As always, I know that the two of you of who look in on my blog on a regular basis are dying for gift ideas for me — I mean, did I really need 225 copies of Fr. John Behr’s book? Er, wait… Anyway, in case you think that’s too impersonal and/or obvious, there’s always this one: Diane H. Touliatos-Miles’ Descriptive Catalog of the Musical Manuscript Collection of the National Library of Greece. Nur sage, wenn du verstehst was ich meine.
Posts Tagged 'modern greek'
Another gift idea
Published 28 July 2011 Academia , General , Media , music , The Orthodox Faith 1 CommentTags: byzantine chant, chant, diane h. touliatos-miles, ecclesiastical chant, gift ideas for richard, giorgos kyriakakis, Greek, hazards of church music, liturgical adventures, liturgical music, liturgy, liturgy and life, medieval byzantine chant, modern greek, my kids will learn latin and greek when they're newborns, random acts of chant, sacred music
Giorgos Kyriakakis: 30 Years Since the Founding of the Greek Byzantine Choir
Published 27 July 2011 music , The Orthodox Faith , Uncategorized 2 CommentsTags: byzantine chant, chant, ecclesiastical chant, giorgos kyriakakis, Greek, greek byzantine choir, hazards of church music, liturgical adventures, liturgical music, liturgy, liturgy and life, lycourgos angelopoulos, medieval byzantine chant, modern greek, my kids will learn latin and greek when they're newborns, random acts of chant, sacred music, simon karas
My recent translation of Lycourgos Angelopoulos’ talk on Simon Karas got the attention of one Mr. Tom Nassis of Chicago, who asked if I wouldn’t mind translating a 2007 article by Giorgos Kyriakais on the 30 year anniversary of Angelopoulos’ Greek Byzantine Choir. I was happy to do so; Tom provided a few suggestions, and then ran it by Mr. Kyriakakis himself, who gave it his own stamp of approval. So, here it is. As always, I’m more than open to questions and comments.
Update, 27 July 2011: By request, the text with which I was provided may be found here.
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One of the longest-lived, and in all likelihood the most internationally recognized, Greek musical ensembles, which Lycourgos Angelopoulos established and directs up to today, completed three decades of activity. The history of the choir in reality coincides with that of its founder, who has devoted himself to applying his world-renowned authentic talent and immense artistic experience to the promotion and achievement of the goals of the choir. The present writer was honored to study with him, so for this, please forgive any sentimentalities detected in the text which follows.
The Greek Byzantine Choir (EL.BY.X. [Ελληνική Βυζαντινή Χορωδία]) was founded with its objective being the study and performance of Byzantine music as it reached our time by means of written and oral tradition. The choir made its first official appearance on 12 December 1977 at Beethovenhalle in Bonn, having been invited by the West German Republic, at a concert with a mixed program. In the first part of the concert, the EL.BY.X. chanted a selection of hymns for the Nativity of Christ, while in the second part featured the world premiere of the work of Dimitri Terzaki, “Leitourgeia Profana” with Lycourgos Angelopoulos as the soloist. But the relationship of the choir and its director with contemporary (and beyond) music will be mentioned in the next article. The debuting choir, then, met with an immediate and enthusiastic reception from a difficult audience. Enthusiams which up to today it causes everywhere where it gives concerts or participates in liturgical events, in Greece and abroad. There are not a few time when it was necessary either to repeat one of its concerts, to go on in a bigger venue than originally planned to enable all of the interested audience to attend, which had surpassed in size the expectations of each of the organizers. The next great international appearance of the EL.BY.X.is scheduled in New York next January, where for a second time it will give a concert at the city’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The EL.BY.X., in the 30 years of its activity, has put on more than 1,500 concerts, liturgical and other events in Greece, it has done so in more than 30 countries throughout the world. Among them are the historical several hours-long vigils at the Holy Monastery of St. Catherine in Sinai (1983), in Cologne (1985), at the Holy Monastery of the Great Cave (1987), at the Holy Monastery of Vatopedi, at the Church of St. Demetrios in Thessaloniki (1993), at the Holy Monastery of Arkadi (2000) and at Krakow (2000), which, in spite of their length, were broadcast on the radio. The chief highlight was the participation in 2000 at the Pan-Orthodox Divine Liturgy of the Nativity of Christ in Bethlehem, while also especially historical and meaningful was the choir’s participation in June 2002 in the Divine Liturgy which the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew celebrated for the first time after many centuries in the ancient basilica of St. Apollinarius in Classe (6th century) in Ravenna.
The choir has recorded at Europe’s greatest radio and television stations, it has presented selections of ancient Greek music and Old Roman melodies, while it presented for the first time in modern years the ancient service of the “Three Children in the Fiery Furnace”, from the few preserved examples of Orthodox liturgical drama (c. 15th century), in a transcription and reconstruction of the composer and researcher Michael Adami. From 1990 it began the recording of all of the works of the most important Greek medieval composer John Koukouzelis the Master (perhaps 13th century). The choir has participated in the festivals of Athens and Epidauros in 1987, while from 1989 to 1991 it gave an annual concert at the ancient theatre of Epidauros. The choir appeared at the Megaro Mousiki Concert Hall in Athens for the first time in 1991 and several times from 1995 up to today. In March of 1997 it gave three concerts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in the context of the exhibit “The Glory of Byzantium” and, in January of 1998, it participated in the events “Greece of Britain” with a concert at Queen Elisabeth Hall of London. In May of 2001 it sang at the initiative of Professor Alexander Lingas, also for the first time in recent years, the service of Asmatic (Sung) Vespers, at Oxford, from a transcription and reconstruction of Alexander Lingas’ and Ioannis Arvanitis’, while in August of the same year it gave for the fifth consecutive year the official concert of the International Conference of Studies in Paris together with Ensemble Organum. The above appearances constitute only a small sample of the exhaustive activity which characterizes the EL.BY.X. from its establishment up to today.
Since 1993 they have released in France and in Greece approximately 10 CDs as well as more than 30 cassettes under the name of the choir, eliciting ever-flattering reviews from the international music press. In many cases, notable music magazines have awarded their greatest distinction to the choir (e. g. fff, the magazine Diapason).
The specific and main reason, largely, that the EL.BY.X succeeded at being established internationally to a degree that should constitute worldwide an ensemble of note in the fields of religious, ancient, and Eastern music, is the fact that the choir “restores” Byzantine music, namely the medieval and more recent “art” music of the former Eastern Roman Empire, as a craft. It can be considered as self-evident that a musical ensemble serves music as a craft or an art, but for those who have inside knowledge of the world of Byzantine chant, it is an open, unacknowledged secret that this almost never occurs. The most customary response, which constitutes even substantial contempt of it from the same institutions, is that Byzantine music is a simple accompaniment, up to the point of a necessary evil, of the activity of Orthodox liturgical practice. The cantors (with or without preparation) are sometimes rendered as simple conduits of an action that often is manipulated and ultimately undermined even by the clergy when he, the priest, behaves as though he is a boss and the “psaltai” as functionaries of the church. Not to open up the Pandora’s Box where most of the “scientists” of “our national-religious-and-such music” live…
The EL.BY.X., under the adept direction of Lycourgos Angelopoulos, places this music on the pedestal that it deserves. Along with the choir’s regular, devotional or festive, but always majestic liturgical activities, its extra-ecclesiastical activity has helped greatly to clarify that Byzantine music exists as an independent musical significance, that constantly provokes the interest of an ever-wider public, but also of musicians and composers, as well as even actual scholarly researchers, in religious music and beyond. The EL.BΥ.X. does not seek to innovate. It remains faithful to the tradition, while also never resorting to complacent, loud-voiced trills that do injustice to the music for the benefit of the personal visibility of its performers, a natural consequence of the fact that it did not treat the high art which it offers to its audience in an opportunistic manner, and it continues to not do so, whether the audience is ecclesiastical or not. A simple hearing of small samples of the choir’s work not only demonstrates the things discussed so far but also guides with certainty even to the conclusions that follow; because the present article does not claim to constitute a musicological study, those conclusions ultimately will be given succinctly: the choir showcases and maintains the form of the compositions that it performs. It is the large world of music lovers that used to believe that Byzantine music is nothing other than a convoluted, boring improvisation overlaid onto orientalizing musical formulas, and it is the same large world of music lovers that changed its mind about the music itself when they heard it performed correctly. In the field of expression, the EL.BY.X. is a genuine heir apparent and practitioner of the pedagogy of the great Simon Karas. It provides a clear image of the totality and the melismas of the compositions without confusing one with the other. In general a virtually erroneous view concerning “heterophony” prevails, which wants all the members of a choir to sing on the same melodic skeleton, with individual variations in the ornamentation of melodies, with the result that a static sound, something “approximate”, reaches ears of the listener. The EL.BY.X. shows in a practical manner that the complete synchronization and coordination of all of the members of the choir is feasible, provided, of course, that proper training and preparation has preceded it… An absolutely unique characteristic of this specific choir, in our opinion, is that it chants stylistically. The choir approaches the texts differently, which results from the research and other recent developments. Nowhere in the world, excepting our small para-ecclesiastical way of doing things, is it understood that one applies the same approach of interpreting a composition of the 14th century with a composition from the 18th century, for example. The EL.BY.X. puts things in their proper place, and does not treat its repertoire as an indiscriminate hodgepodge of materials old and new, traditional and custom, trashy and expensive. Pages upon pages could be written about the importance of the work of the EL.BY.X. and its director regarding period treatment, quality and accuracy of intervals, dynamics, the rotations through both choral and solo phases, stage presence, and many other things which due to space considerations are not mentioned here, the things which all the same succeeded in convincing even an entirely “lay” audience that the EL.BY.X. practices something “religious” on the one hand, but which is still “art” above all on the other hand.
