It's All Greek to Me!

by John Mole

  ‘Good evening. I am the foreigner who bought a house on the hill.’

  ‘I have seen you,’ said the papas, looking past me into the distance. ‘Deuts?’

  ‘English.’

  ‘Ah, Benny Xill.fn2 Are you interested in jokes?’ It seemed a strange preoccupation for a man of the cloth.

  ‘Jokes?’

  ‘Jokes,’ said the papas and pointed up into the sky. The sleeve of his cassock fell to the elbow and revealed the long yellow arm of a woolly vest. I looked up at the clouds. I sympathised with the belief that Creation is a massive practical joke, but that it was held by an Orthodox papas was harder to swallow.

  ‘I have a telescope. From Dixon’s in London.’ Then he added in English, ‘Stargazer. Four inch. Spessial.’ The penny dropped. Not jokes but stars, the difference of an ‘r’.

  ‘You in London?’ I asked.

  ‘My nephew works for Olympic Airways.’

  It was time to pop the question. What was it to be? Greek or mime? The potential for misunderstanding was about equal in both. As we were standing in the middle of the street and all eyes were on us, I chose Greek.

  ‘Would you like my kaka?’

  ‘Your what?’

  ‘My kaka. In my house much kaka. You want kaka in church?’

  The coal-black eyes began to burn. I persevered.

  ‘In my house much goat kaka. Prrrp. Prrrp. Kaka. You want it for the church? For roses?’ I suddenly had a horrible suspicion that Barba Vasilis had played a joke on me and that giving manure to a priest was an ancient insult. But it was a false alarm. The black eyes turned back to the horizon and he nodded.

  ‘Put it behind the church. Next to my garden. Good evening.’

  ‘How shall I get it down?’

  He shrugged again and stalked off on his patrol. In the café everyone else shrugged too. It was the papas’s manure now and of no interest to anyone else. I could not go back on my gift, so I had to pay Dimitris the builder and Adonis his labourer to load it onto panniers on their donkeys and take it down to the pick-up parked by the cemetery. For the same price they would have dug it straight out of the house and saved me three days of hard labour, acute lumbago and hands like skinned sausages. The only consolation was that I would never have found my old front door key.

  The treasure lay heaped up against the back of the church, gently steaming. Every morning it seemed to have shrunk in the night and I could only think that it was settling. One night I couldn’t sleep and went into the kitchen for a glass of water. Out of the window I saw waxy-fingered Elpida sneaking back into the yard with two buckets of manure. The heap was all gone in a week, scattered at night through the gardens of the village. The next time I walked past his house behind the church, I was glad to see that the papas had taken some for his own tomatoes.

  Island of dreams

  Every Thursday I so look forward to Friday when I will be with the family again. On Friday afternoon I think of Arfa strapping little Harry into the child seat, where he spends a lot of his day, awake or asleep. They drive to the school and pick up the other three and supplies of bags of bilious yellow corn curls, called garidakia, and cartons of tepid chocolate milk. They set off for Evia along the National Road, the patched and potholed four-lane, third-world, second-rate highway to Salonica.

  After twenty minutes they turn off on a little road that meanders through vineyards and orchards and pine forests across the hills, with views of Evia over the water, and down a steep winding road to the tiny port of Scaly Orifice, or Skala Oropos as it is more generally known outside our family. Here the Gulf of Evia is half an hour wide by little ferry. While they wait for the next boat, the mob demands its pay-off for not fighting in the back of the camper and lines up for ice lollies at the kiosk by the quay.

  The ferry is a big white landing craft. They reverse on board, the deck hands chanting ela piso piso piso – come back, back, back – into the magical ship’s aroma of old diesel, disinfectant, dead fish, stale piss, sweat, new paint, seaweed, salt, sea breeze and coffee. The engine shudders and thrums, the boarding ramp becomes the bow door rising shut, and with hoots and bells the screws churn up the black and oily water.

  Out in the Gulf the breeze freshens and the family turn their backs on Attica. The sea works its magic. The worries and stress of the mainland sink into the dregs of the wine-dark Aegean, until someone finds that they have left their shoes or their security blanket or their homework behind.

