Saturday was occupied with a drive around the east side of Lesvos, from Skala Loutron to Petra, thence to Molyvos, and back home (with a few detours).
The first detour was off the road in the middle of a valley, far from any of the villages, with Mt. Olympus - the other one - glooming in the distance. There is a Roman aqueduct in this lonely place, seventy feet high if it's an inch. When it was built, it stretched from Olympus all the way to Mytilini, a distance which takes two hours to cover by car. There are only parts of it left now, but what survives is amazing; it seems fragile, like one good earthquake would send its arches crashing to the ground, but it is in fact hollow. The original engineers were able to climb inside it and clean limescale out of the water's pathways. Like the Aqua Augusta in Rome, the aqueduct on Lesbos slopes downwards with a regular decline of two inches per mile - a feat which modern engineers are almost unable to reproduce with stone arches.
***
Lesbos has been a bastion of left-wing sympathy for decades. The Greek Communists are the most popular political party on the island, and collectivist living reaches down to the bone in these far-scattered villages and townships. (Perhaps the net result of millenia of subsistence living - Lesbos, like most of Greece, has the kind of arid landscape where the only things which flourish are goats and olive trees.)
The Petra Women's Labour Collective was set up in the Seventies with the passage of the Greek Equal Rights Act, in order to give the island's women more opportunities to work outside the home. Greek culture being what it was (and to an extent still is), any man who worked in Lesbos' olive factories was an eligible catch, while any woman who did the same was assumed to be damaged goods. The Collective still runs most of the businesses in Petra: in one taverna, where we stopped for lunch on the upper deck, (canvas awning full-bellied with the sun above us, stone walls and tentacles twirling like flypaper as they dried) the menu had a brief explanation of the Collective's history and some photos of the members from the 80s and 90s. They looked like a cross between a hippy commune and a very relaxed order of nuns, heavy pullovers and turtlenecks the order of the day. The Collective seems like a romantic gesture, a hangover of Communist practicality, but the work the Petra women undertook then and still do today is dauntingly, ferociously hard: olive pressing, timber clearing, beekeeping, rug-weaving, hand-crafting ceramics, cooking for forty or fifty people at a go.
My Greek is nowhere good enough to ask, but I wondered how the original Collective members - many of whom must still be active now - viewed their work when they first began. Did they see it as radical, as I would describe it from my third-wave feminist viewpoint, or as an extension of the work that Lesbian women had always done, just taken to a bigger sphere? Should that even be phrased as an either/or question?
Petra isn't the only place with a collective; in Molyvos, an old town with a medieval fortress and cobble-streets winding up the mountainside, we stopped for coffee on the back balcony of a kafeneio. It was the Kafeneio of the Municipality of Molyvos: rather than being a private business, every person in the town has a stake in it. It was a cheerful place, with dark red and butter-yellow walls, window-boxes full of morning glories, and clusters of old men playing checkers in the back room. Fug of cigarette smoke and bouzouki music on the radio (everybody here smokes with gleeful abandon).
***
It would appear to be part of local law that all tavernas on this island must be staffed by extraordinarily attractive Greek girls in their early twenties.
***
On the way home from Molyvos we stopped at some salt flats, glassy and still under the setting sun. There were birds on the flats, which we quickly recognized as flamingoes. Ridiculous birds - masses of pink fluff balanced on pipe-cleaner legs - they had a kind of elegance to them as they dipped their beaks into the water, taking the blessing of salt and weeds on their tongues. The sun set in a haze over mount Olympus (there is no road to high Olympus, Sappho whispers out of time) and we bowled home past the roadside shrines and the fields of gnarled trees, windows rolled down, Melina Merkouri on the CD player.
Pace Sappho: I would indeed think to touch the sky with two arms.
Monday, 30 August 2010
Thursday, 26 August 2010
Mytilini, or The Modern Mnasidika
We went swimming on Wednesday, in the sea at Charamida. I've never been entirely sure why people describe exercise, or pain, or physical endurance as 'honest', but there was something of that swimming for which I can't find a better word than 'honest' or 'clean'. Salt in my eyes and on my lips, salt stiffening my hair into peaks and ridges, the lift and burn as my body remembered that it could swim after all.
