This year, Greek and Roman Easter fall a week apart: the Western Church celebrating on the 8th of April and the Eastern Church on the 15th. So the Greek Church is now in the midst of Holy Week, with Palm Sunday just past and Good Friday and Easter yet to come.
I hadn’t been to a Greek Church for many years, not since I was in Greece, but last Sunday I went. It was part in Greek and part in English, but I didn’t try to follow the service, instead immersing myself in the sounds and scents and images, which reminded me of a short poem by C. P. Cavafy:
In the Church of the Greeks
I love the Church -- her images of the six-wingéd Cherubim,
Her silver vessels, her candelabra,
Her lights and icons and pulpit.
There, within the Church of the Greeks,
with her fragrant incense
and chanted liturgy
and in the magnificent presence of her priests
moving in solemn ritual --
garbed in shining vestments --
my mind runs to the great worth of our race
and the glory of our Byzantine heritage.
On one level, Cavafy has it just right. In the Eastern Church every sense is engaged in worship -- sight and sound and touch and smell and movement -- and to the poet also the associated glories of the thousand years of the Byzantine. But he seems to see nothing of its mystic faith, of the sacred, timeless space of the liturgy, of the believer drawn up to heaven to the company of the saints and martyrs looking out to him through the window of their icon. The poet sees only the outward, superficial things, which is, I think, a sad affair, but then Cavafy had a sad life.
He did write a very nice poem about travel, which I may write about sometime.
Showing posts with label Greek Easter. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Greek Easter. Show all posts
Thursday, April 12, 2012
Tuesday, April 3, 2012
on the overnight boat to Athens
On the island of Crete, during that first Greek Easter, I had met Laurens, a young Swedish fellow who was hitch-hiking through Europe.
The first thing I -- and probably anyone else -- would notice about Laurens is that he looked like a comic book hero. He was blond, square-jawed and well-built. I am usually not immediately well-disposed toward those so unfairly blessed by nature, but Laurens was open-hearted and utterly likable. His female traveling companion, whose name I am pleased to forget, was unfortunately a flibbertigibbet. Pleasant enough when she kept her mouth shut, even Laurens seemed relieved when she disappeared at Iraklio and the two of us caught the overnight boat to Athens.
As was the custom on inter-island boats, we went directly to the rear deck to stake out a sheltered sleeping space. And it was there that we saw her.
Actually, the first thing I saw was her backpack, which hove into view almost a minute before her head appeared over the side of the boat as she climbed aboard. It was the tallest backpack I had ever seen and was all the more remarkable for belonging to a mere slip of a blond, suntanned young woman.
The Greeks were relatively nice about young women traveling alone, who were able to do so without -- most of the time -- becoming the object of unwanted attention. But this young woman instantly became the focus of a veritable court of young males, both foreign and domestic, whom she commanded with practiced authority. Laurens, one moment carrying on a perfectly intelligent conversation at my side, was the next moment at her feet in rapt attention. It was an amazing sight to see.
Later, during an intermission of court, Laurens wandered back, his eyes glazed, and smiling dopily. “She writes for a magazine,” he explained. “She has just come from climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro and being inducted into some tribal society, and she’s on her way to London to talk to Prince Charles about the Whaling Convention, or something.” I told him that if he could put that in a bottle he’d have something, but his mind was elsewhere. Later, Laurens and the young lady moved their sleeping bags close together -- though, chastely, not quite touching -- and I saw no more of him until breakfast.
The first thing I -- and probably anyone else -- would notice about Laurens is that he looked like a comic book hero. He was blond, square-jawed and well-built. I am usually not immediately well-disposed toward those so unfairly blessed by nature, but Laurens was open-hearted and utterly likable. His female traveling companion, whose name I am pleased to forget, was unfortunately a flibbertigibbet. Pleasant enough when she kept her mouth shut, even Laurens seemed relieved when she disappeared at Iraklio and the two of us caught the overnight boat to Athens.
