greekworks

In the author’s note at the end of his second novel, Well-Founded Fear, Tom LeClair informs and maybe assures the reader that his book is a fictional story, with some dose of reality due to the authenticity of some of the documents he uses. Although we might all agree that this is a common practice among contemporary writers, the note itself raises the question of historical fiction, its epistemological reliability, and, ultimately, I believe, the question of what it means to write and refer through fiction to a particular past and present that remain, even today, outside our world-view or, to go a bit further, outside any orthodox historical or political discourse.

Like many contemporary novels, LeClair’s is a hybrid. The author emphasizes and challenges the binary opposition between fact and fiction by introducing legal documents from the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR). On one hand, this documentation supplements the narrative with some historical authenticity. On the other hand, it exposes us to the bureaucratic inadequacy of the UN system that deals with refugees. The title of the novel itself is a legal phrase that justifies the offer of asylum to someone who has a well-founded fear of persecution. The problem, however, is the reliability of Narratives that the refugees provide us with, the impossibility of knowing and deciding exactly who is telling the truth, or what, after all, is a “well-founded fear.”

The narrator of the story is a young American lawyer, Casey Mahan, who is an examiner of applications for refugee status at the UNHCR office in Athens. Her job is to interview, evaluate, and make the appropriate recommendations, mostly for Kurdish refugees (“the world’s oldest refugees”) who apply for asylum. The refugees must provide the UNHCR with the appropriate documentation and Narrative that will justify their “well-founded fear” of persecution. But for Casey:

The narrator’s detailed description of the asylum process exposes the arbitrariness, blindness, and politics of bureaucratic apparatuses – and ultimately the failure of humanitarian organizations – in the face of universal human rights. It also provides the reader with the historical and political context of the plight of the Kurdish people and the hypocrisy of Western powers. It is through her position as an interviewer, her exposure to the individual and collective documentation of atrocities, and her friendship with one of the refugees, Ziba, that Casey becomes a secondary witness to the Turkish and Iraqi atrocities against the Kurds – as well as to the silence and failures of Western politics and consciousness. Understanding the arbitrariness of the system, Casey realizes that it is only through personal involvement that she can make a difference. Her friendship with Ziba and sympathy for the Kurds’ plight convince her to intervene on behalf of Ziba’s brother, Dr. Osman Mamozin, who is jailed in a Turkish prison as a PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party) sympathizer.

In one of the most memorable episodes in the book, Casey travels to Diyarbakir in order to obtain Osman’s release from prison by promising the extradition of a PKK member by Greece, under US pressure, to the Turkish authorities.

But if Osman’s release from a Turkish prison, his eventual arrival in Greece, and the romance that develops between him and Casey might have led to the proverbial happy ending, what actually follows gives an unexpected twist to the plot. After reading about Osman’s torture while in Turkish hands, including the injection of a toxin into his body, Casey tries unsuccessfully to secure an American visa for him to study and research the effects of the chemical warfare against the Kurdish people in northern Iraq. When nothing seems to work, Casey marries him, thus securing his visa.

The plot here takes an unexpected and thrilling turn. Osman leaves Greece without saying anything to Casey. His plan is to terrorize the US from the inside since he blames it for the Kurds’ plight due to US support of the Turkish government. Casey thus finds herself suddenly in the position of having helped to realize Osman’s plans, and she flies back home in order to track him down. As it turns out, Casey is a bad reader herself, who fails to recognize/read the problems of reliability in the narratives of Osman and Ziba, who are not who they claim to be. But the narrative itself raises the question of its own reliability for the reader as well. In an ironic twist, Casey finds herself betrayed by her altruism, experiencing some of the same emotions and fears of persecution that she witnessed as an interviewer of refugees.

In the last few chapters of the book, we follow Casey’s pursuit of Osman in America, their encounter in Chicago, and Casey’s discovery of Osman’s intention to terrorize Americans in their own land – very much like the Kurds’ experience – because of America’s support of Turkish policies. For Osman’s

How can we react to these lines without thinking of the recent tragic events of September 11 and their aftermath? How can the reader be assured that what she is reading is just a fictional story? How can we convince ourselves that this is happening somewhere else, or that we don’t have, like Casey, a “well-founded fear of future persecution,” or that we are not vulnerable?

The book ends with Casey’s final meeting with Osman in Denver, where she is determined to stop him by any means from executing his plans. Osman is dying from the poisonous injections that he received during his Turkish imprisonment, but at the same time he is desperately driven by his desire for revenge. Unable to persuade Casey to assist him, and perhaps unable to proceed himself with his own plans, he disappears in the same way that he appeared at the beginning of the novel. Maybe, as Casey reminds us, all he wanted was for her to become his mouthpiece: “fright, flight, fight, write.” Or maybe he is just a reminder of our sense of vulnerability and even the well-founded fear with which we live.

There are many things to be said about the last couple of chapters of LeClair’s book, but I will let readers decide for themselves. There are many reasons, however, why LeClair’s book is worth reading. Besides any echo of recent events, the story itself is an excellent and thoughtful commentary on our collective and individual blindness, as well as on our responsibility for the plight and suffering of the Kurdish people. The novel seems to bear witness, by finding “idioms” (as the philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard reminds us) to what in the past has been silenced and threatened, but at the same time it questions its own authority and sense of legitimation. The author’s use and manipulation of language, and its bureaucratic referentiality, can only remind and warn us that we are running out of alibis when it comes to human rights, and that the figure of the refugee represents the radical crisis of our humanity. Today, the massive movement of stateless people and the thousands of refugees crossing the borders of Europe question and challenge our political and cultural realities – as well as, ultimately, our perception of laws concerning human rights, asylum, and hospitality.

Apostolos Vasilakis teaches literature and philosophy at Roosevelt University in Chicago.

Diaspora

When the World Trade Center towers fell on September 11, Saint Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church was totally buried by the debris. The destruction of this tiny parish has received sustained coverage in the world press. And while Saint Nicholas is said to be one of the very first churches established in New York City, only scattered bits of information about its history and character have been published. Yet such is the spirit of the Saint Nicholas community that monies are now being raised to rebuild the parish once again. In addition the publication of the 85th commemorative volume of the church is also moving forward without delay. With Paris C. Dimoleon’s exhaustive and detailed history of the Saint Nicholas parish in this forthcoming volume, we will soon have the full, documented history of this community. All that will be attempted here is the briefest of surveys.

Saint Nicholas was founded on October 9, 1916, but did not receive its official charter until August 8, 1917. Baptismal records of 1915 and 1916 suggest the church was operating as a self-aware community for sometime before the formal issuance of a charter. In 1945, a fire destroyed many church records, so exact historical details on the earliest years of the parish were lacking even before September 11.

Services for the Saint Nicholas community were first held in two rented spaces along Greenwich Street, the second of these two locations being at 187 Greenwich Street. In 1919, Saint Nicholas Church moved to a building at 155 Cedar Street, which the community purchased for $25,000 on October 11, 1922. The structure was far from distinguished. Constructed in 1832, the building was first a private residence and then saw conversion into the Cedar House Bar. Aside from its business as a tavern, the Cedar House also rented out rooms.

Given the converted nature of the church building, conflicting accounts persist in terms of its height and precise physical dimensions. The church structure was a four-story building that was not exactly a rectangle. The structure measured only 22 feet wide in front, 20 feet 11 inches wide in the rear, 56 feet in length on one side, and 52 feet on the other. The building rose to a height of only 35 feet. One entered the church on the first floor, while the second floor was the balcony. The third floor was the hall and the fourth floor was composed of offices, restrooms, and the kitchen. The building’s exterior surface was whitewashed with a sign indicating to the world at large that the structure was indeed a church.

The tiny church was quite literally in the middle of a parking lot bounded as it was on three sides by asphalt. This seems to be the reason for the discrepancy, one of many by the way, in the general press. Depending on how one reckons the distance between the church building (the front door of which was on Cedar Street) and the asphalt parking lot behind it (that ran north to Liberty Street), Saint Nicholas was either within 250 feet of Ground Zero or some 1,000 feet.

The Saint Nicholas parish has been described in the world press as New York City’s third oldest Greek Orthodox place of worship. There is considerable lack of agreement on this point. To begin with, for those not from New York City, it is important to stress that the city is divided into five boroughs – the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island. According to Paris C. Dimoleon’s research, the first four Greek Orthodox churches founded in New York City were Holy Trinity in 1892, Evangelismos in 1894, Saints Constantine and Helen’s parish in Brooklyn in 1913, and Saint Nicholas in lower Manhattan in 1916. While always recognized as one of the earliest parishes to be established in New York City, Saint Nicholas has nevertheless never been included in any published history of Greeks in the United States.

In 1995, the Greek American Documentation Project conducted a broad-based survey of archival records by the New York City Greek community at large. Fortunately, Saint Nicholas was included in that field study. Yet some 6.1 linear feet of original parish records and documents – including six books of liturgical records that reported on the history of the parish through general correspondence, newspaper clippings dating back to 1919, wedding and baptismal documents, a small collection of photographs, and papers related to the parish constitution (dating from 1931 as well as 1951) – were all lost in the September 11 catastrophe.

According to nearly every published account, among Saint Nicholas’s icons were an unspecified number of silver encased ones that were gifts from Nicholas II, last czar of Russia. No such icons were to be found in Saint Nicholas at 155 Cedar Street. It seems that writers in the past have confused the Cedar Street church with the Russian Orthodox Cathedral of Saint Nicholas located at 97th Street, east of Fifth Avenue. At the same time, it is also the case that past writers have identified this parish as a Greek church established in 1895. The basis for this confusion seems to be a misreading or understanding of newspaper accounts.

It is quite true that Archbishop Meletios Metaxakis celebrated services at the 97th Street church as Ecumenical Patriarch-elect. In reading further in that account, the parish is further identified as a Russian church and that “the audience, in which men predominate, was divided about equally between Greeks and Russians” (New York Times 20 December 1921). As the late Archimandrite Alexander Doumouras’s research documents, “it is difficult, at this point (in time), to determine exactly what the relationship was, if any, between the Greek people in New York City and the clergy of the Russian Mission before 1900.”

By no later than the 1880s, the lower Manhattan district in which Saint Nicholas was located was known as the Syrian Quarter. This informal neighborhood name was due to the overwhelming numbers of Syrians, Lebanese, Armenians, and Middle Eastern peoples in general. Scattered among the rest were also Greeks, Italians, and even a sprinkling of Turks. Roughly occupying the area bounded by Washington Street from Battery Park to Rector Street, the Syrian Quarter was an area composed of residences and a place where locals worked in the produce business and along the thriving waterfront. Commerce in this district included coffeehouses, tobacco and confectionery shops, and even stores that sold baklava. The majority of Greek immigrants who first established Saint Nicholas had no knowledge of English and lived reportedly eight to ten to a room to save enough money to help purchase the Cedar Street building. In the 1957 film, Dark Odyssey, aside from the Greek American story-line, one can see not only the neighborhoods of lower Manhattan (then called generally “downtown”), but even the wooden piers of the docks that even then were still evident along the shoreline. The Wall Street Racquet Club and the Wall Street Heliport now dominate places that were once working waterfront docks.

Since the 1920s, the Saint Nicholas congregation has made a special point of celebrating Epiphany. Here is how the New York Times concisely described the 1939 celebration, “[P]erhaps the most colorful ceremony will be that of Bishop Arsenios, who will lead worshipers at noon from Saint Nicholas Church on Cedar Street near Washington Street to the Battery. He will enter a barge or other craft with dignitaries for the ceremony of casting a crucifix on the water. White doves will be released. Young men will plunge into the bay in the ancient custom of retrieving the cross” (January 22, page 12). Battery Park, which is just south and west of the church, is only a one-mile round-trip. An additional aspect to this processional, not mentioned in the previous account, is that on the return trip, the officiating clergy would stop at Greek-owned homes and businesses along this route to offer a blessing.

As this newspaper account brings to the fore, among the many historical points that see disagreement in the press concerning Saint Nicholas Church is the issue of the parish’s status as an Old Calendar church. The Paliomeroloyites (adherents to the “old calendar”) were opposed to the Julian calendar being replaced by the Gregorian one. Since Epiphany is on January 6 then, the 1939 observation on the 19th does pose some problems. That being said, the current parish president, James Maniatis, states plainly that in 1993 the parish officially began to follow the Gregorian calendar.

In 1972, minor renovations to Saint Nicholas took place. At this time, reinforcing the floor was necessary because the high tide of the Hudson River would often cause flooding. In late 1989, major renovations were initiated in earnest. The walls were stripped to the wood, more reinforcing was done, and marble was added to the floors, along with new heating and air conditioning equipment.

