Dinner with Persephone (18 page)

A
  cluster of men, all wearing naval captains’ caps, swarm in front of the ferry to Thasos. Streams of cars, motorcycles, trucks carrying cases of beer and wine, and refrigerated trucks full of freshly butchered meat are being waved onto the ferry. I ask one of the group where to show my ticket. “You must give your ticket to that beautiful man,” he says, and giggles at his joke, since it is embarrassingly evident that the man he means is in fact the handsomest of the group.

Inside the big public room of the ferry there is a refreshment counter selling greasy snacks, fruit juices, beer, and bottles of a white wine named for the Via Egnatia, the road the Romans built to link the eastern and western empires that ran through Macedonia and Thrace, from Rome to Constantinople. The ubiquitous ferry TVs, suspended in corners, are playing an ad for a TV series about Jacqueline Onassis, called
Jackie I Agapimeni
, Jackie the Beloved. I go out on deck to watch Kavalla recede, and pass on my way the control room from where the ship is being steered, a room that contains not only the ship’s wheel but a well-tended nursery of hanging baskets of flowers spilling from the ceiling onto the deck,
and the fresh perfume of basil, for no self-respecting Greek ship seems to sail without its protective pots of basil, nor without its icon of Saint Nicholas, patron saint of sailors and merchants, and formerly known as Poseidon, according to some.

Basil is
vasiliko
, the royal plant, honored since the emperor Constantine’s mother Helena found it growing at the site in Jerusalem where by legend she found the true cross. Sadly, the reverence Greeks have for basil means they rarely cook with it, although it is used in various church ceremonies, and the Greek school year starts with a first-day benediction from a priest, who blesses the schoolchildren with basil dipped in holy water. A Greek-American child of a family here for the year, after encountering the custom for the first time, reporting to his parents on the day’s events, announced, “The priest beat me with parsley.”

I settle on deck to read guidebooks, which are always worth a look in Greece, either because they are informative or because they are anthologies of brilliantly Samuel Goldwyn-esque English. One outlines the chief treasures of the archaeological museum, promising that a kouros bearing a ram is “exposed” there. A second tells of a Christian basilica built in the fifth century
B.C.

The Greek islands are lessons in the sheer lack of uniformity and the discontinuity of Greek history, ancient and modern. The islands often weave themselves into relation with Hellenes and Hellenism through those founding myths that bury political history as surely as successions of new towns built on old sites. Thasos was supposed to have been a Phoenician prince, a relative of the Asian princess Europa—he landed on the island while searching for her after her abduction by the Greek god Zeus. The island was prominently and stably settled in the seventh century
B.C.
by colonists from the island of Paros, although there is evidence of prehistoric settlement. The poet Archilochus, first to use the iambic meter, was one of those colonists—in one of the telegraphic fragments which make up the bulk of his surviving verse he describes Thasos as “an island crowned with forests and lying in the sea like the backbone of an
ass.” On Thasos, he courted a rich man’s daughter, and when her father broke his promise that they could marry he is said to have written such excoriating verses that the whole family ended in suicide. But for me he is most interesting as a verse diarist of the life of a professional soldier, courageous and cynical, brutally conscious of all that he has to simplify in his view of the world in order to sharpen himself to kill, measuring the failure of his aging body with a trained eye, mercilessly aware of the constant presence of misfortune, of all that can go wrong between one engagement and the next, one hour and the next. I knew Thasos would put me in the mood to read him, but I didn’t bring a volume, because I thought I would surely find one on the island. Of course I was wrong. Thasos exists in Archilochus’s verse, but at the moment I was there, Archilochus did not exist on modern Thasos. To be fair, I found hardly any more recent Greek writing either.

Thasos’s history, like the biographies of most of the islands, is a story of alternating invaders and governments, and a reminder that in Greece, neighbors can have profoundly different histories. Some of the patterns may be similar—all the islands were targets for pirate raids, one reason the coasts remained so undeveloped, on some islands well into the 1970s. Inland towns on most islands were more heavily populated than coastal ones, much safer from the threat of raids, and in the island treasuries of Christian folklore miraculous rescues from pirates are the miracles most often retold. Between pirates and occupiers, you could hardly ask for a more unstable political life. Thasos was occupied by European crusaders, the Genoese, the Turks, the Venetians (several times), the Russians, who exploited the richly forested island for shipbuilding, and Egyptian overseers, representatives of Mehmet Ali, who had spent part of his childhood on the island and is said to have demonstrated his affection for it by giving the island substantial tax breaks.

