greekworks

“The cook sets before you a large tray on which are five small plates. One of these holds garlic, another a pair of sea urchins, another a sweet wine sop, another ten cockles, the last a small piece of sturgeon. While I’m eating this, another is eating that; and while he is eating that, I have made away with this. What I want, good sir, is both the one and the other, but my wish is impossible. For I have neither five mouths nor five hands….” This scene describes the frustration we feel when we fail to taste all the dishes on the meze spreads. It is obviously an age-old problem, as the passage comes from the comedy, Centaur, by Lynceus, written in the fourth to third centuries BCE.

The art of cooking is nothing new: Even before classical times, there were professional cooks and bakers in Athens; they prepared elaborate foods and sweets on command. Meze, increasingly popular today all over the world, involves the sharing of food. All participants, fork in hand, help themselves from a variety of dishes placed in the middle of the table. Judging from the quote, it has been a regular table custom since antiquity.

Texts and some vague recipes that have survived show how sophisticated ancient cooking and baking was. Today’s food researchers often turn to the writings of Archestratus, the Greek gourmet-poet of the fourth century BCE, to find information about the ingredients and the way food was served in antiquity. Alain Senderens, the renowned French chef, considers Archestratus the forefather of nouvelle cuisine and used his name for the first restaurant he created. Ancient sources are invaluable in the effort to trace the roots of modern Greek cuisine. Being part of the cultural exchange that took place for more than 2,000 years among the large empires of the Mediterranean basin, Greek cuisine has gracefully assimilated many influences from both the East and the West. With the birth of the modern Greek state in the nineteenth century, and in the spirit of reviving its ancient past, several cultural features of modern Greek life were accused of being non-Greek. Unfortunately, Greek cuisine did not escape this cultural “cleansing.” Later, in the 1970s, package tourism stabilized and spread some politically correct dishes all over the world, thus diminishing the rich Greek culinary tradition to three or four “mutant” dishes.

It is not surprising that the most popular Greek foods throughout the world are not chickpea or bean soup, yellow split peas, or the stewed mixed seasonal vegetables and greens that most Greeks ate regularly until the late 1960s. Those dishes only recently started to be part of the menu of upscale Greek restaurants. Mousaka, pastichio, creamy avgolemono (thickened egg-and-lemon sauce), and Greek salad are the dishes that most non-Greeks consider to be the epitome of traditional Greek cooking. Yet, most of these dishes have very little to do with traditional foods. They were developed, or drastically revised, by professional cooks and restaurateurs. Those chefs were particularly concerned in creating recipes that would please the Athenian upper class of the early twentieth century, people brought up eating mainly French-inspired foods, often in cosmopolitan cities of the Mediterranean such as Smyrna (Izmir today) and Alexandria. Those popular dishes have a mild taste and please the palates of Europeans and Americans, as they offer tamed, sweet, and creamy combinations of traditional oriental favorites, such as eggplant – food that even children would like to eat.

In the late 1920s, the first and most influential cookbook appeared in Greece. It was written by Nicolas Tselementes, a Greek chef who had served in places such as the St. Moritz Hotel in New York and the Sacher in Vienna. The book was a compilation of all kinds of recipes (French, Italian, American), together with the Greek ones that the author considered important. There were also chapters on how to serve and present food, how to dress maids, etc. That book made such an enormous impact on the rising Athenian middle and upper classes that, to this day, “Tselementes” is synonymous with “cookbook” in Greece. Tselementes’s beliefs and ideas of what is right and wrong influenced not only home cooking, but also professional chefs, as he was the principal teacher of all the important Greek schools of cooking. He revised many Greek recipes, adding a French accent to them. He is probably the one who added the thick layer of béchamel sauce to mousaka, an eggplant and meat casserole, and pastichio, the Italian-inspired macaroni casserole. He believed that French cooking had its origins directly in ancient Greece and that, later, under Turkish rule, Greek cooking became more Eastern, something that he was determined to correct.

Nothing, of course, could be farther from the truth. While French cuisine is based on technique and elaborate sauces, Greek cooking – as with traditional cuisines all over the southern and eastern Mediterranean – is ingredient-based. Greek cuisine is earthy and makes the most of the seasonal produce of each region. Everyday and festive dishes wisely combine flavorful sun-drenched vegetables and greens with grains – such as bulgur or rice – and pulses, breads, and local cheeses. Olive oil is the key ingredient, while olives, capers, and all sorts of fragrant herbs complement and enhance the taste of even the most basic dishes.

The much-praised fish and seafood of the Aegean was never plentiful and was often considered a delicacy, even on the islands. Meat was scarce in mountainous Greece, and was eaten as a holiday dish, in small portions. In short, traditional Greek cooking, the model for the much-admired Mediterranean diet, is exactly what modern scientists prescribe to people who want to live a long and active life. Unfortunately, in recent years, as Greece has become more affluent, people have tended to eat much more meat.

The tremendous impact that Tselementes’s ideas had on Greek urban society deprived many regional cooks of pride in their traditional foods. They didn’t stop cooking them for their families, but, once in charge of restaurant kitchens, they thought they had to cook meat, and try to prepare “international dishes” to please their patrons. Italy and Spain, as well as Morocco and Turkey, have capitalized greatly on the popularity of the Mediterranean diet. But Greece has done very little to support and encourage the few people who try to keep their rich culinary tradition alive and introduce it to the rest of the world. Public television in Greece publicizes black-tie ceremonies during which awards are given to Athenian restaurants that serve French food, while the few upscale restaurants that serve Greek dishes are listed under a different category. Thus Greeks are still led to believe that the delicious foods their grandmothers cooked – often the same dishes Italians have triumphantly publicized all over the world – are not good enough for modern, affluent Greek society.

Local produce, along with unique and delicious traditional preparations, have been abandoned, as a large part of the country has been developed to accommodate low-budget tourism. In Athens, expensive food items such as Serrano ham and bresaola (air-cured beef) are imported and sold in upscale markets. But the truly exquisite louza of the Cycladic islands (whole pork loin macerated in wine, spiced with savory, oregano, cinnamon, and cloves, and then smoked or air-dried) is nowhere to be found. A myriad of very good local artisanal cheeses is produced in various parts of the country, mainly from goat’s and sheep’s milk. Yet upscale gourmet shops or city restaurants never bother to look for them.

Greeks completely lack the ability to market their products the way Italians do. But the younger generation is learning fast. The only thing urgently needed is a vast campaign to bring back the pride and encourage people to continue their local production or revive the unique delicacies they have abandoned.

There is hope, however: “Greek cuisine hasn’t had a great reputation for the past 2,000 years. Greek restaurants were condemned to Seventies package holiday nostalgia along with the headaches from the retsina,” the restaurant critic of the British newspaper, The Independent, wrote last year. “Now that we’ve resurrected everything from Mongolian hotpots to Peruvian guinea pig, it’s the Greeks’ turn to prove that neo-Hellenic cooking is what we all want to eat in the year 2000,” the critic continued, as he praised London’s Real Greek.

That restaurant – along with New York’s Periyali and Molyvos, and a few others – are shining examples of a new breed of Greek restaurants that have appeared in large cities of Europe, Australia, and the US. For the first time, people who have never had the chance to eat authentic Greek food can now taste and enjoy well-presented dishes, along with modern inventions of talented chefs based on traditional preparations. The success of these upscale overseas Greek restaurants has brought some respect back home for the old frugal, rustic foods. There now seems to be some increased interest among sophisticated Greeks for the almost forgotten dishes of the past. Let us hope that this interest is genuine and lasting, not merely the result of following yet another international food trend.

Aglaia Kremezi is a frequent contributor to Gourmet; her first book, The Foods of Greece, won a Julia Child Award.

Health

Twenty years ago, on June 5, 1981, a report appeared in the medical literature of five cases of pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP), a rare and unusual disease, seen only in people with problems with their immune system. All five cases were reported in previously healthy young homosexual men in Los Angeles, who were in fact the first patients diagnosed with the disease now known as acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, or AIDS.

In the 20 years since the appearance of these first cases, AIDS has exploded into a full-grown epidemic of global proportions, with an unprecedented impact on every aspect of society. Although HIV infection rates differ greatly from nation to nation, there is not a single country upon which the disease has not had some effect. The modes of HIV transmission guarantee that no country can remain free of it. Indeed, AIDS is only one of a number of contemporary public-health issues with a truly global presence. This is the first in a series of articles that will address a number of these issues (bioterrorism, mad-cow disease), as well as their social and financial impact on every level of society.

AIDS is caused by the recently discovered human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). While there were numerous theories regarding its cause early on in the epidemic, epidemiological and biological data now strongly support the premise that HIV is responsible for AIDS. In some quarters, doubt persists, but improvements triggered by medications targeting HIV have strengthened the association between HIV and AIDS. The predominant modes of transmission of HIV are sexual intercourse and exposure to infected blood. Since the first AIDS cases were reported in 1981, HIV has caused approximately 22 million deaths worldwide.

In the United States, approximately 400,000 persons have died, and approximately one million have been infected. At the outset of the epidemic, the affected population consisted overwhelmingly of homosexual men, leading some to assume incorrectly that the disease would be contained within the gay community. New cases of HIV today, however, result predominantly from injection of drugs and heterosexual contact. Of these newly infected people, half are estimated to be younger than 25 years old and are infected sexually. In Greece, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates 8,000 adults and children to be living with HIV/AIDS as of 1999. The estimated number of adults and children who have died of AIDS in Greece since the beginning of the epidemic is 1,600. Of the cases diagnosed in Greece from 1997 to 1999, 24% were homosexual men, 13% heterosexuals, 2% intravenous drug-users, and 59% with an undetermined transmission mode. HIV prevalence has remained low in intravenous drug-users (in Athens and elsewhere). HIV prevalence in prostitutes who were not intravenous drug-users in Athens was actually zero percent in 1991. The reason for this is unclear, but might be because prostitution is legal, with the resultant routine screening and care of sex workers with sexually transmitted diseases.

Today, AIDS has taken on global proportions, with the greatest burden falling on sub-Saharan Africa. In contrast to the number of cases in the United States and other developing nations, the worldwide numbers are staggering. Over thirty-six million people are infected with HIV, while an additional 21.8 million have died, and 13.2 million children have become AIDS orphans, having lost their mother or both parents to the disease. More than 14,000 new infections occur daily, 5.3 million in 2000 alone, including 600,000 in children younger than 15. Approximately 70% of cases occur in sub-Saharan Africa, where approximately 25% of adults are infected.

In the 1990s, the so-called “cocktail” became available. This combination of drugs, known in the medical community as highly active antiretroviral (HIV is a retrovirus) therapy (HAART), has made significant inroads into the epidemic in the United States and other developing nations. HAART therapy has led to substantial decreases in the incidence of AIDS and in the annual number of AIDS deaths.

Therapy costs more than $10,000 a year, however, and is almost completely unavailable in developing countries. Thus, the United States and the world’s other wealthy nations need to provide assistance to make these therapies affordable. Treatment of HIV in Africa is estimated to cost $1.1-3.3 billion dollars per year. This investment, especially in providing medication to pregnant women, may decrease new infections by reducing the potential to transmit the virus. In the US, the rate of HIV transmission from mother to infant can be as low as one to two percent for women taking HAART.

In many developing countries, the social stigma associated with HIV infection has contributed to difficulties in controlling the epidemic. Persons who might benefit from knowing their HIV status often reject counseling and testing because they fear the consequences of disclosure. Other disincentives are the lack of resources for care and treatment and the sense that little is gained from learning that one is infected with HIV. Programs for prevention in developing countries are also compromised by poor infrastructure and social and political instability.

The future of the HIV epidemic is unknown and to some degree depends on the actions and reactions of the world community. A vaccine will not be available in the near future. Stabilization and reversal of the epidemic will depend in large part on programs targeting education and prevention.

WHO and the United Nations have shown a new commitment to responding to the HIV/AIDS crisis with an appeal to the world to act on this global emergency. The central focus of any program should be prevention. While we try to develop a vaccine for HIV and find the best care for everyone infected with the disease, it is of utmost importance to prevent new infections. Prevention programs should target women and young people. In order to succeed in reaching these populations, frank discussion about causes and prevention – including use of condoms – of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases is necessary. In addition, drug treatment programs should include the provision of clean needles. Implementing these interventions continues to be problematic because of personal, social, and political barriers of varying types in all countries and by all governments.

Efforts to improve the care of people already infected with HIV are also needed, including the delivery of medications to developing countries. The UN and G8 nations have called for developing a global health and AIDS fund. Governments, private entities, foundations, and individuals have committed almost $1.5 billion to this fund. Pharmaceutical companies are beginning to work with WHO and developing nations to speed access and reduce the cost of HIV medications.

It is encouraging that the pharmaceutical industry recently dropped its efforts to block South Africa, where one in four adults is infected with HIV, from importing cheaper drugs. A growing number of companies are beginning to offer drugs at prices close to production cost. Brazil has had significant success in controlling the HIV epidemic by allowing generic-drug companies to make HIV drugs for local sale. Nevertheless, it is noteworthy that the United States has objected to Brazil’s practice as a violation of patent rights.

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.

Health

The road to Dr. Panayiotis Zavos’s office from “downtown” Lexington is one of those indistinguishable suburban commercial stretches that give you the impression that you could be anywhere in America. If I was expecting an upscale office complex, with announcements heralding the imminent birth of the first cloned baby, and offering people low financing to take advantage of the new developments in reproductive medicine, I was greatly disappointed. If not for the little sign on the door – ZDL, Inc. (Zavos Diagnostic Laboratories) – the office could have been any office, anywhere in the country. The entire place left me with the impression of trying hard to blend in, justifiably so, given the scrutiny encasing the prospect of human cloning. All appearances, however, of a low-key image were immediately exploded when I finally met Dr. Zavos.

His unqualified singleness of purpose, his acidic criticism of animal cloners, his quick dismissal of the scientific community’s concerns, as well as of all other ethical arguments and considerations, and his undisguised readiness to debate all these issues publicly, suggest a conscious attempt to stand out, rather than blend in. During the interview, Dr. Zavos’s insistence on arguing that he knows how to do this “right” initially left me with the impression of someone who is very vulnerable. But as the interview continued, it became evident to me that I would be deluding myself to think so. I simply wasn’t talking to someone who was just another voice in the debate on human cloning, but to someone who was fully aware of how close he is in to cloning a human being – or, even more to the point, to someone who perhaps had already done so.

Q. I’d like to begin by asking you to comment on the fact that, for those of you involved in human cloning, there’s not much emphasis put on your role as scientists. There’s a perception that you are functioning more like entrepreneurs or members of religious cults rather than scientists. You are referred to as a scientist/entrepreneur and Dr. Brigitte Boisselier as a member of a religious cult, the Raelians, which considers human cloning to be one of their goals.

A. I am a man of various missions in this world. I don’t feel that I can be defined just as one type of person, or that I fit in any one particular description or category. My scientific accomplishments are substantial, well-known, and need no defense. But then this whole issue of entrepreneurship comes into play. There is a view that anyone who has entrepreneurial ambitions is a compromised scientist. My answer to that is that every doctor, whether in Greece or in the United States, is a businessman. You are in this to make a living. Without exploitation, but by using the means that are given to you to earn a living, to which, of course, you are entitled. As long as you do not step over the fine lines that are established, and do not turn to science for the sake of money.

Q. At a meeting of the National Academy of Sciences a few months ago, you announced that you would succeed in cloning a human being within the next year. Do you still stand by this statement?

A. Yes. We do have some very aggressive agendas that we want to meet and, if all goes well, we could do that. However, I think that the world needs to understand that, when dealing with human lives and human beings, deadlines are made to be postponed, to be broken. We have every intention of postponing things, even if we don’t look good in the eyes of a few people who expect us to meet our deadlines. We are not in the business of making pizza, or delivering food, or selling cars, where delivery within a certain period can be guaranteed. Unless we are sure that what we are doing is absolutely correct, and right, with no dangers or risks to the life of the unborn child, to the child that will be born from such effort, we have no intention of doing this. We want to be absolutely sure that we will deliver the first healthy cloned child to this world.

Q. There are two methods of cloning. One is produced by fission, which is the cutting of the embryo, and the other by fusion, which is nuclear transfer. In fusion, the nucleus of an unfertilized egg is removed and replaced by genetic material from the cell of an animal donor. Fusion was used to create Dolly, the first successfully cloned sheep. Which one of the two is the method that you and your team are employing in developing a human clone?

A. We research in both modalities, and I believe that this is the right thing to do. I can’t tell you right now which one we prefer. Whether you transfer subzonally in the case of the oocyte, or introduce the nucleus via nuclear transfer, you require electrofusion material, or electrical charges, in order to allow complete recognition and physical interaction between the ooplasmic materials, or the nuclear interaction between two cells at the subzonal orientation of the cell. So, both methods are effective. I can’t say, however, which one produces the best results in humans. Under various circumstances, one can be more favorable than the other in animals. But again, this technology has not been investigated really well in the animal world. Some prefer one against the other, and I can tell you why. It is an issue of the instruments available. Each method requires the use of different instruments, and nuclear transfer uses cheaper instruments than cell fusion. We are researching both methods, and we have both sets of equipment necessary to do so.

