My Greek Odyssey

The Meaning of Greek Independence

Last  Sunday, our small community in Maine celebrated Greek Independence Day.  Our Greek School teacher, affectionately known by her students as Kiria, has an abiding love for the Greek language. That joy is readily evident from the way her students, dressed in traditional costumes,  presented their poems and renditions of religious and patriotic songs often sung and recited on this occasion. Watching them I couldn't help but get a little teary eyed.  The whole scene whisked me back to my younger days growing up in Greek America. Greek Independence Day was always exciting for me, it was a big deal. Especially the thought of marching in the parade down Fifth Avenue. Since those days I have had some time to ponder the true meaning of Greek Independence.

The history of the struggle against the Ottoman Empire is replete with tales of daring and bravery, unfortunately, it is also a litany of man's inhumanity to man. Struggles of this type, against a determined and fanatical enemy, are never high-browed affairs as many Philhellenes like Lord Byron found out. The uprising in 1821 was a no holds barred war of attrition that can only be  characterized as a fight to the finish. No quarter asked and none given. After all, the Greek subjects of the Ottoman Empire were nothing more than slaves.  Slaves either submitted to the will of the Sultan or were to be made an example of and easily expendable.  As happens in the writing of history,  national mythologies have been developed around the events of those years. The winners and losers in any armed conflict often see things differently.

The question every Greek must now ask, no matter where they  may find themselves today, almost two centuries later,  is whether the Greek world actually achieved "true" independence when the revolution ended.  Despite all we have accomplished in the modern period of our history, and it is substantial, are we truly free of the shackles that weigh us down?  Hellenism as an idea is not encumbered by the narrow borders of the nation-state. Any reading of history or a survey of where one can find communities of Greeks will attest to Hellenism's worldwide reach. Nevertheless, our outlook tends to be parochial, shortsighted and  xenophobic.  Hellenes throughout the world have to look inward and reassess where we are going as a people.

Modern Greeks have always been beholden to outside powers. We could not have achieved our independence without their intervention. That is a historical fact. Unfortunately, ever since, Greeks have aligned themselves with one power or another in order to achieve national goals. After  liberation Greeks were forced to accept a foreign monarch and they divided themselves into warring political factions according to political loyalties based on allegiance to foreign powers. Eleftherios Venizelos saw fit to align Greece with Britain in order to achieve the goals of the Megali Idea.  Ioannis Metaxas, a monarchist and opponent of Venizelos, again sought British help during World War II.  During the subsequent Civil War, George Papandreou put his faith in the United States to defeat the Communist insurgency and the Colonels put their misplaced trust in the US to help them in Cyprus with disastrous consequences. Greeks then turned to the membership in the European Union as their savior from the threat posed by their unruly neighbors, only to see history repeat itself as their interests were put aside in places like Cyprus and the Balkans.  It would be easy to place all the blame for the current state of affairs on allies and friends, real or imagined.  It would be easy to see the root of  Greek problems in our enemies, real and imagined, whether we live in Greece or not.  Before we look for scapegoats,  we need to take a good look at ourselves. Before we look for solutions elsewhere, we need to devise our own, based on the inherent ideas of our own rich culture.

In order to achieve true independence we must liberate ourselves from the constant debilitating infighting between  Left and Right or between Diasporan and Helladic Greeks.  We must free ourselves of our reliance on discredited, bankrupt foreign dogmas and look at the road map that our own ancestors drew for us. Let us cast aside the "isms."  Let's reject nihilism, anarchism, narcissism, consumerism, secularism, multi-culturalism, statism as inappropriate and destructive to the eternal essence of the Greek spirit.  Why are we producing young people that are alienated from their ethnic roots and Orthodox faith?  Why do young Greeks increasingly fail to recognize the beauty and value of the gift that our martyred ancestors placed in our hands at such great human cost? Why do some young Greeks take to the streets to burn and pillage the property of others?  Why do young Greek women abort their babies in a despicable  genocide that we as a people silently countenance? Where are the Greek leaders untainted by corruption and scandal who able or willing to come forward and actually lead?   Why have Greek schools and streets been abandoned to violent hoodlums? Why have we lost our moral compass as a people?