Forty to 50 parishioners were in attendance on any given Sunday, with an estimated total of 90 congregants drawn from Astoria, Brooklyn, New Jersey, Upper Westchester, and Washington Heights. It must be immediately stressed that the physical separation of Saint Nicholas Church from its priest and parishioners is not unique in Greek American historical experience. The growth of suburbs after the Second World War, the overall aging of the general population, and the better-than-average economic status of Greeks in North America have all directly affected parish life. Churches such as Saint Basil in Chicago, the Assumption in Price, Utah, or the Annunciation cathedral in Detroit, where lively communities all thrive, do so without the benefit of neighboring priests or parishioners. And these are not the only churches facing this issue. The presence of a lone Greek Orthodox Church, be it in a decidedly rural area or in a core-urban location, is as yet an unstudied daily social reality of Greek worship in North America.

The tragedy of the Saint Nicholas parish is emblematic of a more widely shared problem of Hellenism in America. No public historical documents are available on this church. Certainly, in the rebuilding process that the parishioners of Saint Nicholas are now undertaking, we can only wish them the very best. But we are forced to ask the question of what has Greek America done to preserve its own historical record for future generations? No one will be Greek for us. The time to assemble such a historical legacy on quite literally every church and every collectivity of Greeks in North America is now.

Steve Frangos lives and writes in Round Lake, Illinois.

Food

For and against retsina
Perhaps I ought not to begin by admitting that the first Greek wine I tasted was retsina. I liked it, and I still do. A remarkable, unexpected flavor; not exactly antiseptic, yet somehow pure and clean. If you are setting out on a long walk in the hot sun, taking along your bread, cheese, and wine, then retsina and no other is the wine you must choose. I know this; I’ve made the test. With retsina, it doesn’t really matter how warm the bottle is by the time the sun is overhead and you sit down in the shade to take your lunch. Dry white wine will be dreadfully dull if it’s hot. Warm sweet white wine will cloy the palate and you’ll not be able to drink it. Warm red wine will make you pine for gamey meat or thirst for cold water. Retsina will always taste more or less the same.

That is exactly why retsina was invented. Historians have made it into a problem, as historians do. It was by chance, some of them say, that ancient Greeks acquired the taste for retsina, because ancient vats and amphoras were waterproofed with pine resin. “Ah!” said Socrates to himself. “I like that taste! I hope they go on sealing the amphoras with it….” Is that how it was? Believe me, it was not.

What really happened was that (maybe 3,000 years ago) those who had the unpleasant task of applying the hot resin to the interior of the fermenting vats sometimes applied more than was intended, or left pieces of unused resin in the vat. Three results were soon noticed. First, the wine picked up a distinct flavor of resin. Second, this resinated wine was less inclined to spoil; on the contrary, it lasted unusually well. Once established, the flavor – such as it was – stayed just the same. The wine was stable even as the temperature fluctuated. Which is why retsina is simply better, and always will be, than the badly made, badly stored cheap French wine that I unwisely drank with my dinner tonight. Finally, unlike most traditionally made wines, retsina is just about the same from year to year. The insistent flavor of resin masks, equally, the worst of a bad year and the best of a good year.

Retsina is typical of Greece, and properly made Greek retsina now claims the official status of “traditional appellation.” More than anywhere else, retsina is typical of Attica, the region of Athens. It has been an Attic specialty for at least 800 years, because it is 800 years ago that Michael Choniates, then recently appointed archbishop of Athens, wrote home to Constantinople that he did not like the local resinated wine. But at that date, retsina had been around many centuries already. In the year 969, an ambassador from the West, Liutprand of Cremona, reported back to the German emperor that he found the resinated wine he was given in Constantinople “undrinkable”!

Nowadays you will find retsina wherever Greek wines are sold, and you must buy it – if you will follow my advice – to drink with a light cold lunch, probably a Greek country salad, maybe an octopus salad, or, of course, to take along with bread and cheese on a long day’s walk. As for which retsinas, there are many on the market. Boutari’s is a light wine, lightly resinated – a beginner’s retsina? Kourtakis and Karela sell more strongly flavored ones; stronger still is Malamamatinas from Macedonia, a fast-selling line at Thessaloniki airport.

Appellation wine? Country wine? Greek wines behind the label
There is no doubt that retsina tastes best in Greece, under a Greek sun. A few years ago you might have said that about all Greek wines, and not many people would have disputed it. Very few Greek wines were marketed abroad, and those that were did not stand up to competition with French or Italian wines. That’s no longer true. There are some remarkable tastes waiting to be discovered in Greek bottles. But it’s necessary to know a little of what to expect behind the label.

Retsina is alone in its nationwide traditional appellation. Twenty Greek districts produce fine wines and are entitled to an “appellation of origin,” Onomasia proelefseos anoteras poiotitos in Greek, part of a system of classification that is familiar in all wine-growing countries of the European Union. The districts, roughly east to west are: Rhodes, Samos, Santorini, Paros, Limnos; four districts of Crete, namely, Sitia, Peza, Arkhanes, Dafnes; on the mainland, Côtes de Meliton, Goumenissa, Naoussa, Amyntaion, Zitsa, Rapsani, Ankhialos, Kantza, Nemea, Patras, Mantinia; and, finally, Kefalonia.

The appellation of origin is the higher classification. Below it comes vin de pays, “country wine” or “regional wine” in English, topikos oinos in Greek. The country wines of Macedonia, the Peloponnese, and Crete are often marketed abroad. A step below the country wines is “table wine,” epitrapezios oinos.

This system has its good and bad points, but its advantage for the consumer is the guarantee that appellation and country wines have been made in an identified district or region, from grapes of selected varietals, of controlled quality, using specified (often relatively traditional) techniques. The names don’t guarantee top-class wine – you only find that by tasting it. They don’t even guarantee that every wine so labeled will be better than the table wine in the next bottle – but nearly all of them will be. The names do guarantee, however, that the wine was properly made and meets a minimal standard of quality. That’s worth knowing.

A controlled appellation will usually be based on a selection of local, traditional grape varietals. The selection will be different for each district, based on the answers to two questions: What has been usually planted in the past, and which varietals will achieve the highest quality locally? The rules on production and maturing will also be different for each district. The classification is operated and the rules are applied by a national association, not by the growers; each maker’s product, each year, will have been tasted independently before it receives the appellation. Some are excluded because they simply don’t taste good; some because the maker didn’t follow the rules, by using an unauthorized blend of varietals, for example. At its best, the system encourages local styles to develop and continue, and winemakers to get the best out of local varietals, while discouraging sudden widespread changes reacting to fads in the wine trade.

By contrast, makers of vins de pays are relatively free to use the fashionable varietals which are now grown all over the world, cabernet sauvignon, sauvignon blanc, merlot, syrah, and others. Vins de pays will sometimes be made from a traditional local blend or a single local varietal, like many of the appellation wines; sometimes they will be made from one of the international varietals. There are few reasons to choose a Greek wine of this latter kind (rather than a French or Californian or Australian one) because Greece is an unusual country. Greek microclimates are unique, and they suit local varietals better than they suit cabernet sauvignon and the rest. (But the next bottle you taste may be the exception that proves me wrong!)

To get to know real Greek wine you have to forget these common varietals. You must have other names in your mind – first, some of those wine districts named above. Look out for the astonishing, deep, powerful red wines of Naoussa and Nemea, the sometimes flinty, aromatic whites of Kefalonia, Mantinia, and Santorini, the heavenly sweet muscats of Samos and Limnos, the port-like dessert wine mavrodaphne of Patras. These are all among the classic Greek wines that are now easy to find abroad.

Some of the varietal names include xinomavro, which contributes to the dark, complex, spicy wines of Naoussa and Goumenissa, and moskhofilero, which produces the flowery bouquet of a good Mantinia white. The major producers include Boutari and Tsantalis, which are really good at making and choosing wines, but an impressive number of independent vineyards in Greece are now marketing their wines abroad as well. With no need to soothe the expectations of an established market, they can afford to be adventurous. The results are sometimes stunningly good.

What to read?
Miles Lambert-Gocs, The Wines of Greece (Faber, 1990). Read this book slowly, over a glass of wine, savoring the enthusiasm of this tireless explorer of Greek vineyards.

Nico Manessis, The Illustrated Greek Wine Book (Olive Press Publications). I haven’t found a copy myself yet, but it comes highly recommended by Matt Barrett of greektravel.com.

Andrew Dalby is the author of Siren Feasts: A History of Food and Gastronomy in Greece and Dangerous Tastes: The Story of Spices; his Flavours of Byzantium will be published later this year.

Health

“The question isn’t whether we will face a terrorist attack with a deadly viral or bacterial weapon, but when,” was written in a book (Michael T. Osterholm, John Schwartz, Living Terrors: What America Needs to Know to Survive the Coming Bioterrorism Catastrophe) on bioterrorism last year. This prediction has become reality with the recent incidents concerning anthrax in the United States.

Since October 3, 2001, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and public-health authorities have been investigating causes of possibly bioterrorist-related anthrax in the US. As of November 15, investigations in Florida, New Jersey, New York, Washington, DC, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Virginia have identified 15 (11 confirmed cases and four suspected) cases of anthrax. Seven of them were inhalational anthrax and eight were cutaneous (skin) anthrax. Of the seven cases of inhalational anthrax, five occurred in postal workers in New Jersey and Washington, DC, and in one person who sorted mail at a media company in Florida. Two letters mailed to two different recipients in New York are known to have contained anthrax bacteria. Six cases were identified in employees of media companies; one was a seven-month-old infant who happened to be on the premises of a media company; and eight cases were consistent with the route of letters known to contain anthrax spores. The bacteria from all the cases are indistinguishable, suggesting a common origin.

Bacillus anthracis, the scientific name for the bacterium that causes anthrax, derives from the Greek word for coal, anthrakas, because the disease causes black, coal-like lesions on the skin. The anthrax bacterium has the capability to form spores that survive harsh conditions for years. For centuries, anthrax has caused disease in animals and, uncommonly, serious illness in humans. There are three types of anthrax disease in humans.

Skin (cutaneous) anthrax is the most common type, and is usually not fatal unless left untreated. Skin anthrax occurs most commonly in agricultural and industrial workers who come in contact with infected animals or animal products. Most recently, cases of skin anthrax have resulted from exposure to spores sent through the mail. The earliest symptom is a small sore on the skin, which blisters and then within one to two days becomes an ulcer with a black scab.

Lung (inhalation) anthrax was rare prior to last month. It results from breathing in anthrax spores. Inhalation anthrax is usually fatal unless treated early. Early symptoms are similar to the flu, remembering that the flu and other viral infections are much more common than anthrax. Gastrointestinal anthrax is also rare, and usually occurs after eating contaminated, undercooked meat. It is important to note that anthrax is not transmitted from person to person.

Many persons have received or stockpiled antibiotics in the face of recent incidents. Current recommendations are that persons do not obtain or take antibiotics such as ciprofloxacin or doxycycline for anthrax, either through prescription or other means, unless public-health authorities inform us to do so in the face of documented exposure. Taking antibiotics without being examined by a physician can do more harm than good, since it can mask symptoms of other serious diseases. In addition, widespread use of antibiotics leads to drug-resistant bacteria that can make medicines ineffective for those who truly need them. If an outbreak occurs, the CDC and other appropriate healthcare organizations will dispense antibiotics through a coordinated effort. Anthrax vaccine is not recommended for people younger than 18 years of age, and is currently administered only to military personnel. In light of recent events, an accelerated anthrax vaccine program is needed.

Research on anthrax as a biological weapon began more than 80 years ago. Today, at least 17 nations are believed to have offensive biological weapons; it is uncertain how many people are working with anthrax, but Iraq has acknowledged producing and “weaponizing” the disease.

Most experts agree that the manufacture of an anthrax aerosol is beyond the capability of groups or individuals without access to advanced technology. However, autonomous groups with substantial funding and contacts may be able to acquire materials for a successful attack. One terrorist group, Aum Shinrikyo, responsible for the release of sarin, a nerve gas, in a Tokyo subway station in 1995, dispersed aerosols of anthrax and botulism throughout Tokyo on at least eight occasions. For reasons that are unclear, the attacks failed to produce illness.

The accidental release of anthrax spores from a military microbiology laboratory in Sverdlovsk, in the former Soviet Union, in 1979 resulted in at least 79 cases and 68 deaths, and demonstrated the deadly potential of anthrax aerosols. An anthrax aerosol would be odorless and invisible following release and would have the potential to travel many kilometers. Evidence suggests that following an outdoor aerosol release, people indoors could be exposed to the same threat as that outdoors.

In 1970, a World Health Organization expert committee estimated that casualties following the theoretical aircraft release of 50 kilograms of anthrax over a developed urban population of five million would be 250,000, 100,000 of whom would be expected to die without treatment. A 1993 report by the US Congressional Office of Technology Assessment estimated that between 130,000 and three million deaths could follow the aerosolized release of 100 kilograms of anthrax spores upwind of the Washington, DC, area – lethality matching or exceeding that of a hydrogen bomb. An economic model by the CDC suggested a cost of $26.2 billion per 100,000 persons exposed.

