Greece Directed and Designed by Hans Hoefer Edited by Karen Van Dyck o APA PUBLICATIONS TABLE OF CONTENTS Part One Welcome to Greece 15 -by Karen Van Dyck History 17-43 -by Mark Mazower Trayelers Through The Ages 47 -by David Constantine The Greek Way of Life 61 -by Jane Cowan "Alhina, My Grandmother" 84 -by Costas Taktsis Part Two Hope Your Road Is A Long One 95 -by Karen Van Dyck The Northeast 98 -by Fay Zika Mount Athos 106 -by Haris Vlavianos Epims and NW Macedonia 117 -by Nelson Moe Hiking in the Pindos Range 126 -by Dimitri Gondic3s Rumeli and the Ionian Islands 135 -by David Ricks Central Greece 147 -by Julia Loomis Athens 161 -by Kay Cicellis Seeing the Sites 167 -by. Kerin Hope Islands of the Saronic Gulf 175 -by Haris Vlavianos Aegina: A Place of Return 176 -by Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke The Peloponnese 187 -by John Chioles The Cyclades Islands 207 -by Stacy Rubis A Hard Night on Mykonos 210 -by Kay Cicellis The Northeastern Aegean Islands 221 -by Nelson Moe The Dodecanese Islands 239 -by Nikos KasdagJis and Aliki Gourdomichalis Views of Patmos 248 -by Richard Kindersley Crete -by Sean Darner 256 Part Three A Cultural ABCs 271 Acronyms 272 -by Karen Van Dyck Byzantine Church Music (an 272 interview with Mark Dragournis) TABLE OF CONTENTS Rembetika (an interview 297 with Mark Dragoumis) Shadow Puppet Theater 298 -by Samantha Stenzel Theodorakis etc (an interview 300 with Mark Dragoumis) Unfinished Buildings 301 -by Karen Van Dyck Vendetta 301 -by Mark Mazower Women 302 -by Lucy Rushton Xenomania/Xenophobia 308 Yoghurt 308 -by Karen Van Dyck Zorba 309 -by Jane Cowan Map~ourt$sy of National Tourist OrganlsatiDn 01 Greece The Northeast 98 The Northwest 116 RumeH and the Ionian Islands 134 Central Greece 146 Athens and Environs 173 The Pcloponnese 186 The Cyclades Islands 206 The Northeastern Aegean Islands 220 The Dodccanese Islands 238 Coffee 273 Crete 256 -by Jane Cowan Delectables ' 274 -by Katy Ricks Evil Eye 275 Friends/Parea 276 -by Jane Cowan Graffiti and Politics 278 -by Mark Mazower Hospitality 280 -by Jane Cowan Icons and Orthodoxy 281 -by Charles Stewart Junta 282 -by Haris Vlavianos Kamaki 283 -by SoCka Zinovieff Language 284 -by Peter Mackridge Movies 287 -by Samantha Stenzel Namedays 288 -by Jane Cowan Oral Tradition and Poetry 291 -by Karen Van Dyck Periptera 295 -by Charles Stewart Queuing 296 -by Jane Cowan A ft f\ ~ f:t F\ A A A }- } "/~ J~/~" /'( A 'tJ 11 AA tJ. 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Even if they have trouble understanding other European languages they can at least read road signs and figure out which is the ladies and the gents. In Greece even international catch words like EXPRESS have a bizarre appearance: E2nPEL. Perhaps as much as anything else it is the strange alphabet that makes foreigners throw up their hands and say, "It's all Greek to me!" The cultural ABCs that follows won't help anyone overcome their fear of es, qis, or I/Is, but it may provide a to another set of symbols that are equally strange. Greece is full untranslatable concepts. What follows is an alphabet's worth of these indigenous phenomena. From E for Evil Eye to K for Kamaki to Z for Zorba these entries introduce the newcomer to aspects of contemporary Greek culture which arc not immediately obvious. Here readers will find out why no one bothers about birthdays (see Namedays), why kiosks dot every corner Periptera), why o1d women dress in black (see Women), why are at odds over tourism (see XenophobiajXenomania). Of course this kaleidoscope of incongruous items is only one of many possible col1ections. The various writers who have contributed to this alphabet are not set on fixing Greece's cultural top on the contrary, each-whether linguist, anthropologist or j'c mrnalist,-is interested in tapping the shifting assumptions that go into making myths and shaping cultural identity. Sometimes humorous, sometimes serious, these entries map out another Greece, as important as the Greece already represented by region in the previous section. As a dictionary or as a set