But alongside with the choir’s purely artistic activity, it also constitutes a great school. The present writer acknowledges that before he came into contact with the choir, being learned in secretive and pompous practices, used to believe that the world of Byzantine music is a closed club to which access for the one not initiated is rather impossible. The reality which he experienced contradicted him. I will not dwell on that; I will say only that for the duration of my trials with the EL.BY.X., I understood what Byzantine music actually is and how instructive it is merely to watch the choir’s members, well-trained to say the least, conversing on the matter at hand: the music. This was also the only time when I heard the “teacher” urge his “students”: Study! If somebody asks you tomorrow, “Why do you say this?”, how will you answer this person? “Because my teacher says so”? And if he should tell you, “It could be, but your teacher speaks wrongly,” then what? Study, so that you learn why you’re saying what you’re saying, and not because I myself have told you so!
And he always referred and guided us to the sources, many times even with he himself assuming the cost of any copies we needed. Finally.
Certainly, the thirty years of the choir did not pass rosily and into unalloyed glories without needing “to open the nose.” Only fruitless trees are not stoned. Our exegetical view, we believe, does not require that we live in the country where, together with chiefly historical matters, plausibility holds the title of metropolitan intolerance. And as regards the area of art… from ancient times (and this one). The Greek Byzantine Choir could not in a third of a century inconvenience the spider-filled psaltic establishment doing a decent job of the obvious thing without receiving its share of intolerance, sometimes collectively, and quite often in the form of personal attacks against its founder. Beginning already from its inception, St. Irene Church on Aiolos Street was the first testing ground. And when the EL.BY.X. was daring to not follow the stupid and distorted line, except for politically correct seasonal things, of the ridiculous three-part “harmonization” of Sakellarides style, it found the church locked at the time of the scheduled rehearsal — something which proved often to be a benefit for passersby, who had the opportunity to watch live the rehearsal that they inevitably held… on the steps of the church. But the worst came when the choir began to have prestige and to develop an international career. Then all the “trustees of tradition and style”, asleep since birth, and the only thing that bothered them was that they selling, boutique-style, their services to national-religious opportunistic merchants, and they identified the “enemy” whose existence gave them the opportunity to “intervene” critically, an opportunity which their ability to intervene musically did not particularly facilitate. Even up to the time during which these lines are written, all of these “border guards” and “zealots”, as they are fond of calling themselves, instead of seeking to be educated at least a little bit, they simply attack… Karagiozis’ Wedding… Personally, I have one question to offer: but is it well that you do not listen?
In the holy war against Angelopoulos and “Little Angelopoulites”, many funny episodes have transpired, episodes which rarely deviate from the music. There, even, many things are not able to be told. A great number of libels have been published from time to time, enough to make any embittered person laugh. Accusations of spying (what happens and what the choir does in Israel and every such thing, so that the Patriarch asking the choir to chant at the Holy Sepulchre is not enough), of heretical views (so many travels and consorting with the heterodox, the “unbaptized”, as they cannot do) and other things which, if they were all written down, anybody would believe that evil, provocative devils encourage them. Suitable for the snuff-box, but less by far for the music. Something is mumbled about contempt towards “the Patriarchal style” the identity of which, as an aside, is being researched, something about an alteration of Athonite style… ridiculous? In the ’70s, the accusation was that “they are going to bring the monastic ways to Athens,” while in the ’90s and beyond it was, “This group attacked, and then the systematic siege certainly being sustained, they laid waste to Vatopedi and having this as a base they plot against the remaining monasteries as it succeeds in imposing its style upon them.” Sometimes even some unsubstantiated speculations are heard concerning the systems of attraction and of intervals, but these hold little sway, obviously because the arguments do not persuade, and neither do those who make those arguments. Thus, henceforth the EL.BY.X. “with the assistance of the mass media, have also imposed such things, systematically altering the content of our national music,” and other humorous stories… The aforementioned matters concerning form, rhythmic training, study and correct result, research into the sources and so on, remain the fine print for a large proportion of the field, and they do not fall loudly on the table. And the sympathetic chief clergy do not make a noise but they are aware of such things. To repeat what I said earlier, a metropolis of intolerance. This time even with a Metropolitan. But all these things aside, the EL.BY.X. continues to produce work, and it does not rest on the international recognition which it already enjoys, and we pray that it continues much longer. As for the “Spartans guarding Thermopylae”, armed with the broomstick of excommunication, even they are members of the ecosystem. It is well that there are those, just as the one “having ears to hear”, able to hear these things on the one hand and able to judge on the other hand able to judge the musical interpretations and scholarly evidence.
Who is so naive as to argue that the subject of research, interpretation, and presentation of any musical movement, are the result of only a few individuals? The only certainty is that history is not rolling back; the Greek Byzantine Choir and Lycourgous Angelopoulos, here and for many years, are writing their own chapter.
– George Kyriakakis, http://www.kyriakakis.de/
Lycourgos Angelopoulos: Simon Karas and Byzantine music in Greece during the 20th century
Published 27 June 2011 Academia , General , music , The Orthodox Faith 2 CommentsTags: byzantine chant, chant, ecclesiastical chant, Greek, hazards of church music, liturgical adventures, liturgical music, liturgy, liturgy and life, lycourgos angelopoulos, medieval byzantine chant, modern greek, my kids will learn latin and greek when they're newborns, random acts of chant, sacred music, simon karas
Simon Karas
I found this on the Analogion website, and it seemed worth translating. Corrections, comments, and feedback welcome, particularly where some technical terms are concerned. This makes mention of a number of what I assume to be the terms of art of Greek music theory, and I wasn’t always sure I was right. Words where I wasn’t certain there even was an English equivalent are left in Greek and in italics. To the extent that anybody’s concerned about such things, we can call this a draft until all such feedback is in.
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Simon Karas and Byzantine music in Greece during the 20th century
Lycourgos Angelopoulos, Archon Protopsaltis of the Most-Holy Archdiocese of Constantinople, Professor of Byzantine Music at Philippos Nakas Conservatory
Opening remarks at the Symposium for Byzantine Music, Romania, December 2002
The subject of my introduction touches upon, in essence, the problem today of the pedagogical method of Byzantine music — theory and practice — a problem which surely concerns all of us, I think.
It is the chief problem which we face so much in research, as much as even in teaching, because the oral tradition which necessarily interprets the written tradition, in some places has almost vanished (where the political situation over the decades contributed to it), in other places been weakened or altered (where it was influenced by the teaching of a European pedagogy — that is to say a foreign system — and the use of a mixed means).
Lycourgos Angelopoulos
Simon Karas studied and confronted this problem, together with many other things noted. The great length of days of life which the Lord granted him (he was born in 1903 in Strovitsi of Olympia and he fell asleep in January of 1999 in Athens) helped him so that a project, an inquiry — but also a practice of life — might be published in large part in the last twenty years his life and might constitute the work of infrastructure for a systematic pedagogy which respects the written tradition and interprets it with the oral tradition. The respect for the written tradition and the the interpretation of the written tradition by the oral tradition is the basic prerequisite of service and offering for everybody who serves the current method of our ecclesiastical music.
As of this year it has been twenty years since the publication of Simon Karas’ two-volume Theoretical Treatise of Greek Music. Before we analyze the importance of its publication, which is accompanied by a practical pedagogical method of many volumes, let us give, very briefly, the situation of Byzantine music in Greece in the twentieth century.
Σince the nineteenth century the new method of the system has spread and been taught, the so-called method of the Three Teachers, which was supported by the publication of the great Theoretical Treatise of Chrysanthos (Trieste, 1832) and some subsequent theoretical publications of other authors who are emultating it.
In parallel, from 1820 and beyond, subsequent publications of music books are produced, the peak being the circulation from the Patriarchate in the middle of the nineteenth century of the four-volume publication “Pandekti,” which until today constitutes a basic pedagogical text, together with the Anastasimatarion, the Irmologion, and Mousiki Kypseli (Sticherarion).
In the modern Greek state, they are teaching students of the Three Teachers such as the Protopsaltis of Athens, Zafeirios Zafeiropoulos, or the archdeacon Anthimos the Efesiomagnis (from Asia Minor) the who founded the School in Messolonghi, with many students and successors of his work.
The support from the state but then even from the Church (between the third and fifth decades of the century) produces the poor parenthesis of the system of Giorgios Lesvos, the system which finally was rejected by the Holy Great Church of Christ in the time of Ecumenical Patriarch Anthimos VI. Most correctly, too, because the dominance of another system would have eliminated automatically the notation and would cut off every connection with the older methods of the Byzantine system and the tradition.
In the 19th century however it has her roots and another cause which troubled our ecclesiastical music: the introduction of polyphony in the central churches of Athens, initially according to the model of the Greek community of Vienna (Chaviara-Nikolaidi harmonizations) and, later, of Russian polyphonic music.
This imposition of polyphony created reactions among the people who followed the tradition. Polyphony in the Church was certainly conforming to the age with the secular music that had been introduced also from Europe (an age in which opera, operetta, and European music in general flourished, the condition in which the idea was cultivated that those genres are superior in comparison to monophonic Byzantine music). As the restoration of Byzaintine music (having been purified, supposedly cleansed from Turkish elements) presents at the end of the 19th century the musically naive system of Ioannis Sakellarides, which produced great confusion among even still-traditional cantors. Chiefly because he used traditional notation lines in many cases and some uses of signs — subordinating the whole to a rhythmic scheme of four-beat feet, impairing the modal character and adjusting their essence to the European system.
Opposite to this situation which is spreading from the capital, Athens, influencing even the other urban centers by word and the educational activity of Sakellarides (pedagogy in ecclesiastical and even secular schools), there are the traditional cantors who are trying to keep the monophonic ecclesiastical music with the teaching but also even with practice (services, vigils, etc.).
Already the Ecumenical Patriarch has convened a musical committee in 1881-3 for the completion and correction of the Great Theoretical Treatise of Chrysanthos.
The committee redefines intervals, describes the characteristic elements of the modes and chiefly defines precisely the intervalic subdivisions of flats and sharps, in other words of the function of attractions according to mode, which even then had not been determined with exactness.
In the practical field — in the printed books which individual cantors are printing at the 19th century, already a process of most analytical notation of oral tradition has begun, a process which eventually arrives at excess with the improper use of certain signs of subdivision of the beat and the use of qualitative signs without calculation of their value.
