Carnival

2 March – Carnival

I think one can never prove that carnival is a Greek invention. Nowadays carnival is celebrated mostly in catholic regions, although some orthodox parts of the world as well join the celebration. Carnival now is celebrated because people want to party before the sober days of Lent start.

Locally some very old rites do turn up during carnival, as old as from pagan times. Carnival looks a lot like the old Roman bacchanals, celebrated in honor of Dionysus (the same god as the Roman Bacchus), you know, this Greek god of partying, drinking and eating (a reason why there are Greeks that say that the Greeks invented carnival).

In Greece there is a little town still celebrating according to the old rites. Where there is a party, there often is as well lovemaking and that is why the inhabitants of Tyrnavos (in Thessaly) on Clean Monday (the last day of carnival and the start for Lent) are having a bacchanal with phalluses. Big, small, thick or narrow, from wood or plastic, they are all paraded through town, they sing with them, they dance with them and they have a lot of fun there in Tyrnavos. Originally this festivity for Dionysus was celebrated only by men, but how do you keep the women off the streets during nowadays carnival? The Orthodox Church does not agree, but today all women do participate in the celebrations.

Anyhow, the Orthodox Church is having a difficult time during carnival. The carnival parades in Greece satirize especially the politic scandals, which includes as well the church. The head of the Vatopedi Monastery (on Mount Athos) earned millions thanks to a clever deal of land swap with the state. This case from last year (that made 2 ministers resign) is now known in history as the Vatopedi-scandal, a great subject for the carnival parade. In Patras they worked at a float that would make a fool out of the abt of the Vatopedi monastery. Besides the local clergy as well 20 monasteries of the Mount Athos sent a letter to Patras with the question if that float could be refused at the parade. The mayor of Patras answered the monks that the float did not intend to offend the clergy, they want just to satirize them.

In Istanbul as well in early times they had a carnival: the Bakla Horani. Before the end of the Ottoman Empire there used to live a lot of Greeks in the quarters of Tatavla and Beyoglu, making a parade through their streets. It was a merry parade of masked people, dressed in the traditional Greek clothes from the region they came from, men dressed like women or women like men. But the best of the parade was at the head where local prostitutes in fancy velvet dresses rode horses, lead by their pimps who walked along. This carnival got banned in 1930 by the Turkish government and the Bakla Horani now remains just a sweet memory.

In the early times Venice was best known for its carnival. Nowadays it is Rio de Janeiro. In Greece it is said that Patras is celebrating the biggest carnival. On Lesvos it is Agra, but as well Molyvos with its carnival parade does attract more and more people.

People in Molyvos were not at all bothered by complaining papas. There were even several floats that satirized the head of the Vatopedi monastery. Another theme that was used several times was the refugees, sitting in their rubber boats.

And off course there was the latest Greek scandal: a driving prison with a lot of prisoners in striped clothes walking outside of the prison. They made publicity for the new Greek air company: Korydallos Airlines (Korydallos is the name of the prison from which two heavy criminals lately escaped for the second time by helicopter).

There was no publicity for the real new air company Athens Airways, that started last week flying from Athens to Mytilini twice a day (they will fly as well from Athens to Kavala, Thessaloniki and Alexandropoulo). The head of the Orthodox Church (see him like the pope of the Orthodox Church), patriarch Bartholomeu I of Constantinople, was the first passenger who took flight from Athens to Mytilini. He opened the office of Athens Airways in Mytilini and visited the island for some days. Bartholomeu lives and works in Istanbul. He tries to keep together the different orthodox churches, he defends the orthodox Church against the Turkish and makes dialogues with the catholic church. Today Bartholomeu was nowhere to be seen on any carnival float. If all papas could be like this good man…

Clean Monday

The advantage of Lesvos is that it's a long way from Athens. This means it never shares the chaos of the capital. Athens and the greater part of Greece were crippled by strikes last week. This was the cause of daily blackouts. And the banks joined the electricity guys, so when you wanted money, there wasn't any. Even when you tried to cash your invested money, you couldn't. For days Greece was a black spooky hole on the international exchange market.

