The cafeneion
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| Run down the mountain to the sea |
Throughout Greece—in every large
city and every small hamlet—the cafeneion is the center of social life.
Not just a place to have your morning, afternoon, and evening coffee (or more potent beverages), it is
also a social hub. Once a venue for men, today the cafeneion is gender-neutral,
as it were.
In our mountain village, where tradition reigns supreme, the cafeneion is populated by mostly old men with canes and worry beads. They sip their coffee, play backgammon, talk politics, and greet each other as old friends do.
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| As they say: life is a beach |
Yeia sou, Michaeli, re palicardi (Hey there, Mike you old warrier).
They slap their backgammon pieces with such fierceness, the sounds echoes
through the village.
The old men who sit beside me, at
9:45 a.m., drink tall glasses of tsipoura, an industrial-strength floor
cleaner masquerading as an alcoholic beverage. It is made from the skins/pits
of grapes, which are distilled after the production of wine. They offer me a
glass and I aver: “But this is medicine!” they say. In Greek the word for “medicine”
and the word for “poison” are the same, distinguished only by context. I want
to believe that Covid cannot survive the presence of tsipoura, but I’m
not about to test this theory.
Perhaps I see myself as one of
these old men someday. It is about the only pleasant vision I can conjure on the subject of growing old—hanging out with old friends, pestering one another in good humor,
talking about the weather, debating the value of the olive harvest. Then going
home for siesta.
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| Disappearing dinner routine |
This morning I drove the 10 kilometers
to Methoni, one of the great castle towns of the Peloponnese. The paint store,
my object, is in the shadow of the Venetian castle, which was constructed in
the Middle Ages as a stopover for pilgrims (and Crusaders) plying the Mediterranean,
from Venice to Palestine.
The Methoni castle (ancient Modon) is said to be the largest castle in all of Europe, based on the interior space. At one time over 30,000 people lived within its walls. When it fell to the Ottoman Turks the first time (it was successively recaptured) the male defenders were summarily executed and the women and children sold into slavery.
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| Wild artichoke |
When my daughter Nia and I
received our Greek citizenship in 2017, with Methoni named as our “home”
village (for bureaucratic reasons), I suggested that we would each have a
shield and a sword and would be called on to defend the walls…should the Turks
ever return.
On the return trip, I stopped at
the building supply yard in Finikounda to order 1.5 tons of crushed stone for
the driveway. You cannot get out of this place without being given a large
glass of wine and often a plate of roasted pork. It was 10 a.m. and old Yianni,
the proprietor, insisted I also take two-liter Coke bottle filled with his 2021
vintage.
His younger son, Nonda, arrived
at the house a half hour later, behind the wheel of a large Fiat tractor pulling a cart laden with stone.
Of course, I offered him a glass
of wine. His father’s wine.
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On generosity
Greeks are, by and large, a very
generous people. The tradition of φιλοξενία/filoxenia
(literally, “friend of a foreigner”), which translates poorly as “hospitality,”
dates back to antiquity.
In modern Greece, particularly in
the rural hinterland, hospitality is one of the primary threads of daily life. People
argue over who is treating whom in the cafeneion. A day doesn’t go by when someone
doesn’t stop by the house to drop off a bag of fruit, a bunch of oregano, a
bottle of wine. Usually these are strangers from the village who wave whenever they drive
past, watching me water our trees or doing some other house task. It is a dizzying display of perpetual kindness that one tries to reciprocate.
Earlier today I picked up the
Albanian gardener S. as he walked along the main road, a hoe draped over this shoulder.
I pulled over and he hopped in.
S. is very much a part of this community, although he is Albanian. (A large permanent Albanian community resides in southern Messenia.) There is a kind of nexus between Greeks and Albanians. The countries border one another and the modern border stations cannot undo 3,000 years of cross-border movement and more modern family, cultural, or religious connections. Most southern Albanians speak Greek as a second language, but even my ear can detect the Slavic tone of their pronunciation. Theirs is an ancient language, distinct in southern Europe, and I cannot begin to learn it.
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| Keep those lamps trimmed |
Historically, Greeks loathed
Albanians, the fearsome ancient Illyrians of the mountain frontier, and in
modern times they have been blamed (along with Gypsies or Roma) for a multitude
of woes—taking jobs from Greeks, stealing, knife-fighting, heroin-dealing, arms
dealing, pimping prostitutes, and the like. They are stereotyped in perhaps the
same manner as Mexicans can sometimes be in America: much needed as day laborers, but otherwise
reviled, because they are the Other. The sentiment, however, is hardly universal.
The southern Albanians are co-religionists (Orthodox Christian), while the
northern and eastern Albanians are Muslim—often, though, the non-religious
variety.
In fact, many Albanians
(especially in the south) are ethnically Greek. When the communists failed in
toppling the Greek Republic after the second of two brutal civil wars (1947-1949)
the retreating Stalinists took hundreds of thousands of Greeks as hostages, forcing
them to march north. Raised under revanchist communist Albania, after the fall
of that country’s oppressive system, many began returning to Greece.
So the “question” of Albanians is
highly nuanced and not prone to simple conclusions.
The Albanian gardener S., who I
picked up on the roadway, lost his left hand as a small child, having been left
home alone while his mother worked. The accident, I’m told, occurred
because of a terrible house fire. Nevertheless, he is an expert one-handed
gardener, a middle-aged man who could “out-weed” any three-handed gardener. (I don’t know too many of them.) He is married to an Albanian woman who is also handicapped, and
they have two lovely children. My daughter Lucia was a fellow student with his
elder daughter at the village school in 2009.
When we first arrived in the village, in February 2009, we had our share of misconceptions about “winter” in southern Greece. It definitely is not the Caribbean; rather, the climate is temperate, much like the rest of Europe. (Yes, spring comes earlier and summer lasts longer, but cold rain and occasional snow are a feature from December to March, when at long last the luscious, warm spring arrives, with its abundant blossoms.
S. and his wife knew that we had
come unprepared. One day they showed up on our porch with bags of season-appropriate
clothes, a gift for us with nothing expected in return. The kindness to strangers,
the offering from people with so little, was incredibly moving. It is something
I will never forget.
We have remained friends ever
since. Regardless of our gardening “needs” I always make a point of hiring S.
to do a job or other in our perivoli (garden): pruning, digging tree saucers,
watering, whatever I could otherwise easily accomplish on my own. He would gladly walk the 4 kilometers
up the mountain with his hoe, but I always arrange to pick him up at first
light in the town square—with a coffee and a cheese pie ready for him.
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| View down to Finikounda |
I never ask him “how much” for
any task. When it comes to paying him, he always says, “whatever you give me is
good.” I know that he earns 5 euros an hour from the stingy Germans and the
Dutch—so I give him 10 or 15 euros. He is usually embarrassed by our largesse.
I am grateful for this generous
soul and respect him as much as anyone I know.
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| Our little red tile roof in the olive grove |
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