As was the custom on inter-island boats, we went directly to the rear deck to stake out a sheltered sleeping space. And it was there that we saw her.
Actually, the first thing I saw was her backpack, which hove into view almost a minute before her head appeared over the side of the boat as she climbed aboard. It was the tallest backpack I had ever seen and was all the more remarkable for belonging to a mere slip of a blond, suntanned young woman.
The Greeks were relatively nice about young women traveling alone, who were able to do so without -- most of the time -- becoming the object of unwanted attention. But this young woman instantly became the focus of a veritable court of young males, both foreign and domestic, whom she commanded with practiced authority. Laurens, one moment carrying on a perfectly intelligent conversation at my side, was the next moment at her feet in rapt attention. It was an amazing sight to see.
Later, during an intermission of court, Laurens wandered back, his eyes glazed, and smiling dopily. “She writes for a magazine,” he explained. “She has just come from climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro and being inducted into some tribal society, and she’s on her way to London to talk to Prince Charles about the Whaling Convention, or something.” I told him that if he could put that in a bottle he’d have something, but his mind was elsewhere. Later, Laurens and the young lady moved their sleeping bags close together -- though, chastely, not quite touching -- and I saw no more of him until breakfast.
Saturday, March 3, 2012
Greek Easter, pt.3.
In our last installment the shipping strike had stranded me in Athens, diverting me from my pious intention to spend Greek Easter on a remote island.
Good Friday and Easter, observed in Athens
That evening I walked through the Monasteraki district to the Metropolitan Cathedral. The narrow streets of the old section were full of the sounds of antiphonal bells and the beautiful voices of priests reading the liturgy over loudspeakers from the Cathedral. It was Good Friday.
I entered the Cathedral by a side door and found inside that the golden fixtures and mosaics, whose beauty is to remind the faithful of the glory of Heaven, had their glory magnified by the glare of studio lights, as the service was being broadcast in its entirety over state television for a country of whose citizens 98 percent adhere to the Orthodox faith.
There were two choirs of seminarians, young men in black robes with red piping, and bearded priests, both bareheaded and crowned. Toward the front of the church and a little to one side was enthroned the Metropolitan, bearded and ancient, in one hand his staff with the twined serpents, looking like something that had grown out of the earth, making his sign over those who came for his blessing.
The altar is screened from the people by a low wall. In the Eastern Church it is called an iconostasis; in the Anglican Church it is called a rood screen, but such things were mostly abandoned in the West during the Reformation and nowadays you see them only in very old European churches. But in the Eastern Church there was no Reformation, and still today their priests enter a place set apart to address their prayers to God, as a Jewish priest of the Temple in Jesus’ time would have entered the Holy of Holies to address his prayers to the Most High.
What strikes the protestant eye as a riot of decoration in an Orthodox Church is in fact a disciplined and well-thought-out scheme devised in the Ninth Century for the instruction of the faithful. From his entrance into a church, the believer is confronted with a series of precisely placed illustrations which make clear the story of Christ’s earthly mission and its relation to the scheme of heaven, rising from the lives of the saints on earth, through prophets, angels and archangels, to a starry dome of heaven surmounted at its very peak by a portrait of Christ Pantocrator, Christ the Ruler of All.
But Christ Pantocrator was obscured by the lights of the state television and so I looked at the iconostasis, the icon screen, with its pictures of the Blesséd Virgin, the Theotokos, the God-bearer, on my left, and on my right of Christ Enthroned, staring straight at me with a level gaze that seemed at first severe but with familiarity became the confident and serene gaze of Christ the King, who had passed through the suffering of the flesh and come at last to his rightful kingdom.
I stood beside a column and saw a small silver casket, about a meter long. A sign tells us that the casket contains the remains of Gregory the Fifth, Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, “who was hanged and thrown into the waters of the Bosporus by barbarian and impious persons.”