These problems are not exclusively Greek, they are Western problems. What saddens me so is that Greeks, wherever they live, are not in the forefront of the battle to save what is good and important.  Why are we not, once again, standing at the pass of Thermopolyae and showing the rest of the world how to combat the rot overtaking us.  Does what remain of the Greek spirit lie dormant and asleep only in forgotten places like Northern Epirus or Occupied Cyprus, waiting to awaken once again like a King made of Marble? Yesterday,  I was looking through my late father's books. I came across a collection of poems by Greeks living in America printed in 1917. Reading it I was struck by the patriotism and the optimism within its covers. These young men, many of whom had fought and bled in the Balkan Wars, the progeny of a destitute but proud nation, were rich in faith and love of country.  One young palikari, staring out from a page of this book, Ioannis Terliamis, wrote the following: "They say that Hellas is lost, perhaps they have not considered things well, our ancestors live in her children."

In 1821, our ancestors fought an enemy made of flesh and blood, to liberate our Patrida.  Today we must fight a much more elusive and insidious enemy, that enemy is a set of  ideas that corrupts and debases our societies. It sucks the very courage and fortitude we need to preserve our legacy right out of us.  Let's hope that we can summon the spirit of our ancestors to fight the good fight and prove ourselves worthy of their legacy. Then Greeks will have truly achieved a lasting independence.

The Cure

 This month marks what would have been my father's ninety-fourth birthday. He died two years ago and I think of him often.  The last few years of his life were difficult. His body and mind wasted away slowly.  I still wonder if the mind and the soul are one in the same because even as his mind became hazy or would crawl into a world deep within its inner recesses, his humanity showed through. What I mean by that is that even as he approached his last days he would still smile, grasp your hand and squeeze it. His eyes would still light up when he saw my mother or sister enter his room. I think the soul is the last thing to leave our body and his soul loved us as only a father could even as his mind no longer worked like it once did.

Baba worked the late shift when I was growing up. One of the lasting memories of my youth was hearing him come home around one o'clock in the morning as the Rembetiko song says, with the sound of his tired and dragging steps.

I would wake up and peer at him through the crack in the door of the room where I slept, careful not to reveal that I was awake. He would take off his jacket, wash his hands and face and sit at the kitchen table and read his copy of the Greek newspaper that was always folded in his pocket. He would eat an apple, peeling it carefully and then cutting it into bite size wedges. When he was finished he would stand there in the kitchen in front of the icons and pray with his hands outstretched. Then he would turn the kitchen light off and walk over to where I slept and open the door a bit to peak in on me while I feigned being fast asleep.  Sometimes he would come in to tuck me in or pull the covers up over my shoulders.

As a little boy my father held a special fascination for me, especially his strong large hands and muscular arms which seemed like they could hold the weight of the world in them. I only remember him being sick once as I was growing up. As far as I was concerned he was as indestructible as the super heroes in my comic books. Baba was laid low only once that I recall. He had a terrible cough and fever. As he was laying in bed visibly uncomfortable, mama and yiayia huddled over him trying to figure out what to do. I could tell they were worried. Yiayia, who was never a woman to stand by wringing her hands helplessly, took charge, deciding that only "Venduzzes," a traditional folk remedy from her native Epirus could cure what was ailing him.  She gave my mother a few quick orders and she of course immediately set to work getting the requisite items yiayia requested. As I watched in abject horror, yiayia proceeded to dip a small ball of cotton in alcohol, light it and place it on my fathers back quickly covering it with a small glass. The cotton ball was immediately extinguished sucking up all the remaining air under the glass which turned into a vacuum adhering tightly. It was supposed to draw out all the bad vapors from Baba's lungs. As she placed one after another on his back, all I could see was the flaming cotton ball as it was placed on bare skin. She repeated the process again and again until there were about five or six glasses stuck to his back. It was painless but to my young eyes it looked like excruciating torture which my father endured stoicly. I bawled through the whole thing, to my father's and yiayia's amusement, while mama did her best to comfort and rassure me. The next day Baba dragged himself out of his sickbed and went to work, albeit with curious circular bruises under his shirt.