I could see the Turkish headland as I bobbed in the water. One of the tutors, Nikos, and I got to talking as we treaded water in the shallows in between bursts of movement. He was trying to describe his family, with an intricate net of nieces and nephews, and when I looked blank, he used ancient Greek words - ὁ παις, ἁι θυγατερες. Laughter mixed with the swell of waves and the wailing of seagulls. It was from Lesbos, according to Homer, that some of the thousand ships were launched to Troy; the island served as a base for the Greek army due to its advantageous location. In Iliad IX, Odysseus attempts to bribe Achilles with a catalogue of promised gifts from Agamemnon, amongst which are 'twenty slave-women of Lesbos / most beautiful amongst all the captive girls.'
Is that true? we want to say. Did the Iliad really happen? Hell if I know, but it makes great copy, and when you're neck-deep in the olive-blue sea, Ayvalik blurry like a fata morgana in front of you, it might even be a little believable.
One of the tutors took a picture of me rocking the 1920s-gayboy look in my swimming shorts, sitting and gazing out at the ocean. It reminded me of something which I couldn't place until I read a blog post about Wittgenstein last night. There is a photograph taken by him of his lover Francis Skinner on the beach at Connemara, around 1936 or so. Francis is sitting in much the same position as I was, hands around his knees, modeling the 1930s standard beach-wear - that is to say, a three-piece suit and a tie, bare feet his only concession to the setting.
Sometimes I wonder whether the definition of academia is the complete fracking inability to ever escape the demands and reminders of your intellectual obsessions, mind-strings and heart-strings tugging you back inexorably along the miles and the days.
***
Greek is anything but an intuitive language. Most western European languages are guessable - 'no' is a fairly standard constant, and in the Mediterranean, 'si' is almost universally the word for 'yes'. 'Then' for 'no', 'nay' for 'yes' and 'ohee' for 'no' - how could you guess those? Greek is tremendously rhythmic, its stress falling in such heavily-defined patterns that people sometimes cannot understand you if you put the accent on the wrong syllable. Sometimes it sounds like Spanish, sometimes more like Russian.
I managed to have my first shouting match in Greek today, although it ended amicably, with free ouzo - a shopkeeper of the 'If I shout louder in Greek and flap my hand at the calculator, the idiot foreigner will understand!' school of communication. Despite this, I had a lovely evening alone in Mytilini town, wandering the market streets and taking pictures of the city's Turkish traces. There is a hanam (old Turkish bath) which is now an art bazaar, painted delicate shades of blue and gold inside; it dates from around 1800 and still has the original stone arm-rests. There's also a crumbling mosque, roofless, its minaret long since knocked down, a haunt of stray dogs. The elegant arches and thin clay brickwork reminded me of other ruins I'd seen in Rome. Eventually night fell over the cathedral dome, and in search of mezzes, I stumbled down the backstreets until I found a pirate-themed ouzerie.
I sat outside in Plateia Sapphou, within eyesight of the statue of Sappho which gives the square its name. She is immortalized in white marble according to the taste of our own times, which prefers the ancient world to be pre-scrubbed and ghostly, rather than to the taste of her own times, when they painted their marble statues in bright primary shades. She has one leg in front of the other, her centre of gravity balanced on the ball of her left foot. She stares out over the harbour, looking for something - in vain? Anticipating her own exile, or remembering it? Staring after the unnamed, departing woman of Fragment 94? ('The truth is, I wish I was dead. / Weeping with many tears, she left me / saying, 'Oh, how badly things have turned out for us; / yes, Sappho, I swear I leave you against my will.'')
There was a live band playing in the square, young men with hard-core earnestness and electric guitars; Mytilini is a student town, with about 6,000 students attending its university. I thought that if you had an acoustic guitar / then it meant that you were a protest singer; / oh I can smile about it now / but at the time it was terrible... I drank a mojito and wrote postcards as the full moon quavered up over the water, to my friends and relatives and the girl I would like to be my girlfriend. *
Afterwards I got a taxi home without using a single word of English.
Sometimes there are small triumphs.
* Of course I'm not telling you who she is. I prefer to engender a healthy paranoia amongst my friends.
I could see the Turkish headland as I bobbed in the water. One of the tutors, Nikos, and I got to talking as we treaded water in the shallows in between bursts of movement. He was trying to describe his family, with an intricate net of nieces and nephews, and when I looked blank, he used ancient Greek words - ὁ παις, ἁι θυγατερες. Laughter mixed with the swell of waves and the wailing of seagulls. It was from Lesbos, according to Homer, that some of the thousand ships were launched to Troy; the island served as a base for the Greek army due to its advantageous location. In Iliad IX, Odysseus attempts to bribe Achilles with a catalogue of promised gifts from Agamemnon, amongst which are 'twenty slave-women of Lesbos / most beautiful amongst all the captive girls.'