The service was in progress when I arrived and was in progress an hour later when I left. In the Western Church we celebrate the most significant events in the history of the world in roughly an hour and fifteen minutes, so that we may be on our way to attended to other, less significant matters. In the Eastern Church, with its surer sense of proportion, they devote the time appropriate. To be fair, while in the West our sense of piety requires that we sit still and pay attention to what’s going on in the service, in the East it is permissible to walk around or wander outside and stretch your legs or have a smoke. There, religion is not a thing separate, but a part of life, and if life must accommodate faith, so will faith accommodate life.
On the way back to my room I notice that a certain hotel was still a den of prostitution, as it had been on my first visit to Athens. Youngish women in short garments lounged in the stairwell, looking out with a bored expression. The name of the hotel had struck me as a pun, but I shall not mention it as this was a few years ago and the establishment may now have a new business plan.
I went back to my hotel on Athenai Street and read more of the book I had brought with me, Nikos Kazantzakis’ The Greek Passion, and was moved to tears when Yanokos realizes his sinful purpose and confesses to Father Fotis, and gave him Lada’s Turkish gold. I tried to be in the spirit of things.
Saturday passed uneventfully. Near my hotel on Athenai Street is a large indoor meat market and I see in the street Greek men returning home with a whole skinned lamb over their shoulder, wrapped in a sheet of plastic, for the Easter meal.
Later in the day I nap for a while, then up and dress for the Great Vigil of Easter, which will begin at 11:30 that night at the Cathedral. There will be long prayers and the church will be darkened and then the priest will come out from behind the icon screen with a candle and cry out, “Come, ye, partake of the never-setting Light and glorify Christ who is risen from the dead,” and light the candles of the people, who will pass the fire back through the church, each candle lighting another, and as they do so they will say Christos anesti, “Christ is risen”, to which their neighbors will reply, Alithios anesti, “He is risen indeed”.
But reality so seldom lives up to expectations. When I reached the Cathedral I found the Square cordoned off by hundreds of police and soldiers, and at that moment arrived a large limousine which someone in the crowd told me brought the Prime Minister. There were two military bands. It was the State at prayer.
I left Cathedral Square and walked across the old section of town to a small street a few blocks from Syntagma, to St. Paul’s Anglican Church, where they were also observing the Great Vigil, though without bands or prime ministers. In the small, old church of the English community of Athens, its walls hung with the banners of the Royal Navy and the RAF, led by a white-haired cleric with a booming voice, we said the well-worn words of the common prayers, and prayed for the health of the Queen. Afterward, when I walked out of the church it was a shock to find myself in Athens, so familiar had been the worship. It was as if I had walked out of my own church in California and found myself in Marrakesh.
On the way back to the hotel I passed the Cathedral. There were neither limousines nor military bands nor, so far as I could tell, any prime ministers. Just regular Christians. But they were still singing their glorious songs and there were priests in beautiful robes, there were icons gleaming in the haze of incense and joy on the face of the people. It was all completely satisfactory.
(More Easter in Greece to follow . . .)
Good Friday and Easter, observed in Athens
That evening I walked through the Monasteraki district to the Metropolitan Cathedral. The narrow streets of the old section were full of the sounds of antiphonal bells and the beautiful voices of priests reading the liturgy over loudspeakers from the Cathedral. It was Good Friday.
I entered the Cathedral by a side door and found inside that the golden fixtures and mosaics, whose beauty is to remind the faithful of the glory of Heaven, had their glory magnified by the glare of studio lights, as the service was being broadcast in its entirety over state television for a country of whose citizens 98 percent adhere to the Orthodox faith.
There were two choirs of seminarians, young men in black robes with red piping, and bearded priests, both bareheaded and crowned. Toward the front of the church and a little to one side was enthroned the Metropolitan, bearded and ancient, in one hand his staff with the twined serpents, looking like something that had grown out of the earth, making his sign over those who came for his blessing.
