opɯdʒɯlɯklɑr

Whenever I am anywhere near Salonica, this place gets a lot of money out of me, and I have to work out how to mail a whole lot of books back to Australia:

The Educational Institute of the National Bank of Greece: Μορφωτικό Ίδρυμα Εθνικής Τράπεζας (MIET). A heavy hitter as an academic publisher in its own right, and a treasury of academic publications in Greek in general.

There is an Athens bookshop and a Salonica bookshop. The Athens bookshop is central, but on a side-street; the Salonica shop is as central as central can be, on the corner of Venizelos St and Tzimiski St (the latter now the major shopping street of Salonica), so it is impossible to miss…

or resist.

I am toning it down this time around, as I’m not truly getting to read that much any more. So I only bought a handful of books this time around.

(Why yes, that is just a handful. You should have seen last time I was here.)

But one of the books I did make a point of picking up was

“The ingenious nobleman Don Kishotis of Mantsa. The first known Greek translation.”

It’s a simple book spine, with three words in ancient accentuation. Euripides. Alcestis. Jacob.

The Jacob is Daniel Jakob, or if you prefer Daniil Iakov (1947–2014), classics professor at Salonica U. He taught my cousin Irene, among many others. Euripides’ play Alcestis was his special interest, and this is his translation and commentary of the play.

Salonica used to be a Jewish town. Jakob is the only Jew I have met here (born in Veria, down the road), and I met him only once. I remember him kind the way absent minded professors often are, doting towards his young daughter, and (as a classicist rather than as a Jew) grateful to Germany for how he had been welcomed there professionally.

The message the book spine is sending is not one many Jews would welcome, and they would have good reason to mistrust it. But Daniel Jakob himself, I suspect, would.

The message the book spine is sending is that Euripides and Jakob are countrymen. They belong in the same, Ancient Greek font.

Requiescas.

I went and saw a play in my first week in Salonica, with my cousin Christos. It was one of only a couple of plays left to see, the season was nearing an end, and as my cousin is an aficionado of the theatre and the cinema both, I thought it appropriate to meet him on his turf.

The play was The Witches of Vardø, Οι μάγισσες του Βάρντε, a dramatisation of the first witch trials in Vardø, in 1621. Play written originally in Greek, by Maria Rapti.

There was something vaguely familiar about the small Norwegian town of Vardø, and it took me a while to remember: it turns up in the Wikipedia article about Sitia. European Route E75 starts in Vardø, at the top of Europe, and ends in Sitia, which is as far south in Europe as is useful to talk about an international road route.

Vardø normally ends up in Greek as <Varde>, but I noted that the play poster decided to play funny fonts with the place:

The play has a YouTube trailer filmed in the outdoors:

but of course, as a stage play it is a far bleaker affair. From the director’s blurb (“A murdered woman never dies. Her existence is transmuted into power. A power capable of burning down the whole world”), it was clearly not going to be a dry documentary, and I was worried that there was going to be nothing either Norwegian or plausible about it, and that it would be an hour and a half of lecturing.

True, there was nothing Norwegian about it. Let alone Sami—the proximity to the pagan Sami being one of the real reasons for the moral panic behind the witch trials. (At least the characters did namecheck them.) True, there was a bit of leaning in on the theme of exploitation and fear of women. The daft details that the women were forced to confess to were recited—but not, perhaps, the desperate lack of imagination that women in the middle of nowhere had about what consorting with the Devil might actually involve. (“He, um, gave us some beer?”)

And what was the main sin for me, most noticeable in the first act: the dialogue was in bookish contemporary urban Greek. Peasants do not talk like that now or then, and every συνέβη uttered stuck out as awkward.

But the play worked well. It made you hate the witch hunters, it made you mourn for the women tortured into betraying each other, and it even made the wish fulfilment scene at the end acceptable.