Is that true? we want to say. Did the Iliad really happen? Hell if I know, but it makes great copy, and when you're neck-deep in the olive-blue sea, Ayvalik blurry like a fata morgana in front of you, it might even be a little believable.
One of the tutors took a picture of me rocking the 1920s-gayboy look in my swimming shorts, sitting and gazing out at the ocean. It reminded me of something which I couldn't place until I read a blog post about Wittgenstein last night. There is a photograph taken by him of his lover Francis Skinner on the beach at Connemara, around 1936 or so. Francis is sitting in much the same position as I was, hands around his knees, modeling the 1930s standard beach-wear - that is to say, a three-piece suit and a tie, bare feet his only concession to the setting.
Sometimes I wonder whether the definition of academia is the complete fracking inability to ever escape the demands and reminders of your intellectual obsessions, mind-strings and heart-strings tugging you back inexorably along the miles and the days.
***
Greek is anything but an intuitive language. Most western European languages are guessable - 'no' is a fairly standard constant, and in the Mediterranean, 'si' is almost universally the word for 'yes'. 'Then' for 'no', 'nay' for 'yes' and 'ohee' for 'no' - how could you guess those? Greek is tremendously rhythmic, its stress falling in such heavily-defined patterns that people sometimes cannot understand you if you put the accent on the wrong syllable. Sometimes it sounds like Spanish, sometimes more like Russian.
I managed to have my first shouting match in Greek today, although it ended amicably, with free ouzo - a shopkeeper of the 'If I shout louder in Greek and flap my hand at the calculator, the idiot foreigner will understand!' school of communication. Despite this, I had a lovely evening alone in Mytilini town, wandering the market streets and taking pictures of the city's Turkish traces. There is a hanam (old Turkish bath) which is now an art bazaar, painted delicate shades of blue and gold inside; it dates from around 1800 and still has the original stone arm-rests. There's also a crumbling mosque, roofless, its minaret long since knocked down, a haunt of stray dogs. The elegant arches and thin clay brickwork reminded me of other ruins I'd seen in Rome. Eventually night fell over the cathedral dome, and in search of mezzes, I stumbled down the backstreets until I found a pirate-themed ouzerie.
I sat outside in Plateia Sapphou, within eyesight of the statue of Sappho which gives the square its name. She is immortalized in white marble according to the taste of our own times, which prefers the ancient world to be pre-scrubbed and ghostly, rather than to the taste of her own times, when they painted their marble statues in bright primary shades. She has one leg in front of the other, her centre of gravity balanced on the ball of her left foot. She stares out over the harbour, looking for something - in vain? Anticipating her own exile, or remembering it? Staring after the unnamed, departing woman of Fragment 94? ('The truth is, I wish I was dead. / Weeping with many tears, she left me / saying, 'Oh, how badly things have turned out for us; / yes, Sappho, I swear I leave you against my will.'')
There was a live band playing in the square, young men with hard-core earnestness and electric guitars; Mytilini is a student town, with about 6,000 students attending its university. I thought that if you had an acoustic guitar / then it meant that you were a protest singer; / oh I can smile about it now / but at the time it was terrible... I drank a mojito and wrote postcards as the full moon quavered up over the water, to my friends and relatives and the girl I would like to be my girlfriend. *
Afterwards I got a taxi home without using a single word of English.
Sometimes there are small triumphs.
* Of course I'm not telling you who she is. I prefer to engender a healthy paranoia amongst my friends.
Wednesday, 25 August 2010
Chewing gum and the Museum
I'm chewing gum which tastes like pine and honey - less sugary than American or British gum, more astringent. It proclaims on the packet that it is με Φυσικη Μαστιχα Χιου: made with real gum mastic from Chios. I associate Chios with Juno's fickle love, with rude jokes about sex culled from Martial's poetry*, with verbal puns about figs and warnings to doomed armies. Gum mastic has been used for centuries, mostly for ink-thickening and corpse-preservation; nothing indicates that the ancient Chians used it for chewing gum, though.
('Atthis, I loved you long ago / a child you seemed to me, and graceless / chewing on your gum, slouching along / with your hands shoved into the folds of your chiton'?)
