by Anastasios Mihalopoulos
I recall the Ouzo. Sitting there at the café, I was not thirsty but gave in to my waiter’s insisting that I have a glass. The man’s ruffled hair sat heavy upon the angular features of his visage. He jostled about the veranda table while carrying a circular plate high above his head upon which sat three cylindrical glasses. He grinned as he set a glass on my table. The liquid was clear, clearer than water until the addition of an ice cube which immediately turned the drink opaque.
I sipped in the cloudy ichor as I sat overlooking the river. I tasted the anise seed which made me think of the distillery I saw in Thasos. There, after the wine is made, the fermented grapes are piled and enclosed in a kiln using bread yeast. The kiln is heated causing the alcohol to vaporize and move along the truncated system laced with anise seeds until it cools, condenses and yields ouzo or its evil cousin, tsípouro. The European Union has ordained ouzo along with tsípouro, a product with a protected designation of origin. Though I don’t know what the sense would be to make the drink anywhere other than Greece. When my father’s parents still lived in the States, my yiayia would keep a bowl of ouzo candy on the coffee table. I could not read the letters on the space-foiled wrappers, so it was not until years later when I came to Greece that I learned of their origin.
It is also worth noting that while easily conflated, tsípouro and ouzo differ by much more than their name. Tsípouro was first produced by the monks of Mt. Athos in the 14th century, it is known for its highly aromatic characteristics which ouzo lacks. Ouzo is drunk before meals as more of an aperitif whereas Tsípouro is more ubiquitous. It is not entirely clear which came first, ouzo or tsípouro. I am not sure it matters. Nonetheless, these enantiomeric drinks inhabit a subtle duality and are equally cooling under the Aegean sun.
At the café, cicadas murmured in the mastic trees behind me; their noise rattled the air in synchrony with the dying heat. I sat still looking out at the bridge of Livadeia and the viper-smooth river water that sloshed beneath. Too hot for words, I tried to listen to the sounds of the river though it was not just a river, but a Greek embellishment of a river. The surrounding cobblestone pathways bore channels that water flowed through, festooning into the stream which ran alongside the cafe where I sat. The riverbed itself contained steps that formed a series of waterfalls. The result of such architecture was a submersion in the sonications of water; a kind of sensorial unity.
This was the town of Livadeia, the capital of Boeotia, which is situated approximately 40 kilometers northwest of Thebes. I was here studying abroad though I was also on a kind of pilgrimage in the country that my father was from, whose cultures influenced my entire upbringing and the reality and details of which I seemed to have forgotten. In some ways, this was an attempt at reparation. A due diligence. I don’t know if learning more brought me closer or farther away but I felt like I had to encounter it myself.
Thebes was the dominant power in the region though its name does not resonate as loudly as the others of Ancient Greece; Athens, Sparta, Thessaloniki; places the world knew, places where my family is from. Thebes seemed to have failed at garnishing itself with the power that its predecessors managed. Thus, it is left with a forgotten lore, a broken mythology melded into a less-recounted history. It is this, I think, that drew me to Livadeia, out of the museum and tourist markets until I found myself in a real place where the menus bore no English translations, where I could test my forgotten tongue.
The waiter noticed my silent gaze and came over to break the trance. He knew English and I hardly knew Greek, but I wanted to ask him the name of the river and so garbled out the words, “Ti potami einai afto?” What river is this? Like all Greeks, the man was delighted by my attempt at his language, though he responded in English which I took as a sign of my needing to spend more time on my speaking skills.
“That one is called the Ekryna.” He traced the riverbank with a long tan finger. “But you must never drink from it, or you will forget everything.” He said this nonchalantly as he refilled my glass with ouzo.
I had read and researched and returned to Boeotia had found no record or mention of the myth surrounding this river. According to lore, the Ekryna is named after a girl who played with the goddess Persephone. One day they had brought a goose with them and as they played, they saw the goose running away suddenly falling in a hole. Ekryna pursued the goose and finding she could not reach it, lifted a large stone. As she lifted the stone, water began flowing more and more until it became a whole river; a river which swallowed both the goose and the girl. There is no mention of amnesia, memory or even what became of Persephone.
