Places
Images and narratives of places
“As my body continues its journey. My thoughts return to days gone by.” Gustave Flaubert (cited in My Indies by Katia Antonopoulou)
“The suspended time of the journey, which I like so much, because detached as it is, it seems to me as if it does not belong to the general sum, as if it were a bonus let’s say, like the thirteenth salary, will soon end.” Katia Antonopoulou
“Language is a system of signs that expresses ideas, and is therefore comparable to pictures, which are also a system of signs expressing ideas.” From the Bald Soprano / 1954 by Eugene Ionesco
“[The] temporal lobe [is] one of the four major divisions of each of the two brain hemispheres (left and right), located to the side of each hemisphere. The temporal lobe is involved in, among other things, recognizing and remembering objects, places, and people, and in language processing.” Kathleen Taylor, Brainwashing (Oxford Landmark Science) (p. 463)
Today’s post contains five drawings of Athens, Ioannina, Alonissos and Astypalaia, two islands that I visited in the 80s. A memory from those summers concerns the widely-travelled writer Katia Antonopoulou in the shop that she kept with her husband at the time, on a coastal road, if my memory serves me correctly, in Astypalaia. During those years, I read her book My Indies. The book resembles “a breathless conversation……. a journey through a thousand paths and a painting of the myriad faces of India…. a journey through place, time and the psyches of people…” (Kostas Stamatiou, 17/07/1988). The author herself writes in the book’s preface “…we will be together for 308 pages from Kalamata and Metaxochori to my Indies and back from where I began…”.
Her narrative begins:
“When I was a little girl, I would go to the train station in Kalamata to watch the trains leave for the unknown and magical Athens and dream of leaving, I never imagined that many years later I would take the train from Metaxochori in Larissa to end up in the Indies. But also that evening when I walked along the Kalamata pier holding my mother’s hand and asking her, “Mom, where are these people going?”, showing her a boat full of people poorly dressed with little luggage, her telling me, immigrants, my child, going to Australia. Nor did I imagine that one day I would go to Australia, married to Jim, who is an Australian and whom I met on Hydra. But did we both imagine that we would one day live in a small village in Thessaly, Metaxochori, he from Melbourne, Australia, and I from Kalamata, in the Peloponnese?”
Actor Michalis Syriopoulos reads an excerpt titled Alonissos, the Other Island from Jacques Lacarrière’s “Greek Summer”: https://www.lifo.gr/podcasts/anagnoseis/alonnisos-allo-nisi
Lacarrière made his first trip to Greece in 1947, and his last in the autumn of 1966.
Widely read poems about Greece with references to different time periods of the past.
Extract from the poem, A Word for Summer, by George Seferis (Autumn, 1936):
….. And yet I once loved Syngrou Avenue
the double rocking of the wide road
that would leave us miraculously by the sea,
the everlasting sea, to be cleansed of our sins;
I have loved a few unknown people
suddenly met at the day’s end
talking to themselves like captains of sunken armadas,
a sign that the world is wide.
And yet I have loved these very roads, these columns;
no matter if I was born on the other shore near
rushes and reeds, islands // that had water wells in the sand that a rower
might quench his thirst, no matter if I was born
by the sea, which I wind and unwind in my fingers
when I am weary– I no longer know where I was born……
The poem, In the manner of G. S, by George Seferis resembles a tour of places in interwar Greece, which refers to history, and feelings of alienation, stagnation, inaction.
Excerpts:
Wherever I travel Greece wounds me.
On Pelion among the chestnut trees the Centaur’s shirt
slipped through the leaves to fold around my body
as I climbed the slope and the sea followed me
climbing too like mercury in a thermometer // till we found the mountain waters.
On Santorini touching islands that were sinking
hearing a pipe play somewhere on the pumice stone
my hand was nailed to the gunwale by an arrow shot suddenly
from the confines of a vanished youth.
At Mycenae I raised the great stones and the treasures of the house of Atreus
and slept with them at the hotel “Beautiful Helen of Menelaus”……………
On Spetses, Poros, and Mykonos the barcaroles sickened me………………
Meanwhile Greece goes on travelling, always travelling………………..
and if we see “the Aegean flower with corpses”
it will be with those who tried to catch the big ship by swimming after it
those who got bored waiting for the ships that cannot move
the ELSI, the SAMOTHRAKI, the AMVRAKIKOS.
The ships hoot now that dusk falls on Piraeus, hoot and hoot, but no capstan moves, no chain gleams wet in the vanishing light,
the captain stands like a stone in white and gold.
Wherever I travel Greece wounds me,
curtains of mountains, archipelagos, naked granite.
They call the one ship that sails AGONY 937.
In his poem Greece you know… Michalis Ganas subtly refers to a line from one of George Seferis’ better known poems, posted above, Wherever I travel Greece wounds me…, and the years of the junta
You can listen to the poem read in Greek and English by Joshua Barley at: https://www.bsa.ac.uk/videos/michalis-ganas-greece-you-know-read-by-joshua-barley/
Finally, a few words about a tiny book by journalist Xenia Kounalaki, Antisemitism in Greece, which contains the speech she delivered at an event of the Jewish community of Ioannina in collaboration with the Region of Epirus and the Municipality of Ioannina on the occasion of the Day of Remembrance of the Greek Jewish Martyrs and Heroes of the Holocaust. Kounalaki tries to briefly record how political parties, the Church, Justice, school and the history lesson that tends to bypass “the unpleasant episodes and shameful footnotes” in the path of the Greek nation, the media, pop culture and Greek public opinion, perceive and negotiate these traumatic events and how they ultimately contribute to the dissemination or strengthening of antisemitism. As causes of this phenomenon, Kounalakis also mentions the circulation of conspiracy stories.
She begins her speech by telling us how her interest in the Holocaust was born, without her having any Jewish relatives or friends. Two defining experiences that helped her cultivate such reflexes were watching a documentary at school and reading Anne Frank’s Diary. She writes: “…what shocked me was my identification with the heroes, the thought that some children my age, just forty years earlier, were not playing carefree in their schoolyards, but were hiding in warehouses so that the Nazis would not arrest them and send them to camps…”.
The book points out that “In Greece, comparisons are constantly multiplying, the use of symbols is increasing, and sketches that relativize the Holocaust are increasing. In other words, we are doing the exact opposite of what, for example, Jorge Sembrun does, who, many years after the event, in 1963, writes “The Great Journey” trying to understand what has happened, or Claude Lanzmann, in the emblematic documentary “Shoah”, who talks about the Holocaust through silent single shots with natural sound: we chatter about the Holocaust, we compare the debt crisis with the Holocaust, us with the Jews………….. We constantly refer to the Holocaust, without really talking about it.”