*it was a hard job being That Kid at the back of the Latin class who knew all the dirty words, but somebody had to do it.
***
Last night we went to visit the Museum of the Refugees again, this time to look inside at the exhibition. It's the newest building in Skala Loutron. The things it holds look surprisingly modern. When we picture the phrase 'Anatolian refugees', I suppose we think of peasant life: faces a picture of misery under trailing headscarves, shoeless children, endless squalor. Yet some of the clothes would not have looked out of place in Edwardian London or Paris: women's silk jackets with bold ruffled necklines and diagonal-cut front flaps, or pin-tucked petticoats, or a dirndl-style cropped blouse made from latticed openwork lace.
Some of the clothing belonged to children - boys no older than five or six. Some other pieces were distinctively Turkish: there was a set of women's clothes from Smyrna, striped silk bloomers with a lace blouse and the stiff cape-style bolero made from red velvet. The shoulders were squared by the pins which held them up - I could imagine the girl for whom they were made; slight, dark, determined.
One article made me pause. It was a white petticoat with a deep flounced ruffle and a panel of intricate lace embroidery. There was an orange stain on the flounce-band, a small patch about the size of my pinky fingernail.
(The shot rang out of time, the screams, the woman standing nearby, not shot herself but close enough to catch a fleck of blood?)
(Of course, there are many ways to stain a petticoat.)
I quoted one of Sappho's poems yesterday, about the hair-band she wore, but when I went back to check my accuracy over breakfast this morning, there was part of the poem I'd forgotten: a rather sinister ending. (Translation is from 'If Not, Winter', Anne Carson's translation of Sappho's fragments):
For my mother
In her youth it was a great
ornament if someone had hair bound with purple -
a very great ornament indeed.
But for the one who has hair yellower
than a pine-torch:
crowns of blooming flowers
and just lately a spangled head-binder
from Sardis' cities.
But for you, Cleis, I have no spangled headband -
where would I get one? -
yet the Mytilinian
These things of the Kleanaktidai
exile took with it:
memories terribly leaked away.
In the museum there are women's headbands and diadems, delicate twisted crowns, fashioned to look like ivy wreaths, made from pearls and dull gold. Sappho herself was exiled to Sicily around the year 600 CE, for reasons probably to do with her support for a failed political coup in Mytilini.
Is exile Lesvos' narrative?
***
There is a photo album in the museum, set in pride of place on a table next to the guest book. The album commemorates the visit of the Greek Orthodox Patriarch to Skala Loutron, who opened the museum. Lots of happy faces, lots of ring-kissing, the Patriarch looks suitably impressed by a display of vintage Greek Bibles. Yet when I look at photographs of people, I always look at the women first: and all of the women in these photographs - from the museum director to the little girls - were veiled, their heads swathed snugly in gleaming white headscarves.
Two thousand six hundred years and the only thing that's changed about women's obligatory head-bindings is their style.
('Atthis, I loved you long ago / a child you seemed to me, and graceless / chewing on your gum, slouching along / with your hands shoved into the folds of your chiton'?)
*it was a hard job being That Kid at the back of the Latin class who knew all the dirty words, but somebody had to do it.
***
Last night we went to visit the Museum of the Refugees again, this time to look inside at the exhibition. It's the newest building in Skala Loutron. The things it holds look surprisingly modern. When we picture the phrase 'Anatolian refugees', I suppose we think of peasant life: faces a picture of misery under trailing headscarves, shoeless children, endless squalor. Yet some of the clothes would not have looked out of place in Edwardian London or Paris: women's silk jackets with bold ruffled necklines and diagonal-cut front flaps, or pin-tucked petticoats, or a dirndl-style cropped blouse made from latticed openwork lace.
Some of the clothing belonged to children - boys no older than five or six. Some other pieces were distinctively Turkish: there was a set of women's clothes from Smyrna, striped silk bloomers with a lace blouse and the stiff cape-style bolero made from red velvet. The shoulders were squared by the pins which held them up - I could imagine the girl for whom they were made; slight, dark, determined.
One article made me pause. It was a white petticoat with a deep flounced ruffle and a panel of intricate lace embroidery. There was an orange stain on the flounce-band, a small patch about the size of my pinky fingernail.
(The shot rang out of time, the screams, the woman standing nearby, not shot herself but close enough to catch a fleck of blood?)
(Of course, there are many ways to stain a petticoat.)
