Foreword

According to my dictionary, a totem is "an animal, plant, or other object serving as the emblem of a family or clan and often regarded as a reminder of its ancestry." 

 

My ancestry being Greek, this blog will be about Greek things, not necessarily animals or plants, but certainly the occasional object.  Over the years I've written various things related to Greece, and a blog seems just as good a place as any other to collect and share them with anyone who's interested.  Some of you may recognize a few recyclings, writings I earlier circulated privately.  There will be new material, too.

 

How frequently I post remains to be seen.  For now, I make no commitments.  I'm brand new to blogging, and I'll post when the spirit moves me.  My interests tend strongly toward the historical, and this blog will reflect that.

 

I've been curious about the Greek world ever since my first visit to Greece in the summer of 1962.  At eight years old, that long golden trip awakened interests in European travel, history, and art that continue to this day.  Especially captivating was Angona, the ruggedly beautiful Cephalonian village that was home to my family for centuries (see "Vatselia") before America beckoned to my paternal grandfather in 1907 (see "An American Dream Cut Short").

 

My youthful experience of Greece naturally led to curiosity about my family's origins.  Over time this produced an accumulation of notes, but a suitable format for organizing them didn't come to mind until I re-read Places of My Infancy, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's short memoir of his boyhood.

 

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
(1896-1957)

Tomasi was Prince of Lampedusa and Duke of Palma di Montechiaro, the last of his ancient line of Sicilian noblemen.  In 1955, two years before finishing his only novel, The Leopard, he composed Places of My Infancy to recall his beloved childhood homes -- a baroque palace in Palermo and four grand country houses, all of which by the time he wrote about them had either been reduced to rubble by Allied bombs, sold out of the family, or humbled by time and other encroachments.  In particular, it was his use of architecture and decoration to evoke memories of childhood and ancestry that stimulated me to use objects as focal points for recounting family lore.  And so I began in 2001 with "An Icon" about an heirloom from my mother's family.  A revised version will appear here later.

 

In this blog I will broaden the focus.  Family history will play a prominent role, of course, and objects too, but the entire Greek world, or oikoumene as the Greeks say, will be fair game.

 

I've set this up as a private blog.  If you've gotten this far you've figured out how to log in.

 

Read on, if you like, for the things that perplex, delight, and awe me about the world of Greece.  Perhaps they'll do the same for you.