This has been a wake-up call regarding a new threat for the United States and the developed nations of the world. The ramifications of this attack and other possible attacks with different biological weapons continue to evolve. The terms smallpox, plague, tularemia, and botulism have all entered our daily vocabulary and are likely to stay there for awhile. For the moment, it seems that the current anthrax outbreak has been controlled. Nevertheless, as the character of Dr. Rieux in Albert Camus’s The Plague understands, it is always premature to celebrate the end of an outbreak of plague: “And, indeed, as he listened to the cries of joy rising from the town, Rieux remembered that such joy is always imperiled. He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men; it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.”

Theoklis Zaoutis is attending physician in special immunology (pediatric HIV) at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and an investigator for the Pediatric AIDS Clinical Trials Group (PACTG). He is also a fellow in pediatric infectious diseases at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and an instructor in the department of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.

Money

The proposed merger of the National Bank of Greece, the country’s largest commercial bank, with Alpha Bank, the second largest, will create a bank big enough by European standards to show up on the radar screens of foreign institutional investors. However, the success of the merger will not be judged by the size of the new entity but by its ability to enhance shareholder value.

“Everybody is talking about market share and size but few people seem to understand that P&L (profit and loss) is the real test,” says a member of the executive committee set up by the two banks to manage the merger. Theodore Karatzas and Yiannis Costopoulos, chairmen, respectively, of National Bank and Alpha Bank, head the seven-member executive committee. National’s deputy governors, Andreas Vranas, Apostolos Tamvakakis, and Theodore Pantalakis, as well as Alpha’s executives, Constantine Kyriakopoulos and Dimitris Mantzounis, are also on the committee.

The proposed merger will create a bank with an estimated domestic market share of 46% in loans, 56% in deposits, and 52% in total assets, ranking it among Europe’s 25 largest banks in terms of assets, according to UBS Warburg. Although the new entity will enjoy a large market share domestically, the Greek competition committee is expected to approve the merger. Nevertheless, some analysts say that it might ask for “symbolic measures,” such as a limited number of branch closings. The merger is not subject to approval by the European Union because neither bank earns a third of its revenues outside Greece.

The government’s new finance team, headed by finance minister Nikos Christodoulakis, favors mergers and acquisitions (M&A) as a means to create large companies better equipped to compete against their peers in the Eurozone. It plans to enact legislation to encourage M&A by giving merged companies tax breaks and other benefits as partial relief for anticipated restructuring costs.

Consolidation, however, is not new to the Greek banking sector, which has one of the highest degrees of concentration in the Eurozone after years of consolidation. Just a few days prior to the announcement of the Alpha-National Bank merger, Piraeus Bank bought a majority stake in state-owned ETBA Bank, a development bank. In March 2001, EFG Eurobank Ergasias, a member of the Latsis family group of companies, announced the acquisition of Telesis Investment Bank. The National Bank of Greece itself absorbed its subsidiary, National Mortgage Bank, a few years ago, while Alpha Bank bought a 51% stake in in state-controlled Ionian Bank in March 1999, and subsequently merged it into its operations.

Executives of the new entity refer to National’s and Alpha’s mergers and acquisitions in order to make the point that “the two banks have gone through mergers in the past and therefore have the experience required to succeed in this one,” as one executive put it. Nevertheless, the mere size of the proposed merger cannot be compared to any previous one. A number of analysts and employees working for the two banks are concerned over a possible “clash of cultures,” as National’s more state-oriented corporate culture meets that of Alpha’s private-sector orientation.

But executives at the two banks, and even an aide to Greece’s prime minister, Kostas Simitis, play down these concerns, saying that the two corporate cultures may differ but have much in common. “I think Alpha’s culture is not that different from National’s despite perceptions to the contrary,” says the prime minister’s aide. And a high-level official at National Bank seems to agree: “It is two years now that we have been cultivating this culture, that is, preparing our people for the day that the bank would embrace another banking institution. We are ready.”

Even if the merged entity succeeds in bringing together the two corporate cultures, there are still lingering doubts as to whether it will successfully tackle other potential problems. Dimitris Spanodemos, an analyst at UBS Warburg, identifies two such key risks in the potential loss of market share and the difficulty of realizing cost savings through staff reductions due to strong labor unions.

“The risk of losing market share is material due to the significant overlapping of the two entities,” he says, adding that both banks depend mainly on the Greek market and have no other markets to offset that revenue loss. Analysts at Deutsche Bank also stress “the risk of revenue disruption and market share losses,” pointing out that both National Bank and Alpha have similar retail networks concentrated in major cities such as Athens and Thessaloniki, “which in theory could lead to staff cuts and branch closures.”

A member of the new bank’s executive committee seems to disagree, however: “Why should we close profitable branches even if they are located in the same neighborhood,” he asks. “We can achieve considerable cost savings through attrition, voluntary retirement, and other means.” He admits that National Bank and Alpha have overlapping branches but adds that “we have found out that the degree of customer overlap is much smaller.”

Shutting down some overlapping branches may prove easier than firing staff. The new bank’s top management has already ruled out layoffs in a bid to quiet the banks’ powerful trade unions. Instead, it has set out to reduce staff through voluntary retirement and attrition. “It is stupid to fire people and collide with the unions. There is no reason for that. This is done when firms merge in the US or perhaps in Great Britain, but not in continental Europe,” says a member of the executive committee.

Nevertheless, staff reductions through voluntary retirement entail an initially high restructuring provision. Based on the experience of Portuguese bank mergers, Deutsche Bank estimates cost savings at 7% of total costs. Assuming the cost per redundancy at €150,000 and given that the new bank group has about 30,000 employees, the total provision amounts to about €315 million. This amount could be smaller in reality if the government passes, as expected, the legislation on tax and other financial benefits for merged corporations.

Deutsche Bank analysts seem to take a hard line on the cost-savings issue, writing in a recent note on the proposed merger that, “Such a merger is not justified in our view unless significant cost savings are realized. That could be achieved through aggressive reduction in the number of employees.” Deutsche Bank, of course, has a 10% stake in EFG Eurobank Ergasias. In any case, this assesment does not seem to bother a member of the new bank’s executive committee. He claims that the new entity will save lots of money by having a single information-technology and telecoms system instead of two, and by reducing its marketing budget.

At the same time, he refers to the immediate benefits for Alpha, which will slash its cost of funding by borrowing at National Bank’s lower rates. “Do you know what that means for Alpha in terms of cost savings right from the beginning? How many people have understood the significance, the potential, of Alpha’s sponsorship of the 2004 Olympics,” he asks. The same executive points out that the merged bank will have €4-4.5 billion at its disposal to go after a mid-sized Eurozone bank fitting its expansion plans. “This is much more than National’s current firepower of €2.5 billion,” he adds.

No one doubts that the merger of National Bank with Alpha Bank will be a long and even difficult task. Calculating the cost savings or revenue enhancements might look easy right now, but might turn out to be quite inaccurate later. Consultants point out that a lot depends on the merged bank’s first moves. “It is critical for the success of the merger that it be executed in the right way,” says one consultant who has played an active role in the current deliberations. “It is imperative that clear goals are set as soon as possible, not less than two months from the announcement of the merger, and communicated effectively. If this does not happen, uncertainty sets in, leading to a beauty contest among employees that undermines the whole process.”

He says that the benefits of a successful merger between National and Alpha Banks “will be tremendous, both for the banks and Greece.” He quickly points out, however, that most bank mergers fail to produce what they intent – enhanced shareholder value – because they make critical mistakes at the outset.

The proposed merger of National Bank and Alpha Bank has the potential to succeed, but it will not be easy. The shaky international economic and market environments make things even more difficult since both banks, especially National Bank, derive a good deal of their revenues and profits from capital-market operations. Cost savings are essential for the merger’s success, but it will be even more difficult to realize them in an unfavorable economic environment. Does that mean that the proposed merger is doomed to fail? Not really, if the quality of execution is high and the Greek economy grows at satisfactory rates, surpassing the Eurozone’s projected average economic growth rate by a wide margin this year and next. After all, size matters – but earnings growth matters even more.

Dimitris Kontogiannis is a financial columnist for the Greek daily, Eleftherotypia.

Arts & Letters

George Tsontakis’s music is often pensive, but I’ve never heard it be mournful before. Some recent composers (Gorecki, for instance) have turned mournfulness into an aesthetic, but Tsontakis’s music more frequently has the ambience of someone mulling over a complex and troublesome past in a moment of calm and objectivity. Now, however, we get Mirologhia, Tsontakis’s new percussion concerto for celebrity percussionist Evelyn Glennie, which uncharacteristically sweeps us up in its emotion. Glennie wails – not only metaphorically, but with her voice – while Byzantine chants in the strings pour out their lament, woodwind bird songs tumble down sadly, and even the orchestra sings. And while this is fitting in a work premiered so soon after the deadliest attack ever made on American soil, the work had to have been completed before the disasters in New York and Washington. Mirologhia was not commemorative, but prescient.

Tsontakis, who turned 50 a few days after Mirologhia’s October 13 New York premiere at Carnegie Hall, is a composer of subtle harmonies, who plays with musical reminiscences. His music is at times tonal, at times atonal, but mostly it explores gradations in between. Unusually, for someone whose music explores semi-tonal pitch cells, his is often quite memorable. I find myself humming his Fourth String Quartet, for example (available on a New World recording), and wanting to rehear magic moments like the one in which three of the strings play in F major while another wanders away into another key. So far, we’ve had mostly chamber music from Tsontakis, but he’s had a sudden spurt of orchestral commissions in the last couple of years, of which Mirologhia was one.

This work was part of an unusual project: the commission of four percussion concerti by Glennie, who has won the hearts and imaginations of audiences partly for her powerfully dramatic stage presence, partly because she solos on percussion despite having been deaf since age 11. (She performs barefoot to feel the vibrations of the music transmitted through the floor to her feet.) To hear any percussion concerto is an odd experience. The genre is tiny, with the most famous concerto perhaps being that of Darius Milhaud from 1949. Suddenly, however, we have four such works dated 2001, by Tsontakis, Joan Tower, Chen Yi, and Stewart Wallace. It was truly brave of conductor Leonard Slatkin to conduct all four with the National Symphony Orchestra, in two evenings, first in Washington and then in New York. And yet as so often happens, audience enthusiasm seemed to justify the venture, and make one wonder why orchestra managements are habitually so timid.

All four composers asked for a wide range of mallet instruments, drums, and more exotic percussion batteries, but otherwise there was little similarity among the four strategies. Tower’s Strike Zone was the most conventional work in terms of the drama of concerto form; Glennie occupied center stage most of the time, her virtuoso passages framed by the orchestra. Chen Yi, between two complex virtuoso movements, used the slow movement as a kind of Chinese opera, having Glennie, while playing, intone a Chinese poem in an exaggerated stylistic manner. Wallace, least inspired, wrote a fast orchestral piece to which Glennie was allowed to add little more than a coloristic accompaniment.

Tsontakis’s solution was perhaps the most highly nuanced. Unlike Tower, he didn’t keep the soloist center stage, but rather made her the chief among many characters in the music. The title, Mirologhia, he explained in the program notes, derives from the word mirologhi, meaning to sing mournfully or wail. Mirologhia are songs of mourning composed spontaneously by women who have lost loved ones. And so in Tsontakis’s dramatic scenario, Glennie was the mourner, the woman giving voice to her bereavement, while the orchestra was the crowd of sympathizers and onlookers.

The opening was a powerfully romantic gesture whose climaxing unresolved suspension made me think that Tsontakis was leading us into Mahler or Sibelius territory. A blast of drumming from the soloist dispelled such an impression, although its violence seemed to be an emotional outburst, not a virtuosic show. Fragments of Byzantine chant appeared in the strings, and ran intermittently throughout the six-movement work. Tsontakis has explored these waters before; his Fourth String Quartet, mentioned above and subtitled “Beneath Thy Tenderness of Heart,” is beautifully based on a Russian Orthodox hymn. In that case, however, the hymn’s intervals are abstracted into motives that pervade the texture. Here, the chants seemed to return intact, as incursions into the work from a religious world just outside it.

They returned, most impressively, in the singing of the orchestra. A few composers have experimented with having the orchestra sing, and it rarely works very well. Sometimes the effect is gimmicky, other times the orchestra just doesn’t vocalize with enough enthusiasm. Here, Tsontakis had the lower string players sing mournful chants while the remainder of the orchestra continued playing; it was a primal, ancient-sounding gesture, and could have been stunningly effective if the National Symphony Orchestra players had put a little more soulfulness and unanimity into their singing. Even so, they were fluent enough that the flow of the melody from strings to voices to mallet percussion unified the work and made the use of singing natural and atmospheric.