The altar is screened from the people by a low wall. In the Eastern Church it is called an iconostasis; in the Anglican Church it is called a rood screen, but such things were mostly abandoned in the West during the Reformation and nowadays you see them only in very old European churches. But in the Eastern Church there was no Reformation, and still today their priests enter a place set apart to address their prayers to God, as a Jewish priest of the Temple in Jesus’ time would have entered the Holy of Holies to address his prayers to the Most High.
What strikes the protestant eye as a riot of decoration in an Orthodox Church is in fact a disciplined and well-thought-out scheme devised in the Ninth Century for the instruction of the faithful. From his entrance into a church, the believer is confronted with a series of precisely placed illustrations which make clear the story of Christ’s earthly mission and its relation to the scheme of heaven, rising from the lives of the saints on earth, through prophets, angels and archangels, to a starry dome of heaven surmounted at its very peak by a portrait of Christ Pantocrator, Christ the Ruler of All.
But Christ Pantocrator was obscured by the lights of the state television and so I looked at the iconostasis, the icon screen, with its pictures of the Blesséd Virgin, the Theotokos, the God-bearer, on my left, and on my right of Christ Enthroned, staring straight at me with a level gaze that seemed at first severe but with familiarity became the confident and serene gaze of Christ the King, who had passed through the suffering of the flesh and come at last to his rightful kingdom.
I stood beside a column and saw a small silver casket, about a meter long. A sign tells us that the casket contains the remains of Gregory the Fifth, Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, “who was hanged and thrown into the waters of the Bosporus by barbarian and impious persons.”
The service was in progress when I arrived and was in progress an hour later when I left. In the Western Church we celebrate the most significant events in the history of the world in roughly an hour and fifteen minutes, so that we may be on our way to attended to other, less significant matters. In the Eastern Church, with its surer sense of proportion, they devote the time appropriate. To be fair, while in the West our sense of piety requires that we sit still and pay attention to what’s going on in the service, in the East it is permissible to walk around or wander outside and stretch your legs or have a smoke. There, religion is not a thing separate, but a part of life, and if life must accommodate faith, so will faith accommodate life.
On the way back to my room I notice that a certain hotel was still a den of prostitution, as it had been on my first visit to Athens. Youngish women in short garments lounged in the stairwell, looking out with a bored expression. The name of the hotel had struck me as a pun, but I shall not mention it as this was a few years ago and the establishment may now have a new business plan.
I went back to my hotel on Athenai Street and read more of the book I had brought with me, Nikos Kazantzakis’ The Greek Passion, and was moved to tears when Yanokos realizes his sinful purpose and confesses to Father Fotis, and gave him Lada’s Turkish gold. I tried to be in the spirit of things.
Saturday passed uneventfully. Near my hotel on Athenai Street is a large indoor meat market and I see in the street Greek men returning home with a whole skinned lamb over their shoulder, wrapped in a sheet of plastic, for the Easter meal.
Later in the day I nap for a while, then up and dress for the Great Vigil of Easter, which will begin at 11:30 that night at the Cathedral. There will be long prayers and the church will be darkened and then the priest will come out from behind the icon screen with a candle and cry out, “Come, ye, partake of the never-setting Light and glorify Christ who is risen from the dead,” and light the candles of the people, who will pass the fire back through the church, each candle lighting another, and as they do so they will say Christos anesti, “Christ is risen”, to which their neighbors will reply, Alithios anesti, “He is risen indeed”.
But reality so seldom lives up to expectations. When I reached the Cathedral I found the Square cordoned off by hundreds of police and soldiers, and at that moment arrived a large limousine which someone in the crowd told me brought the Prime Minister. There were two military bands. It was the State at prayer.
I left Cathedral Square and walked across the old section of town to a small street a few blocks from Syntagma, to St. Paul’s Anglican Church, where they were also observing the Great Vigil, though without bands or prime ministers. In the small, old church of the English community of Athens, its walls hung with the banners of the Royal Navy and the RAF, led by a white-haired cleric with a booming voice, we said the well-worn words of the common prayers, and prayed for the health of the Queen. Afterward, when I walked out of the church it was a shock to find myself in Athens, so familiar had been the worship. It was as if I had walked out of my own church in California and found myself in Marrakesh.
