MY SMALL SLENDER GREEK HOLIDAY

My Small Slender Greek Holiday

                                                         Greece – Modern and Ancient


I like this picture. It’s a real holiday ‘snap’ taken with my Blackberry. I like it because it’s ambivalent. You see the silhouettes of people, having dinner perhaps, in a room with two beautiful pictures of mountains on the wall. Or do you? What you are actually seeing is a few beach vendors gathered together in an unfinished building that they have adopted as their temporary home. Through the holes where one day there will be windows, one hopes, (if the economic position of Greece improves sufficiently) one sees the real mountains beyond. Modern and Ancient. Get it?

A week in Tolon in the Peleponnese. Wonderful dry heat. Calm, clear, warm sea. Good, simple food and wine. In restaurants the menus tell you whether fish is fresh or frozen, which is unusual, yes? And it is usually fresh. Nice people: not only the Greeks but the English folk with whom we occasionally shared a table in the evenings in the Romvi Hotel where we would gather. I think Greece brings out the best in all of us.

***

We took a cruise down the coast to the islands of Spetses and Hydra. On the excursion, there and back we spent about six hours at sea. On the return journey I had one of my rare manifestations of clairvoyance that have happened to me, on and off for most of my life and are always unpredictable (I suppose if I was really clairvoyant they wouldn’t be unpredictable, would they?). They just happen, that’s all I can say about the subject. It just came into my head and I suddenly said to my wife, ‘Dolphins – in about two minutes’. So she looked at the sea between us and the coast and, yes, about two minutes later a dolphin appeared. He poked his nose out of the water and then did one of those dolphin leaps that make sure you don’t confuse him with a shark, or a sardine. Well, I don’t know what you think about it but I think that it was a pretty cute thing to have happened and it made me feel very good. My wife took it all in her stride as she always does.

***

In Hydra the tourist attraction that first meets your eyes is the collection of patient mules waiting for customers. There are men attached, of course. The mules are linked together in mule trains of three or four animals with the first one being ridden by one of the men, the others by passengers. These delightful creatures are able to walk up and down and round and round the narrow lanes of the town that are paved with stones worn to a glasslike finish apparently without slipping or stumbling. We had lunch in a taverna that had its tables set out in the open air between the front of the taverna and the back of another building. This space was obviously the subject of a sort of right-of-way dispute between the taverna owner and the muleteers who frequently exercised their rights by leading the mule train straight through the space and perilously close to the tables.

It was really quite amusing to have these beasts passing so close to one. It was only as one chain of four mules passed through we noticed that each group of mules was followed by a man with a bag and a broom. It was his job to sweep up anything that might have been discarded by the mules. While we were there one such man was a little late in performing his function and voices were raised in protest from the taverna management. Waiters appeared with large buckets of water and sluiced down the stone while yelling their disapproval at the poor bagman. Oh, but how it all adds to the atmosphere! Such fun.

***
It must have been nearly thirty years ago when we spent a fortnight in Crete with our two sons and on one blissful evening I spent a lot of time sitting outside a taverna talking to and providing raki for a musician who was booked to perform a couple of sets within. He was very crumpled and not altogether clean but he played the ‘lyra’ and sang to it. I had never seen one before: the instrument is a sort of three stringed fiddle, held vertically upwards on the thigh and bowed with a violin bow. The music played was of Crete and of Crete alone. I quickly came to love the sound of it this ancient music that seemed to tell stories, sagas rather, of a dark past. Apart from a tape I later bought I didn’t hear any more ‘Cretan Music’ as it is called from then until this short visit to Greece.

