opɯdʒɯlɯklɑr

Once clear of the Spianada, I could see a bunch of magnificently run down buildings in Corfu, and the kind of stream of people I’d last seen in Old Rhodes, and which tells me that this is my kind of place

It really is postcard ready, this place.

One more block, and I came upon the Liston, the tourist highlight of Corfu Town centre for its colonnade. The Liston looks like it came right out of St Mark’s in Venice, but in fact it was built by the occupying French in 1814.

By this stage, I was beginning to wonder if there was anything Venetian left, that wasn’t outshadowed by the 19th century Western rulers of the island. Spoiler alert: with the exception of the Old Town Hall… not really.

The Liston, as you can tell, is an awesome place to have an indulgently slow coffee, watch people go by in the Spianada.

It also is a good place to have an indulgent meal, although it was windy enough by the evening that I went indoors for it, and half an  hour later, so did everyone else.

I am here to discover what the locals do, and that meant I was honour bound to have the local speciality, a pastitsada.

Here, the Aigli restaurant version: macaroni, meat with cinnamon. The meat was familiar enough once I ate into it: it’s kokkinisto, braised meat with tomato sauce featuring cinnamon and cloves. At least some Americans are going to be familiar with that sauce as Cincinnati chilli (though it never occurred to anyone in Greece to add dark chocolate to it). What’s pastitsada about it is the accompaniment with macaroni (or bucatini), rather than the more usual Greek accompaniments of rice or spaghetti.

The waiter suggested I not smother it with grated cheese, as Greeks do the minute they see pasta. Yeah, it was great without the cheese. But I’ve had Greek braised beef with pasta before, even if it wasn’t macaroni. Would have still been fine with cheese!

The version I had of pastitsada at Bellissimo (menu: “with lots of cheese”) was more intense, with some extra secret spices, and with chicken. (The specialty I’d been instructed to find was rooster pastitsada.)

After following the coastline north from Douglas Obelisk (and that took a false start or two itself), I finally caught sight,  not of the Old City itself, but of the Old City Fortress. (As I found out later, that was the Old City in early Byzantine times.)

The ancient Greek looking bit on the fortress is the Anglican church of St George, built in 1840 for the British soldiers at the fortress in predictably ancient Grecian garb, and turned over to the Orthodox church when Corfu was turned over to Greece. I made a note that it was a must-see for me.

I then turned around into what I vaguely called “the park” at the time; subsequently I found out “the park” had a name, the Spianada. (Venetian for Standard Italian Spianata, “Esplanade”.) Behind the Esplanade, the Old Town was clearly visible, so this was a right turn, not a wrong turn.

At the start of the Esplanade used to be Douglas’ Obelisk. It has been replaced by a statue of John Capodistria, first head of state of independent Greece, born here. It only took him 3 years to be assassinated for trying to curb the power of warlords. It took a lot more decades than that for anyone of comfortable stature to rule Greece.

The Spianada is very grand, very British, and impossibly out of place in Greece. Greeks do occasionally do parks, but nothing on this scale.

The Rotunda commemorates, predictably enough in Ancient Greek, the arrival of Thos. Maitland in 1815, after Corfu was the last island to be wrested from the French, to assume rule as governor of the islands. The sequence went: Venice (1204) > Napoleonic France (1799) > autonomy under Russian–Ottoman condominium (1800–1807) > France > island-hopping conquest by Britain (1809–1814) > Greece (1864).

My sense of direction proved unexpectedly challenged in Corfu. In Larisa, I had an excuse: the landscape was flat, every piazza corner looked like every other piazza corner. In Corfu Town, I kept getting lost so systematically, I don’t think I can blame the terrain any more.

In fact, the contrast with Zante Town makes me realise my sense of direction only copes with one dimension. Salonica downtown is a few streets parallel to the Via Egnatia. Zante Town is a few streets back from the harbour. It’s a line. Old Corfu Town on the other hand is a grid, and getting to Old Corfu Town from New Corfu Town (I was near the border, the erstwhile Porto Reale) involved me turning around a corner on San Rocco Square, which I assiduously kept missing.

San Rocco Square, now renamed Georgiou Theotoki Square. It took me three days to work out I had to turn around the corner, to head northeast.