The Lethe is a river that does bear semblance to what the man told me. Lethe, in Greek, is sometimes translated to mean “Oblivion”. It is a river known to exist in the underworld, the river of unmindfulness, the river of forgetfulness. Lethe is said to run parallel to another river named after the mother of the muses, the river of memory called Mnemosyne. The dead are told to drink from the Lethe to remove all memories of their past as a kindness for their next life. But these are merely myths, and no such river exists. This is why I was perplexed when my waiter melded the name of one river with the mythology of another; this was my dilemma.
In most maps of Boeotia, the Ekryna is unlabeled, though it is apparently well-known. Moreover, if you find the unnamed river on the map of Boeotia it seems to trace along the entire interior until it comes to a harsh stopping point somewhere near the outskirts of Livadeia. I do not know if this is at the fault of the cartographer or if the river truly concluded where the map shows. Without this knowledge or any real knowledge, I sought to corroborate something about this place and so I followed the stream.
Having finished my third glass of ouzo, I felt ready to test my body against the heat. I stood and ventured down the cobbled path to the riverbank. I cannot say precisely what drew me there, aside from the typical assumption that I was a boy who wanted to try his hand at the myths of men. Regardless of reasoning, I climbed down. I straddled the stone wall bordering the stream and found purchase on a tree trunk which leaned out over the river as did the surrounding riparian foliage. The river pulled everything toward its center. This leaning evoked a strange kind of twilight. The water twinkled in the occasional rays that found their way through the dense canopy. Further down, trees grew, or rather loomed, in the middle of the water like sentinels in a bog.
I slipped down the bank, forming a private avalanche of dirt and stone as I found myself standing at the edge of the stream. The world behind me was drowned out by sounds of rushing water. Without thought, I sat down, feeling the cold eroded earth bite through my clothes. I watched small eddies crawling over stones, swirling about the foundation of one of the ancient busts which sat in the center. It was too eroded for me to identify it, but I imagine it must have been Persephone, Queen of the underworld, beloved of Hades. Her face was devoid of eyes. The place where her eyes once were was a rolled white slate. The residual features took on a ghastly image as if to give memory a form.
I placed my hand in the current, tilting it and feeling the cold propulsion of the water. I was leaning over the stream, one hand already submersed. I placed the other close to it, formed the most elegant chalice, placed my mouth to the frigid water and drank.
I have thought about this experience several times since. I have rolled it about my mind like one kneads dough never quite knowing when to stop. I can’t say that I understand why but I think it has something to do with names and drinking them in. Something to do with having multiple, like I do, like places do, even if we only know them by one or if we have forgotten them entirely.
Patrick Leigh Fermor once wrote that “All of Greece is absorbing and rewarding. There is hardly a rock or stream without a battle or myth”. But I think it has less to do with absorption and reward and more to do with memory and erosion. There is a way that Greece will conflate a place with a name, a name with a meaning and that meaning with something else until the original source is lost. Such is the case with my name, Anastasios, written as Αναστάσιος. More commonly, people call me Tasos or Tommy. But my true name comes from the Greek phrase Christos Anesti meaning “good resurrection” or “Christ is risen”. Anastasios thus being the infinitive “Resurrection” or “To rise”. A looming tether to the Greek Orthodox church and its eclipse of paganism. There are others too. Agamemnon ‘the resolute’, Alexandros ‘the defender of men’, Thessalonike ‘the victory for Thessaly’, Phaedra ‘the bright’. All words. All clear meanings until they etherealize with a body.
I think, much like ouzo turns cloudy and colloidal upon the addition of water, so too do these names when diluted with experience. What I find perplexing about all of this is the collision of myths. The realization that these stories, like cities, can cohabitate and that history is written by the victor. So, I think, if Boeotia is the loser in the never-ending feud of the Greek City States, then, perhaps its mysteries and myths were subjugated by Greece’s larger body of story.
