Tanagras 1925 Portrait

While visiting my Aunt Kalliope in Athens, I noticed this autographed portrait of Angelos Tanagras (her dearly loved uncle) hanging in the living room. The lighting was low and I wasn't able to take a good photo. Next time, I hope to take it out of the frame and scan it. It's definitely the greatest photo of Tanagras I've ever seen. As the medals testify, he was an admiral and decorated for his contributions to the navy as a medical doctor. For instance, he set up the medical relief program after the burning of Smyrna in 1922 (only three years before this photo was taken).

Although Tanagras died years before I was born, his presence remained physical in the family through his admiral's hat that respectfully rested on a ledge in my grandmother's house.

My aunt Kalliope was named after Tanagras' mother. And our daughter Kalliope is named after both my aunt and my great great aunt.

Paranormal Research in Pennsylvania

Returning to blogging after my summer hiatus, I turn my attention to three people revolving around the constellation of paranormal archaeology: Bill Caraher's Dream Archaeology, my great uncle Tanagras and my colleague at F&M anthropologist Misty Bastian.

If you remember, a couple of years ago Yannis Hamilakis wrote on the relationship between modern (objective) and premodern (less objective) archaeological relationships. He argued that Greeks had an indigenous relationship to archaeology before the emergence of a professional modern discipline. The erasure of this earlier mode the profession constitutes a form of colonialism. For the details, see Hamilakis, Y. 2008. Decolonising Greek archaeology: indigenous archaeologies, modernist archaeology, and the post-colonial critique. In Damaskos, D. and Plantzos, D. (eds), A Singular Antiquity. Athens: The Benaki Museum, pp. 273-84. (Download PDF here) Hamilakis discusses these ideas in his ground breaking book, The Nation and Its Ruins (Oxford, 2007)

Analyzing Late Antique, Byzantine and Early Modern case studies, Bill Caraher began an exploration of dream archaeology, an aspect of indigenous archaeology where dream visions direct archaeological investigation. See, Caraher's working draft here.

All these inspirations made me contemplate my great uncle Angelos Tanagras, one of the founders of Psychical Research in the early 20th century. I blogged about him (here) and about his relationship to archaeology (here). Thanks to those postings, I have come into contact with two prominent historians of Tanagras, Peter Mulacz and Nikolaos Koumartzis. Mulacz is the Vice President of the Austrian Society of Psychical Research. He has sent me the photo above showing the 1930 meeting of the Society of Psychical Research in Athens. Nikolaos Koumartzis has published a much-needed history, Psychical Research in Greece, Paranormal Greece: Psychical Research in Greece (Athens, 2009).

While attending F&M's conference on the curriculum, I got a quick chance to catch up with my colleague Misty Bastian in Anthropology. She quickly filled me in on her fascinating new research on paranormal Pennsylvania. You can read all about it in Haunted Hackman (The Diplomat, Aug. 26, 2010). Now, I look forward to future conversations, virtual, real and even paranormal. Bastian is best known for her work in Nigeria and infamous among students for her seminars on magic (ancient, modern, western and non-nonwestern).

Where to Be Buried: The Immigrant's Choice

During my last visit to Fernwood Cemetery in Philadelphia, I noticed a new memorial in the Greek-American section. My visits here are personal (upkeep of family grave) but also academic (analyzing diaspora material culture). See posting, Buried in Bottles (June 7, 2008). New monuments come with a dose of sadness as, in many cases, I know the deceased individuals, and I learn of their death at the cemetery. One recent burial that I noticed during my visit was Fotios Karalis, who died five months ago at the age of 86. The tomb's meticulous upkeep, the constant burning of the candle and the fresh flowers reflect the family's commitment to the upkeep of memory. The Karalis monument contains typical features found in Greek tombs, even when the options are constrained by the regulations of a historical Protestant cemetery. One source of tension seen frequently in Greek-American tombs is the Greek desire to fence off the human body to avoid stepping (a sign of desecration), which contradicts the idyllic park aesthetics that require the uniform coverage of grass. Any kind of enclosure is a nuisance to the cemetery authorities who must regularly mow the uniform lawn. The fence seen in the Karalis monument is a common compromise between cultural traditions, limiting enclosure to the concrete base of the future tombstone. The fence communicates the desire to protect the body without actually demarcating the body and violating cemetery rules.