We land on the side of the island which lost some twenty-five thousand acres of forest in 1989, after a devastating fire which was said to be set by arsonists. The murdered slopes and hills the bus
drives past are still covered with charred stumps. When I settle in a hotel in the main port, I call Kostas’s parents, Kimon and Elpida, who have a summer house in a fishing village here, and they say they will pick me up tomorrow and take me for an exquisite swim, a promise I take seriously, since they and many other Greeks study and describe the characters of beaches with the nuance of wine connoisseurs talking vintages.

I set out for the archaeological museum, that official link to the past which, like a legitimate birth certificate, is the pride of many cities and islands here. The range of woolens, sweaters, blankets, and mittens you can buy warn that in this northernmost Aegean island, winter will be sharp and Macedonian. The houses are not Cycladic houses, but structured to take serious cold, with smaller windows and slanting roofs to dispose of snow. The stores offer, besides the woolens, the odd mix of trash, quality, and unmatched kitsch and sheer flotsam and jetsam that makes shopping here an experience of fate as much as intention. There are insanely grinning poodles made entirely of seashells, Aphrodites in faintly pornographic vaudeville poses, magic tricks and surprises; one package is labeled “The Horror Ax—makes horrible sound”—which I like for the sheer benevolence of the threat. There are painted china plates with popular Greek proverbs, which you can use to send messages and veiled hints in the form of souvenirs. “If you don’t know the Dance of Isaiah, I will teach it to you,” reads one painted plate with a dancing couple, a reference to the part of the Greek Orthodox marriage service when the bride and groom circle the altar three times in what is known as the Dance of Isaiah.

The archaeological museum is small-scale and familial, just a few rooms washed with milky blue paint, and the treasures of Thasos—barring some fine works that were appropriated by French archaeologists in the nineteenth century and taken to the Louvre—arranged with a clear eye for drama. The enormous ram-bearing kouros is what you see as you enter, the boy dominating the room with his massive stature, but startlingly similar to the limp helpless animal he
holds in his capacity to die. In another room, a Hellenistic Aphrodite perches sidesaddle on a dolphin, her pretty breasts exposed, drapery clinging to her promising belly, while her baby son Eros rides on the dolphin’s tail. They show another facet of immortality—the immortals don’t suffer loss or change from love any more than they die. On their dolphin, the two love deities sail sportively through the sea of love, beyond its gravity, enjoying its dangers and passions as a form of play.

I sit down for lunch at a restaurant overlooking the harbor; indoors there is a room with an open kitchen, a glass-globed lamp suspended from the ceiling, and a television sharing its shelf with a hookah, but I choose an outdoor table, watching the movements of fishing boats and ferries, and the sun glowing on the water, lulled by the last of summer, that great hypnotist of the seasons. “Welcome to our restaurant,” says the man who conducts me to my table. “My name is Steve. I am from Bulgaria.” He wears horn-rimmed glasses and has a cheerfully neurotic air. “Where are you from?” I say the United States, and he says that is rare up here, where most of the visitors are German. “Can you talk the real American English?” he asks me. “Can you talk like Eddie Murphy?” Probably not, I say, and he is crestfallen. “Consequently,” he says, “your Greek is better than your English. I love the language of Eddie Murphy. I hope someday to hear it really spoken.”

Kimon and Elpida pick me up from the hotel for an early breakfast. Elpida is writing the text of a catalogue for an exhibition of paintings in Paris, and has the slightly splintered stare of someone facing an imminent deadline, but she would not be deterred from having at least one day together despite the pressure. “Welcome, welcome,” Kimon says, and Elpida adds laughingly, “and a very happy Saint Evfemia’s Day,” and answering my unspoken question, explains, “Saint Evfemia is the patron saint of dressmakers, a seamstress who was martyred during the Roman emperor Diocletian’s persecutions. Her bones are in Constantinople, in the Patriarchate, I think—my grandmother remembered from her childhood going
to mass on Evfemia’s day, and that afterwards, blessed needles would be distributed to the women in the congregation. I spoke to my mother just yesterday, and she sends you greetings, which is what made me think about the needles.”