I quoted one of Sappho's poems yesterday, about the hair-band she wore, but when I went back to check my accuracy over breakfast this morning, there was part of the poem I'd forgotten: a rather sinister ending. (Translation is from 'If Not, Winter', Anne Carson's translation of Sappho's fragments):
For my mother
In her youth it was a great
ornament if someone had hair bound with purple -
a very great ornament indeed.
But for the one who has hair yellower
than a pine-torch:
crowns of blooming flowers
and just lately a spangled head-binder
from Sardis' cities.
But for you, Cleis, I have no spangled headband -
where would I get one? -
yet the Mytilinian
These things of the Kleanaktidai
exile took with it:
memories terribly leaked away.
In the museum there are women's headbands and diadems, delicate twisted crowns, fashioned to look like ivy wreaths, made from pearls and dull gold. Sappho herself was exiled to Sicily around the year 600 CE, for reasons probably to do with her support for a failed political coup in Mytilini.
Is exile Lesvos' narrative?
***
There is a photo album in the museum, set in pride of place on a table next to the guest book. The album commemorates the visit of the Greek Orthodox Patriarch to Skala Loutron, who opened the museum. Lots of happy faces, lots of ring-kissing, the Patriarch looks suitably impressed by a display of vintage Greek Bibles. Yet when I look at photographs of people, I always look at the women first: and all of the women in these photographs - from the museum director to the little girls - were veiled, their heads swathed snugly in gleaming white headscarves.
Two thousand six hundred years and the only thing that's changed about women's obligatory head-bindings is their style.
Monday, 23 August 2010
Loutra and Herodotus: a Love Story
Yesterday I walked to Loutra. It's a village about 1 km away from Skala Loutron, and it counts as 'large' compared to where I'm staying (i.e. it has two kafeneia, a corner shop, and a war memorial).
I set out at what's rapidly becoming my favourite part of the day on Lesvos: around 7 p.m., when the mountains turn blue, the sky softens pink where it meets the land, and the pinpoints of light begin to flick on across the bay in Perama. The bone-shaking heat had faded a little, leaving some cool air in the road. I followed the dusty track up through endless fields of olive trees, most of which probably dated from around 1909, when the hotel where I'm staying was still an olive oil factory. There are lots of little cats here, adult cats no bigger than kittens, tiny-boned and darting like light on water. I passed by goats, cows, sheep with thick-locked black fleece, and a magnificent chestnut horse.
Just as I reached Loutra, I met an old woman coming the other way. Her face was set in a severe expression, not angry but inward-looking, as if she was thinking over some pain which had happened long before my memory begins. She greeted me as we passed: για σου, the all-purpose remark, with a voice as firm as the tree-coated mountains around her. She strode off down the road, purposeful, and I resisted the temptation to watch her go.
There are still funeral στελοι in Greece today. Loutra has a small memorial to the village men who died in the Second World War. It's a large, upright rectangle of marble, with the figure of a woman in Egyptian semi-profile carved in bas-relief. She is wearing a headscarf and appears to be in her mid-forties, long-skirted, barefoot. Her expression is the same as the woman on the road, one of weary determination.
I was greeted again when I went out in search of the village shop today, by a man of about forty-five or fifty. I said Καλιμερα - 'good morning' - as we passed, and he stopped me in order to press my hand and say 'Very good!'
Brief encounters are benedictions in the thickets of linguistic struggle.
***
Before I came to Lesvos, I thought the island was small. Now, looking just at this one fold of a bay, tucked into the south-east coast, it amazes me that Sappho ever managed to move from Skala Eressou all the way across the spine of the island to Mytilini. This is a place of insularity, where very few people speak English, although the Greek spoken is standard Demotic; the notorious difficulty of ancient Lesbian-Aeolic seems to have left no trace in the modern dialect. I'm slowly getting used to modern standards of pronunciation: my tutor at the summer school has no use for the Erasmic system, so I had to learn to read Greek aloud all over again in the space of one hour. There seem to be no vowels except 'ee' and 'eh', and the consonants are truly bizarre ('mp' = 'b'? In what sensible phonological framework?!) Greek is lisped even harder than Spanish, has no infinitives and few participles, no aorist, no aspirated vowels.
I don't think we're in the Ioannou Centre anymore, Anaktoria.