This trend, which would continue during the entire 20th century, would find the its chief spokesman in the face and work of the Archon Protopsaltis of the Most-Holy Archdiocese of Constantinople, Athanasius Karamani, who documents — as he himself calls it — the “living tradition”. For all practical purposes, these documents are meaningful witnesses for research and for the relationship with the value of the signs.
But let us come back to the beginnings of the 20th century. An important station is the decision of the Musical and Dramatic Assocation, that by 1871 has established the Conservatory of Athens, to advance even to the establishment of the School of Byzantine Music in 1903. The Director of the Conservatory, G. Naxos, goes to Constantinople and submits a request to Ecumenical Patriarch Joachim III for the sending of an appropriate teacher for the service of the School. Finally, Constantinos Psachos is sent and the service of the School begins in September of 1904. Constantinos Psachos will teach some fifteen years at the Conservatory of Athens, and after he will leave and will continue the teaching at other school. At the same time, in the years which follow, Byzantine music schools are established in the conservatories and in this way the teaching of Byzantine music spreads to schools which primarily teach European music.
This cohabitation [with Western music] is further one of the core reasons that the teaching of Byzantine music in the conservatories loses its particular character with regard to musical expression (the values of the signs) and microtones. The final sign of decline is the teaching with piano. Only a part of the repertoire is taught and dry singing prevails. This manner is characterized as “conservatory style”. The years which the Asia Minor Catastrophe (1922) will bring enough cantors from Asia Minor and Constantinople, just as even in the years of the decade of the 1960s, with the collective expulsion of those of Greek heritage from Constantinople, culminating in that [expulsion] of the Archon Protopsaltis of the Holy and Great Church of Christ, Thrasyboulos Stanitsas (1964).
Polyphony, confusion of Byzantine music with European music, along with Sakellarides, dry singing in the conservatories on the one hand, traditional cantors on the other hand, which, nevertheless, increasingly rely on one leg of the tradition — the oral tradition in other words — here is a picture in broad strokes of the situation which prevails when Simon Karas begins his activity with the establishment of the Association for the Dissemination of National Music (1929). The school of the Association has already been created and its creation has already engaged in study and research, work which will hold up for more than seventy years. From the beginning the subject of agreement of agreement of the theoretical and practical parts employs him. HE studies and he solves the problems thus in depth so that the theoretical pedagogy and the practical implementation, which he proposes for the formulation of his pedagogy, should be in agreement.
His pedagogy considers all of the old theoretical texts in conjunction with the oral tradition which he heard during the extent of his long life, and chiefly in the first decades of the 20th century.
The two-volume “Theoretical Treatise of Greek Music” which is published in 1982 is densely written on the hand with respect to his writing, exhaustive on the other hand with respect to the organization of its chapters.
The systematic ordering of the modes and of the classes of modes happens with deep knowledge of the practice. In the same way, the theoretical formulation is not stale, but always results from the practical implementation which he researches and justifies.
For example, I will relate the vivid documentation of the classes of the authentic modes (mesoi, paramesoi, plagioi, paraplagioi) and the plagal modes (difonoi, trifonoi, tetrafonoi, pentafonoi, eptafonoi) just as they result from the musical texts in use.
In this way the relationship between the modes is methodically presented, but primarily the means of generating the octave is emphasized. One consequence of this logic is the treatment of the series of pitches as a whole musical phrase of a certain mode and not separately (not as each separate pitch, in other words), this latter approach being the one which unfortunately prevailed in conservatory-style pedagogy and not only there. The treatment of the series of pitches as a musical phrase facilitates even the determination of the ison which, just as all of us recognize, is not always noted in the text. The mingling, nevertheless, with the polyphony that I talked about earlier, in the combination with the conservatory-style pedagogy produced a freakishly irregular ison based on vertical harmonic consonance, outside the logic of the system of modes, which wants for the ison the tonic of the tetrachord or the pentachord in which the musical phrase belongs.
In the chapter on the modes, the symbol of Simon Karas is important as for the intervals. With the cooperation of Constantinpolitan mathematician and physicist Stavros Vrachamis — authorized in writing by the Ecumenical Patriarch to research the subject of musical intervals according to genre and timbre (as Karas himself mentions) — the intervalic study of the modes even completes or corrects, always justifiably, the earlier opinions on the intervals. As a representative example I will mention that which highlights for the enharmonic genre, in the Great Theoretical Treatise of Chrysanthos, who, while he clearly defines which ones are the intervals of the enharmonic genre, nevertheless in another paragraph he classifies the Third and the Grave mode in the enharmonic genre with intervals of the hard diatonic (whole steps and half-steps). The contradiction is obvious. Another example is the reconstruction of the intervals which the Patriarchal Commission of 1881-3 gives as for the chromatic modes, so that the large and small chromatic thirds of the soft and hard chromatic coincide.
Nevertheless the example of Simon Karas is decisive in the chapter “Musical Expression”, which in detail negotiates the matters of actions and of voices but also of the hand-signs used in directing (“texts only through hand-signs”): the action of these signs, although it is there in the vocal tradition of traditional cantors, has suffered a blow from the conservatory-style pedagogy (and not only from that), which just as we showed, does not welcome it, resulting in the desiccation of the melodic line and deterioration (if not disappearance) of microtonal intervals.
Already this chapter resulted in the motivation for extensive research. Beyond the announcement of the signing at the conference of Delphi in 1986, two doctoral dissertations, of Professor Demetri Giannelos and of Professor Yiannis Zannos, contribute seriously to the documentation of the subject, while a third, that of Dr. Georgios Konstantinos, gives a full picture of the function of the signs in the written tradition.
The proposal of Simon Karas for the reinstatement of certain hand-signs used in directing which correspond to vocal — that is to say, oral — tradition, I think, contributes decisively to the preservation of Chrysanthine notation and the avoidance of the distortion of its nature, with the predominant analyses already changing the use of the signs and, I fear, leading ultimately to the replacement of the signs with European notation.
From the achievements of the “Theory” of Simon Karas is a complete musical terminology, which responds in theory but also in practice, the consistent documentation of attractions in agreement with the Patriarchal Commission of 1881-3, the citation of examples in every chapter from folk music (hundreds of songs, documentation of the same), the through reference to the use of instruments. The multi-volume method for practical training accompanies and fulfills the “Theory” of Simon Karas, and completes the pedagogical framework.
In the years which the work of Simon Karas begins to be published, the final 20 years in other words of the twentieth century, also begins the service of the music departments of universities in Athena, in Thessaloniki, in Corfu. The work of these music departments towards Byzantine music is chiefly theoretical, of musicological, historical, literary, or theological interest. Of a more practical direction is the department of Musical Knowledge and Art of Macedonia University in Thessaloniki. In parallel, the Institute of Byzantine Musicology of the Church of Greece is active with publishing, the creation of a choir and a discography of Byzantine and post-Byzantine musical compositions.
The University Byzantine Chorus of Thessaloniki, which was established in 1972 by Professor Antonios Alygizakis, also has a similar discography.
(Today, I will add also the postgraduate department of the Conservatory of Athens under the supervision of Doctor Georgios Konstantinos, where specialized researchers give to conservatory graduates comprehensive and knowledgeable insights for the balanced development of theoretical training and practical research.)
A seminal contribution in the history of ecclesiastical music from the sources according to the period of Turkish rule is the book of Manolis K. Chatzigiakoumis, “Manuscripts of Ecclesiastical Music, 1453-1832”, as well as the recordings of cantors which were made in the last twenty years and began to be released recently under the title “Monuments of Ecclesiastical Music”.
Finally, we mention the establishment of the Greek Byzantine Choir in 1977, which in 25 years of activity has participated in more than 900 events in 30 countries, with a similar discography in Greece and in France.
We return to Simon Karas.
We have before us, then, an important project which actually dominates the musical scene of the 20th century, a project which prepares tomorrow while at the same time it constitutes a solid link between today and yesterday. For this reason exactly it deserves to be studied more broadly, to be translated and to be useful for all researchers who will find a most important aid for study and contrast, and for teachers and performers who will discover a valuable guide for systematic pedagogy and research.
I should say here that I consider it especially a privilege that our common tradition in Byzantine music originates entirely from our common Mother the Church, the Holy and Great Church of Christ, our Ecumenical Patriarchate.
The Great Church maintained over the ages and preserved in her womb our system of music, with the pedagogy of methods over time in the Patriarchal school, and it will continue even in the future to guarantee its unhindered continuation.
This unity across of the years of the system endorses the research and the systematic pedagogy of Simon Karas — pedagogy which supports, substantiates, completes, corrects, and clarifies the later method in use of the Three Teachers.
At base, we consider the existing written tradition which necessarily is completed by the oral tradition. This means preservation of the notation of the elaborations of Gregorios and of Hourmouzios, with the simultaneous accounting of all the information which the elaborations of their students give us (Petros Ephesios, or Matthias Vatopaidinos of Mount Athos, Nikolaos Diocheiaritos, Ioasaph Dionysiatos, et al.)
The comparative study of the elaborations with each other and with the oral tradition confirms scientifically but, I would say, also solemnly, the comprehensive thesis of Simon Karas for reinstatement of certain hand-signs used in directing but also of the oxeia, already in use in the publications of Petros Ephesios.
This method of research and its practical implementation protects, on the one hand, the unity across time and the functionality of the notation and prevents its mutation in the dry notes of the European system (and thus prevents its being rendered unusable), while on the other hand, it gurantees and strengthens the absolutely necessary oral tradition (with the attractions, the microtones, the phrases et al.) without which the interpretation lacks the richness of varieties which are described theoretically as operations of the signs and are performed practically by the traditional cantors.
With these observations, in conclusion, I would pray to be given to all of those who are interested in our ecclesiastical music for current practical and theoretical study, a continuation which will have the character of the standing scientific but also artistic collaboration and exchange in the frameworks of current reality, with reference always and in relation to the older methods, from those which we will be able to derive important details for knowledge and development.