  Loudspeakers crackle the theme tunes of Greece. Never on Sunday (da di-di-di-di-di-di dum-dum di-dum-dum di-dum-dum) or Zorba’s Dance (da-dum di-di-di-dum da-dum di-di-di-dum). If ever there was a prize for an overworked tune these two would lead the field. Not long before we first went to Greece, Zorba was banned by the American puppet junta because it was written by a communist, Theodorakis. You could go to jail for humming it. Now it makes up for lost airtime.

  After horseplay on the stairs, swinging over the deck rails, hanging from the awning frames, the children shove past each other into the shady saloon for more bribes, lemonade and stale cheese pies. It is too early for tourists. Men in traditional island dress – leather jacket, check shirt and jeans – play cards and drink beer. An old granny skulks in a corner with a live chicken in a basket. The children hide the crusts of their cheese pies under the seats and mesmerise themselves with an old-fangled arcade game, new to Greece, a blob of light simulating a tennis ball that zigzags across the screen and makes a popping noise when you ‘hit’ it.

  Arfa says that computer games will never catch on and tries to entice them to a game of shove-drachma football on the table. The granny comes over and interrogates her: where are they going, how much does her husband earn, how much rent do they pay in Athens? ‘You’ve got lovely children,’ she says, ‘but why did you marry a foreigner?’ Arfa, who has been making serious efforts to learn Greek, has been smug about this question for twenty-five years.

  They go out on deck to watch themselves arrive. Eretria is a natural little harbour overlooked by its acropolis and ringed by scrubby, green-pocked hills. They chug past a spit of wooded land with a sign saying ‘Island of Dreams’. The port is cluttered with blue and white fishing boats, some of them with their owners hunched over yellow nets getting things ready for the evening’s hunting. A man slaps an octopus against a wall below a sign prohibiting the slapping of octopuses and the rhythmic smack, smack, smack echoes across the water. Plastic bags drift in the shallows like jellyfish. Or jellyfish drift in the shallows like plastic bags, it’s hard to tell from the deck.

  A port policeman holds back the scrum of foot passengers returning to Athens. They seem desperate to leave the island with their tatty cases and parcels, pushing each other out of the way like refugees from an imminent disaster that they are keeping secret from the new arrivals.

  Twenty yards from the quay they stop for a dozen souvlakis, little cubes of pork grilled on a sharp stick, drenched in salt and lemon juice and topped with a chunk of bread. The last cube is a piece of gristly fat and the world divides between those who relish it and those who retch on it. Bartering fat cubes or squirreling them under the seat cushions, they take the coast road south. The beach is lined with hotels and tavernas and discos and pizzerias, still shuttered for the winter. On tattered signs Zorbas dance their haemorrhoidal jig. Da-dum di-di-di-dum. Further on the family pass olive groves shimmering silver in the breeze and fruit orchards and small fields of crops divided by dry stone walls. Then rocky foothills to the left and an exquisite blue sea to the right.

  They get stuck behind a Pepsi truck, farting fumes as it labours up a winding gradient, past a round cement silo belonging to the Herakles Cement Company. It is painted cream and adorned with the black silhouette of the hero, his lion skin flopping over his forehead in a widow’s peak. The landscape is scribbled with political slogans and signs, stencilled on fences and buildings and outcrops of rock and the road itself, as if there weren’t already enough symbols in the world – the green ris
ing sun of the socialist party PASOK, the blue flaming torch of New Democracy and the red hammer and sickle of the two Communist parties, the internationalists and the allegedly independent Eurocommunists.

  Aliveri is waking from its siesta. The first men shuffle to their café chairs on the pavement, leaning on sticks and clacking beads. A lignite train from the mines that feed the power station on the bay clatters over the level crossing at the entrance to the town. In the queue an antique blue bus belches blue smoke, pick-ups klaxon the first three bars of the Marseillaise and Colonel Bogey, stereos bray Greek and American pop.

  Outside the town is a square tower on top of a conical hill. Such stone towers are ten a penny. Ancient Athenians and Spartans and Corinthians built them, as did Alexander’s generals, Roman governors, Byzantine despots, Frankish crusaders, Venetian mercenaries, Catalan adventurers, Knights Templar, Turkish pashas, Moorish pirates, mountain brigands and the palikaria of the War of Independence. Then they went out of fashion. German Gauleiter, Greek Colonels and Nato commanders preferred reinforced concrete bunkers.

