A Traditional Greek Village Wedding

by Alec Newell 

 

The receiving line - photos by Newell

 

A typical wedding picture from a home in the village

I don't think I've been in a single home in the village that didn't have at least one traditional wedding picture hanging from its plastered walls.  Greek weddings like the Irish wakes have evolved into national stereotypes, so when we got the word that there would be a wedding in the village, I didn't want to miss it. 

 

Father of the bride

Our house stands about half way between the Orthodox Church where the wedding would be and the village plateia or town square where the banquet and reception was to be held afterward, so even without an invitation, I'd be able to see everything but ceremony itself.  The people in the wedding party:  the couple, the parents, the in-laws, bride's maids, flower girls, and even the Orthodox priest, all looked like they could have just stepped out of central casting for a Hollywood movie.  I'd heard from neighbors that the bride was Greek and that the Groom's accent sounded "British," but that wasn't enough information for a story. I needed to know more.  Their story turned out to be better than fiction.

Flower girls

I discovered that the groom was Welsh and the bride was indeed Greek with maternal family ties to the village going back at least four generations.  The bride's ancestral home, built by her great grandfather, is only six meters or less than twenty feet from the church where her grandmother and aunt had been married.  The bride, from about the age of thirteen, had always expressed an interest in being married in that same church one day.

I arranged a visit with the bride's mother, an aunt and the grandmother, to find out more about the people in the wedding and the family.  Over traditional Greek coffee and cookies from the bakery, I was treated to the whole family history.  It was an interesting and complex tale that closely parallels the national saga in which successive generations of young Greeks have left the country to seek opportunities an foreign countries, only to be drawn back at critical junctures of their lives to reconnect with family members and the villages which have been the cultural taproot that still anchors them to their Greek heritage.

The ancestral home and family portrait

The bride's great grandfather had been a Greek national who had gone to America early in the 20th Century, and had found work there as a lumber jack.  After losing a leg in a logging accident, he returned to Greece, married a girl who had been born here in Vourliotes, and had added a second story to the house where we were having coffee.

The bride's grandmother had met her husband near the village well in the days before the house had been piped for running water.  He was a young soldier from Athens, doing his military service on Samos.  To keep their meetings discreet, she would hang a white towel in an upstairs window of that house to signal the young soldier that she was on her way to the well.  In time the young soldier and his bride left the village for Cardiff, Wales where he found work as a ship's chandler servicing Greek merchant vessels engaged in the Welsh coaling trade.

The village's most recent bride was that ship chandler's granddaughter.  She was born and grew up in the UK, but made frequent summer visits back to their grandmother's house in Vourliotes.  That house is still in the family.  As a youngster, the girl would return home from her summer vacations speaking Greek and dreaming of her own wedding in the old church.  This week's wedding was the culmination of a single dream shared by three generations of women from the same family who had all worked hard to make that vision come true.  
 

The bride and groom

Reception banquet

 



The wedding with its large communal outdoor reception: the large seated banquet, the live music, drinking and dancing were traditions that seemed to breathe a renewed excitement into an aging village.  It was everything I had imagined that a traditional Greek wedding could be, and more.

The bride's maternal grandparents

Talking with the bride's grandmother, I learned an interesting sidebar to this story.  When I asked to see the picture from her own wedding, she told me that the photographer who had taken the picture had also made a blow-up of it as a window display for his studio. The enlarged photo was such a novelty at the time, that it actually drew small crowds on the sidewalk.  When the young couple saw it, they offered to buy the enlargement for themselves, but couldn't afford the price the photographer was asking for it.  The picture shown above went with them to Cardiff, the blow-up stayed behind on Samos, and has been lost to time.