***
We took a boat across the Gulf of Yera tonight for dinner in Perama. Dusk was falling over the bay, and as we pulled away into the water, the full moon emerged over the shoulders of the mountains. There is a church of the Panagia (Virgin Mary) at the top of a very high hill in Skala Loutron; they light candles along the goat-track road which meanders up from the village, either to guide lost souls to the light, or to prevent the creation of more lost souls from people falling off the cliff. (I know Bekah wants the low-down on Greek recipes, but I haven't been eating anything fancy; we've had so much fresh squid that my meals have looked like a Cthulhu family reunion for three days running.)
I wish I could form an encyclopedic view of this place: explain exactly how it is, how the heat gets inside you until your knees loosen, how after seeing the sunset once, you can understand forever why Sappho's favourite adjective was ποικιλασση - fine-tinted, iridescent, glittering. It's tempting to think that very little has changed since the time of the Tenth Muse, but when she was alive, the Persian Wars hadn't even started yet. Small things have happened in between: the Roman Empire, Christianity, Islam, things like that. Yet the paths we trace across the water were familiar to her, too:
Don't ask me what to wear, Cleis.
I have no embroidered headband from Sardis to give you,
such as I wore...
There is still a Turkish presence in the island. As we stepped off the puttering motorboat, back from dinner long after night had fallen, there was a group of men huddled together at the small stone quay. They bowed low as we gathered on solid ground, but their eyes were fixed on something higher: there were prayer mats waiting under their knees, and as we dispersed to the hotel, we could hear the swooping chant of evening prayers in Arabic.
People want to say that spirituality is characteristic of Sappho's time and conspicuous consumption characteristic of ours. Looking at what I've just written, I'm not so very sure.
I set out at what's rapidly becoming my favourite part of the day on Lesvos: around 7 p.m., when the mountains turn blue, the sky softens pink where it meets the land, and the pinpoints of light begin to flick on across the bay in Perama. The bone-shaking heat had faded a little, leaving some cool air in the road. I followed the dusty track up through endless fields of olive trees, most of which probably dated from around 1909, when the hotel where I'm staying was still an olive oil factory. There are lots of little cats here, adult cats no bigger than kittens, tiny-boned and darting like light on water. I passed by goats, cows, sheep with thick-locked black fleece, and a magnificent chestnut horse.
Just as I reached Loutra, I met an old woman coming the other way. Her face was set in a severe expression, not angry but inward-looking, as if she was thinking over some pain which had happened long before my memory begins. She greeted me as we passed: για σου, the all-purpose remark, with a voice as firm as the tree-coated mountains around her. She strode off down the road, purposeful, and I resisted the temptation to watch her go.
There are still funeral στελοι in Greece today. Loutra has a small memorial to the village men who died in the Second World War. It's a large, upright rectangle of marble, with the figure of a woman in Egyptian semi-profile carved in bas-relief. She is wearing a headscarf and appears to be in her mid-forties, long-skirted, barefoot. Her expression is the same as the woman on the road, one of weary determination.
I was greeted again when I went out in search of the village shop today, by a man of about forty-five or fifty. I said Καλιμερα - 'good morning' - as we passed, and he stopped me in order to press my hand and say 'Very good!'
Brief encounters are benedictions in the thickets of linguistic struggle.
***
Before I came to Lesvos, I thought the island was small. Now, looking just at this one fold of a bay, tucked into the south-east coast, it amazes me that Sappho ever managed to move from Skala Eressou all the way across the spine of the island to Mytilini. This is a place of insularity, where very few people speak English, although the Greek spoken is standard Demotic; the notorious difficulty of ancient Lesbian-Aeolic seems to have left no trace in the modern dialect. I'm slowly getting used to modern standards of pronunciation: my tutor at the summer school has no use for the Erasmic system, so I had to learn to read Greek aloud all over again in the space of one hour. There seem to be no vowels except 'ee' and 'eh', and the consonants are truly bizarre ('mp' = 'b'? In what sensible phonological framework?!) Greek is lisped even harder than Spanish, has no infinitives and few participles, no aorist, no aspirated vowels.
I don't think we're in the Ioannou Centre anymore, Anaktoria.
***
We took a boat across the Gulf of Yera tonight for dinner in Perama. Dusk was falling over the bay, and as we pulled away into the water, the full moon emerged over the shoulders of the mountains. There is a church of the Panagia (Virgin Mary) at the top of a very high hill in Skala Loutron; they light candles along the goat-track road which meanders up from the village, either to guide lost souls to the light, or to prevent the creation of more lost souls from people falling off the cliff. (I know Bekah wants the low-down on Greek recipes, but I haven't been eating anything fancy; we've had so much fresh squid that my meals have looked like a Cthulhu family reunion for three days running.)
