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 children did not know of it, and neither did my Cretan daughter-in-law. Folklore is often specific to regions, but everywhere it is under threat. The haste and high technology of modern life render customs such as Kyra Sarakosti quaint at best and out of mind at worst. I often wonder how long it will be before many customs and practices disappear entirely.
As is the case with many traditional occupations: in my time in Greece I have noted the disappearance of the saddlers, the blacksmiths, the coopers, the cobblers and the cabinet-makers from the village scene. The knife-grinders and the tinkers have also gone.
In my long time here, I've also seen Greece's painful divorce from its Levantine and Eastern heritage, and its reluctant espousal of Western Europe. There was a brief honeymoon, followed by a long period of adjustment. With the advent of the economic krisi, the rot of disillusionment set in. As might be imagined and understood, for reasons past and present, Germany has been a particular target of resentment for at least five years.
But life, politics, and economics are unpredictable. The picture Maximus was colouring in came from a German-controlled supermarket, part of a chain that operates throughout Greece. Ironically, it was the supermarket magazine that introduced my grandson and me to a fading Greek tradition, and linked us to the life of previous generations, to the fabric of a culture. And thus to more understanding of the way we were and are.
Gillian Bouras is an Australian writer who has been based in Greece for 30 years. She has had nine books published. Her most recent is No Time For Dances. Her latest, Seeing and Believing, is appearing in instalments on her website.