Mirologhia’s fell movement titles suggested liturgical connotations: “Introit,” “Crotales Angelorum,” “Soson Kyrie” (“Lord, Save Your People”), “Labyrinth,” “Eonia I Mnimi” (“Eternal Remembrance”), and “Mirologhia.” The second and fourth sections featured birdlike woodwind melodies that reminded one of Olivier Messiaen’s music. In the “Soson Kyrie,” the orchestra played slow trills while Glennie limned the orchestral melody by playing “crowbar carillon,” a set of suspended crowbars that Tsontakis had power-ground to specific pitches, and that gave an unexpectedly clear chimelike effect. The fourth movement gave Glennie a cathartic drum cadenza, and had her doubling the orchestra on steel drum. Most haunting – a word that comes up frequently in describing Tsontakis’s music – was the “Eternal Remembrance,” in which Glennie sang of her sorrows over a drone of spare chords in the winds and strings.

In all of this, Glennie commanded the stage with a passionate and well-choreographed presence. One wonders whether other percussionists will have enough theatricality to duplicate her achievements, so that this explosion in the percussion concerto repertoire will radiate beyond her immediate sphere of influence. I hope so, since Mirologhia is a powerful addition to Tsontakis’s work and a new side to his musical personality.

Kyle Gann is the music critic of The Village Voice, and author of The Music of Conlon Nancarrow and American Music in the 20th Century. He is an assistant professor of music at Bard College.

Arts & Letters

According to the twelfth-century poet, Hariri Maqamat, glass was “Congealed of air/Condensed of sunbeam motes/Molded of the light of the open plain/Or peeled from a white pearl.” Indeed, it is not difficult to believe that masterpieces of glass such as those in Glass of the Sultans could be made of ethereal means and not of humble earthly materials like sand and ashes. The magic of glass does not stop at the miracle of its genesis. Its entire history, starting with its earliest beginnings somewhere in western Asia and the Middle East some 3,500 years ago, reads like a fascinating tale spanning most ancient civilizations, continuing through medieval times to Renaissance Europe, and from there to the New World.

Glass of the Sultans features more than 150 glass objects spanning twelve centuries of Islamic glassmaking that represent all the principal types of pre-industrial glass from Egypt, the Middle East, and India. The objects have been selected from 19 public and private collections from around the world, some never exhibited publicly before. Glass of the Sultans has recently closed at the Corning Museum of Glass, but it opened recently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where it will remain until January 13, 2002. It will then travel to the Benaki Museum in Athens, where it can be viewed from February 20 to May 15, 2002.

Glassmaking is basically a conservative art, in which processes, techniques, and tools persist throughout the centuries. The most significant constant is the process for making glass itself, which essentially remains the same with only minor variations from place to place. Within the framework of this traditional art, the history of glassmaking has revealed that innovations constantly revitalized age-old practices. The invention of blown glass, developed in Roman Greater Syria in the first century BCE, was perhaps the most significant innovation, enabling glassware to be “mass”-produced. The blowpipe revolutionized production by freeing the creative genius of artists who had previously been limited by time-consuming methods such as winding hot glass around clay cores.

In the Islamic world, the most important innovations involved surface ornamentation, which is also the principal focus of this exhibition, which groups its treasures according to broad categories of decorating glass. For example, between the seventh and ninth centuries in Egypt and Syria, painted designs were executed in copper and silver oxide pigments, a process which, when completed, left transparent “stains” on the glassware ranging in tones from red to brown to yellow. The metallic sheen of their designs gave these pieces the common name of “luster-painted” ware, best referred to, however, as “stain-painted.” The origin of this method lies in third-to-fourth-century Egypt, evolving from the pioneering work of Coptic craftsmen. Two more techniques of decorating glass were brought to consummate levels in Islamic workshops, earning Islamic glass preeminence in the field and consequently world renown. The ninth- and tenth-century production of “cut and engraved” glasses built upon the tradition of glass cutting, especially of the Sasanian empire; the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century production of “gilded and enameled” objects became highly sought-after export items. Both techniques are given special emphasis in the show.

In an encyclopedic museum such as the Metropolitan, or at the Corning, which houses the world’s largest and most significant collection of glass objects, it is possible to experience the full spectrum of glassmaking. Nevertheless, a stellar comprehensive exhibition of Islamic glass such as Glass of the Sultans gives the visitor a great advantage. On the one hand, after the Muslim conquest, the glass industry continued to function more or less undisturbed, preserving all the techniques, shapes, and colors formerly employed in these regions and thereby creating a smooth transition between the glass of the ancient world and that of the Middle Ages. On the other hand, the ancient heritage of glassmaking, enriched by centuries of Islamic innovations, was passed on to Europe, which, in turn, advanced production to new heights. Thus, Islamic glass forms an all-important “bridge” between the two worlds, allowing for a continuum rarely seen in art. If one has limited time to get to know the history of glassmaking, Islamic glass offers both a sound understanding of ancient glass and a substantial base for appreciating modern achievements.

Glass of the Sultans was organized by Stefano Carboni, associate curator of Islamic glass at the Metropolitan Museum, and David Whitehouse, executive director of the Corning Museum. It is accompanied by a substantial catalogue, with several essays on the history of glass production in the Islamic world, the growth of interest in collecting and studying Islamic glass, the archeological excavations that have yielded important material, the chemistry and technology of Islamic glass (by Robert Brill), and a general survey of Islamic glass-working and glass-decorating techniques (by William Gudenrath). Eight more brief essays reflect the sections of the exhibition itself, each followed by catalogue entries.

In its first section, the exhibition introduces the visitor to the material with two cases, one didactic, containing tools and other glass-working implements, the other dazzling, featuring some very attractive examples that highlight the principal types of Islamic glass. Then, through the aid of informative panels and labels, one begins the journey of discovery, guided through the material by means of meaningful groupings or purposeful focal pieces indicating outstanding glasses. In the rather unassuming “Undecorated Blown Glass” section, one can admire the purity of pre-Islamic forms still in use. Nearby, there is a small section devoted to the three most important archeological sites to yield glass material: Fustat in Egypt, Samarra in present-day Iraq, and Nishapur in present-day Iran.

In “Mold-Blown Glass,” one can begin to appreciate the nascent inventive spirit of Islamic glassmakers who, early on, wished to go a step beyond the Roman practice of blowing a “gather,” or mass of molten glass, into a mold of one or more pieces. The Islamic innovation consisted of withdrawing the decorated glass, or “parison,” from a one-piece mold, reheating it, and continuing to inflate it. This allowed it to be further blown and tooled into a wider variety of forms, all of which retained the original mold pattern. In the section on “Hot-Worked Glass,” one can find a great variety of shapes, colors, and decorations, ranging from the early Islamic period to the thirteenth century, and from Egypt to central Asia, all with strong imprints of pre-Islamic glasses from the Roman, Egyptian, and Sasanian traditions.

As each section unfolds, there is a heightened sense of expectation. Certainly, “Mosaic Glass” is the first high point. Mosaic or “millefiori” glass has been made intermittently for 3,500 years. In the Islamic world, it seems that it was among the least common varieties even though it enjoyed a wide distribution from Egypt to Iran. Islamic examples differed from Hellenistic, Roman, and other ancient examples. The canes that were cut into slices and fused to make the objects have a bull’s-eye pattern with a circular spot at the center and concentric rings of other colors and/or patterns all around. The catalogue is a wonderful way to scrutinize the minuscule patterns of these precious pieces, but it distorts our perception of their relative size, most intact bowls measuring no more than two or three inches in diameter (5-8 cm). Also not included in the catalogue is a special piece recently acquired by the Metropolitan Museum: a ninth-century bowl from Syria or Iraq with a floral pattern of pinkish/reddish “roses” on a green background (2001.266). At 5 1/2 inches in diameter (14 cm), it has the distinction of being the largest intact example of a mosaic glass vessel.

In the next two sections of the exhibition are some of the finest glassware in the world, which bring to mind Hariri Maqamat’s description. “Cut and Engraved Glass” as a heading does not even begin to indicate the unbelievable delicacy with which glass was engraved and cut as if it were hard stone. Wheel-cutting, which was practiced extensively both by the Romans and their contemporaries, the Sasanians of Iran and Iraq, declined in the fourth or fifth century and scratch-engraving disappeared. Not only did Islamic glass artisans revive these techniques, but, by the eighth and ninth centuries, they brought them to new heights, which would not be matched until the seventeenth-century English and Bohemian cut “crystals.” It is difficult to single out pieces in this section, which comprises seven different techniques. Certainly, from the Metropolitan’s own collection, a deep blue scratch-engraved fragmentary plate (western Asia, ninth century, 40.170.131) and an almost colorless beaker, relief-cut with a frieze of palmettes (western Asia or Egypt, ninth to tenth centuries, 1974.45), are special. From the Corning Museum, a long-necked bottle, relief-cut with a frieze of three pairs of ibexes, is, unlike most other pieces, intact (western Asia, ninth to tenth centuries, 71.1.7), and the famous “Corning Ewer,” a glass version of similarly shaped and ornamented rock-crystal pieces from Egypt (western Asia or Egypt, ca. 1000, 85.1.1), is worth a long pause. This ewer is made of transparent light green glass decoration featuring birds and animals over a colorless background. It is a prime example of relief-cut glass in which, incredibly, both the background and most of the interior of the principal motifs have been removed by cutting and grinding, leaving the outlines and a few internal features in relief, a technique clearly derived from Roman cameo carving and cameo-glass carving.

Though several of the pieces assembled here display extraordinary skills and imagination, the section demurely designated as “Painted Glass” is undoubtedly the real coup of the show. The great majority of these works were decorated with a brush or pen in a most painterly fashion. After being painted, their designs were fired again in the kiln at appropriate temperatures that stabilized the pigments without affecting the previously fired shapes of the objects. Two major classes of painted glass were produced, both in Egypt and Syria: stained (mentioned above) and enameled and gilded, which was highly coveted throughout much of the world. If the former category resembled luster-painted pottery and perhaps even metalwork inlaid in copper, silver, or gold, the latter category evokes the preciousness of goldsmithing and jewelry.

In a way, the stain-painted ware is in danger of being bypassed too quickly, as its sparkling gilded and enameled neighbors beckon just around the corner. They are, nevertheless, among the most beautiful objects. Pieces like the Corning’s cup, inscribed with a blessing upon the person who uses it (Damascus, Syria, eighth century, 69.1.1), or the Metropolitan’s bowl, with stylized trees (Egypt, tenth to eleventh centuries, 1974.74), are very eloquent. This segment also demonstrates various other techniques of painting. One particular bowl (Egypt, ninth century, 99.1.1), also from the Corning, is quite unique. It features the image of a bird surrounded by fish and flowers. The bowl’s palette of colors changes depending on the direction of the light by which it is viewed. Under reflected light, cool hues of blue and golden yellow give the piece a sharp graphic quality, which disappears when the light is transmitted from the back and the designs acquire a fluid painterly quality, this time in warm earthy tones of golden yellow, purplish red, and orange-brown. (Press the light button to appreciate the dramatic changes.)

The largest section of the exhibition is devoted to glassware produced in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in Ayyubid and Mamluk Egypt and Syria, decorated in a delicate and time-consuming method. Twenty-three pieces, many of them quite large, demonstrate the way glass vessels were painted in gold and/or enamel (opaque-colored glass reduced almost to a powder) applied by means of an oily medium and a brush or pen. Because gilt and the individual enamel colors have different chemical qualities, different temperatures were required to fix them permanently on a glass surface. Obviously, mastering the temperatures of wood-fueled kilns and correctly timing the successive firings were skills as crucial as those of a painter. Rightly so, such vessels were valued both in the Islamic world and abroad. In this segment, large, tall-necked bottles, such as the two nearly identical ones from the Metropolitan (41.150) and the Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon (2370), the Metropolitan’s footed bowl or tazza (91.1.1538), the “Gulbenkian Beaker” (2378), depicting a fantasy island replete with birds and insects, and the Furussiya Arts Foundation’s bottle with figural Christian subject matter, are complemented by six magnificent mosque lamps.

Mosque lamps of this period are practically the only dated objects of glass that we have. They also have the singular distinction (with few exceptions) of being the only Islamic glass bearing inscriptions with the names of those who commissioned them as donations to religious institutions. Although high-quality glass must have been used by the upper classes, it is an enigma as to why it did not enjoy much royal and courtly patronage, as other arts such as manuscript painting, ceramics, rock-crystal carving, and metalwork. Perhaps the title of the exhibition, Glass of the Sultans, was intended to rectify the original sultans’ omission.

The history of Islamic glass ends with the later Islamic empires: the Safavids, Zands, and Qajars in Greater Iran, the Mughals of the Indian subcontinent, and the Ottomans. Admittedly, late Islamic glassware is no match for that created under the great tradition of previous centuries, especially the tenth through the fourteenth. Still, there were beautiful objects being made at that late date, often influenced by European models, which the exhibition does well to include.