On the way back to the hotel I passed the Cathedral. There were neither limousines nor military bands nor, so far as I could tell, any prime ministers. Just regular Christians. But they were still singing their glorious songs and there were priests in beautiful robes, there were icons gleaming in the haze of incense and joy on the face of the people. It was all completely satisfactory.
(More Easter in Greece to follow . . .)
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
Greek Easter, pt.2.
Easter in Athens
The gods willed otherwise . . .
In a year in which Greek and Roman Easter fell upon the same day, I resolved to spend Easter on the small, remote island of Karpathos, which I had read about in an old National Geographic.
By this time I fancied myself an old hand at Greek travel and made the trip with the casual indifference of a commuter. Once arrived at the terminal in Athens I strolled through the empty customs lane for returning nationals, announcing in practiced Demotiki that I had nothing to declare, and caught a 35-cent bus downtown, where I intended to walk across Syntagma Square and pick up a schedule at the boat office, then off to Pireaus to catch the next sailing to Karpathos. But the gods willed otherwise.
The boats were on strike.
And it was not one of your typical Greek strikes, not one of those worker-declared holidays that they tolerate there, and everyone knows they will go back to work next Monday. It was a real strike, with much head-shaking and upturned palms, baffling even the usually authoritative old fellows in black suits who sip thick coffee from tiny cups at the coffee shop to Neon on Omonia Square.
I was stranded in Athens. Miles away, across the wine dark sea, in the charming mountain villages of Karpathos, the sturdy Romoi were observing Holy Week with their ancient rites and processions while I was stranded in the dirty cement canyons of Athens, listening to unmufflered traffic and breathing the same air that was dissolving the marble off the Parthenon. Odysseus on his journey to Ithaka had been frustrated by the wrath of Poseidon Earthshaker; I was put upon by the ill humor of the seafarers union. The Age of Heroes was indeed passed.
Omonia Square lies about a mile or so north and west of Syntagma Square where Parliament sits and blond and slender Scandinavians take their iced coffee in a sea of outdoor tables in the cool shade of trees and awnings across the street from the King George Hotel.
Omonia is not shade and graciousness, but commerce and traffic. All distances in Greece, I am told, are measured from Omonia Square, and it is on Omonia Square that sits Kafenion to Neon, the New Coffee Shop. New perhaps in Ali Pasha’s time, or when Otho the Bavarian was made King of the Greeks in 1833, but new by no other standard. It is a great, cavernous, high-ceilinged room on the corner of an ancient building fronting on the Square, strewn thick with small tables where old men sit in rumpled black suits drinking thick Greek coffee and reading newspapers and smoking continually. The waiters, in white jackets as venerable as their customers, bring coffee and water and empty ashtrays onto the floor, and the old men can sit as long as they like over a 15-cent cup of coffee.
“I will tell you what is wrong with America,” said an old fellow in a worn black suit at the next table, without my ever asking. “Everyone works too hard. You don’t have time to live life. I have a cousin in America, and I know it is so.”
What could I say? He was right. A Greek man gets married and has children and works hard taking care of his wife and kids and parents, and as soon as his sons are big enough to take over, he gives them the farm or the shop and they take care of him and he spends the rest of his life drinking coffee and playing cards with his old friends down at the coffee shop.
Middle-aged Greek men wear old, comfortable clothes and hang out with their buddies. They do not chase girls. In fact, they have as little to do with women as possible.
“Women are no good,” my source at the next table volunteered. “A woman of good character is almost impossible to find. You are not married? Good. You are better off.”
There are few women in Kafenion to Neon. By Orthodox practice, a man may marry three times, but I doubt that many use up their quota. I do not think Greek men have mid-life crises. I think I might learn something from Greek men.
(My story finds its way back to Greek Easter in the next installment . . .)
