The first half of spring semester got away from me as a result of my extracurricular activities at the beginning of the term, and then my losing a week from illness. The second half of spring semester got away from me because of the remainder of Lent, Holy Week, Pascha, getting the Orthodox Hoosiers website up and running, presenting a paper as well as singing some Byzantine chant for IU’s Medieval Studies Symposium, and then finishing all of my regular schoolwork for the term. It now being the last 30+ hours of the Paschal season or so, I suppose I should say this one last time: Ortanne Laivino! Anwa ortanne Laivino!
Which reminds me: I’m about twenty pages or so away from finally finishing The Silmarillion. I’ve started it any number of times, and gotten a little farther each time, but I finally made a point to keep forging on ahead, come what may. It’s been a rewarding read; it’s not necessarily Tolkien’s most transparent prose and it is a bit challenging to keep track of who is who the whole way through, but that’s probably just because I’m not terribly bright and it is nonetheless very much worth it. I’ll have more to say on it later.
As the end of the semester was coming into view, a couple of interesting things happened. First, I wound up, somewhat unexpectedly, with a choice as to what I could do this summer. I was offered a summer FLAS again to go back to Greece if I wanted, but the truth is, as much as I want to go back, this summer just didn’t seem like the right time. For one thing, Megan is going to Germany for the next academic year, from the end of September ’10 to the beginning of August ’11, and it’s been six years since we’ve both been home during the summer. For another thing, the logistics of being in Greece this summer would be significantly more complicated than last summer was, and with airfare having jumped since last year, most of my stipend would be spoken for before I ever set foot in the country, and that mostly for “redundant” expenses (i. e., having to pay for two places to live for the summer, one in the States and one in Athens). For yet another thing, I have a mammoth Greek and Latin exam to take in about a year, as well as my qualifying exams in Fall ’11, and my advisor and I agreed that with those events on the schedule, eight weeks in Athens doing Modern Greek would probably not be the best use of my time this summer.
While I was contemplating some of these issues a few months ago, I mused to a colleague that it was too bad History didn’t seem to do any sort of summer support if you didn’t have an instructor position. “Oh, no, that’s not true,” he said. “The e-mail just went out — you can apply for pre-dissertation fellowships.”
“Really? I thought I wasn’t far enough along for one of those.”
“Are you writing your dissertation yet?”
“No.”
“Then you’re pre-dissertation. Apply.”
So, I went ahead and wrote up a research proposal for the summer. My advisor said that people either traveling somewhere or who have taken their exams tend to be more competitive, but that it would be worth a shot.
As it happened, a couple of weeks ago I was notified that I am the Hill and Lilly Pre-Dissertation Fellow for History. On a practical level, it is a much better deal financially than the FLAS was going to be, and it means that both Megan and I can be in the same place for the summer. On an academic level, the project that I proposed will do a lot to prepare me for my impending exams, so hopefully I’ll end the summer feeling reasonably ahead of the game. I will look at trying to go back to Greece next summer; it would probably be good for me to look at the American School of Classical Studies’ Byzantine Greek program, and the nice thing about that is that there are a few different possible avenues of funding which aren’t mutually exclusive. That’s sort of an issue with the FLAS — if you have it, you can’t have anything else. I think the idea is sort of that they want you to have enough money to get where you need to go and do what you need to do, but they don’t want you to have enough money to be distracted by other possibilities.
In any event, I have to blink a bit at the realization that not only has History opened their doors to me, but they also seem interested enough in what I’m doing to want to facilitate it during the summer, too. It’s a nice turn of events to have happened.
The other interesting thing that happened was that, a couple of weeks after Pascha, I got an e-mail from John Boyer asking if I might be available to sing in a concert he was putting on with the Josquin Singers in the Bay Area over Pentecost weekend. Long story short, I flew out to Sacramento this last Saturday, the day after finals week was over, and I’ll be here until Sunday, 23 May. I’ll give the details of the concert in a different post, but it’s a neat project in which to be able to participate, and I’m really glad it’s worked out. To be honest, it’s been a little strange how it’s all come together; I haven’t really actively sought out professional singing opportunities for about five years, and it isn’t exactly like I spent hours talking myself up to John while he was in Bloomington. The trip has already worked musician muscles I haven’t had to work in half a decade; as soon as I got off the plane, John asked, “How are your dictation skills?” Turns out there is this three-part Russian setting of the First Ode of the Paschal Canon for which the score has not yet been published, but John wanted to do it in the concert anyway, so I was given the task of transcribing it. It was reasonably easy until the last repeat of the troparion; that’s 40 seconds of polytonal madness, and it took me about two days to get anything that seemed even reasonably close. I will be very curious to look at the published score and see just how many laughs are warranted. (Many thanks, incidentally, to Ivan Plis at Georgetown University, aka “SlavicPolymath,” for giving it a listen and confirming that much of what I had come up with was about as close as we were gonna get.)
That’s the long and the short of it for now. More a bit later. One last time for this year, probably: Christ is risen! Truly he is risen!
This week, our readings dealt primarily with literary sources. I was part of the group that was “leading the discussion” (what seems to be a euphemism for “doing the reading so that the rest of the class doesn’t have to,” given how involved in the discussion the rest of the class seemed willing to be), and the reading I was discussing was the an excerpt from 
The reactions all around were fascinating; they ranged from indifference towards using literary sources to what seemed to be active hostility towards what Cormack was trying to accomplish. “It’s really dangerous to be relying on these kinds of sources for what we do,” I heard more than once. The argument seems to have been that literary sources can only interpret the image for you, and art historians need to be able to see them with their own eyes. Historical context is a nice-to-have, maybe, but ultimately unnecessary and irrelevant compared to actually being able to see what you’re dealing with and to do one’s own analysis of the visual material. Never mind the open criticism I got from one student for trying to relate what we were talking about to a contemporary example, saying point blank, “You can’t do that” — even though Cormack, in the body of the text, invited exactly such an application of his analysis to other scenarios. The professor appeared to understand what I was doing, and tried to bridge the gap between the concerns and what I was actually saying, but my colleague seemed unimpressed and, curiously, quite upset. It was a very odd class session, and I’m still trying to figure out what to make of it. Is Art History, at least as taught here, just adamant about wanting to be Art History, rather than “History of Other Things Where We Occasionally Use Pieces of Art as Evidence”? Like I said, it not being my field, I don’t know exactly what to think, particularly since the professor herself seems to be somebody who is more than adequately conversant with matters of historical context.
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.
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 
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 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.
You can go to 
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? 
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.
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.
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.
That centermost white dot is Tom Hanks.
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”).
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.
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.
The following Monday, I went to an event called the 
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.
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.
Leitourgeia kai Qurbana: Contra den Zeitgeist 