Images, memories and stories from its aftermath Holy Week within its urban fabric of Athens they are brought together by personal interpretations of a climate of mystique. Some still seek it in a city so changed. But when one looks back at the city’s own body of memory, one will see the real thrills of the days’ emotion captured in literature or diary entries. If we focus on George Seferis we will meet him as a young man, in 1925, on Good Friday of that year. Come to Easter late, just like this year. Seferis was reading Verlaine’s correspondence that day…
Until, his attention is interrupted by chants coming from the street. “The epitaph,” he thinks. He turns off the light and goes to the window. We bring to mind him, so young, 25 years old, with Verlaine’s book still in his hand, observing the crowd, an “entourage plumed by small fires”. The trams and the busses, the buses, which pass the crowd, remind us of the fast-paced life. Seferis goes up to the roof. The Lycabettus epitaph is serpentine. At the foot of the Acropolis he sees green and red rockets. From Faliro beyond, the searchlights from the fleet illuminate. “On the windows and balconies candles and censers. Car rattles, ironwork from the trams and the bells, without design and without will, “undermining”. I hear all this. Ten at night.”
The young Seferis listens to the ritual of the city and its subtle vibrations. He sees and feels everything as if from a gallery, he observes thoughtfully. In the illuminated meanders of the city, many looks, many bodies, feel the Holy Week. THE Dimitris Pikionis with his texts, he will lead us to the improvised stalls of Aiolou Street with the folk games, to that dull populism of the city, reminiscent of a festival, an illuminated stage, a dreamcatcher and an urban phantasmagoria. Around Kotzia square are the peddlers’ stalls with the lamps, the cards, the poor little games. And a little further down in Omonia, in the underground shops, in the stationery shops of Hautia and Stadion, the congratulatory “poorly crafted” but so familiar Easter cards of the 50s and 60s, with scenes from pre-eternal bucolic Greece, with rosy shepherdesses, with chubby lambs, with bells, ribbons and the Resurrection of Christ. Expectancy!
“Greek at heart”
These greeting cards were sent until the last decades of the 20th century. They had a great time with the expatriates of distant Australia or Canada and the USA. “Happy Easter!”. In a sense, Barba-Pypis was also an immigrant, “Simple Italian Corfu, Greek mother, Greek at heart”. He boasted that his father, when he was a soldier of Napoleon I, “had partaken of Roman”, when he was in danger of dying.
We have resurrected Barba-Pypis from his short story Alexandrou Papadiamantis “Roman Easter” and that’s because this likable old hero (in contrast to the young Seferis of 1925) was in Athens in the 1880s. He wanted to walk down to Piraeus every year, to listen to the Resurrection of Agios Spyridon. And “after the dismissal”, this “pious” old man took the same road to return to Athens. He wanted to hear “Christ is Risen”, “in the temple of his namesake and patron, so that his soul may have a Roman Easter and be happy”.
He went down to Piraeus with his torch in his hands and despite the treacherous and dangerous things on his way, he reverently observed the order. A shadow from the memory nebula. The Resurrection has always had a symbolic character. In 1945, Easter had fallen on May 6. On Good Friday of that difficult year, Seferis had gone to Epitaphios. Its dark flashes are reminiscent of “the light of darkened warlike streets.” And this will pass, as he says, “along with the rest of our lives”. That Easter, in May 1945, “Kathimerini” wrote that “many Atthides – as well as other perfumers – adorned the “Sweet Nazarene”” with fresh flowers of Attica. This is what Seferis would have seen that Easter. In the Easter Athens of 1945, the main street lights were lit and covered with crepes. Widespread mourning of Good Friday in other times…