The Feasts of Memory: A Journey to a Greek Island

By Elias Kulukundis

The Feasts of Memory is a book that inspires all those who left their homeland behind as well as those in search of new realms. Elias Kulukundis traces the course of a family’s emigration from Kasos island to Syros, the formerly commercial capital of Greece, and then from Syros to London and New York. He is equally at home describing expatriates around a dinner table in exile or delving into the motivating passions of the Aegean islands, some of them, in the words of The New Yorker Magazine, as savage as Homer's.

Elias felt he needed to write The Feasts of Memory in order to learn about himself. At the age of 29, he dramatized how a young Greek-American growing up on the edge of a golf-course in Westchester County could discover a spiritual connection to a barren island in the south Aegean Sea.

The Feasts of Memory is Elias’ narrative recreation on life on the island of Kasos, when both his grandfathers were sea-captains, and both his grandmothers were knobbly-handed island women who held house and home together while the men were away at sea.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jan 1, 1967
• ISBN: 9781483515441

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AFTERWORD

AUTHOR’S PREFACE

I was twenty-nine when I wrote this book, and I’m seventy-six today, so I think a short introduction is in order. My twenties were my most tempestuous decade, except for my thirties which were even more so. In hindsight, both were the result of a difficult adolescence and a stormy passage to adulthood. The only calm I experienced during that time was in writing this book.

Just before I began it, I suffered a severe depression brought about by my going against my parents’ expectations, disdaining the shipping business as it seemed then, to teach at a boy’s school. I lived on the top floor of a redbrick dormitory, where I often stood at the window like the Phantom of the Opera, thinking, What’s wrong with this? Why can’t this be my life?

It was my life all right, but it was only part of it. It was the life I might have had if I’d been American like my classmates, with no other ominous destiny beckoning to me. The other part, the Greek part, would take years to discover and more years to understand. The Amorgos Conspiracy is the latest installment in that search, but The Feasts of Memory was my first foray in what became a lifelong pursuit.

The vision came into the gray gloom of my life at the time like a subterranean river. At first, all I could make out were flickers of light on the surface, but I followed them, hoping they would take me out of the tangled labyrinth of my childhood and lead me to a world where real people lived, where real things happened to make them happy or sad, where people strove to enrich themselves, to marry, to celebrate the birth of children, to avenge injustice and to endure the loss of loved ones.

To find these people, I had to make a journey to the island of Kasos, where my grandparents had been islanders, before they moved to Syros and became provincial townfolk. Next, they became emigrants and settled in London, where they lived in a Kasiot enclave in Wembley Park. Still later, at the outbreak of the Second World War, their children, my father’s generation, crossed the ocean to America.

My parents had never been to Kasos, and they had never seen that iron coast, falling sharply into the sea like waves of rock. They were born on Syros, two hundred miles up the Aegean; and by that time, the villages of Kasos, all laid out on one square mile like eggs on an apron, had already set below the horizon, to live on in legend and be commemorated in the names of ships.

The beginning of the journey.

Meanwhile, growing up by a golf course in Westchester County, I felt that to understand my parents’ life, to understand my own life, I would have to go back one generation.

That was also a way I could be Greek; at that time, it was the only way. In my childhood, my parents had not been involved in the life of the local Greek community, and we went to church only at Easter. My parents kept to themselves and to their circle of friends who had emigrated to America at the same time as they had. There were only two other Greek boys at school, and they were related to me by marriage. There was no way for me to meet Greek people in the U.S. and I had no Greek friends.

I certainly looked Greek. At the beach club, some older boys called me Sabu, the only ethnic slur I can remember experiencing. As I grew older, I realize the image my non-Greek friends had of me was something on the order of Alexis Zorbas. That was their fantasy. The reality was far different, closer to the reserved young man played by Alan Bates in the film, who goes back to Crete to discover a mine that once belonged to his father and finds his real challenge is to break free of himself. Teach me to dance, he says to Zorba.

Zorba is the figure people think of when they think of Greece. Even Greeks like to think this is the way they are, but they aren’t. And I certainly wasn’t. Zorba the Greek was released in 1966, as I was writing The Feasts of Memory, and if there was anyone in the story I identified with, it was that dark-haired young man with the boarding school accent, looking as though he’d just stepped off an ancient vase but who didn’t even know he could dance.

I could read Greek and write it. I had Greek lessons on Monday and Thursday afternoons and they taught me its language and its religion but did not convince me that Greece existed anywhere except downstairs in my house. And to make my journey harder and longer, to stretch it out over enough years to cover a hero’s return from a war, a gorgon was lying in wait for me.