Q. There have been five species of mammals cloned since Dolly: sheep, goats, pigs, mice, and cows. Survival rates, however, are low, and there have been many cloned offspring with severe disabilities. Many people are concerned that we will experience the same issues in cloning a human.

A. My team finished writing an article yesterday regarding this particular issue, which will be submitted for publication to Science. As you may or may not know, most of those animal cloners, who became famous overnight (including Dr. Ian Wilmut), were successful in being at the right place, at the right time, under the right circumstances, and they achieved good results. But most of them have been very lucky in terms of having a good accident make them famous. Wilmut is one of these people. He took 277 eggs, created 29 embryos, transferred them into 13 female sheep, and had one Dolly born. Most experiments performed by animal cloners are of the hit-and-miss type. I don’t take seriously the people who take such an approach, and I debate them all the time.

For example, four months ago, I was involved in a debate on Swiss television with an Italian scientist. He began to tell me that he has been trying to clone a mouse subspecies without success for the last two years. He asked me, “If I am unable to do it with a mouse, how can you be successful or guarantee success with a human?” My reply was that we were not there to debate his incompetence. My point is that there are a lot of incompetent scientists around, desperately trying to become famous by accident, and thus make history. This world is loaded with such people, and I meet them all the time. I have a track record. We are going to do this correctly. This is not an egotistical statement. I feel that this can be done correctly, it will be done, and we are the right people to do it. We know much more about this than your average scientist, and we know a lot about reproductive medicine – more than most of the cloners put together. We have been doing in vitro fertilization (IVF) for the last 20 years. We have been treating male and female infertility for the last 23 years. Therefore, we feel that our team is qualified to be doing this type of experimentation.

Q. One of the most serious anomalies with cloned animals is LOS (large offspring syndrome). There is great concern within the scientific community that LOS will also be a major issue in human cloning. However, Dr. Randy Jirtle of Duke University Medical Center, who has worked exclusively on LOS, believes that cloned humans would be unlikely to have LOS, and that people might be easier to clone than animals.

A. We knew about LOS before we began working on this. Cows and mice have exhibited LOS. But goats, pigs, and other domestic species have not. Pigs are of particular importance in this case since, genetically, they are more related to humans than any other domestic species. At the National Academy of Sciences, a scientist presented accurate data of IVF embryos incubated in two different environments. He was able to show that in one of these, there was a much higher rate of LOS than in the other. This suggests that LOS can be initiated as a result of a particular environment, which can start the epigenetic expression of the LOS gene. We have studied issues like this. We have been incubating human embryos for 23 years, and we have yet not seen an offspring with LOS born from IVF. We are talking about 350,000 IVF offspring worldwide every year. We have more data on the human industry today than on all other species put together. We know what we are doing.

Q. ...However, how can you anticipate problems that might appear much later in the life of a cloned human?

A. You never say never in this world. When you took a plane to fly here, you took a risk. There is no such thing as an absolute guarantee in this life. When we reproduce naturally, we have a 3.5% chance of abnormalities. When we perform IVF, there is an additional 1.5 to 2% chance. The number increases slightly when we do an intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI). The question is a good one. We are going to make sure that things go well. The technology we are developing will be fine-tuned. Nobody knew what the first IVF baby would look like when she was born, and what kind of problems might appear down the road. When the first ICSI baby was born, there were no human experiments done. So, unless we do human experiments, there are no absolute guarantees. There is a fine line here that we have to negotiate. People in the National Academy of Sciences, such as Wilmut and [Rudolph] Jaenisch, have said that unless we can guarantee that we can clone animals with 100% success rate, we should never begin to clone a human being. Which means that I would be 100 years old, and still unable to move forward, because there would still be no 100% success rate with animals. Their logic falls apart simply because today we have established very clearly that animal data do not apply in this particular instance to human cases. They are telling me: “You have no numbers to support this. Where are your numbers?” But if I do it, they will say, “You are unethical, Dr. Zavos.” My answer to them is that we have our numbers, and that we will do it.

Q. Cloning can be defined in two ways. First, as the asexual production of organisms from one stock or ancestor, and, second, as the production of a person or a thing regarded as identical with another. It is the second definition that results in the public’s strong condemnation of cloning, since it alludes to the “photocopying” of human beings. The first definition results in a rather milder reaction from an ethical perspective since asexual reproduction has become common practice today in IVF. How would you define cloning?

A. I am not an ethicist, but I can tell you that I have been more ethically correct than some of these bioethicists who are debating us today. They are all up for sale, and I have established that already. As a matter of fact, you can buy some of these bioethicists. They will say anything you want them to say. We do not operate that way. We are driven by a set of ethics different from theirs. My ethics are different from yours. What is ethically correct by your standards may not be by my standards and vice-versa. Therefore, we are debating an issue about which we will never agree on anything. We are dealing with issues that concern human beings here.

A clone is merely a person that has been put together or made out of the DNA material of the two parents, either one or the other, and more likely will carry the genetic label of the mother or the father, instead of both. Now, she or he will look like the mother or the father. That is the case today when we reproduce sexually. People take this very seriously. They expect their children to look like them. Therefore, the argument that a cloned baby will look like the mother or father does not concern me. So be it. No parent of a cloned child will take it back because it resembles the mother or father. It is never going to be an issue. These children need to be loved, and they will be loved.

Q. Can someone have identical genetic material with one of the parents and still be considered an individual?

A. He or she most likely will not look exactly like the father or mother, and definitely will not exhibit the same behavioral patterns due to special circumstances and different environmental factors that will be superimposed on the child.

Q. France and Germany are seeking a measure from the United Nations that will ban worldwide human cloning for reproductive purposes. The House of Representatives also passed a bill that intends to ban all human cloning. How would these measures affect you?

A. They would have no effect on what we do. I have said this publicly, and I will say it again. We are not doing this in the US. We are not doing it in Germany or France either. Those who introduced the bill in the House did not know the facts. They were not interested in knowing the facts. They were driven by religious beliefs, and gut feelings, which should never enter the picture, simply because this is not a religious issue. Just because I am of a certain religion, which prohibits the application of cloning, that doesn’t mean that I should impose my views on you, and prevent you from having access to this technology. This is not what this country is all about. I have a feeling that even if the president signs the bill, it will be challenged at the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court, based on the First Amendment, will probably throw it out, because the right to reproduce is by definition a human right, and a First Amendment right. It has been challenged before. I believe that a number of rulings by different courts in this country indicate that. Having said that, I have no intention to challenge the system in any way, shape, or form. My intention is to do it.

Q. You said that you are doing this to help infertile couples that cannot conceive in any other way. However, if you succeed in six months or in a year, there are going to be other applications of this technology. Undoubtedly, there is an incredible range of possibilities. What do you think will happen?

A. The sky’s the limit. That’s why I encourage the governments of the world to sit around the table and discuss this. Looking the other way is a very irresponsible form of dealing with an issue of this magnitude. When I was in Cyprus a few days ago, the chairman of the Medical Association of Cyprus confronted me. He asked me if I was creating another atomic bomb. We have no intention of doing that. But if the world continues to avoid dealing with this issue, and looks the other way, this technology can become another atomic bomb. There are many possible abuses that can occur. That’s why I have been very vocal about the need to discuss comprehensively how to avoid the tremendous abuses that remain a possibility in employing this technology. My colleagues and I have no control over this. Countries like Germany and France need to get serious on this and raise questions. What would happen if we ban this technology? Would someone dangerous pick it up? Haven’t we learned any lessons? As for the US, it is paramount to think of the scientific and financial consequences of being left out of such a development. IVF was banned in this country for six years after Bob Edwards began employing it in England. Today, IVF is sliced bread.

Q. I would like to go back to reactions resulting from religious perspectives. One of the biggest issues here is that people feel that you are playing God in the process of cloning a human. On the other hand, every medical intervention constitutes such an act. Every time we do something medically, we are essentially playing God. As an Orthodox Christian, do you feel that you are playing God in attempting to clone a human? Do you have any sense of hubris?

A. The world evolves, therefore religion needs to evolve. We play God when we do heart transplants today. We play God when we prescribe a new line of antibiotics. The question rather must be, should we be playing God? Yes. We are not gods, but maybe we are playing gods because God wants us to do that. I will be more than happy to play God since God put me in this world to help my fellow human beings. I don’t really see any other reason for being here. I feel that our role as human beings is to help our fellow human beings have a better life. If this is perceived as playing God, I do not have a problem with it. Anyway, the term, “playing God,” is misleading, since we are made in God’s image.

Q. I’d like to quote Leo Kass, who was appointed recently as head of the National Bioethics Committee. His concern with human cloning rests on a philosophical rather than ethical perspective. According to Kass, “a clone is a product made and not begotten. It severs procreation from sex, love, and intimacy, and thus it is dehumanizing.”

A. That is his gut feeling, and I respect it. That’s the way he approaches this issue. However, he does not speak to my patients every day. Kass turned off the light one night, made love with his wife, and, two weeks later, his wife said, “I’m pregnant, honey. We’re going to have a child.” What Kass says sounds wonderful, but he’s never experienced infertility in his life. He’s never had to spend a fortune, mortgage his house to have a child, and still be denied. When he says that cloning is a dehumanizing process, that’s his feeling about it. I respect his feelings, but I also respect and listen to people who have needs. He doesn’t have any needs. The people I work with do, however. Therefore, I don’t need to help him, but I will help my patients. I will go to any length to help my patients, as long as I’m doing this in a lawful and mutually acceptable fashion. As long as I explain to my patients what I am doing for them, and have their consent, and am operating within the guidelines of the American Medical Association and the American Society of Reproductive Medicine, I’m okay.

In addition to being a co-founder of greekworks.com, Stelios Vasilakis is a classical philologist and a former associate of the Speros Basil Vryonis Center for the Study of Hellenism.

Our Opinion

In 1981, the vision of the English anarchopunk band Zounds was apocalyptic. The band described a world in chaos, brought upon by technological mayhem. If one had been asked then to attribute a historical reality to the canvas painted by the Zounds, it was unlikely to have been New York City and America at the beginning of the new millennium. However, with rumors of terrorists seeking licenses to fly cropdusters, cases of anthrax infection multiplying rapidly, public announcements of imminent new terrorist attacks, and suspicion emerging as the public’s dominant sentiment, one can easily now place the Zounds’ landscape within a particular historical context: America, 2001.

The smoke that lingered for days above downtown Manhattan has cleared. The “indistinguishable” smell of something familiar, which the island’s population had chosen not to identify, and which had tortured them for so many weeks, seems to have slowly dissipated after the fall’s first strong winds. Now, however, it is fear that has begun taking hold of people, becoming entrenched in the public’s minds and souls.

To realize that fear is now embedded inside us, one only need look into the crowd’s frightened eyes every time a “suspicious” face enters the subway, or the train comes to a sudden halt. Or detect people’s nervousness when opening their mail. Or notice the reaction of travelers when passengers are randomly taken off lines at terminal gates to be checked before entering an airplane. Or, finally, gaze upon the strangely half-empty theaters, restaurants, and cinemas throughout the city of New York, the once and (we continue to hope) future cultural capital of America.

Fear lacks a language, but resides deep inside us, in a primordial space preexisting language. That which lacks a language, however – which can’t be expressed by language – is bound to be misapprehended, to be misunderstood. If security before September11 was excessive in its negligence, security after September 11 appears excessive in its use.

The overwhelming presence of security measures around us does not alleviate our fears, but rather raises them to a higher level. The public knows that visibility does not mean effectiveness in this case. The first step toward gradually removing fear from our midst is removing from around us those things that constantly remind us that there is something out there of which we should be afraid.

Sports

Greeks – some of them at any rate – may be anti-American or anti-Western, but they are less likely to be anti-European. Imperialism and interference in Greek affairs is American or Western, but “Civilization” remains European. This hypothesis may need some research to back it up, but in terms of popular culture, namely soccer, the evidence is irrefutable.

Greek soccer culture is unambiguously pro-European. Hard-core supporters of the AEK Athens soccer club embarrassed the Greek soccer world recently by trying to burn an American flag. There is no chance, however, of a European Union flag or the flag of UEFA, the European soccer federation, being handled with such disrespect in any of Greece’s soccer stadiums. Historically, Greek soccer has always aspired to a higher “European” standard.

Panathinaikos, one of Greece’s major soccer clubs, is living proof of this Greek sports-level pro-Europeanism. The green-and-white-colored Athens club is considered Greece’s “ambassador” in Europe, and it has earned many kudos by distinguishing itself in European club competitions. Panathinaikos lags behind Olympiakos in domestic soccer titles, but the green-and-whites are proud to have consistently done better than any other Greek club in Europe.

It all began back in 1971, when Panathinaikos reached the final of Europe’s most prestigious club competition, the Champions’ Cup. Until then, Greek clubs had been nothing more than punching bags in that competition. Each year, the team that won the Greek championship entered the European competition only to be ousted, predictably, in the early rounds, having suffered defeat at the hands of either prominent or obscure opponents.

In the 1970-71 season, however, Panathinaikos got past the early rounds and met English champion Everton in the quarterfinals. Instead of losing, the Athens team raised eyebrows across Europe by narrowly eliminating Everton and going through to the semifinals to meet the formidable Red Star Belgrade. Incredibly, Panathinaikos managed to overcome a bad defeat in the Yugoslav capital and win by a wider margin in Athens, thus achieving the unthinkable: A place in the European final.

Cinderella dressed in green and white had not only made it to the ball, she had made it to the most legendary dance-floor of all time. The 1971 final was played in London’s awe-inspiring Wembley Stadium, the home of English soccer. The stadium, which had hosted the Olympic Games in 1948, was used exclusively for the English national side and England’s Football Association Cup final, an annual event attended by the royal family. The hyperbolic Greek press outdid itself, announcing that Panathinaikos had not only made it to the final, but had also made it into the “temple of soccer.”

Overwhelmed by the occasion, Panathinaikos succumbed to a superior Ajax Amsterdam side whose performance heralded a decade of Dutch wizardry on the world’s soccer stage. It did not matter for the Greeks. Not since the Serb defeat at Kosovo Polje in 1389 has a fall so emphatically been turned into a glorious myth. The team of green-and-whites returned to yet another hero’s welcome in Athens and the Greek equivalent of knighthood: their identification in the public’s mind as Greece’s European team, or, as one sportswriter put it, “Greece’s ambassador in the salons of Europe.”

Both the aura of appearing on Wembley’s hallowed turf in 1971 and the belief that Panathinaikos can do well in Europe continue to burn brightly. No other Greek club has gone so far in any European soccer competition, and Panathinaikos has twice come close to emulating its historic exploit. In 1984-85, it reached the semifinal round, but was eliminated by English powerhouse Liverpool – another heroic defeat.

It did not really matter that in the years that elapsed between those two bright spots, the Athens team had not distinguished itself on the European stage. The myth was intact. Bad losses could be put down to bad luck or conspiring referees. Success, on the other hand, simply confirmed that Panathinaikos was Greece’s European ambassador. AEK Athens, for instance, reached the semifinals of another European tournament in 1977, but this did not earn it European status in the eyes of the Greek sports press.

Panathinaikos has the most suitable of all soccer pedigrees to claim the lofty title of the country’s “Europeans.” Middle-class Athenians formed the team back in 1908 and, in a gesture of Europhilia, the team soon adopted the Irish green three-leaf clover as its emblem. In the 1920s, when several refugee-based clubs such as AEK appeared in the Greek capital, Panathinaikos emerged as the club favored by the city’s indigenous elite. This was the time when the greatest rivalry in soccer was born: Middle-class Athenian Panathinaikos versus Piraeus’s upstart petty-bourgeois Olympiakos, the people’s team.

The concepts of bourgeois Panathinaikos and lower-class Olympiakos would not survive the scrutiny of an undergraduate sociology seminar, of course, but it is appearances that count. Wealthy businessmen own both teams, and both enjoy a following among a range of social groups. Granted, Olympiakos’s support is in evidence not only in Piraeus and southern Athenian suburbs but also in the provinces, where there is a history of antagonism toward Athens. In contrast, support for Panathinaikos is centered in Athens and is relatively weaker in the provinces.

During the Sixties, a picture of Olympiakos on the wall of the apartment of the Melina Mercouri character in Never on Sunday no doubt enhanced the club’s image as the people’s team. While both clubs can boast their share of support among movie stars, however, the preferences of politicians are, for obvious reasons, a more carefully kept secret. An exception is Georgios Rallis, the conservative former prime minister who is a declared Panathinaikos fan. And few Greeks are aware that the youngest child of former King Constantine, Phillipos, is described as a “strong supporter of Panathinaikos” on the former royal family’s Web site.