Here on the island not for one second was the power cut (except for in our house where we have this bad electricity supply, so that we always have to think about which machine we put on, in order not to have the fuses flying out). So in the capital strikes disrupted daily life, as well as some damage by trains (two weeks ago a train in Pireas crashed through the wall of the station killing a homeless man on the street, and the day before yesterday a train derailed, injuring some 28 people).

On Lesvos we only have calamities at sea. The two boats that embraced each other in a rather hard way close to Sigri were sailed to the north. The badly damaged Georgian Ship is in Petra harbour and the Turkish boat is just outside Molyvos harbour. Since Saturday night Eftalou has had its own rusty vessel to look at. There a Russian ship got stranded in the notorious place where rocks break the surface.

Not that the inhabitants of Molyvos lie awake because of all these stranded ships. They were all into the Carnival and into Clean Monday (Kathara Defteri), the last day when people can stuff themselves with food before the start of Lent. The blowouts (and the carnival) already took some two weeks. If you were really traditional, last week you ate a lot of cheese in the Cheese Week (tirofagou) and the week therefore was the Meat Week (kreatini) that started this year on the 28th of February, Fat Thursday (tsiknopemti) when everybody cooked a lot of meat on the barbecue.

Clean Monday is known for eating shellfish and taramasalata (fish egg paste). Not that there is a Fish day amiss, but on Clean Monday you're supposed not to eat the meat of animals with blood vessels. So if you don't want to eat only vegetables, you can eat plenty of shellfish.

Lesvos is blessed with two big gulfs, where a lot of shellfish live. Though this winter it was forbidden to collect them. These poor creatures were given a year off to increase their population. However, there were plenty of people still collecting them. Last week a friend showed up with very fat and lovely oysters. And to be sure most of the shellfish on the plates of the overcrowded restaurants on this Clean Monday will be local.

Another Greek tradition on Clean Monday is flying kites. Greece is the only country in Europe that has such a tradition. In the fields and from the hilltops, in Molyvos at the castle, you will see everywhere kites flying high in the sky. However here it is not such a rough game as in some Asian countries like Afghanistan, described so well by Khaled Hosseini in his bestseller 'The Kite Runner'. In Greece kite flying is done to entertain the children and not to cut each others flyers in the sky.

Although it nearly became rather a rough day on which we could rerun the experiment of Benjamin Franklin (in 1752 Benjamin Franklin proved that lightning was a kind of electricity; during a thunderstorm he caught the lightning on the rope of a kite, stopping it with a piece of metal: a lightning conductor). For weeks we could be lunching and picnicing outside because of the spring feeling like summer, and especially on this traditional day of picnic and kite flying, black clouds gathered in the east of the island. And when the Carnival parade started, thunder started rumbling in a nasty way.

But Molyvos is not so easily disturbed. Not by stranded boats, nor by menacing black clouds. It had the sun on its side which chased all the clouds over to Turkey.

Many floats in the parade seemed to have known about the stranded ships, because they had as a theme the sea: a whale boat, followed by half of the children of the village dressed as fish, asking for action for a clean sea and our very old Princess Carnival, who does everything to stay young (and manages!), who takes a daily beauty bath in the sea, now transformed into a glittering mermaid. And there was humour as well, such as the bunch of wild men with money all over them, a handkerchief on their heads, following a shovel with an ATM (the bunch of scroundels from the Cretan village of Zoniani!)

I never saw so many people in the village: you could not turn, not even your car. They came from afar and not without reason: the carnival in Molyvos gets better each year.

Later I studied the principles of flying a kite, although I never got one into the sky (I remember it was much easier when I was younger). Finally some men in our party got three kites in the air. They shone like the star of Bethlehem bright in a very blue sky. The days of abundance are gone. But in forty days it will be Easter. Then there will be other days of celebration and the lambs will be roasted over the fires. I wouldn't be surprised if the stranded ships are still there to see how the village celebrates again.

Copyright © Smitaki 2008