Walking Down the Road

For hundreds of years Greek life has been centered around village (horio) culture. During the postwar era, a gradual migration from remote villages to a handful of cities, primarily Athens and Thessaloniki, took place. Even when Greeks moved to a large city like Athens they congregated in neighborhoods that took on almost a village like culture that emphasized sociability and the maintenance of village ties.  

Village life is often the subject of much nostalgia, especially for those that were raised there as children.  To be sure, rural poverty, the lack of opportunities and the periodic upheavals brought by war and occupation, forced many villagers to leave, either migrating to Greek cities or emigrating to foreign lands to find work. Life in the horio or village was characterized to some extent by a lack of cooperation, superstition and competition between families.  It was also marked by a sense of solidarity in the face of outside dangers and a common religious and cultural context. Attributes that are very much in evidence on a wider scale in Greece, even today.  

Most Greeks share a lifelong ambition to build a house in the village of their parents. Many put a great deal of time, effort and money in restoring their ancestral homes. Like migrating birds they return on holidays like Easter, Christmas, the village patron Saint's day, or for weddings, baptisms and funerals. The populations of villages that are normally inhabited by sparse numbers of elderly residents during most of the year, swell instantly to many times their size on these occasions.  The quiet rural landscape is filled with people and cars, the air vibrates with the sound of Church services, singing, dancing and feasting.

The first thing most Greeks do when the first meet each other is to determine whether they come from the same village or province. Even more importantly whether they have a familial connection, which they often do, if they come from the same place, thus establishing a positive link with each other. Village culture and the inordinately strong sense of family bonds have been cornerstones of Greek life.  Unfortunately both are on the wane. 

There has always been an underlying sense that Greek villagers were a bunch of ignorant country bumpkins that were in urgent need of the strong guidance of the well educated, not to mention cultured, Athenian "elite."  Lost in all of this is the fact that Greeks, since preclassical times, have been travelers spurred on by curiosity and the need to find new sources of wealth in a country that is resource poor.  Greek villagers are a neither isolated nor ignorant of the outside world and one only needs to spend an hour or so in the local kafenion to determine this truth. The Greek villager despite being victimized and ignored by successive central governments of the Right and Left has always been not only the foundation of the Greek nation but also its chief defender. The receipts sent to Greece by its far flung sons were for many years one of the country's major sources of income. In addition, the village provided the bulk of the military manpower for the nation's frequent military adventures since the establishment of modern Greece.  Small wonder that the rural villages eventually became the breeding ground for the insurgency that rocked Greece after World War II. 

My grandparents and particularly my father were products of the horio. They're lives reflected their humble beginnings as the photograph above can attest to, in addition to some of the finer attributes of village culture such as piety, philotimo and patriotism.  Recently I came across an old Greek television video, circa 1970, of some musicians from the village of Pongoniani located in the Pogoni region in the northwest part of Greece. This region straddles the Albanian border. The musicians are interviewed by a journalist who asks them to play a song indigenous to this area called "Pigaina sto Dromo (I was walking down the road)." Both of my parents were born in villages in Pogoni and this particular song was one that I remember hearing my father and his hometown friends singing. It is about a young man walking down a road who stops to eat an apple and admire a beautiful black eyed girl.

The lyrics go something like this:

I was going down the road, my little girl, haidemono (caressable)

I found an apple tree by the road

I cut an apple

and gave her my handkerchief, Haide (Come along)

Funny,  when I first heard it sung many years ago, it sounded like the catterwhauling of  some old guys who had nothing better to do than dredge up questionable music from a bygone era.  Now it hits me in the pit of my stomach and brings a tear to my eye.

Comments

[maria]

now that you mention the horio, i must tell you that both my parents came from horia, and we were raised in NZ very much according to the norms of village life. when i first came to greece, my first introduction to the country was the urban greek life in athens. i always found my family there (despite having village origins) very hard to get on with, despite my being born in a completely urban environment (i had never seen a chicken running round in a person's yard, let alone collected a newly hatched egg!)

when i came to crete, despite having a radically different background from the local people, and being much more educated than them, i blended in like a villager myself. even now, i still prefer the village to the town (a stable internet connection does help!) and I feel I am lucky in that i was able to get back to my roots in this way...