The Greek public’s grudging acceptance of the then-European Community (now European Union), which became more sincere as funds began flowing into Greece, also legitimized Panathinaikos’s “Europeanism.” Political slogans such as “Hellas-Europe-Karamanlis” were translated into “Hellas-Europe-Panathinaikos” during the green-and-whites’ matches.

In his study of how the press made football America’s spectacle, entitled Reading Football: How the Popular Press Created an American Spectacle, Professor Michael Oriard points to a crucial difference between entertainment and sport. Both are central to modern popular culture, but unlike fiction or the movies, sport is unscripted. The good guys are not always guaranteed to win or get the girl. There is an element of luck and chance that may wreak havoc on the best-laid plans. The Dallas Cowboys may be “America’s Team,” but they are not always the winning team.

Likewise, Panathinaikos’s performance in European competition has often left much to be desired. But a combination of the Wembley legacy and a flash in the pan at regular intervals keeps Panathinaikos’s European identity alive.

In the mid-1990s, Panathinaikos reached the semifinals again. By this time, the competition had changed its name to the Champions’ League, and it involved many more teams and qualifying games. The green and white team met its old rival Ajax, and a historic Greek victory on the road in Amsterdam appeared to signal revenge and yet another appearance in the final. However, an early Ajax goal in Athens unsettled the Greeks and a collapse late in the game sealed their fate.

Although the 1990s witnessed the ascendancy of Olympiakos, the decade still managed to contribute to solidifying the European moniker of the Piraeus team’s great rival. Whenever Panathinaikos stumbled and threatened to tarnish its image, Olympiakos came to its rescue, determined to spurn European success. Domestic dominance enabled Olympiakos to make regular appearances in the Champions’ League in the late 1990s. But not only was the team from Piraeus unable to win on the road, it also suffered devastating defeats with scores that evoked the very early appearances of Greek clubs on the European stage. For example, Olympiakos contrived to go down 5-1 both in Spain and Norway within the space of three weeks in 1997.

Having learned from its mistakes, Olympiakos did much better the following year and reached the quarterfinals. It was five minutes away from eliminating Italian giant Juventus and moving on to the semifinals, however, when its defense allowed a crucial goal five minutes before the end.

The first phase of the 2001-02 Champions’ League completed in October has furnished yet more proof of Panathinaikos’s European confidence and Olympiakos’s inability to do well beyond Greek borders. Both teams were in separate groups that involved four teams in a home-and-away, round-robin format. Panathinaikos opened with a sensational victory on German soil and never looked back, beating England’s Arsenal on the way to topping the group and becoming one of 16 teams remaining in the competition.

Olympiakos, by contrast, fell again. They were seconds away from notching their first road victory in the League in a game in La Coruna, Spain, but allowed the home team a last-breath equalizing goal. After losing their unbeaten home record to Manchester United in mid-October, they were eleven minutes away from holding England’s champions to a draw at the latter’s famed Old Trafford Stadium. They then promptly allowed three goals, putting the teams from Manchester and La Coruna in the final round of 16 with Panathinaikos – at Olympiakos’s expense, of course.

Thus, once again, life has imitated Greece’s European soccer myth. Olympiakos has stumbled, but Greece’s green and white ambassador marches on in Europe.

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.

Style

Red-white-and-blue was certainly not the expected fashion flash of the season. Neither were star-and-stripe prints, the American flag, or funky ’70s-era “I love NY” logos. Firefighters were not seen as the height of urban style nor were they invited to big-time American fashion awards ceremonies. FDNY jackets and NYPD caps where far from being hot fashion accessories. Everything changed, however, on September 11.

The Day Fashion Froze, or Fashion in a State of Shock
Hitting the heart of New York during Fashion Week, the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center caused immediate casualties to the global fashion system. Important buyers, glamorous designers, and skinny catwalk queens from all over the globe had their usual date in the metropolis of American style. In town to combine business with pleasure, to place their spring and summer 2002 orders, to attend important fashion events, directional shows, must-see boutique openings, and all the parties, they ended up scared and unable to leave town, under definite and totally un-chic shock. Most New York fashion collections either retreated to private showrooms or were postponed until later notice. Appointments were canceled and orders were affected. The fashion crowd was suffering, facing an uneasy feeling of growing insecurity for the first time.

Tattered trends, last season’s camouflage, and hyped-to-death “terrorist” chic, reasonably considered to be in truly bad taste, were immediately taken out of both department stores and fashionable boutiques. In a gesture of patriotism, all the shops in New York and elsewhere replaced their window displays with huge – and popular – American flags. Red-white-and-blue had arrived.

Consumer confidence instantly became an issue, addressed within the first few days of the attacks by both President George W. Bush and ex-president Bill Clinton. “Go shopping,” New York’s mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, urged us. “The ultimate excuse for guilt-free shopping sprees had finally arrived,” a friend said, “how can I resist?” As indulgence and casual spending were transformed into a weapon against terror, patriotism drove our credit cards to their limits. Spending was now considered politically correct.

The “cancel-the-orders” epidemic
Regardless of strong and motivated public support, the international fashion system did not take long to declare itself to be one more “invisible” victim of the September 11 events. The first fashion-industry alarms went off immediately after the attack, as fashion manufacturers got caught in a dangerous “cancel-the-orders” epidemic. From small, downtown production workshops and fabric suppliers to international designer houses, and everyone in between, the fashion establishment counted its losses. Independent designers, new brands, and small businesses became the least likely to survive the order-canceling wave unharmed.

“I’ve received 13 cancellations already,” said New York-based, independent designer Nathaniel Christian on September 24. “Most were new accounts, and I estimate the damage close to $65,000, to this point.” Alice Roi, a rising star of “experimental” American fashion was also wary of the future. Her collections had broken through to the international luxury market just two seasons ago, with orders from trendy Parisian boutique Colette and the UK’s Harvey Nichols. Following the terrorist attacks, however, important luxury buyers find it “difficult” to place orders and try their hand at “alternative” design. Alice Roi is reasonably worried.

Meanwhile, French luxury giant LVMH decisively pulled the plug on two of the biggest fashion events of the season, the launch of Mark Jacobs’s debut fragrance at Harvey Nichols and the John Galliano at Dior retrospective at London’s Design Museum that was to premiere at the end of November.

Supply and retail conflicts
While average consumers tried their best to boost the global fashion economy, supply and retail seemed uninterested in “business-as-usual” scenarios. At a time when the fashion industry is facing a crisis, global fabric manufacturing seems heavily hit by the absence of significant orders and by clients pressing for lower, competitive prices. The situation is similar for the mass-market, bulk-fabric suppliers and the top-of-the-range, European fabric houses.

Indian leather trade exports have also been affected, while major American importers have chosen not to work with their usual Asian suppliers. In the latest developments, a number of companies are cutting cotton yarn, leather, and textile orders from Pakistan, representing a loss of roughly $100,000,000 for the 3.5 million people employed in those sectors.

American designers such as Tommy Hilfiger and Perry Ellis are among those that have cut their Pakistani orders, along with American Eagle Outfitters. The Gap and Warnaco are still holding their ground, however. The decision to cancel Pakistani orders has put serious pressure on European and American fabric houses to deal with tariff issues. For apart from yarns, leather, and fabrics, the Pakistani fashion industry includes a large number of small and usually illegal workshops that are very competitive in price. Cutting off Pakistani imports will soon have an effect on our daily shopping habits, therefore, as it will send retail prices to new, unpredictable highs.

Plunging Stocks and Unfashionable Layoffs
As companies in the fashion industry have watched their stock prices drop, they have announced layoffs. Five weeks after September 11, these were some of the numbers.

Reconstructing the Way Fashion Looks
Within days after the World Trade Center attack, every aspect of fashion and image communications was being reexamined. Magazines were catching up with the events by reediting issues, and pulling out “aggressive” fashion editorials and articles that seemed suddenly offensive or ironic.

Advertising companies have also been re-thinking their strategies, addressing the new, emerging esthetics. Italian sportswear maker Diesel immediately took corrective measures. It not only postponed the opening of a new New York shop, but also altered the message of its current advertising campaign from “save yourself” to “stay young” and renamed its new jeans line from “Scars and Stripes” to “Stars and Stripes.”

From photographers to art directors, powerful global “image-makers” are now asked to stay “sweet and quiet.” Fashion’s intense love affair with sex, vulgarity, and aggression seemed boring and annoying some months ago. In the current light, it is regarded as dangerous and inappropriate. As a result, Abercrombie & Fitch had to drop its Christmas catalogue, which was already printed. Shot by famous fashion photographer Bruce Weber long before September 11, it is now considered “dated” and over-sexed.

Dirty denim, torn leather jackets, and disheveled looks are clearly not acceptable anymore. The fame of Raf Simons, fashion designer extraordinaire, spread throughout the world some months ago because of his “urban terrorist chic.” Now the previously “hot” fashion statement of the Belgian designer is considered dangerous.

While fashion and advertising are struggling to create the esthetics of a new “altered” reality, some seem to welcome the image industry’s reaction as a much-needed change of direction. Fashion magazines and advertising had long ago reached limits of self-centeredness and were facing communications standstills. The public had been complaining for some time of feeling unrelated to extreme fashion editorials and highly unrealistic campaigns.

A Much-Needed Change
Fresh images, and emerging atmospheres of safety, normality, and tranquility seem to be what everyone is looking for right now. The fashion industry’s communications and advertising seem to be heavily addicted to bold and often vulgar statements. Even if the new esthetics need some time to sink in, they will eventually bring a much welcome change in the global world of image-making.

The way we look affects our moods and attitudes. The images we absorb through media and communications shape our self-esteem and position us in regard to the role models of the times. It’s time for a change.

Lena Papachristophilou is a writer for the Greek edition of the French fashion magazine, L’Officiel, and is also a designer. In 1997, she won a European prize in the Masters of Linen design competition.

Travel

Sicily has always known invaders. From the early Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Vandals, Ostrogoths, Byzantines, Arabs, Normans, on through a variety of soldiers of warring European nation-states, until, finally free of these foreign encumbrances, it took on – perhaps with a sigh (see Lampedusa’s Il Gattopardo) – the yoke of the Piedmontese monarchy and became part of the newly created nineteenth-century nation of Italy. Most of these invading peoples left interesting remains, some in relatively good state of preservation, some testimony to the vibrant cultural combinations that existed: a church made from a Doric temple or a room of a mosque forming the nave of a church.

Ironically, lovers of ancient Greece can see more complete temple architecture in Sicily than on the Greek mainland. That is because Sicily remained relatively desolate through the ages while elsewhere city dwellers quarried the remains of temples to build new edifices. Many will argue that a trip through the Greek remains of Sicily starts best on the mainland of Italy. A traveler might consider flying in to Naples so as to visit the Museo Nazionale Archeologico, which has a vast and informative collection of material from the Greek past of southern Italy that will provide an orientation. The Museo is, handily enough, within walking distance of the train station, where one can board a train for Paestum.

It is in Paestum, indeed, that a review of ancient Greek architecture truly begins. Here, situated in an open field with mountains as a backdrop, about 150 kilometers south of Naples, stand three extraordinarily gleaming white Doric temples in a remarkable state of preservation. If one carefully averts the eyes from the squalor of the tourist come-ons located outside the site, it is possible to imagine what it must have been like to visit in earlier centuries before Paestum was “discovered.” Of course, the romantic idea of quiet and spaciousness at these sites is no doubt at odds with the realities of ancient life, when a temple zone would have been a beehive of religious activity, pilgrims, suppliants, priests, sacrificial factotums, and the slaves to support these, not to mention the monumental donations that would mar the serenity of the landscape just as the monument to the veterans of the Second World War will destroy the prospect of the Mall in Washington, DC.

The visitor who continues down the coast to Reggio Calabria (more than 350 additional kilometers) for a visit to the Museo Nazionale della Magna Graecia will be rewarded with a display of two larger-than-life-sized bronze statues thought to be of Greek manufacture from the fifth century BCE. This involves a train ride of several hundred kilometers, first backtracking from Paestum to Salerno to get a fast train. At Reggio, get off at the stop called Lido. This is considered by the hardy traveler to be no more than a hop, skip, and a jump to the museum where the statues are housed, although most travelers – certainly those with luggage – will opt for taxis. These two statues, similar to the Zeus-Poseidon bronze in the National Archeological Museum in Athens, were probably lost at sea while in transit to Roman Italy. Relatively few bronze pieces survive from antiquity since they can so easily be melted down. That is why shipwrecks are so important, the ocean floor being an excellent hiding-place.

Discovered in 1972 off the coast of Riace by a scuba diver, these bronzes were a thrilling find. The photographs of underwater divers bringing them up, and holding them under the elbows as the statues moved through the water almost like humans, will bring a lump to the viewer’s throat. They are remarkable for their state of preservation, having eyelashes, eyeballs, and teeth intact, set into the bronze head, which gives them a ferociously fleshly appearance, quite unlike the ethereal, sightless glance one generally associates with ancient marble statues. Luckily, these great bronze warrior males are so thrilling and unexpected that the visitor to Reggio can overlook the absolute paucity of other matters of interest, not to mention general amenities in the city. There is, however, an excellent hotel directly behind the museum, the Grand Hotel Excelsior (fax: 011-39-09 659 3084).

Cross into Sicily and go south to Siracusa. Among the many delights of this beautiful city is the cathedral that is located on the immediately adjacent island of Ortygia. With its truly splendid baroque façade, the cathedral dominates a large square of exquisite proportions faced with majestic palaces. There are a number of outdoor restaurants and cafes in the piazza to provide the curious with hours of people-watching and the esthete with a variety of pleasing prospects. Inside, the visitor discovers that the cathedral is a seventh-century creation, made from a Doric temple to Athena. Because the interior was wisely stripped of its baroque decoration in the early decades of the twentieth century, the grand columns, pediments, and capitals of the original temple are still there to be seen embedded into the stone walls, forming support for the structure. It is a splendid example of the way in which the pagan religion of antiquity was so easily and naturally blended into the new cult of Christianity.

From Athena to Santa Maria del Piliero (or her equivalent) is a transformation found over and over again in the Mediterranean world. An exquisite variant on this eternal Mediterranean female figure is the so-called Venus Anadyomene (Rising from the Sea), a Roman copy of a second-century BCE Hellenic original, to be found in the Museo Archeologico Regionale Paolo Orsi. This museum is, like so many of its counterparts throughout southern Italy, an architectural gem housing a superbly installed important collection of ancient finds. The museum is on the mainland near the excavations of the ancient theater and amphitheater. Back on the island of Ortygia, the traveler will find excellent accommodation in the Grand Hotel (fax: 011-39-0931-464-611), which permits an easy stroll to numerous restaurants, as well as a visit to the Fons (Fountain) Arethusa mentioned by so many ancient literary figures. Dinner in the rooftop restaurant of the Grand Hotel offers not only superb cuisine but a dazzling view of the great bay of the city of Siracusa and the enchantment of the many fishing boats and yachts moored below.

Perhaps the loveliest place on the island, however, is the region immediately south of the city of Agrigento. The city itself is hideously deformed by modern concrete construction that, by contrast, makes Athens look like the hanging gardens of Babylon. But on the ridge south of the city stand three splendid temples, again from the fifth century. They are essentially Doric in style, but there is that characteristically experimental and innovative styling that the Sicilians achieved since they were far enough away from the rigidly conservative style masters of mainland Greece to be free to do their own thing. The Italian government has made this hilltop with its temples into a park, free of the cheap commercialism that disfigures most tourist sites in the world. A hotel, the Villa Athena, stands below in a large field of olive trees, one of the most delightful spots a visitor will encounter in the pursuit of beauty, tranquility, and history.

On a warm night, one may sit at dinner on the terrace of the Villa Athena while gazing up at the temples, dramatically (if dishonestly) lit by floodlights; after dinner, there is the chance to wander through the olive groves up to the temple site. The Villa Athena (fax: 011-39-0922-402-180) offers excellent food, but for something less pretentious, one may walk up the hill to Trattoria del Templi just at the beginning of the modern town. For an even more delightful outdoor dining experience with excellent food, many would suggest Ristorante Kukalos, some few kilometers by car from the temple site.

A few hours away from Agrigento by car is the vast archeological zone of Selinunte. There are a great number of temples in and surrounding this Hellenistic city site, still mostly unexcavated, but with the grid street pattern and walls very much intact and in evidence. The Italian government is keen to reconstruct the temples to give scale, dimension, and depth to an otherwise flat plain. This flies in the face of standard archeological procedure, but the romanticism of leaving a site “as found” is in fact a denial of the fact that the archeologists derange reality as much as those anthropologists who interview supposedly innocent “natives.” Some temples are already up. Far more thrilling than the temples, however, is the ancient quarry site for the temple construction of Selinunte called Cave di Cusa, 18 kilometers to the west. Here, one can see giant column drums still half carved from the stone, others toppled over, a dramatic sight that works very powerfully on the viewer’s sympathies, making all too clear that frightening moment in 409 BCE when work stopped as the news must have reached the workers that the Carthaginians had invaded.