In the real world, there were two more trials in Vardø in the following 40 years, and 91 victims—a dozen Sami men, the rest Norwegian women. The Steilneset monument recently built at Vardø, in the vague hope of attracting tourism, features a mirrored eternal flame in a chair, with nothing consoling or noble about it, just the terror of irrational rage.

(From Steilneset Memorial / Peter Zumthor and Louise Bourgeois, photographed by Andrew Meredith)

SPOILER?

In the play, after the first woman is burned at the stake, the other women grab knives and flip the script, while issuing a none-too-metaphorical warning to wake the other women up to what was going on. The local priest, already portrayed as a weak man and a follower, was easy enough to torture into admitting consorting with Satan himself.

But there was a nice detail in the final wish fulfilment; it undermined the facile narrative being prepared, but that made it much more effective, and Rapti is to be commended for writing it in.

Unlike the local priest, the witch hunter had dedicated his life to believing that women were evil and in league with Satan. Rebelling women with knives at his throat were hardly going to convince him of the opposite.

No teary confession from him. He just asked them to get on with it.

Salonicans are overall a much more low-key people than the Brian Blesseds of Crete. Something Salonicans themselves acknowledge.

A decade before he became a sesquipedalian reactionary member of parliament, Kostas Zouraris was a magical realist author. And his “fairy tale” Μέσα στο σάμαλι η αχεροποίητος “In the shambali unmade of human hands” beautifully captures the miserableness of 50s Salonica—and Salonicans’ yearning for somewhere sunnier in nature and in mood, somewhere like Crete.

In this town, a strong wind kept blowing, and people had given it some name or other. But the wind just made fun of them and told them “You guys are so clueless, giving winds and breezes any old name you can think up. Can’t you hear how much fairer my sound is than my name? You lot should just mind your own business, and watch how much better I make your town look, when I blast my way through it.”

The strong wind was right, because this town was soft, and a bit slack, and hazy all the time because it got damp; it got all plump down in the city centre, and it was full of mud, Sunday schools, and stool pigeons. It was nothing like Crete, shining through its grapes and deep-shaded carob trees, with its boastful leaping men and laughing women dancing.

[…]

The strong wind was right to make fun of the lot of them. Because their town got a bit of backbone into it, and stood up as tall and playful as it small tiled churches, only when he, mighty as he was, blew.

Then the mud would set; the stool pigeons would draw back; and the gendarmes with their moustaches, their twisted bodies and their black-and-yellow nails would rivet their eyeballs straight up at the roof of the Transfers Department, Poland Street. No, Crete was one thing this windy town would never turn into, this town of mud and stool pigeons doing their rounds with their yellowing nails, by its playful terracotta churches, in its cafes and outside its houses.

(The title is tricky to translate, like anything culturally resonant will be. Shambali (to use its Turkish name, as Wikipedia does), is one of the many syrupy desserts shared across the Aegean, made of semolina, sugar, and yoghurt. acheropoiētos “unmade of human hands” is how the Orthodox church attributes miraculous origin to a small number of icons, and one such icon gave its name to the 5th century Salonican Church of the Acheiropoietos. To speak of a dessert as being of divine origin is the kind of jarring conflation that magical realism does well, and however ridiculous Zouraris proved as an orator, as an author he did it very well indeed.)

… I love that excerpt, by the way, as an outsider. I was introduced to it by my friend George, Salonican born and bred. Another native Salonican I have consulted loathed it: she thought it was infected with Athenian cliches about the second city, and that while it did reflect a time of crisis in Salonican identity, that time was long past since.

Salonica may well still know it’s no Crete, but it has a population, even if they are quieter than the population in Crete. What have I noticed about them this time around?

I’m not making as much of an effort to fit in as previously; that’s had the pleasant result of better banter with young (and therefore far more Westernised) bar staff, because I feel more comfortable drawing on shared Western cultural referents, rather than shared Greek. So I could compliment the barman on his choice of Nirvana as background music, complete with “the razor goes vertically” suicide joke. I could much of the time crack jokes with 20-year old waiters…

… when they didn’t look bored out of their skull to be there. Hospitality has been all over the shop: there was the old familiar service with brutal efficiency, there were chatty service staff, there were surly young things (mostly male), and (mostly female) impossibly chirpy young things, using very American service staff discourse.

