Traditions and rituals are where the comfort is
I like to call it "our mountain". It isn't of course, but generally we are the only ones on it. Now that it is Spring there are a few hunters that watch their hounds chase hares and then leave disposable coffee cups next to
their parked vehicles. Generally though we hardly see anyone. Up on a small promontory half way up the mountain sits a small squat stone Byzantine church. It is inhabited by a solitary monk, who maintains the small grounds and I am sure all the other duties that go with a life of quiet servitude. Every evening a small enclosed shrine is lit and it is the only flicker of light to be seen on the mountain. The church catches the morning light before the shadows retreat lower down to the stream below. On late summer afternoons its stones seem to throb a warm pink as the shadows gradually encircle it. I find it intensely satisfying to look upon. No matter whether I run by early in the morning, midday or bob along by head torch much later. I am not sure what it is about it that always pauses me to reflect as I am not religious. I think it is the idea that I am looking at time, a visible thread back to a time many hundreds of years.
Traditions are like lighthouses in a way, they are focused points of ritual and collective memory. They shed light on why we do the things we do, how we feel and react. Growing up in the New World (I only get to call it that because I now live in one of the great cities of antiquity) traditions were family made or borrowed from our forbears that settled only as far back as 1821. It is a ridiculously short span of time, but nevertheless traditions do form and are quickly prized. Rituals are similar and feed into traditions and can be anything. The smell of linseed oil will forever remind me of the start of cricket season, much the same way that the leather of a baseball mitt must for others. It is a momentary but satisfying association with a time past.
I decided on a long run up Mount Pendeli on Easter Sunday. Pendeli looms above Athens at just over 1100m. It has been ravaged by miners for its prized marble since antiquity and is famous for providing the marble for the Parthenon. Yet with 164 modern and ancient quarries, the nearside flank to Athens has a sunken and pockmarked appearance. Despite it sounding as appealing as a close up of Ray Liotta's face it is an intriguing part of the mountain to explore with rough stone chipped paths and empty quarries, hidden churches and even older shrines to gods long past. There is a sense of time all around.
When I first for got here I was amazed that Easter was a bigger holiday and religious event that Christmas. I can see why now. The season is changing and the hills are bursting with life and colour. Winter, unless you have a white December is dull and grey with the Christmas holiday as a beacon amongst the shortest and darkest of the year. Christmas in the Southern Hemisphere is an odd affair with northern European style Christmas trees and cheery Father Christmas's sweating profusely in their faux red winters outfit. Commercialisation has also become associated with the holiday. I shudder at my often desperate and self-loathing filled last minute shopping trips on Christmas Eve. The whiff of Christmas is first felt when the shops start with the carols and decorations in October. Comparatively, most Easter panic buys are more food, charcoal and extra chairs.
Socks again?
Easter in Greece has a slow inexorable build up that mirrors Spring the closer you get to Easter Sunday. It starts with a meat feast and then a prescriptive Orthodox fasting for lent begins where animal products are sequentially prohibited for the 40 day period until once again another meat feast on Easter Sunday. It is not a token giving up of small pleasures that happen elsewhere. Even McDonalds has had to bend its ways and it provides a special Lenten menu. The culmination of lent is a celebratory day of feasting (usually an entire lamb) and music. The smell of roasting lamb, sounds of music and fussing Greek mothers are common in wherever neighbourhood you are in. It is a day of richness in time, food and family that I find so appealing as a tradition. That is not to say that Christmas has none of these elements, it does, it is just is a richer and more drawn out experience. It may be that it is a better holiday because no one has to pretend that they are happy to have received a pair of socks or a new steaming iron. It is not a day for vegetarians and the gross tonnage of lamb consumed and charcoal burnt must be astronomical. Animals are imported from all the neighbouring countries to satisfy the demands of the celebration. It surely must be happiest day of the year in Greece because Greeks are at their happiest when sat round a dinner table.
It's in the mail
As a tradition I particularly like the service before Easter Sunday to celebrate the resurrection of Christ. Church goers share a flame in the church and carry it back to their homes. It is a touching service to behold. The journey of the flame to each church is an interesting one. It starts off in Jerusalem, in the church of the Holy Light. The Orthodox Patriarch kneels before a marble slab and a flame miraculously appears. This has happened for centuries. This flame is then shared and spread throughout the church. Much like the tour of the Olympic Flame, this too is flown to Athens in a specially chartered plane. News programmes routinely show the aircraft landing with the Holy flame. It goes a long way to explain how important tradition is here and why the country has such poor control over its finances. But without the care and rigidity given to traditions they fall away. Somehow, and this is really the miraculous part because time keeping is not an inherent quality here but somehow the flame is shared throughout all the churches in the land. How they get it to all the islands and backwater villagers is beyond me but it is maintained that it is. If they indeed succeed in this feat I only wish it could be emulated by the post office. How and when my parcels arrive involve a process infinitely more mysterious and miraculous and always much much later than expected.
