They say that when God created the world, he ran out of
resources when he got to Greece, so he took a pile of rocks and mixed it with
the rainbow. Maybe that accounts for the allure of that place in my memories.
I spent two years of my childhood in Greece, in 1952 and
1953, and recollections of those magical days that are still vivid. The Athens
where David and I spent a day last week bears no resemblance to the Greece I
remember as a girl of seven and eight, so I’m tapping those memories that are
so much more alive to me than the tourist-crowded streets, glitzy shopping areas,
and fancy new subway we just encountered.
My experience of Greece got off to an interesting start. Our
plane arrived at the Athens airport at night, and while my parents negotiated
customs and organized the taxi ride into town I wandered off the chat with the
uniformed security guards who seemed to enjoy trying out their English on this youngster
from America. A family of seven with all our bags, we wouldn’t fit into one
cab, so my mom and dad each commandeered one vehicle and split the kids and
luggage between them. Off they went into the dark night, bound for the King George
Hotel in downtown Athens. One problem: Each thought I was with the other party,
and I was left behind!
I ran after the departing taxis yelling wait, wait! A quick-thinking
security guard called over to some friends who grabbed a car and drove off with
me in the back seat. Here I was, seven years old, in a new-to-me foreign
country, not speaking the language, in a car with two strangers, heading God
knows where through unlit streets. I had a half hour to consider my fate, and
tried not to worry. My parents, meanwhile, had registered and were cramming
kids and luggage into the hotel elevator and counting noses. Just as they
realized I was missing, I waltzed in the front door of the King George, safe
and sound. A big eυχαριστώ (efcharisto, thank you) to the men who conveyed this little lost girl safely to her family.
My dad grew up in Bulgaria (the son of Congregational
missionaries from Ohio), so as his career with the Central Intelligence Agency
progressed, he was a natural to be sent to the Mediterranean to make contact
with those escaping the Communist regimes of the Iron Curtain countries.
He was stationed in Athens, and we lived in a suburb called
Ekali, halfway up a mountainside facing Mount Pentelicus where much of the
marble for the Parthenon and other ancient buildings came from. Our street was
a wide, rutted dirt road where I loved to craft little cityscapes in the mud
puddles after it rained. The lack of paving notwithstanding, it was a nice
neighborhood—the prime minister lived on the next street over, and we kids used
to hang out there chatting with the uniformed guards at the gate. He was
Georgios Papandreou, founder of a political dynasty that gave Greece three
prime ministers. I got in trouble the time they finally asphalted the street in
front of the compound. I was dressed in a frilly pink dress to attend a
wedding, and came home from playing with the frills edged in black tar.
We had a nice split-level house with a big back porch. The
kitchen counters were all of white marble. Our parents had a small concrete wading
pool built just outside the kitchen window for us kids to play in, which my mom
filled with a hose connected inside at the kitchen sink.
I had an amazing amount of freedom in our little suburb compared
to kids today. In late afternoon I used to wander alone up the mountain, out of
the residential area, to a pump house situated among the rocks. I would sit
there and watch the sky change behind the distant Parthenon and the sea beyond
as the sun went down—treasured rainbow moments for me.
There were five of us kids, so we had plenty of
entertainment just among the family, but I had Greek friends in the
neighborhood too. I was invited to lunch by a young friend and was surprised
that everyone, including me, was served wine as an antiseptic alternative to
the local water. There was a Greek army base nearby where loud bouzouki music
blared till all hours of the night. I used to visit and dance the Καλαματιανός
(Kalamatianós) with the long snaking lines of young soldiers. There was a
favorite fig tree there in whose branches I loved to hang out. Nearby was a
place you could get a submarine sandwich—half a loaf of bread split lengthwise layered
with meats and cheeses and topped with two fried eggs. There were mules all
over, probably the choice mounts of the military.
The family across the street had chickens, and employed an
axe against the stump of a tree to dispatch their Sunday dinner entree. A
yogurt man came regularly on a bicycle carrying a basket of little terra cotta
crocks of the creamy stuff and calling out “Yaoooourti! Yaoooourti!” One time a
man had an epileptic seizure right in front of our house, foaming at the mouth
and twitching so badly that his clothers were all torn up. My father brought
him in when it was all done and gave the man his own coveralls to wear home.
