Omaira Gil :
When you marry someone from a different culture, the hurdles of married life come with an added dimension. It was nice to see that in certain areas, my own culture and Greek culture are really not that different.
In Greece, the cities empty out during August, and I mean literally. During the month of August, buying a bus ticket from a kiosk becomes a near-impossible task. Everyone disappears, even the beggars lining the streets vanish, to return rested and ready for their work in September. The roads become eerily quiet, and conversely much more dangerous.
As I’ve said before, Greeks drive like there is no one else on the road. When this becomes a reality in the month of August, the roads become even more lethal as the holiday mind set and lack of caution combine.
When the heat well and truly set in, Athens became unbearable and we decided to take a break from our routine for a quick trip to the mountains.
Our destination was my husband’s maternal village of Rapsani. Rapsani is a village along the outskirts of Mount Olympus, unknown to the tourists, population around 1,000 permanent residents. It crawls down a valley towards the sea, and this is where my husband’s grandmother spent her girlhood before moving to the larger town of Larissa.
In the cities it’s the norm to have both parents working, and do. It’s customary to send the grandchildren off to granny’s to spend the summer and fatten up for the winter. Rapsani is no exception. Children were everywhere, to the point that a local teacher is thinking of opening a language school because there are now enough children in the village full-time to make it worthwhile.
It’s in the villages that we see the unusual side-effect of the economic crisis in Greece. While it has decimated the economy of Greece and destroyed careers, a most unexpected result of the crisis was that it breathed new life into the villages and small towns.
Half of Greece’s population lives in Athens. Unable to afford rent and food costs in Athens any more due to the crisis, many young people and families upped sticks and returned to their ancestral villages. The reasoning was that if you were going to be jobless, you might as well be jobless somewhere where you didn’t have rent to pay and could grow enough vegetables to feed your family.
The result is that in little villages like Rapsani all across Greece, the sound of childhood laughter echoes through the narrow lanes once more where once it was just a summer phenomenon.
On our last evening, my husband’s great aunt took us for a walk through the village, dropping in from house to house to introduce us. In a strange way it was like a mirror image of my own walk through my village in Pakistan last year, introducing my husband to family and friends.
At each house we went to, no sooner had we sat down than drinks and syrupy sweets were produced to welcome us. As in my own culture, so too in Greek culture, turning down these little treats would be bad manners. It’s best to temporarily forget the diet you were on and indulge your hosts.
The faces of toothless little old ladies dressed in black lit up at the mention of my husband’s grandmother’s name, and stories flowed like water. My dear, you were just a little boy when I last saw you. Remember how you kids used to all stay up talking until the morning when you would visit? These are your sons? How time flies. Wait and see, before you know it you’ll be old like me and these two will have children of their own. You must come again, and next time you’ll come to my house for dinner.
So on and so forth, in a completely different language and country, and yet all so familiar. Opposites may attract, but common ground can be found almost everywhere.
(Omaira Gill is a freelance journalist based in Athens)
