The Real Greek Language Question

(Chapter 5)

Giorgos was born in 1890 and left his island — Italian territory at the time — when he was sixteen. He spent just over ten years in Russia — Saint Petersburg, Kyiv, Odessa — until the Communist Revolution of 1917, when he came to Greece, to Athens. He used his Russian with his brother for business matters, so that nobody in the house could follow what they were saying.

When Giorgos took Sevasti out on errands, he would run into compatriots — people of various nationalities who had lived in Russia and found their way to Greece — and he would speak to them in Russian.

"Does she speak Russian?" they would ask, nodding toward Sevasti.

"No."

"You're not doing right by her, kyrie Giorgos. What a shame, not teaching the child the language."

Sevasti always felt the sting of this — that her father wouldn't share his second language with her, because she had the ability to learn languages. She had picked up a few words over the years and knew how to say "Christ is Risen" and the response "Trampling down death by death" in Russian. Her uncle had taught her the hymn, written it out for her in Greek characters, but she never had occasion to use it. Every religious service she attended was in Greek. Which was precisely what Giorgos thought — that Sevasti would never have any use for Russian. She would marry a Greek man, and as a woman she would have no need to conduct business in Russian.

"But a language is a culture," his friends would say.

"Exactly. Sevasti will be Greek. She will never be Russian, and I take full responsibility for that."

As fate would have it, Russia stayed Communist for almost the whole of Sevasti's life, and as we've said, her family had been driven out by the Communists — so she never had reason or desire to visit, whatever her complaints. And despite her father's concerns, Sevasti was never pulled in two directions between languages and cultures. She had only one allegiance: the language of Homer, which was also the sacred language of the clergy, the language that bound every speaker to Greek identity.

To master modern Greek in its literary form — to master the katharevousa — was her ultimate goal, and she understood it as her destiny. Every Sunday she went to church alone, without family or friends, and by repeating the liturgy she memorized all the archaic noun endings, refining her speech to bring it as close as possible to the language of the New Testament, to the divine words of Jesus.

And yet Giorgos couldn't account for every available path or where they might lead, because Sevasti became a passionate student of French. She loved the language so much that she managed to persuade her father to give her money to attend the French Academy in Athens for beginner classes.

English was never a language option — the British Council either didn't exist yet or, if it did, she didn't know about it. It would take decades for English to acquire the global reach it has today, for America to become a superpower, and for English lessons to become a trend in Athens.

"All languages are tools. All of them, except Greek — because Greek is who we are," her father would say.

But the money for French classes ran out, and before long, the swift currents of life intervened—an unforeseen marriage to a man many years her senior. Her youth gave way to womanhood. She made herself a promise: if any of the children from that marriage could learn French, she would make sure they did. And so she added this disappointment — that she had not learned other languages — to her long list of dreams that had come to nothing.

Greek became her identity, but she had none of the other tools to work with it that her father had. Giorgos loved the Greek language deeply — the language of his homeland, the language of the longed-for soil. And Sevasti loved Greek deeply too — the language of her ancestors' hunger for life, the language of her own faith and her people. She was glad to be Greek. But occasionally she would wonder what it might be like to become a bird and open her wings like all those people who came and went from Greece.

"Father, I want to become a flight attendant." She and her sister would collapse laughing just imagining how they might break the news to him. They never did break it. Not to him, not to her husband, not to anyone. She ought to be grateful for what she had managed to learn, she was told. Count your blessings. And when Sevasti's children were finally grown and she found a little time for herself, she learned Braille — the language of the blind. She translated the Odyssey for the Center for the Blind in Kallithea.

Sevasti had found her own language at last. Her fingers danced across the paper as she translated the Odyssey, each Braille dot a small act of defiance. Where her father had refused to teach her the languages of strangers, she was now building bridges in a language no one in her family could read. Every time her students read with their fingertips about Odysseus sailing the seas, Sevasti felt she was sailing with them.

But the only journey she ever made was with her eyes closed. She was acutely aware of her inability to see the things she wanted — the things she needed — and she held that awareness like an Oedipal curse she was fated never to escape.

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The Black Market and the Grave Greens: Athens 1941

 (Chapter 6)

Hunger and Hope: Childhood Memories of the Occupation

When the Germans occupied Athens, they installed a government and a mayor, as occupiers do. They weren't obliged to, but they seem to have wanted a semblance of normality, some appearance that daily life was continuing. This effort to maintain the appearance of order was reflected too in how they handled the black market that quickly sprang up. Despite their measures, though, daily life changed beyond recognition.