Week 5 of grad school and all is well
Published 28 September 2009 Academia , Beginnings , College , Early Christianity , General , The Orthodox Faith 4 CommentsTags: american orthodoxy and parish congregationalism, chelsea coil, city and school in late antique athens and alexandria, dan greeson, dom gregory dix, edward watts, fr. george konstantopoulos, fr. nicholas ferencz, Greek, greek orthodox archdiocese of america, greek orthodoxy, greek religious identity, greekness, i answer to "geek", iconoclasm, icons, Indiana University, iphone, iphone apps for late antiquarians, josiah ober, late antiquity, Latin, marriage and orthodoxy, married life, mass and elite in democratic athens, matthew and erin wells, missing old friends, modern greek, my kids will learn latin and greek when they're newborns, orthodox weddings, peter brown, reasons i don't do brain surgery, seeing old friends, st. andrew's orthodox church in south bend, tessa studebaker, the shape of the liturgy, the world of late antiquity, unfortunate princess bride quotations, unmercenary readers
The last couple of times I had a hiatus in blogging, it was because things weren’t altogether well for me.
This time, to be honest, I’ve got nothing to complain about. Things are going really well.
I’m going to repeat that, just for emphasis and the sheer joy of being able to say that truthfully and unreservedly, perhaps for the first time since moving out here over six years ago:
Things are going really well.
The last several weeks have been something of a whirlwind; after getting back from Greece I had two papers to finish, a godson’s wedding to hold crowns for, my wife to murder, and Guilder to frame for it — er, wait. That is to say, two days after the wedding, Orientation Week started, during which I had to take a Latin and a Greek diagnostic exam; then the semester started for real, and it was off to the races.
I'm photographing Matthew and Erin being photographed. There's something kind of uncomfortably "meta" about this, don't you think?
Matthew and Erin’s wedding was wonderful; we were in South Bend for the three days leading up to it to help out with various things, and it was a joy to be part of it at every step. Fr. George Konstantopoulos at St. Andrew’s Greek Orthodox Church in South Bend served with Fr. Peter, and this was a lucky match for everybody — Fr. George has decades of experience and knows all of the little things that often get left out in the simplified versions of services that are often done these days. For example, I was a lot busier as the koumvaros at this wedding than I was for another one at All Saints last year — at that wedding, I just stood there. Here, I did the crown exchange and the ring exchange — and let me tell you, I was sweating it during the ring exchange. Oh, I thought. These rings are very small, and my fingers are very big. And all three sets of hands are shaking. If I drop them it will be very bad. Now I remember why I don’t do brain surgery. Fr. George also had the gravity and authority (to say nothing of the beard) that comes from many years of doing this, and it complemented well Fr. Peter’s still-youthful energy (he’s 35, I guess it’s not inappropriate to say that, right?).
The next morning, the newly-crowned Mr. and Mrs. Wells met us at St. Andrew’s for Divine Liturgy, and Fr. George gave them a big ol’ head pat during the announcements — “Matthew and Erin from Bloomington were married here yesterday,” he said, “and this morning they were here for Divine Liturgy. To me, that is an example of what living life as an Orthodox Christian is all about.” His meaning could hardly be plainer had he hoisted a neon sign saying, Please take being here as seriously as they do.
"I need a calculator to adequately express in mathematical terms how much shorter than me you are, Megan..."
Before driving home, we headed to Chicago to see our friend Tessa Studebaker, an old singing colleague of mine from Seattle whom we hadn’t seen since before we moved to Indiana. When I met her ten and a half years ago, she worked at Barnes and Noble for the discount and was still in high school; now she’s in her upper twenties, is a college graduate, took a job in France for a while, moved back, and is possibly getting serious about somebody. It’s incredible to think that the last ten years have gone by so quickly that all of that could have happened, but there we are. It’s even more incredible that the majority of that ten years has been spent here in Bloomington — it means I’ve spent more time here than I spent in Seattle after dropping out of college the first time. It means that the address I’ve had the longest in my entire life (four years) has been here. It means that by the time I’m done with my PhD, I’ll have spent probably over ten years at a place I thought maybe I’d spend three years at the very most.
But enough with the existential pondering for the moment. I guess seeing old friends has a way of bringing that out of me.
Orientation was more or less a non-event; I’ve been here for six years, I know where the library is, my e-mail account hasn’t changed in all of that time, so there wasn’t really any particular novelty for which I required context. That said, a couple of things stick out for me — one, Ed Watts, the Director of Graduate Studies for the History department here (who also happens to be my PhD advisor), strongly impressed on everybody to find a schedule for working, a rhythm of grad school life, that gets the job done and can be adhered to, and then to stick to it. Coming from a situation where I was trying to fit being a half-time (or more like three-quarter time) student in around having a fulltime 8-5 job, that advice really resonated with me; I’ve done my best to take that to heart, and I think it’s served me well thus far.
Secondly, I observed this kind of thing while students were introducing themselves:
“Hi, I’m Jacob Goldstein, and I’m doing Jewish history with an emphasis on Holocaust education.”
“My name is Sankar Ramasubramanian, and I’m interested in modern Indian history.”
“I’m Ramon Santiago, and I do early modern Latin American history.”
Do you see where I’m going with this? It seems that who one is can’t help but inform their research interests, and the correlation there appears to be entirely natural and predictable. That said, the same correlation appears to be viewed with some amount of suspicion when it comes to Christians doing Christian history. I haven’t directly experienced that among my cohort yet, but I’ve seen it in other contexts, and something I’ve picked up on a bit is a certain point of view, perhaps almost subconsciously held, that can be expressed as, I’m interested in history because I want to prove that everybody has always been as petty, nasty, and not to be trusted as they are now. It’s a fundamental skepticism of humanity bordering on loathing (but ironically, I think its proponents would probably self-identify as humanists), and it seems to cross disciplinary and ideological lines. I’m not exactly sure what to make of it.
My Greek and Latin exams evidently went well enough; for each language, I had three passages, a dictionary, and an hour. In each case I got through more or less the first passage and the first third to the first half of the second. I don’t remember what the passages were, but they didn’t generate any particular concern. I was worried, when I next saw Watts, that he’d get a concerned look on his face and say, “We need to talk,” but that didn’t happen. He just said I did very well with the Greek, and while the Latin wasn’t as good, it was still pretty good. I figured the Latin would be the weaker of the two anyway.
Then it was time to actually start classes.
So, I’m taking three classes for real, sitting in on two, and then doing some individual reading with Watts for one credit. I’m taking third year Modern Greek, a mandatory “Welcome to the History Department” course called “Introduction to the Professional Study of History,” and then a course in Classical Studies where we’re reading Ancient Greek judicial oratory — Antiphon, Lysias, and Demosthenes, namely. Modern Greek I have to take for my funding (and I should be doing as much with it as I can, anyway), and then Watts wanted me to take some upper-level Classical Studies courses so I could have a chance to sharpen my Greek a bit. The one credit of individual reading we’re doing finds us reading St. Jerome’s Life of St. Hilarion, so I’m also getting some Latin in this semester. Since I’m ahead of the game a bit in terms of my coursework, Watts thought it was important to give my languages some extra time, and he’s right — it’s been a good thing.
(Watts and I have had a couple of simpatico moments with our iPhones — today, for example, we were reading Jerome and needed to look up a word. I pulled out my sketchy little pocket dictionary, and he said, “I’ll one-up you there.” With a gleam in the eye only recognizable by the fellow geek, he pulled out his iPhone and asked, “Do you know about the Latin Dictionary app?” I didn’t, but within two minutes I had it along with its companion Greek Lexicon by the same developer.)
I’m also sitting in on an undergraduate survey Watts is teaching on the Late Antique Roman Empire, as well as a seminar in Art History called Problems in Early Christian Art. The former is really useful background, and I’m doing it instead of taking Watts’ actual graduate seminar on the same material (since I’m actually at a point where it’s vital I take seminars from people other than him). The latter is a result of recognizing a) that my interests, the way I want to talk about them, are interdisciplinary, and b) given certain realities, I will be best served doing some of the interdisciplinary work on my own time. The course is basically dealing with Christian art up to Iconoclasm; the reading is actually highly useful stuff for me, and I’m learning a lot, with certain things I can already talk about being discussed in a very different context than that to which I’m accustomed.
Anyway, it’s a lot, but it’s not a back-breaker of a schedule by any means. Yes, it’s a good amount of work, but I’m finding it easier to manage now than I found it to manage less work while having to juggle a fulltime job. It means I’ve had less time for blogging, yes, but it’s been for a good reason. I think I’m at a point where I understand the rhythm well enough that I can post a bit again.
So, in brief, that’s where I’ve been and what I’ve been doing. Coming up, there’s another wedding this weekend, that of a certain Daniel Maximus Greeson and Chelsea Coil, plus I’m also supposed to run a book review for these folks by 10 November. Plus there are any number of other things for me to talk about regarding what I’ve been reading and what I’m thinking about — it’s more “Where the heck do I begin?” than “What do I have to say?” Let me tell you, these are all problems I am thrilled to have.
I will close this post in the manner which I think I may start closing for the time being — that is, with a rundown of what I’ve recently finished reading and what I’m currently reading.
Recently finished:
- American Orthodoxy and Parish Congregationalism, by Fr. Nicholas Ferencz
- City and School in Late Antique Athens and Alexandria by Edward Watts
- The World of Late Antiquity by Peter Brown
Currently reading:
- The Shape of the Liturgy by Dom Gregory Dix
- Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens by Josiah Ober
Waking up in the middle of the night and not being sure where I am
Published 11 August 2009 Academia , General , The Orthodox Faith Leave a CommentTags: athens centre, byzantine chant, frappé, great uses for eggplant, Greek, greek food, greek identity, greekness, imam bayaldi, international travel tips, ioannis arvanitis, making nescafé bearable, modern greek, my kids will learn latin and greek when they're newborns, nescafé sucks, orthodox travel, richard barrett in greece, travel
I’ve been back in the States since about 4:50pm last Wednesday, and back home since about 1:30am Thursday. A wedding, a paper, and some other efforts are now presently occupying me for the remainder of the month.
There’s a lot regarding the last two or three weeks which I’m still processing. Some of it I can talk about, some of it I can’t, and I can’t even really explain why I can’t talk about it because to even do that is to talk about it in a way I really shouldn’t do.
