A Room in Athens

by Frances Karlen Santamaria

  57 how to use their hands: a note in the original diary: “Infants here are swaddled first three months (at least).”

  58 Fifth Day Black Bile: a facetious, but probably correct, allusion to the use of archaic humoral medicine at the clinic. In the 1960s, childbirth in Greece was rapidly moving from the home and midwife to the hospital and obstetrician—in 1960, fully 60 percent of Greek women still gave birth at home; by 1970, more than 82 percent of births took place in a maternity hospital. Nevertheless, the practices at 26 Bouboulinas Street, and throughout the mainland and islands, were still strongly infused with a mixture of folk customs and ancient medical beliefs, such as humoral medicine.

  Humoral medicine was based on the theories of Empedocles (495–435 BCE), Aristotle (384–322 BCE), and the physicians Hippocrates (460–370 BCE) and Galen of Pergamon (130–200 CE), and was prevalent across the Ottoman Empire and the West until the nineteenth century and the emergence of cellular pathology. Humoral principles held that matter was composed of four basic elements, each with a primary characteristic: Fire (hot), earth (dry), water (wet), air (cold). The human body, too, was composed of four fluids, or “humors,” each with two elemental qualities: blood (hot/moist), phlegm (cold/moist), yellow bile (hot/dry), and black bile (cold/dry). The humors were both fluids and “vapors,” which suffused the body and dictated health and temperament. Illness resulted when the humors were not in equipoise (e.g., an excess of black bile resulted in a melancholic personality). Humoral medicine sought to restore the “delicate balance of humours,” as she rightly describes it in the diary, through the use of opposites.

  After childbirth, it was believed, a woman’s loss of “warm” blood and her “open” womb left her in a dangerously “cold” and receptive condition. Humoral medicine dictated dry heat and closure of the womb. New mothers were urged to ingest warm foods and to stay heavily covered in bed, with windows and doors closed against drafts. Windows and doors were also kept closed, in traditional belief, to ward off daemonic forces from the vulnerable mother and infant.

  Another instance of lingering traditions appears in a sentence cut from the published diary: “[Miss Elleadou] … insists that I rub my belly with olive oil at night, for inexplicable reasons.” Oil massage of the abdomen was a traditional technique used by midwives to ensure the womb was in the proper position before birth and to prevent stretch marks. See, e.g., Georges, Eugenia. Bodies of knowledge: the medicalization of reproduction in Greece. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2008; Nusbaum, Julie. “Childbirth in Modern Athens: The Transition from Homebirth to Hospital Birth.” Penn Bioethics Journal, vol. II, issue ii. Spring 2006; Trichopoulos, Dimitrios and George Papaevangeou. The Population of Greece. Department of Hygiene and Epidemiology, University of Athens Medical School, 1974.

  59 A Farewell to Arms (1929): Ernest Hemingway’s novel of the First World War, a love story about a wounded American soldier, Frederic Henry, and an English nurse, Catherine Barkley, who cares for him at a hospital in Italy. The novel may have come to mind because she, too, is an American abroad in a hospital, and because in the novel Barkley repeatedly takes Henry’s temperature, by mouth, which prompts intimate discussions about it. Perhaps she also thinks of the story because Catherine Barkley dies during childbirth in a foreign country.

  60 De Vries: she was reading The Mackerel Plaza, a 1958 comic novel by Peter De Vries.

  61 clean binders: a binder is a broad, girdle-like bandage applied to the abdomen after childbirth to provide support for the abdominal walls and for the womb to return to shape. Prenatal binders were also used, to support the uterus. Binders were worn by women in ancient Greece and in much of the ancient and modern world, and they are still used today. However, American women would have bought their binders, rather than sewn them together themselves, as the women do at the clinic.

  62 Hava Nagila (“Let us rejoice”): a Jewish folksong, often sung at celebrations.

  Hora: a traditional circle-dance of Romania and Israel.

