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St Mark’s, Zante
The Solomos museum, and next to it the Catholic Church of St Mark’s. Solomos got the Central Square named after him; this square, one block back, is still St Mark’s. Even though the museum was originally an Orthodox church. It helps that the Venetians not have Orthodoxy as their state religion.
Greek Catholics exist, and I have seen plenty of Catholic churches, in Corfu, Iraklio, Salonica, and Athens.
But Greece has a state religion, and unlike the Republic of Venice, Catholicism is not it. Compared to the commanding presence of Orthodox churches in Greek towns, Catholic churches in Greece have always given me the impression that they are somewhat plain and meek-looking on the outside. Like they are trying not to draw undue attention to themselves.
Famous Bamboo Chinese Restaurant
Greece is a culturally conservative place overall, and there is nothing wrong with that. That includes cuisine. American fast food has been entrenched for decades. Italian cuisine is rather easy to get even in the countryside, and that includes fine dining and not just pizza. They certainly knew how to use truffle oil in Karpathos.
But other cuisines are only hesitantly turning up at all, especially outside of Athens. And when it is attempted, you can wish it wasn’t. Both times I’ve had Mexican in Salonica, I’d wished I didn’t. Sitia, quite incredibly, has a combination Japanese and Chinese restaurant, and I simply wasn’t game to find out what they had come up with.
This may well be an acceptable Chinese restaurant, for all I know. But the combination of cheese and wontons makes me think it is not somewhere anyone Chinese would be rushing to go.
I was going to sneer that not a word on the shop front being in Greek shows you no Greek is going to set foot in such an exotic place either. But that would apply to Greece in 1970, not 2023. You cannot leave the house in Greece now without understanding English.
In pursuit of Zante serenades
The marina street front is of course fully tourist oriented, with lots of ads for cruises to island destinations for beach lovers and nature lovers.
And I had to overcome yet another prejudice that night. Because depicted is Varkarola taverna , the taverna recommended to me as the best place in town to hear folk music played.
Yes, I know “live music” in a tourist destination ordinarily makes the heart sink. But see? There’s a mandolin on the shop front alongside the guitar. (Ok, I guess you can’t see.)
There are, the first website I found tells me, two genres of Italianate, four part harmony, traditional urban songs here.
- Arekias, the older form of song, are a capella, with the 3rd male voice usually singing a third above the first. In Cephallonia, they are called arietes. They are songs sung about women.
- Kantadas add mandolin and guitar. They are serenades, songs sung to women. (Whether the women welcomed the attention or not is a different matter.)
Hence an inevitable 11880 phone directory ad, featuring a recurring couple of tourists:
[*Flower pot goes clunk*]
Yes?! Is that 11880? A hospital, a doctor, an ambulance! …. Where are we? Hang on!
George darling, do you remember now where we are?
11880! That’s the only thing I remember!
(Of course all parts were sung by men, and women didn’t get to stroll around singing in public, either arekies to themselves, or kantadas to other women. Venetian Zante was still traditional Greece, after all.)
I was momentarily concerned that whatever I was going to hear here would be much watered down, with just two vocalists if I was lucky, and no differentiation between arekia and kantada.
… Well of course. That’s what I’m going to get in a marina taverna in 2023. It’s still going to be a lot better than nothing. And if I want to go deeper, I can always look up mandolin orchestra performances on YouTube. (And to their credit, the duo declined to perform one song, because they thought it would sound awful reduced from four parts to two.)
Kantada is merely the Venetian pronunciation of cantata, in its original meaning: something sung. Arekia is less obviously Italian: it’s a orecchie, “by ear”.
Kantadas are known in the rest of Greece as serenades, although I doubt anyone in the rest of Greece has gone serenading in pursuit of courtship this past century, outside of comedy skits like in that 11880 ad.
