Nightclubs overflowed with masked figures and hooded, black-satined dominoes. Inhibitions disappeared in the security of anonymity, only to reemerge the next morning, perhaps accompanied by a hangover, embarrassing recollections, and the fervent hope that one’s disguise had been preserved. Costumes were rented but, more often than not, were made by a dressmaker brought to the house for the purpose. This was the season when crypto-exhibitionists and frustrated thespians were able to indulge their illusions.
Carnival parties abounded. On the three Carnival weekends one was often invited to two or more a night — at hotels, sporting clubs and at private houses. Walls were decorated with garlands and paper lanterns and supplies of serpentines, balloons and whistles were brought in. Gossip columnists covered the larger affairs listing the names and describing the costumes, their interpretations often hilariously off the mark.
The elaborate preparations frequently led to complications. At a Roman Party ten years ago, the invitations were written on burnt parchment in Latin. A Greek translation was provided but this did not prevent one couple from arriving a week early. Four ‘Christian Slaves’ all chained together, were among the guests. At intervals they were to be seen trailing to the bathroom, which they were obliged to visit together.
On the last Sunday of Carnival, a visit to the Plaka was de rigueur, Pushed along by a singing, squeaking, whistling crowd, one inched along the narrow streets covered with confetti. Those over a certain age remember even earlier Carnivals when it was looked forward to, and prepared for, months in advance. It was one of the most exciting times of the year. Then the streets of the Plaka were filled with revellers dancing around maypoles, with animated beasts (the camel was particularly popular), men on stilts, and bands of clowns playing the drum, the tambourine and the clarinet.
This year for the first time Athens will not be officially celebrating Carnival. The official reason is economic. During the Junta, the mayors of Athens and Piraeus vied with one another in mounting tasteless extravaganzas with gaudy floats and flashy drum majorettes imported from France. Perhaps they delivered Carnival its death blow. There are still parties and much activity in the Plaka, but Athenians must now travel to Patras or other parts of Greece to celebrate the real thing.
For one brief interval, however, Carnival this year came unexpectedly to life for those at Zappion Gardens when the Bread and Puppet Theatre made an unscheduled appearance. The American troupe, bearing a portable puppet stage, a four-man dragon and a few large, symbolic papier-mache figures joined the Sunday morning throngs of costumed and masked children and began to put on their show. The astonished children surrounded the performers and looked on in disbelief. After a while they began to understand. Soon they were participating and applauding. For an hour or so, the true spirit of Carnival prevailed once again in Athens.
Frugal Fantasies
LATE in February our friend the Proud Pater Familias from the Peloponnisos invited us to his home for dinner. When we arrived, we found him presiding over a family council. His wife, the Patient Patricia, sat a little to his side, far enough back to be out of her husband’s eyeshot. From this vantage point she commanded a full view of her five children, and could signal them to silence when her husband’s filotimov/as threatened.
The Man of the House was lecturing his family on the virtues of frugality, a subject inspired by the arrival of the electricity and water bills, and the purchase of a ton of heating fuel and enough gasoline for his car to make a round trip from Psyhiko to Sintagma. These amounted, he quietly explained, to a sum that exceeded the annual earnings of the average family in Greece. He had barely recuperated from this shock when he was presented with the family’s cost-study estimates of its needs for the Apokries (Carnival) festivities. Among the requirements were fifteen hundred drachmas for a costume for the youngest child who had been invited to join several friends for a stroll in Zappion Gardens where the junior contingent masquerades on Sunday mornings during Carnival, and an astronomical sum for the eldest to take his girlfriend to the Plaka.
The family meeting reached a climax as our Proud Pater Familias launched into a dissertation that united the subjects of Frugality, Carnival, Clean Monday and Beans.
The connection is not as obscure as it may first appear. Clean Monday (Kathara Deftera), which this year falls on March 8, blows the whistle on Carnival and marks the beginning of Lent — which theoretically is the period of fasting preceding Easter. Since beans are one of the traditional foods during this period, it provided an obvious bridge to our Pater Familias’s favourite subject: the virtues of the simple life.
Explaining to his children that when he was a boy virtually everyday of the year was a fast day and meat rarely appeared on the humble table in his humble home in Tripoli, he announced his decision that this year they would not only observe Lent, but continue the regime throughout the year. At their ages, after all, he had gratefully consumed whatever was placed before him. In his home, beans had alternated with boiled potatoes and cabbage, occasionally relieved by spinach and rice, salted sardines, fresh fruit in season and the odd piece of meat on a Sunday. In a moment he was waxing sentimental on the nutritional value and gastronomical delights of beans which the Patient Patricia noted was on the menu that night.
Carried away by the nostalgia of the moment, he banished forever from the family diet beef, pork, chicken, tuna fish, and Papadopoulos’s Petit Beurre cookies. A yearly allotment of one pair of shoes, one pair of trousers and one sweater per individual would suffice as far as their wardrobes were concerned. Their only daughter was to take sewing lessons and begin by making her own dresses and turning the collars on her brothers’ shirts. Affluence, he declared, was destroying his family while his Peloponissian childhood had made a Man of Him.