The gods willed otherwise . . .
In a year in which Greek and Roman Easter fell upon the same day, I resolved to spend Easter on the small, remote island of Karpathos, which I had read about in an old National Geographic.
By this time I fancied myself an old hand at Greek travel and made the trip with the casual indifference of a commuter. Once arrived at the terminal in Athens I strolled through the empty customs lane for returning nationals, announcing in practiced Demotiki that I had nothing to declare, and caught a 35-cent bus downtown, where I intended to walk across Syntagma Square and pick up a schedule at the boat office, then off to Pireaus to catch the next sailing to Karpathos. But the gods willed otherwise.
The boats were on strike.
And it was not one of your typical Greek strikes, not one of those worker-declared holidays that they tolerate there, and everyone knows they will go back to work next Monday. It was a real strike, with much head-shaking and upturned palms, baffling even the usually authoritative old fellows in black suits who sip thick coffee from tiny cups at the coffee shop to Neon on Omonia Square.
I was stranded in Athens. Miles away, across the wine dark sea, in the charming mountain villages of Karpathos, the sturdy Romoi were observing Holy Week with their ancient rites and processions while I was stranded in the dirty cement canyons of Athens, listening to unmufflered traffic and breathing the same air that was dissolving the marble off the Parthenon. Odysseus on his journey to Ithaka had been frustrated by the wrath of Poseidon Earthshaker; I was put upon by the ill humor of the seafarers union. The Age of Heroes was indeed passed.
Omonia Square lies about a mile or so north and west of Syntagma Square where Parliament sits and blond and slender Scandinavians take their iced coffee in a sea of outdoor tables in the cool shade of trees and awnings across the street from the King George Hotel.
Omonia is not shade and graciousness, but commerce and traffic. All distances in Greece, I am told, are measured from Omonia Square, and it is on Omonia Square that sits Kafenion to Neon, the New Coffee Shop. New perhaps in Ali Pasha’s time, or when Otho the Bavarian was made King of the Greeks in 1833, but new by no other standard. It is a great, cavernous, high-ceilinged room on the corner of an ancient building fronting on the Square, strewn thick with small tables where old men sit in rumpled black suits drinking thick Greek coffee and reading newspapers and smoking continually. The waiters, in white jackets as venerable as their customers, bring coffee and water and empty ashtrays onto the floor, and the old men can sit as long as they like over a 15-cent cup of coffee.
“I will tell you what is wrong with America,” said an old fellow in a worn black suit at the next table, without my ever asking. “Everyone works too hard. You don’t have time to live life. I have a cousin in America, and I know it is so.”
What could I say? He was right. A Greek man gets married and has children and works hard taking care of his wife and kids and parents, and as soon as his sons are big enough to take over, he gives them the farm or the shop and they take care of him and he spends the rest of his life drinking coffee and playing cards with his old friends down at the coffee shop.
Middle-aged Greek men wear old, comfortable clothes and hang out with their buddies. They do not chase girls. In fact, they have as little to do with women as possible.
“Women are no good,” my source at the next table volunteered. “A woman of good character is almost impossible to find. You are not married? Good. You are better off.”
There are few women in Kafenion to Neon. By Orthodox practice, a man may marry three times, but I doubt that many use up their quota. I do not think Greek men have mid-life crises. I think I might learn something from Greek men.
(My story finds its way back to Greek Easter in the next installment . . .)
Saturday, February 25, 2012
Greek Easter, pt.1.
I hadn’t intended to go to Greece for Easter. I originally found myself there at Easter time simply because I hadn’t wanted to go in the crowded summer tourist season, or when it might be cold and I would need to pack heavy clothes. Here are a few of my stories of Easter in Greece.