—That’s wonderful! (Υπέροχα!)
—Awesome! (Τέλεια!)
—Great choice! (Ωραία επιλογή!)
—Happy enjoyment! (Καλή απόλαυση!, which is of course a remodelling of the traditional καλή όρεξη “Happy appetite!” to match American “Enjoy!”)

And an oddly sing-song chirp in their farewell formulas:

—Here’s YOUR change! (Τα ρέστα σας!)
—Thank you VERY much! (Ευχαριστώ πολύ!)

and, same tune, the formula that has spread like wildfire in the last decade:

—Happy con-TINU-ation! (Καλή συνέχεια!)

It’s a novel expression, but it does hit the spot. It’s not just “have a pleasant rest of the day”, it’s pretty much “have a good rest of your life”, whatever you might be getting up to next, once you leave the store. And it’s the store staff nicely implying that there is something you’re going to get up to next, worth enjoying; that it won’t be just watching the TV in your sweatpants.

But I am in a bigger city; there’s less readiness of service staff to banter. I dropped an aside about a book editor at the high temple of academic publishing, the bookshop of the Educational Institution of the National Bank, hoping to bait the staff into a response. They didn’t bite when I was around; but my friend George decided to buy the same book I did, and he did hear from them about the oddball with his running commentary about the book’s editor.

There’s surliness among cab drivers too. Far from universal—I had a pleasant time explaining to a cab driver my obscure reference in “glory be to Ya Rabbi, I’m a foreigner so I don’t have to care about the elections.” (Greek in the mid-20th century had a nickname for God, taken from the Arabic for “Oh Lord”.) But I also got cab drivers crappy with me for thinking I was withholding small banknotes from them, or for heading in the wrong direction. That of course was just the reminder that I was out of the countryside, and back in a big city.

There are more people hanging out in street cafes or nightclubs than I remember last time I was here in 2019; that suggests at least some recovery in the economy. I have had reports that gone are the days of staying out till 3 am on a weekday, but patches in the city still had people out till midnight, and the weekend was still great business for bars.

My accommodation this time around was AirBnB, and AirBnB is being vilified as triggering rentier flight from the city: people rent their inner city housing out and flee to the suburbs, and as a result the city centres of Athens and Salonica are full of non-residents: tourists, who are a known quantity, and digital nomads, who are novel, and who are treated with the same suspicion here as they are anywhere. (As I pointed out to my cousins, I’m working this trip, which means that logically I’m one of those digital nomads too, undermining the vitality of the city.)

In particular, it was in a side of town I hadn’t explored before: Valaoritou St, one street behind the now much ghostlier Via Egnatia. (It used to be the main shopping street, but decades of subway road works have sapped it.) By day, it hosts a slowly-dying, small scale rag trade. By night, it has a lot of bars, including the latest fad of shisha bars, and a lot of young things out and about in bars. Not a whole lot of smiling, but a widespread notion of coolness, at least.

Oh, and accusative indirect object pronouns, the local shibboleth, remain plentiful. Not at all universal, but plentiful. (My friend George has admitted to trying not to do that around me as a southerner.) The other local shibboleth, the dark l, may still be plentiful, but if so, I have too tin an ear to make it out.

I’ve settled during my current sojourn in Greece into a comfortable pattern. I stay for three weeks somewhere familiar, where I settle down, get reacquainted with the surrounds, work, experience things, and don’t blog much at all. Halfway through, I do a side-trip to avoid feeling too settled. When the three weeks are up, I take a week’s holiday somewhere completely alien, get thrown, and blog a truckload.

Repeat three times, but the repetitions are different. My coming to a rest this time has been in Salonica.

(No, of course I’m not going to call it Thessaloniki. So long as there are Greek nationalists that the <k> makes happy, I’m going to keep distancing myself from them with a <c>. Anglo fashion be damned: it’s not imperialism that I have ancestral beef with.)