It is not only the pious attend a service that evening which concludes at midnight with the light being shared to the congregation. When we have opted to not attend the service we were reproached for breaking with tradition rather than out of piety. In true Greek fashion the great majority will arrive with 10 minutes to spare to light a candle and then rush back to enjoy a meal at home. I once attended a service where the priest implored the congregation not to leave once the light was shared as the service still had some important bits to cover. It helped not because in joyous celebration the church was emptied speedily and the sermon was drowned out by the crack and thumps of fireworks. Occasionally, where churches are within range, fireworks are aimed at each other resulting in a startled re-entry of the congregation back into the church. News segments the following day are usually quite entertaining. Life can never be entirely peaceful in Greece.
The Orthodox Church keeps an iron grip on tradition. There is no middle way found in other Christian Churches - there is just the way. There is no interpretation and debate. And that way has not changed since the very beginning. Services are still given in Byzantine Greek because that is the language of the early church. Of course most church goers have only a sketchy grasp of what is actually being said. But it is an unbreakable link to the past. Even if you do not know what is being said, you know that exactly the same thing was said in the same way hundreds of years ago. For the faithful and the traditionalists this can only be reassuring. It has also managed to stay clear from many of the pitfalls that the Catholic Church has fallen fowl of. Premarital sex is frowned upon but it has decided to pick its battles and look elsewhere. Condoms are allowed, its Priests can marry. Divorce is permitted and you are given the opportunity to marry and divorce up to three times. Four is considered taking the piss, but I think it is the church's recognition of the fact that a Greek mother-in-law is a difficult beast to manage and so some wiggle room is only fair to find more peaceable pastures.
If you hadn't already guessed by now, it is an overwhelmingly Christian country which makes it one of the few outliers in an increasingly sceptical Europe. Although its inhabitants are not what you would call pious in the protestant sense. Life carries on the way it does with humans, messily and with little guilt. The Orthodox Church is more of a reminder of who they are (Orthodoxy and Greekness are inextricably linked) rather than how they should be. No one wants to be lectured, lest of all Greeks and so the Church has stuck with ritual and tradition and it is the cornerstone of its longevity.
Icons are to be found everywhere. Growing up Protestant I still haven't got quite used to them. Go and sort something out at the Vodafone store and you will have some Saint peer balefully back at you while you query your bill. Visit the doctor's office and it is usually Madonna and Child that you share your consultation with. Of all the icons, it is they that I find at odds with a modern doctor's office. With the biological improbability of a virgin birth, it makes you wonder how much room the doctor is leaving for luck or divine second opinion. About the only place I can see an icon being useful is at the Greek Tax office because if there is anywhere that you are completely and utterly alone, it is there.
So you are a Gemini...
Curiously, despite the ever presence of the church here, you will never find a people more interested in what star sign you are. Unless you are foreign they know you are Orthodox (because there can be nothing else), but what they don't know is what position several celestial bodies were at the time of your birth and whether you would be compatible enough to go for coffee with.
What good has change ever done?
Anyone with an appreciation for history is grateful of a glimpse into the past, or something unchanged. The Parthenon is ever glorious, yet the sun bleached skeleton of a building that have now is a far shade from its gaudy and colourful past. It is hard to imagine and the link with a time 2500 years ago is faint. The Orthodox church has steadfastly remained the same, its buildings and interiors need to conform. There is no modernist intellectual architecture to contemplate, just a steady repeated living reminder of what they should and have always looked like ever since sandals were about the only footwear option going. And therein lies the comfort, whether it is right or wrong, it has managed before and will manage long after we are gone.
We find comfort in routine. It is the comfort of writing early in the morning with a cup of tea while the day brightens. Running likewise is full of routines that we knowingly and sometimes unknowingly follow. It is the comfort of running a trail, sometimes quickly, sometimes just to be there, sometimes to just feel restored. It may be the smell of brewing coffee and a bowl of oats before a long run. The feel of quiet on an early morning outing. It is why we always stop at a particular spot, to mark our times or just to take time out to take in the senses. It is something we cannot help but enjoy, even unknowingly.