I certainly didn’t work that out the first day. I ended up heading south down Alexandra Ave, noting to Facebook in my befuddlement:

• there are a few faded 19th century houses among the standard 20th century brutalist stuff,
• there is a tourist bus and a tourist horse coach doing the rounds,
• the sing song accent of the locals, that I have only known from shadow puppet plays in its Vaudeville edition, sounded curiously Cypriot to me out of the city’s taxi drivers.

(We’re coming back to the accent of the locals at the end of this cycle.)

To Oüardus Duglasius, knight, general, high commissioner, who has become benefactor to all Seven Islands of the Ionian, through increase of the academic offerings and the establishment of the Ionian High School and the improvement of Primary Schooling, but also through the establishment of the Ionian Bank and the Savings Banks (?), and through the preservation and compilation of the laws, and the extension and completion of public roads; and especially in Corfu, for opening up the seaside road, bringing no small benefit to those dwelling  both in the town and the countryside, and for placing cemeteries for both the Eastern Orthodox and Roman  churches, and for ensuring houses of refuge for the indigent and the insane, and for founding the hospital, and the prison, and for repairing and improving the aqueduct constructed by Fredericus Adamus, and for lending aid to the merchants building the Stock Exchange, and for establishing communication between the city and the outskirts, by ensuring ease of construction in having marshes dried and building bridges: the Commons of Corfiots, in eternal gratitude, have erected this in the year 1843.

We know the prison and prison warden it name-checks, from the 30s. We know that the first person to record the song in the 50s was in primary school when that warden was running the Old Army Barracks jail in Athens, so it can’t be his lyric, and the song must have gone unrecorded before him. («Δεν ξανακάνω φυλακή με τον Καπετανάκη»: Ποιος ήταν επιτέλους ο Καπετανάκης, but see also revisionist account in Η ιστορία του ”Δεν ξανακάνω φυλακή…”)

I’m not going back to prison
with Kapetanakis,
and his Dooglas moustache.
We’ve talked it over, we’ve made a deal.

My poor mother,
you’ve given her poison to drink,
you did, Kapetanakis.
Let her not wear purple [for mourning] any more.

I wake up, I see iron bars
fastened to the ground,
those  poor men!
We’ve talked it over, we’ve made a deal.

My travelogue posts have a spasmodic character, and they reflect the spasmodic way they have been authored. The travelogue pattern I have established in this sojourn to Greece has been:

• Walk 100 m
• Take 5 photos
• Spend an hour in a cafe writing commentary about those photos,
  • often with tangential excursions into other aspects of Greek history and culture,
  • as an awkward mix of speech to text and Swype to text (for when the vocabulary or the proper names get too much for Google)
• Walk off in the wrong direction
• After 10 minutes come to realise I am walking off in the wrong direction
• Get back to where I was before
• Repeat
• Glance cursorily at the stream of Likes the posts get, especially once people are awake in Australia
• At the end of the day, review, and fix the most outrageous speech recognition errors
• A week later, copy paste all my Facebook posts into a sequence of blog posts, and add even more links

Like I said before, with reference to Hull, I treat tourism as an excuse for writing prompts. In fact, I make a point of looking for things that would be quirky to write about…

I didn’t have a local guide in Corfu, so I couldn’t work out what the local rivalries are among the Seven Islands. Working out what town the locals resent is ground zero for establishing contrasts and getting people on side, I’ve always felt. (Mainly because of how much Salonicans resent Athens.) I tried that technique out with Vangelis Lolos in Larisa, and the “Austrians” of Volos, but he wasn’t biting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionian_Islands#/media/File:Ionian_Islands.svg

I couldn’t work out the regional rivalries of the Heptanese, but that doesn’t stop me guessing. Some of these guesses, I have to warn readers, are less well informed than others.

1. Kerkyra, aka Corfu, on Corfu: We are the premier island of the Heptanese, and the rest are lesser imitiations.
   Everyone else on Corfu: (True, which is why the only reaction is resentful seething.)

2. Zakynthos, aka Zante, on Zante: We are the Flower of the Levant! All your culture and music comes from us! We are the brains of the Heptanese!
   Corfu on Zante: … Well, we’ve got three philharmonic societies here. How many have you got again, Zakynthos?