Pictures on tombs tend to be portraits of the deceased. The Karalis monument is extraordinary in its visual images, namely two laminated photographs nailed on the cross. Both images show the deceased in his village in Greece. The lower photo (left) is framed by a vertical wooden post belonging to a porch in the village. The person who took the photo stands under the porch, shooting Karalis in the distance. Once nailed on the cross, the wooden post captured in the photograph runs parallel to the wooden post. The real wood (of the cross) and the wood from Greece (holding up the house) reverberate with each other. The pins that hold the image of Karalis on the cross also reverberate with the image of Christ on the cross represented in an icon. The photograph surface is plastic. They have been laminated to protect the image from the rain. A close up of the laminated surface shows specks of grass, thrown up on the image from the mechanical mowers cutting the cemetery's lawn. Grass from the ground has invaded the vertical image giving it, at the same, time a three dimensional texture and dimension of reality. Such art-historical readings were not certainly not intentional. The haphazard juxtapositions between real and unreal, present and past, here (Philadelphia) and there (Greece) animate the monument as a work of cultural production.

The inclusion of photos from the deceased individual's homeland is on its own interesting. The Greek American immigration narrative expressed in songs and attitudes inlcudes a yearning to be buried in Greece. Such a return of the body brings closure to the immigrant journey. Being buried away from the extended family also translates to a fear of not being remembered ritually. Burial in the "xenitia" (foreign land) means that the tomb will be forgotten among strangers. The extended family will not be able to perform the continuous rituals of commemoration, the trisagions, the continuous lighting of the candle and the visual upkeep. Most Greek immigrants of Karalis' generation faced a powerful dilemma. If they were buried in the U.S., their tomb could be visited by their immediate loved ones (spouses, children) but not by the extended kin. With geographical mobility in the U.S., the next generation might not even be anywhere close to the city that the deceased was buried. Burial back in the village of birth in Greece, nevertheless, guarantees a locus of visitation, a point of origin. After all, you would be buried next to your parents, grandparents, siblings and cousins. The photographs in the Karalis tomb resolve the dilemma in an interesting way. Although physically buried in the U.S., the photos on his tomb have transported him back to his village. The photos, in other words, facilitated that final journey home. Karalis is at both places.

My family is a good example of the geographical tensions of immigration. Like many immigrants, my father wished to be buried in Greece. Greek-American funeral homes, interestingly enough, do this frequently and have mastered all the bureaucratic steps along the way. It's not an easy matter to transport a corpse across international boundaries. For instance, the corpse has to be embalmed, a practice not common in Greece, and placed in a special metal coffin that is sealed and airtight. The special transport coffins are larger than the typical coffin used in Greece and, therefore, cannot fit in the pre-existing tombs. Commonly in Greece, the bones of the ancestors are interred and the new deceased is buried in the same location. When my father's coffin arrived, we had to excavate a new burial large enough to accomodate the high tech coffin. Having been embalmed, moreover, means that my father's body will probably never be interred because the body will take decades to decompose. But these are gorey details. The important conflict is that he is buried with his relatives (most importantly with his parents) but his immediate family can only visit him whenever they go to Greece, about once every two years.

My mother, on the other, hand was so patriotic towards her adopted country that she wanted to be buried in Philadelphia. Even though neither my sister or I live in Philadelphia, we still manage to visit her grave about once a month and perform the regular upkeep. My mother is the first member of our family to be buried in the U.S., so she has no family kin next to her. She's buried in the Greek-American section, but she is surrounded by strangers. My mother's family is from Athens and everyone has been buried in a family mausoleum. By choosing to be buried in the U.S., my mother is the first family member of many generations to be missing from the mausoleum in Athens.

This geographical choice of burial is not only complex but difficult to communicate. Consider the difference between my father and mother. Since we were little children, my father would take us to his village cemetery and involve us in the rituals of visiting the ancestors. After each annual visit, he would remind us that one day his bones would rest next to his parents, suggesting indirectly that one day, it will be us (my sister and I) visiting him. So when he died unexpectedly from a heart attack, there was no question about what his wishes regarding country of burial. My mother, on the other hand, had never expressed any choice to either her children or her siblings. When it was obvious that her cancer was terminal, we were placed in the rather sad position of having to ask her directly. Her choice to be buried in Philadelphia upset the rest of the family back in Greece. Not only had the immigration deprived them of their family member, but they couldn't even express their final farewell.