An Accidental Easter on the Island of Crete
My first Easter in Greece began unpromisingly on the island of Crete, when I found I had left my passport and all identification back at the car rental office at the port of Iráklion and no hotel would have me. I discovered this inconvenience when I arrived late evening, on the southern coast, at the village of Plakiás, after a several hour drive across the island. When I tried to phone the car agency I found that everyone had gone home for the Easter weekend, which came as a surprise, as I did not think it was Easter. Some years Greek and Roman Easter fall on the same day, but this was one of the years that they did not, and I realized that I had arrived in Greece in the midst of Holy Week and my passport would be sitting safe on the desk of the nice man at the car rental agency in Iráklion, which would be closed until he came back to work next Monday. I thought it all very unbusinesslike. But I had a car and a pocket-full of money and was at large in Greece, and was sure everything would work out just fine.
I drove a few miles down the coast to the monastery of Moní Preveli, confident that the monks would offer a room to anyone as personable as myself. But alas, the monks were off on some monkish business and the place was in the care of an agéd and ill-tempered Cretan peasant. I would be overstating my knowledge of Greek to say that it was elementary, but it probably made no difference, for as Lawrence Durrell once wrote, you may speak Greek quite well and still not be able to understand a word of a Cretan peasant. In fact, I am sure that neither of us understood a word of the other, though he managed to communicate quite clearly that I would not be staying there that evening.
Leaving the monastery, I gave a ride to an elderly Greek couple who told me there was an inn farther up the coast. Their directions took me down a treacherous and unpaved road coiling over mountains and along cliffs, but at the end I reached the sea and found the promised inn, and one so obviously isolated that I was sure a missing passport would be no problem. And indeed it wasn’t, though, alas, there was no room in the inn. They had, I believe, only four rooms, and all these were taken, but I shouldn’t worry as someone might leave tomorrow and I could sleep on the beach in the meantime.
Well now, what is adventure but inconvenience rightly understood. A night on the beach, on the shore of what the Greeks call the Lybian Sea, sounded positively romantic. I had supper at the inn and then looked for some soft sand to curl up on.
But there is no such thing as soft sand. Or, after a while, even comfortable sand. And then the winds came up off the sea. I dug a burrow into the sand to get out of the wind and tried to fashion a comfortable surface to lie on, but a few inches below the surface the sand was not only no softer, it was also wet.
I returned to my car and found that, as I suspected, a Volkswagen Beetle is about as comfortable to sleep in as a box of carpenter’s tools. I unpacked my clothes and used them to try to cushion the knobs and levers that poked out from every surface. I was only partially successful.
Taking another tack, I walked back to the inn and bought a small bottle of ouzo, which turned out to do the trick. I relaxed and drifted off into a passable night’s sleep.
The next morning when I came into the inn -- the first customer of the day -- the owner seemed to be singing a church song and I remembered that this was the Sunday of Greek Easter, and so I greeted him with the traditional “Christós anésti”, Christ is risen.
You are a Christian, he asked, and when I said ‘yes’ his attitude became friendly and solicitous. I did not realize why being a Christian should make such a difference until later in the day I began to meet his other customers, some very strange young people from a hippie colony who had been living in caves down the beach since the ‘Sixties, and I understood why he was so pleased to find that his new customer was God-fearing and reasonably well-scrubbed. Although he was never able to give me a room he apologized for it regularly and lent me a blanket to sleep on. When some Italian tourists arrived in the days that followed I discovered that I was sleeping on a nude beach.
It was my first Easter in Greece and I had a fine time, sometimes sleeping on the beach and sometimes curled up in the front seat of the Volkswagen, lulled to sleep by the soft licorice warmth of ouzo. Though the hoped-for vacancy never materialized, the fellow at the inn fed me well and we damned the hippies together. I found a place far down the beach from the feral cave-dwellers and disrobed Italians, where I passed my days reading and writing and lying in the sun, perfectly contented. And even today, when I smell the sweet licorice aroma of ouzo, I remember that happy time on the beach on the shore of the Lybian Sea.
(More Easters in Greece to follow . . .)
