To this April 25th’s post on Easter in my village, “Easter in Derviçani,” Philopomeon writes:
“Beautiful. It’s rare that we get a look of what is going on among Greeks in Albania without having to hear about ‘Vorio Ipiros’ and ‘Chameria’ back and forth.”
Yeah P., except for a few real old die-hards, that stuff is pretty much over, and most people, young and old, have very maturely and intelligently, gone on with their lives and accepted things as are. The most striking example of that is that there are youth associations from each of the Greek villages in the region, with members in Jiannena or Athens or all over the rest of Greece or Albania or the States or Australia, but the old pan-Voreio-Epirotiko associations like MABH, with their irredentist discourses have pretty much dissolved. The hate is gone too, which was the most heartening thing to feel: the on-going, still often fatal feud with the neighboring Albanian Muslim village of Lezarates is mostly personal at this point and not an issue of religion or ethnicity. I know more infantile little fascistakia in Athens, with no relation whatsoever to our villages, who are more preoccupied with those old causes — and feel like they have a right to shoot their mouths off about them as well — than anybody in Derviçani is today and who probably are greatly disheartened by our indifference to our “national issues.” You’ve never wanted to lose it on someone so bad as I do when your family has been through what mine has (see: “Easter Eggs…”) and then have some snot-nosed Kollegiopaido think he can lecture you on how you don’t live up to them and lack their “national feelings” and other such bull-shit.
The young people of my village, particularly, are a marvel, a youth that any society would — or should — pray to have. They are fanatically in love with their village; they return every chance they get — dozens come from Jiannena on just a regular weekend. They’ve organized a new panegyri (village festival on the village saint’s day) on August 15th, when the village’s population is the highest. This has happened all over Greece; since most people go on vacation in August, depopulated villages that only fill up with returnees at that time often organize a second “unofficial” panegyri in August, along with the traditional one which could be at any time of year, to take advantage of the greater presence of chorianoi. Derviçani, however, has never really had this problem, because this is a village with such a gigantic ego that no mere saint would serve; its traditional panegyri was Easter itself! culminating on Easter Friday — της Ζωοδόχου Πηγής — and always packed, then and now… But, what can I say, it’s a party town. The youth association pays for this summer festival out of its own pocket; they’ve put a stop to the stupid drunken brawling that used to go on, even though they themselves can pack it away for sure. They do tons of volunteer work for the village: roads, squares, little beautification projects, football fields and basketball courts. Natally bilingual, interacting with the “other” and crossing borders both figurative and literal all their lives, they have that innate cosmopolitanism and perceptiveness of the wider world that can’t be learned in any school and that no Northern Suburb çoğlani could buy himself with all the millions in the world or a thousand trips to Europe or New York. They’re strong, attractive, smart, open, friendly, generous and whether they’re busting their backs at the hardest manual work in Greece or other parts of Albania, or acing it at universities in Greece or in Europe, they’ve built active, productive lives for themselves out of nothing. I’m not ashamed to say they put me to shame in almost every way.
The most satisfying feeling and identification I shared with them though was the sense that they knew who they were: Derviçiotes, Dropolites, Epirotes, and Greeks — and that they have absolutely no need for the Neo-Greek nation-state as a reference point to bolster those identities. Greece never did anything for them anyway except make their lives difficult when they got there in the nineties or provide leftist intellectuals to tell them that life in communist Albania wasn’t that bad or little Athenian pricks to mock them as “Albanians.” (As opposed to the Church of Greece, however, which I’ve always found to be an abominably reactionary institution, but has really helped a lot of Greek kids from our parts find their way in life and adjust: learn trades, increase their Greek literacy skills, get them into universities, etc. — recognition should be granted when it’s due.) They get tired of explaining to Neo-Greeks that they’re not Albanian, but ultimately they don’t give too much of a shit: one, because they don’t think being Albanian is an insult and, two, they know they’re Greek — in fact, they know they’re Greeker. Their generational cohort in Greece would not want to hear their opinion of most of them.