commentaries, use these pages as you please, rassment if you knew that the great hordes shouting rIAOK (pronounced "paok") in the ACRONYMS streets of Salonika on Sunday were not po­ litical activists but soccer fans. Even classicists, who can bumble their way through the more conservative newspapers BYZANTINE with their many archaisms and purist forms (see Language), would have a difficult lime CHURCH MUSIC deciphering the strings of acronyms that appear in most articles today. Always used for the names of political parties (KKE. IIALO K, Q: In most parts of Greece on Sundays and N~, KO~H:EO, EllEN, ~HANA), acronyms Namedays (see Namedays) radios are turned now stand in for everything from social ser­ on ful! blast and towns resound with the nasal vices (lKA, EES, ANAT, IKY, ~EH, O\fl~) half, and less than half, tone dips of the to soccer clubs (rIAOK, AEK). Athens' Mitrop61eos cantors. Can you briefly A contemporary Greek painter, com­ explain why this chanting sounds "eastern" to menting on the rece'nt proliferation of acro­ a westerner's ear? nyms, chided that soon the Greek novel would consist solely of abbreviations. It could be he A: Traditional modern Greek music has many was merely denigrating language as a Icsscr oriental features, as indeed had the JIlusic of medium-we all know that according to the ancient Greeks: not only tones and semi­ painters, a picture speaks a thousand words­ tones, but other smaller and larger intervals, but even so he had a point: acronyms are the oriental chromatic scales, a nasal quality in the fast-food of modern Greek discourse. Just as voice and characteristic motifs decorated with Americans have begun to wonder what Mc­ grace-notes such as are particularly common Donald's really means, so Greeks are begin­ in the East. ning to wonder what acronyms are all about. Why, ironically enough, have public an­ Q: How did Byzantium give birth to two nouncements and newspaper articles started such different church musics as the Roman to resemble their ancient stone predecessors Catholic and the Greek Orthodox? with their long lines of unpunctua ted capitals'! This may be an exaggeration, but the abun­ A: Were these two kinds of music really so dance of acronyms is still a notable cultural different 1900 years ago'! Plenty of scholars phenomenon. Especially since acronyms, like doubt this. For example, this is what Igor fast-food hamburgers, have an uncanny Reznikoff believes: "At the end of the 19th ability to camouflage what they contain. One century French Benedictines wanted to revive soon forgets what an acronym really stands the "Gregorian chant" and created melodies for. It suddenly has an association all its own, based upon notes with identical time-value, completely separate from its components. The often indeed beautiful, but which have no con­ prime minister Andreas Papandreou recently nection with the genuine ancient chant as we took advantage of this slippage and decidcd to know it from manuscript sources on the one use the same acronym for the Greek police hand and from the tradition of model music force as the left-wing resistance fighters had on the other." used during Greece's civil war. EAAL now stands for both. In this case an acronym Q: What docs Orthodoxy have to say about proved a subtle way of legitimizing a partic­ music? Has it always been an integral part of ular moment of leftist history. the Greek church service? Has there ever been But subtleties aside, even ifit would take a any instrumental accompaniment? . lifetime to decipher the politics of acronyms it doesn't take long to learn those that are most A: Music has been used in the Christian frequently used. And although Greek phrase Church since Apostolic times, and is regarded books rarely mention them you would be hard by the Orthodox Church as an integral part 'of pressed to phone overseas if you didn't know the liturgy, to be preserved by each generation that the public phones in every Greek town or as a holy relic and to be performed contritely, city were housed in a building called OTE humbly and with due decorum.