An Accidental Easter on the Island of Crete
My first Easter in Greece began unpromisingly on the island of Crete, when I found I had left my passport and all identification back at the car rental office at the port of Iráklion and no hotel would have me. I discovered this inconvenience when I arrived late evening, on the southern coast, at the village of Plakiás, after a several hour drive across the island. When I tried to phone the car agency I found that everyone had gone home for the Easter weekend, which came as a surprise, as I did not think it was Easter. Some years Greek and Roman Easter fall on the same day, but this was one of the years that they did not, and I realized that I had arrived in Greece in the midst of Holy Week and my passport would be sitting safe on the desk of the nice man at the car rental agency in Iráklion, which would be closed until he came back to work next Monday. I thought it all very unbusinesslike. But I had a car and a pocket-full of money and was at large in Greece, and was sure everything would work out just fine.
I drove a few miles down the coast to the monastery of Moní Preveli, confident that the monks would offer a room to anyone as personable as myself. But alas, the monks were off on some monkish business and the place was in the care of an agéd and ill-tempered Cretan peasant. I would be overstating my knowledge of Greek to say that it was elementary, but it probably made no difference, for as Lawrence Durrell once wrote, you may speak Greek quite well and still not be able to understand a word of a Cretan peasant. In fact, I am sure that neither of us understood a word of the other, though he managed to communicate quite clearly that I would not be staying there that evening.
Leaving the monastery, I gave a ride to an elderly Greek couple who told me there was an inn farther up the coast. Their directions took me down a treacherous and unpaved road coiling over mountains and along cliffs, but at the end I reached the sea and found the promised inn, and one so obviously isolated that I was sure a missing passport would be no problem. And indeed it wasn’t, though, alas, there was no room in the inn. They had, I believe, only four rooms, and all these were taken, but I shouldn’t worry as someone might leave tomorrow and I could sleep on the beach in the meantime.
Well now, what is adventure but inconvenience rightly understood. A night on the beach, on the shore of what the Greeks call the Lybian Sea, sounded positively romantic. I had supper at the inn and then looked for some soft sand to curl up on.
But there is no such thing as soft sand. Or, after a while, even comfortable sand. And then the winds came up off the sea. I dug a burrow into the sand to get out of the wind and tried to fashion a comfortable surface to lie on, but a few inches below the surface the sand was not only no softer, it was also wet.
I returned to my car and found that, as I suspected, a Volkswagen Beetle is about as comfortable to sleep in as a box of carpenter’s tools. I unpacked my clothes and used them to try to cushion the knobs and levers that poked out from every surface. I was only partially successful.
Taking another tack, I walked back to the inn and bought a small bottle of ouzo, which turned out to do the trick. I relaxed and drifted off into a passable night’s sleep.
The next morning when I came into the inn -- the first customer of the day -- the owner seemed to be singing a church song and I remembered that this was the Sunday of Greek Easter, and so I greeted him with the traditional “Christós anésti”, Christ is risen.
You are a Christian, he asked, and when I said ‘yes’ his attitude became friendly and solicitous. I did not realize why being a Christian should make such a difference until later in the day I began to meet his other customers, some very strange young people from a hippie colony who had been living in caves down the beach since the ‘Sixties, and I understood why he was so pleased to find that his new customer was God-fearing and reasonably well-scrubbed. Although he was never able to give me a room he apologized for it regularly and lent me a blanket to sleep on. When some Italian tourists arrived in the days that followed I discovered that I was sleeping on a nude beach.
It was my first Easter in Greece and I had a fine time, sometimes sleeping on the beach and sometimes curled up in the front seat of the Volkswagen, lulled to sleep by the soft licorice warmth of ouzo. Though the hoped-for vacancy never materialized, the fellow at the inn fed me well and we damned the hippies together. I found a place far down the beach from the feral cave-dwellers and disrobed Italians, where I passed my days reading and writing and lying in the sun, perfectly contented. And even today, when I smell the sweet licorice aroma of ouzo, I remember that happy time on the beach on the shore of the Lybian Sea.
(More Easters in Greece to follow . . .)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)