I learned a tremendous amount on this trip. What I learned is not necessarily what I went to Greece thinking I would learn. The principal objective, to improve my Greek, has been accomplished, but there’s so much more I need to do. One year of university classroom instruction and eight weeks in the Mother Country really only gets you so far. Thankfully, I will have another year of classroom instruction, and I find it likely I will apply for the FLAS again for next summer, but it really is a marathon and not a sprint.
My secondary, personal objective, to be able to study Byzantine chant with a “native speaker” as it were, was also accomplished. I can now look at a Byzantine score and at least have some idea what I need to do with it. We’re talking about the basics here, to say the least, and I need to keep up with what Arvanitis taught me in order to not lose it, but that’s a lot better than I was able to do on my own in Bloomington. It remains to be seen whether or not it will be possible for what I learned to have any practical application at the parish level, which troubles me somewhat; if I learned all of this stuff strictly for my own benefit and not for the service of the Church, I’m not sure I see the point. Nonetheless, Arvanitis really was a gem and exactly the kind of person with whom I needed to be studying; he was able to discuss the psaltic art not just from the standpoint of applied performance but also in terms of historical development and paleography, and even more than that, he was a grade-A human being all around. It was a joy to get to know him and his wife Olga, however briefly, and if I go back next summer, I look forward to being able to do more with him.
I also learned that a well-made Frappé is a decent — and addictive — use of otherwise useless instant coffee. This was an unanticipated, and pleasant, lesson. In other matters relating to food, my newfound appreciation of eggplant and zucchini represents a brand-new chapter in my life.
Unfortunately, something else I learned is that regardless of culture, language, or creed, somebody can be well-meaning, well-intentioned, and earnest and still encounter people who will irrationally decide at first sight that they don’t like you, and nothing you can do will change that. Rules of communicating with normal, rational people just don’t apply, and the best you can do is to try to not have a person like that in a position of power over you. I will re-emphasize that this has nothing to do what one’s nationality or native tongue is; there is neither Jew nor Greek here, as it were. It is a lesson which transcends linguistic, ethnic and cultural barriers — it just happened to be in Greece that this was made manifest to me.
Next year, if I do this again, there are things I will do differently. I will make different living arrangements, and look for a short-term apartment rental (unless Egeria Home Exchange is up and running and comes up with a decent fit). I will also leave more time on either side of the school commitment for traveling — eight weeks really isn’t all that much time for such things when you have someplace to be four hours a day, five days a week.
More specific reflections will have to wait for a bit.
Listening at the reliquary and taking Pentecostals by surprise: in which the author visits the island of Aegina
Published 26 July 2009 General , The Orthodox Faith 3 CommentsTags: aegina, avoid the gate e-8 café at piraeus, flying dolphin xv, fr. nicholas samaras, fr. seraphim rose, frappé, Greek, greek butcher shops, greek food, greek identity, greekness, hellenic seaways, international travel tips, listening at st. nectarios' body, models of holines, modern greek, my kids will learn latin and greek when they're newborns, new horizons ministry, nick samaras, orthodox christians are christians, orthodox travel, panagitsa cathedral aegina, piraeus, richard barrett in greece, sounio, st. herman of alaska, st. john maximovitch, st. nectarios, st. nicholas chapel aegina, temple of aphaia, temple of poseidon, the greek hard sell, the importance of saints, travel, ways to barter in greece, ways to haggle in greece, we need more american saints
Fr. Nicholas Samaras, of Ss. Constantine and Helen Church in West Nyack, New York, told me when he found out I was going to Greece, “You need to go to an island called Aegina. St. Nectarios is there.”
When you buy tickets online to go to an island, you’re e-mailed a confirmation number. This is not a ticket, as the e-mail rather forcefully reminds you; you have to redeem the confirmation number for your ticket at the boating line’s office no later than an hour and a half before the boat pushes off. As my boat was leaving at 8:50am, this meant needing to pick up my ticket no later than 7:20am; furthermore, this meant needing to be at the Ethniki Amyna metro station by roughly 6:30am, which, the 404 bus being what it is on the weekends, meant waiting for it starting around 6am, which meant being up by 5-5:30am.
(Of course, the Halandri metro station reopens shortly after I leave. Sigh. I’m going to have to come back just to develop an impression of the public transportation system when a good chunk of it isn’t closed.)
So anyway, last Saturday I stumbled, still half-asleep, out of the Piraeus train station at a little past 7am. To say the least, it was a bit of a zoo; this is the time of year when everybody in Athens flees for the islands. Hellenic Seaways was where I needed to pick up my ticket, and I realized I didn’t know where that was. I headed for the nearest big sign that said “Hellenic Seaways,” which actually led me into the office of a travel line bearing a different name.
“Excuse me,” I said, “I don’t think this is the right spot, but where do I need to go to pick up tickets for Hellenic Seaways?”
“Here,” they told me, and gave me my ticket. Um, okay.
Now, your ticket bears a gate number and the name of your boat. You would think, as I did, going off of the system in use in most airports, that gate numbers would be unique to individual boats. So, I merrily headed for gate E-8, thinking it would be obvious as soon as I got there where I needed to go.
So, the reality is, there are something like 10-20 boats per gate. It is good that I realized this, because I was sitting at a café being robbed blind sipping a mediocre at best double espresso for which I had paid 5 Euros at gate E-8 (word to the wise: don’t bother with the gate café, just get something at one of the many other cafés around the harbor) until 8:30, wondering why the heck I wasn’t seeing the 8:50 boat for Aegina anywhere. I realized, getting up and looking around some, that gate E-8 stretched quite far away from where I was sitting. Jogging over to the far side of gate E-8, there were multiple signs, kiosks, and offices telling me I was in Hellenic Seaways country, and while it hadn’t arrived yet, they showed the Flying Dolphin XV as being on their schedule to depart for Aegina at 8:50. It arrived shortly thereafter, and off we went. It’s only about 40 minutes there (Aegina is the closest island to Athens, I believe) — no time at all.
The marina in the town of Aegina is very charming; pistachio nut stands are everywhere (these evidently being one of the island’s big exports), there is no shortage of restaurants and cafés on the water, and plenty of bakeries and shops and so on and so forth.
There’s also a butcher shop right on the water that shows you exactly what you’re buying. From left to right, I believe we have a rabbit, a lamb, and a chicken:
Plus an outdoor public market:
I’ve mentioned before, I think, that Greeks are excellent at the hard sell; there were a couple of examples of that in particular I ran into on Aegina. One involved me going into a bakery where they had nothing posted on any of the pastries to tell you what they were; I would ask what a certain item was, and the game the person behind the counter played was that he would tell me, I repeated to make sure I understood, and he would take that as an order. It took me a tiropita and a zambontiropita before I realized what he was doing, at which point I stopped asking. Well, okay, to be honest, there was another factor at work here that I may have misunderstood, but I really don’t think so. I’ll explain what I mean in another post.
The other example I’ll get to shortly.
There’s also a beautiful church along the water, the Cathedral of the Dormition (also called Panagitsa). It evidently dates from 1806; one very distinctive characteristic of this church is that, in addition to the 2+ centuries of incense permeating the walls, there is a very strong smell of honey as you walk in from the beeswax candles. Like many churches here, there is an ambo, but curiously enough they have removed the steps leading up to it, leaving only the pulpit portion in what is a clear state of disuse.
On the other hand, this is what’s called a chandelier:
I walked around the harbor for a good couple of hours, simply taking things in (and unsuccessfully trying to engage an old man in a backgammon game). At that point, it seemed like a good plan to try to find St. Nectarios.
By the way, it is difficult to overstate the level of local devotion there is to St. Nectarios on Aegina; he is everywhere. Icons of him, to say nothing of other memorabilia, are in virtually every shop (as well as prominently displayed in the churches). The island of Aegina is very insistent that you know that it is St. Nectarios’ home. But you don’t know the half of it until you see the monastery.
I had originally looked at a map of the island and thought to myself, “Oh, the island isn’t all that wide; I can probably walk it.” It is an extremely good thing that I disposed of that folly and got on a bus. It was hot, it’s a lot farther than it looks, and the terrain is not exactly even. As it was, the bus was almost too hot.
The buses, by the way, are easy to find on the harbor and cheap — about a Euro and a half each way — and they take you right to the doorstep of the monastery. If you don’t know what you’re looking for, you’ll be standing on the bus, thinking to yourself that you wonder how you’ll know when you’ve reached the monastery, and then suddenly the bus is right in front of this:
And then you’re thinking to yourself, Oh. Well, that was easy, wasn’t it?
You can go to my Flickr page and peruse the pictures all you want; one of the main things I want to point out is that they’ve built two levels of galleries in the church, and the church is already freaking huge — as in, bigger than Holy Trinity in Indianapolis huge. This suggests that on 9 November, St. Nectarios’ feast day, they expect it to be packed to the rafters.
The other thing I want to point about the interior has to do with the chapel off to the south end of the nave, where some of the relics are. Particularly, the iconography — for example, here at the dome of the apse in the chapel (and I would look at the pictures of other frescoes in the chapel, too — time and space simply do not allow for a full discussion here). Does that look familiar? It should. The point is, here’s a holy man who died less than a century ago — for all I know, there is still a living memory of him somewhere. Despite being contemporary, he is still “discussed” iconographically in the same language as saints of antiquity. I suppose what I’m getting at is something I’ve said before — saints do not belong to a fixed time period. Someone is, or able to be, no more or less holy based on when they lived. In fact, we desperately need contemporary saints and to have such people in living memory presented to us in this way. It is one of the ways we are reminded of how to be Christlike, to have these models of holiness in our midst and thought of us as in continuity with (or in the tradition of, if you prefer) all of our other saints. It tells us that miracles still happen, that the Holy Spirit still moves among us, that Christ is still in our midst. Our saints need not, in fact must not, be limited to accounts from antiquity which we’re starting to talk ourselves out of believing. And local veneration is incredibly powerful — to look at an icon and to realize, “Hey, I’m standing right where that happened and where those people lived and breathed and did what they did,” is humbling beyond belief.
Speaking of humbling beyond belief, I will now tell you of the second hard sell I encountered.