The Lethe leads to Hades and memory to the muse though the names are surely forgotten just as easily as they are overwritten. In fact, I am not sure I know the difference. If Persephone and Ekryna were playing on the stream, surely the place had a name before it was given another. The onomatology of myth is one we seldom grapple with.
I do not remember crawling up from the riverbank, only that I’d decided that I was going on a walk. And so I walked, alongside the river. I went past the village and the amphitheater. A memory walking along a stream that lacked it. I walked until the river turned creek, until that creek turned to drizzle and that drizzle turned to white-washed rock beneath the harsh Mediterranean sun. I walked in search of Charon or something else that felt like an answer or a guide to one. I continued along the path, finding the rubble of it comforting. The accretion of the river’s absence remained as a ravine that cut harshly into the cliffside which I began to scale. The path was a series of cutbacks that traced along the cliff. I did not know where it led.
I spotted a small white hut. I used my phone camera to zoom in on it, as if the unrefined pixels of my screen would reveal something my eyes could not. I decided that this strange object of dilapidation would be my goal. The hike was strenuous, but it is hard to gauge exhaustion without the exhaustion of peers. I recall being hot, fatigued and feeling the ouzo precipitating in my fingertips and toes as I zig-zagged along the cliffside’s belly. The ground dropped out beneath me and I focused on the increasingly narrow dirt path ahead. There were clutches of oleander and lavender along the trail which sprung up diagonally from the rock. I wondered how they ever found water. As I continued to hike, I realized that the white hut was, to no surprise, a church.
And now I am thinking of Greek Orthodox funerals. I am thinking about how the women sing their miroloy poems and weep outwardly with shrieks and screams, calling out the name of their departed loved one as if the name will bring them back. I am thinking of the men who stand anhedonic only hinting at their grief by growing out their beards. I am thinking about how the whole lot chants the phrase “aiónia i mními… aiónia i mními…”, memory eternal. They did this at my aunt’s funeral. Her body was too blackened by the cancer to be shown so I do not know if they placed coins on her eyes, but I watched the men with their beards and her daughter attempting to throw herself on the casket as it was lowered beneath the ground. I begin to wonder If forgetting is a kind of cure that a place can never ingest.
There was a final step over a flimsy, wooden plank which might easily dislodge and fall down the cliffside. I crossed it to reach the threshold of the tiny cliff-set church and find its name. Mikri Ierousalim. The words, as I’ve translated them, come to mean “tiny Jerusalem”. And so, I stood there, having found yet another hidden residue of another history. Another story, forgotten and sunken into the stone. The church was small. Its door was garnished with wooden flutes and azure carvings that scream out from the white stucco. The sills of the windows bore a blood-red outline. The inside was dusty and infernal; the kind of heat you expect to find in a stone-walled edifice along a barren cliff. The space was cluttered with rosaries and wilted flowers. There were gold-leaf painted icons about the walls half-hidden by the dust. I wiped off one of them and made out enough letters to find my name and wish I hadn’t. I grew weary in the unventilated heat. Too heavy with names and myths and histories and whatever lies in between. I stepped out of the church only to be battered with light. I recall the green panorama of Livadeia, the river, the orbital shape of the amphitheater now a speck beneath me, even something blue in the distance that I assuaged myself to believe was the sea. I suppose I have risen over something. Out of something? I am still not sure what. Something about forgetfulness. Something about names upon names.
Anastasios Mihalopoulos is a Greek/Italian American and is currently a Poetry MFA candidate in the Northeast Ohio MFA (NEOMFA) program. He holds a BS in both chemistry and English with an emphasis in creative writing from Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania. He has also attended the Writing Workshops in Greece on the island of Thasos. He has recently published work in Foothill Poetry Journal and Volney Road Review. In his free time, he enjoys swimming, skiing and joyful conversations with family and friends. Anastasios grew up in Boardman, Ohio.