For background information on this post read: "The Greek Diaspora" - 7/1/2013
at:  http://mysamoshome.blogspot.gr/2013/07/the-greek-diaspora.html

Rebetiko Music at Bacchus' Taverna

"Bacchus' Traditional Taverna"
 

 Rebetiko Music

or

 "Greek Oldies" night at Bacchus' Tavern

 

by Alec Newell

 

 

 

The group called Tekeros - photos by Newell and Skaggs

Last night we received a word of mouth invitation to join some neighbors for dinner at a taverna in the upper end of the village that specializes in traditional Greek food and hot baked bread, all prepared on site from meat and vegetables produced by the family on a local plot of their own land.  In addition to the amazing food and local wine, the family had arranged for a quintet of young musicians who specialize in playing a style of Greek music called Rebetiko.




photo from the net

Rebetiko Music it turns out, is a form of urban folk music with complicated roots and traditions that officially dates from the 1920s to the 1950s.  There was a revival of the style beginning in about 1960 that continues today.  There were perhaps only thirty guests in the restaurant, which was a shame because the food and music should have rated a packed house anywhere on Planet Earth.



authentic Greek menu

The up side for us as Americans, was that we had had the incredible good luck to have been invited to such a small and intimate gathering.  As the evening progressed and younger guests trickled in, dishes were emptied and glasses were filled; wine flowed and the guests got mellow, the musicians loosened up and the music only got better.  A few members of the audience, their eyes glistening with wine and nostalgia, joined in the singing. Kathy and I of course, were unfamiliar with the lyrics, but music evokes universal emotions; laughter from the musicians and smiles from other guests drew us in and made us feel right at home.  Except for the Christmas holidays, it's something we rarely experience in our own culture these days.



 



Applause

It was already a very late night when Kathy and I left, but the musicians and younger guests seemed to still be gathering momentum as we started down the steps of the taverna to head home.  The owner followed us out and in very limited English, took our hands and let us know that he had been pleased to have had us as his guests, and hoped that we had enjoyed ourselves.  We stumbled back down the stone paved foot path toward the house in an almost giddy glow as the music trailed off behind us.  Nice party.

The table carnage left in our wake.

 



 

July 5th - "The Ballot" by Alec Newell

The polling station in Vourliotes
photos by Newell

The balloting place for our village is the primary school.  As you enter the  building the first classroom on the left is for voters with last names that begin with Alpha through Kappa, and the first classroom on the immediate right is for voters with last names that begin with Lambda through Omega.  The atmosphere is relaxed.  The poll sitters and voters all seem to be on a first name basis, but the actual voting procedure is fixed and somewhat formal.

The voter hands over a laminated identification card which is checked against a computer generated list, an envelope is stamped and initialed by a poll sitter, and the voter is issued two pieces of paper.  One is a printed ballot sheet with two boxes: one marked Oxi (pronounced O'-hee) meaning No, the other marked Nai (pronounced nay) meaning yes.  The second sheet is an aspero meaning white.  It is a blank sheet of paper that signals a formal abstention.  The voter retires to an aluminum frame cubicle with a curtain to mark the ballot, inserts one of the sheets of paper into the stamped envelope, and drops it into the Plexiglas ballot box in front of the polling attendants.  At this point the voter has his identification card returned.  I saw several instances where older voters walked off forgetting to collect their ID cards, and a polling attendant had to chase the voters down to return them.



A bit of last minute campaign messaging

The impression I got was that the younger voters seemed to favor rejecting the proposal.  One held up his ballot for me and pointed at the box marked Oxi or No.  He encouraged me to take a picture but when I stepped back to include him in the photo he said, "No Face."

The older voters, worried about losing what remains of their dwindling retirement money, seemed to favor the more conservative option.  On one occasion I noticed a man with very limited sight ask for assistance from a poll sitter to help him mark his ballot.  My Greek is limited, but I could hear a very audible "Nay" (yes) spoken from behind the closed curtain.

the voting booth

A restaurant owner from the village recognized me and smiled.  Just before he dropped his envelope in the box, he drew his finger across his throat saying "Ohee" (no) then he signaled a chopping motion to the back of his neck with the edge of his hand and said "Nay" (yes) then he shrugged, turned his palms up and dropped his ballot in the box, indicating that no matter which way today's vote went, no good would come of it.

