All that’s Greek to me

All of Greece is a monument to the past, an ancient civilization, in which originated many of what we would consider modern everyday things, like central heating, bridges, competitive sports, architecture, and of course philosophy.

In fact, is it possible that all of our ideas about ourselves—the self—are derived from the explorations of ancient Greece through its philosophers like Socrates, who believed that the self existed in two parts, the body and the soul, or Sophocles who, having said that “the keenest sorrow is to recognize ourselves as the sole cause of all our adversities,” might have introduced us to the idea that, ultimately responsible for our fate and ourselves, we aren’t 100 percent subject to fate or some kind of pre-destiny?

There’s so much to learn from the Greeks, particularly from its island Crete on the Aegean Sea, which, along with Mesopotamia and Egypt in the Middle East, the Indus valley, where now lie Pakistan and India, and what used to be Caral, over 150 kilometers north of Lima in Peru, is believed to hold the key to the origins of civilization as we know it.

Which is why Ioannis Pediotis, Greek ambassador to the Philippines, whose close friends fondly call Yiannis, is godsend.

From the moment I met him while he was new in his current post, he had been keen on celebrating Greek National Day in Manila, a world event that for one reason or another had until this year never been celebrated in the Philippines before.

March 25 is Greek National Day, commemorating the Greek Revolution of 1821, a war for independence from four centuries of Ottoman rule, a revolution that lasted until 1829. This historic day coincides with the Greek Orthodox Church’s celebration of the Annunciation to the Theotokos, when Mary received word from the Archangel Gabriel that she had been chosen to bear the son of God.

The date presented the first hurdle for ambassador and his wife, Aliki Pappas, who had been involved in the preparations from the beginning. No sooner had they sent out the digital Save-the-Date cards than they received a warning from Manila insiders that it was a bad time to throw a party in the Philippines, March 25 this year being Holy Monday, the second day of Holy Week, right after Palm Sunday.

While the long holiday only begins officially on Maundy Thursday, many Filipinos, especially those with children abroad, take full advantage of it with an extended break, often leaving the weekend before Holy Week.

It was initially a big blow to Ambassador Pediotis. When I ran into him at a party, looking worried and forlorn, he said to me, shaking his head, “No wonder Greek National Day had never been celebrated in this country.”

But all’s well that ends well. With Aliki and her strong resolve on his side, the ambassador soon decided to hold the celebration a few days in advance, on March 21, at the grand ballroom of Fairmont Makati, into which he transported some of the best of Greece, including the oh-so-Greek yogurt and cucumber dip tzatziki with garlic and dill, the layered casserole moussaka with eggplant, minced meat, and béchamel sauce, the spinach and feta stuffed phyllo pastry spanakopita, fried squid called kalamarakia, psari plaki or fish baked Greek style with tomato and onions, the Greek meatballs keftedes with herbs, and well, what’s a Greek indulgence without baklava, the uber-rich pastry made of layers upon layers of phyllo dough with nuts and honey?

Ambassador Pediotis and Aliki did not leave any stone unturned to make sure the Greek National Day in Manila would give their guests only the most authentic taste of Greece, going as far as importing many of the essential ingredients, such as the olives, from Athens. In February, working closely with Fairmont Makati’s executive chef Béla Rieck, they invited me, foodie and Lifestyle Asia food editor Pepper Teehankee, power couple Philip and Ching Cruz, and Philippine Airlines’ president and COO Stanley Ng to a dinner-cum-food tasting at Mirèio, just to see to it that what they planned to serve would be as much to their liking as it would be to ours. Also included on the menu were dolmadakia or grape leaves stuffed with rice, stifado or tangy beef stew with herbs and aromatics, and the simple classic Greek dessert of yogurt with honey and nuts and a mouthful of a name—yiaourtime meli kai karidia.

To complete the experience, the celebrity bouzouki player Manolis Karantinis was flown in for the occasion and there were Greek dances with the grace and energy of the Greek muse Terpsichore and the most enjoyable of the evening’s activities, plate-smashing, during which the guests were asked to intentionally hurl plates down on the dancefloor at the feet of the dancers. The plates were made of plaster to prevent them from causing any injury, but how cathartic it was, a Greek celebratory custom believed to have originated from the ancient Greek practice of conspicuous consumption, in which affluence would be displayed by the plates being thrown after use in a banquet into the hearth instead of being washed for later use!  

It was all Greek to me, as Ambassador Pediotis and his wife Aliki made sure it would be. If I listened extra carefully, I might even have heard a lover’s lament, “Ode to Aphrodite,” being recited by Sappho or “The Amores” by Ovid or “The Beloved” by Theocritus. And if I opened my heart a little further, I might have had a taste of the four different kinds of love in the Greek language—Philia, eros, storge, and agape. In the course of writing this article, I also received a recording of Sean Connery’s soulful reading of “Ithaka” by Greek modernist poet C.P. Cavafy—“Laistrygonians, Cyclops, wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them / unless you bring them along inside your soul…” On Greek National Day, I might have, if I paid enough attention.

I look forward to the celebration of Greek National Day next year, only the second time such a day would be celebrated in Manila in the history of Greece in the Philippines since the establishment of formal bilateral, diplomatic, and trade relations between our two countries in 1950.

A few more evenings like this, which proved as successful as the Greek War of Independence that in the 1820s freed Greece and its people from their Ottoman cage, and I think I’d be a certified Grecophile and freer to express all the love that exists in me.

Sinharitíria!

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