I am not sure when I met my first Apodoimous. It had to be when I was a child because I don't remember it very well. What I do remember is that they were family friends, immigrants somewhere in America. They came back one summer after many years, to discover that Greece had moved on! Video cameras, high technology sport shoes...everything had also arrived in Greece. I think they were a little disappointed...Maybe because they could not speak Greek very well anymore, and that no one was interested to know about the land of opportunity, and that everybody called them Americans...
Many years went by since then. I don't even remember them anymore. Maybe because now I remember those I have met all these years. It may sound simple and maybe a little silly, but the feeling of knowing people all over the world is unbelievable. You cannot explain it. They all come back every summer, as though something attracts them here.
They nag- even more than we do who experience everyday the charm
of our "sloppiness"-but still they keep on coming back. And
they are wondering what happened to the Greece they dreamt of
all these years...what if you tell them that now we are in Europe,
they insist to remember, to dream, to smell the same smells
of their houses, their villages. And continue to nag...for the
traffic, the endless hours they have to spent at the tax office,
for the cities that are not so clean, that some things do not
work as they should...
I look at them and have nothing to say to them. They are right! Nevertheless something keeps us together and I still haven't discovered what this is. I don't think it is our common roots, our common culture or religion. Not even our "filotimo". Maybe it is just the smells, the pictures...I don't know. Something though drives me to love the Apodoimous. I guess it is because their relationship with what we all call Patrida, is pure, clear and intense, just like a spice...
I wait for them every summer, as though I am their relative, to learn from them something new about our Patrida, something that I still haven't discovered, or I just don't want to discover. And suddenly I feel that slowly I become an Apodoimos as well, even though I live where they all dream of returning someday.
I wait for them as everybody was waiting in the old days for
the Aunt from Chicago to come back...to let them get on my nerves,
to get on their nerves, to try for endless hours to explain
to them that it is not a Greek custom to spend every night at
the bouzoukia, and that we all work in the morning...and that
the gentleman who did not serve on them at the tax office the
other day is not a prototype for all of us...And they insist
that if all things in Greece was done in the right way as happens
abroad, everything would be better...
Yes, I agree, but if everything was different, then maybe Greece would not be Greece anymore! And then maybe you would not come every summer, and you would not dream of the smells, and maybe I would not have the chance of knowing you...
My beloved Apodoimoi, I owe you a huge thank you for making me see Greece through your eyes and soul, and for making me at last understand why for you All the World...is Greece!
Katerina Kourtessi
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