#zinovieff

When lockdown eased and travel outside one’s home region was permitted, we escaped the unseasonal heatwave in Athens for the mountains.

Our village is the kind you wouldn’t normally visit without a reason: there’s nothing particularly historic, and, though the landscape is pretty, it’s not much different to other hillsides in the region.

In England, you might find a country cottage somewhere that suits your taste or fantasies; in Greece, few people choose their village. More often, it’s something you inherit, like the family nose or an old trunk full of Yiayia’s embroidery. The village is where you have roots, where your forebears were born, where people know who you are, or – as for me – a place you acquire with marriage. And like marriage, you take the thick and the thin, for better and for worse.

Our village is perched 850 meters above the Sperchios valley between Lamia and Karpenisi. It is slap-bang in the middle of Greece, though when Vassilis’ grandmother was born here in 1896, it was only 4 km from what was still the Ottoman Empire and had boarder-guard posts.

Today, we have an event: the newly appointed bishop is coming. It is mid-morning and things have suddenly gone quieter, like the calm before the storm. Dogs are not barking, nor cocks crowing. Even Panos has turned off the radio that blares popular laïki numbers through a loudspeaker outside his nearby house.

I first lived in Greece in the late 1980s as a student. I’d exchanged chilly Cambridge for the beautiful Peloponnesian town of Nafplio and was carrying out postgraduate research on modern Greek identity and tourism. Like many first-time social anthropologists, I was learning on the job – studying the language, attempting “participant observation,” and trying to meet as many “informants” as possible.

“Come for a coffee and you can study us!” friends would quip. Whenever I visited someone’s home, I was consistently treated with kindness and generosity; almost without fail, there was a glass of cool water and some homemade spoon sweets. This was often followed by coffee and koulourakia (cookies), and often cooked food followed as well. Whenever I declined to be fed on the spot, I was regularly sent away with parcels of spinach pie or other delicacies for later.

This largesse was a delight and I began to appreciate how significant hospitality was in Greece – caring for the stranger resembled a Christian virtue but was clearly a tradition from Homeric times, when an individual’s worth and honor was measured according to how he treated a guest. Nafpliotes were proud of being philoxenoi, of literally “loving” the xenos – the stranger or foreigner.

As a foreigner, I began to realize that there is an established etiquette not only for the host but also for the guest. Nobody should forget what Odysseus did to Penelope’s greedy, inappropriate suitors, who lost their dignity (and eventually their lives) for abusing the rules of hospitality. Was it disrespectful, I wondered, if I rejected an offer of food? What should I do after the third or fourth home visit in a day, when faced with yet another slab of walnut cake or cut-glass saucer of bitter orange peel in syrup? Most Greeks would disapprove of someone who doesn’t even offer water to a visitor, but a guest who doesn’t respect his host’s munificence is a disrespectful, ungrateful wretch.

A handmade taverna sign | presented by Sofka Zinovieff