I spent probably an hour or so in the church. After leaving, I started walking up the hill to the monastery proper. An old woman in what looked like a nun’s habit appeared out of nowhere, walked right towards me, and thrust an icon of St. Nectarios in my hands. “You need this,” she said in Greek. “You need St. Nectarios’ prayers for you. Fifty Euros.”
I had absolutely no idea what to do. This woman had two teeth. She had lines in her face like the Grand Canyon. Her voice had been sanded down with a lot of age. Worst yet, and what I never know how to deal with in such situations, was that there was an edge of desperation to her entire presentation that would slice through cement. I started to hand it back to her, saying gently in Greek, “Thank you, mother, but I need to think about it.”
She pushed it back towards me. “What’s there to think about?” she said. “The money doesn’t matter! What matters is that you have the prayers of this holy man blessing you and your life!” She made the Sign of the Cross in my direction, and then threw a prayer rope on top of the icon. “There, take that too.”
“No, really,” I said. “I should think about it.”
She tossed an icon of St. Marina and another prayer rope on top. “I’m telling you, the money doesn’t matter! What’s money when you have the prayers of these holy people in your life?” She hesitated a half-second, and then said, “Thirty Euros.”
“Thirty Euros?” I repeated.
“Thirty Euros.”
I gave in. It was clearly very, very important to her that I take these icons off her hands, and ultimately the thought which I couldn’t escape was, “What’s thirty Euros to me compared with what it would be to her?” I gave her the money, thanked her, and as I walked away I muttered to myself, “I just got hustled by a nun.”
Only about half of the monastery proper is open to the public; this includes two (much) smaller churches, the chapel where St. Nectarios’ body is , two bookstores, and then his cell is open as an exhibit. The main thing I want to talk about here is seeing the veneration of his body, and (to some extent) participating in it myself; this is something that up to this point was rather foreign to me as an Orthodox Christian in the United States, given that, of the three analogous examples I can think of, only two are actual glorified saints (Ss. Herman of Alaska and John Maximovitch) and all are in California or Alaska (the third is Fr. Seraphim Rose), meaning that they’re rather remote for somebody whose Orthodox Christian life has been spent in the Midwest thus far.
People knelt and prayed at the casket which held his bones; I saw pilgrims weeping; and strangest of all, I saw people pressing their ears to the reliquary, as though they were listening for some sound from within. I really didn’t know exactly where to put myself in all of this, to be honest; I lit a candle, and I prayed at the reliquary, but my emotional response wasn’t quite that demonstrative — which isn’t to say that I didn’t have one, I did, it was just rather internalized — and since I didn’t know what was going on with the listening thing, I didn’t do it.
I went into the bookstore and asked the woman behind the counter, “I’m Orthodox, but I’m American, and I’ve never seen anything like this before. Why do people listen at the body?” She wasn’t sure how to answer; she said that it was a way of honoring St. Nectarios with another sense, but she couldn’t quite articulate exactly how.
All told, I spent about four hours at the monastery; I had originally hoped to be able to stay for Vespers, but my boat back to Athens was leaving at 8pm, and the bus schedule didn’t quite line up to make things work. That’s okay; as I’ve had to tell myself a number of times, this won’t be the only time I come to this part of the world.
Let’s say that there was a lot about the monastery that was spiritually overwhelming, even if I didn’t necessarily understand everything I saw. Part of why I spent so much time there is that I kept returning to the body and to the other reliquaries — there was something pulling me back to them, something that I was supposed to learn from being there. I’m still figuring out exactly what that is.
From the monastery, I took the bus to to the Temple of Aphaia which, as I noted earlier, is said to form an equilateral triangle with the Parthenon in Athens and the Temple of Poseidon at Sounio. There really is something very cool about being able to walk around structures from antiquity like this; that said, I think I would have rather come here first and then gone to the monastery. My head was simply too occupied by what I had witnessed there to really be able to appreciate what all I was seeing at the ruin. The Temple of Aphaia is certainly fascinating intellectually, but I was very much someplace else spiritually, so it left me a little cold.
Even if that was the case, however, I have to say that there were some really beautiful views from the top of the hill. It is nice being someplace where one can see water and hills and mountains, I can’t deny that.
Something that was really bizarre: there was a father and son walking around the ruin, and I heard them speaking German. I addressed them in German, and we talked a bit. They were just in Greece for the weekend(!), and I found out that the boy would be going to high school in Boston. No, that’s not the weird part. The weird part was that I started sentences in German but kept finishing them in Greek. My mouth really, really, really wanted to default to Greek, and I had very real trouble staying in German. I kept having to apologize — luckily, they just laughed and took it in stride.
Anyway — I didn’t spent four hours at the Temple. More like one and a half.
I got on the bus back to the harbor. I had a Frappé (I am going to have to get a handheld mixer when I get back to the States so I can make these blasted things myself), and then settled down for a grilled fish dinner at Inomagirion, one of the waterfront restaurants. The fish was very good, as a local resident assured me (pictured left), and I had to agree with him, although he kept wanting to verify that it really was as good as he remembered. Being thankful for his help, I obliged a reasonable amount. (Best meal he’s had in weeks, I would have to guess.)
I tried to go to Vespers at Panagitsa before taking the boat back to Athens, but as it started at 7pm and was combined with 9th Hour, so I had to duck out at 7:30, when they had just begun “Lord I have cried…” Alas.
On the boat back to Athens, I became aware that the young (mid-20s, maybe) couple sitting next to me was American. Their names were Erin and Jeremy. We got to talking, and it turned out that they were Pentecostals of the Assemblies of God variety. Erin has been working for some time in the Dominican Republic for a ministry that deals with troubled youth called New Horizons; “If you’ve heard of us, it’s probably from bad publicity,” she said. “We get that a lot.” Well, there came a point in the conversation where I was asked point blank what I was, and I was obliged to tell them I was Orthodox (“Greek Orthodox,” I said, for purposes of convenience) — not that I had been hiding it, mind you. I brought up the St. Innocent Academy after she talked about New Horizons, for example.
Anyway, the point is, after I told them I was Orthodox, she got a funny look on her face. “Really?” she said. “I’m sorry — from the way you were talking, I would have thought you were Christian.”
Let’s not even go into what my inner monologue was doing at this stage of the game. I just smiled and said, “I am.”
“Really? I thought Greek Orthodox were like Catholics. Well, okay, so Greek Orthodox think of themselves as Christians?”
“Yes, we do.”
The funny look became an intensely puzzled look. “Like, do you guys have a personal relationship with Christ and all of that?”
“Absolutely,” I said, although the inner monologue continued without me — just not exactly in the same way you mean that…
“Well, okay, then what’s a basic summary of what you guys believe?”
“That’s the easiest question you could have possibly asked me,” I said. “It’s very simple, and it goes like this: ‘I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth…'” and I proceeded to recite the entire Creed for her.
The puzzled look got even moreso. “Okay, so then what’s the difference between Greek Orthodox and Pentecostal?”
Keep in mind we only had a forty minute boat ride.
I chose to explain, broadly, that we see a continuity, rather than a disconnection, of Christian history over the last 2,000 years, placing ourselves in line with that, and as such believe we are in continuity with the Church of the Apostles. And just today, I saw one of the latest heroes in that history, I thought to myself.
“Huh,” she said. It was clear she had never heard anybody talk this way before.
I don’t know what they will do with that, if anything; I spent a little bit more time with them after we got off the boat, helping them find a bus stop that would get them back to their hotel. (Boy, I sure hope it did. Some of the streets around Piraeus at night are a little sketchy.) They were nice folks, even if it still amazes me that… well, maybe it shouldn’t.
By the way, I asked Fr. Samaras about the whole business of pilgrams listening at St. Nectarios’ body. He said this:
People have reported, for years now, that they’ve heard the Saint tapping back, or have heard some kind of music, or the sound of a Bishop’s staff knocking. So, people continue to listen. […] This tradition only happens with Saint Nektarios, the people listening. It doesn’t happen anywhere else.
So, there you have it. Next time I’ll be preapred.
At the start of week seven — catching up, and the beginning of some ends
Published 23 July 2009 Academia , General , The Orthodox Faith Leave a CommentTags: aegina, athens centre, athens grand prix tsiklitiria, babylonia, byzantine chant, demetrios byzantinou, engraving in greece, epidauros, euripides, finding engravers in greece, Greek, greek food, greek identity, greekness, halandri, helen mirren, international travel tips, ioannis arvanitis, jean racine, Joshua Robinson, katharevousa, king aegeus, modern greek, my kids will learn latin and greek when they're newborns, nafplio, olympic stadium in athens, orthodox travel, paramidi, peter bouteneff, phaedra, richard barrett in greece, sounio, st. irene athens, stanley townsend, temple of poseidon, tom hanks, tom hanks at epidauros, travel, ways to barter in greece, ways to haggle in greece
That centermost white dot is Tom Hanks.
I’ll get back to that.
Obviously, much has happened in the three weeks or so since I was last able to post a chronicle of my time here. It’s also enough time that certain chapters are closing, or have in fact already closed; I have less than two weeks left here in Greece, my second class at the Athens Centre comes to an end tomorrow, Flesh of My Flesh arrives Monday afternoon, at which point my residence will shift for a few days, my IU colleagues have headed back to the States, and Ioannis Arvanitis has gone on vacation until the end of next week, meaning that last Friday’s Byzantine chant lesson was probably my last.
When last I was able to post, my first 3-week class at the Athens Centre was over and the new one had not yet started. This has been a good class, and it has certainly been more of an immersive language learning environment than the first managed to be. There are only two others in the class — Jim, a schoolteacher from Vancouver, B. C. who married a Greek woman and who is hoping to raise bilingual kids (if not just move here altogether), and Jan, the ambassador to Greece from Slovakia. We’ve jelled well. The good thing is that we all have our strengths and weaknesses, but they tend to complement each other. Jan is an experienced language learner, but speaks Greek with a thick Slovak accent. Jim has never learned a foreign language before, and as a result grammatical concepts take him some time, but he absorbs vocabulary very quickly, and his listening comprehension is vastly aided by having had Greek in-laws for the last decade. For me, grammar and reading comprehension are things which come quickly, but vocabulary takes me a bit longer than I’d like, and while my listening comprehension is vastly improved from where it was, I’m still sometimes painfully aware of how slow my ear is. With our forces combined, we’ve nonetheless been able to speak predominantly Greek in the class — let’s say between 80-90% on average, but often getting closer to 95%.
