Eleni N. Gage

Reprinted with the permission of The American Scholar which ran the following article in the Spring, 2003 issue.

I spent last year overseeing the rebuilding of my late grandparents' house in Lia, the tiny village in Epiros, Greece, where my father was born. I kept a journal in the form of e-mails sent to friends back home in the U.S. This was my eighth installment.

From: Eleni Gage
Sent: Sun, 21 Jul 2002 13:16:33-0700
To:
Subject: Lost and Found

FOUND: IMPORTANT ARTIFACTS

Digging up the old foundations of my grandparents' house, the workers have found: one tsellinge, a swinging metal hook on which you hang your slaughtered animals; four metal guards from the heels of soldiers' boots; one metal lantern; one glass lamp; one bone pipe; the ceramic end of a spindle; a massive, rusted lock for the front door; one bullet (unexploded); and one glass bottle of foulsmelling liquid that could be ink or iodine or any number of things that turn brown and iridescent after being buried for fifty years.

Last, my most adored artifact: a plastic medallion that shows the Mother and Child on the front and, on the back, a crown resting on the letter F, ringed by the phrase "The Soldier's Undershirt." It must have belonged to one of the Nationalist soldiers who were stationed in the house while defending the border against Communist threat after the civil war. Because people used to contribute to the war effort by knitting socks and undershirts for soldiers, any donation to the army was known as The Soldier's Undershirt, and this must have been a gift from Queen Frederika. It's not very nice of me, but I call her Queen Frederika the Earth-Shaker, because she was buried in Greece (although the Royal Family had been kicked out by the time she died), and shortly after that there was a huge earthquake. Since she was of German origin, people accused her of being a Nazi sympathizer (although she and the rest of the government fled to Cairo to avoid the Nazis when they invaded) and insisted that the earthquake happened because the Greek soil didn't want to accept her body.

LOST: ONE ROOSTER

Traditionally, when you build a house in Greece, you kill a rooster over the foundations, bury his head in the cement, and then treat the workers to a delicious, nutritious rooster stew. Like all customs, this one has both practical and spiritual applications. Practically: mmm, rooster! The feast motivates the workers (and did even more so when meat was scarce). And spiritually: well, duh, there's a long tradition of animal sacrifice around here. Constructions demand sacrifice to stand-otherwise, why did so many workers die building the Brooklyn Bridge, and are still buried inside?

As I told my mom, Joanie (my parents are visiting for the village festival held every July), you can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs. The house demanded a sacrifice, it was going to be either her or the rooster, and, since she carried me in her body for nine months, I chose the rooster. There was some talk of me killing the rooster myself, but I convinced everyone that the contractor should do it while I photographed the gore. Blood spurted and the rooster jerked a little once his head was chopped off, but it was not quite as gross as I had imagined.

Later, Net, the Albanian boy who works on the construction site with his parents, asked the contractor, "Why did we have to kill a rooster? Isn't there enough blood in that house?" (He had undoubtedly heard that the bodies of thirty-six people executed by the Communists were found buried in the neighborhood after the civil war.)
But Net didn't complain when we ate the rooster in red sauce over macaroni. The rooster was mighty tasty, and I toasted his memory in gratitude for making our house strong. He led a good life, inseminated lots of chickens, lived to a ripe old age, was immortalized in a house, and nourished citizens of three different nations.

FOUND: EIGHT TERRORISTS
(who LOST a few fingers)

It all started when an icon painter, let's call him "Butterfingers," had a bomb blow up in his hands as he attempted to hurl it at an as-yet-unidentified target. His icons are second-rate, but after this incident it became clear that as a terrorist, he's a great iconographer.

Butterfingers survived, sans some fingers, and is now in a hospital in Athens, talking trash about all his fellow terrorists. He was part of a Marxist terrorist group called November 17 (after the day in 1973 when the military dictatorship rolled tanks into a crowd of demonstrating university students). In the last twenty-seven years, they've killed twenty-three people, including lots of British and American diplomats. They've never been caught. But now, thanks to Butterfingers's little slipup, the police have arrested more than eight people said to be involved (including two of Butterfingers's brothers; he's one of ten children of a bearded priest who has been looking very bewildered lately, stumbling in front of the TV cameras as he goes to visit his sons in prison).