The black market started immediately. The opportunists and the predators began hoarding everything — hiding food because they wanted to sell it later at extortionate prices. You'd go to the market to buy half an oka — because in those days we still used the Turkish oka for measuring weight, not kilos — of beans, and you'd pay the price of a house. You'd go to buy olive oil and you'd pay the price of another house. Or your jewelry. Or whatever you had. Even whatever you didn't have.

Every time the Germans caught a black market oil trader, they gave him the death penalty. Do you know where they took them? They hanged them in Syntagma Square, on the gallows, as an example to the other black marketeers. The people who saw it were shocked and revolted. I saw it myself as a child. But on the other hand, I think some people also felt a sense of justice, because they had suffered so much at the hands of the black marketeers during the Occupation. My mother, for instance, sold every piece of jewelry she had. To scrape together a little oil, a few beans, a little flour, a handful of chickpeas. Whatever she could find — she gave every piece of jewelry we owned for it. Things were completely out of hand. The Germans couldn't track down all these people; we found out about them by word of mouth. My mother would hear that someone somewhere had beans and off would come all her rings.

And we, small children, went every day — every single day, and not only us, the whole population — to Brahámi. The area that's now called Agios Dimitrios, which has since become a whole suburb swallowed up by Athens, was then an open stretch of fields, and we went to cut wild greens. We lived on wild greens. It was me, my sister, and another girl from the building who used to go, because my brother was only four years old and we didn't take him. He couldn't understand any of it. He was just hungry and cried day and night.

We were older, we could understand, and we didn't cry — we could be patient. "I have nothing to give you, children," my mother would say in despair. "I have nothing." And we were patient. And if we came across an orange, we ate it with the peel to feel full, to feel like we had something inside us. We didn't throw away even the white pithy parts. And my mother had to find food for our brother somehow — she'd take a bite of something and pass it from her own mouth to his to stop the crying. Many times we'd take a bag and a knife and, with the girl who was our age and lived in our courtyard, go out to the fields with my sister.

But once we went the wrong way and got lost. We wandered for a long time, walking an hour or maybe two hours off course. We couldn't see anything familiar, no main road, no cars, nothing. Because in those days there was only one paved road we knew — Veikou Street in Koukaki. Everything else was dirt tracks. Imagine that the tram on Dimitrakopoulou Street ran on rails laid over a dirt road. It went past the Odeon of Herodes Atticus, past the theater, and down toward Thiseio. I learned that later, when I was older and in gymnasium and started walking in the other direction from our house, toward the center rather than toward the fields, and I saw all the tram rails.

When I was in elementary school I didn't walk far, because the school was very close to home. When the bell rang for break, we'd go outside — there was no danger then. In front of the school there was a man who sold sesame-coated rolls and a chestnut seller, if you happened to have ten drachmas to give him. But my father didn't have even those ten drachmas. So when school let out, I ran straight home and my mother would cut a piece of bread, sprinkle a little water on it to soften it, and scatter some sugar on top, and that was my snack. It was wonderful, that little bread. When the bell rang again for class, I'd hear it from the house and run back.

So the day we got lost, we ended up at the Brahámi cemetery. Three young girls walking into a graveyard — and there on top of the graves we found enormous wild greens. In our childish innocence, and in the desperation of hunger, we saw something that looked like a solution. We didn't understand then why the grown-ups avoided picking greens from there. The plants were tall and lush, growing straight up out of the mounds of the graves. In those days graves weren't marble — they were just bare earth, raised up like small hills. Before we knew it, our bags were full. And we found our way back using the same road on which we'd gotten lost.

We were smart enough, though, to agree on one thing: we wouldn't tell our mothers where we'd found them, or they'd throw them out. When we got home, my mother and the other mother said: "Oh! What beautiful greens! Where did you find these?" "We lost our way and wandered a bit into some field off to the side, and Mama, you should have seen it..." I told her. "Nobody had found them, apparently... We filled up quickly and left." They believed it. We boiled the greens and everything was fine.

