Greece journal: 2003 part 4

As I went to breakfast in the hotel, I saw a poster for a linguistics conference to be held in Plaka. It was an unseen hand telling me what I was doing here, and of course I went, though it cost me $80.
Most of the linguistics students in Greece, as in America, are young women. They talked constantly, much to everyone’s annoyance. The conference seemed to be more or less for the benefit of the professors who badgered each other, trying to poke holes in each other’s theories with questions. It deepened my past observations that although fascinating linguistics research has been done, little information from this research has leaked out to the general public. Linguists talk to other linguists about it.
I continue baffled at Saki’s silence. I would call it rude but it is also perhaps an indication of his poor health.
The afternoon presentations at the linguistics conference were quite incomprehensible, except for Professor Athanasios Phivos Christidis, from Thessaloniki. He was 65 or more, a bit shorter than I am, but he had luxuriant white, longish hair and a handsome face. As he took to the podium he said he would rather stand than sit because as a heavy smoker, it helped his breathing. Every time he breathed in it was labored and audible, though he didn’t cough. More emphysema than cancer. When I met him afterwards his eyes were red from the smoke. He probably has a cigarette in his mouth most of the time.
His talk about language in the twentieth century included one small reference to about Chomsky, and all the rest was about Piaget and de Saussure, etc. After it was over I asked him about the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages. He had been part of the team which wrote the proposal to present to the Greek government asking them to accept this Charter, which recognizes and provides support for minority languages. The only language which they recognize in Greece is Turkish, which is the result of a hundred-year-old treaty. This is why Kostas at the Educational Ministry, could work in the field of educating Turkish children in Thrace. Christides said that he felt that Greece should be open-minded, that it would not hurt to let people openly speak their preferred language, but other people did not agree with him, and Greece refused to sign it. “They are afraid,” he opined.
The purpose of my upcoming trip to Florina was partly to report on the health of the Macedonian language there. The sticking point between the Greeks and the Greek Macedonians is language and, in a larger sense, culture.
While nibbling on cookies over lunch I had told a couple of the linguists at the conference about my upcoming trip, and they told me to be careful. One of them said, “People have been put in jail for a lot less than you are planning to do.” This was sobering. Did I want to spend time in jail for the cause of the Macedonians? Their cause meant nothing to me personally, though it was professionally of interest.
Professor Christides spoke without alarm about my trip. He did, however, acknowledge with a smile that “We live in the Balkans and this is a dangerous neighborhood. We are not Sweden and Norway.” He has taught and lived in Thessaloniki, formerly a hub of Macedonian culture. They had seen a lot of this conflict around Thessaloniki during Professor Christides’s lifetime. I thought for a brief while of calling off my trip to Florina and going instead to someplace welcoming, warm, and non-threatening, but talked myself back into it.
I wandered out in Plaka near Monastiraki, and found a cozy square with chairs and tables from several restaurants. It was a sunny day and the trees in the square provided a comfortable shade. The waiter was more interested in chatting with the other waiters at some distance than in finding out whether I wanted to eat anything. I don’t know what it is about cobblestones that is relaxing, but they relaxed me. The light played off the pastel old buildings around the square; the people at the tables made quite a lot of noise; there were babies and old ladies; I drank a carafe of retsina.
I talked to a woman who was Polish who did something about Semantics and Pragmatics, and talked to the guy who gave the lecture about habitus. They seemed fairly uninterested because I am nobody. They wanted to talk to each other.
The young Greek women were a pain in the ass, chattering and whispering all the time. They are very controlling people, who are only happy when they are on the inside. They do things to make it so they are on the inside, gaggling up together and talking on their cell phones so that we see how popular they are. When they are on the outside they are neither polite nor hospitable nor friendly; they are extremely rude. When I lived there, was part of a Greek family, and was on the inside, they were warm, as long as I behaved the way I was supposed to behave. One lecture, on the passive voice, was given by I think a Japanese man, Junichi Toyota. He had a lisp, stuttered badly, and had an accent. A couple of the young women left the room, and just outside, while they were going up the stairs, they were making fun of him. His lecture was pretty much incomprehensible to me in both style and substance, but I was offended at the women’s rudeness.
Going back to the hotel, I saw a man leading a blind man out into the street wagging his finger for a taxi. This is quite the opposite of what it would be in New York. He would try to hide the fact that the man was blind because it would hold up the taxi and he wouldn’t pick you up. Here you expect, as the Greeks always do, to take the poor and wounded under their wing. It’s when you are hale and hearty that you have trouble.
Tomorrow I leave for Florina, and I think I will sleep restlessly tonight as I wonder whether I will get in any trouble up there. I am not used to living in a repressive society, and must be aware of the signals as I run into them. As a freewheeling American, I might not pick them up quickly enough. I have lived in Greece, speak the language, and thus have the advantage, but it’s been twenty-five years……