Sunanda K. Datta-Ray
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Photograph by Graham McLellan
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Kythera has always been the crossroads of the
world. The waves of Byzantine, Ottoman, Venetian, French and British conquest
have left their traces on the surrounding seas. It was another token of the
island’s global dimension, which may have saved Kythera from the depression in
which the rest of Greece is languishing, that a Welsh lawyer from Athens
visiting his Greek-Australian in-laws here before relocating to Singapore lent
me Jit Paul’s memoirs, The Business of Life: Growing up with Apeejay. The Pauls
were his clients and Jit Paul inscribed the book to him in London.
I met the lawyer during Easter which has a
special resonance for a robust community determined to enjoy life. His
mother-in-law, a handsome woman of great warmth and vivacity, is Australian one
moment and English the next but always Greek. No extended Hindu family can
compete in numbers or cordiality with the cousins, uncles, aunts, nephews and
nieces surrounding her. They were all descended from her great great
grandfather, Nicole Diacopoulos, a 19th century worthy from Karavas village,
who was also my host’s great great grandfather.
We may not have fasted for Lent but broke it
with great gusto in her villa overlooking the Aegean Sea in the small hours of
Sunday morning with lashings of the thick soup called magiritsa made with
homemade olive oil washed down with jugs of homemade grape wine. Relic of
fertility rites older even than the Greek Orthodox Church, hardboiled eggs dyed
bright red were smashed, shelled and eaten. Another feast — lunch sounds too
tame — followed a few hours later on the beach between Agia Pelagia’s
whitewashed hacienda-style arches and the cobalt glass of the sea. Greek
dancers whirled around in skirts and baggy trousers to the sound of bazooka
while we gorged on hunks of succulent lamb carved off sheep turning slowly on
spits. The meal ended with yalaktoubourikou, a creamy custard in crisp flaky
pastry oozing syrup.
Nothing in this cheerful ebullience supported a
British pro-consul’s jaundiced verdict that “the Karavas people are the most
disorderly and lowly in the island, and notoriously addicted to plunder”. His
ire was aroused when a bunch of Karavas men looted a papal brig wrecked on
Kythera’s north coast in 1855. Apparently, Nicole Diacopoulos’s three sons,
Giorgio, Demetrio and Aristide, were among the culprits. Seven of them (including
the Diacopoulos brothers) escaped from the forbidding Hora Castle when the
jailer “forgot” to lock their cell, and made their way to mainland Greece. The
three who remained were tried but had to be acquitted because the witnesses
(local men like the “absent-minded” jailer) changed their stories. However, the
fugitives were sentenced in absentia to 23 years’ imprisonment. When they
wanted to return to Kythera some years later, the British allowed everyone
except the Diacopoulos brothers who “might take revenge on the men who betrayed
them to the authorities.”
According to Diacopoulos family lore, Demetrio
and his brothers were punished for being staunch freedom fighters who wanted to
throw out the British who had ruled Kythera from 1815 and merge it with Greece.
That finally happened in 1864, ending a turbulent history whose relics can
still be seen in the squat little 11th century Byzantine chapels of Ayios
Nikitas and Ayios Demetrios which packs four churches in one building and in
Venice’s Winged Lion of St Mark at Mylopotamos Castle.
Unlike the mainland, Kythera went global more
than a century ago. Greece is suffering its worst economic crisis in six
decades. Unemployment is at a record 27 per cent. United Nations agencies say
public health services have collapsed and over a million people have no access
to health care. Infant mortality is soaring. More than a third of minors face
poverty or social exclusion, a tenth live with jobless parents or guardians.
Moreover, 11 million Greeks are burdened with a million illegal immigrants from
Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan and various Muslim African countries.
Greece’s porous sea and land borders makes it the gateway for even poorer folk
to enter Europe.
Economic distress coincides with two developments
of which, too, there is no whisper in the crowded cafes and partying crowds of
this idyllic island whose crashing waves are believed to have given birth to
Aphrodite, goddess of love. Some say the government’s Operation Xenios Zeus,
launched in August 2012 to round up illegal immigrants, is both cause and
effect of the growth of the fiercely anti-immigrant Golden Dawn party which
wants to expel all illegal foreigners. It sent members to the legislature for
the first time last year and now ranks third in popularity among political
parties.
The government has come down hard on Golden
Dawn. Greece’s parliament voted overwhelmingly last year to suspend state
funding for the party. Some of its senior leaders, including legislators, were
arrested and charged with being members of a criminal organization. But given
the popular mood, people suspect the government fears Golden Dawn will steal
its constituency. Hence Xenios Zeus, named with unconscious irony after the
mythological god who protects travellers, and the arrest and cross-examination
of tens of thousands of foreigners presumed to be undocumented migrants.
“We will not allow our towns, or our country,
to be occupied and become a migrant ghetto,” the hardline public order
minister, Nikos Dendias, declared as plans were discussed to build eight
detention centres in Athens to imprison up to 10,000 immigrants. Recently, 88
Pakistanis were put on planes, accompanied by guards, and packed off to
Pakistan. That didn’t stop racist attacks by groups of men dressed in black,
sometimes with their faces covered. Victims include a popular anti-fascist
rapper and a 27-year-old Pakistani who had lived in Greece for five years. Both
were stabbed to death.
Migration is something Kythera understands.
Diacopoulos boys aged nine to twelve years were put on boats bound for distant
Australia to sink or swim there. Most swam with spectacular success. Almost
every island family has a connection with Australia where there are 60,000
prosperous Greeks of Kytherian descent. But prosperity didn’t come easily. One
of the most poignant memorials I have ever seen is a lonely little cross under
a tree with a faded inscription calling it the point of tears, welcome, joy and
bitterness. It’s the spot where migrants said their last goodbyes before
walking down to the harbour at Agia Pelagia. Someone has donated a simple bench
next to the cross “in memory of Angeli”. Presumably, Angeli was one of the
unfortunates who couldn’t swim.
Thursday’s final Easter rite involved muscular
males led by the Bishop of Kythera and priests in gorgeous embroidery carrying
a large ikon mounted on poles from church to church. St Luke is believed to
have painted the ikon which has blackened faces for Mother and Child and which
Kytherians invest with miraculous powers. There is a replica in Karavas’s
214-year-old St Charalampos church whose murals, richly painted ceiling and
glittering gold make India’s most gaudy temple seem pallid and whose Easter
rituals with incense, bell and flowers could have been elaborate versions of
Hindu rites.
Karavas’s priest is a Diacopoulos. His wife
(Orthodox priests can marry) is half a Diacopoulos. That might explain why the
procession climbed the hill to pass the starkly stylish new Diacopoulos house
where I am staying to the surprise of my host who wasn’t waiting at his door
with burning incense as custom decrees. I had seen the priest earlier at the
Anastasi (Resurrection) service at St Charalampos which was plunged into
incense-laden darkness just before midnight on Easter Sunday. The candles each
worshipper held provided the only illumination as the congregation chanted
“Christos Anesti ek nekron … Christ is risen from the dead” before the solemn
exchange that said it all. “Christos Anesti … Christ is Risen” and the response
“Alithos Anesti … Truly He has Risen”. Without blaspheming, it could be
Kythera’s story.
telegraphindia.com
