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

[lines missing]

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.