[petroskar@att.net]

stavro, thank you for connecting me to my horio upbringing.although you were raised in
america you are very well informed and very
correct about all the subjects that you
write.may god keep you safe and healthy.i
enjoy your writings very much.
petros

[Stavros]

Maria,

You bring up a good point. Many of us were brought up according to a set of rules, an ethos, an outlook that emanate from the horio. Even my mother who grew up in Constantinople and looked askance at some of the things my yiayia did like digging up horta and reading coffee cups, was essentially a product of the village culture of her parent's. Even my father, despite being well educated and read, was a product of the horio where he grew up until he left for Constantinople.

When I lived in Greece I spent a great deal of my off duty time in Nea Smyrni, where my Aunt and cousins lived. Thia had moved there before the war when Nea Smyrni was still sparsely populated. Even in the 80s she still had a chicken coop and a wonderful garden next to her home. Unfortunately her children sold the property a few years ago after her death to make way for a multi story apartment building. Such is progress. Small wonder that we crave the simplicity, the natural surroundings and most importantly, the human contact of the horio.

Petro,

Thank you, Na se kala. Feel free to correct me when I write something foolish, which is not uncommon.

[Margaret]

Stavro,

Your post got me thinking about Dunbar's number again.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

I don't think it takes an anthropologist to tell us that most of us want to belong to a village-sized community - probably the horio that most of our ancestors lived in, before the Industrial Revolution trickled out to rural areas or sucked people in to the towns. Even if we don't have our village any more, I think many people create their own villages, in their school, their workplace, their church congregation, their sports clubs, their Facebook site. My uncle was telling me about his childhood last week, living in poverty in a town. He said that his grandparents had brought up eight children in two rooms and whilst they had nothing, they had something that was priceless - their respectability. It got the family a long way, that respectability.

[Stavros]

Margaret,

I think you have nailed it. There is a basic need we have for community. We are not meant to live in isolation. Unfortunately cities, especially the big ones, seem to spawn residents who are secluded from each other. Many of us do create a community of our own, though some do not, for various reasons.

In the old days, respectability and honor, were highly prized, in particular, by those who had little else. These days, we look up to those who seem to have neither.

[Perry]

Excellent! Many good thoughts here. On my now defunct blog, I have a post and some photos from my 2004 visit to Greece.

http://perrybessas.com/vf-archives/mirror/?p=41

Some additional horio photos here:
http://perrybessas.com/vf-archives/mirror/?page_id=70

[Stavros]

Great photos. Thank you for sharing them with us.

[DD]

My distant roots are in Macedonia and Crete, with all of the older folk migrating to Asia Minor probably between the 17th and the early part of the 19th century. My parents lived in large cities, including Constantinople, so my horio stories are meager. Nevertheless, growing up in Greece gave me plenty of opportunities to experience how life was away from Athens -- and, Stavros, you correctly point out that villages in this country have been consistently neglected by governments. Today, the village is withering away; large swaths of the country, especially in the northwest and the islands have been almost completely abandoned, with all younger people leaving for the cities and the older folk left behind to fend for themselves. Greater Athens claims the unenviable record of being home to nearly 45 percent of Greece's population. Nature thought hates a vacuum and so we should expect not very pleasant developments in the future concerning the depopulated parts of Greece.

[Stavros]

Perhaps it's my age but cities hold little attraction for me. Isn't it amazing that successive governments have been unwilling and unable to do what it takes to stem the flow of young people to the cities and abroad? Unfortunately I feel it will be more of the same with Yiorgaki.

[maria v]

i love travelling in cities - absolutely crave it. but not to live in, just to visit, for a maximum of, say, 10 days. after that, i feel i'm rotting.