3. Cephallonia, aka Cephallenia: All your culture and music comes from us! We are the brains of the Heptanese!
   Zante: … Is there an echo in here?
   Everyone else: That’s the place everyone blasphemes, right? No wonder their leading author got excommunicated. (Andreas Laskaratos.)

4: Lefkada, aka Santa Maura: WHY DO YOU KEEP FORGETTING TO INCLUDE US IN THE LIST OF IONIAN ISLANDS?! WE ARE BY FAR THE MOST UNSPOILT ISLAND!!
Everyone else: You’re only an island because the Ancient Greeks dug a canal. And the way you speak Greek, you still act like you’re attached to the mainland. (Lefkada has the same vowel reduction as Greek mainland dialects north of Corinth do.)

5: Ithaca, aka Thiaki: HOME OF ODYSSEUS!
Everyone else: Yeah yeah, Thiaki, Home of Odysseus, whatever. After the first 2500 years, it gets old.

6: Paxi: “Paxi and Anti-Paxi, Worth Sixteen Londons!” (A couplet I learned in school: Παξοί κι Αντιπάξοι, Λόντρες δεκάξι.)
Everyone else: That couplet’s bigger than the island of Paxi. I mean what next, do we count the Diapontian Islands to get to 10? Ereikoussa, Othonoi, Mathraki, total population 1200?
Paxi: We’ve got double that population, we’ll have you know!
Everyone else: 2400. Uhuh. You do realise London is 4 thousand times bigger, right?
Paxi: Not to change the subject, but… how did we get to seven islands to begin with?

7: Cythera, aka Cerigo: Birthplace of Aphrodite!
Everyone else: Right. Venetian conquest they held on to after the fall of Crete, and them lumped in with us. Have you even looked at a map, Cerigo? The Ionian Sea doesn’t go that far south. No wonder the Greek government lumped you in with Attica. (Nick Nicholas’ Answer To: Why does the island of Kythera belong to Athens although it is geographically near Peloponnese?)

I came to Corfu and Zante in my 50s, out of a nebulous query that I had formulated in my teens.

The Ionian islands were the only part of Greece not to have been ruled by the Ottomans. They had 600 years of continuous rule from Venice instead. How did that make them different from the rest of Greece? How differently did they tick?

I’ve found when I came to Greece that my cousin Irene has pondered the same question in her time. But Modern Greece being such a strongly centralist state, with such drive to realise homogeneity (like the mini-France it has turned out to be), the time to come to Corfu to get an answer to such a question was 1880, 1930 tops. And even at that time, it would have needed three months of close anthropological observation, not a week of strolling around two towns. Not to mention that it’s a question hardly innocent of Turcophobia.

And as the social realist stories of Constantine Theotokis show (a lot more on him later), the Turkish or Venetian layer of influence didn’t reach all that deep; Greek peasantry was not ultimately all that different whether their suzerain was the Ottoman Empire, Venice, or one after the other one, as in the case of Crete.

But a curiosity about the Ionian islands did get me here, and I am glad that it did. I have found my time here profoundly relaxing (to the extent that I don’t know how I’m going to resume work on Monday), I’ve enjoyed the urban landscape and the history I’ve picked up along the way, and I’ve picked up lots of anecdotes and curiosities to share.

What I haven’t quite formulated is an answer to the question, what is Corfu like? I can’t answer the initial question, as I was hardly in a position as a tourist to get inside of the head of Corfiots; but even this more straightforward question is a challenge. Corfu Town is beautiful, but how would I describe it?

… Corfu Town is in some ways an 18th century theme park, just like Old Rhodes is a Mediaeval theme park. In some ways: Corfu Town in the summer welcomes a steady tramp of cruise ship passenger processions; a few streets in the Old Town are as weighed down with tourist tat as any in Old Rhodes; the alleyways and genteelly decaying two-storey buildings are postcard ready.