  Michael Row the Boat Ashore: her nostalgic affection for the song was rooted in her years at Antioch College, in the mid-fifties, where she took part in folk-singing parties, called hootenannies (“although I had no degree, I had had lots of folk dancing” she remarks on p. 13). The song, a slave spiritual, had been recorded by the Weavers, The Highwaymen, and Harry Belafonte, among others, in the fifties and early sixties during the American folk-music revival, and it became an anthem of the civil rights movement.

  63 baby blues: a mild depression experienced by a majority of women after childbirth. Baby blues is believed to be caused by hormonal changes, and fades within a week or two. The condition is sometimes mistaken for the more severe, and rarer, postpartum depression.

  64 language, says Durrell, creates character: “…we spoke French: language creates national character…” From Justine. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1957, p. 39.

  Chapter 4: Him

  65 infants and animals: such questions remain unanswered, fifty years later. When this diary entry was written, the revolutionary discovery of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep had occurred only eleven years earlier, in 1953, opening the door to scientific knowledge of dreams. Newborns spend about half of their sleep in the REM stage, which is a period of dreaming but also of other neurological activity. Most mammals and birds experience REM sleep but, as with newborns, their dreams, if any, are yet unfathomed.

  Vision, for newborns, has been shown to develop gradually, through the first six months or so of life. Studies have indicated that, initially, a newborn perceives its environment in shades of gray and is near-sighted, seeing most clearly at less than twelve inches away; however, differences in light and shapes are discerned, as is movement. The precise age when infants begin to perceive colors is uncertain, although it is generally thought that color perception emerges during the first eight weeks of life. A newborn’s sight is, as she notes, pristine, but apparently far from perfect. See, e.g., Foulkes, David. Children’s Dreaming and the Development of Consciousness. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1999; J. Bremner, Gavin and Theodore D. Wachs, 2nd ed. (Eds.). The Wiley-Blackwell Handbook of Infant Development, vol. 1. Basic Research. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.

  66 the Plaka: the old, picturesque section of Athens, at the northeast base of the Acropolis, a hub for nightlife and music.

  67 the king: Constantine II (b. 1940) had succeeded his father, Paul, as king, in March 1964, at age twenty-three. Young and dashing, he was married to Princess Anne-Marie of Denmark. He was effectively ousted from power by a military coup, in 1967. When the monarchy was abolished in Greece, in 1973, he fled the country for England. In 2013, at age 73, Constantine and his wife returned to live in Greece, after 46 years in exile.

  Chapter 5: The Visit

  68 ‘going to Europe’ for a vacation: the phrase has faded in recent decades, but English travelers had long remarked on its use among Greeks and throughout the Balkans. In 1889, the English novelist George Gissing, while in Athens, wrote in a letter: “The Greeks always talk about ‘going to Europe’ & indeed this is not Europe but the East. It will be a very long time before Greece rids itself of its Orientalism.” In 1898, William Miller, an English historian of the Balkans, stated: “When the inhabitants of the Balkan Peninsula are meditating a journey to any of the countries which lie west of them, they speak of “going to Europe,” thereby avowedly considering themselves as quite apart from the European system.” And a century afterward, the Bulgarian historian Maria Todorova prefaced Miller’s remark in her book Imagining the Balkans with this statement:

  What did exist in the Balkan vernaculars of the nineteenth century and throughout the first half of the twentieth, and may still be encountered among a certain generation, was the phrase “to go to Europe.”

  See: Mattheisen, Paul F., Young, Arthur C., and Pierre Coustillas (Eds.). The Collected Letters of George Gissing, vol. 4 (1889–1891), Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1993, p. 146; Miller, William. Trave
ls and Politics in the Near East. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1898; Todorova, Maria. Imagining the Balkans. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009 [1997], p. 43.

  69 special delivery: although she makes light of the matter, she did indeed write to her doctor, who was indeed named Edward Wingheld, and he replied by letter, in part: “I am a little puzzled by what they meant by the statement “the wall has fallen.” Are you sure the doctor didn’t say that the womb had fallen? In either case, the implication is that there has been some relaxation of the supporting ligaments of the uterus…” It appeared she had a prolapsed uterus.