But I have deep memories of kantadas, since my uncle Savva in Cyprus sang them to welcome us at his dining table. Singalongs at dinner is something I’ve yearned for this forty years since, and never had satisfied…
The duo performing did have to gratify their crowd, and there was a lot of extraneous repertoire they performed: they enjoyed the challenge. (They also had a heavily Italian crowd earlier in the evening, who got their Volare and whatever song it was that prompted them to yell Forza Napoli!)
By the end of the evening, I was requesting bouzouki classics myself, and singing a bass to their primo e secondo as best as I could manage. (Bass is easier, you just keep out of the other voices’ way.)
But I came for arekias, and arekias I got, and was grateful for. Starting with my uncle’s favourite, On the foam of the sea.
It’s going to be hard to recapture in the recording studio the manic glee with which the terzo-singer decides to start belting out his descant. This is one of those genres of music which are more fun to perform, or at least hear at very close quarters.
This is likely how O Νυχτομπάτης “The night-time breeze” was meant to be performed from the beginning:
How do you get away with just two guys doing it? Irreverently. The duo had a blast doing the sudden ritenutos and the boat calls. And of course, that irreverence is what you need to keep it a live tradition.
Even if the results are just tasteless, and I can’t describe what they did to Kostas Makedonas’ stern, resigned 1994 hit Μαργαριτάρια “Pearls” any other way.
Wrong—but fun!
Or, for that matter, their update ending an exchange of yore between prisoners:
When time comes for me to die, bury me with a mobile phoneDon’t bury me too deep, or I won’t have any reception!
These guys brought me joy, by sharing their island’s songs with me and all present. It was not the “genuine article”, and that was entirely fine. Thank you.
The changing icons of Zante
The icons are throughout the museum, and on the upper floor, as the placards bemoaning the earthquake cease, they are arrayed in chronological order, to tell a story.
The Byzantine story may display some variation, but you would need a keener eye than mine to see it. Byzantine icons were highly stylized and highly conventionalized, and they’ve been reiterated a lot in modern times, so the contemporary Greek eye has been deadened to the variation among them.
Which is why the Byzantine frescoes are such a revelation to such a Greek. There is so much more stuff going on in them.
And then in the mid 18th century, so somewhat later than in Corfu (if I remember right), Western techniques come to icon painting. Nicholas Kallergis’ icons (that’s his signature, 1732) are still posed like in Byzantine style, but the faces are something new.
And then Western painting comes to town in full earnest, and it’s like someone has switched on the lights all of a sudden. I was particularly struck by the John Chrysostom (guy with candles).
Nicholas Kantounis, St John the Evangelist, 1833. We’re not in Byzantium any more:
—as indeed his self-portrait confirms, from the Solomos museum:
If you are used to Catholic devotional art, which I am not, these paintings may not make that much of an impression on you. They may not be particularly good, I don’t know
But as I said repeatedly, I have lived in the century of Kontoglou, of universal exceptionless Byzantine revival in icon painting. Seeing these icons in an Orthodox context blows me away.
The frescoes of St Andrew’s Monastery, Volimes, Zante
The museum features not just entire salvaged iconostases, but an entire fresco chamber from the monastery of St Andrew in Volimes, other side of the island (built 1595).
As I noted, frescoes were a feature of late Byzantine churches, which were not included in the Byzantine revival led by Fotis Kontoglou. I guess they were too impractical for 20th century church building.
As is all too typical of such frescoes, lots of randoms that got to visit, back before respect of old things was a thing, scratched KILROY WAS HERE on the fresco. If you zoom in, you can see an instance from the 1940s, and another from the 1840s.
You can also see a speech bubble from someone in the river of molten lava. The spelling is so bad, and the white paint stands out so much, I presume it is a later interpretation.
As far as I can make out: “Father Abraham have mercy on me, and send some water so I can moisten [can’t make out] my tongue.” Labelled “the rich man”: this is from Jesus’s parable of the rich man and Lazarus.
“Father Abraham, have pity on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, because I am in agony in this fire.”