The Olympic Committee et al. had understandably been giving the Greek government flak for not going after this group aggressively, so now everyone here is feeling pretty pleased with himself. One article in the Athens paper compared the whole thing to the big finish of the Oresteia trilogy (which is really underutilized as a source in the New York Times), "when the goddess Athena decides to end the endless cycle of violence by ordering a trial with human judges and sends the Furies (the agents of vengeance on which November 17th's warped gunmen modeled themselves) to their new subterranean home. From that point, Aeschylus says, Athens will be run by the rule of law. It was a liberating moment then and it is now."

But my favorite commentary was in a gossip column, which cited another master of drama: Joan Collins. After quoting the U.S. ambassador as saying "When I walk through the streets of Athens I feel safe" (it does have the lowest crime rate of any European city its size), the column continues: "If our readers recall, a similar statement was made by the actress Joan Collins about the island of Hydra, although she was not referring to terrorists but to thieves, as she was in the habit of wearing all her jewelry when she went out."

LOST: MY CAREER AS A CITY COUNCIL MEMBER

This cute civil engineer from Filiates who helped me get the permits for the house and is on the city council there asked me to join his ticket for the October elections, because it would be a real asset to have someone who went to Harvard and has a name that's recognized locally. I wish there was a Gov. major I knew whom I could refer him to, because I had to let him down easy. Since I'm leaving Greece in December and will have to be in the U.S. for much of the following year, I said I didn't think it would be fair to my constituents to run if I could serve only a two-month stint. Besides, I already feel safe wearing all my jewelry in Filiates, and what other issues are there?

FOUND: HISTORIC HOUSES AND HEADLESS HELLIONS

And I wasn't even looking for them. My cousin from Corfu took me on a field trip to the city of Konitsa, in the northeast corner of Epiros, and its surrounding villages, known as the Mastorochoria, the Builder Villages, because in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the men from there would travel all of Eastern Europe and Asia Minor building houses, then come home in August to par-tay. The best builders came from Pyrsogianni, and there's a saying that God must be from Pyrsogianni because he built the world so beautifully.

En route we saw three of Epiros's rivers (one is the cleanest in the E.U., thank you); a statue of a soldier at the spot where the outnumbered Greek troops beat back the Italians at the start of World War II (Areti, my cousin, is a teacher and taught me lots of 1940s songs that call the Italians macaroni- heads and were meant to inspire the Greek troops-apparently they worked); and the word OXI, "No," written in stone on a mountaintop where one of the battles took place. According to popular folklore, that is what Metaxas, the Greek Prime Minister, said to the Italian ambassador when he asked him not to resist the Italian occupation. (Metaxas really said, "Alors, c'est la guerre," but that would look so sissy carved into a mountaintop, wouldn't it?)

In the Mastorochoria, we noticed lots of cool flourishes the builders used when making their houses, like indenting the corners so carts could pass by, painting niches blue to repel the Evil Eye, making church doors low so the occupying Turks couldn't ride their horses in and desecrate the house of worship, and even carving a spooky face in the side of a bell tower to scare off evil spirits. A crone in one town told us about the old builders' customs: "They used to kill a rooster and put his head in the foundation of the house." Areti had done this herself when building her home on Corfu-but we just nodded, like, "Ooh, how wacky and primitive people once were!"

In Konitsa, which was a rich Turkish town under the Ottoman Empire (the Greeks lived in the poorer villages), we saw the huge stone home of Hamko, the mother of the infamous early nineteenth-century tyrant Ali Pasha. It has a great view and neato hieroglyphics carved above the door, and it made me want to start the Tyrant's Tour of Greece, where you visit all of Ali Pasha's homes in Ioannina, Konitsa, Parga, and Preveza, and then go to Constantinople, following the path of his disembodied head, which the Sultan demanded to see as proof he was killed. Good times!