A special Greek pal lived down the street in a big house
with a pigeon coop in the backyard, also furnishing the occasional dinner. Costa was much older than me, probably 17 or 18, and his father owned a string of
movie houses as far north as Thessalonika. My friend played at film making by painting
cartoons frame by frame directly on the 35-millimeter film, and we watched his
creations again and again. One time he offered to take me on the bus to Athens
to visit the Acropolis. It was a great outing, and totally innocent, though
what parent today wouldn't be suspicious.
Critters were interesting. The vacant woodlot behind us was
home to giant orange centipedes, six and seven inches long! There were no
screens on the windows, so our folks tacked mesh to the shutters to keep out
the mosquitoes. One morning I woke to see a shadowy lump the size of a pingpong
ball between the mesh and shutter. I gingerly pulled back the edge of the mesh
to see a huge spider resting there, the “pingpong” being his enormous abdomen.
It might have been a tarantula, but it was pink and not furry, so I’m not sure.
Dad captured it in a glass jar, and we fed it fat flies for a few days but it
died.
At Easter time, we saw people leading their lamb dinner home
on a string to be roasted all afternoon on a spit over an open fire while kids
played at smacking red-dyed hardboiled eggs against each other to see whose
would crack first. Our family attended an American church presided over by
Reverend Olander. I remember his name because it was like “oleander,” a
fragrant shrub that grew all over. He always invited us children to the front
of the church for a special sermon before excusing us to go to Sunday School. I
remember singing “Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam (to shine for Him each day, etc.)”
for my classmates, possibly as a duet with one of my siblings. My mother has a
photo of Rev. O preaching a sunrise Easter service near the Temple of Athena
Nike on the Acropolis.
Our household of seven must have been a chore to clothe and
feed, but my parents had time for hobbies. No doubt our Greek maid Maria
lightened the burden. My mother took voice lessons and held a performance
featuring Schubert Lieder. My father played the loony nephew Teddy in the expat
theater’s version “Arsenic and Old Lace.” I remember him running up the stage
stairs with his bugle yelling “Charge!”
I took a special trip with Maria to her mother’s home in a
village a long bus ride away. The house had one dark room with a dirt floor, a
bed, and a huge loom in the corner. I took a nap in the front yard one day and was
surprised when I woke up next to a huge, dusty pig also taking a snooze. I
witnessed a wedding at the town’s chapel, presided over by priests in tall
black hats swinging incense. We ate the traditional pastel pink and white
coated almonds in celebration afterwards. My mother’s memoir recounts that
later Maria got married at our home in Ekali, and cried the whole time because
her mother didn't approve and refused to come.
We shopped for groceries and household goods at the PX
(short for Post Exchange), but we also patronized the local purveyors. I
remember a town where we regularly stopped at a butcher’s where huge carcasses
were hanging from hooks with flies buzzing around them. There was a bakery too,
where loaves fresh out of the oven rarely made it home in one piece. I had two
favorite fast foods that could be purchased from street vendors. One was Kokoretsi,
lamb or goat organ meats wrapped on a skewer with cleaned intestines and
roasted over an open fire. The other, a newspaper cone of deep fried sardines
which were eaten whole, head, tail, and all.
Household goods were sometimes ordered from the Sears
Roebuck catalog, and each of us kids got to pick an item of clothing or a toy
so we all could look forward to the arrival of the big box from the States. The
laundry was done in a wringer washer and hung on a clothesline to dry. The
morning milk was reconstituted from mail-order powdered milk by the brand name
KLIM. Our favorite lunch was peanut butter and green grape sandwiches with mayo
on white bread. One time we were served okra for dinner, a disgusting slimy
mess that I refused to eat. My father sent me from the table with my dinner,
and I flushed the okra down the toilet. (Too bad they didn’t cook it like we do
in Indiana—deep fried with a cornmeal coating, yum!)
