Life is a learning curve, if you ask me, and even if you don't, I'm here to tell you that the ageing process is a great teacher of lessons related to time, change, and the transmission of culture. Migration accelerates the process — three decades after an unexpected emigration from Australia to Greece, I'm still learning.
I recently visited my grandsons, and was consequently taught various lessons. Carnival had been enjoyed, and Lent had started. Orthodox and Western Easter coincide this year, as happens every four years.
Their mother, my daughter-in-law Katerina, led the way, with the result that I am now wearing the red and white cotton plaited bracelet that most Greeks don on 1 March. Katerina became a virtual plaiting factory, and supplied bracelets for all of us, and added to my small knowledge of folklore as well.
Long ago my late mother-in-law told me the bracelet was meant to protect wearers from the sun. But Katerina, who is from Thessaly, tells a more charming tale, as told by her Yiayia/Granny. You wear the bracelet from the first day of spring, but the minute you see your first swallow, you cut the bracelet off and hang it on a branch of the nearest tree, so that the swallow will have something with which to start building its nest.
While his mother was weaving, five-year-old Maximus, temporarily suspending gladiatorial combat with his big brother, was concentrating hard on colouring in a picture. It was of a rather strange woman. Katerina came to the rescue again: the picture was of Kyra Sarakosti. Which might be translated, loosely, as Lenten Lady.
In the days before calendars and diaries, Katerina explained, Greek housewives would draw themselves a picture of Kyra Sarakosti as a way of keeping track of the weeks of Lent. Kyra was pictured without a mouth, because Lent is not a time for eating, certainly not a time for eating things one likes. Her hands are demurely crossed on her breast, for Lent is a time for prayer and self-examination. And she has seven feet.
Every Saturday, with one week elapsed, housewives would cut one foot off the picture. The last foot was cut off on Holy Saturday, Easter Eve. Then it would be tucked into a dried fig, which would be placed among many others. Whoever selected the special fig with its odd addition, was assured of good luck.
This custom is reportedly very old, and supposedly Greece-wide, but my Peloponnesian