  70 the Pill: the revolutionary and controversial oral contraceptive had been initially approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration only four years earlier, in 1960, and was given approval for general use as a contraceptive in 1962. By 1964, 2.3 million women were on the Pill.

  71 name him Joshua: a joking reference to the Old Testament Book of Joshua, in which the Israelite leader miraculously destroyed the walls of the city of Jericho with a blast of trumpets.

  72 according to Dr. Spock: their discussion would have been quite different today. In the mid-twentieth century, Dr. Spock had been an important force in promoting the widespread belief in the United States that babies should be put to sleep on their stomachs to prevent choking. However, evidence emerged in the 1970s that infants who slept on their stomachs were more susceptible to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), or Crib Death. SIDS, which was not medically identified until 1962, usually occurs during sleep but remains unexplained. It is believed that SIDS is linked with abnormalities in breathing patterns. In 1992, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended that infants be put to bed on their backs or on their side to prevent SIDS. It was also determined that an infant would have no greater chance of choking when lying on its back than on its stomach. See, e.g., Ember, Carol R. and Melvin Ember (Eds.). Encyclopedia of Medical Anthropology: Health and Illness in the World’s Cultures, vol. 2. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, 2004; Spock, Benjamin and Robert Needlman. Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care, 8th Ed.: New York: Pocket Books, 2004.

  73 the ability to think: such surmises about the lasting psychological impact of swaddling on European children (and by implication, on the European “national character”) may appear far-fetched to some readers today, but they would not have seemed so to many Americans at the time. During and after the Second World War, American and British social scientists, especially those affiliated with the influential “Culture and Personality” movement, became particularly focused on the origins and features of “national character,” a concept as old as the modern nation-state itself but which had fallen out of favor.

  Popularized by anthropologists such as Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, the Culture and Personality movement (later described as “psychological anthropology”) emphasized the reciprocal relationships of the individual and society in the formation of national character, beginning with a culture’s methods of child-rearing. Mead, in And Keep Your Powder Dry (1942), and Benedict, in The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture (1946), wrote of the “national character” of Japan and of America, respectively, with conclusions tied directly to these countries’ child-rearing practices. Perhaps still more to the point in the diary’s context is the controversial book The People of Great Russia: A Psychological Study (London: The Cresset Press, 1949), in which English anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer and psychoanalyst John Rickman developed what became known as the “swaddling hypothesis.” They concluded that the swaddling of infants in Russia for long periods not only caused later negative personality traits, such as emotional coldness and sudden mood swings, but also was a key aspect in forging the Russian national character. The concept of national character would be increasingly disputed during the fifties and sixties even while it remained commonly referred to among educated people, and in travel magazine articles. See also, Mead, Margaret. “The Swaddling Hypothesis: Its reception.” American Anthropologist, vol. 56, no. 3, pp. 395–409, 1954. Generally, see, e.g., Gilkeson, John S. Anthropologists and the Rediscovery of America, 1886–1965. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

  Chapter VI: The Spartan Athenian Couch

  74 the persons, yes … some of the time: “The People, Yes”: Carl Sandburg’s 1936 poem celebrating the American people; People Are Funny: game show on radio, and later, television, which aired from 1942 to 1960; “Of the people, by the people, for the people”: from President Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Gettysburg Address; “Just plain people”: may refer to Lincoln’s famous phrase “the plain people,” used in a July 4, 1861, speech, or to the expression (and turn-of-the-century popular song) “just plain folks”; “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and you can fool all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time”: attributed, in various forms, to Abraham Lincoln (and also to American showman P.T. Barnum).