But Corfu Town retains a heft about it, a heft that Zante Town lacks, and that Rhodes Town is too theme-park now to carry. Corfu Town was where decisions were made, and history happened; and it still feels like it might. Not as much now as it used to—the town only has a population of 30k, it very much feels on the periphery, a bit too laid back (although the right amount of laid-back that I was looking for). But your heart swells to walk through those cobblestones and alleys and battlements. This was a place that mattered: it tells you it’s a privilege to walk through it.

(And any regional town where you can get drinks at a bar at 1 am, as I did to finish a work task, is a place that has my respect.)

And if anything jumps out about Corfu about being out of the ordinary for Greece, it’s not its Venetian heritage. It’s its British heritage. The British made sure the cityscape commemorated the fifty years they ran the island, from 1816 to 1864. And in several little ways, the material culture of the island has held on to reminders of it. Even without the steady flow of British tourists here.

There is more to the place, but I was a shy tourist, I wasn’t going to start quizzing people…

… although I am a lot more relaxed about chatting to strangers now than a month ago: the country is rubbing off on me.

It is an exaggeration to surmise that I go to places off my usual route when overseas, merely so they can serve as writing prompts.

It is, but not as much of one as it should be. There have been several trips in my life where I spent more time writing about what I was experiencing, than actually experiencing it. Particularly when I’m fairly far north.

Larisa is not as far north as, oh, Hull; but it’s still occasioned some reflections. Including the reflections I’ve just written.

Getting to Larisa from Salonica involved me taking the train. The rail disaster on that same track was three months ago, and most people still hesitate to board the train. I made a point of boarding a train; that was the kind of ornery reactiveness I gravitate towards when I’m outside my comfort zone.

The rail approach to Larisa is through a run-down neighbourhood, and I momentarily had a sinking feeling that my unarticulated Thessalian Gothic fears were going to be realised.

When I got off the train, I was just puzzled at my own temerity, venturing into a place I knew nothing about. What exactly was I doing here?

When my friend Vangelis Lolos pinged me that he was coming to pick me up, I asked him the same question.

“Anthropological research!”, he said, relaying back to me my own earlier perplexity while in Sitia.

The walk from the station is through a somewhat featureless part of town, as is often enough the case for railway stations in Europe; so my “what exactly was I doing here” was still left a hanging question…

… right up until we hit the city centre.

Larisa, as I got to experience it in a weekend, is a joyous cake of piazzas and fountains and parks and monuments, and hip Greeks (wearing, now that I think of it, a bit more black than they do in Salonica) spilling out of cafes and onto the pedestrianised sidewalks. And the cake is held together with cohesive town planning and an intelligible grid.

I’m not used to this kind of thing in Greece. I’m used to twisty mazes and no tree in sight, not malls and greenery. It’s a prosperous, coffee-drinking city in Greece, with the same cafe-hoppers as in any number of other Greek cities—except its cityscape has been allowed to loosen its corset and breathe.

I found it magnificent. I grinned the whole time at the novelty of it.

As noted, the locals I met (including Vangelis himself) were puzzled at my enthusiasm. They live there, and they know the downsides of living there. And when I asked them what they were, the list was familiar enough.

And see, they were the downsides to living in regional Greece in particular, or Greece in general. But those other cities in Greece didn’t have MALLS. MALLS, MAN. Where else in Greece has come up with pedestrian malls?

It gets better. The prefecture has pioneered the use of roundabouts in Greece.

A lot of the forward thinking, I am informed, can be attributed to Aristides Lamproulis (1921–1999), mayor 1980-1994. There was much annoyance in the city with the strange novelties the communist mayor brought in, the fountains and piazzas and pedestrian malls: WHERE ARE OUR CUSTOMERS SUPPOSED TO PARK?

They like the malls fine now. As did I.

The roundabouts (which were the initiative of the regional administration and not the city) are the only initiative to have been universally applauded from the beginning.

The comedian Lakis Lazopoulos is from Larisa, and his TV skit series Ten Little Dimitrises (1992–2003) was huge enough to have influenced the Greek vernacular: it’s become commonplace in contemporary colloquial use to drop the preposition after “go”. The expression that most Greeks first noticed that trend in was pame platia?, “Wanna go [to the] piazza?”, one of the catchphrases from the show. And having been to Larisa, I can see why Lazopoulos’ character wanted to go the piazza. Everyone in Larisa goes to the piazza, or next to it. And one piazza keeps spilling into another.