I know that one day when I leave Greece, the smell of thyme will instantly be associated with my dry and dusty mountain and my heart will quiet and I will be back there for a brief moment. Traditions are those momentary connections with something past. Perhaps it is because we know nothing of the future, but the past at least, we can see like a trail of breadcrumbs behind us that slowly get swept up by time.
I like to call it "our mountain". It isn't of course, but generally we are the only ones on it. Now that it is Spring there are a few hunters that watch their hounds chase hares and then leave disposable coffee cups next to
Traditions are like lighthouses in a way, they are focused points of ritual and collective memory. They shed light on why we do the things we do, how we feel and react. Growing up in the New World (I only get to call it that because I now live in one of the great cities of antiquity) traditions were family made or borrowed from our forbears that settled only as far back as 1821. It is a ridiculously short span of time, but nevertheless traditions do form and are quickly prized. Rituals are similar and feed into traditions and can be anything. The smell of linseed oil will forever remind me of the start of cricket season, much the same way that the leather of a baseball mitt must for others. It is a momentary but satisfying association with a time past.
I decided on a long run up Mount Pendeli on Easter Sunday. Pendeli looms above Athens at just over 1100m. It has been ravaged by miners for its prized marble since antiquity and is famous for providing the marble for the Parthenon. Yet with 164 modern and ancient quarries, the nearside flank to Athens has a sunken and pockmarked appearance. Despite it sounding as appealing as a close up of Ray Liotta's face it is an intriguing part of the mountain to explore with rough stone chipped paths and empty quarries, hidden churches and even older shrines to gods long past. There is a sense of time all around.
When I first for got here I was amazed that Easter was a bigger holiday and religious event that Christmas. I can see why now. The season is changing and the hills are bursting with life and colour. Winter, unless you have a white December is dull and grey with the Christmas holiday as a beacon amongst the shortest and darkest of the year. Christmas in the Southern Hemisphere is an odd affair with northern European style Christmas trees and cheery Father Christmas's sweating profusely in their faux red winters outfit. Commercialisation has also become associated with the holiday. I shudder at my often desperate and self-loathing filled last minute shopping trips on Christmas Eve. The whiff of Christmas is first felt when the shops start with the carols and decorations in October. Comparatively, most Easter panic buys are more food, charcoal and extra chairs.
Socks again?
Easter in Greece has a slow inexorable build up that mirrors Spring the closer you get to Easter Sunday. It starts with a meat feast and then a prescriptive Orthodox fasting for lent begins where animal products are sequentially prohibited for the 40 day period until once again another meat feast on Easter Sunday. It is not a token giving up of small pleasures that happen elsewhere. Even McDonalds has had to bend its ways and it provides a special Lenten menu. The culmination of lent is a celebratory day of feasting (usually an entire lamb) and music. The smell of roasting lamb, sounds of music and fussing Greek mothers are common in wherever neighbourhood you are in. It is a day of richness in time, food and family that I find so appealing as a tradition. That is not to say that Christmas has none of these elements, it does, it is just is a richer and more drawn out experience. It may be that it is a better holiday because no one has to pretend that they are happy to have received a pair of socks or a new steaming iron. It is not a day for vegetarians and the gross tonnage of lamb consumed and charcoal burnt must be astronomical. Animals are imported from all the neighbouring countries to satisfy the demands of the celebration. It surely must be happiest day of the year in Greece because Greeks are at their happiest when sat round a dinner table.
It's in the mail
As a tradition I particularly like the service before Easter Sunday to celebrate the resurrection of Christ. Church goers share a flame in the church and carry it back to their homes. It is a touching service to behold. The journey of the flame to each church is an interesting one. It starts off in Jerusalem, in the church of the Holy Light. The Orthodox Patriarch kneels before a marble slab and a flame miraculously appears. This has happened for centuries. This flame is then shared and spread throughout the church. Much like the tour of the Olympic Flame, this too is flown to Athens in a specially chartered plane. News programmes routinely show the aircraft landing with the Holy flame. It goes a long way to explain how important tradition is here and why the country has such poor control over its finances. But without the care and rigidity given to traditions they fall away. Somehow, and this is really the miraculous part because time keeping is not an inherent quality here but somehow the flame is shared throughout all the churches in the land. How they get it to all the islands and backwater villagers is beyond me but it is maintained that it is. If they indeed succeed in this feat I only wish it could be emulated by the post office. How and when my parcels arrive involve a process infinitely more mysterious and miraculous and always much much later than expected.