Follow the White Marble Road to Halandri

While I don't typically report on new archaeological discoveries, I cannot help mentioning the excavation of a road that, in antiquity, connected downtown Athens with its marble source on Mount Penteli. The process of marble extraction, transportation and general provisioning for the Acropolis has been beautifully elaborated by Manoles Korres in Από τη Πεντέλη στον Παρθενώνα (Melissa, 1994), or the English edition of The Stones of the Parthenon (Getty, 2000). My good friend Anna Androulaki has just informed me that a section of this marble road has been unearthed in the neighborhood of Halandri . "Follow the Marble Road" was the title of her email. The witty reference to the Wizard of Oz has a deeper personal meaning that I'll explain later in the blog.

"The Ancient Road of Marble," was announced in yesterday's Eleutherotypia newspaper. The excavation was supervised by Giouli Papageorgiou of the 2nd Ephoria of Prehistoric and Classical Antiquities. The ancient road is 3.30 m wide and it contains the expected wheel ruts. What is wonderful for post-classical archaeologists (like myself) is the presence of a Frankish coin indicating the road's continued use into the 13th and 14th c. According to the secondary literature on this issue, all marble quarries stopped functioning after antiquity. Penteli's quarry was opened up again in the 19th century for the rebuilding of neoclassical Athens. Research on medieval quarries is in its infancy. Frederick Cooper and Sarah Franck (University of Minnesota) have been studying the issue with G.I.S., and Demetris Athanasoulis (Ephor of Byzantine Antiquities in Corinth) has been tracking limestone quarries connected to the foundation of Glarentza and Kastro Chlemoutsi. A coherent picture is emerging for the Frangokratia in the Peloponnese with new limestone quarries servicing the need for ashlar detailing (quoins, rib vaults, sculpturalal relief, gargoyles, etc.)

What is personally exciting about the new stretch of the marble road is its location in the ravine of Halandri near my friend Anna Androulaki's house. I've spent endless summer hours on Anna's balcony between field projects. All of Athens seemed to have vacated and we splurged on DVD marathons of the Sopranos, Haagen Dazs, peinirli, and Penne alla Vodka. Anna's son, Patroklos, is my godson. When he was eight years old, I decided to take him on his first "archaeologcial expedition." Since I would go to Greece and then disappear up in the mountains, Patroklos had created an inflated idea of how "cool" my job was. So, I decided to give him a true taste. I got him a compass and a notebook and we headed up the mountain to the quarries of Penteli. Actually, Anna drove us up there, but we walked back on our own (for hours). It was one of my fondest days in Athens: me and my godson crawling through quarry caves and Byzantine churches, looking down upon Athens, all alone with no other soul in sight. The walk back was interesting, too, since Patroklos insisted on wearing his unlaced Run DMC sneakers for the occasion. Once we reached civilization, we took a bus to downtown Athens. It became clear to me at that point that Patroklos had never taken an Athens city bus. The adventure was topped by a special bookstore visit to buy the latest volume of my favorite children's literature, Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, just translated into Greek.

Now, we don't have to take that journey anymore. We can simply walk to 133 Penteli Street and watch the marble road. But things have changed. My friend Anna and the kids have immigrated to Germany; Anna, an IB teacher, got a fantastic job at the Salem International College in Uberlingen. So, my godson became an immigrant at the age of fourteen, almost as old as I was when my family immigrated to the U.S. I feel an additional bond with Patroklos; such a transition is a mixed bag full of growth and excitement, on the one hand, but sadness and estrangement, on the other hand. I regret not being there for some sympathetic support. For Anna, Patroklos, and his sister Dynameni, the return to Halandri is the return from the Xenitia on the sporadic holiday. For me, Anna's house in Halandri fulfilled the need of an immigrant's return home. Paradoxically, the same house is now serving this very role for Anna and the kids. Circuitously, it emerges at the end of a different yellow-brick road. And my wife tells me that there is another circuitous path: Daniel Handler (aka. Lemony Snicket) is Wesleyan alumni.

Finally, I should mention that Patroklos is blooming into a successful recording artist, a proud representative of a small but booming hip-hop scene in Greece. So this last Christmas holiday, when her returned to Halandri from Germany, he spent his time at "home" in the recording studio, mixing the tracks of The Fat Free Yogurts (Άπαχα Γιαούρτια). Now I'm really glad he didn't compromise his unlaced shoes for the mountain of Penteli.