After that ordeal,  Yiayia assumed an even more exalted position than the one she already held in my boyhood imagination, as the purveyor of strange medical cures that were beyond the skill of mere mortal physicians. Baba, who seemed no worse for all the wear and tear, took on the mythic proportions of the Greek heroes depicted in my Greek school textbook. Although I questioned his judgment at times as an adolescent in subsequent years, he would always remain a heroic figure in my eyes, even on his deathbed.

Hot Soup

Based on a True Story

When he walked down the street, he turned heads. He wore the black floor length cossack, a plain silver cross around his neck and a black monk's hat.  It was his long white beard and his piercing blue eyes however that really caught your attention. He went everywhere thus attired because it was the mark of who and what he was. An Orthodox priest and monk. He lived in the world, in the very heart of it, on the island of Manhattan but he was not of the world.

Once while riding the escalator down into the subway. He glanced to his left to see a little boy holding his mother's hand and looking at him in wonder as the opposing escalators brought them closer. The little boy smiled and waved his free hand, "Hi God."  The towering figure looked at him smiled back and said gently, "Are you being a good boy?" as they passed each other. The mother, rather irritated, pulled his hand closer, looking at him disapprovingly, "That... is not God."

He was known for his work, ministering to the city's homeless and dispossessed souls while wandering through the crevices and holes of the inhospitable city where they hid. All he could offer them was a cup of hot soup or a sandwich, occasionally he might coax one into the shelter he ran, where they might shower, wash their clothes and sleep in a clean bed.  This particular winter night was frigid and he was grateful for the warmth of his black cossack which was insufferably hot in the sweltering heat of the city during the summer.  The subway ticket agent ensconced in her ticket booth saw him coming, the man lugging his overloaded bags. "You can't come in here with that food, my boss says that's not allowed. It's Transit Authority regulations." 

The man looked at her through the thick glass, "My boss, who by the way, happens to be your boss too, said that we have a duty to help the poor and I'm am not letting your regulations get in my way." He put his token in the slot and walked into the train station moving methodically to the the end of the platform and into the tunnel beyond. Experience had taught him that this particular tunnel was often used by the homeless to hide unobtrusively from the Transit cops and enjoy its warmth despite the dangers involved. It was a place where speeding trains and the 600-volt third rails could make any misstep fatal.The tunnel reeked of human waste, urine and despair. Rats scurried for cover when the heard the man approach. The underworld of the city was filled alternately with the deafening screech of passing subway trains and the distant rumble of traffic from the streets above, punctuated by eerie moments of silence.

They huddled in the stairways and catwalks, in supply rooms and any other available spot where they could establish a makeshift shelter. It was a hellish place where hope had been abandoned long ago.  The man moved among them handing out containers and sandwiches.  "Yo hot soup, how ya doing man?" said a young man with long dreadlocks hiding under a knit cap with a toothless grin. The man smiled, "I'm OK, how are you?" he said as he began his silent prayer as a train roared by. As it faded into the distance, the young man slurped his soup as he looked up, "I've been better but I ain't as bad as that dude in the box down there," pointing down the tunnel.  The man moved on.  After walking into the darkness for awhile he stumbled on a large box-like structure made from pieces of discarded cardboard covered in ragged sheets of plastic.  A dark figure huddled inside. Hearing the man's approach the figure inside stuck his head out, struggling to focus, "What do you want?"   Then he noticed the man's form and laughed, "What are you doing in hell, priest?"  The man crouched down and looked him in the eyes, noticing the beads of sweat on his unshaven grimy face.  What is your name?  He hesitated, "Vladimir, I was baptized in the Orthodox  Church which has never done a damn thing for me. Go away, priest"   "I am the Church and I'm here, am I not?"  "Your God doesn't live here and he couldn't care less about any of us." cried Vladimir.   "You're wrong my friend, He cared enough to send me here to help you."  There was a long silence between them.  "Father, will you hear my confession"   The man leaned over and listened.  When Vladimir was done, the man made the sign of the Cross with his three fingers joined over his head and kissed it gently. He begged him to come to the shelter. Vladimir refused to leave despite repeated attempts to coax him out. "Leave me alone now, Father, so I can rest."  "I'll be back tomorrow,"  said the man handing Vladimir a small printed Icon of Jesus, a container of soup and a sandwich. 