An even bigger shock for a Greek city was how big Alcazar city park is: a park that starts at the rerouted river Peneus, and the statues of local notables,

then was extended into what was the local open market, and the inevitable (for that time period) monument to the WWII Resistance,w

and keeps going all the way up to the notorious Alcazar stadium—and, to its west, the tomb of Hippocrates:

Larisa is in Thessaly, and Thessaly was at the edge of the Greek classical world: the action was in Athens and the Peloponnese. So Larisa is rather proud that Hippocrates, Mr Oath, worked and died in Larisa.

The Alcazar park would not be out of place in Germany, with its bike-rider traffic instruction course, its pavilions, and its peacefulness (at least until you get to the stadium).

Getting to the park involves treading the Archbishop Anastasius footbridge, over the now defeated Peneus river, rerouted in the 30s.

What it bridges over is old, and for Greeks of a certain age, it triggers the Pavlovian reaction of the old song:

“At the river of Larisa, called Peneus,
If perchance you do not want me, that’s where I’ll go drown.”

There would never have been a settlement of Larisa if there wasn’t a river there first. As anyone who has played Civilization knows. But the river has outlived its usefulness to the the city, as I am told, so by the time it was dammed, it was no longer a big deal to the city.

Still, very pretty bridge. The river now just needs some rowboats to be completely Cambridge. (And fewer lovelorn suitors from the 60s…)

The prosperity of Larisa did need an unwelcome side-effect of the river to be vanquished though. Hence the riverside statues of local notables include Emmanuel Manousakis.

Manousakis was a Cretan doctor who worked in the military, specialising in infectious diseases. He got a job with the army medical corps in Larisa as a demotion in 1935, after being photographed by the media in the wrong place at the wrong time. And since he was already there, he mobilised the army medical corps to help eliminate malaria in Larisa, as the river Peneus was being rerouted.

The urban grid is what makes the city all work. In comparison with most of the large cities of Greece, Larisa was a small place, 10k people when incorporated into Greece, and that gave the opportunity for some actual city planning to happen. Something quite impossible in the medieval streets of Iraklio, for example.

As a result, the good news is that there is a discernible grid, with wide open streets, linking piazza to piazza, and pleasant to walk down.

The bad news is that Larisa, queen of the plains of Thessaly, is flat. Very flat. So flat, locals say “flat” in English for emphasis. Which means that every street corner looks identical to every other street corner.

It is astonishingly easy to get lost here. Even with Google Maps on. Believe me, I wasn’t even trying to get lost. (In fact, I was convinced I was lost when I went out for coffee on Sunday morning—when it turned out I’d ended up at exactly the same place I’d gone for coffee Saturday morning.)

Larisa has a balance of Ancient marble and Byzantine and Ottoman brick—something not a lot of places have in Greece (because not a lot of places were prospering cities in both Antiquity and the Middle Ages.) The first ancient theatre of Larisa, up has been adopted as the city logo.

It is the focus of a flurry of restoration work at the moment. The surrounding buildings over the centuries looted the theatre as building material. The surrounding buildings are now slowly being taken over and levelled by the archaeological service, and they are looting the bits of the theatre right back.

It is a point of local pride, which my cicerone Vangelis was delighted to relay, that Larisa was a big enough deal to have had two theatres in antiquity. (The mumbled follow-up is, the Romans built the second theatre for theatrical performances, because the more imposing first theatre had been turned over to gladiatorial sports.)

The second ancient theatre is a humble little ruin, only a couple of marble seat rows shaded by surrounding apartment buildings.

I had not noticed the cypress trees planted all around. Vangelis pointed them out to me, and yes, they are a nice touch. They are a cemetery tree in Greece, but this quiet humble theatre ruin does have that feel about it.

The second theatre has already been used live, and as you can tell from the brand new marble additions in the restoration, the first theatre is going to get a lot of modern bums on seats in time.

The Byzantine brick isn’t represented by the original basilica of St Achilles, which endured for a millennium. It’s changed location a couple of times since, each time on what is as close to a hilltop as the very flat Larisa can muster. The original basilica survives only in its foundations, and apparently was close to being reduced to its foundations when the Ottomans arrived anyway; its Byzantine brick ended up repurposed as the nearby Bedesten (market).