And now when I think about it, after all these years — what was wrong with those greens? Nothing, really. They were only so lush because nobody ever cut them there, so they kept growing and growing. As for the graves themselves — a grave is very deep, and there's nothing until the coffin has completely dissolved, and how far could a root possibly reach down to where the earth has settled like a small mountain? I was the one who urged the others on. I told them: "We're going to cut these greens. There's nothing wrong with them — what could be wrong? They're not growing out of the body itself. Don't say a word, just cut them and fill our bags and let's go." No one saw us because no one was there — all the older women were far too superstitious.

We only went that one time, because our mothers were frightened at how long we'd been gone and wouldn't let us take that road again. Sometimes we went for greens with our mothers too, to the same places everyone went, and after a while there was nothing left on the ground — because the grown-ups didn't want us straying from the fields where everyone always went.

But once, two mothers — mine and a neighbor — set out for greens, and as they were walking, they came across a paved road, because in every area there was one main paved road as a central avenue. From a distance they saw something black and shiny on the surface — the whole asphalt was black but it was gleaming in patches. They thought some kind of animals had passed and left their droppings or tracks, because there were shepherds in those parts who passed through with their flocks. But when they got closer — what did they find? Black currants. A cart must have passed and spilled them. Because carts in those days were open, and some sack must have split. They gathered them up, turned back, and came home with currants instead of greens. Their bags were full — there was a whole heap of them. That day the mothers came home happy.

I have images in my mind of people dying of hunger — I saw those images every day. We didn't die because of my mother, who was a hero in all of this. She ran to find us food, despite being illiterate, despite having been, her whole life, a closed and private person who made no friends and devoted herself only to her family. The necessity of the Occupation woke something up in her and made her resourceful.

To begin with — and even if it wasn't her own idea, another woman initiated her into it — she did something that saved us. In those days we had no identity cards or anything of the sort. The occupying forces issued a ration card for each family, and every day you could collect bread for however many people were in your household. Five people — five slices of bread; six people — six slices; two people — two slices. Every bakery was ordered to register the families it served, but there was no real oversight. My mother registered six people at the bakery under the name Kalymnios. But a neighbor told her: "You can go to the other bakery where they don't know you and register another six people under your own surname." So she went there too, under the name Xypolyta, and that way each of us got two slices of bread a day. Those slices kept us alive — because at one bakery, six slices made a loaf, and at the other bakery, another loaf, and so we had two loaves of bread a day. That way she had a little more bread to give to my little brother, and a bite for herself as well.

The rations were only for bread. There was nothing else in the shops. There were a few small grocery stores but all the shopkeepers had hidden their stock, so the black marketeers had made fortunes. Some of them may have been in league with the Germans, but most weren't powerful people — they operated in secret. The ones who actually collaborated with the Germans weren't mainly these small-time black marketeers; they were the people who collaborated politically, and they were called dosilogoi — collaborators — and their business was informing on their fellow citizens to the Germans.

The black marketeers were simply crooked traders; they let people starve but they didn't hand anyone over to the Germans, and the Germans had no particular fondness for them either. From the very first day of the Occupation — a catastrophic, cursed day — all goods became scarce and all food vanished. But the day the Germans left, the traders stopped hiding their stock. October 12th, 1944. That day it was as if everything had suddenly sprouted from the ground, and food appeared everywhere.

My mother had a cousin who lived in Kypseli, married to a man from Macedonia. He traveled to all the villages of Macedonia to gather food. Those people still had their land — they could sow and they could eat. The countryside didn't suffer the catastrophe that Athens did. We in the cities starved. Where were we going to sow? Where were we going to plant? On the pavement? So this man would go and bring back supplies. My mother would therefore walk on foot from Neos Kosmos all the way to Kypseli, and there she would leave her gold jewelry in exchange for a few beans, a few chickpeas.

My mother, God rest her soul, was a deeply tender-hearted woman. Whatever she received, she never ate alone — she shared it with the whole courtyard. She'd pour a little oil into a small Greek coffee cup, take it to the neighbor, and say: "Here, put even a drop in your food." Whatever she had, she divided. That is how our entire courtyard survived.

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Among the Judges

 (Chapter 19)

Supreme Court Friends, the Arrogant Contractor and a New Baby

For a stretch of years, until my children were grown, I had no life outside the house — my sole occupation was raising them, and that went on for the better part of a decade. I had no social world of my own. Whatever contact I had with people came through my husband. When we went out, we went out with his friends. That was partly the circumstances, but also because I hadn't yet come into myself — I didn't have the confidence to build a circle of my own.