Salonica is a city I fell in love with close to thirty years ago, and that has endured. I’ve been reminded again, in this sojourn, how much Salonica feels like home to me.

It’s not because I have any ancestral links to the place. Sure I have an aunt here, who married a Macedonian Greek, but that’s as far back as any family connection goes—that, and a cousin or two who has studied at Aristotle U.

It’s not because of the big heart of the locals. Sitia has big-hearted locals to spare, which is why the whole town is a booming incubator of Brian Blesseds, boisterously teasing each other with no inside voice. But as was rightly pointed out to me, that’s not the whole of Greece: that’s rural Greece. Salonica is a city, and as with any city, people tend to keep to themselves. The exceptions—insistent beggars, insistent lottery salespeople, irascible cab drivers, couples broadcasting their domestic dispute in central thoroughfares—stand out here a lot more.

It’s not because of the continuous history of the place, although that has been a comfort. The eerie marble of classical Greek antiquity has columns in the Greek urban landscape look like they’ve airlifted in by aliens. There’s a little of that in Salonica’s Ancient Forum—which is far from the most commanding old site. The forum aside, Salonica’s old constructions are in reassuring flat brick. And it’s hard to tell apart 4th century Roman brick from 16th century Ottoman brick: there’s a continuity between the Rotunda and the Yahudi Hamam, and between both and construction as know it now, that I have always found reassuring.

Rotunda: Tomb of the Emperor Galerius

Yahudi Hamam: the communal baths of the Ottoman Jewish quarter

Like a lot of the historical narratives of urban landscapes, it’s a narrative that works for the locals, and that elides the inconvenient past. There is very little left to speak of what was a majority Jewish city, critically: just a couple of sidewalk memorials. The Great Fire of 1917 wiped much of that Jewish history out—and made the pleasant, breezy boulevards of the modern city possible, even if the influx of new arrivals turned their backstreets rabbit warren soon enough.

It isn’t the progressivism of a new city for a new country, that Salonica used to take such pride in throughout the 20th century. The ideological split between Salonica and Athens was real, and Salonica was the forward-looking place. Salonica feels like home, and Salonica feels young (at places), and Salonica has hip progressives in it; but the overall narrative has shifted, and there are many more reactionaries and populists now to express that shift. Much too often, Salonica is now an aggrieved, fearful place; anxious about threats to its north, anxious about neglect from the south, anxious about its economic decline. The progressive confidence that used to be articulated here has metastasised into florid philippics of anger, whether from the old left (Kechagioglou) or the neo-right (Zouraris).

(It’s a source of ongoing amusement to me that I first heard that analysis of a fearful Salonica articulated on TV, on Themos Anastasiadis‘ talk show—amidst bored strippers and inane mockery of politicians. But that’s how Greece works. It does confound high and low.)

It’s not these things, but it is a result of these things. The new town of Salonica, after the 1917 fire, is a walkable, contained urban centre, delineated with boulevards that have grown dense and busy, and stuffed with back alleys and random openings. It’s a delight to explore, and there is enough order left from the original city plan that you can explore it: it isn’t the chaos that Athens has grown into.

And what you find when you go exploring is bookshops and tavernas and Byzantine and Ottoman buildings and offices and cake shops, and strolling, usually chill, often fashionable Salonicans.

What you find when you go exploring now is a city that is less affluent and relaxed than it used to be, that parties less and reads less and strolls less (wearing its Sunday best less often) and remembers less. Yet it still parties, and reads, and strolls, and remembers, enough to be a city that makes sense to me, a city that pleases me just to be in the thick of. More than many a city. More, I daresay, even than my home of Melbourne.

Of course, I’ve been fortunate in Salonica to have had my friend of thirty years, George Baloglou, be my guide and my conversation partner each visit; and those conversations have taken us up and down the town, sidetracking as much in our walks as in our discourse. I’ve had that joy again this visit, and good discourse is truly one of the things that makes life most worth living. I remain in his debt.

