Patricia Storace - Dinner with Persephone: Travels in Greece

PATRICIA STORACE
Dinner with Persephone

A native of Mobile, Alabama, Patricia Storace was educated at Columbia University and the University of Cambridge. She is the author of a book of poems, Heredity, and the winner of a prize for poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her essays have appeared frequently in The New York Review of Books and in Cond Nast Traveler. This is her first book of prose.

FIRST VINTAGE DEPARTURES EDITION, SEPTEMBER 1997

Copyright 1996 by Patricia Storace

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1996.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: Cambridge University Press: Excerpt from Folk Poetry of Modern Greece by Roderick Beaton. Copyright 1980 by Cambridge University Press. Reprinted by permission of Cambridge University Press. Hestia Publishers and Booksellers: Excerpts from Demotiko Tragoubi Tis Xenitias, translated in this work by Patricia Storace. Copyright 1990 by Hestia Publishers and Booksellers. Reprinted by permission of Hestia Publishers and Booksellers. Ludlow Music, Inc.: Excerpt from This Land Is Your Land by Woody Guthrie. TRO Copyright 1956, renewed 1958, 1970 by Ludlow Music, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Ludlow Music, Inc. Original Book, Inc : Excerpts from Oneirocritica by Artemidorus, translated by Robert J. White, 1990. Reprinted by permission of Original Books, Inc. Princeton University Press: Excerpts from Denial, Syngrou Avenue, 1930, and The Mood of a Day from Collected Poems of George Seferis, translated by Keeley Sherrard. Copyright 1967, 1981 by Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Storace, Patricia.
Dinner with Persephone / Patricia Storace.
p. cm.
1. Storace, PatriciaJourneysGreece. 2. GreeceDescription and travel. I. Title.
DF728.S76 1996
949.5dc20 96-7650

eISBN: 978-0-307-76533-8

Author photograph Jeffrey Weiner

Random House Web address: http://www.randomhouse.com/

v3.1

For Mrs. Emily M. Flint
and in loving memory of
Mrs. Louise S. Lovett

Where is love that with one stroke cuts time in two and stuns it?

From The Mood of a Day
by George Seferis

In the different cities of Greece and at the great religious gatherings in that country in the largest and most populous of the islands, I have patiently listened to old dreams and their consequences.

Artemidorus of Daldis

May we believe in Greece.

Serapheim, Archbishop of Athens and All Greece

I thank Lynn Nesbit, for her support of this work. I also owe thanks to the Department of Hellenic Studies of Princeton University, and in particular to Dimitri Gondicas. Affectionate thanks also to Richard Burgi, Robert Lane, Demos Kounidis, Krista Zois, and John and Athina Davis, for evenings of white wine and Cavafy, and much more. My heartfelt thanks and love to my dear friends Sofia Theonas, Zacharias Thrillos, the poet Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke, and the painter Yiannis Zikas; nothing would have been possible without them. I am grateful to Robert J. White for his eloquent translation of the Oneirokritika, from which all the Artemidorus quotations are drawn. Thanks to the painter Peter Devine, for joyful hours spent looking at Greek art; and love and gratitude to Ron, involved in this book in more ways than he knows. A number of people did not want acknowledgment, for reasons of privacy; you know who you are, and you know my gratitude.

It is an honor and an education to work with the editor Erroll McDonald; the guidance of such a profound literary mind is beyond thanks.

It is rightfully against the law to remove antiquities from Greek territory; and yet I brought home ancient treasures in the form of Greek words. Thanks to my teachers, Tryphon Tzifis and Dora Papaioannou, without whose patient work I could not have shared in these precious possessions.

The chapter Dream of Love After the Dance includes references and quotations from the books of the archives of P.S. Delta First Memoir and Memoir of 1899 which were published by Hermes Publishing House under the supervision of P.A. Zannas and Alexandros P. Zannas. The quotations have been reprinted with the permission of Alexandros P. Zannas and Asimina Zannas.

A rkhe tou paramythiou, kalispera sas, is a traditional beginning of a Greek fairy tale. The fairy tale begins, good evening to you.

I lived in Athens, at the intersection of a prostitute and a saint. It was a neighborhood of mixed high-rises and a scattering of neoclassical houses, some boarded up while the owners waited to be offered the right price for their inheritance. The neighborhood hardware stores carried, along with screwdrivers and lengths of wire and caulking pastes, icon frames with electric lights in the shape of candles attached, so you wouldnt have to inconvenience yourself with oil for the perpetual flame. All the neighborhood shopsthe laundry, the butchers, the vegetable market, the TV and appliances store, the cheap dress shop and the bridal gown shop, the school supplies shop with its large-sized brightly colored picture books of Greek myths and tales of Alexander the Greatwere defended by charms against the evil eye suspended over their counters. If you took the evening volta, stroll, that provides most Athenians with their exercise during the punishingly hot times of the year, certain streets gave you glimpses of Mount Hymettus, smudged with darkening violet light, like a drawing someone had started and then decided to cross out with ink.

The tiny cottage of an apartment I moved into yesterday has already begun to teach me what a different world I have come to, physically, socially, historically. It is no easy matter to find apartments with furniture and kitchen appliances here. In Greece, the tenant is supposed to supply these things. Until 1983, when the obligatory dowrythe prikaa woman brought to her husband was declared illegal, refrigerators and beds were components of the marriage agreement. And for the most part, unmarried people until fairly recently lived with their parents, and had no need for their own domestic equipment. Even now, when it is common for couples to marry later, and to live together before they do, many people I know from previous visits live in a kind of compromise between independence and family surveillance. Their parents or grandparents built family-only apartment buildings in which each child of adult age is housed on a different floor, along with members of the extended family, who wander in and out of each others living rooms, dandling each others babies, stirring each others pots of