It's All Greek to Me

TO ALL

Many of you are aware that I have had 2+ years of New Testament* Greek. I was an audit student, but I didn’t just sit through those classes, I did ALL the work. In fact I basically broke the “audit student mold” and aced those classes. And enjoyed every minute of it. Yes, I know, I’m a little weird. But the point is: for me, the Greek language is no longer a good metaphor for total incomprehensibility. In fact, the title of this travelogue is intended to be an old idiom with a new twist. Read carefully.

When our plane lifted off the tarmac at Frankfurt International Airport, I was under the impression that New Testament Greek and Modern Greek were two totally different languages – same alphabet, different vocabulary and grammar. I have no clue where I got that idea. In retrospect, I recall a conversation with a friend some years ago, that should have led me to the opposite conclusion. This friend has a brother who is a Greek Orthodox monk and lives in a monastery in the Sinai. The story goes that one time he was called upon to translate, from modern Greek into English, a speech given by some visiting dignitary. I find this a little hard to believe, but supposedly he was able to do a passable job of the assignment based on the New Testament Greek he had had in seminary.

Regardless, by the time we landed in Athens I had parsed the words on the back of the airplane seat in front of me (“Keep your seat beat fastened”) and was well on my way to concluding (in regard to NT Greek and Modern Greek) that “It’s all Greek to me,” i.e. it’s all the same language. Basically there are only two differences: (1) the vowel sounds have changed. (And also maybe the gender of some nouns?) and (2) there are words you need for modern living that weren’t needed in NT times – like airport, gasoline, passport, etc. So the vocabulary has expanded – but it hasn’t really changed. Obviously my sample size is wholly inadequate and my survey very unscientifically conducted, but I only stumbled onto one word that seems to be totally different than the one I learned in NT Greek. The word I learned for water was ὕδατοϛ (or hudatos). The word they use now is νερό (or nero -- just like the emperor).

Having said all that, there were some definite limitations to the usefulness of my NT Greek because (1) I’ve forgotten a lot!—even though it’s only been a couple of years (2) I never really learned the capital letters! (Fortunately, I had the alphabet and all my vocab cards on my PDA which turned out to be a big help!) and (3) we didn’t do much listening to or speaking Greek in my classes. Being able to accurately translate the NT was the goal – not being able to carry on a conversation in Greek. Between my lack of Greek oral skills and the fact that the vowel sounds have changed over the years, I can’t honestly say that I understood anything that I heard spoken in Greek the entire 9 days we were in Greece (which is why I find my friend’s story a little hard to believe!) However, once I got my capital letters down I could read a lot of signs. Pretty much everything was written in English as well as Greek, so my skills weren’t exactly essential to life, but just the same, I had a lot of fun trying to figure things out.`

Here are a couple more odds and ends observations about the Greek language and then I will get on the sights themselves:

(1) One of the reasons Greek is a challenge to learn is that there are a several Greek letters that look like Roman (i.e. English) letters but have an entirely different sound. It’s hard (especially at my age) to convince oneself that something that looks like a “v” is really an “n” and that something that looks like a “w” is really an “o” and that something that looks like a “p” is really an “r” and that something that looks like a “y” is really a “g.” Just when you think you’ve got everything filed away correctly in your brain the music stops and one of those pairs of letter starts fighting over who is going to get the last chair. It’s not a pretty sight. But . . . . I now have the pleasure of knowing that Greeks have the same problem when working with Roman letters. Here is an example --

The word “Ayia” should have been written “Agia.” Ooops! “Ayia” or “agia” is a transliteration of the Greek, i.e. the Greek sounds have been written with Roman letters. Signs in Greece are about equal parts of each of the following: Greek letters (all caps), Greek letters (caps and small letters), transliterations, and English. Sometimes you have to stop and determine which of the four you are looking at before you know what to do with what you are seeing! (By the way “Agia” means saint. And “Anastasis” means resurrection. Why didn’t they just translate?)

(2) Here is a Greek word that anyone with even a passing knowledge of the Bible should recognize even when it is written with Greek letters. Exodus is Greek for Exit and thus is a very common word on highway signs. The literal translation would be “way out” which, incidentally, is what the Brit’s put on their freeway exits.