I didn't have that confidence in front of my husband. He had known me without friends, without a social life, and it would have taken courage to change and tell him: I am not the same person you married. To tell him simply: you met me when I was young and now I have grown. I was always sociable by nature, but the demands of family life had made it impossible to keep up with other women. Many women were in that situation.

There was also our significant age difference, and what happened was that as he began to slow down and wind down, I was coming back to life. That was the natural order of things: Telemachos was beginning to look for the quiet of retirement while I, having gotten through the first great chapter of raising children, felt that my own time was finally starting. I grew into myself and began taking initiative. Where he had once placed me in his social circle, I built one of my own and brought him into it — naturally, without any pressure, offering him a new kind of companionship. In the decade after the children were grown, I started going out, making acquaintances. Mostly through church. One woman would introduce me to another and my circle began to widen.

I had sociability in me. Because the education I had longed for had been taken from me, I always felt drawn to people with culture and standing — I was born for those circles and I always sought out people who had something I didn't, a certain social position, a certain education, and the moment I found that something more, I would connect. Not out of snobbery, but out of a hunger to learn — because I always believed that you only grow, you only fill your own gaps, by surrounding yourself with people who are better than you.

When my children were small I had no complaint about having no free time, because I didn't have enough free time even to feel lonely. But as they grew, naturally, I began to go out — and the first place I went back to was church. I didn't go to church to make connections; I went because the church was a place of peace, a place to breathe. But like it or not, you come into contact with people, because the word 'church' — ekklesia — means assembly, a gathering of people.

In the early years my husband didn't attend the liturgy. But when he retired he gradually began to come with me. He wanted to be at church on Sundays. I went from the early morning — I liked to hear the whole service, not just arrive for the final blessing. He would follow a little later, arriving roughly midway through. But he did like passing through the church on Sundays.

When he was younger we had his social circle — people from work and family as well. You can't overlook your relatives; whatever they're like, you tolerate them. For us the family was always sacred. Crooked or lame, they are your people — whereas friends you choose, and if they don't suit you, you can say goodbye.

He also had one very good friend, Sotiris, from gymnasium. They weren't from the same village — they had met when they went to gymnasium in the nearest central town, where all the surrounding villages sent their students. Later, when both came to Athens, their paths diverged: Sotiris enrolled at the Athens University of Economics, while Telemachos, for various reasons, joined the gendarmerie. For a number of years they lost track of each other, until they met again in Xanthi, where Telemachos was posted and Sotiris was doing his military service. One day they ran into each other by chance in the street. 'Well, Telemachos!' 'Well, Sotiris!' They embraced and never lost touch again after that. My husband always had someone.

So when I had grown into myself and my children had grown up, I found myself at a point in life where I was very content. I enjoyed my circle of friends and my husband enjoyed it too, because I never pushed anything on him that he didn't want. We mostly saw women friends — not necessarily couples or families — and my husband came along. The period when I brought him into that circle was remarkable. I'll tell you one thing that happened right here in this house: I set a table for people from the Supreme Court. I had the former President of the Supreme Court in my home.

I met him at the church of Agios Spyridonas, where he used to come to worship — he was a devout Christian. I used to go there with my choirmaster to study Byzantine music. And it turned out that for some years the President of the Supreme Court was also studying Byzantine music. One day I asked him: 'Do you perhaps know Manthos T., the public prosecutor?' 'Manthos!' he said. 'A wonderful young man! How do you know him?' 'Manthos,' I told him, 'is a family friend — our parents have been friends since before we were born.' 'I'll see him at the Supreme Court and give him your regards!'

There was a young woman named Lina, who'd later become Manthos' wife. I had held Lina as a baby and rocked her to sleep. I knew her because her parents were also from Kalymnos and we lived in the same neighborhood. Back when my mother took me to learn dressmaking to pull me out of school, she took me to Lina's mother, kyria Thalia [Mrs Thalia].

At that time Lina's mother was still unmarried. But her brother was studying law and had a fellow student from Rhodes. Eventually kyria Thalia the dressmaker married that friend of her brother's — his name was Lefteris. When the islands were reunited with Greece and needed to be staffed with professionals — doctors, lawyers, notaries — Lefteris asked to go to his home island of Rhodes and become a notary there. They had two children.

We had a piece of land in Rhodes that belonged to my father, and when we went to see to it we stayed at Thalia's house. That's when I held little Lina in my arms and played with her. But when the girls were grown, Lefteris sent them to Athens to study. Both of them got into the Law School.