She had come when I was three, just after I had begun to speak, and from then on she lay coiled around the portal of my life, like Cerberus, waiting to strike. She was my stutter, and she stayed with me through my adolescence and well into my early manhood. She could spring up in midsentence, in either language, and she was always there when I tried to speak Greek. A fateful lasso would be pulled tight around my throat; my speech would be cut off at the source, and I would stare at my listener, paralyzed, unable to make a sound. I lived in mortal fear of that happening. I dreaded to see the look in my listener’s face, staring in bewilderment across an unbridgeable canyon. I would do anything to avoid seeing that, and as a result, I very rarely spoke Greek.

Since there was no way I could speak Greek, and no way I could be Greek and not talk, writing this book became my way to join my life together. I wrote in English, but I also used Greek words, giving them meaning by virtue of their context. I delved into the heritage of Homer and tried to dramatize it in the language of Shakespeare. It was an effort of synthesis, which served an immediate and desperate need; for what was being synthesized, what seemed irrevocably divided and needed to be joined together, was my life.

My mother (left,) and Miss Prew. c. 1941.

My conflict had begun early, when I lived in another house with blue shutters, this one in Rye, New York. There I had to divide my allegiance between my parents and all their mercurial and unpredictable ways and my English nanny, Miss Prew, who was like a warm patch of good English common sense amid the oriental ocean that surrounded me. You could say I was trying to interpret the confused and fragmentary messages of my heritage with the clarity of English common sense. And in a way I was. But the synthesis came later, in the actual writing of this book. That was the journey to a Greek island, and the island was myself.

If I had begun with the present and worked backwards, I would have tried to make sense of my parents’ emigration itself. But at my age of twenty-nine, that would have demanded more skill and more knowledge than I possessed. So I skipped over the emigration and landed on the other side of it. I planted one foot on the golf course in Westchester County where I awoke to memory and placed the other on the far side of that mysterious passage of my parents, in a terrain that had begun to take a definite shape in my imagination. It was the island of Kasos, a barren outpost of the archipelago between Crete and Rhodes, which I had never seen, which my parents had never seen. And the story became my story--- a journey of discovery.

Although I couldn’t have explained what I was doing, like many writers, I was trying to create a tradition for myself by imagining a world that had meaning and relevance for me. With Greek stones and English mortar, I tried to build myself a sheepfold in the hills, a shelter from chaos and confusion that I felt instinctively had come with my parents’ emigration. And I have returned to that shelter in my writing throughout my life.

I wrote a nostalgic book, but I like to think it was not a sentimental one. One reader I have never met said it is one of the few books about Greece that doesn’t gush about it. How could I gush about it, considering the conflict I had felt about Greece until then?

But I didn’t want to groan and complain about it either. I didn’t want to write an autobiographical novel about the anguish of growing up Greek in an Anglo-Saxon citadel. That would have been romantic, but it wouldn’t have been true. The anguish was real, but I didn’t want to deal with anguish. I’d be the first to admit that. I had too much of that in my everyday life. I wanted to find something to make my life worth living, something like Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto, which I had discovered in my father’s record collection when I was fourteen. From the opening chords, I knew that I was in the presence of something glorious. The quiet trills of the piano seemed miraculous; and the full orchestra answered the small but delicate movement of the human fingers with a booming affirmation, as though the universe was saying yes to man’s deepest question. I felt the joy of the answer, and I felt it applied even to me.

I wanted my spirit on to soar on music like that. I wanted to play the piano on the typewriter. I wanted to make my life sing.

The book was originally published in 1967 in New York by Holt, Rinehart and Winston. In 2002, as I was preparing a reprint, I was at a dinner given by the Greek Ambassador to the United Nations, and I told a man sitting next to me that I was planning to make some changes in the original. The man was shocked. You can’t do that, he said. The book does not belong to you anymore, and you can’t just do what you want with it.

The man’s outrage gave me some pause. But most of the changes I planned to make were minor, intended to eliminate anachronisms and generally make the text more accessible. I also decided to include an additional chapter, Vacations Afloat, based on my Uncle Manuel’s recollections of his childhood voyages on his father’s ship. That was a happy addition, as it contained a little portrait of Uncle Manuel, who was perhaps overshadowed in the original by his elder brother George. It also gave me the chance to make a sketch of my grandfather and namesake, Captain Elias, whom I never knew. In the process, I was led to reflect on the relationship of Greek fathers and sons.

Finally, I could not reissue The Feasts of Memory without pausing to remember my cousin M. Michael Kulukundis, son of Uncle Manuel, who sadly departed this life two years ago. Whereas I included a portrait of his father for the second edition, for this one I draw on my memory of Michael, who was probably the most universally beloved member of our family.

Otherwise, my companion at the Greek Ambassador’s dinner table can be content. The rest of the text has generally remained as it was, and I think this revision combines the best features of all the editions to date. Only the chapter Vacations Afloat has become a kind of accordion, stretching to accommodate additional memories that have come to me since the book was originally written, including this tribute to dear cousin Michael.