A couple of weeks ago, I went with Frank (my Greek teacher at IU), his wife, and my fellow student Stefanos to see Phaedra with Helen Mirren at the ancient theatre of Epidauros. It was a really wonderful day all around; we first went swimming at a beach in Loutraki, a seaside town on the Peleponnesian peninsula — and let me say, swimming in the Gulf of Corinth ain’t bad. I think that’s the first time in probably eight years I’ve been in a body of water of any size, or salt water for that. Following the swim, we drove to the port town, and former Greek capital, of Nafplion. We ate a late lunch at a taverna called Vasillis (hey! That’s “Richard” translated into Greek! Perfect!), walked around the square, and also drove up to Palamidi, the Byzantine/Venetian/Ottoman mountaintop fortress which overlooks the city (“Real cities have medieval castles”).
By that point, it was time to head up to the theatre. After being seated (by the way, bring something soft to sit on — the stone risers are pretty much exactly as they were carved 2500 years ago), I heard an American couple talking behind me — “Seen Tom Hanks yet?” I wasn’t sure if they were joking, but I kept an eye on the entrances, just in case.
Sure enough, he and his wife showed up and were seated in the center of the front row. That picture at the top of this post was the best I could do, with distance, light, and camera all combined.
The play was good; it was a bit weird, seeing a French Baroque playwright’s adaptation of Euripides, translated into English by a modern author, with Modern Greek supertitles, but there we are. It was very nearly a bare stage, with only a few chairs, some sort of small circular platform in the center, and a shell around the back of the stage with ramps leading off and on. Dress was modern, with Hippolytus pacing around the stage in a wifebeater in the first scene. Stanley Townsend was a larger-than-life, aged Theseus; for all of you IU kids reading along at home, think Tim Noble. Helen Mirren, naturally, owned the stage every second she was on it, and was downright creepy for much of the evening. I tend to think that her death scene didn’t have a ton of impact, but that seemed to be a bit of awkward staging more than anything.
I will also note that the acoustics at Epidauros are everything people claim them to be; it takes the ear a second to adjust, but once it does, you hear every word without any difficulty whatsoever.
The very next day, Giorgos took me for a drive along the coastline to Sounio — in myth, the place where Aegeus threw himself into the sea, and where there is a temple to Poseidon which is said to form an equilateral triangle with the Parthenon and the Temple of Aphaia on the island of Aegina. The point where Aegeus is said to jumped is very rocky and uneven with a lot of loose stones; to be honest, if there was an Aegeus, I find it more likely that he just tripped and
fell, black sails or no black sails. I was wearing Birkenstocks instead of my Merrells — bad idea.
On Sunday, at Divine Liturgy at St. Irene, I saw somebody else in the Communion line who looked remarkably like St. Vladimir Seminary faculty member Dr. Peter Bouteneff. As it turns out, it was, in fact, Dr. Bouteneff, explaining why it looked so much like him.
The following Monday, I went to an event called the Athens Grand Prix Tsiklitiria, a big international track and field competition. It was a chance to see the 2004 Olympic Stadium in action; I got to see the men’s steeplechase, some of the men’s javelin, men’s high jump, and some of the women’s sprinting events. One very interesting thing is the pit of razor wir
e between the seats and the field; they are evidently are various serious about not wanting fans to rush the pitch — not surprising, since it’s also used for soccer.
Throughout the week, I did some gift shopping; I discovered that there are a couple of city blocks right off of Annunciation Cathedral where there is nothing but ecclesiastical supply shops. I spent some time browsing through these establishments; as with Apostoliki Diakonia, the answer to just about any question beginning with “Do you have…” is “Yes, what kind are you looking for?” It’s quite something to see such places with your own eyes when you’re accustomed to there being only one or two places in the United States which carry these things at all, and then they usually have to import them. I will be going back for a few gifts; there is a bookstore (which I decline to name) which will not be among the places to which I return, however. Wh
en I walked in to browse, somebody was immediately following me, asked if they could help me, and when I said I was just looking, they didn’t leave me alone. It was clear they didn’t want me in there (and I’m not altogether certain why), so I won’t burden them again.
By the way: a useful phrase in Greek is, “Μήπως μπορείτε να μου κάνετε μία καλύτερα τιμή;” (Mipos boreite na mou kanete mia kalitera timi?), which means, “Maybe you can give me a better price?” People will haggle, so don’t be afraid to ask.
Also — engraving is quite inexpensive here. I had bought a brass cigarette lighter as a gift, and I wanted to have the person’s name on it. There is an engraver at 9 Havriou Street who does beautiful work; it took less than an hour and cost all of 5 Euros.
This last Saturday I went to the island of Aegina — this will be its own post.
Sunday, I met Joshua Robinson, the Byzantine Greek student I was supposed to go to Petraki with a couple of nights ago. We had e-mailed a bit the week previous, and he met me at St. Irene. He joined Arvanitis and me for what has become our customary coffee after Liturgy, after which we went to Thanassis for lunch and traded stories. Very sharp and nice guy, and it’s good to know that he’s only a short drive north once I’m home — I hope to get to know him better on the other side of the ocean.
Monday of this week, Stefanos (Anna’s brother, not my IU colleague) and Liana took me to a play at the public theatre here in Halandri called Babylonia, by the 19th century Greek playwright Demetrios Byzantinou. The key conceit of the play is that each character is speaking a different dialect of Greek and they have trouble understanding each other; I actually understood more than I thought I would, and perhaps what I understood would be different from what everyday Greeks might understand. Of the two characters I understood most, one speaks katharevousa or the “purifying” speech, which is an elevated dialect quite close to Ancient Greek, and another speaks a dialect with a good amount of Italian mixed in. Even if I didn’t understand everything, I found it fascinating and highly entertaining, and had some unexpected laughs at moments when nobody else was laughing. For example, the scholar who speaks katharevousa has a speech where he walks a verb from the Attic form through the sound changes to what it looks like in “the Italian dialect”. I understood exactly what was going on, and I thought it was hysterical. There’s also an exchange where the Anatolian is dictating a letter to the katharevousa speaker, and in asking what the letter should say, the scholar uses a verbal adjective form, something rare which I’ve only ever seen a handful of times and would have trouble constructing if somebody held a gun to my head, but to my own surprise I got it, and immediately thought to myself, “Hey! That was a gerundive and I understood!” Shortly thereafter, the Anatolian, after hearing what the scholar has written, tells him, “You’ve written a troparion.”
Anyway, I was inspired enough to seek out a copy of the play, and I found one easily enough. It seems a worthy exercise for the person taking old and new Greek seriously to try to read some of it — we’ll see how it goes.
My chant lessons have been extraordinarily valuable; Arvanitis told me this last Sunday that we’ve worked through in a month and a half what he usually takes a year to teach. I am going back to the States with a decent grasp of the basics, close to twenty hours of lesson recordings for reference, and some books of repertoire that are difficult to get on that side of the water. We’ll see what I’m able to do with all of it once I’m home — I definitely have some ideas.
Okay — on the whole, this catches us up in terms of the travel narrative, save for Aegina, which will come later. Other thoughts and reflections to come.
Less than two weeks. Sheesh. Where does the time go?
Metro Athens: “We are ascertaining the presence of a common tradition”
Published 9 July 2009 General , Media , The Orthodox Faith 5 CommentsTags: ecumenical patriarch, ecumenical patriarchate, Greek, greek orthodoxy, greek religious identity, modern greek, modern orthodox problems, Orthodox Ecclesiology, orthodox unity, Patriarch Bartholomew I, Patriarch Kyrill of Moscow
From Metro Athens, 6 July 2009, p. 9: (text originally in Greek, translation mine)
Word of unity from the Phanar
The Patriarch of Moscow and of All Russians Kyrill characterized as the most meaningful event of his visit to the Phanar the concelebration yesterday of a Divine Liturgy with the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew at the Church of St. George.
“This peaceful visit is the first of a series of visits to the sister local Orthodox Churches,” said Patriarch Kyrill, and stressed that “the visits will comprise a good beginning for the renewal of the brotherly relations in Christ between two great Orthodox Patriarchates of the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church of Christ.”
One Orthodox Church
The Patriarch of Moscow and of All Russians made a particular reference to the processes which began at the initiative of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew in 2008 for dealing with the problems of the Orthodox Churches. “From all our soul we are supporting the call which Your Holiness issued from here last year to the local Orthodox Churches, that we should be conscious of ourselves and function as one Church. This, our interpretation, comprises even our own sincere conviction,” said Patriarch Kyrill, speaking to Patriarch Bartholomew.
“A coordinating organ”
Patriarch Bartholomew on his side reiterated how “the structure of our Church according to Patriarchates and Autocephalous Churches in no wa signifies that we comprise Churches and not a Church.
“The Orthodox Church certainly does not employ primacy of power, but also it does not lack a coordinating organ, not compelling but expressing the unanimity of the local churches. This martyr’s Throne humbly exercises the ministry from the ages and sacred tradition in absolute fidelity to the imperatives of Orthodox Ecclesiology,” he added.
Strong ties
Patriarch Kyrill referred in detail to the great ties of the Church of Moscow with Constantinople. “We are ascertaining the presence of a common tradition, which unbreakably connects the Church of Constantinople with her former daughter, today the sister Church, equal in rank, of Russia,” he noted, and added, “Our common tradition comprises the firm foundation of our common witness to the modern world.”
PULL QUOTE NOT IN BODY OF TEXT: Kyrill: “Despite historical cataclysms, the name of Christ continues to be hallowed in this city.”