The Post-Byzantine Museum of Zante and its narratives
In the picture, the statue of the great man in front of the new museum, in the Central Square named after him
The new museum is called the Post-Byzantine Museum of Zante. Its subject matter is the period of Venetian and British rule.
The 1953 earthquake is everywhere in the museum. It is as much a museum about the destruction of the island, as it is about what was salvaged from it and brought here out of the ruins.
And I truly was not expecting this, but the image of the two salvaged iconostases, so obviously torn out of their churches, is still making me cry.
(The left iconostasis was in what was the Pantocrator church and then the original museum; it is now the Solomos museum.)
And the stack of salvaged icons may be an appropriate way to display them; but they are also a reminder that they too are salvaged and torn out:
The museum is built on a touching story of archaeologists and townsfolk and sailors, salvaging the heritage of the islands from the disastrous earthquake.
It is a feelgood story, with two sour notes. The first is a story which the museum’s voice through its placards does not want you to forget: a lot of the townsfolk were quite happy to level what was left standing up, because they wanted to look to the future and not the past.
I noted that three churches were restored after the earthquake. A lot more could have been, and the responsible government committee had a list closer to a dozen. A lot more of the old town could have been salvaged.
Museum curators and townsfolk tend to have conflicting agendas, as Michael Hertzfeld memorably documented in A Place in History about Rethymnon, a town where archaeologists use the weight of the State to preserve a mediaeval city—in conflict with the poor shmucks stuck living in its houses, and who want to build more room for themselves.
The museum folk want to preserve, and so do some locals. Most locals want to rebuild, and a few of them want to make a stash while rebuilding.
I don’t know whether the museum was being literal or metaphorical when it said this in its placard, but it spoke of the locals dynamiting what was left the remaining old buildings, so they could rebuild newer, bigger, and tourist-friendlier.
(My concierge, FWIW, weighed in that that’s not quite how it went down, but there was a lot of dirty pool played when the town was being rebuilt. She certainly had no problem pointing out how shortsighted the locals had been about preserving the place’s heritage.)
The other sour note only occurred to me afterwards.
There is nothing secular in this museum at all. Not a single heraldic crest, not a single Latin inscription of martial valour, not a brick from a British barracks.
There may well have been a bias in the old museum (housed in a church, after all), whose contents were the immediate target of salvage. But the fact that there is nothing at all secular here sends a clear message, and one the museum curators are less eager to broadcast.
The only heritage people on the island cared to salvage was their religious heritage. The Venetian and British stuff? That could go.
I did walk past a house that had put a crest back up on its wall. So that wasn’t a universal mentality. Some people did care about the crests. And the museum, for all I know, may have storehouses of crests to go through. But that is not the impression its narrative is giving.
The shade of Solomos
When a small town in Greece has produced a great person, the shadow of that person weighs heavy on that town. Mostly because that town sees to it that it does.
Everything in Sitia is named after the great Renaissance poet Vincenzo Cornaro. Similarly, everything in Zante is named after Greek national poet, Dionysios Solomos.
The Greek national anthem is the first two stanzas of his Hymn to Liberty. But the Hymn to Liberty is not his greatest poem, and now that some Greeks are gradually and tentatively allowing themselves not to be fire breathing patriots, you will even find people saying that it has not aged well.
Solomos was a tinkerer who seldom finished his major efforts (the Hymn is an exception), and his genius is mostly in the fragments. In fact, in a post-modern kind of way, the genius is highlighted by the fragmentariness, and his marginalia in Italian. His striking imagery and lyricism can stand out, without being bogged down in the chattiness of 19th century Romantic poetry.
That said, I have never sat down to read Solomos seriously, the way I have Cavafy. Something else to fix.
In the picture, the statue of the great man in front of the new museum, in the Central Square named after him; and the old museum, formerly Church of the Almighty (Pantocrator), rebuilt after the earthquake into the museum of Solomos, Kalvos, and Other Illustrious Zacynthians.