  I wait in the café. Three hours after leaving Athens the camper stops and I am jumped on and tickled and scragged until I buy the children off with ice creams to tide us over the last part of the journey to Kyria Sofia’s taverna in Limanaki, where we spend a riotous weekend. By Sunday afternoon I so look forward to Monday when they will leave me in peace to get on with the house.

  Evia’s heyday was three thousand years ago when its seven city states were thriving and independent. Chalkis, or Halkida as it is now known, means copper and that was the source of its wealth. The plain between Chalkis and Eretria was famous for horses and the cattle after which the island was named. Evian warriors had a reputation for old-fashioned courage. They didn’t use cunning stratagems or throw spears like cissies but fought like men, hand to hand with swords. Evians founded colonies in the Aegean islands and Italy. Reggio Calabria was founded by Chalkidians. Cuma north of Naples got its name from Kimi.

  Since this golden age Evia had got lost in the backwaters of history. Why don’t we talk about Chalkis and Eretria in the same breath as Athens and Sparta, Corinth and Thebes? Until we went there we had never heard of them. Yet it was a large, fertile and populous island close to trade routes and seaways. Perhaps people who bred horses and liked to do things the old-fashioned way weren’t smart enough to prosper in the growing sophistication of the Greek world. Perhaps it was because they had a talent for backing the losing sides in the interminable wars between Athens and Sparta and Thebes. When they sided with Athens, Thebes won. When they sided with Sparta, Athens won. When they rose up in revolt, they were smacked down again. In the end Philip of Macedon, Alexander the Great’s father, swallowed them all in his Macedonian empire. Evia became known again for what its name means, happy cattle, and its fertile plains grew grain for Athens.

  A hundred and fifty years later Macedon was swallowed up by Rome. The Romans were fond of the swirly green cipollino marble from Karystos at the southern tip of Evia for their baths, but otherwise they left few records of the island. The Roman empire split and Byzantium took over the east. We can skim thankfully over the next eight hundred years along with local historian Tassos N Petrisa: ‘The emperor Justinian fortified Halkida in the fifth century. There then follows a period of some centuries during which very little of importance seems to have happened.’ Happy cows.

  In 1209 the Pope’s crusaders captured Constantinople. The Republic of Venice took over Evia, which they called Negroponte. It ranked as a kingdom, like Crete, and its flag was one of three flown in St Mark’s Square. Halkida, which the Venetians also called Negroponte, was already a wealthy and cosmopolitan trading centre. A symptom of and probable contributor to this was the largest and oldest Jewish community in Greece, known as Little Jerusalem. The Venetians made the city their centre of operations for all the Aegean: the laws of the island were written in their dialect and they had a church and a warehouse in every large village. The island was divided into three baronies owing allegiance to the king of Salonika. The Venetians held the ports and numerous minor Frankish nobles occupied the interior, which they adorned with their castles. For the next two hundred years they engaged in confusing and readily forgettable skirmishes, invasions and wars with Albanians, Turks, pirates, each other and the rulers of a resurgent Byzantium.

  On 29 May 1453 the Ottomans captured Constantinople. For the next fifty years they whittled away at Venice’s empire. In 1470 they took the city of Negroponte with the greatest massacre the island had seen. The kingdom became the fief of the Capitan Pasha, high admiral of the Ottoman Empire. It was renamed the Pasalik of Egripos and included Athens and Thebes.

  For the next four centuries again nothing much happened. In the words of another local historian, Alexandros Kalemis, ‘In 1470 Evia surrenders to the Ottoman hordes of Mohameth and has to bear the Turkish yoke until the revolution of 1821.’ Actually Evia was liberated on 13 June 1830.

  From time to time I decide to learn classical Turkish and the Arabic script it is written in and to rediscover Greece from the Ottoman point of view, decisions that last about five minutes until I think of other ways to spend my time. There must be letters and reports from the pashas of Egripos and Aliveri and the scribes of the Capitan Pasha when he came on state visits. Perhaps some Anatolian Leigh Fermor had a bestseller among the chatterati of Topkapi with his Travels in the Egripos. There must also be things written in Greek by clever Greek administrators, who ran the empire.