Selinunte is a very large site to walk around, but luckily enough it stands on the very edge of a modern resort town called Marinella, where modest hotels (among which some favor the Lido Azzurro) and a variety of good fish restaurants surmount a beautiful strip of beach. By now, the tourist must decide whether it is time to hasten to the airport outside Palermo, visit the city with its beautiful palaces and Norman architecture (one will have a comfortable stay at Centrale Palace Hotel [fax: 011-39-091-33-48-81]), or make the effort to detour to see a most unusual and singular statue on the island of Motya, near Marsala on the western coast. This extraordinary find, discovered quite by accident in 1979, is a marble sculpture, life-size, of a teenage boy, whose face is not unlike other archaic or early so-called severe-style heroic boys (one thinks of The Charioteer at Delphi, for instance). This boy, however, wears what is for moderns the erotic provocation of a diaphanous gown revealing what straightforward nudity makes unremarkable. The reward for seeing this strange phenomenon easily makes up for the indifferent accommodations in hotels and restaurants one will find in this part of the island.

Finally, no visit to Sicily is complete without a stop at Segesta, a temple far out in the countryside, in the hills, two hours south of Palermo. Its peristyle stands on a large stone base, stark, dramatic, with no other diversion for the eye. For once, the mechanisms of commercial tourism fade into the background, the enormous fact of this solitary structure demands the viewer’s complete attention, and the passage of time is obliterated.

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.

Arts & Letters

Hedwig and the Angry Inch opens with a roar – “Don’t you know me, Kansas City? I’m the new Berlin Wall. Try and tear me down!” – and never flags for 90 minutes of rock musical that just may breathe new life back into this moribund genre.

Hedwig, the “internationally ignored song stylist” from communist East Berlin, tours the seedier establishments of the United States in a shadow tour of her one-time lover, Tommy Gnosis, who has stolen her material and soared to stardom. Born the same year the Berlin Wall was erected, Hedwig (née Hansel) suffers the permanent effects of a botched sex change operation performed so that s/he could flee East Berlin with her new American GI husband and sugar daddy supreme, Luther. After Luther abandons her in a Kansas trailer park for a younger man, however, Hedwig rallies herself and mines her undying devotion to rock-and-roll and pop ballads, first playing the drab holes near the military base and later launching her national tour with her husband, Yitzhak, and crew.

Hedwig’s story unfolds in a series of songs, stories, and flashbacks, told to a few admiring fans and the rest of the stunned patrons of the various Bilgewater establishments into which her energetic manager books her and her band, the Angry Inch – a constant, visceral reminder of what transpired on the “doctor’s slab.” As doubles of her audience, we, too, perhaps, are initially stunned by her tale, but are fully won over by a story that is raw and heartbreaking, and conveyed with sincerity and utter abandonment.

It seems entirely appropriate that Hedwig would be released as a feature film in the same summer as the fortieth anniversary of the construction of the Berlin Wall. Indeed, not only is Hedwig’s biography closely linked to the Wall, but the construction of the Wall, the divisions the Wall represented, and the lingering political and national ambiguities in the wake of its demolition, serve as constant metaphors for Hedwig’s own story. The irony is lost neither on her nor on us that the drastic actions undertaken to enable her to leave East Berlin would have been obviated just one short year later by the Wall’s collapse. As the opening song intones: “We thought the Wall would stand forever, and now that it’s gone, we don’t know who we are anymore. Ladies and gentlemen, Hedwig is like that Wall. Standing before you on a divide between East and West, slavery and freedom, man and woman….”

The image of a split, and the subsequent search for wholeness and shared identity, are constant themes throughout the film, whether in the references to Berlin (“a town ripped in two”) or most overtly in the masterful ballad, “Origin of Love.” This seemingly simple song – which recounts the theory of love from Plato’s Symposium that, having been split into two by vengeful gods, human beings must spend their lifetimes looking for their other halves – engages complex questions of identity and loss, which gain poignancy for not being limited to gender ambiguities. The playful, yet powerful, animation sequence by Emily Hubley unites this ancient text, not only with Hedwig’s plight but also with the political, ideological, racial, and sexual divisions that divide us all.

Hedwig’s stage presence and singing is clearly influenced by the music that she heard in East Berlin over Armed Forces Radio, when she was still young Hansel, dancing with abandon on his bed (much to the chagrin of his mother). Indeed, rock-and-roll is not (or at least, not only) idealized as a route to fame and stardom – the traitorous Tommy Gnosis is criticized for having bought into the falsity of that soulless exploitation of music – but as a way of bridging divides and helping us to dream. In “Sugar Daddy,” Hedwig sings about the “rush of rock and roll,” and it is indeed a rush that we in the audience experience from this music, composed by Stephen Trask and performed by John Cameron Mitchell. Hedwig is a combination of her singing heroes, bringing the pop sweetness of Toni Tenille and Debbie Boone into collision with the wit and audaciousness of Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, and David Bowie, and the howling rage of punk rock. The Hedwig tour is all glam, all the time – and an unparalleled advertisement for the cosmetics industry, stonewashed denim, and blonde hairpieces (lovingly draped on individual wig stands on every available surface of Hedwig’s various hotel rooms).

The film takes us on a glorious romp through decades of image-making and image-selling in America – most notably in the stupendous “Wig in a Box” sequence, in which Hedwig first reveals her drive to go on after Luther has abandoned her. Cataloguing trends and fashions from cocktails and entertainment systems to hairstyles, the song and staging are all about our own image obsessions from the 1950s through the late 1980s – and the ever-increasing presence of these images in our lives. The song leads us through various chronological transformations, from the lowly checkout girl who aspires to be a beauty-pageant contestant to Farrah Fawcett to, finally, a punk-rock star of stage and screen (this last in obvious reference to the massive transformations of Courtney Love, of which our image- and tabloid-obsessed culture keep us current). The song culminates as the house in which Hedwig is singing literally loses its “fourth wall” to become a rock-concert stage in the middle of the desolate Kansas prairie, emitting its signal to all those lonely hearts and dreamers across the country.

This highly stylized sequence is one of the most self-consciously “performative” scenes in the film. It even pokes fun at its own over-the-top self by incorporating a bouncing ball sing-along. Or, perhaps, the film slyly winks, we are witnessing the new sound of music, and, henceforth, sold-out movie theaters won’t be seating the dirndl-wearing crowd, but will be packed with Hed-heads in yellow Styrofoam headgear deliriously singing along.

The film successfully navigates an extremely difficult challenge, namely, how to reconceptualize the original stage show (which played to adoring crowds in New York City) into a feature film without losing the edge and electricity that made it so successful in the first place. Despite the obvious loss of a physical presence, we in the audience actually feel closer to this screen image of Hedwig. For although John Cameron Mitchell continues to play in broad gestures, his attention to detail and nuance bring us in closer contact with the character’s inner life. In other words, Hedwig is played both larger than life and utterly realistically. And the pain and poignancy of her story are intensified rather than masked by the musical performances. The contrast of Hedwig with Tommy Gnosis is played to good effect in this respect. Tommy is all image with no soul, who neither understands the symbolism of his name, his facial paint, nor the meaning of his songs (in one scene, Hedwig listens to Tommy sing “Origin of Love” and realizes he mistakes the name of one of the ancient gods).

After watching Hedwig in all of her rage and glory, it is jolting to see her strip away her persona as the film closes. Finally embraced by adoring crowds – even fêted on the cover of New York magazine – Hedwig seems to realize that her own anger has created a stranger capable of unimagined cruelty. Stripped of her finery, Hedwig turns over the show to Yitzhak, who, deprived of his chance of joining the overseas tour of Rent, finally revels in the spotlight of the rocker. Hedwig exits the film, naked and engulfed by the streets of New York, in search, perhaps, of an identity that was lost long ago. For even with the divide bridged and the Wall torn down, unification as a true merging remains an ideal that, whether in love or politics, can never be fulfilled.

In the meantime, we’ll be listening for those transmissions on the midnight radio. Hedwig takes the “good stuff” and runs with it.

Stefanie Harris is assistant professor of German and comparative literary studies at Northwestern University.

Arts & Letters

The history of rebetika, both as a recorded and live genre, has always been closely linked to the émigré Greek communities in the United States. Rebetika were an important part of the repertory performed in the cafes aman such as the one opened by Marika Papagika and her cimbalum-playing husband Gus on 34th Street in New York in 1925. The list of singers, songwriters, and instrumentalists – from Marika Papagika, Madame Koula, and Amalia Baka to Jack Gregory (Ioannis Halkias) and Yiorgos Katsaros – is long and distinguished. American recording companies such as Columbia, Odeon, and HMV, as well as specialized record companies such as the Greek Record Company of Chicago and Orthophonic, recorded hundreds of Greek folk songs, as well as songs in the so-called “Asia Minor” and a smaller number in the Piraeus rebetika styles. The market for these songs was, as record sales suggest, much broader than the Greek community of the United States. Not only were Greek songs popular with an audience of immigrants familiar with the music of the former Ottoman empire, but recordings made by Greek stars in the United States were exported to Greece and influenced trends in the popular music of the homeland.

Judging from the recordings, the long and rich history of Greek dimotika, cafe aman, and rebetika music produced in this country lasted, with a few exceptions, from around 1910 to 1948, with its heyday in the 1920s. During the 1950s and 1960s, as the Greek recording industry recovered from the Second World War and musical tastes changed, Greek recording studios based in Athens became the principal source for Greek music. And when the revival of interest in the rebetika began in the 1970s, it was Greek-based record companies, starting with EMIAL, that led the field in reissuing original recordings, first of the 78rpms made in Greece, but later also including records made in the US.

For those interested in Greek music who had no access to the originals, recordings such as the CBS Ta Prota Rebetika – The First Rebetika (CBS 53753) and the Falireas Brothers’ Authentic Rebetica Recordings from the U.S.A. (AF 67) were amazing discoveries. Whatever the quality of the recordings (and some were better than anything available in Greece, having been preserved in the United States), it was evident that there was a fund of cafe aman and rebetika music recorded in the United States before Greek studios were established. It was the first time many rebetika fans listened to the marvelous voice of Papagika, or were made aware that the American Greek musical scene might have been as rich as its Athenian counterpart.

One problem of the early re-recordings of rebetika released in Greece was that they provided minimal information about the music or the artists, even when the material was available. The recordings on the Falireas Brothers’ label, for example, were obtained from the fine collection of Dr. Jim Pallis, who could have provided, had he been asked, useful information for liner notes. It was not until Martin Schwartz’s record for the Arhoolie label, Greek-Oriental Rebetica: Songs and Dances in the Asia Minor Style. The Golden Years: 1911-1937 (Folklyric CD 7005), that we saw a well-produced album, with excellent cover notes and careful attention to sound quality. The Arhoolie record, based on Schwartz’s own remarkable record collection, was followed, in 1994, by fellow Berkeley resident David Soffa’s well-produced Marika Papagika: Popular and Rebetic Music in New York, 1918-1929 (Alma Criolla Records ACCD 802), a CD that helped restore the place of this legendary singer in the Greek musical world of the Teens and Twenties.

Fortunately, it is not only in the United States that we can now find well-documented and carefully remastered recordings of rebetika. Companies such as Minos-EMI, with its Greek Archive series, Lyra, and FM are now all producing excellent CDs of rebetika with accompanying notes and booklets. But Rounder Records, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has made a significant contribution to the booming industry of revamped rebetika with their series of CDs based largely on the personal collection of Charles Howard. The two CDs under review are the latest in this series.

Mourmourika
Mourmourika (Rounder CD 1120) wisely focuses on some of the unique treasures of the early Greek musical scene in the United States. It is a fascinating collection of songs, many of them quite rare. As one might expect from the title, the focus of the collection is songs that deal with drugs and the underworld. With three or four exceptions (depending on how fussy you are), the quality of the recordings is good, sometimes surprisingly so, and at least from my point of view the rarity of the scratchier recordings justifies their inclusion. For example, the third track is a song called “Ta disticha tou manga” recorded in Athens in 1931 by a singer known as “Spachanis.” The bouzouki player is Yiorgos Manetas, a performer about whom we know almost nothing, but whom Markos Vamvakaris credited with having been the first to use “European” tuning (D-A-D) on the instrument. There are a number of other interesting features of this song, including the chorus of voices and tapping which give it the flavor of an improvised performance. The lyrics, too, are notable because they appear to be the source of Mouflouzelis’s “Pou’soun manga to heimona” (na’mouna sti gi veloni/na patas na s’angiloni…Anapse to kai svise to/to keri to sparmaseto).

Another US recording on the CD is a version of Tassos Eleftheriadhis’s version of “Mourmouraki,” with Nick Doneff on violin and Marko Melkon on oud. The song was recorded by Rita Abadzi in 1934 for HMV and credited to Christos Marinos. The version on the Mourmourika was recorded in New York around 1948 and apparently credited to the singer. Eleftheriadhis’s voice is pleasant and Doneff’s violin-playing is, as usual, a delight to hear. While the quality of the sound is excellent, the same cannot be said for the bouzouki solo, “Raste tou Deke” (sic), by legendary bouzouktzi Jack Gregory, in which the scratchy surface makes it difficult to appreciate the instrumentalist’s skill. But a taximi by the performer who may have been at least partly responsible for the popularity as well as the style of the bouzouki in the Piraeus rebetika repertory is worth stretching one’s ears for.

One of the more curious pieces on the CD is “Kochlarakias” (sic) by Vassilis Mesolongitis, a review artist who apparently made only two rebetika recordings. Like Papazoglou’s “I Foni tou argile,” the song opens with two manges exchanging humorous sallies like actors in a vaudeville show, followed by a song of hard luck and addiction. The connection to comic theater is also present in Yorgos Kamvisis’s “O kaimos tis filakis,” an Odeon recording made in 1933. Kamvisis was a writer and performer of sketches for theatrical reviews, and here he has taken the Turkish melody of “Alatsatiani” and composed new lyrics about a prisoner whose girlfriend deceives him while he’s in prison. As far as I know, no one has followed up the connection between rebetika and epitheorisi, but it might be worth investigating. Although recorded in the US, Yorgos Katsaros’s “Mas pigan exoria” might also be classed in the category of comedy routine, with its junkie protagonists refusing the unappetizing diet of milk, peas, and jam fed to them in internal exile.

Zacharias Kasimatis’s version of “O mangas tou Votanikou” has a rough charm highlighted by the marvelous bouzouki-playing. The notes say Peristeris is playing guitar here. There is some debate about exactly what instrument Peristeris is playing, but it is not a guitar, and it sounds remarkably like a bouzouki to me. Both of Stellakis’s (Stelios Perpiniadhes’s) tracks on the CD are as fine examples of early rebetika as you could wish for. One is his rendition of “Papatzis,” a zeibekiko by Papazoglou, the other is his version of Toundas’s great song, “Zoula I Maryiori.” Together with Kanarapoulou’s “Enas ston teke,” they make the Mourmourika more than a CD for aficionados only. They remind us that the best of rebetika was as rewarding as any Greek folk music.

The Women of Rembetica
The most recent CD released by Rounder Records, Women of Rembetica (2000), contains only one recording made in the United States. An interesting collection because of its focus on early female singers in the rebetika tradition – some well-known, like Eskenazi and Abatzi, others less so, like Daisy Stavrakopoulou and Virginia Manghidhou – the CD consists of remastered recordings made in Athens during the 1930s and 1940s, with one important exception. The Smyrna-born singer Virginia Maghidou made a series of fine recordings for the Metropolitan label during the Second World War, most with violinist Nick Doneff. She also had her own recording company (Virginia Records) in New York City during the late 1940s and early 1950s.

The female singers of the early rebetika were consummate performers, and we have some fine examples of their art on this CD. Roza Eskenazi’s “Eimai alaniara meraklou” and “Neo manavaki” are both charming (incidentally there are some lines missing from the translation in the second song), but for me, as usual, it is Rita Abadzi who stands out, with her magnificent amane in the mode Sabach. (To call it “Morning Manes” is not helpful; here we need to be told what “Manes” and what “Sabach” mean before we go into the temporal associations of the mode.) With the immortal Semsis backing her, her vocal improvisation is not just a heartstopper, it is also superbly controlled. No wonder one of the musicians calls out, “Na haro to stomataki sou, kouklitsa” (May I enjoy your little mouth, sweetheart!). Whether amanedhes can be called rebetika is another question, but since the focus of the CD is on the performers, such vocal improvisations help establish how musically skilled these singers were. The other example of an amane on this CD is sung by Marika Kanaropoulou. Again, it showcases her virtusoso skill as a singer, and in this case highlights the fine performance of Dimitris Ladholoulos (“Manisalis”) on violin.

Another of my favorite pieces on the Women CD is “Nea Politissa” by Marika Frandzeskopoulou. The charm of this version is in the singer’s interaction with her “koumpania,” or musical ensemble. It is a great line-up of performers, led by Yiannis Draghatsis (“Ogdhondakis”) and Agapios Tomboulis on oud, but there is so much kefi that you wish you were in the studio sharing the fun.