They love their Church, they love their music and they love their dancing. Here are two videos of the early twenty-somethings, “Manastiri 1” and “Manastiri 2” (age groups and families take their turns) dancing up at the Monastery over the village on Easter Monday. My camera work on my brand-new little pocket Cannon is atrocious, but their spirit will come through. I was astonished by how down-packed and completely internalized they had the traditional gestures and body language of the regional dance tradition — though I think dancing with open beer bottles is a new innovation and by the second video you can see they’re getting kind of sloppy. There’s this one kid, FotoDretso, with the cartoon cowboy t-shirt, at the head of the line in the first video with the beautiful statuesque girl in the white sweater that no one can identify (“maybe she’s from another village…” the phantom beauty who showed up at our panegyri…), who is the son of GianneDretso, a village character out of Djilas’ Land Without Justice with a fearsome reputation for leaping across borders and mountain tops like some cougar — a good rep to have around there. Foto is also shown turning his spitted lamb in the “Easter in Derviçani” post. He seems to be something of a village youth leader, but the reason I couldn’t get enough video of him that day is, not just that he has my father’s name, but he dances exactly like my father did. At times it was chilling. Watch in that first video at around 1:35 when he takes lead of the dance.
FotoDretso, buddy and animal at the Monastery, Easter Monday 2014 (click)
In one of Misha Glenny’s books on Kosovo, Glenny asks a female Albanian politician in Tetovo, the unoffical capital of Macedonia’s some twenty to twenty-five percent Albanian minority: “Do you still dream of a Greater Albania? Where all Albanians can live in one state?” And he got nearly the identical answer from her that I got from an Albanian guy I was talking to in the restaurant of our hotel in Tetovo: “Well…of course. I guess we all do. But those years are over. The point now is not changing borders. The point is making the borders not count.”
This is what most of my chorianoi — my “landsmen,” for New Yorkers, the rest of you can use your context clues, as we used to say in ESL — young and old seem to feel these days. They live productive, happy as possible lives, where the border is practically a technicality and only promises to become more so as the years go on and the general integration of the region continues — a process that I see being halted only by those ideologues who get hard-ons at the thoughts of borders and nation-states and playing with little tin soldiers and tanks to defend them with. But they’re a dying breed, unlikely to ever again reach a critical mass with which they could make a difference, whether they know or like it or not. And the sooner the better. So we can all get on with our lives.
Below are the kids dancing from my crappy footage. But I have FINALLY found THE documentary video that captures the ethos of the whole music and dance tradition of Epiros as perfectly and deeply as possible but I’m thinking of the right way to set it up for readers. In the meantime, enjoy.
This third video, “is taken at the August dance, all generations participating. The woman dancing at the head, Agathe Baruta — what relation to my Barutaioi I don’t know — is a stunning dancer (and a beautiful woman), and displays the precise, stylized seriousness that’s considered both beautiful dancing and proper elegant comportment for a woman. (The kerchief is a remnant from a time when a man and a woman never touched publicly, even if related; the tall, handsome man she’s dancing with is her husband and is a member of the Greek Presidential Guard. But some things are traditional formalities while the realities, obviously, change; one song from the new repertoire says: “Join the dance later and hand me a note with your cell number on it.”) You’ll get a better sense of the communal joy this simple to-and-fro incites in people from this video because it’s more ordered than the kids’ dances above. What you see here goes on, literally, for hours, till it induces an almost trance-like state; it starts at around eight in the evening and goes till dawn — for three nights in a row. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to capture in my videos above — nor is there a point here — a moment where the musicians slow down the tempo and the dancers get even more excited. (At the end you get a fast number that really reminds you of how Balkan and Klezmer traditions are often connected.) If you can, give it some time, because it needs time to build, time that we all have so little of; this whole tradition is the antithesis of the quick high and fake fun that characterizes our civilization: “Play it sweetly boys, sweet and slow, to heal the sickness I have in my heart”:
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Meanwhile, back at Easter, some of the adolescents, watching the dance respectfully till it’s their turn. (click)
The older guys, below, on dance break (click).
Some nephews of mine being bozos; every time I lifted the camera at them they would put their hunk of meat down and pose, so I asked them to be natural and this is what I got. (click)
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Comment: nikobakos@gmail.com
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Jadde: from Bosnia to Bengal 
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