In a more cozy manifestation, bits of Byzantine villas from Justinian’s time poke up in a city green space, on top of the underground carpark of St Bessarion, next to the Music Hall that was my own landmark. (My AirBnB was around the corner.)

My trip was motivated by wanting to meet Vangelis Lolos, whom I have known on Quora for close to a decade now, and from whom I have learned so much about my culture. He did not disappoint as a host, or as a conversationalist, or as a friend. His country is lucky to have welcomed back someone who combines such erudition and such dry wit (at least for a Greek; the dad jokes, I am choosing to pretend didn’t happen).

It is, on the other hand, melancholy to realise that Quora has taken such a tumble in recent years, there really wasn’t much going on currently on the site that we cared enough to talk about…

It’s an interesting thing, to interrogate one’s petty prejudices. Especially when you think yourself above petty prejudices.

Your correspondent aspires to cosmopolitanism and objectivity, and whenever he runs into the siren song of Greek nationalism, he will spell Greek words with a <c> instead. But bias seeps under your skin all the more when you think it can’t. This is a simple, daft, instance, but enough of one to do penance for.

The official narrative of Greek nationalism praises the kilt-wearing warriors of the Greek mainland, who fought the War of Greek Independence. The Greek White Pages number is 11821 (1821 being the year the war started): the phone service has traded on Greek nationalism, and so did the ad for it, delivered with accent to match:

Don’t think from that ad that the mountain man accent featured, all reduced vowel system and sloppy sibilants, is revered. It’s held in as cartoonish contempt as the cartoon itself hints at. Hillbilly. Unsophisticated. Stinking of the sheep pen.

The depiction of the malaproping northerner familiar from Grecollywood in the 60s, as done by Kostas Hatzichristos, was on the affectionate side:

(He won’t sell “villager” souvlaki, no sir, he’s too close to the village himself to be seduced by any urban nostalgia for the sheep pen. He’s selling a “European” souvlaki! And of course he’s going to mangle it as “Agro-pean”. That’s what northerner hillbillies do, you see. Αμ πώς!)

Hatzichristos may represent the benign side of the prejudice, but the prejudice is there, and it doesn’t stop at the accent. And it is something I know I’ve soaked in from my environment growing up.

The Cretan accent, on the other hand, is revered. For the most part, anyway. There was some mocking portrayal of Cretans as naive in Grecollywood, mostly by Giorgos Papazisis.

(I was very ready to fulminate at this point at Papazisis not even being from Crete, and mangling the accent. But then, I doubt Hatzichristos, of Istanbul descent, was a scrupulous dialectician himself.)

But Cretan parochialism, and Cretan investment in their macho image, has asserted itself right back. (Kaliarda, the queer cant of Greece up to the 60s, had no kind epithet for anybody, but its speakers were keen observers. Their epithet for Crete was musandopalikaru. “Mother of fake braves.” They could tell braggarts a mile off.)

And as a result, Cretan is the only dialect that still turns up in the mass media. It turns up in soapies with the same repeated plot—feuds destroying families, and indeed entire villages; but the toxicity of Cretan masculinity is celebrated rather than critiqued. And it is certainly not ridiculed, the way gentle big lug Manolios was, as portrayed by Papazisis. (Or for that matter his literary precedent, Pantelis Prevelakis‘ naive hero Patouchas “Bigfoot”.) The heroes of Cretan feud soapies are too tragic to be offered up for mockery, though their notions of manhood are more ludicrous. And in any case, Papazisis’ mockery was still gentler than Hatzichristos’.

That’s not to say that Cretan dialect isn’t retreating in the face of constant attack from the urban standard, and that so is much of the traditional culture that goes with it: of course it is. But there is no voice out of Athens heard so far south as Sitia, telling people there that it is ridiculous to be Cretan. Cretans have kept their parochial pride, and the mainstream has not refuted it. Crete assimilates those who have settled there from elsewhere, be they Asia Minor refugees, Albanian migrants, or African soccer players: their grammar may be Standard Greek, but they all end up with heavy Cretan accents, with its melodramatically swooping intonation. And they happily keep that accent up, when they go off to work in the neighbouring islands.