Antisphaerisis
There is a Hellenic coinage for tennis, antisphaerisis, although you will only ever see it in the name of sports clubs established in the 19th century. Such as the ZAOA, the Zacynthian Sporting League for Antisphaerisis. (Ζακυνθικός αθλητικός όμιλος αντισφαίρισης.) The poster helpfully adds: “Tennis for everybody!”
I helped translate a Duden-style dictionary of modern terms into Ancient Greek. (Of course I did.)
And in the process of translating it, I noted that while other contemporary sports were well served by Puristic Greek, so archaic terminology was available, tennis wasn’t. So I couldn’t rely on 19th and early 20th century Greek to come up with ancient Greek renderings. I couldn’t even find a new classical word for racket.
Okay, hockey and curling were even less well served by Puristic Greek. But I doubt those games have ever been played in Greece to begin with. We don’t have the weather for it.
I am used to seeing the parks of Australia interrupted by tennis courts. Seeing one here, in a rather dusty outskirt of a provincial Greek town, was a surprise.
Fior di Levante
The Venetians called Zante the Fior di Levante, the flower of the Levant, because of how beautiful the landscape is.
Greeks still do. At least in telephone directory ads. I am rather taken by the recent 11880 ads, featuring the Zante ferryboat, and/or the female narrator rattling off a list of Greek towns, and merrily trilling Fiorrrro di Levante! instead of Zakynthos.
(Yes, I know it’s fiore in Standard Italian. We don’t have nouns ending in –e in Greek; fjoro is the Greek nativisation.)
I didn’t find the recent ad, but I found the identical ad from 9 years ago, with a male narrator reading it. He just didn’t have the same enthusiasm:
I also found this much older ad, featuring a brief four-part harmony choir, and someone confusing mandolin and mandolato (nougat).
Cosmote phone company and Levante Ferries seem to have a cosy business relationship. So enjoy this extended nature porn from them, because you’re not going to get that kind of thing from me:
You don’t just find Fioro di Levante in telephone directories and ferryboats; you’ll also find it in murals here:
I’m not much of one to even notice nature exists, but yes, it is pretty. Although there was no way I was going to lounge around a beach bar enjoying it.
Levant is a funny old word, by the way, and one that translators lurched at temporarily when trying to render the name of ISIS. 20th century geopolitics mean people no longer think of Greece or even Turkey as being “the East”: the Middle East starts in Syria.
The Near East, when it was still being used, was where 19th century English people thought the East started, Ottoman Europe. And the Levant was originally where Renaissance Italians thought the East started.
Which was here. Not least because here was the flower of it.
Dimitris Lagios
Opposite my hotel, a monument to Dimitris Lagios (1952-1991): Δημήτρης Λάγιος
Lagios worked as a continuator of the Italianate, mandolin-heavy musical tradition of the island, seeking to extend it to loftier subjects than the traditional love songs. He seems to have needed to be pushed into releasing recordings commercially, and his discography on the monument is full of ανέκδοτο, “unreleased, unpublished”.
(Sadly the translator had weak English, and peppered the discography in that language with “anecdote recording”.)
I have heard a minute on YouTube of a setting by him of Kalvos’ hymn to the island.
I loathed it.
A lot of that is my bias against Kalvos, which I’m going to explore later. But some of that is bias against the music as well.
Mandolin-backed four-part vocal harmony is a delight in light entertainment, and I am very happy I experienced at least the two-part version of it here live. But I find it a lot more fun in a taverna than a recording or a concert hall; pressed into service for art poetry, it seems wrong. And any setting of Kalvos’ archaic Greek that didn’t involve a lyre and a chlamys seemed even more wrong.
This is a trip where I confront my biases. At least some of my reaction to Lagios is the inherited prejudice that “your mandolin barbershop quartets are not really Greek, and cannot be taken seriously.” Maybe, maybe not. I’m going to try him out again, after I’ve heard a decent amount of Zante music (which sadly will have to be recordings). Maybe I will change my mind about him.
Maybe, maybe not. Bear in mind, I can’t even stomach Manos Hatzidakis, I find him too French for me…