What is our homeland?
Is it perchance the great plains?
Or the tall mountains where no man has sown?
Or maybe the golden glow of the sun?Or the bright starlight?
Thus wrote I. Polemis in one of the most often parodied pieces of poetry in the world. I am not partial to the poem, and have never felt the urge to grab an antique shotgun, run to the border and kill people. But in seeing my homeland for the first time since I went on the Great London Adventure, I wondered what I had missed the most about home. We will, for the sake of argument, disqualify my mother's spinach pie.
I put it to you, dear reader, that there is nothing quite like the sight and sound of
kafrila to remind you of home. Now
kafrila, for those who are not Greek, is a
bona fide disregard for civilized conduct, as expressed in the words or actions (
kafriles) of a person (
kafros). The word comes from the Arabic
kafir, denoting an infidel, one who would cover, or hide, the truth of Islam. This name probably stuck to some of the wilder African tribes, who were having a lot of trouble bying into the sophisticated religion of the Caliphate. Anthropologists then spread the term by applying the word
kaffir as a pejorative term to Black Africans, most notably to the
Xhosa. Finally, Greek sailors and possibly writers brought it back to Greece from their travels. When the word acquired its present meaning, I do not know. Another day's blogging, that.
On my search for the true
kafrila, I went to that temple of learning, my alma mater, the
Athens University of Economics and Business, most awkwardly named school of economics in the universe. It is often said in Greece that the University is (and should be) a place where the youth of Greece discovers politics. It is even so, in the same way of course that one 'discovers' a prudently forbidden Inca city. What it
really means is that you discover the myriad shadings of the Greek Left, from the brilliantly radical to the viciously militant, to the perpetually stoned.
Now the University Left fascinates me in the same ways all extreme views do: like
Neonazis,
Raelians and those delightfully naughty people who put down their religion as
"Jedi", our Left have no regard whatsoever for reality and it, in return, has left them in peace. In their solitude, or solipsism, they spend hour after hour in pursuit of
kafrila.Consider our first wonderful specimen, sprayed against a garage door: "We have another way of spending the nights," rejoices this radical, "long live Paris, city of
bonfire lights!". In the school basement, another warns us that "Meligalas was just the beginning / we'll dig wells in every School", hinting at one of the best known and least-commemorated
atrocities of the
Civil War. His colleague (not comrade, these aren't communists we are talking about) feels the need to clarify, adding "<--for all of you fascists". But for
kafrila of the wildest proportions, one must step just out of University, and survey the handiwork of the real pros. The squatter/revolutionaries of urban areas are omnipresent, but their true gurus live in Athens, where a great deal of the city Centre has been commandeered for the purposes of the
revolution. In one of their latest flashes of inspiration, a rogue reindeer festivally chimes, "Fuck You Boss - You and your Customers".
But
kafrila begins closer to home; it is discovered in those testosterone-addled years of Junior High. In my home town of Faliro, the wavebreaker is central to Junior High antics, as beer-chugging, antisocial playground and pulling location of choice for generations of youngsters. The latter purpose is further served by its height: high enough for the guys to hop down, but not so for the gals, who must trustingly jump into their date's arms. I have never tried that one, being a rather short guy myself, and also in part because, when I was still in Junior High the
gulf stank unimaginably of industrial waste, as documented by that great man,
Nikos Karvelas in his immortal song,
Kalokairines Diakopes.
Still, I find the view of the wavebreaker to be most poignant in its symbolism of the country: dirty, ragged, beautiful and steeped in
kafrila.
Kids nowadays do not appreciate such things, I believe. Not that they have all developed nastier habits. When I was a debating coach, maintaining some distance from the kids' lives and the dodgy stuff they got themselves into was essential to my work. In my retirement, however, I receive more invitations to join them, and I often do. You can tell who were more willing to walk in my (exact) footsteps from a few
subtle clues.
Didn't I say that
kafrila beings at home? At the end of a long day's trek across the
kleinon asty, City of Renown, I return to my living room to the sight of dad slumbering in utter contentment in the armchair while, on TV,
Aggeliki Nikolouli frantically searches for traces of missing persons. Is this
kafrila? Probably. But it pales before the fact of actually
bying the armchair in the first place: a
raw statement of masculinity along the lines of "It won't hurt you to fetch me my slippers". My mother responded by putting a pair of Cretan
daggers ceremonially on display, the better to be admired from the armchair.
The day is over, but my collection of
kafriles, big or small, is far from. One of my favourites is the number-in-a-booth trick, which I have myself threatened to use on one or two people. The
inside of the booth reads, quite parsimoniously, "AM BOY GIVE HEAD". I call this
Occam's Blowjob. But notice how somebody has been at the number with a permanent market. Maybe he didn't appreciate being called up by the
pirated CD peddlers and knick-knack merchants of Patission. Or maybe some dissatisfied customer is striking back at our friend the Occamite Sodomite. Aah, the stories of the city.
The reader might also want to speculate on the next exhibit. There are few pigeons in London, but they are a plague in Athens
. Hence, this craftsman's promise to make your house "pigeonproof" for a tidy sum of money. One must look beyond the surface: it is not our hatred of bird poo landing on our coats while we're basking in the winter sun, or our fear of erosion and disease that makes the Greeks so hostile to the poor creature. Rather, I would argue, it is a deeply ingrained view of flight as
hubris, as a challenge to the gods that will not go unpunished. We are reminded of the perils of hubris by the plight of poor
Icaros (the ill-fated name we also give our air force cadets). In Metaksourgeio, where I have my shisha, he is forever plummeting to his
death. Or so would one presume from the way his neck has snapped. Those looking for further proof of the perils of flight (and hubris) in Greece, would do well to check out a brief history of
Olympic Airways. Speaking of transportation, one must not miss the possibility to expose yet more
kafrila. In dictatorships, Mussolini assured us,
trains run on time. In Greece, birthplace of democracy, they run whenever t
hey please, thank you very much. Used to the lightning correspondence of the Tube as I was, I was late on more than one occasion, but it was always shisha appointments and I still got stood up. What do you know.
Thus did I spend my holidays, immersed in the absurdity and
kafrila that is the heart of our nation, thoroughly enjoying the sun, the sleep and shisha, before it was all over and the kleinon asty faded into the haze of a warm afternoon, the people, the places and the stories, and I was taken back to
dear old Blighty, where the new year is living up to my expectations. And that doesn't even include the Sales at Selfridges. MAN!