He walked back toward the light where he eventually boarded an empty subway car headed back downtown to his Monastery.  He glanced at his watch. It was one-thirty in the morning and he felt more tired than he had ever felt before. He fingered his prayer rope and repeated the Jesus prayer. Again and again. At the next station a lone passenger got on. He was young, wore a leather jacket, pants and boots with a tattoo of a green dragon rising from his collar, up his neck to the back of his shaved head.  He stared at the man for awhile, then made his way toward him. The man continued to pray, thinking perhaps his time had come to meet his Maker. The man with the leather jacket moved toward him and stopped in front of him grinning, "What are you supposed to be old man?"

"I'm an Orthodox priest."

"Is that so. Is it like being a Catholic?"

"Sort of, but not quite,"  said the man looking at the dragon.

"Do you guys believe that a wafer and wine can become the body and blood of Christ?"

"Yes"

"Well, if that was true then why would anyone ever leave church?

The train slowed to a stop and the doors of the train opened. The young man turned and walked out onto the platform. The man crossed himself and resumed his prayer. The next day he returned to the tunnel and found Vladimir lying cold, stiff and motionless. His countenance was serene. He had died during the night clutching the icon of Jesus in his hand.

The Irish, Greeks and the Multi-Cultural Soup

Growing up in the multicultural soup that is the United States of America, one cannot help but be exposed to other cultures.  Perhaps that means that your own becomes invariably watered down and dies a slow, ignominious death replaced by a unidentifiable conglomeration of  the what passes for an American ethos and reigning pop culture.  It can also mean, however, that it expands your horizons, allows you to question your own "truths" and ultimately, to strengthen your own identity or to transform it entirely. In saying this, I am neither advocating that everyone follow the American example, nor do I long for Greeks in Hellas to adopt ideologies or aspects of cultures not of their own making. Instead, I am merely pointing out the realities that Greek immigrants face on a daily basis.

During my days as a little kid living in a dingy brownstone tenement in the Yorkville section of Manhattan, we lived down the hall from the Healy's.  Billy, my best friend, was one of eight children crammed into a small apartment. The Healy's were a devout Irish Catholic family and although the atmosphere over in their home could only be described as chaotic, it was characterized by strong doses of parental love provided by Billy's Mom and Dad.  Billy's Dad worked like many other men on our block,  at the Ruppert Knickerbocker Brewery.  The brewery was huge, encompassing an area over two square blocks and overshadowed our neighborhood by its aromatic presence.  Mr. Healy, a rather sad looking character, weighed down by the responsibilities of feeding a large brood, spent a great deal of time at the local pub, tasting the fruits of his labors.

Billy was the youngest of five brothers  In my eyes, the four oldest were rather imposing, large and muscular.  My special relationship with Billy meant that his older brothers assumed responsibility for my survival in the jungle that was our neighborhood.  More than once the Healy brothers stepped in and saved me from certain extinction at the hands of  local bullies or misinformed outsiders who mistook me for a misplaced resident of Spanish Harlem.  On occasion, I would accompany Billy, we had become quite inseparable, to the the corner bar, at the behest of Mrs. Healy, to retrieve Mr. Healy  in time for supper.  My mother and Mrs. Healy had developed a fondness for each other, often sharing coffee while discussing their respective travails.  As a result, Billy and I would sometimes end up in each other's homes at the dinner hour.  Billy received his introduction to lamb and stuffed grape leaves and in similar fashion, I entered the world of corned beef and cabbage. I can just imagine what Mr. Healy thought when he sat down at his boisterous table and spied an olive skinned, dark-eyed, nine year old little boy with jet black hair in the midst of a sea of his red headed offspring. He would look at me, smile and settle in to his evening meal, probably thinking that God must indeed have a sense of humor.