Tanagras and Kourouniotis

In my postings on Angelos Tanagras and archaeology, I contemplated certain lines of inquiry. Since then, I've found one more piece of evidence. Tanagras was friends with Alexander Philadelpheus, a very important Greek archaeologist. Reading through the list of case-studies in Psychological Elements in Parapsychological Traditions (New York, 1967), I was thrilled to find an entry by another very important Greek archaeologist, Konstantinos Kourouniotis, Director of the Archaeological Service (left, picture from Eleusina). In 1929, Kourouniotis submitted a report on paranormal activities to Tanagras' scientific journal, Psychic Researches. This suggests that Kourouniotis was not only a follower of Tanagras' theories but perhaps also a friend. His report was both public and signed. I quote the whole passage below, involving an incident of bee the exorcism. It does not involve the practice of archaeology per se, but it took place during Kourouniotis' fieldwork in Asia Minor. This is the period when Kourouniotis conducted excavations in Ephesus (the church of Saint John), an interesting chapter in Greek archaeology between the 1919 Treaty of Versailles (which granted Greece control of Asia Minor) and the 1922 "Great Catastrophe" (which ousted the Greeks from Asia Minor). For the archaoelogical geopolitics of that period, see, Jack L. Davis, "A Foreign School of Archaeology and the Politics of Archaeological Practice: Anatolia, 1922," Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology 16.2 (2003), pp. 147-173.

Tanagras recounts Kourouniotis' story in the chapter, "Psychobolic Influence on Animals,"Psychological Elements in Parapsychological Traditions, p. 65.

"CASE 62. Professor C. Kourouniotis, the ephor of antiquities and head of the archaeological section at the Ministry of Education, has reported the following case, which was published in the Psychikai Ereunai, January, 1929: In 1920, during the Greek occupation of Asia Minor, Professor Kourouniotis was at Eskihesir, for the purpose of exmining the local antiquities. For his accomodation, an empty house had been requisitioned, and in the door of this house, at a height of six fee, a swarm of bees had built their nest. Every effort was made to dislogde the nest, without success, and, as the maidservant was very disturbed by the proximity of the bees, they were advised to call in a hodja (Turkishy priest) who had the ability of 'exorcising' and would therefore be able to solve the problem. Mr. Kourouniotis acceded to the appeals of the maid and called the hodja, who came in the evening and stayed for some time in order to pray. The bees were not seen again and no dead bees were found, as would have been the case if fumigation or a poison had been used. (signed) Professor C. Kourouniotis."

It is important to stress that Tanagras sought scientific principles behind these occurances, and there is no reason to think that Kourouniotis was any less scientific in his approach. The Tanagras Theory belongs to a fascinating moment in the history of science where Einstein's relativity, Curie's radiology and Freud's psychoanalysis coalesce into one discipline. According to Tanagras, animate beings (both animals and humans) emit psychic rays, similar to X-rays, that directly affect the physical world. His discipline of Parapsychology sought to substantiate, to experiment on, and to explain the processes of psychic projection. It was not, therefore, an enterprise of the occult but a respected scientific endeavor with many followers of high social standing in Greek society. Tanagras traveled throughout Greece to collect evidence and published authoritative eye-witness reports by other trustworthy sources

Tanagras and Archaeology

After giving a general biographic introduction to Angelos Tanagras, I now turn to Caraher's research on dreams and archaeology. Psychoanalysis had a fondness for archaeology from the very beginning. I'm thinking of Freud's extensive collection of antiquities including a bronze Isis and Horus, a terracotta Sphinx, a marble Eros and a bronze Athena (on display at the Freud Museum in London). There is also his essay "A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis" (1936) that documents his experiences during his first visit to Athens in 1904.

There is the metaphor of digging through the layers of memory to get through the psyche, the Jungian search for mythological archetypes, or simply the primitive fascination of physically connecting to your ancestors (father, mother) by digging up their graves--defiling them and celebrating them in the same action. Michael Shanks has related the archaeological sentiment with Julia Kristeva's notion of the Abject; in so many words, the archaeologist has a fundamental cultural need to get dirty, to play with his own shit in the sandpit.

But more specifically onto Tanagras, I'm brainstorming to find any specific connection that might contribute to Caraher's thesis. I don't have a clear answer but a few thoughts.