When the girls came to Athens, their father found a place a little further down from here. He found the apartment and came to see me — I was married by then, with a husband and children. I introduced him to my husband and said: 'This is kyrios Lefteris from Rhodes, a notary. He has brought his daughters to study.' He explained that he had brought them here because the university was nearby, and he also said: 'I've brought them here so you can keep an eye on them.' I was surprised — 'How am I supposed to keep an eye on grown girls?' He simply meant that if they needed anything, they would have someone to turn to, they could knock on my door.

The younger daughter, Lina, followed a legal path and became a judge. She spent her early years on the bench in Patras. But whenever she came to Athens for any reason, she would always come to visit me. One day when Lina came to see me, she noticed that a short way down from my building an old bakery had been demolished and a new apartment block was going up in its place. She thought she had a little money saved and perhaps with her father's help she could buy an apartment in Athens. So she went upstairs and asked for whoever was in charge. She told him she was interested in one of the apartments, from the plans.

But the contractor, looking at this small young woman, spoke to her with contempt. She explained that she was a district judge and so on, but he laughed — he roared with laughter — and said, 'Ha! And I'm a Supreme Court Justice.' Dripping with sarcasm.

She kept talking to him: 'But… I am interested in buying one.' In the end he told her: 'Off you go, sweetheart — bring your mother and we'll talk.'

She didn't look the part because she looked so young. She came to my house in tears and told me: 'Kyria Sevasti, [Mrs Sevasti] what happened to me! Could you please come with me and say that you are my aunt?'

'We're going right now,' I said.

'Listen,' I told him, 'what exactly do you need, sir? Shall we bring a birth certificate to show you how old this young woman is? Or her university degree to convince you? I am sorry,' I told him, 'but you mocked and sneered at a woman who is currently a serving member of the judiciary. Now then — I am her aunt. What is it you want?' And I finished with: 'Come to an agreement with this young woman, who has both the will and the means to buy an apartment in your building. Will you sell to her or not?'

'I'm sorry, I'm sorry,' he began, 'it's my fault entirely, I apologize both to you and to the young lady. She didn't register to me — I took her for a high-school girl and I was joking around. That's why I told her to bring her mother.'

I told him: 'And how would her mother come? This young woman is from Rhodes — her parents are in Rhodes. She makes her own decisions. She is a district judge, sir. Is she not capable of making decisions about her own life?'

The contracts were signed on the spot, and you should have seen the accommodations he made for her afterward. He agreed to her payment terms and every single modification she requested for the apartment. He was delighted — everything was still on paper, and he had managed to sell his very first apartment to someone of that standing in the judiciary.

She bought her apartment, and it was around that time that she met Manthos, who also served in the legal system. They were married at Agios Dionysios the Areopagite, and they lived in that apartment for many years. It was there that she brought her first child into the world — the child who is now a distinguished doctor with a postgraduate degree and her own clinic near Alexandras Avenue, little Thalitsa. They brought Thalitsa to this house of mine for about three and a half years, because Lina used to leave for the courts early in the morning and I looked after the little one. My own children were all grown but none had married yet and had children of their own, so I didn't yet have my grandmotherly duties. My husband was either at work or at the coffeehouse, and I had a great deal of time.

One morning Lina came and asked me: 'Please — I have a very early court session and I have nowhere to leave the child. Could I bring Thalitsa for you to keep until midday?' I told her: 'Lina, what are you even asking? Bring her here with her stroller and everything that comes with her.' The little girl would stay with me until midday, until her mother came to collect her. I made Lina a proposition: 'Whenever this happens, bring her — don't hesitate.' And that's exactly what she did.

But before long I had gotten so fond of the child that I was asking for her every day. I loved that little girl because she was so gentle and so bright. She was a treasure. Once she began to understand the world around her, she started asking questions — endless questions. Always asking. If I answered one, she went straight on to another — why this, why that — until finally I'd tell her: 'Well, I don't have any more answers for you!'

It was plain that this child was going to become something extraordinary. And she had grown so attached to me that she didn't want to leave. When her mother came in the afternoon to take her home, she would cry and say: 'We'll stay with Kyria Sevasti.' And I had such a wonderful time with her — I would take her with me when I went to visit my mother, and she made my mother happy too.

Our whole lives, my mother and I and the other women — we raised children together. Our friends' children were our own.

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