I think Billy enjoyed spending time with us, Mama always laid out the red carpet for our guest as required by the honored Greek custom of hospitality that was so ingrained in her. For a few short hours, until summoned home by his Mom, Billy was transformed from just another face in the crowd into the center of attention and treated like a pint-sized pasha. He loved every minute of it.  Please don't misconstrue this to mean that the Healy's didn't heap love on Billy, the did, but when you have nine kids, there is only so much love to go around. 

I lost touch with Billy after we moved to our new home on a tree lined street in Queens when I started high school.  Years later I heard he had dropped out of school and joined the Navy. Ever since, I have had a bit of a soft spot for the Irish. As a brand spanking new Marine second lieutenant attending The Basic School at Quantico, I ended up in a Irish pub called "The Dubliner," which is frequented by Marines in the Washington, D.C. area. The United States Marines have a special affinity for pubs, since they were conceived as an organization in one. When I walked into that pub I was immediately whisked back to my memories of my Irish family. Ironic that it should happen in a pub of all places. One of my Irish buddies from my Marine days, Kevin, an occasional commenter on MGO and whose people came from Louisburgh, County Mayo (I've included a local landscape in this post), sent me a email a couple of years ago.  Although I have not asked permission from him to do so, I'd like to share a piece of it with you on this Saint Patrick's Day.  Marines are taught that it is always easier to seek forgiveness than permission, so here goes:

"Among my people, the tendency toward resistance may provide some explanation for so many who remained stalwart to our ways and faith.  It remains one of the blackest assignations you can make against a man to call him a "dirty soup-er."  Or to say of his clan, "Sure, and didn't they take the soup?!"  These are Famine references. The all too meager relief efforts during those dark years, soup lines and the like, were often tied to renouncing the evils of popery and accepting the doctrines of the Ascendancy or the Presbyterian do-gooders.   The English King  earlier had tried to suppress our people and religion by the passage of the Irish Penal Laws, after King William III defeated King James II at the Battle of the River Boyne on the 1st of July 1690 - although the anniversary of the victory is now celebrated on the 12th because eleven days were lost with the switch from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar in 1752.  These Parliamentary Acts expelled the Catholic clergy from Ireland and prohibited papists from owning or devising land, from serving on juries and holding offices, from practicing their religion, from educating their children, from owning arms (except for fowling pieces) and from owning a horse of any greater value than five pounds, among other matters of discrimination.  When acts were passed requiring the teaching of English and prohibiting the use of the Irish language, many cattle and sheep sales were conducted in Greek or Latin (taught in hedgerow schools) rather than in English."

The Irish, gotta luv' em.

Happy Saint Patrick's Day, Kevin and family. And to the Healy's, wherever they may be. May God always hold all of us in the palm of his hand.

One more thing.  I would like to share the attached video with everyone who enjoys Celtic music. It's a piece by a Celtic band made up of Serbs. Yes, my friends, God definitely has a sense of humor. It is one of Belgrade's top bands. The group is called "Orthodox Celts."

Enjoy, preferably while sipping a pint of Guinness.

Koinonia

 

What are the lessons? That's the question DD over at LandofMiracles asks himself (here and here), in trying to make sense of the senseless murder of classmates and teachers by a German teenager.  What made Tim Kretschmer commit this heinous act?  There are no simple answers. When we explain such acts by laying the blame on bullying, mental illness, the availability of guns or even dysfunctional parenting, I think we miss a very important over-arching element in the equation.  Researchers J. Reid Meloy, Anthony Hempel, and their colleagues analyzed a sample of thirty-four adolescent mass murderers whose median age was seventeen and who had killed alone or in pairs between 1958 and 1999. They divided the sample into five types, as follows: the classroom avenger, the family annihilator, the bifurcated killer (family and classroom), miscellaneous, and the criminal opportunist. Meloy and Hempel found that over 70 percent of their sample were termed "loners."