Elias Kulukundis

Syros

August 2013

ARRIVAL

I did not see Kasos until I was twenty-seven, when I made this journey. I have never lived there, and neither have my parents. They were born on Syros, another island two hundred miles up the Aegean. I was born in London, came to America when I was three.

Only my grandparents were native Kasiots, all four of them. My grandfathers were sea captains, and at the turn of the century they emigrated to Syros, then the largest port in Greece. After the First World War, they emigrated to a still larger port: London.

My father and his brothers took over the shipping business their father had begun. Eventually, in 1939, my parents extended the emigration farther to America. They settled in Rye, a suburb of New York, where I spent all but the first three years of childhood.

This journey will be back along the course of that emigration. The destination is Kasos, the final island. On the way back we come first to Syros, capital and metropolis of the Cyclades. Syros was where my parents met for the first time, when my father was six years old and my mother was an infant.

It was at my mother’s christening. My mother was in her godfather’s arms; my father was standing beside his own mother, the youngest in a row of five brothers ranging in age from six to twenty. They met in a house filled with relatives and neighbors on a mountainside of scrubbed white houses, rising like an amphitheater before the ever various spectacle of the Aegean Sea. At the windows of that house, looking southward down the Archipelago, we are two hundred miles from Kasos and one generation still to go.

Syros, like London, was a way station in the journey. My grandparents lived there as immigrants, as almost everyone in Syros was at one time. Except for a few natives descended from medieval times, Syros was settled by people of other islands—Chios, Psara, Crete, and Kasos—all made homeless by the Greek Revolution against the Turks in the 1820s.

Much later, at the end of the nineteenth century, when my grandparents sailed to this first America, there was already a Kasiot quarter waiting for them, just as there were Chiot and Psariot quarters. As Kasiot children, my parents felt different from the other children of Syros, just as they were later to feel as adults in London, and their own children were to feel in Rye, New York.

But if my parents were not true natives of Syros, still it was their beginning. My mother’s father built a villa in the hills, and my parents helped preserve it ever since his death and returned to it summer after summer. They kept it as a memorial to their parents and their childhood, a reminder of what they were before they embarked on outward voyages to begin their life together in an alien land, then raise their children in yet another one.

It is a familiar story in a Greek life. Exile is a Greek experience, and there is even a Greek word for it that does not exist in other languages. It is xenitia, which is not exactly exile because it can be self-imposed, and not estrangement because there is no spiritual estrangement. Xenitia is simply the loss of the native land. It is an old experience in the Greek mind, as old as the pre-Christian Greeks who spread from the native peninsula in an ever-widening diaspora to other shores of the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, and the Black.

Despite this sense of exile, which haunts him to the grave, the Greek is ever journeying, especially the islander, hemmed in only by the horizon. This Greek is arriving or departing, on the way out or on the way back. No sooner did my parents take the outward journey than the horizon opened toward their way home. No sooner did they cross a continent to Europe and an ocean to New York than they repeated the journey in the reverse direction, performing it in a continual celebration of the same event, a perennial round-trip of reconciliation and farewell.

But my journey back was different. I had no memory of Syros, no image of a native island, of a villa with a red gabled roof and groves of olive, orange, and lemon trees descending from it on orderly terraces of land. When I awoke to memory, Syros was behind me.

The first place I remember is a room in a country club in Rye, New York, where my parents had come to live. That country club is a huge stone edifice erupting out of the suburban landscape, with statues and porticoes, vaults and gargoyles. To this day I wonder how my parents found it. To Greek immigrants it must have been the epitome of strangeness.

Here is America, my father must have thought, as he settled down with his family in a cavernous fortress from A Diamond as Big as the Ritz. Here, in this gigantic relic of a lost America, my Greek childhood began. Downstairs, in a vaulted dining room, my parents sat around an oval table with friends and relatives, most of them not only Greeks, but Kasiots. Meanwhile, upstairs, by windows that overlooked an outdoor dance floor and ultimately a golf course, I lay in bed, puzzling out the arabesques on my carpeted hotel floor.

After some months my parents bought a house nearby, and after a while I did not think to ask how we had arrived there. I did not think of journeys then, because for a child there are no arrivals and departures, no past and future, only now. It was years later when I saw Syros.

In the meantime, I had to understand as best I could that I lived in a Greek house in Rye, New York. It was a house in Rye where the Greek language was spoken, Greek food was on the table, and Greek people gathered in the evening after an hour’s drive from New York City, sitting together in their xenitia, before a window that overlooked the golf course and the hills of Westchester.

My family house in Rye, New York.

As for Greece, I knew nothing of it. As a nation it was slumbering in my mind, just as it had slumbered for centuries in the Ottoman Empire before awakening to discover itself in 1821. Through those years of darkness, the same agents worked on me as had worked on the medieval subjects of the sultan: parents, priests, and teachers. They taught me its language, religion, and history; but none of them succeeded in convincing me that it really existed anywhere.

The only Greece I could believe in was the Greece I knew. Greece was downstairs