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Perspectives, retrospectives, spectacles
Sep. 21st, 2010 12:08 amThe most interesting thing about coming home has been the sense of absolute dislocation.
I find myself missing Greece. It grew on me, in ways weird and strange and hard to comprehend. I miss the rhythms of speech, the rhythms of life, the clamour of traffic and the ringing of bells from the churches at evening and the stray dogs wandering from sunlight to shade. Pale faces seem dull and out of place, English harsh and sharp, Ireland too green and damp, claustrophobic between the grey clouded sky. There's a part of me now that feels as though it understands Greece, at least a little: a part of me where pieces of it had taken root and begun to grow.
You can't understand a place until you've lived in it. And even then, you understand it only shallowly, in fewer dimensions than it truly exists. I don't understand the complex interrelationships of country and language, nationality and religion, sound and sense, that stretches from north-eastern Italy through Bosnia-Herzegovinia, Serbia, Croatia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, Georgia and Armenia. Until I stayed in Thessaloniki, I didn't even know it was there to understand. I didn't understand how different the treed mountains of northern Greece are from the sharp, dusty mountains of the southern mainland - or how alike. Or how the plains of Thessaly lie between the mountains and the sea, so oddly flat in such a mountainous country, until I'd been bussed across them. Or what it means to live in a climate where one really can live mostly out of doors, where one needs a roof less than one needs shade.
Or what it means to see a Byzantine fortress which had been converted to a modern prison, and only turned over to the Ministry of Culture in 1991, and wander around the insides practically alone in the noon heat, one's view of the sky reduced to the blue directly overhead. Or to stop inside a Greek Orthodox church one evening to get out of the heat, and in the chanting of the service watch parishioners coming and going, making the rounds of icons, rocking a pram, taking a call on their mobile, solemnity combined with movement and a sense of the sacred space being a little like a neighbour's house.
Greek culture is full of obnoxious nationalist sentiment. It's deeply misogynistic, a church- and family-centred chauvinism that goes bedrock deep. And the ubiquity of its militarisation made me deeply uncomfortable. On the other hand, I've never met so many people willing - even eager - to help in the course of a month before. The kindness of strangers is often overlooked, but it is the thing about Greece that touched me the most deeply, and that I will remember longest.
In other news, I am now officially a postgraduate student of Classics, with a shiny new student card and library borrowing privileges. I'm not quite sure how I'm going to handle this year, without the sanity-saving presence of a ready-made peer group in classes. On the other hand, there are still a few people who haven't disappeared to pastures green - for now - so we'll see if I manage not to become even more isolated and strange than I am already.
I need to start thinking and planning again. Maybe soon.
I find myself missing Greece. It grew on me, in ways weird and strange and hard to comprehend. I miss the rhythms of speech, the rhythms of life, the clamour of traffic and the ringing of bells from the churches at evening and the stray dogs wandering from sunlight to shade. Pale faces seem dull and out of place, English harsh and sharp, Ireland too green and damp, claustrophobic between the grey clouded sky. There's a part of me now that feels as though it understands Greece, at least a little: a part of me where pieces of it had taken root and begun to grow.
You can't understand a place until you've lived in it. And even then, you understand it only shallowly, in fewer dimensions than it truly exists. I don't understand the complex interrelationships of country and language, nationality and religion, sound and sense, that stretches from north-eastern Italy through Bosnia-Herzegovinia, Serbia, Croatia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, Georgia and Armenia. Until I stayed in Thessaloniki, I didn't even know it was there to understand. I didn't understand how different the treed mountains of northern Greece are from the sharp, dusty mountains of the southern mainland - or how alike. Or how the plains of Thessaly lie between the mountains and the sea, so oddly flat in such a mountainous country, until I'd been bussed across them. Or what it means to live in a climate where one really can live mostly out of doors, where one needs a roof less than one needs shade.
Or what it means to see a Byzantine fortress which had been converted to a modern prison, and only turned over to the Ministry of Culture in 1991, and wander around the insides practically alone in the noon heat, one's view of the sky reduced to the blue directly overhead. Or to stop inside a Greek Orthodox church one evening to get out of the heat, and in the chanting of the service watch parishioners coming and going, making the rounds of icons, rocking a pram, taking a call on their mobile, solemnity combined with movement and a sense of the sacred space being a little like a neighbour's house.
Greek culture is full of obnoxious nationalist sentiment. It's deeply misogynistic, a church- and family-centred chauvinism that goes bedrock deep. And the ubiquity of its militarisation made me deeply uncomfortable. On the other hand, I've never met so many people willing - even eager - to help in the course of a month before. The kindness of strangers is often overlooked, but it is the thing about Greece that touched me the most deeply, and that I will remember longest.
In other news, I am now officially a postgraduate student of Classics, with a shiny new student card and library borrowing privileges. I'm not quite sure how I'm going to handle this year, without the sanity-saving presence of a ready-made peer group in classes. On the other hand, there are still a few people who haven't disappeared to pastures green - for now - so we'll see if I manage not to become even more isolated and strange than I am already.
I need to start thinking and planning again. Maybe soon.
