One of the first posts on this blog — Egypt: The Other Homeland — mentions her.
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Patricia Storace‘s Dinner with Persephone (along with Patrick Leigh Fermor‘s Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece) is one excellent book that I recommend to all friends who are planning on visitting Greece and want to know what to read.
At one point Storace writes:
“Greek is not a voluptuous language, or a lilting one, but stony and earthy, a language full of mud, volcanic rock, and glittering precious stones…”
Listen to Lambete beautiful recitation of Cavafy’s “The City” and you’ll know what she means:
Η Πόλις
Είπες· «Θα πάγω σ’ άλλη γη, θα πάγω σ’ άλλη θάλασσα.
Μια πόλις άλλη θα βρεθεί καλλίτερη από αυτή.
Κάθε προσπάθεια μου μια καταδίκη είναι γραφτή·
κ’ είν’ η καρδιά μου — σαν νεκρός — θαμένη.
Ο νους μου ως πότε μες στον μαρασμόν αυτόν θα μένει.
Όπου το μάτι μου γυρίσω, όπου κι αν δω
ερείπια μαύρα της ζωής μου βλέπω εδώ,
που τόσα χρόνια πέρασα και ρήμαξα και χάλασα.»
Καινούριους τόπους δεν θα βρεις, δεν θάβρεις άλλες θάλασσες.
Η πόλις θα σε ακολουθεί. Στους δρόμους θα γυρνάς
τους ίδιους. Και στες γειτονιές τες ίδιες θα γερνάς·
και μες στα ίδια σπίτια αυτά θ’ ασπρίζεις.
Πάντα στην πόλι αυτή θα φθάνεις. Για τα αλλού — μη ελπίζεις—
δεν έχει πλοίο για σε, δεν έχει οδό.
Έτσι που τη ζωή σου ρήμαξες εδώ
στην κώχη τούτη την μικρή, σ’ όλην την γη την χάλασες.
The City
You said: “I’ll go to another country, go to another shore,
find another city better than this one.
Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong
and my heart lies buried as though it were something dead.
How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?
Wherever I turn, wherever I happen to look,
I see the black ruins of my life, here,
where I’ve spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally.”
You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore.
This city will always pursue you. You will walk
the same streets, grow old in the same neighborhoods,
will turn gray in these same houses.
You will always end up in this city. Don’t hope for things elsewhere:
there is no ship for you, there is no road.
As you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner,
you’ve destroyed it everywhere else in the world.
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And if you can see the documentary posted: Egypt: The Other Homeland by Giorgos Augeropoulos and Al Jazeera about the story of Alexandrian Greeks. It’s really beautiful; I remember I first posted it on Erev Pesach in 2012 and introduced the post with: “Another people’s exodus from Egypt”. Plus, it’s good to remember the positive aspects of our long historical relationship with Egypt at times like this. I think it’s particularly noteworthy that one of the doc’s subjects talks about how Greeks slowly and steadily starting leaving Egypt because they felt there wouldn’t be any room for them in the nationalist and statist revolutionary Egypt of Nasser, but it was striking that “…we never felt fear” in Egypt.” Contrast that with the chronic low-level fear — punctuated with moments of real terror — Greeks in Istanbul lived with throughout the twentieth century…
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Jadde: from Bosnia to Bengal 
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