When the fifteen-year old son asked if he intended to trade his Mercedes for a donkey, the Patient Patricia frantically signalled him to keep quiet. A crisis was averted when the maid appeared to announce dinner.
We took our places at the table and toasted each other with homemade wine which the Proud Pater’s pater had shipped to Athens from his village at considerable cost, and began to eat our bean soup (fasolada). It was accompanied by a few Kalamata olives, some feta, Kris Kris’s packaged sliced bread (from the freezer — it was a Wednesday and bakeries had closed early that day), and raw onions ‘to protect us from the flu’ currently gripping Athens. Having made his way greedily through these delicacies while the Daughter mumbled about the number of calories per spoonful of fasolada and ‘passed’ on the onions because she had a date that night, the Pater Familias sat back waiting expectantly for the next course — which never came.
Back in the living room, our somewhat subdued Proud Pater began to instruct the Patient Patricia on what their Kathara Deftera menu should include this year. (Although his British wife has lived here for twenty years, he never trusts sacred tradition to her discretion). The new regime, he explained, would have to be temporarily suspended in the interests of hospitality since they would be joined on that day by many guests. The menu would include the traditional beans, dolmades, octopus in wine, cuttlefish, aubergine and other salads, and wild garlic (of course) as well as a bit of shrimp, lobster, mussel pilaf, red caviar and avgotaraho (a rare specialty of Messolongi) to add a little colour to the banquet. The menu prepared, he sat back sipping the scotch and soda the Patient Patricia had brought him. When he closed his eyes, we knew he was dreaming of a simple, pleasant life shorn of its harsh reality. All that was left was an irretrievable memory.
Anarchy in the Streets
OUR LATEST epistle from our old friend Kyria Elsie deals with the traffic in Athens, a subject dear to our hearts since walking through Kolonaki to our office in the morning is among the more exhilarating parts of our day. Sprinting off the road to dodge on-coming cars, clambering over an assortment of vehicles monopolizing the sidewalks as well as falling into the occasional subterranean stairwells that begin in the middle of sidewalks, and sliding along the polished pavements are just a few of the daily exercises that keep us in shape. On the day that our friend’s letter arrived, our sortie had involved a grand /ere’worthy of Nureyev which had carried us halfway across a road and just beyond the reach of a car whose driver had spotted us trying to sneak across; a hastily executed pirouette when a Mercedes began backing over us to park on the sidewalk where we were walking; and a fifty-yard dash when the Mercedes’ driver came after us with fists extended, claiming our coat button had scratched his car when we squeezed between the latter and the wall against which we had been pinned.
We receive many letters on the subject of Athens’ traffic but Kyria Elsie’s, while blistering with indignation, is printable. She wrote:
‘The definition of ‘anarchy’ in the Oxford English Dictionary is ‘Absence of Government — Disorder — Confusion’. One presumes that a Minister of Transport exists and that he functions, so perhaps the first definition cannot be applied. Disorder and Confusion, however, describe exactly what is to be seen these days in all the main streets of our city, and what is so startling is that both the disorder and the confusion are growing worse.
‘The law is deliberately flouted as anyone who stands for a few minutes at any junction controlled by lights, and counts the number of cars that go through the red ones, can see. Anyone except, of course, the policemen standing there. Red lights are ignored right under the noses of these gentlemen who are either incompetent or too lazy to do anything about it. (Surely they have not received instructions not to book anyoneior any of fence whatever!) Not long ago, a sensible regulation was passed forbidding private cars to use the right lane on main thoroughfares to free it for buses and taxis. Enforced for, at the most, a few weeks, it is now completely ignored by drivers and policemen alike.
‘The ‘No Parking’ signs might just as well be removed since they serve no purpose whatever. Drivers park anywhere they please, even on the pavements, forcing pedestrians onto the street at the risk of their lives.
‘Accompanying all this blatant defiance of the law, we must also bear the incessant blaring of car horns which has now become a reflex action. Almost all drivers — taxi drivers in particular — sound their horn the moment the light turns green (if not before) as though everyone in front were asleep at the wheel or that every car were able to rise vertically, like a helicopter, in order to allow others to pass. Car horns, specially equipped to play ridiculous snatches of melodies, make the days, and the nights, hideous with raucous renditions of mooing cows, the 1812 Overture, “Never on Sunday”, and “Colonel Bogey”. We hear the lot on the streets of Athens and nothing delights their owners more than to play them fully amplified, for as long as possible, and with several encores.
‘Of course, the driving in Athens has always been atrocious. A few years back, however, one made allowances, acknowledging that Athenians were novices in heavy traffic and looking forward to the day when they would eventually learn how to comport themselves. It is bitterly disappointing, therefore, to find that far from improving, they are growing more rude and impatient. Our city is being reduced to a maelstrom of discourteous citizens, contemptuous of the law and impervious to the cacophony. We must appeal to whatever officials responsible to return from wherever they may be and to remove from our streets these ill-mannered, impatient, and irresponsible drivers.’