The sound quality of the recordings on Women is more even than on the Mourmourika. Only in the case of Abadzi’s “To bouzoukaki” and Angelitsa Papazoglou’s “Dervisena” does it become a problem, but the opportunity to hear Vangelis Papazoglou’s blind singer-songwriter/wife perform is a bonus for serious fans of rebetika. Another unusual song on the CD is the naughty and charming “Mylonas” recorded by Anna Politissa with Stellakis Perpiniadhes in 1934. The lyrics take the form of a dialogue between a randy girl and a miller whose “mill won’t grind.” Unfamiliar to me, too, are the two recordings by Yeorgia Mittaki, who was known for her recordings of dimotika, but has an earthy voice that works well for the rebetika lyrics she is singing here. There is also a rare recording by Daisy Stavrakopoulou. The latest dated recordings on the CD are by Virginia Maghidhou and Stella Haskil, whose “Pexe bouzouki mou,” with Peristeris on bouzouki, is another high point on this CD. These last tracks on the CD take us up to 1948. By then, there were many other rebetises performing, including the great Sotiria Bellou and Marika Ninou. One hopes that another Rounder CD will focus on these women stars of postwar rebetika.

Generally, the liner notes to these two Rounder CDs are informative and much better than many such CDs released in Greece, but there are some errors and oversights that are unfortunate in an otherwise well-produced series. One problem concerns the use of transliteration rather than Greek script for the lyrics of songs. I’m not against transliteration per se, but as there is no universal system of transliteration, it can lead to confusion. It would seem to me that listeners who know the language would prefer to have it in Greek script and those who don’t won’t make much out of the transliterations. Throughout the notes to the Women of Rembetica, there is a recurring problem of an additional letter “I” appearing in place of a simple apostrophe indicating ellipsis. This makes it difficult to reconstruct the Greek original, let alone pronounce the Latinized transliteration. There are some other minor errors in transliteration, such as Marika Politissa appearing as Poitissa in one place.

The most serious error is that two of the tracks on Women have been switched so that Marika Politissa’s fine rendition of “Den me toumbaris,” listed in the booklet as Track 9 is in fact Track 8, while Rita Abadzi’s “Hira m’ekapses” is Track 9. Incidentally, it is hard to imagine why the liner notes on the Politissa song should say, “Spyros Peristeris (guitar or bouzouki),” when Marika calls out, “Yeia’sou Spyro me to bouzouki sou!”

But these are, as I have said, minor quibbles. On the whole, rebetika fans will be grateful for the new Rounder CDs, which make a number of unusual and high-quality recordings available to listeners and remind us that this early period of Greek urban music was indeed a golden age.

Gail Holst-Warhaft teaches at Cornell University and is the author of The Road to Rembetika: Music of the Greek Sub-Culture.

Athens 2004

Greeks like to say that, although they do things at the last minute, they somehow always manage to pull through. It’s such a popular sentiment that President Kostis Stephanopoulos expressed it to explain how Athens will deal with its Olympian delays. However, it’s a bit of Greek folk wisdom that the International Olympic Committee (IOC) doesn’t want to hear anymore.

Following an IOC inspection on September 26-28, Alex Gilady, the Israeli member, said that one of his goals was to convince Greeks to stop saying “that in Greece we are used to doing things at the last minute and usually they work.” The Greek government has insisted since it was awarded the Olympics in 1997 that it will organize memorable 2004 games, as well as deliver the venues on time. It was a reasonable promise when it was made because Athens had 70 percent of the venues already built, but, since then, the only thing as consistent as the government’s assurances has been the IOC’s warnings about delays.

After the recent visit to judge Athens’s progress, Denis Oswald, the man in charge of the IOC coordinating committee for 2004, said that significant problems remain in venue and road construction, accommodation, and transport. “We feel that measures have to be taken immediately in order to be sure that we are back on track and that everything is delivered on time,” Oswald said. “It is important also for the test events….We will have a number of test events in the different sports…even one year prior to the games, and the condition for these test events is obviously that the installations are ready on time,” said Oswald, a Swiss lawyer who is head of the International Rowing Federation.

Athens’s organization has been plagued by problems since the city was awarded the bid four years ago. The government has yet to build any venues, with only 34 months remaining before the games are held. Former IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch warned last year that organizers were running out of time, which prompted Prime Minister Kostas Simitis both to bring back Athens bid leader Gianna Angelopoulos-Daskalaki and to pledge personal involvement in the preparations.

When Angelopoulos-Daskalaki was first appointed over a year ago, she used to say, “We are running a marathon at a sprinter’s pace.” Now she has changed her tune. “We also need the government’s support, not with words, but with actions,” she commented after the IOC visit. “The coordinating committee has expressed its concern in matters relating to construction of venues and sports facilities. It is clear: We need infrastructure and cannot afford delays….It is the government that must construct the foundation for a great Olympic Games.”

Deadlines have repeatedly been pushed back over the years, and the government has blamed delays on the “Greek way” of doing things. “The timetable can be assessed in many and different ways. In Greece…we have a mentality as a country and as a society. We are very polite and very flexible when we have discussions with foreigners, and we make overly optimistic judgments,” said Evangelos Venizelos, minister of culture and an important official in the 2004 organization.

Nevertheless, IOC officials are worried, and they have also grown tired of issuing warnings every two months. They are starting to believe that the delays are due to a stop-and-go approach, working hard when an IOC team is about to visit for an update and then slackening off after it leaves. IOC president Jacques Rogge, formerly the head of the Athens oversight committee, has regularly criticized the bureaucracy in Greece. “There should be no comfort in the fact that 2004 sounds far off in the distance,” said Rogge, in his first visit to Athens as head of the IOC.

Venizelos claims that Rogge has gotten it all wrong, saying Greece has experience in construction, while the IOC does not. “The IOC has no experience in construction, while it has great experience in all the non-construction programs of the Olympic Games, which are repeated almost identically in every Olympics organization….This explains the difference in the points of view,” according to Venizelos. Oswald stresses that the IOC does know about construction, and he adds that prolonged delays jeopardize the delivery date of the venues. “We know you can postpone the beginning of the work once, twice, but if you postpone too much, at the end it is difficult to achieve the final date of delivery,” Oswald says.

The clock keeps ticking. Tight deadlines may therefore force officials to resort to prefabricated venues, including nearly all the sporting facilities along the southern coast, where boxing, handball, and tae kwon do are scheduled to take place. This decision means that the games may not leave a legacy to the city, which was an important reason for having them come back to their birthplace.

There are “a number of areas where we have delays. And these areas are mainly connected with construction, and when I say construction, it is not just construction of sports venues, but also construction of road infrastructure,” Oswald said after his inspection. “If you do not have a road to get to the best technical installation, the best stadium, obviously it is not useful.” Greece needs to be constantly monitored and pressed in order to move ahead, Oswald warns.

Accommodation is another big problem, as there is a vast shortage of hotel rooms in the capital. There is nowhere to house the many spectators that are expected to travel to Greece for the games. About 3,500 rooms still remain to be booked for the 16,000 members of the Olympics organization, which includes referees and officials. Hoteliers and the government have been at odds over building new hotels because their post-Olympics use is uncertain. Organizers have suggested using cruise ships docked at the main port of Piraeus.

Other major delays are the table tennis and gymnastics venue in Goudi. The contract for the facility was supposed to have been signed in July 2001, then was pushed back to September, and now still remains to be announced. Canceled road works that would connect venues and cut down on the traffic clogging the capital could create a transport problem. Already, an extension to one of the major arteries in the area will not be built, and there are concerns about an important ring road leading to Piraeus. Finally, plans are still uncertain on construction of proposed suburban rail and tram lines to connect the city center with seaside venues.

“IOC-stated reservations may be correct, but they refer to some works and not to the totality of works under construction,” according to Tilemahos Hitiris, a government spokesman. In an attempt to cut down on bureaucracy, the government approved legislation on legal sanctions for major works, as well as urban-improvement plans. It includes a wide range of provisions, from hiring more than 3,000 culture ministry employees to reducing the billboard space in downtown Athens. Not all venues are behind schedule, however. The most controversial one, the rowing center at Schinias, 30 kilometers (18 miles) north of Athens, is two months ahead of the timetable.

In August, Oswald sent an expert to check on Athens’s progress and found that the situation was alarming. Oswald was also concerned that a crisis in the governing PASOK party was a factor in the slow preparations. For months, Simitis’s government has been in the midst of political turmoil because of failing to meet economic targets or fixing the bankrupt social security system. An emergency party convention that adjourned on October 14 finally decided that Simitis will stay as head of the party.

Some IOC members are upset by the government’s lack of visible progress and are looking toward the next stage in the preparations, which is technical, such as the test events. The first test event will be held at the sailing center in Agios Kosmas. Construction is set to begin in November.

There are some aspects of the preparations that have proven very successful, such as marketing, licensing, volunteers, and broadcasting, all run by the 2004 organizing committee. In any case, while the games will go on in Athens, they might never come back home again. “Only Greece can organize such magical games because of the historical heritage, and we do not want to miss this opportunity. The next one might only come in 100 years, and we have some hope to have a long life, but probably not long enough to see the next games in Athens,” Oswald comments. The next inspection by the IOC is set for November 21-23.

Lisa Orkin works in the Athens bureau of Associated Press.

Athens 2004

Greece has finally reconciled itself, not to one, but to three American bases near the old airport at Elliniko, the coastal suburb of Athens – but they’re for baseball, not military bases. The US Air Force base there closed in 1990, but some facilities are still being used for cultural and other activities run by local residents and Athens-based clubs and societies. Of all those facilities, it is the baseball field that has gotten the most regular use, as the staging ground for bringing baseball to Greece.

Baseball took off only a few years ago in Greece, but it quickly received a major-league boost thanks to the Baltimore Orioles. Efforts in Greece to develop “America’s national pastime” attracted the attention of Nicholas Burns, who until recently served as US ambassador to the country. Eager to offer assistance to Greece’s baseball pioneers, Burns – an avid baseball fan – contacted Greek American Peter Angelos, owner of the Baltimore Orioles. He suggested that Angelos help coordinate a new type of US aid to Greece: Greek American baseball players who would play for the Greek national team.

While this project is obviously not as weighty as the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan that shaped Greece’s course after the Second World War, it almost seems to be as urgent for some people. Instead of ensuring Greek adhesion to the Western alliance, however, the task at hand now is to help Greece avoid humiliation in the baseball competition at the Athens Olympic Games in 2004.

Greek baseball, begun as a recreational pursuit by a handful of people, would have remained in obscurity had not Athens been awarded the 2004 Olympics. One of the privileges accruing to the host country of the Olympics is that it automatically plays in the finals of all team sports. All other national teams have to compete in qualifying rounds over a period of several months, as the Olympic finals can accommodate only a limited number of participants in team sports.

Getting a bye on all rounds up to the finals may be good news for Greece’s national teams in established sports; it is mixed news at best, however, for team sports that are still very new to Greece. The increasing emphasis on exercise, and on playing a variety of sports other than the two major spectator sports of soccer and basketball, has seen the growth of many new sports in Greece (volleyball, for example, or a form of racquetball played on the beach called “raketes”). While it is safe to say, however, that the latter activity will not make it into the Olympics in the near future, sports new to Greece such as baseball, canoeing/kayaking, field hockey, softball, triathlon, and women’s soccer will be part of the program in 2004.

The small groups of pioneer enthusiasts in each sport will be competing against the best teams in the world, therefore, with a very thin line dividing the potential for a glorious underdog performance from a crushing and humiliating defeat. In order to forestall a public-relations setback at the 2004 games, the Greek government has taken an earnest and unprecedented interest in the new sports. It has appointed administrators of newly created “federations” to run and finance them and, above all, to organize Greek “national teams” for each one.

The baseball federation organized its first tournaments in the season that spanned 1999 and 2000. Marousi 2004 won that initial championship and Spartacos Glyfadas won the cup. These tournaments are now an annual event that involve 18 teams from Athens, Patra, Thessaloniki, Kefalonia, and Aigio.

The tournaments have taken place at the Elliniko baseball field simply because there are no others in Greece. The teams practice on makeshift fields in open lots or on soccer fields. The federation covers the travel costs of the teams outside Athens. Officials from Italy, a country where baseball is fairly strong by European standards, have gone to Greece to umpire the finals.

Most Greek baseball players are homegrown, a testament to the slow but steady spread of the game across the globe. When Srdjan Milosavljevic became manager of Thessaloniki’s team, Baseball Club Petritsi, he found that his players were mostly locals, with only a smattering of players who had played in the United States, Canada, or Germany before their families re-emigrated back to Greece. Milosavljevic, an expatriate Serb, learned to play the game in the former Yugoslavia.

Ambassador Burns was taken by baseball’s arrival in Greece, but he was also very concerned that the creation of a government-sponsored federation in itself would not be enough. As a Bostonian, Burns knows all about lost causes on the baseball field. The legendary Boston Red Sox have not won the “World Series” (US baseball’s championship) since the First World War. Greek amateurs needed some help with the Olympics looming on the horizon. The Greek national team’s first games, against Italy and Israel, resulted in losses. In the Olympics, it may come up against baseball powers such as Cuba, Japan, or the United States – hence Burns’s call to Angelos, whom he contacted through Maryland’s Greek American senator, Paul Sarbanes.

Angelos has warmed to the task of locating talented Greek American ball players in the minor professional leagues, as well as on top-level college teams. The Orioles have already identified a long list of about 90 Greek Americans who could play for Greece. They are being assisted by Major League Baseball, which runs professional baseball in the United States and is interested in spreading the sport globally. Major League Baseball International (MLBI) will reportedly contribute some $500,000 by the time the Athens games arrive, and it is also shipping baseball equipment to Greece.

In addition, it has named a full-time youth development official, Mike Riskas, a former college coach and Pomona College professor of physical education. Riskas is upbeat about baseball’s prospects in Greece and says that the “Greeks are wonderfully motivated and excited about learning how to play baseball. The advent of baseball-experienced American, Canadian, Australian, and Italian Greeks and others will help contribute to the growth of our great game.” Meanwhile, other Greek Americans are contributing. Greek American businessman Chris Karalekas, a lifelong New York Yankees fan, has formed Baseball Acropolis, a group that aims to raise funds for Greek baseball.

A recent ruling by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) paves the way for many Greek Americans to play for Greece. The IOC and the Greek government have agreed that any person of Greek descent who has at least one grandparent (from either side of the family) born in Greece qualifies to participate in the 2004 Olympics. This relaxation of the usual criteria of nationality offers college and professional baseball players of Greek descent a unique opportunity to represent their ancestral homeland in the Olympics.

There is even talk now of Greece hosting the upcoming European “B” level baseball championship in Athens. This, however, would require acceleration of plans to construct baseball fields in the area of the old airport at Elliniko. The field on the old US Air Force base is smaller than regulation size – there simply would be too many home runs batted over the heads of outfielders and beyond the field’s perimeter. If the new fields can be built in time, hosting a European tournament would alert the Greek public to baseball’s arrival. To date, baseball’s Greek pioneers are laboring in obscurity.

In the summer of 2001, the Orioles invited the Greek national team to train at their home field in Baltimore, the famed Camden Yards. Reporting on the visit, writers scrambled for appropriate puns: “Beware of Greeks bearing bats,” “Greek baseball bring the Home-r to Greece,” and the inevitable “It’s Greek to them.” However, US baseball know-how and material “aid” added to Greek American talent can make observers change their tune. Greek athletes have been winning more and more distinctions in the Olympics across a range of sports. Thanks to Greek America, they may even do so on the baseball field.

Balkans

As NATO troops complete the collection of weapons voluntarily turned in by Albanian rebels and the parliament of the republic of Macedonia finishes debating a package of measures to expand Albanian civil rights, the international community is congratulating itself for having averted one more Balkan conflict, at least in the short term. The complex agreement worked out between political leaders representing the Macedonian Slavs and the Macedonian Albanians is indeed a tribute to the persistence of such international bodies as the EU, the UN, and NATO. All parties, both local and international, have publicly touted the agreement as a major step (although still only a first step) toward creating conditions for a functioning, multiethnic Macedonian republic. The question I would like to ask here is not so much whether the agreement can be made to stand up in its initial phases, but whether what has been agreed upon can indeed lead to a functioning, multiethnic state.

Background
Before beginning this analysis, a quick review of some facts is in order. The former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia achieved independence in 1991, having been previously (since 1945) one of the six federal republics that composed the second Yugoslavia. This landlocked country of 25,000 square kilometers is home to approximately two million people. Sixty to seventy percent of the population are Macedonian Slavs, mostly Orthodox Christians, who speak a South Slavic language quite close to Bulgarian. Twenty to thirty percent are Macedonian Albanians, almost all Muslim and speaking Albanian, a language unrelated to Macedonian. The exact percentages of Slavs and Albanians in the population is a matter of much dispute, however, and a census that was to be held this year to resolve the issue has been shelved for the moment. The populations are distributed unequally in the country, with Albanians dominant close to the borders of Albania and Kosovo in the north and northwest (including the city of Tetovo, the country’s second largest), and Slavs dominant in the south and east. Skopje, the capital, is an ethnically mixed city at the border of Albanian-dominated territory. This rough distribution of population suggests comparisons with similarly sized Belgium. Over the past three decades, Belgium has evolved into a federal state, with Flemings making up a bit over 60% of the population, Walloons making up around 30%, and the multiethnic city of Brussels accounting for most of the remainder.