The exhibition reserves a surprise at the end with imitations of Islamic glass by European glassmakers. Fine Islamic glass in fact enjoyed two “afterlives,” attracting European attention in two broad periods. The first was in the late Middle Ages, when it was prized as the rare product of an exotic civilization, brought back by Crusaders and other travelers to be preserved in royal or church treasuries. The famous San Marco Bowl of opaque turquoise glass set in a Byzantine and western European gold-and-silver-gilt mount with enamels and gems is a prime example. The second period was after the mid-nineteenth century, when Islamic glass began to be seriously collected, studied, and imitated. By then, the heyday of Islamic luxury glass had long passed; already, by the late fifteenth century, Venice had secured the position of leading manufacturer of fine glassware in the world. Indeed, even Muslim patrons sought Venetian glass, as is testified by a mosque lamp in the show, decorated with gold and enamels in the Islamic manner and most probably made in Venice ca. 1500 (Kunstmuseum, Dusseldorf P1978-1).

After the Paris expositions of 1867 and 1878, which displayed medieval mosque lamps, and the Vienna world’s fair, which included two medieval enameled vessels, significant attention was kindled by Islamic glass. This went hand in hand with the contemporary vogue for things “Moorish” or “Oriental.” Subsequently, not only did scholarship and collecting of Islamic glass become a serious undertaking, but also European glassmakers (such as Philippe-Joseph Brocard in Paris, Emile Galle in Nancy, J. and L. Lobmeyer in Vienna, and Antonio Salviati in Murano) began to make more or less faithful copies or other imitations of Islamic glass, especially of the gilded and enameled types, and mosque lamps in particular. The show has examples of luxury glass from most of these manufacturers.

The growth of interest in Islamic art took place against the background of nineteenth-century European Orientalism. The case must have been different for Greeks, however. Anthony Benakis, the founder of the Benaki Museum, was born in 1873 in Alexandria, Egypt, at the time—like most of what would later become contemporary Greece—part of the Ottoman empire. He grew up in a cosmopolitan environment imbued with traditions of service and dedication to the Greek nation. He started collecting while still living in Alexandria, and settled in Greece in 1926. The museum was founded in 1930 but Benaki continued enriching its collections and supporting it financially until his death in 1954. In addition to the museum’s specific aim of representing the Greek spirit as comprehensively as possible, it was also intended to engage in open dialogue with other cultures, especially those that came into direct contact with the Greek world. Islamic artifacts play a crucial part of the Benaki’s collections, and they are soon to be housed in a separate building in Athens that will provide a suitable environment for these extensive holdings.

As regards Islamic glass, the Benaki has important examples from the ninth to the eighteenth centuries. According to curator Anna Ballian, Benaki himself was a fervent collector of this material, and the museum’s collection is one of the finest for the study of early and medieval examples of the art. The Benaki Museum was among the first institutions to promote this particular field by commissioning a catalogue from Carl Johan Lamm, the Swedish scholar considered to be the patriarch of glass studies, a work completed after Lamm’s death by Christoph Clairmont. Indeed, the Benaki Museum will be the only venue for this major exhibition in Europe.

Annie-Christine Daskalakis Mathews is an art historian; she has taught for several years and has a special interest in glass and eighteenth-century domestic architecture, both in the Islamic world and Europe.

Arts & Letters

George Tsontakis is an American composer whose family roots in Crete continue to inform and inspire his work. This fall, Tsontakis celebrates several milestones: his fiftieth birthday, his residency in Berlin as the recipient of the 2002 Berlin Prize, and the premieres at Kennedy Center and Carnegie Hall of a remarkable new work, Mirologhia, written for percussionist Evelyn Glennie and the National Symphony Orchestra.

The Berlin Prize is the most recent in a long list of awards that have distinguished Tsontakis’s career. These include two Kennedy Center Friedheim Awards in 1989 and 1992, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Lifetime Achievement Award in 1995, and a Grammy nomination for the recording of his monumental work for solo piano, Ghost Variations. Samuel Lipman wrote in The New Criterion of Tsontakis’s quartets, “His quartets give hope that what had seemed impossible is truly possible: beautiful new music can be composed (as it used to be said) from the heart to the heart, even today, and we can begin the urgent process of reclaiming our musical heritage.”

Despite all the recognition that has come his way, Tsontakis considers his growth as a composer to be slow and organic. He often invokes the example of his primary composition teacher, Roger Sessions, when speaking about his attitude toward composition. Sessions was a patrician composer who remained apart from many of the fashionable trends of mid-century composition, while his dense, demanding works found a loyal following among the cognoscenti. Tsontakis’s work has followed a similar pattern: a slow, organic development of an individual musical language, much of it informed by his periodic return to Greek subjects.

As so often happens with creative artists, Tsontakis’s first attempts at composition were already informed by his heritage. Just after receiving his bachelor’s degree at New York University, the composer set poems of George Seferis in English translation for voice and piano. Looking back on this early work, he remarks: “These settings don’t really work: it’s an immature work. In my recent settings of Seferis [a work for mezzo-soprano and chamber ensemble that received its premiere in Frankfurt recently], I’m doing it right, getting much deeper into these poems, partly by going back to the original language.” The organic unity of Tsontakis’s work seems to come almost by itself: the singer who inspired the current Seferis settings sent Tsontakis a number of poems to consider, several of which were identical to the poems he had set as a student 20 years before. “Every few years, a Greek work seems to come by itself,” the composer commented, “I don’t look for them; they find me.”

Tsontakis wrote several of his largest works on Greek themes during the period when he also served as conductor of New York’s Metropolitan Greek Chorale in the late 1970s. As a conductor, he brought to New York audiences the works of various Greek composers, including Mikis Theodorakis, Manos Hadjidakis, and Stavros Xarhakos. He also wrote two large-scale works for chorus, orchestra, and soloists during this period: Scenes from the Apocalypse and Erotokritos, the latter premiering in New York’s Alice Tully Hall in 1982. Writing in The New York Times, Theodore Libbey placed Erotokritos in a context with two other major twentieth-century works that defy categories. He wrote, “The unusual fusion of Greek poetry rendered dramatically, choral commentary in the ancient Greek manner, dance as a symbolic enactment of the plot and music, brought to mind such modern hybrids as Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex and Penderecki’s Paradise Lost.” This massive work also includes actors, dancers, a narrator, and folk singers, as well as chorus and orchestra.

The work has a fascinating genesis, typical of Tsontakis’s ability to recognize fertile source material wherever he finds it. He learned about the Erotokritos, an epic poem that he describes as a “Cretan Romeo and Juliet,” from a retired sea captain while on a trip to Italy. The tale evokes the period of Venetian-dominated Crete, an atmosphere to which he was attuned through his visits to Chania, the home of his mother’s family. In Erotokritos, Tsontakis utilizes Cretan rhythmic patterns that appear in different forms, at times explicit and at times subtle. These hypnotic, tightly sprung patterns occur in many of his works of the past two decades, including the recently composed Mirologhia.

Tsontakis traces the origins of these rhythmic patterns to the lyra and laouto, two Cretan folk instruments. The driving, highly energetic music in which they’re used is, for Tsontakis, “made up of small rhythmic cells that through constant repetition form larger shapes.” He adds that, “There’s a connection here with the gestural language of Beethoven, who also loves to take a tight rhythmic motif and, by repeating it, increase the intensity to reach a huge climax.” He illustrates the point with a few phrases from the finale of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony sung in a raucous, untrained voice that does indeed seem to evoke a world lying in between formal and folk music.

Mirologhia, which received its world premiere on October 5 at Washington’s Kennedy Center and its New York premiere on October 13 at Carnegie Hall, was inspired by the remarkable Scottish percussionist Evelyn Glennie, a charismatic musician whose theatrical presence and virtuosity have inspired a number of composers. Serendipity again played a large part in the origins of the work. While composing at Yaddo, the artist’s colony in Saratoga, New York, Tsontakis was introduced to a volume of mirologhia, Greek laments. “Suddenly, I saw Evelyn’s role in the work and the kernel of the whole piece as a reaction to an unexpected tragedy, a working-through from a state of complete psychological shock. Since the piece originated well before the September 11 attacks, it now seems somehow prophetic and even more powerful.”

In his program notes for Mirologhia, Tsontakis provides a context for understanding the work: “My Mirologhia is a kind of psychological drama, ultimately about consolation and healing. Its setting is the pivotal moment in which the momentum of life is shattered by some astonishingly sad news, the point at which a state of psychological shock takes over.”

He also reveals something of his philosophy as a composer: “As a composer, I must imagine that there is a music for everything. If a simple woman can compose a profound lament – a crystalline expression – in her moment of deepest sorrow, then perhaps she is not so simple. It is just that music that I have imagined for her and composed in Mirologhia.”

Tsontakis’s interest in Greek music also informs his work with young composers. In 1999, at the invitation of Theodore Antoniou, president of the Greek Composers Union, he participated in a festival at the Athens Concert Hall (Megaron Mousikis). Here, he served on a panel that selected a number of young Greek composers to have their works reviewed and performed.

It’s not an accident that Samuel Lipman paraphrased Beethoven’s writing in his praise of Tsontakis’s work. “From the heart to the heart” was Beethoven’s description of the path that music must follow: Tsontakis’s originality and keen sense of heritage work together to speak to his listeners’ hearts.

Brian Zeger is a pianist who has appeared in distinguished concert venues in the United States and Europe, collaborating with artists such as Itzhak Perlman, James Galway, Marilyn Horne, and Kathleen Battle. He is currently on the faculty of The Juilliard School of Music.

Balkans

No sooner had the major fires been extinguished from what was left of the World Trade Center towers in New York last month than the followers of the Greek communist party were out in full force in the streets of Athens protesting against “the US murderers” and “the terrorist Bush.” They did so because, according to the Communist Party of Greece, the September 11 attacks were the result of US global policies.

The view that the September 11 attacks were not a ruthless act committed by cold-blooded murderers was also echoed in statements made by Archbishop Christodoulos, primate of the Orthodox church in Greece. In a sermon delivered a few days after the tragic events, he interpreted these terrorist acts as a consequence of the inequality and injustice prevailing in the world.

The similarity of the views expressed by the Orthodox church of Greece and the communist party (KKE) concerning the attack against the WTC was one more sign of the gradual ideological convergence of the two organizations. Indeed, the rapprochement between the party and the Church constitutes one of the most remarkable political developments in Greece during the last decade. This ideological convergence encompasses issues such as globalization and the nature of the capitalist system, but above all it centers on the common dislike both groups feel for the West, and especially the United States.

The event that acted as a catalyst in bringing about this rapprochement was without a doubt the war in the former Yugoslavia. Throughout the 1990s, both organizations passionately supported Slobodan Milosevic’s policies in Bosnia and later Kosovo, while at the same time very strongly opposing NATO and US interference in the region.

The Greek communist party was one of the most vocal opponents of NATO’s actions during both the Bosnia and Kosovo wars, allegedly because they violated Serbian sovereignty and aimed to undermine Milosevic. The party also played a prominent role in organizing mass rallies and open-air concerts and meetings in which US-led “aggression” against Yugoslavia was denounced in the strongest terms. One of the party’s most noteworthy actions in this respect was the creation in November 2000 of a Balkan Anti-NATO Center in Thessaloniki whose aim was to coordinate anti-NATO activities in the region. The party was also one of Milosevic’s staunchest supporters, and, in January 2001, when Milosevic’s other political friends in Greece began to distance themselves from him, its general secretary, Aleka Papariga, visited him in Belgrade to show her party’s solidarity.

Equally strong was the identification of the Greek Orthodox church with Milosevic’s policies. For almost a decade, the Greek church provided the ideological legitimacy for war crimes in Bosnia. The Church even invited Radovan Karadzic, who has been indicted by the international tribunal at the Hague for war crimes, to visit Athens in the summer of 1993 to be honored at a rally in Piraeus. During the war in Bosnia, Greek Orthodox priests traveled regularly to the ravaged country to provide spiritual succor to the Bosnian Serb army in Sarajevo, Zvornik, and other areas.

Moreover, during the war in Kosovo, the US and its president were frequently denounced by Christodoulos and other Church dignitaries as “Demon” or “Satan,” and New York City as “the Whore of Babylon.” The archbishop saw the Western intervention in Kosovo as an attempt to eliminate Orthodoxy from every corner of Europe. The NATO attacks were thus, according to this line of argument, motivated by hatred against Orthodoxy and had as their aim the elimination of Orthodox religious monuments in the region!

If the love affair between Greek communists and the Orthodox church started with the war in the former Yugoslavia, it certainly did not end there. On the contrary, it extended to other issues. This was stressed by the Greek archbishop when, in an interview to the Sunday Vima early this year, he said that he finds the Communist Party of Greece’s geopolitical views on issues such as globalization, Kosovo, and US foreign policy, to be much closer to those of his Church than those of many other political parties.

At the same time, Archbishop Christodoulos has increasingly adopted left-wing concepts and the vocabulary of the left. In one of his most noteworthy speeches recently, he compared the US to Nazi Germany. In January 2000, during a speech to a fundamentalist group, he said that he was frightened by the expression, “new world order,” to describe the dominant US role in the world because, as he put it, the Nazis had used the same term. In the same speech, he accused former president Bill Clinton of being responsible for the mass slaughter of innocents, saying that he had blood on his hands. His comparison of the US with Nazi Germany was made more explicit a few days later when, during a sermon in Thessaloniki, he called Clinton an insidious fascist. The archbishop’s comments, of course, provoked strong protests by the US ambassador to Athens, Nicholas Burns.