The voter turnout for this referendum was unusually high today, and the results from the ballot could even be in before I post this, so we'll see.

the ballot box



 



July 4th - Star Spangled Souvlaki




photos by Newell

Watermelon, Fireworks from the Grill,

and Cucumber Sorbet

by Alec Newell



Heinrich Schliemann's Face of Agamemnon
National Archeological Museum of Athens

"Agamemnon, king of men, sacrificed an ox, a male five years old, to the exalted son of Cronos. They flayed the beast, prepared and carved it up, chopping it skillfully into pieces.                                                        
They skewered these on spits, cooked them carefully, and drew them off. This done, they prepared a meal and ate. No one went unsatisfied. All feasted equally"

Homer's Illiad, Book VII - 370

 
Traditional American Independence Day celebrations are a hard thing to give up, even when you happen to be in a foreign country.  As the old saw advises, "When in Rome..."  or at least try to make some suitable adaptation to whatever country you happen to be in.

 

ancient souvlaki skewers and brazier
National Archaeological Museum of Athens

Meat cooked on skewers is a Greek tradition that goes back at least to the time when Agamemnon and his bronze-bright warriors camped, made sacrifices to Zeus, and feasted on brazed beef near the plains of ancient Troy.  This time honored tradition is still a part of Greek cuisine that is today called souvlaki.  In America it goes by the name of sish-kabob, the perfect choice for an American style cook-out with a Greek pedigree. 
 
We generally use chicken or sometimes pork when we make souvlaki, but out of deference to far older traditions, I decided to use beef.  Kathy put together some side dishes, I located a locally grown watermelon, and we invited Susan and Dimitris Trovas, a Greco-American couple and long time friends over to help celebrate.




ad hoc Greek cucumber sorbet

By mid morning a bag of cucumbers had shown up on our doorstep which Kathy turned into  another one of those on-the-fly dishes she creates from the unexpected vegetables that our neighbors frequently bring us.  Some went into the salad, the rest got turned into a lime green cucumber sorbet we had for dessert.

Growing up, dessert was always something you got for eating all the vegetables on your plate, and if you don't count pumpkin pie, vegetables as dessert was something I'd never really considered before.  It turned out to much better than what I'd imagined.




Beef souvlaki with onions and peppers

The souvlaki turned out well too.  Staring at the hot coals in the grill after dinner sparked a final thought on Agamemnon and the long-haired Achaeans - the regal simplicity of grilled meat and fire to celebrate the occasion.  I think our guests enjoyed themselves too.  To paraphrase lines from Homer himself, "No one went unsatisfied.  All (had) feasted liberally"



Real 4th of July  fireworks or pyrotechnics

pʌɪrə(ʊ)ˈtɛknɪks/  from the grill



Greek Economic Referendum - 2015

by Alec Newell


ATM lines in Karlovasi this week
photos by Newell

  

Ancient Greek voting machine
the Agora Museum of Athens

Since arriving on Samos, we've been bombarded almost daily, with questions from concerned friends and neighbors about how the EU's impending Sword of Damocles is affecting us.  The good news is that it's not, at least not in the short run.  This week the Greek government limited ATM withdrawals for Greek nationals, to 60 Euros per day.  Fear has resulted in long lines at some ATMs and a major inconvenience for older, retired Greeks many of whom are having to get by on about 300 Euros a month, or about half of what their retirement benefits had been before austerity measures were imposed.  But there have been no real  limits on American credit cards and ATM withdrawals.  The only limits are imposed by American banks and credit unions that are only there as security measures to protect their customers against theft and credit card fraud.  ATM withdrawal limits drawn against US bank accounts still hover between 300 and 400 Euros per transaction.

 

Political battles are nothing new to the Greek people.  In ancient times ostracism was used as an expedient to remove political opponents.  Today, the tactics have become more refined, but the game hasn't changed.

The referendum scheduled for this Sunday has huge implications for the future of Greek economy with the outcome way to close to call.  It would be the first national referendum to actually hit the polls since 1974, and with the 20 million Euros it would cost to implement, the latest rumor in the wind is that it may even be cancelled, though there is no constitutional procedure in place for that.


Ancient ostracism tokens
the Agora Museum of Athens



Greece - For Sale

I am not a Greek and I don't have a crystal ball, but what I am seeing is a lot of Greek real estate on the. market for increasingly more affordable prices; and with my wife casting avaricious glances at all those For Sale signs, this whole thing is making me very, very nervous.