Since independence, Macedonia has been a relatively peaceful enclave in the midst of the general post-Yugoslav implosion. Still, Albanians in Macedonia have never felt equal to Slavic Macedonians, despite explicit constitutional prohibitions against ethnic- or national-based discrimination. In particular, Albanians have found it unacceptable that Slavic Macedonians regard themselves as the sole constituent people of the country, and consider Albanians (as well as smaller populations of Turks, Roma, and Serbs) to be minorities, rather than equal partners. Albanian disaffection became more open after 1999, when international intervention gave their Kosovar brethren de facto independence from Serbia. The Kosovo model, as well as direct help from Kosovo and Albania, led Albanians to resort to violence in order to force the Macedonian state to consider their demands. As was the case in Kosovo, although much earlier in this instance, the international community rewarded the turn to violence by forcing the parties to negotiate a compromise that, if ratified, will give the Albanians most of what they desire, at least on paper.

As noted above, however, I am less interested in whether the short-term compromise forged with international strong-arm tactics will be ratified than with the implications of this compromise for the future of Macedonia. So let us examine some possible scenarios for Macedonia.

Scenario A: Disaster
Parliament passes the legislation proposed. NATO troops collect weapons for thirty days. Some kind of military force stays to protect international monitors, but they don’t do much. Over the next few years, no hot war breaks out, but refugees don’t return and, in time, Albanians gradually force Slavs to leave Albanian territory and vice versa. The two sides drift farther and farther apart until a political but non-violent Albanian secessionist group (like that of Ibrahim Rugova in Kosovo) appears. The country, which has now been divided into two more or less ethnically pure regions, breaks up but not before the Macedonian Slavs attempt to reassert control. This leads to civil war of uncertain outcome.

Scenario B: Not quite so bad
Everything goes as described above, but with the eventual appearance of a political but non-violent Albanian secessionist group, it becomes clear to the Macedonian Slav leadership that the “political” Albanian separatists are backed by enough firepower to be unstoppable. The country, which has now been divided into two more or less ethnically pure regions, breaks up peacefully on the model of Czechoslovakia, although what happens to Skopje is unclear. The Macedonian Albanians either go it alone or, more likely, join up with Kosovar Albanians and those from Albania in some form of federation or United Albanian States. The Macedonian Slavs also either remain independent on a smaller scale or decide that their continued existence can only be safeguarded by federating with one of their neighbors: Bulgaria, Serbia, or Greece.

Scenario C: Pretty good
Parliament passes the legislation proposed. NATO troops collect weapons for thirty days. Some kind of military force stays to protect international monitors, but they don’t do much. Over the next few years, no hot war breaks out. Gradually, the country evolves into a federation with a multinational capital on the model of Belgium. The two sides don’t particularly like each other, but decide that they are nevertheless better off together than separately.

Scenario D: Ideal
Parliament passes the legislation proposed. NATO troops collect weapons for thirty days. The international military mission is extended and ensures that all refugees return to mixed ethnic communities. Macedonian and Albanian leaders recognize that ethnic-based political parties are destructive and that the only path to a truly stable multinational state is full bilingualism and elimination of the notion of constitutive peoples altogether. Massive foreign aid allows the Macedonians to get their economy rolling, and they become so prosperous that ethnic divisions become meaningless.

Which of these scenarios is most likely? I think that we can quickly eliminate Scenario D. There is, unfortunately, nothing in the agreement that would lead to the creation of robust supranational institutions. Under its provisions, Albanians will have even less incentive than they do now to learn Macedonian, especially if the government fully funds an Albanian-language university in Tetovo, and Slavs will have no incentive to learn Albanian. At best, the agreement will produce separate but equal populations that see themselves as dual constitutive peoples. It would take political leaders far more visionary than any on the scene in Macedonia or in the international community to convince Macedonia’s citizens to try to eliminate the concept of constituent peoples altogether in favor of a citizenship-based state. Prosperity is a long way off and there is no indication that the international community is ready to provide the kind of assistance that would jump-start Macedonia’s economy.

The other three scenarios are all, in my view, plausible. Which of them transpires will depend not only on internal developments in Macedonia but on regional and European-wide developments as well. We will examine them one by one, but first it will be instructive to think about the case of Belgium.

The Belgian Parallel
Belgium was formed as a unitary state in 1830. According to Michael O’Neill, it “drew initially on a manufactured sense of national identity, manipulated to its own advantage by a francophone elite which adopted a strategy of assimilation” (“Belgium: Language, Ethnicity and Nationalism,” Parliamentary Affairs 53, 1, January 2000, pp.114-134). Tensions between the two main linguistic groups were, however, always apparent; by the 1970s, it was clear that change was necessary if Belgium was to survive. An evolutionary series of reforms has been ongoing since then; it led to the recognition in 1993 that Belgium had become a truly federal state. It is by no means clear, however, that federalism has improved the long-term survival of the country. As O’Neill notes: “[F]ederalizing the Belgian state has confirmed the everyday experiences of citizens inhabiting two distinct communities: it has not enhanced a common national interest, and without countervailing forces the affective solidarity that sustains federal states elsewhere may become so diminished as to threaten the very continuance of the body politic” (p. 130). At the moment, the Belgian bargain is holding, but the balance between centrifugal and centripetal forces is extremely delicate, and even the most sanguine commentators believe that the country might still break up into two independent states.

It is the instability of a country such as Belgium that leads one to believe that Scenario C is fairly unlikely for Macedonia. For the “countervailing forces” holding Belgium together are far stronger than in Macedonia. First, Macedonians, and Macedonian Albanians in particular, have much less to lose from divorce than do their Belgian counterparts. Per capita income in Belgium was on the order of $22,000 annually in 1999, while it was approximately $3,800 in Macedonia. Second, the group that has historically been culturally dominant in Belgium (the francophones) is economically in worse shape. Thus, the cultural power of the minority is balanced to some extent by the economic power of the majority. The situation is far more asymmetrical in Macedonia, where the Slavs have been both culturally dominant and economically better off. Third, the Belgian compromise has held, at least for the moment, because Belgian politicians have been inclined to moderation and compromise, something that can hardly be said for most of the political actors on the Macedonian scene. Fourth, Belgium has a 170-year history as a state to fall back on, as well as supranational institutions (the monarchy, most obviously) with some prestige. These are almost entirely absent in Macedonia.

Finally, there is no external pressure on Belgium. The Dutch are not interested in amalgamating with the Flemings, nor are the French enchanted by the idea of absorbing the Walloons. The Macedonian Slavs are similarly not drawn to consider amalgamation with their neighbors (particularly since each of them has at times laid claim to Macedonian territory). But the same cannot be said of the Macedonian Albanians. It is obvious that the inspiration for the current unrest came from the success of the Kosovar Albanian uprising, and it is also clear that many of the weapons and some of the people who carried out the uprising came from Kosovo or Albania. Although Albanian military and political leaders deny any desire to secede from Macedonia, such denials must be taken with a grain of salt, for all these leaders realize that, given the international community’s mantra of “no border changes in the Balkans,” even to hint of this long-term desire would doom their chances of international support.

All of this almost guarantees that Macedonia will not see the kind of federalist compromise that has been worked out in Belgium. At the moment, the only glue available to holding together separatist tendencies in Macedonia is the oft-stated unwillingness on the part of the international community to contemplate changing borders in the Balkans. However, this claim is being severely undercut by the open-ended NATO mission in Kosovo. Until and unless the international community is able successfully to force a reintegration of Kosovo with Serbia, Macedonian Albanians will be unconvinced that they need to work seriously on a formula that will allow them to live with Macedonian Slavs. It is, however, extremely doubtful that Kosovo will ever be reunited with Serbia. Whatever the international community says, borders will eventually change in the Balkans, if only because the desire for change on the part of many of the region’s inhabitants will outlast our willingness to stay and prevent such changes.

The Other Options
This, then, leaves the dissolution of Macedonia as the most likely long-run scenario. It is difficult to predict whether this can be achieved without major violence, however. Will future Macedonian Slav politicians recognize that they simply cannot control territory that is almost 100-percent Albanian and hostile to them? Will the international community allow some future Macedonian Slav government to use whatever force is necessary to stop secession? Will the idea of a unitary or federalist Albanian state have purchase or not when Macedonian Albanians are ready to make their move? These questions simply cannot be answered now, and the resolution of the Macedonian situation cannot occur until these answers become clear.

Assuming the divorce happens, it is also unclear what the fate of the Macedonian Slavs will be. If the security and economic climate in Europe are such that they can feel safe in a rump state, the Slavs may elect to remain independent in a smaller territory. If, however, they are worried by the presence of a greater Albania on their immediate borders, they may decide that their only long-term hope for survival is to join a neighboring state. On the face of it, Bulgaria would be the logical choice for partnership, since the Macedonian and Bulgarian languages are extremely similar. However, the Macedonians might well believe that in time they would lose any distinctive national identity in a Bulgarian/Macedonian federation and would therefore prefer one of their other neighbors. Historically, relations with Serbia were excellent in communist Yugoslavia, so at least the present generation of Slav political leaders might find such a federation comfortable. Serbia is poor, however, while Greece is rich. And while relations with Greece were terrible in the first five years of Macedonian independence, they have improved dramatically in recent years and it is by no means inconceivable that Greece could be the choice if a federal partner is sought. How any of these three neighboring countries would react to such a desire is, of course, unclear.

In any case, this review of possible scenarios gives some indication of why Macedonian Slavs have been, in general, extremely unhappy with NATO intervention. For whatever the outcome (even if it is the less-likely but still-possible Scenario C), the dream of a unitary Macedonian state dominated by its Slavic population is over. The Albanians are simply too numerous and powerful to be Macedonianized (as they can and are being Hellenized in neighboring Greece). Albanians will either become equal partners in a federal state or, more likely, eventually become strong enough to secede.

For NATO and the international community, however, the limited intervention makes sense. Although it will not create the conditions for a successfully multiethnic state, the agreement being rammed down the throats of the Macedonian Slavs has averted major war for now (a war that, for all their bluster, the Slavs would probably not have won). And there is a good chance that when the country finally does break up, it will do so in a less violent manner than would have been the case otherwise. While this might not seem a cause for rejoicing, compared to the outcomes in other parts of the former Yugoslavia, it isn’t bad.

Andrew Wachtel is Herman and Beulah Pearce Miller Research Professor in Literature at Northwestern University. He is also director of the consortium on southeast European studies at Northwestern and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Book Reviews

It is curious that so many novels of the last decade feature a central or motivating figure who is a professor of classics. Classics is a subject that is now entirely marginal to the academic enterprise and dramatically dismissed in American culture. The writer who makes a central character into a classicist therefore is being emphatic in a way that putting the character to work in a pizzeria is not. In Donna Tarte’s The Secret History (1992), the character Julian is the teacher of six other central characters, who are all advanced undergraduate students of Latin and Greek; the protagonist in Robert Hellenga’s The Fall of a Sparrow (1998) is a professor of classics in a small Midwestern college; Philip Roth’s The Human Stain (2000) deals with a classicist who is a recently retired dean in a small New England college town; and Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein (2000) has a central character who seems to have been modeled on Bellow’s good friend and colleague at the University of Chicago, the late Allan Bloom.

“Elite,” “freak,” “withdrawn,” “brilliant,” are, one imagines, commonplace contemporary responses to the idea of a classicist, when indeed a classicist can even be defined or identified. A classicist is probably more remote from the real or imagined experience of a modern reader than, say, Henry James’s European aristocrats. As proof, I offer Helen Dewitt’s The Last Samurai, a novel that I left out of this essay because it is so esoteric. The narrative describes a woman who is a classicist and her very young son, to whom she has taught Greek. The child (not your average boy) also knows Japanese, and the plot – for what it is – follows the lad, a modern-day Telemachus, on his search for a father, although the mores of the samurai class more often than not dictate the action. This is a very post-modern adventure story in which, in place of Scylla and Charybdis or bands of warriors, the boy hero must do battle with the intellectual acquisition of language. The detailed workings of language systems (down to declensions, conjugations, and comparative grammar) are not everyone’s idea of the stuff of narrative, no matter if action-driven plots are now considered passe. The book demands total surrender by the reader. Who, for instance, can tackle the novel who does not at least know Greek script? A meanspirited critic might insist that The Last Samurai seems to be a very up-market coffee-table book meant to demonstrate, if not trendiness, at least high seriousness. The more generous would allow that it is a work that celebrates all those attributes of “freakishness,” “elitism,” “brilliance,” and so on listed above, being a work that from the start earns its cult status.

The Secret History
The books under review describe a curious world that will be familiar to a professional classicist of a certain age. We have met some of these classicists before. Donna Tarte’s Julian is an older man, very rich, one of those dollar-a-year professors who teach what they want and whom they want, and run an operation more or less separated from the routine academic practice of their institutions. He is an intellectual who knows everyone of importance on the cultural scene in Europe and the United States (p. 225), and is extremely cultivated in all aspects of so-called higher culture. His ability to choose wines, set a table, or appreciate a piece of music, show him to be one of those old-fashioned mandarins who used to be considerably more common in academic life.

His teaching method seems Socratic. The classroom scene reveals someone who plays out the drama of intellectual inquiry while at the same time dominating the proceedings to the extent that one might argue that Julian’s students are his creatures. Of course, this is true in general in the academic world – that is, the slave-master paradigm prevails – but here one gets the idea again and again that classical antiquity is more than a concept resting on a body of certifiable data. It is a state of mind within which Julian operates and to which he will bring his students. Julian drills the students in composition, and they are encouraged to speak the ancient languages. The author obligingly demonstrates them by introducing Latin tags or Greek sayings – some even of the students’ own creation – as well as by keeping a diary in Latin. One is reminded of Werner Jaeger’s Dritte Humanismus; classical studies as a kind of substitute for religion was not uncommon fifty years ago in the United States. The narrator happens to observe a private moment in which Henry gives Julian a kiss on the cheek, which depicts a kind of intimacy that is special, if not indeed homoerotic.

The narrator is given several pages to exclaim over his profound love for Julian (p. 479), which is, however, clearly enough not the least bit erotic. One senses that the twentieth century does not enter or matter much in Julian’s teaching. Some of his students are not altogether unlike him. Henry, for instance, did not know that a man had set foot on the moon (p. 80). This ignorance is exemplative of the fact that Julian’s students have chosen to live lives at one remove from quotidian experience. At one point (p. 139), the narrator describes the drinking, drugging, partying undergraduate life of the college negatively, as one might imagine, as though everyone who participates in it are thugs, druggies, clowns, or swine. Of course, several of Julian’s students have backgrounds that would inhibit their entry into the typical undergraduate experience. They are Henry, whose very rich parents dole out a large allowance to him; Francis, who lives off a large trust fund; and the twins, Charles and Camilla, whom the reader senses are associated with, if no longer in possession of, what used to be called “old money.” On the other hand, there is Bunny, who is clearly conventional in some sense (see p. 96, where he fantasizes being a middle-class dad), but also very rich, although very clearly enough nouveau riche. Curiously enough, Bunny is financially dependent upon his friends since his parents give him no spending money, a detail which is necessary for the plot, but not terribly convincing.

Finally, there is the narrator, Richard, who is a classic narrative convention without any real personality, emotion, or relevance to the story. The author underscores Richard’s detached status by describing his utterly conventional middle-class background in suburban California (to which he admits with anguish, e.g., p. 208). The few times that the author decides that Richard must function in the story, she has him making a few tentative passes at Camilla, who declines him more as the mechanical dismissal of an unessential human being rather than as someone repulsed or not interested. Of course, Richard often describes himself doing his homework (e.g., p. 138, studying his irregular second aorist verbs), which is an authorial reminder that her stick-figure is actually in the plot.

The plot takes off when Henry, Francis, and the twins reenact a Dionysiac frenzy in the course of which, while racing over the hills, they come upon a man and kill him. They are unmoved by this horrific act. Henry, for instance, after anguishing over it, can suddenly ask, “Did you do your Greek today?,” Julian, as it turns out (p. 226), is equally unmoved when Henry tells him; he has nothing but contempt for the Judeo-Christian tradition (p. 228), which no doubt includes guilt over murder. We learn all this, of course, only when Henry tells the narrator, who had not been present. Bunny, on the other hand, figures it out for himself, and proceeds to makes himself utterly obnoxious by hinting at threats of blackmail. The group decides that they have no choice but to murder Bunny. This they proceed to do in the same detached manner in which they seem to acknowledge anything in what can be called “the real world.”