1. The name Tanagras reveals an archaeological sensibility. I do not know when Tanagras chose this literary pseudonym and, more importantly, why. As far as I know, the family originated from Paros, so there is no regional connection to Boeotia. Tanagra became a famous site when in the 1860s, some farmers ploughed through Hellenist tombs full of terracotta figurines. The naturalistic pose and the preserved pigments on the little statues appealed to the contemporary aesthetics. The figurines became a late-19th-c. celebrity, flooding the antiquities market (including a number of fakes) and becoming standards of beauty for contemporary artists. Tanagras may have identified with the mythological figure Tanagra, the Naiad nymph that gave name to the ancient city. Naiads were the deities of wells, springs and fountains and Tanagras may have identified with the mythology of flows. At any rate, I suspect that he chose the name Tanagras, specifically, because of its reputation (thanks to the figurines) throughout Europe.

2. Going through the memory banks of what relatives have told me about Tanagras, I cannot find any referencet to archaeology. Nevertheless, I was shocked a few years ago to discover a dedication to Tanagras by Alexander Philadelpheus in his 1924 Monuments of Athens (Μνημεία Αθηνών). Philadelpheus was Greece's best known archaeologist of the early 20th c., he was director of the Archaeological Museum and quite international. He and Tanagras must have been good friends.

3. Caraher's fundamental question is the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity in archaeological practice. I have only one story to offer on this front regarding Tanagras. According to my aunts, Tanagras had an apartment on Aristotelous Street, where he held seances attended by some elite members of Athenian society. His professional research, after all, was on the communication of spirits and paranormal psychic activities. Among the regular attendants were members of the Police Department, who sought clues for solving crimes. This might seem bizarre to us today, but we must remember that through the early 20th-c. somnubalism, spiritualism and theosophy were considered mainstream intellectual positions. Madame Blatavsky comes to mind, the founder of the Theosophical Society. What distinguishes Tanagras from other spiritualists is his commitment to documentation, scientific objectivity and material proof. Tanagras seems to have filmed at least one of his subjects; he exhibited the film in 1935, at the 5th International Congress of Phychic Research in Oslo. Fotini Pallikari, professor of Physics at the University of Athens has presented fascinating new research on this controversial film, see "The 1935 Oslo International Parapsychology Congress and the Telekinesis of Cleio," International Conference of the Society for Psychical Research, University of Winchester, August 2008. Bill Caraher will especially appreciate this filmic side of Tanagras, given his interest in documentaries and video (see PKAP).

This is all to say that there at least a spiritual connection between Tanagras and archaeology but perhaps more. It is hard to know since such little has been published on his life. I should collect more information from surviving relatives. Some clues might be found in Tanagras' unpublished autobiography, which he sent to the Elliot Garrett Parapsychology Foundation Library in New York. The library is in Long Island, and I would love to visit it. I also hope to communicate with Fotini Pallikari, the scholarly expert on Tanagras. My cousin Angelos (named after Tanagras) Vallianatos is the official family historian; we've just connected on Facebook and I hope to talk to him more about this legendary great uncle when I travel to Greece this summer.

Angelos Tanagras

William Caraher has been researching the relationship between dreams and archaeology, specifically how visions have assisted the discovery of new sites. This is an ancient trope that Caraher has been tracing through Late Antiquity, Byzantium and Greek folklore. His research has taken a turn towards psychoanalysis and the figure of Angelos Tanagras, the Greek pioneer in psycho-physical studies. Tanagras happens to be my great uncle, the brother of Katerina Bravos, my maternal grandmother. My mother and aunts were extremely close to Tanagras, he was their closest thing to a father figure. He died when I was only five years old so I do not remember him well, but my mother and aunts always talked to me about him with curiosity and admiration. For today's posting, I will give a general overview of Tanagras' career to the degree that I have been able to reconstruct it. This might be helpful, since so little is available in English. In future postings, I want to make some speculative connections between Tanagras and archaeology, directly responding to Caraher's research.

Angelos Euangelidou was born in Athens in 1877. The name Tanagras is a literary pseudonym that he created for himself, surely based on the romantic associations of the Tanagra figurines (19th-c. archaeological discovery in Boeotia). Tanagras studied medicine at the University of Athens and pursued graduate studies in Berlin. He joined the Greek Navy in 1897, and fought in the Greek-Turkish war. He organized the health standard of Piraeus' port and an infectious disease center on the island of Salamina. He fought in the First Balkan War (1912-13) and World War I. During the 1922 destruction of Smyrna, he became public health supervisor of the International Committee of Asia Minor, organizing the city's health standards. He retired from the navy as Admiral and as Chief Health Commissioner.

