Mount Olympus wears snow now, but in the village we have only had snow on the ground two times, each for just a few days, the former nicely timed for Christmas, and the latter just a few days ago. Most of the time it's sweater or even shirtsleeve weather, even in January, at least for us who are accustomed to northern Minnesota. (With the Greeks themselves, it's another story.) In the photo here, shot from just off the Platía Elefthería in Litóhoro 11 December, you can just see the Profítis Ilías chapel on the far left about halfway up. The two highest peaks of Olympus are a little to the right of center, separated by a small steep cleft: Mítikas (2919 meters) on the left, and Stefáni (2909) on the right. Framing them, and the gorge of the Enipéas, at the sides of the picture are the cliffs of Gólna (left) and Zilniá (right).
Two days after I wrote and posted the last entry, on Sunday 10 December, we went by invitation to visit Chrysóstomos and family. Chrysóstomos himself was not there when we arrived, and we learned (across the still formidable though slowly diminishing language barrier) that he was out at his orchard plot harvesting his olives. I seized the first opportunity that presented itself, after lunch, to go join him; and the children, fortunately including the bilingual Chrysoúla, came along. We did not get to stay too long, and Chrys did not let us get too much into it, for fear of seriously staining on our clothes, olives being both dark and oily. But we did get to harvest some, to the thin, penetrating, repetitive, and vastly irritating strains of "Santa Claus is Coming," as played by an electronic Christmas light string at a nearby house.
Chrys gave us a great deal more olives than we had harvested, to take home and cure according to his half-understood instructions. I had the children sort them into two batches. The more thoroughly ripe ones I have been curing dry, with just a plentiful quantity of coarse sea salt distributed through them, in a plastic bag (with drainage holes) that we shake up a bit daily; and after a bit over a month these are very tasty indeed. The greener ones are submerged in brine, held down by a dinner plate, and the brine gets changed every five days or so. I'm hoping that batch will yet become worth eating. In any case, I am no longer so much in awe of whoever first discovered the process: like the molding of Roquefort cheese (or Fleming's Petri dish), it was probably at first just a happy accident, when some wild fruit fell into the sea, and someone fished it out a month later, and so got to experience what Lawrence Durrell called "a taste older than meat, older than wine . . . as old as cold water"--except of course then it was brand-new. Brine and dry salt cures are nowhere near so thorough as lye cures in removing the bitter glucosides from the flesh of the fruit, but they are a good deal easier and safer for the amateur; and anyhow, that very inefficiency is a major reason why Greek table olives have so much more flavor than those wretched canned California jobs, which are the only ripe or black olives that many Americans ever taste (if one can even be said to "taste" something so tasteless).
The next Tuesday, Larissa and I walked up to the Enipéas gorge, and after starting up the high (Priónia) trail on the south or Gólna side, we forked down, and eventually (after crossing a bit of talus slope) we reached the river just above the dam where the aqueduct trail ends, on that same side of the stream. I believe I read somewhere that some locals claim this was the river down which Orpheus's head floated still singing, after the maenads ripped it off his body. In any case, when we passed "Orféas" (Orpheus's) Street on the way up through town, Larissa asked me who that was and I told her the story, complete with that alleged local connection. No floating severed heads being anywhere in evidence, we tasted the fine clear cold water.
Olympus is made of limestone and accordingly riddled with caves. There is a whole group of them just after you start the Priónia trail. This photo captures a hint of a mysterious dim face inside one of them, I think. Whose it is, I leave to your own imagination--just bear in mind what mountain this is.
A week later the other kids joined us for a repeat of the same expedition. On our way up through town we took a slightly different route and discovered a playground park--the best we've yet found, though it's quite a hike from home--and the kids played there a while. When we got to the start of the aqueduct trail, though, we had to turn back, as children were underdressed for the weather at that altitude.
Christmas was a rather quiet and private affair for us. One particularly inspired gift from overseas was D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths, sent to the children from my parents. I remember that book very fondly indeed from my own childhood, when I spent many hours poring over it, little imagining that some day I would be reading it to my own children in their bedroom with a view of Mount Olympus itself out the window.
In Greece, New Year is a rather bigger deal than Christmas, even (I suppose) when it does not usher in a new century or millennium--though really every day ushers in a new century and millennium. The red-coated and white-bearded figure whom Americans know as Santa Claus or St. Nicholas is known to the Greeks as St. Basil, and St. Basil's Day is January first. Special bread (Vasilópita) is baked for the occasion, with a coin inside, supposedly lucky for whoever gets it in his or her slice. (This year it was Trevor.) The bread itself is sweet and oddly seasoned with a seed spice called mahlépi and a tree resin from the Aegean island of Chios, Híos mastíha or gum mastic. Among other peoples, such as the violin-makers of Cremona, gum mastic is used as a varnish ingredient, but here it is used both in this holiday bread and to flavor a fine clear spirit called Tsípouro. As the Greeks are also known for (in effect) flavoring their wine with turpentine (to make retsína), I have to wonder whether this fondness for ingesting paint ingredients is related to the peculiarly high density of paint stores in this country. But I digress. Shortly before midnight on New Year's Eve we got a telephone call from another cousin, one we had not yet met, a son of Sími and Iríni, named Kóstas, who speaks good English. He wished us compliments of the season on behalf of himself and his mother. At midnight "there arose such a clatter," but it was not of hooves, rather of firecrackers, or so I hoped--but I closed the shutters just in case it was festive gunfire and not with blanks.
The next two days we had lots of visitors. So did others in our building, which made us regret that the guy who had recently fixed our hitherto inoperative street-door intercom had botched the job, in such a way that now any of the other apartments' intercom buttons rings through also to our apartment. Some of the visitors were troups of young carolers, who sang traditional Greek carols, to triangle or goat-bell accompaniment, for small change. These did not much care which party they roused, so long as they got into the building to make their rounds. Then Kóstas and Iríni, together with his wife and children, paid us a visit on very short notice, not having so much as mentioned it the night before on the telephone, but telephoning now again just in time for me to go out to meet their car and steer them to our door. By the time Chrysóstomos and Déspina arrived the next day, together with Penelópi and Chrysoúla, and with not even that much notice, I had tired of answering the intercom for others, so they had to keep pushing the button for a while. When they came in at last they took over our kitchen and made lunch, having brought most of the the ingredients with them. It was all a bit overbearing, but with the best and kindest of intentions.
The following Sunday, 7 January, I went to Athens by bus alone for a few days of intensive library work in the Carl Blegen Library at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens. I managed this time to make the morning bus, so I got some of Sunday in Athens before buckling down to work. After depositing my back-pack in my hotel, I set out to photograph, before sunset, the cave of the Furies in the base of the Acropolis (left). To find and identify it, I relied on the directions of our professional Acropolis guide from the previous visit, later confirmed by an edition of Eumenides that I found in the library, with translation and commentary. On the way to get the shot, I was astonished to encounter on Ermoú Street two familiar faces from Hagg-Sauer Hall in Bemidji (where I worked ten years before getting this sabbatical, and to which I shall return to work till the next). Professor Susan Scrivner from my own department (English) and Professor Emeritus Gerald Schnabel from History were spending three weeks in Greece between semesters. They had assumed I was too deeply buried in the hinterlands of Macedonia for a get-together, and so had not e-mailed advance notice to me. We arranged to meet at eight at their hotel to go out for dinner. I found us a nice taverna right by the Tower of the Winds, with a view of the Erechtheum--where Greeks could only wonder at three climatically challenged xéni (aliens) dining al fresco in our shirtsleeves three hours after sunset in January.