To this extent they are very much Platonic idealists or, one might say, cast adrift from everyday preoccupation with getting by because of their money, alienated by their eccentricities (Camilla and Charles, for instance, are incestuous). Led by their teacher to consider the ideal and the abstract as having considerably more meaning than action, they are insulated from the heinousness of the murder of someone who had been, if not a real friend, then an intimate of their circle. One of the weaker features of this novel is that Richard, the narrator, goes along on this adventure – otherwise we would not have an account of it – but his peculiar detachment, which derives from his narrative function rather than being a developed characterization of an unfeeling monster, makes the reader impatient.

As a classicist, one comes away from The Secret History remembering all too well half a century ago just such teachers, and just such students, when classics was a fraternity or mystical bond for classmates who shared in what was considered to be the preferred socioeconomic background. It is odd to think that a person as young as Donna Tarte is said to be would have conceived of such a story. Today, one would think that, with merit rather than wealth being the criterion for college admission, the professionalization of classics faculties so that what they do is more a job than a “calling,” and the deconstruction of the so-called “old truths,” the elements upon which such a narrative is constructed would have long since disappeared. Still, to the degree Tarte knows of that old world of classical studies, one can see how she would find it amenable to describing the perverse, the off-beat, the inverted view.

The Fall of a Sparrow
In The Fall of a Sparrow, Woody, the father of three daughters, and a happily married, successful classicist, wakes up one day to learn that his oldest child has been killed in a terrorist explosion in the Bologna train station. The novel could be described as an exposition of the way in which Woody and his wife Hannah confront this truth philosophically. After first going berserk in Bologna, Hannah returns to their home and, in planning her daughter’s gravesite, argues for a line from Dante, la sua volunt – A nostra pace. This opens up an impossible rift between the parents; Woody refuses what he considers to be an easy acceptance and surrender, Hannah moves away, eventually becoming a cloistered nun by the end of the novel. Woody wants to place a line from a Horatian love poem on the gravestone, fine as an epitaph, but disturbing and inappropriate in its poetic context. One important strand of this novel is Woody’s sexual behavior as a kind of antidote to death. One is reminded of a novel by Andre Maurois in which a couple, having viewed the plaster casts of the struggling dead in the ashes of Pompeii, hurry back to their hotel and pass the afternoon furiously making love.

Classical education is another strand that the author introduces time and again to demonstrate his hero’s use of another culture and another set of values to define his stance in the twentieth-century Christian world. “But dead is dead, he thought, and life goes on, and if you think seriously, if you consider the alternatives, you’ll even see the value of death in the natural cycle of things, and you’ll see that death gives shape to life. That’s the great lesson of The Iliad. Compared to Hector and Andromache, Achilles and Priam, the lives of the gods who live forever are meaningless. The lives of the gods, who confront no limitations, who make no important decisions” (p. 44). One is reminded of Wallace Steven’s “Death is the Mother of Beauty,” in his poem, “Sunday Morning.” But later, Woody thinks of the great-books course he taught for years, how he and everyone else thought that life was meaningless, and that death gave life meaning. Only his daughter’s death does not; he cannot get past this particular, unique, horrible fact of his daughter’s death. He must wrestle with this throughout the novel.

Like Julian in Donna Tarte’s novel, Woody is engaged with classical antiquity as a kind of religion from which he tries to find support and meaning in his present crisis. The author emphasizes this aspect of classical learning by juxtaposing Woody’s quest with that of Hannah, who finds redefinition in a vocation within the Roman Catholic Church. Again, a professional classicist will recognize the type. Men like Woody dominated the teaching of classics in the Fifties and Sixties, the first generations to teach from translations to large classes of seekers and would-be believers. How long ago it all seems peering back through the obstructive haze of post-modernism, deconstruction, and multiculturalism.

Woody has two sexual adventures, or, I suppose, three, since he has sex with his old college sweetheart a few times when she rushes to Bologna from Rome following the attack to be with him, while Hannah is hospitalized with a mental breakdown. One must describe this experience very definitely as therapeutic sex; as for the other occasions, the reader is never sure. Death may be the Mother of Beauty but it also seems to be a very good substitute for Viagra. Back home, Woody proceeds with a relationship with the freshman daughter of this very same woman. Admittedly, the girl almost forces him into sleeping with her, yet he does, repeatedly, letting her move into his house. To this critic, Woody seems overly preoccupied with sex. At the memorial service for the several Harvard students killed in the explosion, Woody sees the boy he assumes was his daughter’s boyfriend, and proceeds to imagine his daughter’s vagina being penetrated by the boy’s penis (p. 47). In another scene, Woody stands before the mirror pondering the male nude, considering his own penis, and at that moment thinks once more of his daughter being blown up (pp. 310f.). I wonder what is going on here, and I don’t think the author is altogether forthcoming; perhaps I am too Freudian. The author gives his reader lots of sex. Woody is curiously matter-of-fact about the sex, using it, or so it seems, more for its mechanical value – that is, therapy – a conscious statement about the human condition, and finally as a way to keep the machinery functioning. He never seems to concern himself with the young girl with whom he is having the relationship.

As a man who has spent his life nurturing the young, recognizing them as something other than complete adults, Woody is curiously indifferent to what might be motivating this child, or what might be happening to her as a result of their affair. The reader somehow feels that the author’s determination to live out his own fantasies just will not allow the narrative to go in that direction. The author is content to allow the young girl to emerge from this experience as though having done nothing more than spend an afternoon shopping for a new dress. At one point, Woody says to himself that he does not need his daughter’s permission to go to bed with someone (p. 117). That “someone” is telling. She is a young woman known to him since childhood, she is the same age as his daughters, and the daughter of his oldest and dearest friend. She is certainly not “someone.” On the other hand, he can say to her, “I’m old enough to be your father” (p. 110). So he is not entirely oblivious, but certainly he has no qualms about what is happening.

If his wife represents the Christian way to finding a meaning for this disaster, the author seems to be setting up the female Jewish dean of the faculty as yet another traditional take on things. From the Upper West Side, she is described stereotypically as complaining about the quality of the bagels in the small town in which the college sits. She is self-righteous and in the end forces a showdown over his behavior with this student. The author seems to be setting the law of the Jews, their judgmental inclinations – as the stereotypes so often depict Jews – in opposition to Woody’s determined pagan hedonism. The dean complains about a lewd performance by his student lover, which the student claims is an old Iranian folk light-and-shadow performance. The dean says that Woody eroticizes the students. Elsewhere, there are comments about his use of Ovid and Catullus, the possibly sexually offensive nature of these poets, and Woody is allowed to vent his feelings about the horror of academic standards of political correctness, the horror of the Christian hostility to sex. What perhaps remains in the mind of the reader, however, is Woody’s insidious behavior as a male eroticizer. As if the author has not already demonized the dean sufficiently, he also assigns to her a determination to merge classics into a world literature program; thus she is also the Devil.

As a classicist, Woody reverts to classical topoi often. With his surviving daughters and the young girl residing in his house at the same time over vacation, Woody thinks that this is just like the beginning of the Oresteia. This is, however, an entirely simplistic observation not the least bit true. Woody is that tiresome species of classicist who must always find the appropriate analogue. One wonders if the author has set out to make Woody pompous, or it is the instinct of a classicist at work here. Although hardly to the extent of the classicists in The Secret History, Woody’s world is an ideal based on ancient literary texts. He prides himself on having committed to heart Socrates’ prayer at the close of the Phaedrus: Let me be the same on the inside and the outside, and so on and so forth (p. 174).

When Woody plans to go to Italy for the trial of the terrorists, his ex-wife says to him: “Oh, Woody, let it go. All things shall be well, remember, and all manner of thing shall be well. I wish I could make you believe it.” To which he responds, “Maybe I do,” as the narrator adds, “without really knowing what he meant when he said it” (p. 135). One other major influence on Woody is the blues, which he plays on his guitar. The narrator quotes many of the great blues songs that Woody delights in, as in this line, “All my life I’ve been a traveling man, staying alone, doing the best I can” (p. 49). The blues are an interesting counterpoint to the celebrated ancient Greek pessimism; they are so forlorn, so desperate, yet so clear-headed – like Greek tragedy, no illusions are allowed to exist. Woody often sings the following song, which resonates with all the sorrow of his daughter’s death (pp. 55f.):

The African-American experience from which the blues derive has produced a pessimism similar to that of the Greeks, but with the startling difference that after all the sorrow has been rehearsed, the mood often settles into a more benign view of things, as in the song above. Whether this is the influence of Christianity upon enslaved Africans, or the instinctive reaction of a people utterly ground under the heel and helpless, who can say?

The last spiritual journey that Woody takes at the end of the book is finally to get beyond his daughter’s death. While in Bologna, he acquires a new lover, a woman more his own age, who shares his delight in great cooking (which, by the way, is important in this novel, and, just as in The Odyssey, offers a constant alternative to sex as the great defense against death). Woody begins to find a new life, and, indeed when the novel ends, we find him settling into life in Italy, an itinerant guitar player in restaurants, far away from small Midwestern colleges.

The Human Stain
Upon first reading this novel, I was put off by Woody’s self-obsession, his relentless sexuality, his neglect of his living children. On the second time around, I was conscious that Woody was just Woody, warts and all, not all that likeable, made miserable, perhaps almost unbearably so, by the tragedy that befell his family. His desperation leads him into a variety of attempts at reconciliation, justification, solace, and comfort. One of the important redeeming factors is his knowledge of classical antiquity. Philip Roth’s The Human Stain is the story of a man of mixed race, white enough to pass, whose father instilled in him the importance of European learning as a defense against the denial and deracination that the white majority enforce upon blacks in the United States. As a teenager involved with a Jewish boxing team, he passes as Jewish so as to ensure his own success. Silky, as the hero is known, studies Greek in a public high school in New Jersey – unlikely, it seems to me, in the Forties – then goes on to get a doctorate in classics at New York University, thus fulfilling his father’s admonition to absorb European culture. Classics was once upon a time a common strategy of upward mobility in this country. It was a way to identify with “old money” WASPs in one quick generational leap from out of whatever ethnic ghetto in which one happened to be languishing. But Silky is black, too, of course, white-skinned though he may appear. Along the way, he meets a white woman from the Midwest with whom he has a genuine love affair, but they part when she is unable to deal with her discovery that he is African American.

He does not yet give up on his blackness, however. Although offered boxing scholarships to Ivy League colleges, he attends Howard College because he cannot betray his father, and then after the abortive love affair, he courts a black woman with whom he has a highly satisfying relationship because he can be honest with her. As someone who has spent years of my life for a variety of reasons closeted because I am gay, I can attest to the deep feelings of completeness that come to a gay man only when he is with other gay men. It reminds me of the Englishman Michael Kustow, former head of Channel Four in London, who came to work in the United States briefly and once said to me, “For the first time in my life here in the States I can be free to be a Jew; it seems normal here.” (Unfortunately, he decided that the environment was not on the other hand sufficiently conducive to using his brain, so he returned to London.) But Silky gives up the black girl for a passionate love and subsequent marriage with a New York Jew, from whom he hides his African American identity. Why? It is never precisely stated. One might say that among this novel’s several meanings, one is about the long-term identification with and attraction of New York Jewishness for alienated and deracinated people in the United States.

The plot turns on a charge of racism leveled against the novel’s hero – who becomes a professor of classics at a small New England college and later its dean – when he uses the word “spook” (in the sense of ghost) to refer to two chronically absent students who, it turns out, are black women. The subsequent ruckus allows the author-narrator the wonderful luxury of denouncing (in a performance more Bellow than Roth) the outrageous behavior of the academic community since it is in fact a black who is the innocent perpetrator and victim of the incident. Classicists of a certain age will recognize this as the most impossibly artificial narrative contrivance set up by Roth. It is highly unlikely that a Jew would ever have been hired by a New England college 40 years ago, certainly never, never in classics, the most goyishe and WASPy of all disciplines. This is especially true of a Jew with a degree from New York University, which sometimes used to be called New York “Jewniversity” by sneering gentiles, who went to public high school in New Jersey. Some things are sacred in classics in New England!

The reader cannot object to the novel’s premise because, even if in Jewish drag, it is a black man who so eloquently criticizes the insidious nature of political correctness, which can seemingly mindlessly offer support to the two black students and betray the dean. In addition to his objection to political correctness, the author attacks contemporary critical theory by means of what is almost an allegorical figure. He has set up a young French academic import, Delphine Roux, whose devotion to theory is as passionate as she is politically correct. Roux, the evil theorist, works to destroy the dean. The author is thus not afraid of moving his plot into Oprah territory as well. He introduces a working woman (naturally also abused and at risk from an estranged husband) at the college with whom the dean begins an affair after his wife has died of a sudden stroke brought on, as he claims, by the brouhaha over the “spook” incident. Another force of evil in the narrative – right out of Russell Banks’s collection of monster rustics - is an alcoholic, drug-abusing, memory-destroyed Vietnam veteran, the estranged husband of the dean’s lover.

The dean’s resignation, his wife’s death, his new love affair, and his delight in Viagra, recall the hero of the Hellenga novel, whose new-found sexuality propelled him down roads not taken, except that here sexual fulfillment leads to death. This narrative would be tragic if it were not soap opera. There is little reference to classics in the novel other than in setting the hero up as a classicist. But a critic could argue that the plot is essentially a tragic take on the Oedipus story: The hero who determines to hide the truth of his birth cannot escape it, and it comes to haunt him when he is denounced as racist. The further irony, although I don’t think that Roth does justice to this, is that very likely the particular virulence of the faculty denunciation derives from Silky being perceived as a Jew since it is Jews who are often accused by blacks as being particularly racist.

The reader will ponder Roth’s constellation of black, Jew, and classicist. Silky’s father insists that his children have the right and obligation to participate fully in American culture. The author seems to be saying that Silky could not go further in doing so than by becoming a classicist, although even the slightest glance at contemporary American culture, highbrow or lowbrow, might suggest that a knowledge of classical antiquity scarcely defines an American in the twenty-first century. Still, the author is no doubt working with the commonplace estimation of 40 or 50 years ago. In styling himself a Jew, Silky disowns his African-American heritage. As Silky sheds his blackness, however, the author (that sly puss) saves his hero from becoming a cultural albino – a WASPy kind of Jew – by inventing for him a marriage with a New York Jew who is so echt Jewish that she will save him from the possible sterility of his intellectual studies.

Ravelstein
The hero of Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein is curiously much like Roth’s Silky, although here the amalgam is classicist, Jewish, and gay. The hero’s gayness is not the least bit hidden but rather allows for an immediate identification with Plato’s Symposium. Plato discusses the appetitive as a necessary condition for finally arriving at true knowledge, and he defines it as beginning with a desire for beautiful boys. Desire is the key word, not satisfaction. Ravelstein is a compulsive shopper, but he is indifferent to what he buys, as illustrated by the messiness with which he ruins expensive clothing. He is also indifferent to eroticism in his non-sexual relationship with his young companion, but compulsively satisfies his immediate sexual needs with rent boys. Both examples illustrate Plato’s idea of the search for beauty, which is the search for the good and, in both instances, the appetitive principle in action. Ravelstein is presented as a dazzlingly good teacher whose gayness plays into the ancient Greek ideal of pederasty in education, which depends upon a desire for beautiful boys as the motivational drive for the teacher. Here again, it is the appetitive that is the powerful force, in which desire is transmuted into creativity through teaching beautiful young males. Like Plato, Ravelstein understands that beauty in young men is more than buffed bodies, it is also intelligence and intellectual curiosity. This masculine beauty is attractive beyond sexual desire. I think of two emphatically heterosexual male classicists of the not-too-distant past, John Finley and William Arrowsmith, both of whom were besotted by attractive, intelligent young men who wished to be their acolytes.

Ravelstein’s Jewishness is a significant feature of his personality, as much commented upon by himself and the narrator as is his gayness, indeed far more. Ravelstein is paranoid about being a Jew in Christian America, aware of the inherent hostility in the larger world. It matches the paranoia of any gay male, and it establishes Ravelstein’s otherness, as an intellectual, as an elitist. On the other hand, Ravelstein is no observant Jew, and perhaps the study of classics is the ideal occupation for anyone choosing to assimilate to the extent of abandoning a strict religious identity. The orthodox Jewish male spends his life with the Torah, pondering the meaning of the Hebrew. The classicist who is obsessive about philology can do the same with Greek or Latin texts. A lifetime of study is another kind of spiritual exercise.

Bellow, it seems to me, has, if not contempt for homosexual relationships, then extreme distaste, content as he is to describe his hero’s compulsive promiscuity without suggesting the concomitant sadness. For all his bluster, drama, style, and panache, Ravelstein is sad. He is like Carol Channing or Marlene Dietrich, or any of those larger-than-life prima donnas. One remembers the type so well from the field of classics a half century ago. Ravelstein is very much like Donna Tarte’s professor, Julian. Eroticism was so central to teaching before the emergence of sexual harassment, before women in the classroom changed the playing field. Nostalgic old queens will recollect how eroticism revitalized and sustained a teacher who had to repeat himself year in and year out, how it gave to young men a wonderful glow as they sensed – usually subconsciously – how loved and appreciated, how enthusiastically received they were. But sic transit gloria mundi.