His research and consequent claim to fame, however, was not directed on the physical body but on the psyche. Starting with his psychoanalytical research in Germany, he became a leading authority in the causality between psychic and physical phenomena. In 1923, he founded the first Greek psychological society, the Society of Psychic Research, that pioneered the study of paranormal phenomena. He published the journal Psychic Research. In 1930, he organized a very important meeting in Athens, the 4th International Congress of Psychic Research. His theories of "psycho-projection" were first published in Berlin (Zeitschrift für Parapsychologie und Metaphisica, November 1929) and in France as La destin et la chance: La psychobolie humaine (Paris, 1929). The latter was translated into English in 1967, in honor of his 90th birthday. On his 89th birhday, he escorted my mother down the aisle; the picture above was taken at the wedding party. As far as I have been able to find, Psychophysical Elements in Parapsychological Traditions (New York, 1967) the only available English text of Tanagras, and I was thrilled to find it even in Wesleyan's library. The "Tanagras Theory" gave scientific explanation to soothsaying, luck-based telekinetic phenomena, telepathic prompting and animal psychic projections. Additional writings include "The Scientific Proof of God's Existence," "The Soul and Immortality," "Telepathy and False Memory," and "The Unconscious and Conscious Ego in Human Memory." Tanagras was also known for his literary works, which include Σπογγαλιείες του Αιγαίου (trans. into French), Η Μεγαλόχαρη (trans. into French), Μακεδονικαι ραψωδίαι (trans. into German), Άγγελος εξολοθρευτής (about his experiences in the Balkan War), Εις τα πτερά του θανάτου, Ρόδον των Γαδείρων, Μαύρες πεταλούδες, Σαν ζωή σαν όνειρο, Ο πέπλος της Ίσιδος, Η ιππότισα τής Μάλτας and Νενίκηκας Ναζωραίε. Tanagras died in 1973 at the age of 96.

The Partridge

In 1967, my grandmother Afendra Kourelis came to Athens for a short visit with my parents, who just had their first baby, my sister Afendra (or Angeliki). Giagia Afendra was raised in Leukada, a small agricultural village in Fthiotis, in continental Greece (Sterea Ellada). One of the treasures that she brought along from the village were folk lullabies she sang to her baby granddaughter, no doubt the very same tunes she sang on my father's bedside back in 1929, when my father was born. Mid-60s Athens was a booming metropolis, but my grandmother hated the city and could not wait to return to her fields. But modern Athens offered new media like television, film, phonograph records and tape recorders. My father did an amazing thing at that moment, to record his mother's lullabies. My father's obsession with recording sound is itself an interesting topic for another posting. I found the reel-to-reel tape a couple of years ago and transcribed it into a CD, which I am now going through closely in order to lern the songs and, in turn, sing them to my own infant daughter. The whole experience has been incredibly moving, listening to a woman born in 19th-century Greece. My infant sister is making baby sounds, while my parents (both deceased) are engaging with her in silly ways. It is also fascinating to hear my father, who was born and raised in Leukada but became totally urbanized as a teenager. While encouraging his mother to sing more of those old songs, he flips into the local dialect, a different voice from the one we grew up with. The songs were recorded in a small apartment in the neighborhood of Kypseli. My sister's childhood photo album contains a picture of this very visit, with a grandmother wrapped in her black tsemperi, sitting royally in a tight balcony.

Some of Afendras' songs are difficult to decipher because of the thick Sterea Ellada dialect. Among the discernible tracks is the song of the Marked, or Striped Partridge. I transcribe my grandmother's lyrics below, trying to be faithful to all the words, even the ones that I don't undrestand (like the "mo" and "mari" insertions).

Που ήσαν πε μαρί πέρδικα
που ήσαν πέρδικα γραμμένη
κι ήρθες το πρωί βρεμένη

Ναι μανί μαρί πέρδικα
ναι μανί ψηλά στα πλάγια
στις δροσιές και στα χορτάρια

Κι έτρωγα μαρί πέρδικα μω
κι έτρωγα το μαντριφύλι
κυδωναύγουστο σταφύλι

Where were you partridge?
Where were you, you marked partridge
that, in the morning, you returned all wet?