I wish I could form an encyclopedic view of this place: explain exactly how it is, how the heat gets inside you until your knees loosen, how after seeing the sunset once, you can understand forever why Sappho's favourite adjective was ποικιλασση - fine-tinted, iridescent, glittering. It's tempting to think that very little has changed since the time of the Tenth Muse, but when she was alive, the Persian Wars hadn't even started yet. Small things have happened in between: the Roman Empire, Christianity, Islam, things like that. Yet the paths we trace across the water were familiar to her, too:
Don't ask me what to wear, Cleis.
I have no embroidered headband from Sardis to give you,
such as I wore...
There is still a Turkish presence in the island. As we stepped off the puttering motorboat, back from dinner long after night had fallen, there was a group of men huddled together at the small stone quay. They bowed low as we gathered on solid ground, but their eyes were fixed on something higher: there were prayer mats waiting under their knees, and as we dispersed to the hotel, we could hear the swooping chant of evening prayers in Arabic.
People want to say that spirituality is characteristic of Sappho's time and conspicuous consumption characteristic of ours. Looking at what I've just written, I'm not so very sure.
Saturday, 21 August 2010
Skala Loutron - rambling impressions of the first two days
Lesvos is a land of impressions. I want to describe it, but all I can muster are handfuls of images, sentences as fractured as Sappho's poetry.
The striations of water, olive-blue brightening to turquoise.
The dessicated lushness of olive trees; figs fallen into the dusty street.
Faded houses, tired kafeneio, no aspirations in the speech.
I came to the island without a single word of modern Greek, and over the last two days, I've been diving for my Lonely Planet phrasebook at a rate of once a minute. The cute girl at the kafeneio down the street from my hotel was an early victim of this.
I arrived around 2:00 p.m. on Saturday the 21st, and immediately wanted a traditional Greek coffee, the kind which arrives in a mug the size of an eggcup and is so strong that it's like a punch to the face crafted from solid caffeine. Thus I venture out to the kafeneio, where I'm confronted by a red-haired vision of loveliness, who would have made Sappho snap her stylus in half. Sadly, we establish right off the bat that she speaks no English.
θα ηθελω καφε ελλενικος, I try. Praise Allah and Berlitz, who have not failed me: her eyes light in recognition, and I gather that traditional Greek coffee can be obtained at this fine establishment.
She asks me something in quick-fire Greek, then relents in pity when she sees my expression.
'Sweet? Bitter? No sugar?' she asks me.
γλυκη; I ask. I draw the vowels out, 'glu' as in 'glue' and 'ke' as in 'okay', remnants of three thousand years ago.
γλυκος! she corrects me. What do you know, coffee is masculine, and somewhere between the Ioannou Classics Centre and modern Lesvos, the 'u' has become an 'i'. Glee-kos.
ε-να καφε ελλενικος γλυ-κος! we repeat, laughing a little. She vanishes into the darkness of the kafeneio and I wander outside to the little stone-flagged terrace.
When she brings my coffee, it's dark and grainy and everything I wanted; I sit outside, drink my coffee, read Manuel Puig's Kiss of the Spider Woman. The breeze smells of salt and octopodes. There's a strong wind coming off the Aegean, harsh enough to knock my phrasebook across the table; a fishing boat called ΕΙΡΗΝΗ (Peace) bobs on the low tide, tied up to the low stone pier at the back of the kafeneio. Some fresh tentacles, part of the day's catch, are drying on a wire rack balanced between two chairs. Across the gulf of Yera, as the sun sets, I can see the lights of Perama.
***
Skala Loutron, the village where I'm staying, is a destination of exile. It was founded in 1922 by Anatolian Greeks who had to flee genocide in their native Turkey.
We went to the Museum of the Anatolian Refugees earlier this evening to hear some traditional Greek music. The woman at the microphone talked in a low stream of emphatic Greek; the mic, not being particularly good, would occasionally emit sharp thock! sounds, like the whack of a knife. They showed footage of the refugees, the women in plaid skirts and long headscarves, the young boys staring mistrustfully into the camera. The songs the women sang - and they were all women who sang and danced - were slow and repetitious, songs meant to be learned by heart, transmitted by mouth, a living ancient tradition.
