It was like Deja Vu, all over again….enjoying the view, eating the amazing pizza and salad and then racing down the mountain to make the concert on time. Patmos’ Revelations of Music Festival is wonderful. It’s like having season tickets to the Hollywood Bowl, only the front row is always filled with Greek Orthodox clergy and there are only two police officers to secure the place – who sort of stand around and chat outside.
This time we attempted to enjoy Seraphim, a male choir from Serbia which performed centuries old hymns from Russia, Lithuania, Bosnia and Serbia. When I first saw the program for this Serbian make choir, I imagined something between Gregorian chants and the kind of majestic choirs one might hear in a French cathedral.
It turns out that in our limited sphere of taste, Russian hymns are about as dynamic and exciting as toast. Not that it was a reflection on the choir, which performed admirably. I’m sure that if we were devout Greek Orthodox we might appreciate more the sounds of other Orthodox heritages. But it lacked a certain zeal and fervor.
But to a certain degree, it didn’t matter. The experience of music on this little island continued to amaze me all the same. I thought about what I’ve thought often about since we’ve arrived. What must it have been like on this quiet little island as time passed by?
What happened here during World War II? When did telephones arrive to Patmos? Did anyone ever know about the American Civil War? Was anyone aware of Russian Revolution? How much did the ripples of time and history wash up on Patmos’ shores? Or has it always been pretty much the same with an occasional new ruler or flag and once in a while a new technology?
I also thought about Serbia, Greece and something I read recently. I started working on Orhan Pamuk’s “Istanbul” in which the Nobel Prize winning Turkish author interweaves his own biography and the biography of the city in which he has spent his life into one. It seems like a great way to get ready for Istanbul.
In the book, Pamuk discusses growing up in the capital city of a collapsed empire. He talks about how his city was once at the center of world attention and now his whole country has practically faded from global consciousness.
This is rather true of Greece as well. When we learn about Greece in school, it’s all the ancient stuff. Buildings with columns, promiscuous deities, oracles in caves, philosophy, hypotheses, geometry, medicine, etymology of our own language, a few scuffles with Persia… and then the Romans take over and Greece falls off the edge of the history book pages in a big way.
MAYBE if you actively paid attention in college, were an avid “60 Minutes” watcher during the 70’s and 80’s, or through some other interest, you got a few other tidbits on Greece – such as part of the Byzantine Empire, parts absorbed by the Ottoman Empire and then the giant skip aheads to hosting the Olympics here and there, Communism threatening Greece after World War II, a bunch of juntas and failed governments, joining NATO, having airplane after airplane hijacked out of Athens, the 1974 war against Turkey over Cyprus, joining the EU, and most recently being financially saved by said EU.
Perhaps part of why Greece fell off the map was because for a very long time, was because it wasn’t even a country until the late 1800’s, and then largely because a number of the islands were sick of the Ottomans and rebelled. Like the Brady Bunch, they felt they should all become a family, and so the rest of Europe hired them an Alice – aka a king they picked from the Austrian royal house – to keep things somewhat in line with the rest of Europe.
But for the most part, Greece remains more a place for dreamy vacations than a country at the center of the world stage. With their ambitions lying more in enjoying life than in empire building – political or financial – it’s easy to see why they might not attract a lot of attention. There’s just not a lot happening. Which I think is mostly fine by them.
So, as I’ve looked around at the life, the places and the shores of Greece, I wonder what has and hasn’t happened here? What don’t we know about them? What don’t they know about us? At the moments when there were “shots heard ’round the world” and the events that we write chapters about in books and discuss daily at water coolers – like who’s rooting for who on American Idol – has anyone on Patmos ever been affected or cared?
Did the Transformers and the Smurfs pass these people by? When Ghandi led India to freedom did anyone on Patmos even know? Did anyone put down their ouzo to listen? Or is this one of those enchanted places like Bali and Laos where the people and history have had a quiet and amicable divorce?
I also thought of Serbians – the nice people singing boringly in front of us. They had one big shining moment in history where the Archduke Ferdinand was shot in Sarajevo – which launched everything into its first great World War.
If you were like me in history class when you learned this, you thought – who are these people and where did they come from? They were never to be heard from again until the 1990’s when suddenly they came back with another round of war and genocide issues in the terrible aftermath of Yugoslavia’s collapse.
But all of a sudden in the last ten to fifteen years as the people of the Balkans stopped killing each other and started rebuilding building their countries, they have choirs, basketball players and even up and coming tourism industries. What’s gone on there for the past several hundred years? Who knows?! But there they are.
And then there’s Turkey which is really the modernized, post-downsizing version of the Ottoman Empire which most of us only learned even existed because of a side mention in the World War I chapter of our history books. If you travel to the Middle East or study much about it, then all of a sudden it turns out that these people actually did a lot, in parts of the world in which it turns out people were living and doing things – some of them interesting and important.
At points in the Ottoman Empire’s history, it was actually very much on the radar of the leaders of Europe as a trading partner and in some senses a semi-rival. The Austrian Empire used to have an ambivalent push pull with the Ottomans since they neighbored each other – the Balkans going back and forth between the two empires and Greece being mostly Ottoman. Turkish fashion and culture became a curiosity and interest to Europe as the Ottoman Empire rose in stature and Istanbul stood prominently as a center of power on the world stage.
But what do we know about Turkey today? It wants to join the EU. It’s a member of NATO. It makes Turkish Delight? They’re Muslim, right? Yeah – I think so. Okay, they’re Muslim. But they aren’t Arab are they? Maybe they are? No, not Arab. They definitely have bazaars! They had a recent fight with Israel. Maybe you know they have a tenuous relationship with Greece after all the years of empire and such. There was also that whole Cyrpus war in 1974.
I think that’s pretty much it. This is Pamuk’s point – both interesting and sad.
Sometimes, understanding what something isn’t – such as no longer being the capital of a great empire and instead being in shabbier shape and more poverty than it’s ever been – is as much a part of the story as what a place is at first glance.
So, as we go along this journey, I think about these things. Because where we go isn’t just great pictures, beautiful scenery, and fun activities. These are places where things have happened that I often feel badly I don’t know more about. These are the homes and lives of peoples with the same or more richness as ours and with events and outlooks which I hope to better understand by the time it’s all over.
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