Of Greek, Greeks and English

This is a collection of ephemera – odds and ends of thoughts that have not been built into a fuller blog post worthy of it’s own separate entry or new stuff that has arisen since the original topics were written.

Being all good higgerant English tourists, some of us have been trying to murder the local tongue as only English tourists can. We’ve efharisto’d (thank-you’ed) shop keepers and parakalo’d occasionally (it means ‘please’, but flexibly, so it can mean anything from ‘what’ to ‘come on’). Elsewhere we were taught that the normal greeting is yassou (hi) but here they say yassas or just grunt yeah in passing.

There’s a bit of a joke among a few of us here to do with greetings. Kallemera (pronounced cally mairer) and kallespera are good morning and good evening. However sometimes people get a little mixed up and instead say kalamari. The joke runs ‘good morning, good evening, squid’. In addition there’s also a small hamlet just across the road called Pirgoi (pronounced peer-gee, means ‘tower’) that has been referred to several times as ‘pigri’ in our hearing.

There is no B sound in the Greek alphabet, and the nearest they get is to used mp together. So Zormpa was a Greek (I have seen a taverna that used the name spelt this way) and there is Cramp Salad on the menu in one local taverna. The symbol we see as a B is veta, and has a hard V sound. This is land is Lesvos, and they are pretty certain about that.

Talking of which, we had a guided tour of the new archaeological museum in Mytilini, which of course included a discussion of Sappho. The guide was pretty sure that Sappho had little to do with homosexuality, and having looked up some of her poetry, one would be really hard pressed to find any erotic content in it unless there’s a subtle euphemism tucked away somewhere. There IS praise for women in the way men would be praised and honoured put of respect, and that is really what makes it unusual. Our guide offered the alternative explanation that a Roman General’s wife, called Lesbiana, might have had the practice named after her instead, since she used to arrange same-sex orgies. Maybe I’ll greet the lesbians I know with Greek and see how we get on….?

;-)

Another interesting thing we saw at the museum were from marbles carved to honour the dead. In the image, the dead person depicted on horseback was seen approaching a tree with a serpent coiled through it’s branches to represent wisdom. The echoes of the fall of man in Genesis were striking. No doubt there are interesting explanations as to why such a cross-over might exist.

On Wednesday we had a steaming hot day, deciding to stay on site (yesterday the thermometer in the car we used read 36’C at around 5.30pm, and this was at least as hot) and go swimming morning and evening while sleeping and reading our way through the afternoon. When Chris and I snorkel we normally go separately because communication is difficult and we enjoy different paces. Today things were different, and this morning we found another shoal of those muscular, plump yellow and blue fish and generally had a good swim. This afternoon I went out alone at first and came across an additional section of the roman harbour that we’d not seen before, plus additional stuff at the original site. Someone has been doing underwater archaeology/restoration and the huge stone blocks that might have constituted the original harbour arm have been uncovered, and in some cases cleaned up. beyond the blocks there was also a section that looked as if it might have been cobbled, with regular rounded stones set in the sea bed. I’d guess there’s quite a bit more waiting to be uncovered for the hard-working and enterprising soul who loves to study under water.

The last couple of days have been much cooler, and I snorkelled again this afternoon. It was like swimming through a London fog from the 1960s, with navigation only possible by sticking one’s face above water and choosing a point to aim for.

Through the window I have just watched a shield bug walk across the table. We had quite a few visitors of the chitin-covered variety, including cicadas, a large cricket, several grasshoppers, one of which sat in the sun with me this morning, swaying curiously from side to side as if it had just disembarked from a boat. We’ve also had our share of insect bites, which formed large red wheals, often with a small hole in the middle that would ooze for a while. I must be changing, because Chris always suffered and I never did, so either I now react to them or they didn’t used to bite me. Could it be I’ve become sweeter?

Generally we’ve not been aware of mozzies in the room, except for a couple of days ago when I found and killed 3. The new liquid form of insect killer that everyone now sells instead of the old tablet-based kind makes my react allergically, and I stream first thing in the morning until an hour after I take a Cetrizine tablet. Yesterday the wind picked up and that keeps flying insects down. We left the device switched off and I have not required a tablet today. QED?