But now here is the capital letter version of “Exodus.” See why I never learned capital letters?

My second year NT Greek professor is one of my most faithful travelogue readers. He will no doubt have things to say about all the above. I wait with bated breath. Just please, Russ, don’t make your 1^st year Greek students learn the capital letters. Four messed up Roman letters is enough. When you add the capitals there are several more that look like one Roman letter and sound like another. Adding those to the already heavy load of elementary Greek students is sure to cause massive brain melt down.

The second most startling thing about Greece (after the discovery that the language had some familiarity) was that it is really, really, really, dry and barren. Somehow I missed that little detail in my preliminary planning and reading. Having grown up in Colorado and then having lived in southern Arizona for 4 years, I like dry climates, but I was totally unprepared for this and it took me a few days to get used to it and to disabuse myself of the notion that perhaps we had picked totally the wrong island for our home base! (Actually, I think we did pick the wrong end of our island – the island of Kos – but that’s another story.) To add to my chagrin, one of the first things we saw upon exiting the airport in Kos was some emaciated cows with their rib bones sticking out and I could have sworn that somehow we had ended up in Mexico.Of course this was about 8:30 in the morning after a very short night’s sleep on the floor in the Athens airport so sleep deprivation was probably at least partly to blame for my confusion!

Once I got used to the idea that we were in a truly arid climate, I began to remember all the things I liked about southern Arizona. For starters, I love cactus of all kinds. Also, my face always feels more healthy in a dry climate. And I love the mornings (which is truly a miracle since I’m not a morning person). I have no clue how to describe what is different about morning in an arid climate, but something is different and I love it. I also love blue sky and it seems that the only time the sky isn’t blue in Greece is at night and occasionally in the early morning.

At this point I probably should tell you a bit about our itinerary and how we ended up on the island of Kos. Kos is in the center of a group of islands called the Dodecanese. It is quite a ways from the mainland of Greece but only a stone’s throw from Turkey – go figure. We picked the island of Kos for a home base because Alan and Rose were determined to spend the entire week on one island and actually vacation. Mike and I were wanting to see Greece. Rose had heard that Kos was a nice island and I perceived that it seemed to be within reach of several other islands that looked interesting. So it seemed like win/win island.

According to our Lonely Planet guide book, the best beaches on the island were on Kefalos Bay, about 45 minutes southwest of Kos Town which is the only town of any size on the island. (Yes, you read that right, our Lonely Planet Guidebook. Rick Steves doesn’t have a guidebook on Greece! Horrors! Can you believe we went somewhere without Rick Steves?). We found a reasonably-priced apartment on Kefalos Bay via the internet. (By the way, Kefalos, which means “head,” is one of those Greek words that apparently has changed gender. You really wanted to know that, right? KE-fa-los is masculine. Ke-fa-LAY, as it is in the NT, is feminine. Okay, okay, I promise: no more technical Greek stuff for the rest of the travelogue!)

The apartment turned out to be REALLY nice: an incredible view, a very peaceful location, a really nice private swimming pool, gorgeous landscaping, a kitchen, etc, etc, etc. And Lonely Planet was right: the nearby beach was really nice. Unfortunately, there were a couple of problems with the location of our apartment: (1) most of the excursions to other islands took off from the harbor at Kos Town, so Alan and Rose ended up without a car a lot and Mike and I did a lot of driving between our apartment and Kos Town, (2) our apartment wasn’t really in any town, so there were no convenient grocery stores or restaurants and (3) our apartment was quite a ways above Kefalos Bay and there was no direct footpath from our apartment down to the beach, so Rose and Alan ended up doing a lot of walking every day just to get to the beach. Neither of those things were show-stoppers, just things we probably would have done a little differently were we to do this again.

Amazingly enough all four of us were rather tenacious in maintaining our original agendas for the trip. Rose and Alan went to the beach every day and did not leave the island of Kos at all until it was time to head home. Mike and I left the island almost every day and did not go to the beach even once. Hummmm. What was that all about? We did meet for supper almost every night. (We kept threatening to play cards after supper, but somehow Mike and I could never stay awake long enough to do that.)