PHOTO CAPTION: Warm embrace of two hierarchs
Various observations at around the 3/8 mark: in which the author is able to identify his hat and sandals a little too easily
Published 4 July 2009 Academia , General , music , The Orthodox Faith 2 CommentsTags: athens centre, athens public transportation, byzantine chant, cielo e mar, Greek, greek food, greek identity, greekness, hailing cabs in greece, halandri, heat sensitive travel tips, international travel tips, ioannis arvanitis, memorials in greece, modern greek, my inner grammar nazi, my kids will learn latin and greek when they're newborns, orthodox travel, richard barrett in greece, richard is bald, the power of the indicative mood, travel
I’ve been trying to post this since Thursday, but I’ve been subject to a very finicky Internet connection. Oh well.
Yesterday was the last day of my first class at the Athens Centre. It’s a bit hard to believe that this particular chapter has closed, but I suppose all those people who told me that the time would go by quickly are right.
The Athens Centre does six different levels in the Immersion category; I started out at level three, which is basically intermediate. We’ve finished the class not having hit quite all of the things which were covered by the fourth semester of the sequence at IU, but since I skipped over the middle two semesters, I’ve been content to have the chance to let things settle a bit. I’ve been very appreciative of Anna, the teacher, who has a grounding in Ancient Greek and Latin and is able to answer a lot of the kinds of questions I have; with her help, I was able to find the textbooks used in the secondary schools here to teach Ancient Greek. (They’re dirt cheap, too — three Euros or so a pop, and in the States books like these would cost around $25 apiece. I asked Anna if Greek linguistic pride was state subsidized; she smiled and said, “Φυσικά!” — “Of course!”) She uses the communicative approach while being able to talk about grammatical and linguistic issues, which is very helpful for me. As I found out yesterday, she’s also teaching Level IV, and I’m happy about that.
(Incidentally, for the last day, she had me make good on an earlier agreement to sing something for the class at some point. I broke out the ending section of “Cielo e mar” from La Gioconda — “Vieni, o donna, qui t’attendo…” — since it’s a reasonably useful party trick with the two sustained Bs flat at the end.)
I’m something of an oddball in the class; as I said earlier, I’m the only one who doesn’t have any Greek heritage, which also means I’m the only one who didn’t grow up hearing the language spoken, I’m the only one who has traveled specifically to take the class, I’m the only one who wasn’t in the previous class as well, and I’m also the only academic besides the teacher. What this all means from a practical standpoint is that grammatical issues aren’t really where I struggle, and I feel reasonably comfortable at least trying to express myself (perhaps a bit more than some of my classmates would prefer — hey, if we’re not at least attempting real conversations, how are we ever going to learn?), but my listening comprehension lags behind that of my fellow students. It’s gotten better; my ear is gradually waking up, but there’s still a good amount that flies past me. From that standpoint alone, I’m glad I still have another five weeks. By the end, we finally had reached the point in class where I had hoped we would start — that is, with Greek being the vast majority of what’s spoken in class — and I hope that means that I’ll feel pushed by Level IV. Alas, I’m the only one in this class going on to IV, so it’ll be a whole new group of people on Monday.
It’s really interesting trying to function in Greek; one very telling experiment was to go into a bunch of different shops starting off in Greek and seeing how long it took before either the shopkeeper switched to English or I had to switch to English to be able to tell them what I wanted. Some people replied in English immediately; one or two spoke English to me before I said anything at all but then looked taken aback, if not downright confused, when I replied in Greek. Cab drivers are great people to try to talk to; I usually take a taxi to and from my chant lesson, and the ones who talk seem to have a lot to say. I’ve gotten the same response from several when I’ve answered their questions about where I’m from and what I’m doing here — “Why? Since when do Americans care about what happens here?” One cabbie, when I assured him that I care very much about what happens here, told me, “Well, maybe you can get other Americans to care, too, then. You guys have all the power, not us.”
I also had to make an interesting mental shift during one cab ride when, after explaining that I was here specifically to learn Modern Greek, the driver asked, “What do you that you’re able to do that?” I started to say, “Well, I’m hoping eventually to be able to…” and then I realized, “Wait. I actually am.” (With apologies to my godson Lucas — for all of my fellow grammar Nazis out there, we might call this the power of the indicative mood.)
(Travel tip regarding hailing cabs here: if at first you don’t succeed, try, try, again. Keep trying, and eventually one will stop. Of the ones that stop, eventually one will agree to take you where you want to go. Just be patient and give yourself some extra time.)
My time with Arvanitis is extremely well-spent; I’ve had roughly ten hours or so worth of lessons with him, and we’ve been able to work through learning most, if not all, of the signs used in Byzantine notation; and with tonight’s lesson we started looking at actual chants. I’m still getting the hang of the intervals, but since he sings all of the exercises with me, my ear is gradually getting it. I feel awfully slow and dumb, but he assures me I’m not, telling me that we’ve covered in five lessons what he usually takes a semester to teach in class. He’s been a good person to get to know otherwise; he’s an adept scholar as well as a performer, and is able to speak with authority about why you’re reading those particular squiggles on the page, not just explain how. It’s also clear that what he does is informed by genuine faith; “When I sing, it’s to glorify God, not me,” he told me the other day, and it was refreshing beyond words to hear somebody like him say such a thing totally un-self-consciously. Last night’s lesson was rather unconventional; he met me at Kifissia Station and said, “Problem — I forgot the keys!” So, we had a lesson outside in the park sitting on a bench. I’ll be very interested to hear how the recording comes out.
By the way, my days of using cabs as my default mode of transportation from Halandri to Kifissia are, I think, over. I found a way to do it via public transportation that is far more reliable, to say nothing of faster by at least fifteen minutes and potentially half an hour depending on how things go. There are a lot more moving parts, but they go quickly, and they don’t involve me waiting for half an hour for a bus that may or may not come, since all of the buses involved are on major thoroughfares. Basically, I take one bus from home to Halandri Station, an express bus to Doukissis Plakentias Station, pick up the suburban railway there to Neratziotissa Station, and then the train to Kifissia Station. I’m not on any one leg of the trip more than five to ten minutes or so, and I don’t have to wait more than 10-15 minutes for any individual segment, either. (Richard public transportation WIN.)
So, one thing that it is pretty hard to get around when it comes to being in this part of the world:
It’s hot.
Now, it’s nowhere near as humid as Indiana is this time of year, so I’m on the whole more comfortable here than I would be at home, but back home I’d be in an air-conditioned building most of the day. That’s not the case here, generally. Greeks are built for the heat and tend to manage without A/C. Maybe they have it, and maybe they even tell you “Turn it on if you need it,” but there’s something unspoken, something behind the eyes, that says, “Only if it’s life or death, please.” I told Arvanitis that to me, it’s always hot here; he chuckled and said, “To me, when I’m in America, it’s always cold.”
To lay all cards on the table: my heritage is English and Danish. My ancestors, as I’ve noted before, were slaying each other in the ice and snow of northernmost Europe wearing only loinclothes and horned helmets. Some of my classmates have talked about finding their family villages while they’re here in Greece; I think mine is called Rydbjerg and it’s in Denmark. I tell them, only half-joking, that my kinsmen were ice fishing while theirs were raising goats.
In other words, I’m calibrated for about fifty degrees cooler than it is here right now, no getting around it. Trust me, I’m wearing all the linen and breathable fabrics I can; I wear a hat to keep off the sun, I carry water with me everywhere I go (and I even drink it without it being boiled in coffee grounds first), I’ve only worn sandals since I’ve been here. I wear undershirts; there are tradeoffs either way there, because the extra layer definitely heats me more, but it keeps me from sweating directly onto my outer shirt too much.
I still have sweat pouring off of me like I’m a miniature Niagara Falls. All. The. Time. I can be on a bus surrounded by people who are barely glowing, and I leave a puddle where I was standing. I have to carry water with me because I’m losing it faster than I’m able to take it in. Even though it’s light straw, my nice Panama hat still contains heat around my head, and I’ve actually sweated through it, with the band showing a telltale white trail from the salt, and I have to clean it out with rubbing alcohol more or less daily lest the hat be, shall we say, far more trouble than it’s worth. Since my feet sweat like the dickens too, essentially what I have to do when I get home is to take off my sandals, put them outside, and then go wash my feet. The sandals then stay outside until I need to wear them again. I also seem to have developed some heat rash on my legs, meaning I’m not wearing shorts again until it clears up.
I’m not sure that we in the constantly climate-controlled parts of the United States fully appreciate how much the weather has an impact on how people behave, to say nothing of the general rhythm of life, in this part of the world. There’s an extent to which dressing comfortably means something very different here than it usually does in the States, for example; mid-afternoon naps make more sense than working during the hottest part of the day; days tend to extend into the nights because it’s still warm but not too hot, and so on. Knowing that this is what the Mediterranean is like adds an extra dimension to St. Photini drawing her water from the well during the noon hour, and it certainly lends a very concrete, gritty reality to Christ washing the feet of the Disciples.
Anyway, for the heat sensitive traveler, I will say, at the risk of passing on too much information but nonetheless wanting to suggest something practical that might not be obvious, that the single best thing I’ve done (besides all of the above) is be smart about my undergarments. As much walking as I do here, there was a strong possibility of a wrong choice in that department making me miserable for the duration of the trip. Lest I really go down the TMI road, I’ll further add only that the closest you can get to something like Nike Dri-Fit shorts will be well worth it.
Oh, one other possibly useful travel tip: evidently, even with transformers and plug adapters, things like hair clippers and other tonsorial electronics from the States have a tendency to not like the power outlets here. I found this out the hard way at 11pm last night, when two things happened simultaneously: 1) the shield on my clippers slipped, taking a large chunk out of my hair, and 2) the batteries in my clippers died, and I was unable to recharge it at all. I wasn’t left with a lot of options beyond the disposable razor that Air France had given me when it turned out my luggage was still in Newark. As Anna the Greek teacher said to me this morning, “Why??? Your head looks like an egg!”
Can’t really say she’s wrong.
(I actually was thinking about donating my head after I die. To bowling.)
I close with a totally unrelated observation: memorials are big deals over here. Public notices are posted, and people travel to them. Here’s an example of such a notice posted near St. George here in Halandri:
Leitourgeia kai Qurbana: Contra den Zeitgeist 