The convergence of the Church’s positions with those of the communists may not simply be an opportunistic alliance reflecting a specific political conjuncture. Some very influential thinkers in the Church have recently argued that Orthodoxy represents the only true form of communism. Included in their ranks is Father George Metallinos, a theology professor at the University of Athens and frequent guest on television talk shows. According to this view, the persecution by the Bolsheviks of the Orthodox church in Russia was not an attempt to impose a secular order by violent means. Rather, it was an attempt by the German kaiser’s “agent,” Vladimir Lenin, to impose false communism on the country by destroying the true communism of the Orthodox church.

However, one of the most important elements fueling the Greek church’s strong anti-Western posture – and thus indirectly its ideological rapprochement with the equally anti-Western communist party – has been the appearance of a group of influential Neo-Orthodox thinkers who have revived and brought into focus the antagonism that existed between the Orthodox East and the Latin West during the Middle Ages. What these thinkers have done is to recast traditional religious conflicts in the contemporary idiom of world politics and to use them as the basis for advocating policy positions whose ultimate aim is the total separation of Greece from the West.

According to the Neo-Orthodox, Greece has nothing to gain from its contacts with the West. For them, just as for Muslim fundamentalists, the West is inferior, corrupt, and dominated by extreme political amoralism. Moreover, the West continues to perpetuate the legacy of hatred for the Orthodox church that started with the Great Schism and the filioque dispute, and culminated in the sacking of Constantinople by the Crusaders in 1204.

Thus, according to this view, Western hatred is primarily directed toward the Greeks, not only because of their religious beliefs but also because Greeks are the “inheritors” of the Byzantine empire. The West, particularly the United States, has been trying continuously to undermine Greek interests by helping Greece’s enemies, including Turkey, the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia, the Bosnian Muslims, and the Albanians. Greece has been subjected to the ultimate degradation of having to rely on the West for its continued existence by pleading for Western protection against the Turks. All the misfortunes that have befallen Greeks during their recent history – from the Asia Minor catastrophe in 1922 to the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974, and the resulting division of the island – have thus been due presumably to Greece’s failed attempt to imitate the West. The Greeks’ decline will not end, therefore, until they recognize their superiority as members of the Orthodox church.

More recently, in a column in Kathimerini, the newspaper of record for Greek conservatives, one of the more distinguished members of the movement, Professor Christos Gianaras, condoned the terrorist attacks against Washington and New York, and compared them to similar acts committed by the Greek fighters of the War of Independence of 1821! It is also of interest to note that, in some instances, relations between the communist party and Orthodoxy are not restricted to ideology but also extend to politics. Thus, one prominent member of the Neo-Orthodox movement, Kostas Zouraris, was included in the list of parliamentary candidates that the Greek communist party filed in the last elections.

According to both the Neo-Orthodox and the communist party, the rot in Greece will stop only when Greeks substitute the “servility” that characterizes their relationship with the West with the spirit of resistance against the latter’s immoral barbarism. Herein lies Greece’s path to salvation and moral rejuvenation. That day, unfortunately, may come much sooner than they think – with consequences, however, that no one can predict at the moment.

Takis Michas writes for the Greek daily Eleftherotypia and is a frequent contributor to The Wall Street Journal Europe. His book, The Unholy Alliance: Greece and Milosevic’s Serbia during the 1990s, will be published next year by Texas A&M University Press.

Book Reviews

This is a most welcome book. Glenn Peers provides the reader with a sequence of incisive readings of Late Antique and Byzantine accounts of angels and their representations. These varied texts reveal both the complexity of the proposition that angels could be represented in Christian art and the skill with which Greek theologians grappled with this problem. Peers’s primary object is to reveal the grounds that made it possible to represent the bodiless angels. In so doing, he is able to show that the distinct case of angelic representation should be understood to address central issues in the discussions that revolved around the icon in general in Byzantium during the course of the eighth and ninth centuries (compare Chapters One and Three). This account is both subtle in its own right and convincing.

The book begins by identifying major examples of angelic representation in Late Antique and Byzantine art. It then discusses the opposition to these images found in such theologians as Epiphanios of Salamis in the fourth century and the iconoclasts of the eighth and ninth centuries. The third chapter introduces the symbolic defense of icons of the angels by linking the fifth-century writings of Pseudo-Dionysios the Areopagite to the arguments of eighth and ninth-century iconophiles. The fraught question of the veneration of angels is then examined in Chapter Four. These various strands of argument are brought together in an examination of the cult of the Archangel Michael at Chonae in Chapter Five, in relation to which the complexity of angelic representation is inscribed in both the landscape and in icons. Finally, the lengthy conclusion provides a brief account of the continuing fascination with the problems and delights of angels in later Byzantine writing. The author provides a full set of footnotes and a complete bibliography. While the photographs are apt, the paper on which they are printed somewhat dulls their impact.

One of the central points made in this book is that any discourse on representation is conditioned by the degree to which an object or person shows itself or themselves to an audience. In this regard, the particular discussion of the representation of angels can be said to offer an important inflection upon the basic assumption of the necessity of the body for Christian art. The idea of the angel’s subtle body is central to this argument. Peers takes the term (lepta) from Macarius Magnes (ca. 300-ca. 390) and John of Thessaloniki (d. 649?). This subtle quality indicates a fundamental difference between angels and mortals. While angels appear to have bodies in one of their many guises before men, they are by definition bodiless. This occasional body thus becomes a means of opening the angels to our vision, gifting themselves to our knowledge. It is a paradoxical giving and withdrawing of the angelic body that both confounded fathers of the Orthodox tradition, Epiphanios of Salamis for example, and gave them cause to delight in these same representations, as in the case of Agathias or Psellos.

For Peers, these works of art “excite the viewer’s desire to explore the enigmatic transparency of the images.” They provoke their audience to contend with the process of representation itself, forcing a confrontation with the very real limits of artifactual depiction. As such, angelic representations exist on the very fault-line that unveils the potential crisis in every act of representation. Hence, we find on page 136 that “the value of images of angels resided in their necessarily incomplete testimony to the incomprehensible nature of the angels.” This almost fragmentary and certainly subtle presence – ordained in the mists of time by the presence of the cherubim on the Ark of the Covenant – prompted a powerful revision of the possibilities for representation in general. Peers’s excellent study both clarifies and expands upon this point, providing the reader with a satisfying account of the very real complexities of the Christian work of art.

Charles Barber is an associate professor of art history at the University of Notre Dame. His study of Byzantine iconoclasm, Figure and Likeness: On the Limits of Representation in Byzantine Iconoclasm, will be published next year by Princeton University Press.

Book Reviews

This is a short book, but a provocative one. It begins as a kind of biography of Achilles and enlarges into a meditation on him. Its author, Elizabeth Cook, the poet and scholar, has previously published a critical study of Renaissance poetry, and edited the text of the poems of John Keats, interests far removed, one might think, from our Bronze Age hero. But in the final chapter, which is almost an epilogue, Cook brings together quotations from Keats’s poems and letters that demonstrate, not only the poet’s fascination with Homer’s epics, but his belief in the transcendence and continuity of human experience, which makes the Trojan War, Achilles, and Odysseus as immediate as Keats’s own lived experience. Cook has taken up this idea and tried to set down for Achilles a life that would be a coherent whole, and, still more tantalizing, a psychological portrait, as though he were a flesh-and-blood historical figure, immediately available to us. Yet her style distances the material sufficiently to lodge it into that transcendent never-never land where all of classical antiquity and the classical tradition must now lie.

Achilles is the nominal hero of The Iliad, just as Odysseus is the central figure in The Odyssey. Whereas the latter poem is pretty much focused upon Odysseus’ travels and struggles to return home to his wife and save her from the suitors, however, Achilles must share the audience’s attention with Hector, his womenfolk, the fall of Troy, the machinations of Agamemnon, and a variety of battle scenes in which his fellow warriors hold center stage. The same is true when Achilles appears as a character in later literature; he has walk-on parts of varying degrees of importance. (The play written by Aeschylus about Achilles’ tragic love affair with Patroclus has not survived.) So, we in the twenty-first century can only find the known details of Achilles’ legendary life in the handbooks of Greek mythology, where the details of his story have been collected from sources that span two millennia, bits and pieces, like a puzzle, that, when put together, are no more than a flat, one-dimensional representation of a person.

True enough, the earlier Greek authors, from Homer to those writing during the period of the tragedians, did not develop detailed characterizations or offer idiosyncratic ones. The formulaic nature of the narrative and the stereotypical realization of the characters stood in for the psychological or sociological motivation to which moderns are accustomed – or at least were before the advent of post-modern fiction, which has many more complicated games to play. Thus, moderns who speculate endlessly upon Penelope’s motives for announcing to the suitors that she will hold the contest of stringing the bow, when it is plain to see that her hour of deliverance is at hand and that Odysseus will soon be home, fail to comprehend that the plot has moved to the point where the theme of “Husband Returning in the Nick of Time” is about to be played out, for which the bow contest is an indispensable ingredient. It is not about Penelope’s inner thinking, it is about traditional story devices.

Similarly, Achilles is just another version of Diomedes, Ajax, Idomeneus, and the rest, only more so. That very fact engenders some of the pathos and tragedy of his story; one always has the sense that Achilles so desperately would like to break out and go beyond that stereotype. Before Elizabeth Cook, there was Christopher Logue and Anne Carson. The former has translated portions of The Iliad (in what classical scholars would consider an incredibly loose and – to many – irresponsible way) into what is an absolutely true and in a paradoxical sense literal rendering of the text. Yet, of course, he is giving a reading of the ancient text, not the text. His War Music reads like a film script, filled with minute details that suggest visuals that capture human specificity and both deepen and complicate the Homeric characters. Like Logue, Cook sometimes uses elaborate spacing of the words on the page or sentences set in capitals or direct address to the audience to ask for special attention, all of which remind the reader of the interventions and directions of the film script. Carson, in her prose poem, The Autobiography of Red, has taken the legend of Hercules and Geryon, changing Hercules’ killing of the monster into the unrequited passion for Hercules in Geryon. The poet casts the range and depth of this passion in a dazzling array of images and allusions from antiquity to the present time.

Carson writes in a spare prose that seems distant, somehow disengaged from the emotion that fills the story. It is like the eyes in sculpted figures from antiquity (invoked again by Picasso in his so-called “classical” period), which see all and look at nothing. Cook’s prose is often much the same. The struggle to render the sensibility of Homeric epic has induced generation after generation of translators to try their hand at this task, and no sooner have we read extravagant critical praise for one translation than another is announced in the press. Perhaps the dead eyes are the clue; perhaps Cook and Carson have got it right, certainly for our generation. Neither is translating a text, but both have the sensibility that comes upon one when reading the Greek of Homer or Herodotus or Pindar. Cook’s Achilles is prose, but it is a poem.

Some of the set pieces, such as the arrival of Thetis to grieve over the death of her son, or Achilles’ fight with the River God, or Theseus’ rape of Helen, or Peleus’ bridal rape of Thetis, are brilliant imagistic writing. Homer’s poems are famous for the imagery that comes in the similes. In a sense, these verbal extravagances in an otherwise spare prose, often contained in paragraphs of one sentence, have the same force as those similes.

Cook does give a straight narrative line to the life of Achilles. She begins with him dead in a scene taken from The Odyssey. Odysseus goes to the underworld to seek Tiresias and while there speaks with Achilles and Agamemnon. In addition to the traditional events of this scene, there is an interesting portrayal of Achilles and Patroclus in love, interesting because their love has all the attributes of caring and feeling that one does not ordinarily associate with ancient male love (whether of males or females) in general and least of all in the narcissistic, self-obsessed breast of Achilles. (See page 31, where the twosome are described as dancing together, whereas Homer sets up their domestic moments with them taking turns playing the lyre.) Cook’s Achilles ends with a portrait of Chiron, the centaur who raised the boy Achilles, whose enduring wound gave him the gift of healing, whose sorrow and sense of emptiness at the death of Achilles is remedied by patience and endurance, continuing to do what he knows best.

Cook is not interested in story but rather in rendering the tradition into vivid set pieces. For instance, in the second section, she begins with a marvelous reconstruction of the courtship of Theseus by Peleus, which we know from allusions, and which Renaissance artists used as a chivalric theme. Here Cook has made it into a high-stakes rape scene in which the goddess Thetis fights off Peleus with frightening magical powers of transformation, testing her obstinate and frightened suitor to the very limits of human endurance.