This essay began with the rhetorical, “It is curious that so many novels of the last decade feature a central or motivating figure who is a professor of classics” – a commonplace verbal entrapment of the reluctant reader. As a matter of fact, it is perhaps not so curious at all. Saul Bellow created a main character who bore so many similarities to his friend Allan Bloom that his being a classicist was almost inevitable; Robert Hellenga created a central character out of his own life lived with the philosophical implications of being a classicist; Helen Dewitt very recently studied classical philology at Oxford, and the experience obviously is something she is still trying to exorcise; in making his black passing for Jewish white into a classicist, Philip Roth was quite ignorant, it seems, of the historical, sociological truth of the profession, but he probably wanted to ensure that his character would appear to his reader as having gone as far as one can go in making himself into a traditional American. For men of Roth’s generation, the profession of classics was probably as white-bread, old-school, and goyishe as a fellow could get. Only Donna Tarte seems to have used real imagination in her conception of a band of depraved classics students following the degenerate philosophical leadership of their teacher – classics gone wrong, so to speak. And so we may say, finally, that this sudden flurry of novels having to do with the classics is no more than coincidental.

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

This is a beautiful book, and it demands to be read in comfort. But you won’t be comfortable for long, because every second recipe makes you want to rush straight into the kitchen to try those flavors for yourself. And each time Aglaia Kremezi adds a note or anecdote to her recipes – as she usually does – she raises issues that just have to be followed up in the study!

In essence, this is a cookbook. There are well over 120 recipes, spaciously set out, fully explained in language of crystal clarity. And there are plenty of alternatives for those who can’t get a special ingredient or just want to try something different. In the closing pages, you find a list of unfamiliar ingredients and a directory of suppliers of Greek products.

The chapters follow the familiar sequence from appetizers to desserts. Which means, in Greek-island terms, that we start with the meze, in a chapter subtitled “more than just appetizers.” We end with island desserts, which, as the subtitle reminds us, highlight “honey, fruits, nuts and fresh cheese.” Between these two milestones are six other chapters: savory pitas and pies; fish and seafood, “scarce but excellent”; succulent meat; beans, rice, bulgur, and pasta; seasonal salads, vegetables, and potatoes; and the powerful mysteries of bread.

Aglaia has collected recipes assiduously and adapted them for the modern kitchen wherever necessary. They come from her own family, from lifetime friends, from her travels across Greece, and from the more adventurous and authentic of chefs at Greek island tavernas. Notably, there is a selection of recipes developed and tested on critical New York palates by Jim Botsacos, chef of Molyvos Restaurant. I’ve enjoyed his octopus salad (page 42) and I like his grilled fish (page 85), so I’m looking forward to tasting more of this Molyvos selection.

The recipes are astonishing in their variety – although not so astonishing, perhaps, when we realize that each island has its own quite distinct history. Men from every island traveled the world. Each island has encountered different influences from traders, invaders, and others. Thus, the Venetians and the English left their mark on the Ionian Islands such as Cephalonia, Ithaca, and Corfu. Turkish and Anatolian influences were strong in Lesbos and Chios – but Chios was a Genoese possession for hundreds of years. Crete was ruled by Arabs as well as Turks and Venetians.

These varied influences – outlined in the introduction – mean that each island has its own culinary traditions. So, from Tinos we have a recipe for that light-textured but fiery-tasting garlic dip, skordalia, in a local version that includes capers. Kythera offers its famous grilled artichokes. From Folegandros comes a cheese-and-onion pie known locally as kalasouna. From Skopelos, a spinach pie often called (of course) skopelitiki. From Chios, a fish terrine, psari pikti. From Lesbos, barbounia gemista, stuffed red mullet. From Crete, tzulamas, a festive pork, currant, and pistachio pie. From Andros, finally, leg of lamb stuffed with wild greens and feta cheese.

Any reader will learn something new about Greek history from this book, and food history in particular. You’ve heard of Archestratus, the Syracusan Greek of about 350 BCE who has rightly been called the “father of gastronomy.” Do you remember, however, what Archestratus said about cooking fine fish? Aglaia Kremezi will remind you: Take it as fresh as possible; prepare it as simply as possible, with few added flavors, just a dash of olive oil maybe and a spray of oregano; and don’t overcook it. On page 74, she reinforces this ancient judgment with a contemporary viewpoint from Yannis Foskolos, the cook at an excellent fish taverna in Syros, who says that, “Masters of fish cookery take care to prepare [fish] as simply as possible so that the exceptional taste of each different kind is not lost.”

Notice Aglaia’s well-chosen subtitle for her fish chapter, “scarce but excellent.” In this chapter, she does more than provide some excellent recipes for fish. She also helps historians toward an answer to a real puzzle: Historically, how significant was fish in the Greek diet? Scholars such as Tom Gallant, who have argued that it was something of a rarity, can take heart from her remarks on page 73: “Because seafood is not plentiful in Greek waters, fish has never been the staple food of the islanders. The fishermen sell most of their catch to merchants in Athens or to the large hotels and tavernas of the popular resorts. On most of the islands, except the larger ones, there are no fishmongers. People catch their own fish, or they wait at the port for the boats to return and pick from what is available. Because fish is expensive, fishermen keep just the smallest of their catch or the kinds they can’t sell.”

This is clearly true and well-observed, and it ties in very neatly with those scraps of early comedy in which the characters boast of the fish they found at market and of how much it cost. Those characters are Athenians, and not the poorest Athenians either. Then as now, they were the people from whom the fishermen of the Greek coasts and islands had to make a living.

Greek history is present in the background throughout this book. It’s bound to be. But, throughout, what shines through is not dry history but fresh inventiveness. Look at the originality of the flavors, and at the confidence with which unexpected combinations create a newly classic dish. Taste the black-eyed pea and Swiss chard salad (from Cyprus). Just imagine the tangerine-scented almond cookies (from Chios). And don’t miss the chicken and fennel stew with quince (from Corfu). Is Greek cooking one of the classic gastronomic traditions? On the evidence of this work, it is.

And on the evidence of her life, Aglaia Kremezi is the ideal person to write this book. Here, she recounts growing up:

She tells us how to make the cherry spoon-sweet on page 240, by the way. As for her aunt’s bitter orange preserve, however, we might have to wait for a sequel.

Throughout this book, anecdotes and sidelights bring us closer to the realities of Greek island life – or, often, to the way of life remembered by islanders who are now living elsewhere. It is a life that may soon be doomed to disappear. This is an issue that disturbs Aglaia and should disturb all of us. The tone of this book becomes, suddenly, deadly serious as she discusses the continuation of island cooking traditions.

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

A Greek Island Cosmos is about kinship and community in the village of Spartokhori on the island of Meganisi, near Lefkadha in the Ionian Sea. Roger Just, an Australian social anthropologist who lived on Meganisi from 1977 to 1980, turns the relationship among these seemingly banal abstractions (kinship, community, village) into a question worthy – one might say, still worthy – of examination. Why and how, given all that we know about the past and present mobility of populations and individuals in rural Greece, are claims made and supported locally that the village is one family, that there is a solidarity of a distinct kind that characterizes Spartokhori, that the village community, bluntly put, exists? As Just defines it, community is not a function of a uniform cultural mentality or geographical isolation but an idea that people have about themselves as people who share particular values. His book traces a compelling story of how this works out in practice, how the rhetoric in part constitutes social life, how different rhetorics of identity compete.

In the wake of a flurry of village monographs from the Fifties through the Eighties, accusations were made by critical scholars that village studies are exoticizing and anachronistic in an urbanizing society, and that researchers should turn their attention to other contexts (urban, elite, migratory, etc.) – which indeed many subsequently did. Just makes a strong argument for leaving the village in the picture: it isn’t by any stretch of the imagination the only significant location, but it’s an enduringly significant one for Greece. A village study must be properly understood, and properly carried out, however. What this means according to Just is that the local site has to be analytically framed by a double process. On the one hand, the analysis has to be, as Just puts it, “historical and deconstructive.” The village isn’t a natural and indelible feature of the landscape but a thing that has an origin in time, experiences immigration and emigration, dissolves and is reinvented, and therefore – in sum – has none of that primordial quality subjectively attributed to it by its inhabitants and romantic observers. (Susan B. Sutton’s work has demonstrated the mutability of villages beyond a shadow of a doubt; see her 1994 “Settlement Patterns, Settlement Perceptions: Rethinking the Greek Village,” in P. Nick Kardulias, ed., Beyond the Site: Regional Studies in the Aegean Area.) The researcher’s job is to document that process.

On the other hand, however, a good analysis must also be “sociological and constructive.” That means that the research must also show how despite this historical fragmentation and entropy, cohesion and solidarity are socially regenerated through the local interpretation of everyday life (where they are, and one cannot assume that they always are). The key to all this is, of course, kinship – but how kinship does this is more complex than we might think. While this double agenda is not entirely original in current anthropology, I would argue that less attention has been paid of late to the second factor, sociological reconstruction, than to the first one, historical heterogeneity. It may be that Just’s book comes at a moment when the pendulum needs a slight correction in the direction of a sociology of interaction.

Just is, arguably, a classic social anthropologist whose questions about solidarity are not classically structural-functionalist. Fundamentally, he wants to know what the effects are on social reality of what people say they believe. For example, what if they say that their village is a good one, filled with a good people who look out for one another, but also that their fellow villagers are pimps and liars? Just gives this famous paradox of village life the most careful, balanced, and revealing scrutiny it has yet received in the literature. By indicating when something is said, he tracks the social impact of such assessments. They begin to make sense as acts. In one of his finest stories (pp. 246-254), he describes the minute gestures that constitute this elusive solidarity. In order to calm a fellow villager, a number of people (normally not his patrons) make a slight deviation in their routines to stop by his coffee shop for a drink. Nothing much is said, but the gesture is effective; not in resolving the longstanding conflict between the main antagonists, but in providing the context for suffering conflict – support in hard times. People do this because while they believe that their neighbors are roufianoi, they also say that their people are good people. Consequently, in social life, even the “charades” (p. 167) can heal wounds.

When Just went to Spartokhori looking for a “village” and “villagers,” he quickly found that the Spartokhoriots were a diverse lot. Some families had been on the island for a long time, some had immigrated quite recently; some had a good deal of experience of the greater world from Athens to Australia (a few, quite disconcertingly, even had doctorates). The history of the island revealed quite dramatic shifts in class structure and subsistence from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, with a postwar economy that had thrived on emigration and employment in the merchant marine. Despite this complexity, the villagers themselves proclaimed their solidarity. Peculiarly, they did so by asserting two apparently contradictory things. First, “We are all foreigners here”; and, second, “We are all one family.” Just did not think the sense of community was an illusion (either his or theirs), and set about discovering how it was produced. In closely argued chapters, he examines, in turn, the kinship system and its terminology; godparenthood; friendship; household and inheritance; romance and dowry. The chapter on kinship terms argues that the idiom of consanguineal relatedness extends to include even relatives by marriage – thus incorporating, sometimes retrospectively, new immigrants through marriage ties. Godparenthood ties together just about everybody else into a further network of complementary relatedness. Thus kinship and spiritual kinship networks are so extensive and overlapping that they cannot distinguish ipso facto corporate groups; but this is not to say that they do not create group identities, because Just’s argument is that collective groups may exist even where they are not corporate (that is, discrete kinship bodies that act as a unit in all, or several, areas of life.) It turns out to be no exaggeration that Spartokhori is one family, given its system of reckoning. At the same time, because kinship is everywhere, it can’t be the main determinant of social actions and interest groups; so Just devotes a good deal of attention to where and when “kin” cooperate or fall out. Some of the best material relates to the fissioning of households (the diagram describing one house, on p. 194, is a masterpiece).

Just stays far away from general discussions of “culture.” His prose is not by and large descriptive or evocative – more prosaic than poetic, as befits the spirit of human compromise (oikonomia) that is the book’s subject. And yet the reader is brought close to the local texture of life by means of carefully drawn family histories and Just’s own stories and dialogues from fieldwork. He is a talented observer of social life. His descriptions of the delicate relationship of fathers and sons, of the problems of brothers who are both the epitome and the nemesis of the ideals of kinship, and of courtship, are extremely perceptive. Some of his stories are also very funny. There’s a depth and comprehensiveness to this ethnography that is almost novelistic.

The fieldwork on which the book is based was carried out between 1977 and 1980. This time lapse would appear to pose something of a problem (though it is not so a rare a situation). The first question is what to do about the effects of the passage of time on Spartokhori as an object of description. Anthropologists once freely exploited a rhetorical device called the “ethnographic present,” in which the present tense of the monograph was meant to indicate a kind of structural, rather than chronological, time: an infinite present that constituted the logic of culture. This is no longer intellectually defensible, and anthropologists talk quite specifically about the time, place, and conditions of their research – which is generally a loosely defined “present” (except where the research is explicitly ethnohistorical). But anthropology is not journalism, and the point is not primarily to translate a reality synchronic with the present time of the reader, but rather to translate the synchronicity of a reality – in other words, the actuality of social experience.

At the same time, John Peristiany observed to Just (p. 5) that anthropology is the study of “what is,” and Just’s book is not a history but a picture of the period of his intervention. Although he briefly registers the changes that have occurred between 1980 and 1994 (the year of his last visit to Meganisi) in an epilogue, the book is not a long-range survey. Yet because it is not (and is not meant to be) a picture of a bygone way of life (indeed, it focuses very little on paradigmatically rural aspects of village life) – still less a lament for lost virtues – the book can be “read historically” (as Just suggests on p. 259) without a sense of irrelevance. In other words, it can be understood as part of the flow of time. It may seem paradoxical, but it is precisely the depth of detail that prevents the book from being dated. Just’s subject matter is social interaction, and it remains fresh. The tensions Just describes between the claims of common virtue and the threads of mistrust – between a local life (life being local everywhere) and a cosmopolitan world – are not, as far as I have been able to gauge, datable. Nonetheless, the changes that have occurred on Meganisi since the time of the fieldwork do pose challenges to Just’s central thesis concerning the socially and ideologically constructed community of Spartokhori – for example, a (re-)emerging class stratification may very much strain the family metaphor.

The second question this late publication presents is quite different. Just’s fieldwork took place during – or slightly before – an explosion of (especially Anglophone and French) field research in rural and urban Greece. Much of that research has now been published (Just also takes important unpublished doctoral theses such as that of Mari Clark into account) and the field seems glutted with monographs of Greek village life. Just himself has published well-known articles on various subjects from nationalism to naming to Orthodoxy. How does one place a new monograph on an older period of research within this scenario? Just seems refreshingly without straw horses to beat; he makes no claim that previous ethnographies are generally (or particularly) deficient. (His most serious objection is to Julian Pitt-Rivers’s over-generalizing claims regarding spiritual kinship in the Mediterranean. Pitt-Rivers – in his 1974 “Ritual Kinship in the Mediterranean: Spain and the Balkans,” in J.G. Peristiany, ed., Mediterranean Family Structures – argued that spiritual kinship in this area is basically a contract between individuals and emphasizes individuation; Just sees godparenthood as part of a system of collective reciprocity.) With the array of earlier and later monographs before him, Just engages in a kind of comparative, synthetic, and reflective discussion of the issues raised by his own data by means of a range of other case studies. If a reader wanted to know something about the social anthropology of Greece, Just’s book would be a good place to start. He gives his own data of the late Seventies the advantages of a maturing field, while offering intelligent reconsideration to the wider field.

Of course, not everything is included in Just’s picture. While a focus on kinship and community might sound immensely broad, it is in fact quite specific; Just’s viewpoint was that of a young foreign man to whom certain persons and sites were inevitably more available than others (notably, of course, the domestic life of women was more or less off-limits, and conversely the magazia were especially accessible.) There are some missing bits in the history (very little on the Second World War and Civil War periods). I feel that Just might more creatively have used some resources outside the Greek corpus he knows so well (Charles Lindholm’s 1982 work on male kin and male friendship, for example, Generosity and Jealousy: The Swat Pukhtun of Northern Pakistan). Finally, I would have been interested to hear more from Just about time and ethnography. While his introduction does include reflections on the field – past and recent directions in ethnography, in Greece and elsewhere – he says relatively little about his own experience of researching, writing, and thinking in the temporal context of this book.

If anthropology at some point was – and is popularly still thought to be – in fear of losing its subjects, Just’s book is another proof that we can sleep soundly at night. Researchers continue to write monographs – island studies, city studies, studies of networks and corporations – as the world changes, and, mysteriously, as Just argues, people continue to generate the stuff of social life: its rhetorics of identity, its attempts at collective action and individual distinction. Nothing, in the end, really depended on the illusion of the isolated village. What counts for Just is not the system of kinship, or relative isolation, or integration into world markets, but what ideology makes of these matters: the “way people think” (p. 127). In that sense, “relative isolation” may be, not only the best description of the past, but the stable – if virtual – description of the present and future.

Laurie Hart is associate professor and chair of the department of anthropology at Haverford College.

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