22 February 2009
Sunday

Yesterday’s glimpse of summer is replaced by today’s cool, damp, overcast––not unlike Maine in the spring, the weather takes one step forward and then two steps back. We roused the children early—assisted in our efforts by the hourly tolling of the church bells—so that we could attend the Divine Liturgy service at the nearby church.

Pocohantopoulos and the Pirate

Last night we took the kids to the village apokreotiko (carnival) celebration held at the nearby discoteque. Manny refused to dress in costume but the girls proved more compliant: Lucia wore the Pocahantas outfit borrowed from our friends’ daughter Dionysia; Evyenia wore her pirate costume. Manny, wearing his University of Virginia ballcap, was disguised as “the all-American boy.”

The party was the living incarnation of mayhem. The younger children (toddlers to age 10 or so) ran in circles around the bar, from both directions, with inevitable collisions amid the confetti, strobe lights, and highly amplified DJ mix. The parents, safely pressed along the margins, chain-smoked cigarettes and drank scotch and ouzo. The blue haze of smoke was suffocating, so thick, in fact, that far end of the bar was barely visible. A fog horn would not have been out of order. Our American sensibilities regarding cigarettes and young children were checked at the door, by necessity.

Manny begged for an early retreat after just a few minutes—like his father, never one for noise or consusion. He strolled back to the house along the village’s nearly deserted and darkened streets. He had the good sense to make his exit just before the clown arrived.

Overamplified and with a dearth of any useful tricks, the clown nevertheless won over the crowd of youngsters, a veritable pilgrimage of costumed youth came from Fini and several of the surrounding hillside villages. We met a few of our new friends—Dimitri the butcher, Panayioti the fisherman, Kosta from newspaper shop—and made new ones amid the noise, the smoke, the incessant thump of the disco beat. We fashioned our own retreat—Jonathan, Ann, and the girls—after little more than hour, somewhat disappointed by the experience if the truth be told.

Divine Liturgy

We arrived at the village church on Sunday morning at 8:30, a thirty-second walk from our door. It is a cavernous space whose plain exterior belies the marvelous frescoes that cover every square meter of the interior walls and ceiling space. The stories of both the Old and New Testament are painted in brilliant colors throughout.

An utterly unheated space—again and again we are reminded of the fact that this is the coldest, wettest winter in village memory—the parishioners were wrapped in their heaviest overcoats, steam rising from open mouths.

Manny asked if the service would be different than that of St. George, our parish back in Bangor, Maine. One of the beauties of Orthodox Christianity is its constancy—and so the service in the Finikounda church was very much like that found in any Orthodox church. But the truth is always in the details.

Four canters chanted; the men and women were segregated (women on the left, men on the right); the candles are made of bees wax, not artificial parrafin; and, naturally, there was no English chanted or spoken. The priest, Papa Giorgi, did ask, in English, why Manny did not receive communion—we had broached the subject the previous day—and Jonathan explained that he had not fasted properly: the lure of a beefteki the previous evening was a sufficient explanation.

There was a moving memorial service (mnimosyno) following the regular liturgy. Each parishioner was given a candle to hold and left their seats to join in a circle before a table that held the kolyva, a highly symbolic sweet cake (said to symbolize the sweetness of this life and that of the life to come), which is made of boiled wheat, honey, mint leaves, and pomegrante seeds, plastered with white sugar and decorated with Jordan almonds and other shiny sweet bits formed in the sign of the cross. After the service, the kolyva is divided up into cups and distributed, along with other sweets, to the parishioners by members of the family of the deceased. It is a beautiful service that demonstrates the love and solidarity of the parish toward one of their own.

After church we walked to our friend Niko’s house (he had offered to wash our clothes the day before), and he read several more of his poems—over copious oranges and mandarins, of course. He was inspired by Jonathan’s comment about a great uncle who had died anonymously in Spain fighting Franco’s fascists in 1937. His poem was written in memory of a Frenchman slaughtered by the Turks in 1827, fighting in Pylos during the Greek War of Independence. Niko had been contacted by one of the Frenchman’s contemporary relatives, seeking any information on their ancestor’s heroic death. Niko was moved by the fact that this man, who gave his life for Greece’s freedom, had seemingly disappeared from history, without a trace. While Lord Byron’s heart is buried beneath a marble shrine in Mesolonghi, Monsieur Roucher’s final resting place, like that of my great-uncle Ilias, is lost.

Again, our visit to Niko yielded another take-home translation project for Jonathan.

A siesta, a run along the beach, and then dinner with our new friends Petros and Sandra.

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23 February 2009
Monday

Woken by the incessant vibrations of a cement mixer—along with the jack hammer, the bane of modern Greece—Jonathan set off for an early morning walk through the village and along the waterfront before working.

Our landlady emerged at the door at 8 a.m. carrying a large sweet cake, still steaming from the oven; she was back after siesta with a vat of olives from the family grove, plump purple Kalamata olives swimming in oil, plus a delicious bowl of taramosalata, a spread made from bread dough and fish roe and olive oil. Lucia, who is constitutionally opposed to fish, tasted some on a slice of horiatiko (whole-grain village bread) and declared it “yummy.” “What’s in it?” she asked. Her father looked away pretending not to hear the question. And she had a second helping.

Yesterday we helped our landlady “borrow” a wheelbarrow from the nearby work site, filled it with large pieces of dried olive wood, and then wheeled it through the back back alleys in a downpour to her mother’s house. We assumed that her poor mother was cold and needed the wood for her tzaki (fireplace). Her eighty-two-year old mother was delighted for this offering, because, we soon learned, she was about to roast a whole pig in an outdoor oven. We are keeping our fingers crossed that we might be on the receiving end of her culinary skills.

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