For one of the wedding songs, they decorated a seat-swing with orange flowers and sat two girls on the seat's cushions, rocking it from side to side as they sang. I couldn't help but think of Sappho:
ατε ταν εὐποδα νυμφαν /
τα παῖδα Κρονιδα ταν ἰοκολπον /
<τη>ς ὀργαν θεμενα ταν ἰοκολπος α...
The bride with beautiful feet,
Kronos' child with her lap full of violets,
the one who sets aside anger, her lap full of violets...
'Daughter, pray tell the daughter of your daughter's daughter that her daughter hath a daughter': it's not inconceivable that some of Sappho's descendents may still live on the island, in Mytilini or Skala Eressou.
I am beginning to understand what Cavafy said when he described Greece as a 'mythic landscape'.
The striations of water, olive-blue brightening to turquoise.
The dessicated lushness of olive trees; figs fallen into the dusty street.
Faded houses, tired kafeneio, no aspirations in the speech.
I came to the island without a single word of modern Greek, and over the last two days, I've been diving for my Lonely Planet phrasebook at a rate of once a minute. The cute girl at the kafeneio down the street from my hotel was an early victim of this.
I arrived around 2:00 p.m. on Saturday the 21st, and immediately wanted a traditional Greek coffee, the kind which arrives in a mug the size of an eggcup and is so strong that it's like a punch to the face crafted from solid caffeine. Thus I venture out to the kafeneio, where I'm confronted by a red-haired vision of loveliness, who would have made Sappho snap her stylus in half. Sadly, we establish right off the bat that she speaks no English.
θα ηθελω καφε ελλενικος, I try. Praise Allah and Berlitz, who have not failed me: her eyes light in recognition, and I gather that traditional Greek coffee can be obtained at this fine establishment.
She asks me something in quick-fire Greek, then relents in pity when she sees my expression.
'Sweet? Bitter? No sugar?' she asks me.
γλυκη; I ask. I draw the vowels out, 'glu' as in 'glue' and 'ke' as in 'okay', remnants of three thousand years ago.
γλυκος! she corrects me. What do you know, coffee is masculine, and somewhere between the Ioannou Classics Centre and modern Lesvos, the 'u' has become an 'i'. Glee-kos.
ε-να καφε ελλενικος γλυ-κος! we repeat, laughing a little. She vanishes into the darkness of the kafeneio and I wander outside to the little stone-flagged terrace.
When she brings my coffee, it's dark and grainy and everything I wanted; I sit outside, drink my coffee, read Manuel Puig's Kiss of the Spider Woman. The breeze smells of salt and octopodes. There's a strong wind coming off the Aegean, harsh enough to knock my phrasebook across the table; a fishing boat called ΕΙΡΗΝΗ (Peace) bobs on the low tide, tied up to the low stone pier at the back of the kafeneio. Some fresh tentacles, part of the day's catch, are drying on a wire rack balanced between two chairs. Across the gulf of Yera, as the sun sets, I can see the lights of Perama.
***
Skala Loutron, the village where I'm staying, is a destination of exile. It was founded in 1922 by Anatolian Greeks who had to flee genocide in their native Turkey.
We went to the Museum of the Anatolian Refugees earlier this evening to hear some traditional Greek music. The woman at the microphone talked in a low stream of emphatic Greek; the mic, not being particularly good, would occasionally emit sharp thock! sounds, like the whack of a knife. They showed footage of the refugees, the women in plaid skirts and long headscarves, the young boys staring mistrustfully into the camera. The songs the women sang - and they were all women who sang and danced - were slow and repetitious, songs meant to be learned by heart, transmitted by mouth, a living ancient tradition.
For one of the wedding songs, they decorated a seat-swing with orange flowers and sat two girls on the seat's cushions, rocking it from side to side as they sang. I couldn't help but think of Sappho:
ατε ταν εὐποδα νυμφαν /
τα παῖδα Κρονιδα ταν ἰοκολπον /
<τη>ς ὀργαν θεμενα ταν ἰοκολπος α...
The bride with beautiful feet,
Kronos' child with her lap full of violets,
the one who sets aside anger, her lap full of violets...
'Daughter, pray tell the daughter of your daughter's daughter that her daughter hath a daughter': it's not inconceivable that some of Sappho's descendents may still live on the island, in Mytilini or Skala Eressou.
I am beginning to understand what Cavafy said when he described Greece as a 'mythic landscape'.
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