The third section tells the story of Achilles being disguised as a girl by his mother, so that he won’t go to Troy to fight, and being discovered by Odysseus to be a man when he is offered a spear. Cook introduces a teen love interest, the king’s daughter who alone has discovered Achilles’ masculinity. This scene sets up the notion that, at this moment and later, Achilles will have a sexual interest in women but will love only men. Odysseus’ stratagem of the spear, which in the original telling suggests a fairy-tale identification scene, has been deepened and darkened by Cook. As Achilles in disguise takes up the spear, Odysseus arranges for one of his men to be stabbed to death “offstage,” with the accompanying cry of a man dying provoking the bloodlust in the boy Achilles and making him drop his disguise.

In the fourth section, Cook manages a virtuoso miniature narrative, collapsing the events of the sixteenth through the twenty-second book of The Iliad, the death of Patroclus in battle, the rescue of his body, and the return of Achilles to the fight and his killing of Hector. Like Christopher Logue, Cook manages to tell this long story largely through allusion because she counts on an audience that will know the Homeric version. The least likely character to appear in this account is Helen. As Cook acknowledges, Achilles never paid her any attention, the only one of the major Achaean heroes to be indifferent to her. She fancies herself to be the loneliest woman in the world. Cook has her remember more than once in this section the time when Theseus raped her as a ten-year-old child. She is what remains for the Greeks when they storm Troy, another kind of rape after all, the prize for which they came to fight.

Every line of this work contains an allusion to a mythological realm that is what we have inherited as our notion of the Greek Bronze Age. Much is suggested, little told. The style invokes the very idea of transcendence and immanence that is the message of the Keats epilogue. Cook is addressing a reality that her readers who are heirs to the Western literary and cultural tradition have made into more than a memory, rather a kind of alternative life history. How much longer that claim will hold true one cannot easily imagine, but for those endowed with the knowledge, Cook’s narrative is especially rich.

Charles Rowan Beye is distinguished professor emeritus of classics at the City University of New York, a contributing editor to greekworks.com, and author, most recently, of Odysseus: A Life.

Book Reviews

For ten years, Diane Kochilas has been traveling up and down Greece, exploring local foods, discovering and recording traditional recipes. She has already written The Food and Wine of Greece and The Greek Vegetarian. In this, her third book, Diane once more shares the knowledge she has gained in her personal gastronomic odyssey, and we are all richer as a result. “I got this recipe,” she reports in one case, “from an old cruise ship chef in Neapoli, a town on the southern coast of the Peloponnese known for…the predominant profession of its local sons. A whole generation of sailor-cooks came from here.”

The Glorious Foods of Greece is, as a result, a great cookbook. More than 400 recipes are gathered in these well-planned pages; most of them have never appeared in English before. But this is also more than a cookbook: It is the nearest there has yet been to a true encyclopedia of regional Greek cooking.

Each regional chapter begins with a whistle-stop tour, followed by sections on the foods of each district or island, followed in turn by a survey of cheeses. These cheese sections deserve a special mention. Until now there has never been such full information in English on the local cheeses of Greece. Now we know more, from the “extremely creamy” feta of Cephalonia to the krassotyri, steeped in wine-lees, of Kos. After the regional chapters, there is a section on basic ingredients and techniques, with plenty of details on the inimitable trahana, described by Diane not unfairly as a “pebble-shaped pasta,” an ancient and traditional way to dry milk and wheatmeal for later use. Now, a foretaste of those regional chapters.

And poor Athens gets only three pages! But it’s perfectly true, as Diane writes here, that “Greece’s capital and its environs don’t really have a regional cuisine.” In Athens, in fact, the whole country is represented, not only in the menus of ambitious modern restaurateurs and chefs, but also in the astonishing, crowded Central Market, which Diane does her best to describe in one scintillating page: “a raucous symphony of unabashed huckstering. The carnal, almost salacious odors of the meat market and its 45-odd stalls (replete with pigs’ heads and cows’ tongues dangling on hooks, tripe, and just about everything else displayed without much heed to the heat or to more puritanical issues such as hygiene) segue to the unmistakable scents of salt and iodine next door, where almost twice as many fishmongers hawk the catch from ice-filled stands. Here and there the sharp, briny smells of pickles and olives pierce the air….”

If The Glorious Foods of Greece tilts the balance slightly in favor of Crete and the mainland rather than the Aegean islands – at least I think it might, although I haven’t counted pages – that’s no bad thing. The mainland, outside a limited tourist circuit, is less well-known to most travelers. And the islands have been the focus of several recent cookbooks, including Aglaia Kremezi’s The Foods of the Greek Islands (which I have already reviewed on greekworks.com)

. Aglaia’s well-illustrated book will stand beside Diane’s on many shelves: thanks to both these authors, and their publishers, the gastronomic pleasures of Greece will reach a wide audience.

Andrew Dalby is the author of Siren Feasts: A History of Food and Gastronomy in Greece and Dangerous Tastes: The Story of Spices; his Flavours of Byzantium will be published later this year.

Book Reviews

Nationalism is gradually regaining its respectability in the eyes of scholars and observers of current affairs. The Necessary Nation is a book that adds weight to the growing corpus of works that seeks to understand rather than merely demonize nationalist ideology.

An ideology that fascinated some of the sharpest minds of the nineteenth century, nationalism saw its status tumble in the twentieth century in the wake of the rise of fascism between the two world wars. After suffering academic denunciations in the post-1945 era, nationalism fell out fashion, as well as out of college and university curricula.

To be sure, the world remained divided into nation-states. But in a clear repudiation of the excessive emphasis on the glories of a single nation exploited by the dictators who caused the Second World War, nation-states gravitated toward bigger umbrellas. The United Nations tried to stress cooperation among nations and supported human rights rather than national rights. The developed world divided into Western and Eastern transnational alliances: NATO, the Warsaw Pact, the European Economic Community, COMECON.

Scholars followed suit. After a few trenchant repudiations of nationalism, they turned their attention to what seemed to be the emergence of a post-national world. One could barely find a book on nationalism in print in the 1960s and 1970s.

When nationalism re-appeared on academic screens in the early 1980s, it was in an emasculated form. First came UCLA historian Eugen Weber’s account of French nationalism between 1870 and 1914. A whole century after the French revolution, Weber wrote, nationalism had not really taken root in the French provinces. As lofty as its ideas were, nationalism had to be inculcated into the peasantry’s consciousness, a process he described as the transformation of “peasants into Frenchmen.”

Soon after Weber demythologized the purportedly inherent strength of nationalist doctrines and showed them to be a tool in the hands of the state, Cornell professor Benedict Anderson delivered an even stronger blow. Nationalism, he suggested, in what was to become an oft-repeated phrase, was an “imagined community,” in other words, a construct of people’s minds.

Within the academic world, Anderson’s slim volume finished off the job that Weber’s much bulkier study had begun. Nationalism was labeled a “construct,” an artificial concept located in people’s minds rather than in reality.

The real world thought otherwise, however. Less than a decade after Imagined Communities appeared in 1983, the collapse of Soviet-style socialism in eastern and central Europe was followed by a revival of nationalist sentiment – along with violence and ethnic cleansing.

Did the emperor have clothes, after all? Confronted with the realities in eastern Europe, academics, journalists, and newly minted “experts” turned their fire on “cultural nationalism,” the specific brand of nationalism supposedly indigenous to that part of the world. They blamed the culturally and ethnically defined nationalisms in the former Yugoslavia and the former Soviet Union for all the violence.

The dichotomy between “cultural” (or “ethnic”) and “civic” (or “political”) nationalism is an old one. It was German nineteenth-century thinker Friedrich Meinecke who first suggested that nationalism could be divided into two categories depending on its underlying principles. Cultural nationalism defined the nation according to cultural traits – descent, language, religion – and it appeared in central and eastern Europe, where the existence of multiethnic empires made national boundaries extremely hard to determine.

Civic nationalism, in contrast, was a more territorially based and thus politically oriented nationalism that embraced all inhabitants of a particular region. Clear borders meant less reliance on cultural distinctions. France and the United States were prime examples of countries where this brand of nationalism prevailed.

It took several years into the Yugoslav conflict for observers to raise doubts about the wholesale blame for it that was put on cultural nationalism, or to contest the view propounded by political scientist Samuel Huntington that what was occurring was a “clash of civilizations” between the civilized Western and the uncivilized Eastern worlds. Area specialists and reflective journalists who witnessed the Soviet and Yugoslav break-up at close hand countered with evidence showing that persons with base political motives were manipulating cultural nationalism. The violence was bred by political interests, and aided – but not caused – by nationalist beliefs in cultural differences. It was not culture; it was its political manipulation that caused the violence.

Gregory Jusdanis, professor of modern Greek at Ohio State University, offers his own defense of cultural nationalism. Princeton University Press exaggerates when it claims on the book’s jacket at that this is a “controversial” look at nationalism. This is not the first defense of cultural nationalism, although perhaps the publisher meant that it is the first of its kind from within the realm of “cultural studies,” the field that Jusdanis declares he inhabits (p. 67).

Jusdanis criticizes “culturalists” who consider national culture as something separate and unaffected by social dynamics, and he has harsh words for his colleagues in cultural studies who limit themselves to unproductive social criticism. In doing so, he lapses into rare flashes of jargon, in what is an eloquently written text, declaring that “in the hands of post-poststructuralists, culture becomes a hermeneutics of negation rather than a safety net against anomie.”

Jusdanis proposes a three-part thesis. First, nationalism can be a socially positive force and the nation “should be perceived as a positive institution in human society” (p. 4). Second, all nationalisms are by definition both political and cultural, or, in his words, “culture became political when it became national” (p. 6). Therefore, distinctions between good political nationalism and bad cultural nationalism are redundant.

Third, Jusdanis argues that the cultural aspects of nationalism are a necessary mechanism that helps all latecomer nations adapt to the strictures of modernity. This is because these cultural aspects reassure people at times of great shifting changes. As he puts it, cultural nationalism “allows elites in postcolonial and belated societies to understand their ‘backwardness’ as well as to try to overcome it.” Nationalism, he adds, “promotes modernization by reassuring the Volk that its way of life will survive because it, rather than the monarchy, the church, or the colonial ruler, now forms the life and structure of the state” (p. 10).

Of these three points, it is the extraordinarily insightful presentation of the third one regarding cultural nationalism and belatedness that makes this book well worth reading. This point is developed mostly in his fourth chapter, in which, for once, he uses mainly one country as an example, choosing Greece in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The starting-point is his suggestion that nationalism “begins” when people compare the relative standing of nations, and many specialists on Greece would agree that this perception is at the core of modern Greek life.

Jusdanis’s other main points, nationalism as a positive force and the defense and de-demonization of cultural nationalism, are ideas that several others have already developed. Nonetheless, his way of expressing those viewpoints are interesting. However, in regard to his remarks about globalism, and federalism as an ideal system that can accommodate contemporary nationalist and ethnic tensions, most readers will require more thorough explorations.

Readers are bound to be intrigued by this study, but whether or not they will be persuaded by its theses depends on whether they can keep up with the frenetic pace so common to works of cultural studies. There is constant geographical moving around and referencing of sources, along with seemingly inexhaustible name-dropping of theorists. All this is compounded by the author’s combination of theoretical and historical sources. His bibliography runs to an astonishing 32 pages.

Jusdanis uses history as a means of making concrete what otherwise would be the type of abstract “culturalist” treatment of nationalism he deplores (p. 70). Yet because his is a cultural-studies approach, aside from the chapter where he focuses mainly on Greece, all other chapters offer a dizzying array of brief examples taken from tens of countries all over the globe at different historical moments. It all makes for an excitingly fast-paced reconsideration of nationalism, but there is a risk of more traditionally minded readers suffering from intellectual motion sickness. Thus, rather than offering the final word, Jusdanis’s book functions as an invitation to think through and pursue further the rehabilitation of cultural nationalism.

Alexander Kitroeff teaches history at Haverford College and is a contributing editor to greekworks.com, which published his most recent book, Wrestling With the Ancients: Modern Greek Identity and the Olympics.

Book Reviews

The Rich Part of Life, the debut comic novel by Jim Kokoris, is about the consequences of winning the lottery, that rich part of life (both literally and figuratively) that will change and transform a Midwestern Greek American family in unimaginable and unpredictable fashion. The voice of the narrator, Teddy Pappas, takes us through the anxieties and questions that an 11-year-old boy faces while his life takes one unexpected turn after another. The novel opens with the family purchasing a winning lottery ticket exactly a year after the boy’s mother has died in a car accident. Right away, we are introduced to the rest of the family: Teddy’s younger brother, Tommy (often called the Nose Picker), and his father, Theo, a Civil War historian.

However, nothing at the beginning of the novel prepares the reader (or the family) for the variety of characters and episodes (often comitragic) that are going to be introduced gradually into Teddy’s world, a consequence of the family’s incredible “luck.” The $190 million lottery ticket brings together and introduces us to, among others: Teddy’s uncle, Frank, a B-movie producer writing a book about the human condition; Aunt Bess, who claims to communicate with dead relatives and celebrities; Mrs. Wilcott, a beautiful divorcee neighbor and TV host; Silvanius, a B-movie actor who ends up marrying Aunt Bess; and Maurice, a black former NFL player who has been hired as a bodyguard to protect the boys from Bobby Lee Anderson, an archetypal white-trash Southerner who turns out to be Teddy’s biological father.