  Whisper it softly, but many Greeks, including clergy, welcomed the Ottomans. On the whole Muslim rulers have been much more tolerant of infidels than their Christian counterparts have. As long as their subjects paid taxes and provided recruits to the harems and armies of the Sultan, they could have whatever religion they liked. Only when they joined religion with revolt did scimitars and stakes come out. Orthodox Christianity was under far greater threat from the Roman variety imposed by Venetians and Franks and Catalans. Jews too were safer from pogrom under the crescent than the cross. This is not a line of thought that goes down well in Greek company.

  The War of Independence began in 1821. Out of this Balkan saga of courage and heroism, chaos and confusion, massacre and betrayal, brigands and warlords, Great Power rivalry and Ottoman infirmity, a new Greece was born. Evia played its part. A hero of the revolution, Kriezotis, took his name from the village of Krieza, just down the road from us. Actually he came from another village and by rights should have called himself Argyrotis – all the received information about this confusing time needs to be carefully picked apart.

  The Halkida revolutionary committee raised money and the nationalist consciousness. The Crispi and Cohen families were active members, not least to promote religious freedom in the event of an Orthodox theocracy. In fact a secular republic was created in 1828 and lasted until its president, Kapodistrias, was assassinated in 1831. It was replaced by a monarchy in 1833. Emulating its British protector, a German king was installed, the Bavarian Otto.

  We decided to explore the square tower in the middle of the amphitheatrical plain that we could see from the house. Chivalry was the theme. The knights accoutred themselves in various bits of cardboard and plastic and stick.

  ‘I don’t want to be a damson in this dress again, I want to be a knight,’ said Kate.

  ‘All right, you can be Sir Pegoraro de Pegorari, Baron of North Evia,’ said Arfa, who had been reading up on the mediaeval history of the island.

  ‘And me,’ said Harry.

  ‘You can be Sir Gilberto de Villardoin, Baron of Middle Evia.’

  ‘And me,’ said Jim.

  ‘Sir Ravanos de Lecarzeri, Baron of South Evia.’

  ‘Maam, you’re making these up,’ complained Jack.

  ‘I’m not, promise. Genuine thirteenth century. As you’re the eldest, you can be Sir Boniface de Montferrat, King of Salonica, who was in charge of all of them. He reported to Venice. They took over after the crusaders plundered Consta
ntinople.’

  ‘Yebbut who do we fight?’ asked Jack, getting to the crux.

  ‘The other French and German and Spanish and Italian knights who tried to build castles here. They fought all the time.’

  ‘Yebbut what about the Greeks?’

  ‘They kept small and quiet. The Emperor of Constantinople was Belgian. His name was Henry. They fought him too.’

  We set off in the camper down into the valley and along a maze of dirt roads through fields of vines and melons to the tower. We parked at the bottom of the hillock, as the slope was steep and covered with a jumble of rocks and cut stone, all that remained of the winding road that led up to the main entrance. It was stoutly built with massive stones, about four storeys high with authentic-looking crenellations. It was probably a Venetian signal tower, one of the chain that ran the length of the island, and not much use thereafter except to watchmen who guarded the fields. We disturbed the present chatelaine, a large white owl, who flapped off crossly when we went in.

  We had a good view of the lake and its emerald shore. In the middle was a tall, conical island topped with a jumble of stone and marble ruins, all that remained of Dystos, one of the seven independent city states of ancient Evia. Hidden in the mountains beyond were the 3,000-year-old Dragon Houses of the Heroic Age, massive bunkers made out of giant slabs of rock that these days would need heavy cranes to lift. Who built them and how and why are still a mystery.

  The hills around the lake were dotted with little Byzantine chapels. On the shore at the closest point to the island of Dystos was the Serai of the Pasha of Aliveri, a summer palace with the remains of a handsome stone tower and stables and outbuildings. High in the blue sky above us the vapour trails of a flight of fighters traced the Greek flag. If we squinted we could make out our house across the plain. It was thrilling to feel that we were part of this landscape full of stories.