I was often troubled by nightmares: of tanks rolling up our
streets, of earthquakes that reduced whole villages to piles of rubble—I guess
these things were really happening in some parts of the Mediterranean—and, no
surprise, of my bedroom being right in the path of migrating tarantulas.
I attended second and third grade at an American school in
the closer-to-town suburb of Kifissia. My third-grade teacher was Miss Fisher.
My brother Brian’s kindergarten teacher Miss Tracey became a great family friend,
and after returning to the States we rented her cottage on China Lake in Maine.
I had a sort-of boyfriend named Michael Georges whom I invited to a birthday
party. His mom must have picked out my gift—a set of seven nylon panties in
different colors with Monday through Sunday embroidered on them—and was I
embarrassed!
There were special expat girlfriends with whom I enjoyed weekend
sleep-overs. Tanya Peterson, Anne Lium, Gerda Sanders—I wonder where they are
now. At Tanya’s I overheard the adults talking about having had to fire their
maid; I was horrified, thinking that meant a firing squad. At Gerda’s we played
at paperdolls and gobbled pomegranate seeds from the copiously fruiting tree in
her back yard. At Anne’s—her family was Swedish in origin—I had my first taste
of animal brains, served for dinner; I ate no more than one bite.
An American family down the street from us had a huge old
walnut tree in their yard, and we kids would climb up in the branches to munch
on nuts that we would crack with a stone. One day I lost hold of my stone and
it fell and hit one of the family’s younsters who was standing directly beneath.
In the ensuing panic, I overheard the father say, “I’m going to kill whoever
did this,” and I slunk home and never said a word to my parents.
As a family we went sightseeing: to the Corinth Canal, to
ancient Mycenae and Delphi, and past Mt. Olympus, legendary home of the gods,
to Salonika.We sailed to an island that was famous for its pistacchios;
enormous sacks of the meaty green nuts with partially split shells were piled
at the dock for purchase. And we went to the beach! The beach at Marathon was a
favorite. We stayed all day by the turquoise blue waters and enjoyed a picnic
lunch among the pines.
I remember a particular Fourth of July celebration that the
American expats put on at another beach somewhere. A pair of bikini-clad French
girls caused a huge sensation. (My dad, when he saw a pretty girl, used to joke
with my mom, “Mommy, will you buy me one?”) As the sun set there was a huge volley
of fireworks, capped off with a blazing ground display of the American flag.
A national holiday that Greeks celebrated was October 28, marking
the day in 1940 when their prime minister Ioannis Metaxis faced an ultimatim
from Italian dictator Mussolini to allow the Axis powers to occupy strategic
locations in Greece or face war. Metaxis answered with an unambiguous όχι (ochi, no)! (Unfortunately, in the ensuing
war, Greece was occupied by Italian, German, and Bulgarian forces.) I
remember a big parade on “Ochi Day” featuring tanks and rockets and marching
soldiers to show off Greece’s military might in the event of further incursions.
We watched from hotel room windows above the main street.
When we went to the movies, they were outdoors and we sat on
folding chairs. My brother Peter, five years older than I, had the popcorn
concession, and I remember he and my mom filling giant galvanized steel tubs
with fluffy kernels popped in olive oil to be doled out in little white bags at
the “theater.”
My parents threw the occasional party, and we kids had fun
fooling the guests at one of them. It was Peter’s idea. He cooked up a scheme à
la Orson Welles’ radio broadcast of “War of the Worlds,” whereby we hijacked
the piped-in dance music to interject a news bulletin that alien craft were
landing in Athens. We giggled like crazy as concerned guests made their way out
to the porch and craned their necks to catch a glimpse of the invasion.
A family heirloom that has come into my possession is a well-worn coffee-table
book of photographs, Aspects de la Grèce, published by a Frenchman in
1953. It must have been given to my dad by his office mates when he departed
Greece; as the endpaper bears several well-wishing signatures including a joking
request for a raise. I've always loved this book. The photos of grizzled
fishermen, fishing boats, and endless ancient ruins are all rendered in black
and white, unlike my own memories of Greece which are in all the colors of the
rainbow.
