Crete -- unspoilt and spoilt

After Athens, we took the boat to Crete. Instead of the 40 minute flight, this is the leisurely way. You get on the boat at Piraeus around 8.00 at night, and wake up in your little cabin at 5.30 in the morning as it chugs into Souda Bay.

This was partly a chance to do some reading and writing in the sun (up early, work till lunch; eat and swim at the beach; work again before supper). It was partly a return to old haunts. For years when they were young we took the children to the house (above) of some good Greek friends in a village outside Chania. A decade later we wanted to go back – and also see how much it had changed.

For us, there was good news and bad news.

Some of it had changed much less than we had expected. “Our” village (Tsikalaria) had grown some vast  Hollywood style houses on the margins, but for the most part it was the same as we had left it a decade ago. “Our” beach was much the same too, so long as you didn’t notice a vast new hotel a couple of hundred yards away.

But there were pockets nearby which seemed to have been taken over by “A Place in the Sun”. The generally seedy village of Kalives (not far from Chania) was just as seedy as ever. The only difference was that it was now almost entirely populated by the British. The major High Street store  was now an estate agency called “Hellenic Homes” and there were loads of advertisements for “The English Builder” – who was presumably responsible for many of the identikit concrete boxes overlooking the sea.

It would have been a mistake, I suspect, going into a café there and ordering in Greek. (No bad thing for me, I should confess, as I struggled to remember the third person plural present indicative . . . )

I couldn’t quite work out how bad I thought this was – or how snobbish about the concrete boxes I could let myself be (I'm a tourist myself, after all). Maybe in 50 years time these little enclaves of the British will be as quaintly exotic as the Patagonian Welsh.

All the same, it was marvellous. The hire car didn’t actually collapse. Fed up with the multi-national companies, we had found a local car hire company on the internet. All seemed fine – until they asked for just 160 euros in cash for five days with fully comprehensive insurance (shouldn’t that cost 160 euros on its own, I thought)  and the driver’s mirror fell off on the first day. But we fixed it with some sellotape (our attempts to ask for string in the local store having resulted in the purchase of a washing line). And we escaped minus incident, unscathed.

We also did a load of work. My aim had been to read a book on laughter (ancient or modern) per day. That proved to be easier, of course, with the short books than the long…Bergson’s essay on Le Rire at under a hundred pages being significantly speedier than Bakhtin’s two hundred or so. 

There was nostalgia here in another sense. I felt back to being an undergraduate again and to all that over-promising I had made to my Director of Studies. Yes, I would try to read a couple more plays by Euripides during the summer, I would say at my end of term interview …and the first thing on my agenda was to discover which plays were the shortest.

In fact, for a few years, I had an enviable knowledge of the shortest works of all the major classical authors. Who said students were getting lazier?

Comments

[Mary]

Yes Anthony...you're giving away your Oxonian roots. The "Director of Studies" (or "DOS"s as they are called by the students.. as if they were remotely "dossing") is a traditional part of the Cambridge scene.

[anthony alcock]

I think Modern Greek is called New Greek in its own language, isn't it ? Isn't it also sometimes called "Romaic", one of the words for the language taken over by the Egyptians (and subsequently the Arabic-speaking inhabitants of the same country). The word "Hellene" in Egyptian (Coptic) usually means "non-Christian".
MB: Did you really have a Director of Studies when you were a student ? My tutor at Oxford always wanted to be a Director of something. I once told him he should go to Germany and become a headmaster of a school.

[Michael Bulley]

Beware, however "the shortest works of all the major classical authors". Remember what Auden wrote in "Under the Lyre":

Among bewildering appliances
For mastering the arts and sciences
They stroll or run,
And nerves that steeled themselves to slaughter
Are shot to pieces by the shorter
Poems of Donne.

[Tony Francis]

I took Shakmatny Bulletin (also called Shakmaty on the 'net) for several years, under the vain delusion that I could teach myself to read Russian with a dictionary. I discovered that about 1/3-1/2 the words in Russian sound the same as in English, once you get past the Cyrillic alphabet. Speaking and listening to it is another matter.

[Barbara]

The British intelligence officer dropped into Crete, speaking Homeric Greek to the inhabitants, really existed: I recall reading about it many decades ago. I think it might have been Nicholas Hammond or Patrick Leigh Fermor, or someone of that ilk.It was only incorporated into the fictional work later; I often wondered how his family must have felt about that.

[Ray Hobbs]

Mary... you need to read the fantastic and honest "Learn Greek in 25 years," Brian Church's attempt to put anybody off learning any language at all. Much more honest than my copy of "Norwegian in 3 months." But then the again, the much-praised Penguin Russian Course has a note from the author in the intro pointing out that Russian is an easy language to learn! Minime vero,as I've been stuck around chapter 16 for a good while. Best wishes from Ray

[Cambridge alumna]

Another Cambridge don had been to a Greek island called Antiparos in the mid-1950s. Since then, I think he has hesitated to revisit Greece for fear that change and development have taken something out of its soul. Well, they almost certainly have - much like anywhere else in the world. But, this summer, our young family spent a wonderful holiday in Antiparos. One cannot sleep under the stars anymore (except in the organised camping site) and people will charge you for everything, rather than invite you to their homes. But if you want a family-friendly Greek island, Antiparos with its safe beaches and pedestrianised, picturesque harbour is what you are looking for. So, this is one of the very few times I would disagree with my beloved professor whose I advice I still seek after all these years.