My previous visit was incognito from my relatives; this time I got to spend time with my cousins Christos and Nikos as well, and explore bits of Salonica I previously hadn’t. My thanks to them as well.

When I was touring the Hospitaller Palace, high school children were rehearsing for a musical performance. (You could tell they were high school children from the especial exuberance of their “Hey, Malaka!” to each other, once they were outside the palace.)

So I went back at 8:30 pm for the free concert, which turned out to be a concert of six music high schools in Greece—an institution that has only been in place since 1988. I did have to go back to my flat at 10, to get a jacket: outdoor concerts are a thing in Greece, but May has been unseasonably chilly. By the end at midnight, only the parents of the kids were left in attendance. It was brutally cold.

I dreaded hearing, during rehearsal, a phrase that I thought belonged to the resident Greek reactionary irredentist composer, Stamatis Spanoudakis. I already had hate-watched a special on him a month ago, my first weekend here.

I was wrong. The phrase was from Karl Jenkins’ Palladio, a concerto grosso that started life as a De Beers ad. (Look it up: it keeps showing up on ads.)

It takes a lot of brass for a high school music ensemble from the outer suburbs of Athens to rock up to Rhodes, and play a musical fantasia of Crete. Then again, it takes a lot of brass for a high school music ensemble to call itself “Give a peasant encouragement”.

The rest of the proverbial expression in Greek goes “and he’ll climb into bed with you” (i.e “give him an inch and he’ll take a mile”.) I guess I am in Europe, after all.

The group specializes in Cretan folk, and they’ve been going for at least ten years. They aren’t standard lyra-and-lute 1960s repertoire, they’re researchers: YouTube has them boisterously reviving Cretan carols.

HIC JACET THOMAS NEWPORT PORTUS ACTIE MILES O- OBIT 1502 xxii DIE M–SS SEPTEMBRIS CVM ANIMARE QVII SCAT-N PACE AMEN 150-.

At the bottom is quite the jolliest skull, seeming to be in conversation, and two crossed bones.

From this inscription it appears that there were two knights of this name about the same period. The one was Turcopolier in 1500, and died in 1502, as we see by this inscription. The other was Bailiff of Caspe and Cantaniera, and also Bailiff of Eagle (in co. Line.) in 1513. He was sent at the close of the year 1517 into England to entreat aid against the Turks. Having obtained some assistance, he was returning to Rhodes, when he was driven by a tempest back to the coast of England, where he and his followers perished in August, 1552. Three original letters from him to Cardinal Wolsey,’ in 1517, are preserved in Cotton MSS., Otho, C. ix.

Went back to apartment, fell asleep for 4.5 hours, realised that I did not come to Old Rhodes Theme Park to sleep, and quickly frog marched myself through the Hospitaller Palace and the Archaeological Museum (originally the Hospitaller hospital).

The way out of the Old Town is verdant where it isn’t monumental. Delightful walk up to and through D’Amboise gate.

Glancing back at D’Amboise Gate, the moat, and the twin towers of the Suleimaniye Mosque and the Clock Tower. (The latter is branded as Mediaeval and Venetian, but its current incarnation dates from 1852.)

Once you’re free of the theme park, a nice green walk takes you to what used to be the Royal Constabulary College. Now, it’s the Humanities building of the University of the Aegean, where I’ve just spent a wonderful one and half hours getting updates from Eleni Karantzola on her research programme. She truly has a great thing going here with her team.

Old Rhodes, 11:40 pm. Mostly quiet, and the odd car is allowed back in, just a few stragglers at restaurants that are otherwise closed. But the off street clubs are still pumping music, and the one open souvlaki joint is waiting for the 1 am rush.

The piazza that riotously greeted me with tourists and touters earlier in the day is Jewish Martyrs Square, and now that the crowds have scattered, I can see the multilingual monument to them. On this side, in Ladino, the language that the Jews of Rhodes spoke.