My Greek Odyssey

At the Movies

A nostalgic view of village life from a bygone era. This 1958 production from Finos Films highlights the collision between modernity and tradition in a small Greek village.  It is about about the hilarious conflict between the newly arrived village doctor played by Orestes Makris and a savvy midwife, Georgia Vassiliadou. With English sub-titles.

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.