“Still,” says Kimon, “there is a better saint for Patricia in the City.” The City was what Byzantine Greeks called Istanbul when it was their capital, and it is what most Greeks I know still call it. Several different dishes of Ottoman Greek cooking are suffixed “in the style of the City,” and it is frequently explained that the Turkish name Istanbul is a transcription of the Greek
eis tin Poli
, into the City. And although Constantinople has been Istanbul since the fifteenth century, I’ve noticed that when there is a TV news report from a correspondent in Turkey, the titles identifying place and reporter read “So-and-so, reporting from Constantinople.” “Patricia is a poet, not a dressmaker, so maybe her patron saint is Saint Kosmas the Poet. When you go to the City, you must make a special trip to the Khora church to see the mosaics and the portrait of Kosmas with his pen and manuscript.”

“I think, as many people do, that Khora is more beautiful than Agia Sofia,” Elpida says. “But perhaps at this particular moment, the most interesting saint to you is the patron saint of breakfast. We’ll stop at an interesting little hotel run by a mixed Greek and German family, a mixture that the Greek
Gastarbeiters
in Germany have made more common, and have something to eat. And then, if you don’t mind, we have a few household errands to run, which I fear will involve us in a series of coffees and gossips. But finally we’ll have the beach.”

We drive through stands of pine and poplars, trees heavy with figs at this time of year, and pomegranate trees, which look like the natural archetype of Christmas trees, with the brilliant red globes of the pomegranates dangling like living Christmas ornaments from their branches. The hotel, all clean marble and glass, is set on a hill dense with trees, like an alpine lodge on the beach. Behind the reception desk is a library of paperback German novels, and breakfast
is uncannily silent; the voices of the German clientele are modulated as Greek voices never are. One of the children of the owners knows Kimon and Elpida, and puts us at a table overlooking the trees. He and Kimon fall into a discussion of whether or not the upcoming Maastrict agreement to European union is a good or bad idea, a hot debate this summer. Interestingly, the boy’s response to it is divided, like his heritage. He feels it will be good for the Greeks, who as one of the lower-income nations of Europe will benefit, but bad for the Germans, who will end up disproportionately supporting the poorer nations. Kimon feels that the assent to the idea of the union is inevitable, but that the fact of union will not be accomplished in his lifetime, or perhaps ever. And he is not sure that in the end the Germans won’t profit even more from Greece than the Greeks will from the Germans. “Now that Greece is a member of the EEC, no one can prohibit the sale of Greek land or houses to foreigners under the broader European laws we have agreed to. And what this means, perhaps particularly in Greece, with our labyrinthine laws and taxes on property inheritance, is that it is often more advantageous to a Greek owner to sell his house than to leave it in the family. The heirs often stand to profit more from the proceeds of a sale, and it also spares them the considerable expense of restoring traditional houses to the standards now codified by the Greek government.” It is ironic to hear that the word that would be the equivalent of our “preservation” is
anapaleosi
, which in its literal meaning is not restoration at all, but making something old again, reinfusing a house with antiquity, the architectural equivalent in a way of Katharevousa, the “purified” Greek which was conceived in the eighteenth century, and which was designed to reinfuse spoken modern Greek with classical Greek, in the broad effort to make the new nation of Greece a neoclassical nation.

“You cannot yet imagine—I cannot yet imagine,” Kimon says, pouring himself more coffee, “what impact this will have on the country. Even now, there are whole villages on Thasos which are
virtually German, always prime real estate with beautiful settings and traditional houses. And this is also true on other particularly picturesque islands, like Santorini and Crete. And Chios, whose mastic villages, with their unique houses, are coveted by foreigners. So here you have enormous shifts occurring—there are organized foreign networks that actually comb islands for properties, cultivate local politicians, and then bring in their own construction workers to restore properties, whipping up bad feeling locally. Then of course, what happens if our islands end up being Floridas, retirement communities for Europe, with foreign populations who are also aged, and may not have much interest in local communities and problems which are in any case outside their own roots? And what is most extraordinary, and unpredictable, to me, is that the whole tax structure of the country will change shape, since so many houses must then be owned by people not subject to Greek income tax, and since real estate values have altered so dramatically with tourism. We could, if we don’t think this through and find the balance, end up with a situation in which Greeks can’t afford to live in Greece. Can’t live on their own islands. You cannot imagine how this preoccupies me—it is so central to our history, this problem of how you earn your living through foreigners, which we always have, whether as colonists or emigrants, but without relinquishing the ownership of your assets and properties to them—it is a problem we have never solved, not in antiquity, not in modernity.”