And . . . .we did spend a day together in Athens at the end of our trip. Initially, the day in Athens was sort of a reluctant concession on my part. It seemed criminal to go to Greece and not see the Acropolis, but somehow I felt like I’d seen enough ruins when we were in Rome and I wasn’t too enthused about more of the same. As it turned out, I was a lot more impressed with the Acropolis than I thought I would be. The day in Athens turned out to be a pretty neat day. More about that later.

So here are the major “destinations” of our trip and a few sentences about each.

(1) Kos Island

Two sites were particularly interesting here:

The Fortress of Antimachia is on top of a hill, in a very desolate location, and is hot even in early October. It is a ruin, and mostly just the outer walls are left, but the walls are massive and the area they enclose is pretty large and there were incredible views in every direction.The Asklepieion is also a ruin, parts of it dating back as early as the 4^th century BC. It was the world’s first medical center, its practioners using Hippocrates’ methods. Just enough restoration has been done so that it is possible to image what it was like centuries ago, but not enough to make it seen fake. I liked that. And, again, the views were incredible.

(2) Turkey -- as I said before, Kos Island is a very close to Turkey. We went to Turkey on an excusion boat two days in a row: the first day to Bodrum, the second to Turgutries.

Two things of interest:

The huge markets: more fruits and vegetables than I have ever seen in any one place at the same time and some varieties of fruits and vegetables that I have never seen. Also spices, nuts, clothing, shoes, linens, etc, etc, etc. I wanted to bring back a bunch of fruit and gorge on it the rest of the week, but we weren’t sure what things might be confiscated when we went back through customs so we decided not to take the risk.

The western influence: Turkey is Moslem, but apparently the influence is fading. I didn’t see a single burka and even head scarves weren’t all that common. We were there towards the end of Ramadan and we saw signs advertising Eid, the feast that happens at the end of Ramadan, but I didn’t get any clue anyone was fasting!!! Restaurants were packed and there was food everywhere. When the call to prayer happened (a recording, not a live voice), the activity level in the market place went on as if nothing had happened.

By the way, Greece is part of the EU. Turkey is not and probably won’t be any time in the near future.

(3) Kalymnos – again, we went here on an excursion boat. The itinerary included time at a private swimming beach,a barbeque, a short stop at a remote village and then another swimming beach. It was a really fun, really relaxing day. The ocean was wonderful – exactly the right temperature, really clear and clean, and accessible from our boat. The salt content in the water was high enough that I wondered if it was even possible to drown. I seriously think I could have fallen asleep in the float position, if I had been tired enough, and lived to tell about it!

(4) Rhodes (pronounced RAH-dohs – a better transliteration would be “Rodos”), the ancient home of the Colossus of Rhodes, if it ever actually existed other than on paper. The old town of Rhodes is pretty good sized and has massive crusader-style walls around it. It’s one of those places where you could wander forever and never be bored. There is also a huge castle to one end of the old town that has a bunch of mosaic floors on display that were rescued from various other Greek Islands – mostly Kos.

(5) Patmos – This was our favorite island. We went here on the ferry as opposed to an excursion boat. We arrived at about noon one day and were supposed to leave at 9:00AM the next day. We liked it so much we paid extra to have our return ferry reservation bumped back to 1:30PM.

We rented a car for the 24 hours we were there and drove every road on the island, exploring all along the way. The island is very irregularly shaped with lots of bulges and fingers of land going out in various directions and new and interesting things around every turn in the road. There was lots of terracing on the island of Patmos, obviously put there only with great effort, but there was never anything growing on the terraces. Some of the terraces were in really good shape, others were only faintly discernible. We decided that there must have been a lot more agriculture on the island of Patmos at one time than there is today. Maybe now the money is in tourism?

The Monastery of St. John the Theologian is on the highest point of the island and is visible from almost everywhere on the island. It is a massive structure – built in 1088 in honor of the apostle John and still in use as a monastery. We were able to tour parts of it.The “Hora” (or town) hugging the walls of the monastery was equally fun to explore.

We did NOT go to the Monastery of the Apocalypse – it is built around the cave in which John supposedly had his revelations. They show you the rock that he used for a pillow and the triple fissure in the roof from which the voice of God issued --- yeah right!!! Too hokey for me.