Yes, said the partridge
I went to the high slopes
where there is dew and grass

And I ate
I ate the clover by the sheepfolds
and the quince-like grape of August

The song is amazing in many ways, and I have not gone through any close linguistic or symbolic readings. I know that in Byzantine literature, the partridge symbolized the church and fidelity but also temptation and betrayal (see, 14th-c bird epic, Πουλολόγος, etc.) To me, the song has clear sexual connotations; the partridge returns all wet having tasted some forbidden fruit. The wonderful thing about Greek folk songs is an ambiguity that leads to multiple readings. In the context of an infant, the wet partridge stops being sexual and becomes a metaphor for the baby that wetted itself overnight having traveled to idyllic dream-lands.

I also love the way that the partridge is described as "γραμμένη," which literally means "written," but refers to the "γραμμές," the lines that marked its body. Alectoris graeca, the partridge indigenous to Greece, has beautiful black stripes on its wings. In English it is known as Rock Partridge. The partridge, moreover, has a beautiful voice and is, thus, a worthy model for the crooning singer. Alcman, the Archaic poet from Sparta, for instance, learned his poetic skills from partridges. To call a partridge "γραμμένη" also adds an element of inevitability, the participle form also means "fated," as in "it has been written." My friend Nassos Papalexandrou, whosε family is from the same region as mine, tells me that his mother still uses the word "γραμμένη" to describe the beauty of well shaped facial features, like eyes and lips.

Spolia in the Garden: Fernwood Cemetery

This is a quick posting inspired by Bill Caraher's "Spolia in the Garden" (The Archaeology of the Mediterranean World, August 13, 2008). During my sporadic visits to Philadelphia, I've been trying to care for the dead, i.e. the traditional Greek duty of keeping parental tombs well tended. See, for instance, earlier posting Buried in Bottles. Part of this upkeep involves caring for flowers and burning the flame. The Greek section of Fernwood Cemetery is caught between two monument traditions. It's a predominantly Protestant cemetery, where the tombs receive no adornment beyond the tombstone and endless grass. The Greek section is a lot more monumental with a hodge-podge of installations trying to replicate Mediterranean customs, which involve demarcating the whole length of the tomb and reassuring that nobody ever walks over the burial.

For my mother's plot, I decided to go half way and leave most of the area covered with grass (hence regularly mowed) but demarcate a small flower plot with one perennial (mums) , one annual (chrysanthemum) and one plastic flower (respecting my mother's friends who brought it; old Greek-American ladies argue that plastic flowers are far superior to natural ones--they have a point). In order to protect the little garden from the wrath of the lawnmower, however, I built a tiny submerged brick enclosure, just like the one that Bill and Susan Caraher made in their garden at Grand Forks. Rather than buying new industrial bricks from Home Depot, I, too, recycled. I salvaged seven 19th-c. bricks from the back of my house.

Note the candle holder in the picture. The good upkeep of the plot is done just as much for the living visitors as for the dead. Americans go nuts over their lawns at home; Greeks go nuts over their cemeteries. A well-kept tomb (i.e. by a family that cares) has a lit candle. The candle holder in the photo is a gift from our friends, the Zogas family. The candles are basically Latin American votives, which I buy from my local Latin American grocery store. Celina prefers the ones covered with gaudy Catholic iconography (sacred hearts, etc.), I prefer the simple red. Not to be macabre, or anything like that, but burial plots come in pairs, an upstairs and a downstairs. If for whatever reason, I happen to pass away unexpectedly, I find it comforting that I might be resting here, too. But I'll stop here. On grass, Elizabeth Kolbert's article is a MUST, "Turf War," New Yorker (July 21, 2008).

Buried in Bottles

Eleftheria Kourelis, the fearless lady that was my mother, loved to save bottles. This would drive my sister and I crazy as kids, a familiar source of embarrassment with parents or grandparents raised during the Great Depression or the World Wars. Now, of course, bottle hoarding is socially acceptable, hip and ecological. Elie, as Mrs. Kourelis was known to all her American friends, passed away in December, 2006, but some of her recycled bottles, filled with spices like eucalyptus or oregano, survive in our kitchen cupboard. We fondly look a these bottles now with the meticulous marking by her own hand. A bottle of oregano, for example, notes "8/18/05, brought by Popi." The spice had been bought by our Aunt Popi at the "Ecologists,"an organic store on Omonia Square, Athens, and brought in her suitcase during her last U.S. trip before it was jarred by my mother in an airtight reused container.

