“Ephestaious theous” (Εφέστιους θεούς) is phrase in Greek which can be translated as “household gods.” It is a legacy of a paganistic and anthropocentric view of the world.
In such gods we can all believe
The term, Household Gods, suggests that the gods can be domesticated, but it also enshrines the home. This never-ending agona – (ἀγών), struggle – between mortals and gods always finds its most precipice with exile.
To leave home was not just the risk of losing your moral railings but also the threat of falling into an abyss. Exile was an expulsion to a zone that is even beyond the reach of the gods.
Gods in exile, homes unmoored
The Pontus region was home to Greeks for over two and a half millennia. In this place the gods, the landscape, the rhythms of life, and the home found an accord.
The expulsion of Greeks from Pontus – the southern coast of the Black Sea in modern-day Turkey – occurred in stages, culminating between 1916 and 1923, with the most significant and final phase tied to the Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922) and the subsequent 1923 Treaty of Lausanne.
In 1922 the so-called Great Idea (Megali Idea – Μεγάλη Ιδέα), an ultra-nationalist vision of expanding Greece to include all ethnic Greeks and former Byzantine territories, culminated in the ill-fated invasion of Ottoman Turkey in 1922. A total military defeat led to the final great catastrophic population exchange and the expulsion of up to two million Greeks from Asia Minor, as modern Turkey emerged from the remnants of the Ottoman Empire.
Did these people’s gods come with them? Or were they left behind? If the gods stayed home, and the people went into exile, how would anyone find the measure of things?
Bessarion left Pontus as a young man in the fifteenth century. He was adopted by a local priest and eventually sent to Mystras to study under the legendary Plethon. For Plethon, Christianity was an interesting set of ideas. However, in comparison to the depth and breadth of Platonic philosophy, he thought that they were rather shallow. Eventually, he thought that Christianity would fade away and the vigour of paganistic ideas would reclaim their place.
The Pontian refugees who arrived in Greece were obsessed with building homes and schools. They were told they were going home but they arrived in a no man’s land. No one had been this far from home before, and no one in Macedonia knew their names.
The Pontians were bewildered but they did not fall into dissolution and depression. The agona – making the best of the cards you are dealt – continued.
Faith, feeling, and the relics we carry
In the metropolitan cities a church was built with a tower that loomed high above the dome. The swallows encircled it in the morning and evenings. The clock had two faces – north and south. The short and stout hour hands were consistent, but the longer and more slender minute hands were often slightly at variance with each face. Lawrence Durrell, who lived for a spell in Corfu, thought, at first, that this might be a theological mystery.
The peasants in my grandmother’s village would just say: “The wind takes all.”
Inside the big church there was a relic wrapped in red robes and seated in a glass case that was adorned with silver. It had been transported from the homeland. A committee had been formed to protect it from their envious neighbours. Teenage boys tried to outmuscle each other in order to claim the more prominent shifts as guards.
Some saints made the journey. But did the peasant notice the time or believe that their power was preserved?
I believe, like Plethon, that the peasants trusted their feelings – an atavistic aesthesis that pervades the body. This feeling remained unnamed, but it was deeper than any faith in religious dogma. It survived even if those priests said the same thing over and over again.
“Throughout the centuries we bore the yoke of Ottoman rule, it was the Church that had kept our identity intact and provided sustenance for the soul.”
“Hairs,” the peasants muttered contemptuously under their breath.
They allowed the Church to play its political role, and insofar as it secured some protection, they expressed gratitude. But they refused to tether their feelings to an institution that was riven with scoundrels and parasites. The idea that gods took many forms and that they were in everything was far more alluring.
Rebuilding with stones and suspicion
The Pontians rushed to build new schools in Greece. They used the local wood and stones. Revered the teachers that brought light. They were in awe when the germ of democracy that took root in the school spread into the discourse of the plateia and the kafenion. The agona of democracy was the struggle to find accord from the polyphonia of the people. One village elder forbade the opening of the kafenion until sunset.
Despite the new love of pedagogy and the honour bestowed to the teachers from Athens, the Pontian villages retained a guarded stance. When strangers arrived, kids hid and threw stones, grandmothers stationed at the highest window in the house glared with suspicion, and the parents remained working in their distant fields. Hospitality would come, but it was shrouded and prickly.
If a merchant tried to outsmart Hariklia, she would clench her lips, and then unleash:
“Hey shithead, gather up your shit and beat it before I shit on you and everyone else in your shitty race.”
All the Pontians complained that they left tidy homes and were allotted hovels in Greece. They quickly knocked the old ones down and started again. A new structure was needed. It made them think: what is a home? Of course, it is a shelter and a container. But so is a coat and a barn.
When guests visit, a god has also arrived. Upon entry they would note an aroma of garlic mixed with oregano. The icons were neatly arranged on shelves. Cushions lined the walls and divans. As much as the roof provided shelter from rain and sun, or the walls held the breath of the newborn child, the style and placement of the embroidered curtains offered sanctuary. No relic in the metropolitan could yield the equanimity that comes from finding an order in your home.
*Professor Nikos Papastergiadis, is a cultural historian and author of many books; his recent one is ‘John Berger and Me’.