In fact, I wondered while in Kasos, where I heard far more of the Cretan than Dodecanesian accent, whether Crete was the US to the Dodecanese’s Canada: the boorish neighbour, drowning them out in its own oblivious loudness. When Pallini Music School performed a Cretan fantasia in the heart of Old Rhodes Town, I wondered that even more. (Though the Rhodes shopkeepers at least keep their accent up strongly. Making a stash in Rhodes is also something to maintain local pride in.)

And somehow, I don’t think it’s the same elsewhere in Greece. In other parts of Greece, the local accent is not celebrated as charming and/or macho—to say nothing of the horror that encounters any non-Hellenic language. In other parts of Greece, local peculiarities don’t turn up on soaps in Athenian TV. The White Pages mascot with the kilt and the sloppy sibilants isn’t admired or feared in mass culture, the way the Cretan is, a dagger stashed in the belt of his breeches. He’s held up to ridicule by the city folk of Athens. Him and his dress and his customs and his sheep.

And the good people of the north and the Greek mainland hear Athens mocking northerners, loud and clear.

The thing is: so do the good people of the south. And the Greek islands.

And Crete.

My friend Evangelos Lolos, from whom I have learned so much about my culture, was not born in Thessaly in order to challenge my biases. But when I was drawing up my itinerary, and I realised that I wanted to meet him, I also realised that I had a bias instilled in me, that discouraged me from visiting him in Thessaly. I hesitated to detour away from Salonica, to venture out into the actual North.

(Yes, in many ways Salonica is the capital of the North, the counterweight to Athens. In a few critical ways, it is as cut off from the regional North, as Athens is from the regional South. And the Greek mainstream, that supplies so many “ew, Northern” cliches about the north, has a different set of cliches about Salonica. Patronising, rather than ridiculing.)

I did not even dare articulate to myself the biases driving me away from Larisa, I just recognised that they were there, and they needed not to be there: they were cheating me of visiting a fairly large chunk of the country. This was the trip for me to see bits of Greece I had not seen before. This was the trip to expose myself to new experiences, and work towards surpassing those petty fears that had kept me locked into the past. Yes, damn it, I was going to do a side trip to Larisa, precisely because I was reluctant to.

And having now been there, I can dare articulate those biases to myself, accumulated over dozens of movies and jokes and a few classic novels, and toss them for the nonsense they always were.

Why exactly would being Cretan be inherently superior to being Thessalian? To the extent of making me reluctant to set foot in Thessaly? What curious notions were beneath it?

• “They talk funny.” They don’t in Crete? I’m not going to seriously argue that /x/ > [ɕ] is charming, but /s/ > [ʃ] is inherently ugly, am I?
• “They’re culturally conservative.” Again, they aren’t in Crete? At least they don’t have feuds in Thessaly.
• “They’re pastoralists.” Yeah, and you think your pastoralist second cousin George is pretty awesome.
• “They were serfs.” As was every Orthodox villager in Crete under Venice.
• “They’re lowlanders.” Blessed with rich fertile plains that feed the country. HOW VERY DARE THEY.
• “There’s Vlachs here.” Ok, so you get to eat a bit more cheese if you’re lucky. That’s not even mainstream Greek prejudice—the most bigoted Greek nationalist embraces Vlachs as loyal Greeks. That’s the heavily monolingual past of Crete at work on me.

I mean, come on. Are these the reasons to fear that people are going to be irretrievably different to you, and you won’t be able to make any sense of them?

Of course not. This is the same level of cultural bias by osmosis that tells you that everything in the American South is evil, and that consumers very far from the US’ ongoing cultural immolations replicate unthinkingly. (And with far less pretext.) No, there is such a thing as good country music. No, mint juleps are not the drink of the devil. No, I trust that Faulkner is worth reading.

And yes, Larisa was indeed worth visiting. Why the hell wouldn’t it be? In fact, I was grinning the entire time I was there: I found its cityscape delightful, to an extent that puzzled the locals I met. (That wasn’t overcompensation, although I know that was a risk; that was just happiness at seeing a well laid-out city full of people lounging in outdoor cafes.)