  75 much more solid: in retrospect, the Wellesley girl gains significance as a face of the revolution to come, like the long-haired students my mother saw that summer in the Latin Quarter (see note 81) or the backpackers in Kolonaki Square (p. 112). They were among the first of the sixties’ “flower children.” In a letter home, she uses the recent word “hippy” in her description of the girl, which was far more acerbic than in the book: “She was talking hippy talk from between her teeth: ‘Man, it’s a gas…a gaaasss…I’m going to make the scene, man, like in India. I’m going to smell the flowers in the Himalayas…man, I gotta go there…’ Arno is going to throw her into his novel. Someone should throw her into the Ganges.”

  76 music of Theodorakis: Greek composers Mano Hadjidakis (1925–1994) and Mikis Theodorakis (b. 1925) brought bouzouki music to world renown in the 1960s. Hadjidakis received an Academy Award for his music for the film Never on Sunday. Theodorakis wrote the music for the film Zorba the Greek. See Introduction, p. xix and note 2.

  77 prey of the Athenian man: she is referring to the kamakia (literally, “harpoons”), a class of men, married and unmarried, who had appeared in Greece with the growth of postwar tourism, and amid the more restrictive customs governing relations between Greek men and women during that era.

  78 the most glib bust … a young bottom-pincher: the bronze bust honors Panagiotis Anagnostopoulos (1790–1854), a leader during the Greek War of Independence. Cesar Romero (1907–1994): versatile film and television actor of Cuban descent. Darkly handsome, with a trademark trim mustache, he was known as “The Latin Lover.”

  79 Misirlou: a traditional song in the Eastern Mediterranean region, in which the singer declares his passion for a sprightly, beautiful Egyptian girl (the song’s title is an Arabic word for “Egyptian girl.”). First recorded in the United States in the 1920s, the song hit the Billboard charts in the 1940s, when it was covered by big band leaders Harry James and Woody Herman, among others. The melody, with its slow, winding, hypnotic quality, appealed to Americans with its evocation of sultry romance in the exotic East, and it became a popular standard. This versatile tune has been reinterpreted endlessly, from klezmer and R&B versions to manic-paced surf-rock songs by Dick Dale & the Del Tones and the Beach Boys. It continues to be inventively referenced in pop culture today. See, e.g., Sullivan, Steve. Encyclopedia of Great Popular Song Recordings, vol. 2. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2013; Bendix, Regina F. and Galit Hasan-Rokem (Eds.). A Companion to Folklore. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. The lyrics, as roughly translated:

  My Misirlou, your sweet eyes / Have lit a flame in my heart

  Your lips are dripping honey / Ah, Misirlou, your magical, exotic beauty

  Drives me crazy, I can’t stand any more/ I will steal you from this Arab land

  My black-eyed, wild Misirlou / My life changes with a kiss

  From your little lips…

  80 ouzo: see note 26.

  81 we saw them all over the Left Bank: she made the following caustic observation in her diary while in Paris, on August 18, 1964: “In Latin Quarte
r in Paris this summer—fad of long hair for males. Many young English, Germans, and Scandinavians of the Bizarre School wearing hair to the shoulders. They all look like Liszt, or Edvard Grieg on his way to a guitar lesson.”

  82 cooked into cakes: a New Year’s Day tradition in Greece known as Vasilopita, in which coins are baked into cakes or breads in honor of Saint Basil the Great (c. 329–379 CE), the archbishop of Caesarea who died on January 1. Those who find the coins are believed to have good luck for the year. The custom follows various legends that St. Basil had coins or valuables baked in cakes or breads for needy citizens of Caesarea.

  83 Stadiou Street: one of Athens’ oldest major thoroughfares, running between Omonoia and Syntagma squares.

  84 D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930): English writer known for celebrating a return to primitivism, including the regenerative power of male bonding.

  85 Dan Dailey-Betty Grable Technicolor festivals I absorbed: film stars Dan Daily and Betty Grable co-starred in four Hollywood musicals for 20th Century Fox, in which they play romantically involved stage performers: Mother Wore Tights (1947), When My Baby Smiles at Me (1948), My Blue Heaven (1950), and Call Me Mister (1951).