ALSO FOUND: THE GATEWAY TO EUROPE, COMPLETE WITH ELECTRIC LIGHTS

The next day we saw natural washing machines-these huge vats with rushing water near a mill, where people wash their flokati rugs and bedspreads-and the village of Molivdoskepasti, where we bought tsipouro (moonshine) from a distillery and looked out from the guard post at the border with Albania, which is formed by the Sarantaporos River. In October they're going to open a huge bridge over the river that will be the largest border crossing in all of Greece. The soldier looking down on it pointed out how all these fancy lights will illuminate the bridge and the highway on the Greek side, "so that people will know they just entered Europe" and not confuse the riverbank, fields, and stone villages on this side with the riverbank, fields, and stone villages in Albania. I suggested that they put up a sign that says "Europe starts here," like the one Joanie saw painted on the side of the harbor on the island of Kastellorizo, which is the first island over from Turkey. The soldier was not amused.

ALSO FOUND: VARIOUS ACCESSORIES

Back in Lia, I found a lucky snakeskin that some reptile had shed and left under a flowerpot in my yard. Joanie thinks it must feel good for a snake to shed his skin, "like taking off a girdle."

And a neighbor gave me a cane with an engraved metal top. All the cool old guys carry canes here, to hit the ground so snakes get scared away, and to help them walk up the mountain. I feel a little like a poseur wielding mine, as if I might bust into a tap routine at a moment's notice, but I do it anyway.

LOST: ANY MEASURE OF SHAME IN TAKING PEOPLE'S PHOTOS

This happened during a memorial service for the son of my next-door neighbors, Dina and Andreas, when a woman shoved me in front of the church and had me photograph the kollyva, the boiled wheat covered in powdered sugar that was placed in front of the dead man's photo on a table before his grieving parents and offered to guests after the service. I felt bad taking pictures in church, especially of crying people, but as I left, everyone said, "Bless you!" and some people kissed me on the cheek. That was when I realized that these people love having their pictures taken.
My attractive friends in New York (that's you) are always like, "Oh, no pictures, I gained three ounces and my highlights are growing out," but people here love photos of their toothless, wrinkled selves, and I am Miss Popularity because I make copies and pass them around. I've thought a lot about this difference and what accounts for it. Do people here have better self-esteem? (I have seen women accept a second piece of cake when it was offered to them-a groundbreaking moment for me.) Or, once you've lost your supple skin and your teeth, maybe you seriously lower your expectations of how you should look. Now, after random strangers at panegyris (festivals) have asked me to take their photos and mail them, I've settled on two theories: either a) people here don't have cameras, which is true in some cases, although I've seen other people wielding camcorders, or b) they just appreciate the fact that someone thinks their lives are worth documenting. Of course, I still put my hands in front of my stomach when posing for photos, and I threw out all the sunburned pictures of me on the beach in Parga, in which I looked pink and tubby, like a British tourist.

LOST and FOUND: ALBANIAN HOUSEBUILDERS

Vlad, Xalime, Net, and Dorina, the Albanians who lived across the street, have moved. This is good for them, since they now live in a two-bedroom house with a kitchen, bathroom, living room, and garden, instead of the one-room shack next to Dina and Andreas. It's sad for me, because a) I liked having them in the neighborhood, and b) I think I now occupy the lowest socioeconomic niche in the village, since I don't have a TV or washing machine and have only one bedroom (it has two beds, though).
And Lia has a new arrival: another Albanian family (although these are Northern Epirots, meaning they are ethnic Greeks who live in Albania). A mom, dad, and son, they are master builders who commute here during the week to work on the house with Vlad and Co., and go back to the city on weekends. Boy, are they speedy! The entire second floor is almost done. You should see the mom, Margarita, lift rocks.