I have no doubt that being exiled to the island of Patmos was not a fun thing in John’s day, but I think I could handle a month or two of it today without a problem, unless of course those two months were July and August! I’m not sure there’s any part of Greece that would be enjoyable in July or August.

(6) Athens – we did a walking tour of Athens. (Rick Steves doesn’t have a book on Greece but he does have some stuff on Athens on his website, including a walking tour.) We saw a lot of neat stuff, but clearly the Acropolis was the highlight of the day. Acropolis is Greek for “city on a hill” or “city on a apex.” That “hill” or “apex” is massive and waaaaay above the rest of the city of Athens. Regardless of what’s on top of the hill, the hill itself is pretty spectacular.

The top of the hill is presently a giant construction site – there is even a set of railroad tracks to expedite the moving of marble blocks! The Parthenon itself is covered with scaffolding. Scaffolding is really common in Europe – almost every cathedral or castle has some somewhere – but the Parthenon has more than it’s share. Apparently this restoration project has been going on for several years and it does not appear that the end is in sight. Even so, the Parthenon is pretty spectacular. The Erechthieon is equally spectacular and is free of scaffolding. And of course the views of the city from the Acropolis are wonderful.

From the northwest part of the Acropolis you can look down on Mars Hill. It is much smaller than the Acropolis and it is not flat on the top, nor are there any buildings on it. Mars Hill (or the Areopagus, as it is called in Bible) is where Paul gave his speech about the unknown god. We scrambled up Mars Hill and Alan tried to entice me into reading Paul’s speech in Greek. I’ll pass on that, thank-you very much. However, in the future, when I read Acts 17 (in English!), it will be neat to be able to picture exactly where Paul was when he gave that speech.

One other thing in Athens is worthy of brief mention, if nothing else because it is so unique and picturesque, if not downright amusing: the changing of the guard in front of the Parliament building.

So, those are the sights of which we partook in Greece. I have to say, though, that when I think of Greece, I don’t immediately think of the Acropolis, or Rhodes Old Town, or the Monastery of St. John the Theologian or any of the sights mentioned above.

Instead, when I think of Greece, I think of . . . . .

White sugar cube houses spilling down the hillsides to the ocean

white houses with blue doors and shutters

and solar water heaters on the roofs

and porches with half circle openings looking out onto the sea

and straw awnings

I also think of half-finished houses with rebarb sticking out the top! (Because it's easier to add on later if you decide to.)

and white churches with blue roofs and domes

and lots of icons inside

and monks in black garb

and minarets and old windmills

and beehives

and mosaic cobblestone

and picturesque ruins

and barren landscapes

and spacious views

and rocky shorelines

and tiny uninhabited islands

and brillant blue oceans with white sailboats

and cactus

and pretty white weeds

and bougainvillea

and hibiscus

and olive trees

and stray cats

and village dogs

and goats

and more goats

and kid goats

and hyperactive roosters (this is the only one I ever saw, but I heard them at random times all day long!)

and Döner Kebabs (These are more commonly known in the US as Gyros. I think that Gyros is the Greek name and Döner Kebab is the Turkish name, but they’re called Döner Kebabs a lot in Greece also.)

and Greek salads with feta cheese (compliments of all those goats!)

and last but not least --- Baklava. Alan made it his goal to eat this at least once a day while he was in Greece and I think he was pretty much successful. Of course we couldn’t make him go it alone!

Now, what was all that long list about again? It’s all Greece to me.

So now, at the risk of ruining my very carefully crafted conclusion, I suppose I should give you some family news. There’s actually not much to report . . . . except that I am on my way (as you read this) back to the States for a one week class at Northwest Baptist Seminary in Tacoma. I will spend Thanksgiving with Deanna on the way home – probably at the guest house at Wright-Patterson AFB! – we are both looking forward to just vegging out.)

Mike and I have just returned from another excursion – a four day weekend to Wales – more about that in a later travelogue.

We have oodles of company coming in December – and more trips planned. All three kids, plus Rose (Alan’s girlfriend) and my dad and brother will be here for Christmas.

With all that on the calendar, this may be the last you hear from me until 2008, so . . . .

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year,

Nancy