It is not only the pious attend a service that evening which concludes at midnight with the light being shared to the congregation. When we have opted to not attend the service we were reproached for breaking with tradition rather than out of piety. In true Greek fashion the great majority will arrive with 10 minutes to spare to light a candle and then rush back to enjoy a meal at home. I once attended a service where the priest implored the congregation not to leave once the light was shared as the service still had some important bits to cover. It helped not because in joyous celebration the church was emptied speedily and the sermon was drowned out by the crack and thumps of fireworks. Occasionally, where churches are within range, fireworks are aimed at each other resulting in a startled re-entry of the congregation back into the church. News segments the following day are usually quite entertaining. Life can never be entirely peaceful in Greece.
The Orthodox Church keeps an iron grip on tradition. There is no middle way found in other Christian Churches - there is just the way. There is no interpretation and debate. And that way has not changed since the very beginning. Services are still given in Byzantine Greek because that is the language of the early church. Of course most church goers have only a sketchy grasp of what is actually being said. But it is an unbreakable link to the past. Even if you do not know what is being said, you know that exactly the same thing was said in the same way hundreds of years ago. For the faithful and the traditionalists this can only be reassuring. It has also managed to stay clear from many of the pitfalls that the Catholic Church has fallen fowl of. Premarital sex is frowned upon but it has decided to pick its battles and look elsewhere. Condoms are allowed, its Priests can marry. Divorce is permitted and you are given the opportunity to marry and divorce up to three times. Four is considered taking the piss, but I think it is the church's recognition of the fact that a Greek mother-in-law is a difficult beast to manage and so some wiggle room is only fair to find more peaceable pastures.
If you hadn't already guessed by now, it is an overwhelmingly Christian country which makes it one of the few outliers in an increasingly sceptical Europe. Although its inhabitants are not what you would call pious in the protestant sense. Life carries on the way it does with humans, messily and with little guilt. The Orthodox Church is more of a reminder of who they are (Orthodoxy and Greekness are inextricably linked) rather than how they should be. No one wants to be lectured, lest of all Greeks and so the Church has stuck with ritual and tradition and it is the cornerstone of its longevity.
Icons are to be found everywhere. Growing up Protestant I still haven't got quite used to them. Go and sort something out at the Vodafone store and you will have some Saint peer balefully back at you while you query your bill. Visit the doctor's office and it is usually Madonna and Child that you share your consultation with. Of all the icons, it is they that I find at odds with a modern doctor's office. With the biological improbability of a virgin birth, it makes you wonder how much room the doctor is leaving for luck or divine second opinion. About the only place I can see an icon being useful is at the Greek Tax office because if there is anywhere that you are completely and utterly alone, it is there.
So you are a Gemini...
Curiously, despite the ever presence of the church here, you will never find a people more interested in what star sign you are. Unless you are foreign they know you are Orthodox (because there can be nothing else), but what they don't know is what position several celestial bodies were at the time of your birth and whether you would be compatible enough to go for coffee with.
What good has change ever done?
Anyone with an appreciation for history is grateful of a glimpse into the past, or something unchanged. The Parthenon is ever glorious, yet the sun bleached skeleton of a building that have now is a far shade from its gaudy and colourful past. It is hard to imagine and the link with a time 2500 years ago is faint. The Orthodox church has steadfastly remained the same, its buildings and interiors need to conform. There is no modernist intellectual architecture to contemplate, just a steady repeated living reminder of what they should and have always looked like ever since sandals were about the only footwear option going. And therein lies the comfort, whether it is right or wrong, it has managed before and will manage long after we are gone.
We find comfort in routine. It is the comfort of writing early in the morning with a cup of tea while the day brightens. Running likewise is full of routines that we knowingly and sometimes unknowingly follow. It is the comfort of running a trail, sometimes quickly, sometimes just to be there, sometimes to just feel restored. It may be the smell of brewing coffee and a bowl of oats before a long run. The feel of quiet on an early morning outing. It is why we always stop at a particular spot, to mark our times or just to take time out to take in the senses. It is something we cannot help but enjoy, even unknowingly.
I know that one day when I leave Greece, the smell of thyme will instantly be associated with my dry and dusty mountain and my heart will quiet and I will be back there for a brief moment. Traditions are those momentary connections with something past. Perhaps it is because we know nothing of the future, but the past at least, we can see like a trail of breadcrumbs behind us that slowly get swept up by time.
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