[PL]

On the subject of people attributing shrewdness to different races, Carl Sandburg, in "The People, Yes", quotes this saying: "An Armenian can only be cheated by a Gypsy, a Gypsy by a Jew, a Jew by a Greek, and a Greek by the devil". Sandburg only failed to record the coda -- "and the devil by a Genoese" (told to me naturally by a Genoese).

[Deirdre]

Love the washing-line part!

An item of interest to those disturbed about the proliferation of English estate agencies and builders in holiday resorts...This may all come to an end soon.

Our window-cleaner, a man of many talents, recently took part in a TV game-show which involves cooking meals for strangers. On the back of his success in this, the TV company has invited him to go forward to take part in day-time quiz ahows. The reason being, that all those "do-up an old property" and "buy a place in the sun" concepts now have to be dropped pretty quick because of the credit crunch. New programme ideas are required.

Mary, there may be a place for you on the quiz show about short classics.

[Paul Potts]

I have different memories of Crete. Many years ago, before the modern depradations you mention, I stayed in a youth hostel on the South coast. My jacket was stolen there, I suspect by the "manager", I nearly got drowned in the sea, where the currents are dangerous - not good at swimming, and I learned what drowning was like. Lying on the beach, my skin was burned so I could hardly put my clothes on, and by the way the ship I travelled in from Athens later went down with the loss of all on board. Evelyn Waugh has similar tales to tell about the British disaster in 1943 - but glad you are enjoying your trip.

Paulo

[Lucy]

This is a lovely post - don't we all have memories of what a place 'used to be like' that we secretly want to see challenged? And I love the presentation of a perfect blend of pleasure and duty in reading rigorous academic books on a sunny beach! Now ... to prove that students are indeed lazier than their teachers, can you provide us with a digested version of what Bakhtin does say about laughter, please, Mary?

[Craig]

I always think of Crete as the Greek version of the Deep South. Full of angry men with guns and bad attitudes.

Quaint, I suppose in a psychotic kind of way. Ask the six dead cops who tried to bust the dope growers in Zonania last year or the three seriously injured a month ago.

[Tony Francis]

When I was in grad school, there was a red-headed Greek kid who had a desk in the computer lab. We became pals. He had a kind of volitile personality, and disliked anyone from an Islamic country. He had no qualms about telling them what he thought. Once he got going on a rant and said, "They should send all those (insert uncomplimetary descriptives here) back to where they came from, and leave America for us Americans." Of course, he wasn't a citizen, just a resident alien. His brother, who was a resident alien had a business trading office buildings in New York. That is a multimillion dollar business. The Greek kid went back to New York one summer and took a physics class at City College. He told me, "It was a Jew who taught it. Man, was that Jew tough.... he made us do every problem in the book!" After that, he started importing electronic gear from China and founded his own computer company. He made so much money, he quit grad school for a while. I told my mother, "Those Greeks would make money when a Jew would starve in the street!"
He later came back to grad school, and got his PhD in chemistry. I have good reason to believe that large swathes of my work ended up in his thesis. Whether this is plagiarism or creative collage is debatable. But like Foska, I wasn't angry - instead, proud, honored and grateful that he had stolen my work.
Like Foska, I have never known a girl named Dierdre. I have known a couple of Peen-a-lopes. I dated a girl off and on for several years who looked a lot like a young Daphne Zuniga. She wasn't Patagonian Welsh, but rather Kansas Czech. Alas, she married some other guy and had a passel of kids. This is my loss! My question to Foska: Is the functional equivalent of knowing a girl named Dierdre?

[Michael Bulley]

So in cafés are you wanting to say "They'll have an orange juice"? Let them fend for themselves. Just order your own drink.

[JD]

Ah Mary, if only you would share with us your knowledge on the shortest plays, to save us yet more time in fulfilling the lofty promises we made to our DoS!

[Richard]

Plenty of comedy value in classicists trying to speak or understand Greek (or, as we like to call it, "modern Greek," as if to register our disapproval of these upstarts for daring to speak such a debased form of the language). I remember seeing what appeared to be a strange linguistic business in Athens, advertising "metaphors and additional corrections" (METAPHORAS KAI EPIDIORTHOSEIS). It really meant "removals and repairs".

Louis de Bernieres' romantic novel "Captain Corelli's Mandarin" featured a British intelligence officer dropped on Cephallonia because he knew ancient Greek. The novel represents his speech as Chaucer-period English.

All best,
Richard

[Jackie]

Oh to be able to read all day without feeling you should be doing something more useful - like housework! I have a pile of books, some of which need to be finished to go back to the library, but, because I am not officially doing anything academic, at the moment anyway, sitting down with a book seems like laziness! And to do it in the sunshine of Greece too - I do envy you Mary.