One evening, after dinner at the Romvi Hotel which is right on the beach, we had started to walk back to our little studio apartment. We left by the back door, entered a dark alley and were about to climb the steps leading up to the road when we heard music. It came from somewhere in the blackness of the alley – and it was, beyond any doubt, the same music I had heard all those years before, being played on a lyra by … someone there in the darkness. It wasn’t a recording, you could tell. We stood and listened and wondered again at this magical sound for which we must have been the only audience. Then someone turned on a light and it illuminated the entrance to a house where the musician was sitting in the open porch. Now we could see him and he could see that he had an audience. He played a little more and we applauded. He stood and nodded his head in acknowledgement and asked us in English if we knew the music. When I told him that it had been nearly thirty years since I had heard it last and that I loved it and could still remember it he seemed amazed and delighted. And then he packed the instrument into the back of a van saying Goodnight as he did and that was it.

***

The language is the problem for me. There are other languages where you have to translate the letters before you can even begin to pronounce the words but this language was the challenge right under my nose. I can read out words written in French and Italian even if I don’t know what they mean; but Greek, oh dearie me! But through perseverance I discovered the meaning of ‘fava’. On a menu. There was that symbol with a circle and a vertical line through it (called ‘fi’) then an ‘ah’ sound, then the B with a tail looking thing that we used to call Beta in my early maths days (but they don’t say it as a ‘B’ they say it as a ‘V’ – Oh the confusion!) then another ‘ah’ sound. It spells ‘fava’. Now, why is that important to me? Do you remember Hannibal Lecter in ‘The Silence of the Lambs’? “I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice bottle of Chianti”. I’ve been wondering about this for years: what are fava beans? I thought that perhaps ‘fava’ was the place where the beans came from. 'Fava' is actually the word for lentils. Are lentils beans? I don't know.

***

Spoken Greek has its problems and confusions. ‘Yes’ is ‘ne’. ‘No’ is ‘ekhee’. With ‘ekhee’ sounding all too similar to ‘OK’ it is an even greater shame that the word for ‘Yes’ sounds awfully like ‘no’. Amusingly, if you want to ask where the loos are you say ‘poo ene ee tooaleta?’ ‘Poo’ means ‘where’, should you be wondering.

Greeks seem to like our language and speak it pretty well in restaurants and shops but their perceptions of some phrases lead them into odd paradoxes. The hotel next to our studio apartment was proudly emblazoned with its name, ‘Paradise Lost’. A shop selling baby clothes was bizarrely entitled, ‘Sophie’s Choice’.

I'm sure that a Greek speaker would put me right on this but I get the impression that the Greeks don't have the equivalent words for Monsieur and Madame, or Senor and Senora, or Signor and Signora, or Sir and Madam. These words are not merely titles they fulfil an important part in what one might term the 'courtesy', the 'politesse' of a language. If the Greeks do have such words then I certainly didn't hear them in use. I think that this absence of a formal or quasi-formal greeting is a handicap to their language and thus to them.

***

Some countries have guilty secrets; things they would prefer their overseas tourist markets not to know about. Like snakes in Costa Rica. A fabulous place but it has a lot of quite horrid snakes, which wouldn’t matter so much if the tourist attractions didn’t rely so much on visitors going for long treks in the jungle. It has crocodiles too and they seem to be able to thrive in salt water as well as fresh. ‘I wouldn’t go on the beach for a romantic walk in the moonlight if I were you’ you hear them say. My observation is that there’s nothing wrong with having venomous snakes and crocodiles about the place but maybe you should just mention it to folks in the sales literature.

Greece, or at least the part of Greece we visited, has a guilty secret. In every toilet we came across, including the one in the apartment we rented, there is a small bin, with a plastic liner, and a lid – and a notice saying that one must not put ‘used’ toilet paper in the toilet bowl but rather put it in the small bin. This instruction, read by people who have, all their lives, believed that the flush toilet:
Receiveth as the sea, naught entereth there
Of what validity and pitch so’er
But falls into abatement and low price
Even in a minute!                                                                   (W.S. Twelfth Night)
can cause severe interruption of the digestive process. Dear Reader, I am going to leave you now with the exhortation to go somewhere quiet and brood upon what is written on those notices and imagine how you would cope with the challenge .....................

They really oughter warn us, didn’t they?