Studies show that Americans (and I suspect Europeans as well) are far more socially isolated today than they were two decades ago, and a sharply growing number of people say they have no one in whom they can confide. America, like many other Western countries is becoming increasingly more fragmented and intimate social ties, once seen as an integral part of daily life and associated with a host of psychological and civic benefits, are either shrinking or nonexistent. In bad times, far more people appear to suffer alone, without a safety net of close friends and confidants.

Scientists tell us that "social isolation from others is anxiety arousing or stressful in and of itself, producing physiological arousal and changes, which if prolonged, can produce serious health deterioration and even death. Conversely affiliation or contact with others reduces or modulates physiological arousal, both, in general and in the presence of stress and other threats to health." A growing body of evidence from experimental studies of animals and humans is consistent with this hypothesis. Putting aside the the physiological consequences of social isolation, Father Chris Metropoulos talks about the resulting spiritual poverty that comes with it and which I believe contributes to the present societal breakdown  in the West:

First, A Poverty of Perspective. Living an isolated life cuts you off from the balancing effects of hearing viewpoints other than your own. One of the great values of our Orthodox faith is that is provides a very real and tangible connection to the faithful Christians who have gone before us. We have access to the wisdom of that “great cloud of witnesses” that helps us keep a healthy perspective about our struggles, and provides us wonderful role models of faithfulness that we can draw strength from when life just gets a bit overwhelming. There is nothing like the voices of friends to encourage us when we face life’s hard times.

Second, A Poverty of Purpose. This sickness of isolation weakens our resolve to live honorable lives. Evidence of this can be seen in the steadily growing acceptance of pornographic web sites and materials in America. Internet pornography is already a $4 billion a year business. Easy access to porn, coupled with a sense of isolation from friends and family, is a recipe for spiritual catastrophe. When you feel cut off from close friends, you feel less of an obligation and purpose to guard the community from the baser desires of fallen mankind. Alone, you do what you desire; in community you cannot forget how your personal behavior affects those around you. When you are alone, you can be more willing to accept the degrading illusion of intimacy without responsibility.

Finally, A Poverty of Person. Eventually, this disconnectedness begins to erode the lonely person’s own identity. Our Orthodox faith teaches us that we can truly only know our real selves “in the face of another.” St. James says it best when he describes a man looking in a mirror, who “observes himself, goes away, and immediately forgets what kind of man he was.” (James 1:24) Alone, we either fall into the trap of being too harsh with ourselves, or letting ourselves off the hook too easy. In Community we keep a vision of our true selves in the clarity of all the other faces that surround us. We were created in the image of the eternally communing Holy Trinity. When we are isolated, we risk spiritual poverty by denying who we were made to be.

In the absence of community, people begin looking to counterfeit communities. Our society is full of counterfeits offering something close to the real thing but missing the one essential, God. Some of the fastest growing community groups are in inner city America. They are known as gangs. Their rapid growth is due in large part to the providing what young people are looking for and cannot find elsewhere:

• Acceptance and belonging
• Sense of family
• Sense of belonging to something with a greater cause
• United for one purpose
• Encouragement to contribute in order to benefit the group
• Devoted to a cause
• Personal identity is that of the group
• Loyalty even to death

The early Christian communities devoted themselves to Jesus' teaching and living a Christian life, often at the risk of their own lives.  In a society where the prevailing attitude was one of selfishness, materialism and exclusiveness, Christians epitomized the attributes of unselfishness, love and inclusion.  The social isolation experienced by people of this time was rooted in poverty, class and the overcrowded urban centers that grew up throughout the Empire. Christian communities offered a God centered alternative and their numbers grew exponentially as a result. There is a Greek word that contains the essence of this Christian concept. That word is koinonia. It is in community that we find the truth of who we are and how we should live. It is in God’s community, in koinonia, that we find our life as persons.  Christianity offers us an alternative to the social isolation within a modern society that idolizes individualism to the detriment of a true personhood.  Bishop Kallistos Ware gives us this insight: “The human person is created for relationship.” True personhood is not found in individuals – it is found in community."

The key lesson of these tragedies is always the same. It is the story of individuals who are cast adrift in an increasingly inhospitable society of strangers; a society that is steadily destroying the very communities that offer our best hope for combating the alienation that produces children who kill.