I didn’t go to the Greek Festival this year for a number of reasons, not the least of which was a strange but no doubt untoward reaction to one of the ads for the thing which encouraged attendance so one could “Feel like a Greek” for a day.
I have lived in Greece for many years and know it better than I know Santa Barbara. I have known Greeks from barmen to mayors, to shipping magnates, priests, and a couple of clowns and a communist from Thessaloniki beneath the summit of Olympus in a German refuge over ouzo and stew. I have been to weddings and funerals, christenings and riots. I have drunk long and deep with veterans from both sides of the Civil War. I climbed Mt. Olympus five times and watched the fog obscure us from the mortals down in the Aegean and the motorists on the National Road on their way to visit the unsightly village of Drama or Thermopylae — the “hot gates’ where the Greeks and the Persians slaughtered each other and where the Marathon got its name. I have fished for octopi by moonlight, bribed bankers and bus companies while hiding my tax burden under loads of obfuscation and misdirection.
I have known its gut-punch beauty blocks from desperate bordellos and immigrant hideouts in Piraeus and Patras. I have seen the sun rise over every sea in Greece, been to the Parthenon 80 or so times, visited the cave where Zeus was born on Naxos, and bought coins on the black market with the head of Alexander the Great emblazoned like a raised middle finger at all the history that had come before him. I have drank wine at Delphi where the Oracles, stoned and enigmatic, wavered and quaked as they spun their enigmas. I have been to Delos, a Sacred Island, where no one has slept for a thousand years.