sub-cultural solidarity with each other? Were they indeed, as many contend, setting out to insult the Greek state? It is impossible to fathom the inscrutable workings of their young minds. What is certain however, is that the ensuing hysteria, clearly is a product of a deeply felt insecurity about the changing face of Greece, where recourse to threadbare tropes of collective national self-indulgence no longer assist in any meaningful way to interpret the world around us.
No amount of wishful thinking will bring Greece to the almost ethnically homogenous state it believed itself to be, between the end of the Second World War and the downfall of the Communist bloc – itself a temporary aberration in two millennia of continuous population movement. Many of those population movements, such as those of the Avars, Slavs and Goths caused upheavals that directly threatened the security and existence of the Greek-speaking people. Yet despite the immense human cost of those almost continuous upheavals, eventually, over a long period of time, Greece was able to absorb those populations and make them their own, despite the state of insecurity it found itself in. Such a long view of history makes the hand gestures of little boys, pale into insignificance.
Ultimately, we cannot hope to know now, whether it will be government policy, or social attrition that will determine how ethnic non-Greek peoples will be accommodated as Greek citizens and what form any type of multi-culturalism, if any, will take. The social and ethnic realities of Greece do not bear any resemblance to those of western multicultural countries, created largely as a result of colonialism or de-colonisation and thus any comparison or translation of their ideologies is unhelpful. The pre-existing, though not-consistent practice, of not permitting “risky” groups such as Thracian Muslim citizens to bear arms with ammunition while serving in the Greek army suggests that the creation of distinct “classes” of citizens is a possibility, with all the implications for the bilateral relations between Greece and the target’s country of origin that these entail. This is especially so considering that over the border in Albania, the Greek minority and its politicians’ commitment to the Albanian state is called into question on a daily basis by the media and Albanian politicians, often, most crudely.
Of paramount importance therefore, is to keep ethnic and social tension from bubbling over, as the unique processes of dealing with the new social realities, resolve themselves over time. The best we can do to assist such a process is to exhort all concerned, little Albanian soldiers and Greeks alike, to keep their hands firmly in their pockets, where we can see them.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 4 February 2017

GOODY'S GOODY'S YUM YUM

SMYRNA UNPUNISHED

ΚΗΔΕΙΑ

A WOG LETTER OF LOVE

NOTED TRANSPARENCIES

GREEKS AND DECIBELS

ΒΕΥΟND THE POSEIDONIANS

OXI

ON NANNIES, CORPOSES AND FAILED STATES

THE HELLENISTIC AGE

DI PASTA GRECA

ΠΑΡΑΜΥΘΙΑ

GREEKS AND COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY

SHORT CHANGED

AUSTRALIAN HELLENISM REBOOTED

A PENTELIC CHRISTMAS DIALECTIC

THE APOTHEOSIS OF EPIRUS

THE QUICK GUIDE TO HELLENISM

ΨΩΜΙ ΠΑΙΔΕΙΑ ΕΛΕΥΘΕΡΙΑ

DOUBLE HEADED BOGEY MEN