Throughout the novel, we witness surreal and bizarre characters – who often seem straight out of daytime talk shows – and their interactions with Teddy’s life and family, as well as a number of episodes such as Teddy’s life in school and a reenactment of a famous Civil War battle. However, it is the relationship between Teddy and his father that really holds the story together and, I would add, maintains the reader’s interest. Theo’s character, a well-known Civil War historian, is a spectral figure who seems to be living in history, in the pages of his own books (not the best portrait of an academic). From the very beginning of the novel, the son describes the father as someone who has:

It comes as no surprise to the reader that the father’s relationship with the rest of the family is literally nonexistent. He seems to be constantly outside of space and time, “trapped in a remote place” of silence and disorientation; “you act one hundred and fifty years old,” Teddy recalls his mother saying to his father. Theo and his wife had been in the process of divorcing when she was killed, and until that time he had had a merely decorative function in his children’s lives. The old Zenith television set (bought when Nixon was president), the lack of a VCR, the prehistoric Buick that the father drives, and the old colonial house in which the family lives, all serve as metaphors of the family living in another time.

Although Theo had seemed to be slowly reclaiming his role within the family after his wife’s death, it is winning the lottery that forces him to step out of his lethargic state and struggle with the present and everything that it represents. He has difficulty understanding and dealing with different aspects of contemporary life and society, such as the cult of celebrity. He constantly tries to protect his family from publicity, but that seems impossible.

One of the funniest and at the same time most ironic episodes (indicative of the time that we are living in) is the reenactment of a famous Civil War battle in Virginia in which the family is invited to participate because of Theo’s generous contribution to the Living History Society. On the one hand, the reenactment offers comic relief to the reader, but, on the other, it provides an ironic commentary on contemporary culture and its tendencies toward commercialization, sensationalism, historical inconsistency, and theatrics. The presence of an Abraham Lincoln impersonator (the president was nowhere near the actual battle) who is supposed to sing “Dixie,” the hiring of an African American actor to portray the personal slave of General Jackson (reluctantly played by Theo Pappas) since there are no African Americans in the Society, and the presence of a Starbucks tent on the battlefield, are paradigms that reinforce the relationship of contemporary culture to history and, further, are reminders that maybe our past and our prejudices are not yet behind us.

It is after this episode that the real troubles for the Pappas family begin. It is not a coincidence, I believe, that, after the iconic Civil War battle ends, a symbolic one begins between the Pappas family and Bobby Lee Anderson, Teddy’s biological father, as they assume stereotypical identities of the opposing sides. Until this moment, everything in the book has been told in a lighthearted tone, with a heavy dose of comedy or clownish elements. From this moment on, however, the tone becomes quiet serious, as we prepare for a more intimate reenactment of the Civil War.

As if we hadn’t already guessed, Robert (“Bobby”) Lee is a frightening character, named after a certain Confederate general. He hails from Memphis, Tennessee, drives a red pickup truck, likes his bourbon, and, of course, abused Teddy’s mother, who worked in a nightclub when she met Theo Pappas and fled her life. Upon learning about the lottery ticket, Bobby arrives on the scene to capitalize on the Pappas fortune, claiming that his son was taken away from him. Confronting him is a scholar of history whose only fault is that he is extremely naive and perhaps overly dedicated to his studies. As if we were not already convinced as to who is the best father for Teddy, Bobby Lee kidnaps the boy after he has lost his battle for legal custody (even the law is against him) and takes him on a frightening road trip. The story ends with Theo and Maurice confronting Bobby at the cemetery where Teddy’s mother is buried, and it is not hard to guess who is going to win this battle.

After I finished the novel, I had forgotten all about that “rich part of life” that the Pappas family was slowly discovering: the fortunes and misfortunes that a lottery ticket brings, the bonding between father and son, and, most of all, the innocence of a narrator who reminds us of, and brings us back to, something of our own childhood. I found myself, rather, tired and suspicious of the repetitive and quite simplistic and stereotypical portrayal of a Southern character. Should we assume that the author’s message is that history still haunts the present, destined to repeat itself, or that the fictive representation is after all a historical one? I think it takes more than a “Bobby Lee” to thematize the relationship between the realities of the Civil War and contemporary American culture and human existence. After all, one of the main characters in the novel has spent his entire life studying history, and understanding the peculiarities and contradictions of that war, as well as its historical reasons. Surely, an author who can create such a knowledgeable character should know better than to indulge in overly simplistic portrayals.

However, before making up your mind about the book, which I enjoyed up to a certain point, one might suggest an alternate reading. Maybe I have taken it too seriously, and the Pappas family story, with its bizarre and colorful characters and episodes, is not to be read too deeply after all, but rather as a potential script for one of Uncle Frank’s B-movies: a story that has no meaning at all outside its own framework, but is simply entertaining. The last lines of the book indeed blur any distinction between the two:

Apostolos Vasilakis teaches literature and philosophy at Roosevelt University in Chicago.

Food

Greece is probably not where wine began. That honor is, for the moment, in dispute. The two consensus candidates seem to be Georgia, in the Caucasus, proud of its many millennia of winemaking and the region where botanists believe that the grape may have been first domesticated, and its southeastern neighbor Iran, where archeologists have found the earliest solid evidence of wine – a wine-stained jar of around 6000 BCE. Yes, it was really wine – chemical analysis has proved it.

Already as long as 8,000 years ago, people had been gathering grapes sufficiently sweet that, if you collected their juice, it would ferment into wine. There is no such evidence from prehistoric Greece – at least, not yet. But there is something else, almost equally important. A series of grape pips or seeds of gradually increasing size were recovered from successive prehistoric layers, from about 4500 BCE to 2500 BCE, carefully excavated at the ancient village of Sitagroi in Thrace. This means that the fruit, too, gradually increased in size over this long period of 2,000 years. So, already in those very early times, people in northern Greece were slowly but surely selecting vines for the size of their fruit, and probably for the fruit’s sweetness, too.

Some, at least, of the dozens of modern Greek grape varieties surely go back to that early period of homegrown development. They grew out of local forms of the wild grapevine, not out of already-developed varieties from the Caucasus or the Near East. In fact, by 2500 BCE, Greek wine must already have gained some individuality, as it was already beyond its infancy.

It is no surprise, then, that wine is listed among the stored wealth of the Mycenaean palaces of Knossos, Mycenae, and Pylos a thousand years later. Those Linear B inventories on clay tablets were time-consuming to make and awkward to store. No one would have made those lists unless they mattered. Wine (along with perfumed oil, chariots, harnesses, and the rest) evidently mattered a lot. Almost as important to the people of those palaces were their krateres, the vessels in which wine was mixed with water, and the pelikes from which they drank.

However, the struggle to make sense of the Mycenaeans and their world is a difficult one: we can read their stock lists, but not their literature. With classical Greece, it’s quite the opposite. From the Homeric poems (composed about 700 BCE) onwards, there is an unbroken succession of literary texts that tell us just what Greek people in each historical period were thinking – about wine, about pleasure, about life itself.

From archaic Greek poetry, we learn that wine had a place at every meal – and that the wine was mixed with water, as it would normally be throughout classical times. One ate in silence, and then talked and drank. This order of events was so standard that strangers are not even asked their names in The Iliad and The Odyssey until after they have been given food. Long stories were told over the wine – sometimes they were told in verse – and maybe this is the origin of the two great epics themselves.

In the storerooms of big houses, wine in amphoras was stored for many years. This heavy, aromatic wine is described as “fiery”; in a famous image, the sea itself is compared to it, oinopa ponton, “the wine-like sea.” Let’s make a safe guess that it tasted of the pine resin, terebinth resin, or mastic with which the amphoras were sealed; but, when all is said, we do not really know how archaic Greek wine tasted. However, the monstrous Cyclops, encouraged by Odysseus to try wine for the first time, thought it was just like the magical nectar that the Gods were said to drink. It was dangerous, too, as the Cyclops found: once the wine had gone to his head, Odysseus’ men were able to blind him and make their escape.

That very wine – the story goes – was acquired by Odysseus on the southern coast of Thrace, the same region in which we know that vines had been selected and improved long before, and from which came some of the best wines known in classical Athens, around 400 BCE. It is during this later period that we can draw a map of the fine wines of Greece for the first time.

These wines came from the big islands of Thasos, Lesbos, Chios, and Naxos; from the smaller island of Peparethos (now Skopelos); and from Mende and Torone in the northern peninsula of Chalcidice. There were many other wine producers all over Greece, but these were the wines that people talked about. There was a twist to some of these names, however. Peparethos had a colony in southwestern Thrace; Thasos had a string of possessions on the neighboring Thracian coast. There were vineyards along the slopes of Mount Olympus, not far from Peparethos. There were vineyards along the Asia Minor coast not far inland from Lesbos and Chios. Almost certainly, some of the wine that was marketed under those expensive names – Thasos, Lesbos, Chios, and Peparethos – had actually come from vine-growing slopes on the nearby mainland. How might these wines have tasted? We will come back to this question in a future essay.

Wine in classical Athens was as central to social life as it had been in earlier times. Whether or not people had begun to talk while they ate, it was still true that the time for serious conversation (and serious enjoyment), when the meal was over, was during the drinking. The meal was the deipnon; the drinking that followed was the symposion. This “symposium” was the setting for some of Socrates’ philosophical discussions, including the famous discussion on the nature of love that is retold in Plato’s Symposium.

The Greek colonies in Italy and Sicily set a fashion for importing the wines of their homeland, and the Etruscans of northern Italy also liked Greek wine. So, in due course, did the Romans. The Roman empire, therefore – let’s say from 30 BCE to 300 CE – was possibly the period when Greek wine reached its greatest fame. This may seem strange, because the wines of Italy were already very good indeed. Romans, who liked to drink while they were eating, drank Italian wines with their food. But, if they could afford it, they preferred Greek wine for their aperitif.

Sweet Cretan wine was a good choice here, or else a dry wine mixed with the fine Greek honey of Mount Hymettus near Athens. Chian wine was the classic choice, however. When Julius Caesar gave a public banquet, Chian was his after-dinner selection. But Chian wine came in small amphoras and was very expensive. At least one Roman was known to have excused himself for spending so much on it by explaining that his physician had prescribed Chian wine “for his heart.” In place of Chian wine, one could choose the slightly cheaper wines of Mitylene, Methymna (modern Molyvos), and Eresos, the three wine-producing cities of Lesbos. But one had to be sure to select the best wines from these cities, according to the tasting notes of the imperial physician Galen, because seawater went into the making of the others, and seawater was an additive of which many physicians disapproved.

In Roman times, these were the best names in Greek wine. There were others, however: the wines of Asia Minor are discussed in great detail by Galen, who was born there, but nobody else says much about them. The wines of Cos and Rhodes are often mentioned in Roman texts, but they are not usually complimented. Coan wine, in particular, was the typical salty wine. (This odd business of adding seawater had been invented – Pliny tells us – by a slave to avoid punishment for pressing too small a daily quantity of grape juice.) Never mind its origin, salted Coan wine was very popular and fairly cheap in Rome.

Whatever their flavor when classical Athenians were tasting them, Greek wines were heavy and sweet to Romans of the empire since there was only one historical way to stabilize wine for long-distance transport. The Greek wine that the Romans tasted had been “cooked,” with boiled-down must (grape juice) added to it. Therefore, in a very distant way, it resembled the port, sherry, madeira, and mavrodaphne that modern Europeans sometimes like to sip before or after dinner. Tastes change, but some tastes go on for centuries. The wines of medieval “Romania” (Byzantine Greece and Crete, in other words) had the same heavy, sweet qualities, and people in medieval France and England would pay high prices for them.

As the Roman empire shrank to become what we now know as Byzantium, Italian wines were no longer easily available. New names in Greek wine thus came to the fore in Byzantine texts. Alongside Chian and Lesbian wines, there were now Monemvasian (known in medieval England as Malmsey) and Samian wines. The wines of Thrace and Bithynia (northwestern Asia Minor) became popular again, being produced not far from the walls of Constantinople itself. The wine of Varna (in modern Bulgaria) is heard of for the first time. An archbishop of Athens, Michael Choniates, dared to write that he did not like the local Attic wine because of its strong taste of resin. Some visitors to Byzantium from the West found retsina simply “undrinkable”!

In many ways, classical and medieval Greek wines seem to have prefigured the modern vintages that we will explore in the next essay. The geography has changed – historical circumstances have ensured that Lesbos, Chios, and Thasos, to give just three examples, no longer produce wine in commercial quantities – but the grape varieties are still, most of them, unique to Greece. Can we still taste those ancient flavors?

Andrew Dalby is the author of Siren Feasts: A History of Food and Gastronomy in Greece and Dangerous Tastes: The Story of Spices; his Flavours of Byzantium will be published later this year.

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