At the beginning of summer last week, Celina and I visited my mother's grave at Fernwood Cemetery in Landsdowne, PA, on the edge of Philadelphia. We went to water the flowers planted last spring, light the candle and simply say hello soon after our arrival in Philadelphia. Fernwood Cemetery contains two sections belonging to Saint George and Saint Demetrios, the two major Greek Orthodox Churches in Philadelphia and Upper Darby. the previous summer, we had observed that adjacent Section 186 was being surveyed for expansion. This time around, it was booming with burials. Out of curiosity, we approached two of these newly prepared graves plots (their funerals took place on June 1, 2008). The excavated heaps took us by surprise. Mixed with the dirt was a massive array of bottles, plates, iron objects and other pieces of historical garbage. Clearly, this section of Fernwood Cemetery was a dumping ground during the 19th and early 20th centuries. This must also have been the case with the area around Elie's grave, and it dawned on us that Elie was buried in bottles. Her tomb, pictured here, is located at 39°56'48.9"N, 75°15'17.4"W and can be seen with these coordinates in Google Earth.

Fernwood cemetery dates to 1870 with sumptuous tomb stones along its earliest paths. Once an idyllic suburban cemetery along Cobbs Creek (of Fairmount Park), it was encroached upon by an expanding city. Unable to suppress our archaeological training, Celina and I became fascinated by the historical potential of all the bottles sticking out of the fresh dirt piles, such as the blue Milk of Magnesia bottle from the 1940s (left). We thought it would be fitting to clean them up, photograph them and see what kind of information they might yield about the archaeological history of Elie's graveyard. As with Philadelphia's better known cemeteries (Laurel Hill, Woodland), Fernwood has beautiful tombstones of prominent families, Civil War heroes and famous Philadelphians. My favorites are social reformer Wiliam Sylvis (1828-1869) and Major League player "Yaller Bil" (William Harbridge, 1855-1924). Far from its original rural beauty, Fernwood now has a distinctively inner-city flavor with adjacent basket-ball courts, lower income houses and urban blight. In order to get to it from Center City, one has to process along Baltimore Avenue from 38th to 63rd Streets, which is a grounding and deeply humbling experience. The Greek section is onthe northwest corner and visually stands out through the liberties taken while investing the Protestant grounds with Greek iconographies and rituals. As with cemeteries throughout Greece (or Spain and Italy, for that matter), the Greek section of Fernwood is bustling with social activity. We have never visited when some family member was not tending a nearby grave. When we first asked the cemetery officials about the rules for monuments and landscaping at Fernwood, they conceded that none of the cemetery rules mattered at the Greek section. The tone in the officials' voice suggested exacerbation; the Greek did not follow the cemetery rules, they built monuments, planted cypress trees, brought in gravel, built grave boundaries. Celina enjoys serving the funerary duties of a Greek bride, but also enjoys discovering similarities with the Ancient Greek cemeteries of her scholarship. In our last visit, for instance, we noted that many graves had planted mint, which may be connected to the myth of Hades and the nymph Menthe. During the 2007 Annual Meetings of the Archaeological Institute of America in San Diego, Lita Tzortzopoulou-Gregory gave a fascinating paper on her fieldwork and Ph.D. thesis on East Korinthia and Cythera, "Remembering and Forgetting: The Relationship between Memory and the Abandonment of Graves in 19th- and 20thCentury Greek Cemeteries." Lita's paper gave us incredible insights (and analytical tools) in understanding the modern Greek cemetery from an anthropological point of view. Discussions with Lita about grave maintenance, grieving rituals and diaspora communities, moreover, was personally therapeutic. Elie had been buried in her Fernwood plot only a few days before this conference. The paper will be published in a special issue of the International Journal of Historical Archaeology that I have just finished editing.

Especially since Celina and I are not going to Greece this summer for fieldwork, the bottles of Fernwood put us in an archaeological mindset, while we both work on our books and get in touch with Philadelphia history. The rapid growth of the new cemetery sector is striking. It does not appear to be ethnically Greek. The Greek sector seems much slower, which is perhaps indicative of the shrinking Greek community in Philadelphia and its dispersal into the suburbs.