FOUND: ALL MY LOST SAINTS

I kissed the icon, photographed the assembly line of women serving stew, and threw my donation in the basket at the panegyri for Agios Prokopi in Glousta. (It's a pay-whatyou-want donation system for the food and the band, which features a swinging clarinetist-the town makes more money that way than if they charged for food, because everyone wants to look rich and generous as they toss their bills in the basket.) And I listened to old men harmonize as they squatted in a circle, trying to remember the words to an old Epirotic tune at the panegyri of Agia Marina in the village of Agia Marina.

Flush with religious revelry, I tried to convince a monk visiting Lia that ladies should be permitted to visit Mount Athos, maybe just one day a year, but no dice. Then I suggested once every ten years. Still not buying. Ah well.

Over the past two days I celebrated the panegyri of the Prophet Elias here in Lia, starting with the procession of his icon on Friday night. Later that night I photographed Father Prokopi as he opened the festival in the churchyard, leading the dancing as the clarinet wailed and the vocalist sang about a papa leventis, a handsome priest. I danced as well, but not as impressively as Vlad and Ioanni, the Northern Epirote builder, who did fancy jumps and spins, holding his arms out like the wings of an airplane.

At 7:00 on Saturday morning, Joanie and I joined the rest of Lia in climbing up the mountain to the small chapel of the Prophet Elias, which is always built on the highest point in any village, right where the Temple to Helios used to be (Helios-Elias, get it? And they both rode golden chariots). I made use of my handy cane. Once we got up, most of us sat outside on rocks as the liturgy continued inside the chapel, which is about the size of a doctor's examining room. At the end, Father P. came out and distributed bread, then did a brief memorial service for a 42-year-old man named Elias who had died this spring. At one point, Father P. burst into tears and cried for several minutes as the rest of the village followed suit, but then he pulled himself together, finished the service, and walked back down the mountain. Joanie and I rode down in the back of a pickup with seven other women and one boy. Thomas, the contractor for the house, was driving, and kept yelling out like a gypsy grocer, "Women. I've got some nice women today. Come take your pick." But no customers showed up.

That night there was more dancing and clarinet-playing and lamb-on-spit eating. But it wasn't all fun and games. Yesterday also had a life-and-death drama. Which brings me to . . .

LOST: ASYMINA, TRUSTED RENTAL CAR
FOUND: NICK GAGE
oanie and I were sleeping off the morning's exertions when my father walked in and said, "Wake up. I have good news and bad news. The bad news is, I totaled the car. The good news is, I'm alive."

Once we saw the crushed carcass of my rented Hyundai, which I'd christened Asymina, because of her silver-asymenio-exterior, we realized that it was a miracle my father was still alive, so we were very grateful to the Prophet Elias-although I do have to admit that a small part of me was thinking, "Damn it! He ruined my rental car!" See, I like to walk and my father does not, so I let him have the keys while he was here, and, since he had not climbed up the mountain with us to attend church, he was joyriding around the village, visiting his pals as we rested. While foolishly trying to back out of someone's sloping driveway, he rolled off the side of the road, flipped over, and landed on the next street down.

Prophet Elias had worked lots of miracles: that no one had been in the mashed passenger seat, that a rock had blocked the car from rolling again (because otherwise it would have rolled all the way down the side of the mountain), that my father was okay even though he hadn't put on his seat belt, and that he'd been able to crawl out the window. Joanie and I felt partly responsible for the saint's intervention, since we had lit candles in the church after our long trek that morning. My father's friends all came to kiss him and make the sign of the cross, and Foti, who had secured the rooster for us, opined that the Evil Eye had caused the accident, because so many people had passed by my grandparents' house on the way down the mountain from Prophet Elias and admired it. Foti took my father to the hospital to get checked out (he's fine), and I spent the day overseeing the towing away of faithful Asymina. That evening we all made an appearance at the panegyri, and my father got lots of attention.

Asymina and I have shared some good times. But as everyone here says, steel can be fixed and humans can't, so I think the Prophet Elias made the right choice in whom to save.

Big Kisses,
Eleni