Evangelos was curious what exactly I thought I was going to find, when I was reluctant to come to Larisa. I didn’t even dare formulate what exactly I thought I was going to find, because I already knew it was going to be stupid. But it was probably some Thessalian Gothic scene straight out of Karkavitsas ca. 1895, with the urbane 160k people of the fifth largest city of Greece reduced down to a flock of goats and a couple of kilt-wearing Thessalians, snarling at each other in Aromanian, and looking at southron arrivals menacingly.

Told you it was stupid. But Karkavitsas’ Beggar really is that powerful a novel. Especially if you read it at the age of 10…

At Pringipessa taverna, Salonica, 23 May 2023.

There’s been an election here.

The results were SYRIZA electorally smashed. Partly by a resurgent right and far right, but it’s been far too convenient for to blame that alone. There’s been a whole lot more voters in no mood to give SYRIZA a third chance; and the memories of 2015–2019 are raw enough, that people fled to the also resurgent, and familiar, brand of PASOK—whose own failings of 1981–2010 have now receded into the past enough to be forgotten, if not forgiven.

None of the four front-runners were convincing: the Tories were bland and polished, SYRIZA were in permanent opposition mode, PASOK were blaming both left and right to a comical degree, and the Communists are still waiting for the Revolution. The Greek people had to vote for someone, with little enthusiasm; and a lot more voted against SYRIZA than anyone, left or right, expected.

There are several SYRIZA supporters that I follow on Facebook. I commend Nikos Sarantakos for his sober assessment, and his readiness to concede strategic failure. I am often at odds with both his politics and his fervour, but on this occasion, he gave an account that honours him.

(His main analysis: SYRIZA, unlike both PASOK and the Communist Party, is stuck in 3% of the electorate mode, and did not develop the level of party machinery that a 40% of the electorate party needs to function. Something which I, less, charitably, have called amateurishness in my time.)

Of the others that I follow here, it is entirely fair to say that many went apeshit. Saying that to vote Tory was to vote for New World Order puppets, with the blood of the Tempe rail disaster dripping from their hands. (As if Minister Spirtzis revolutionised Greek Rail during his tenure in the previous government.) Wishing all the catastrophes they could on the Greek people that did not reelect them.

It got far more toxic, of course, on Twitter, with good leftists, good servants of The People, wishing the rest of Euboea burnt to a crisp (“NOT A SPRIG OF CAMOMILE LEFT”), and pledging allegiance to Erdoğan, should he choose to invade as divine retribution for our sins.

(They said that about Mehmed II, as well.)

An average day in contemporary US politics, in other words; but not the kind of thing I’m used to in this country. This country’s civil war was meant to be exorcised by now. The apathy of the Greek people around the election was proof that they now know better, finally wise to the impracticalities of demagoguery, after a devastating confrontation with their limits in the 2010s.

And for that matter, the lack of celebration from the Right shows that they are just as human, and as aware of the impasse the country is in, and take no joy in having to pick the New Democracy party. And not, as a friend suggested, that they’re merely malingering, ready to be unleashed at the bidding of their masters (like so many fiends, as opposed to 40% of your fellow citizens).

Those friends are starting to settle down into more constructive commentary, I see. But as people also have pointed out, its how you deal with life’s downs that shows your true character, not life’s ups. And too many of those who exult in the superior morality of the progressive appear to have taken Brecht’s Lösung as a manual, not a parody.

After the uprising of the 17th of June
The Secretary of the Writers’ Union
Had leaflets distributed on the Stalinallee
Which stated that the people
Had squandered the confidence of the government
And could only win it back
By redoubled work [quotas]. Would it not in that case
Be simpler for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

The people are not all-wise, despite the mythology of the Greek left proclaiming so (for selective values of who counts as “the people”). But you don’t get to “dissolve the people and elect another”. At least not in a democracy. (You do in a dictatorship of the proletariat, literally, but let’s not go there.)

They voted against you? They voted against you. That’s not your cue to do more of the same, ever more eternal struggle. That’s the cue for you to take your lumps, work out what YOU did wrong, and do better next time. Your business is winning elections, not sainthoods.

Although doing more of the same certainly feels more satisfying…