PASCHA

by Dimitri C. Michalakis

My life in Chios when I was a little kid revolved around two things: the history of Chios and the Turkish occupation markers everywhere. And the church, which provided a solace and inspiration to the freedom fighters, and a way of life for me growing up.

I remember roaming with the other kids of our neighborhood in Kofinas over the dry river bed, which after a flood, would drain and then unearth all sorts of artifacts: a variety of buttons, rusted old nails, little steel balls that were apparently the lead shot of revolutionary firearms (so my papou assured me, and he was a great storyteller, but owlish—so you never knew if what he was telling you was true or another of his tall tales). And once we unearthed a scabbard, brown and crusty, but crusty with ornamentation—and it was curved, like the heroes, and Turks, of the revolution carried in all those heroic paintings. Could this belong to one of them—a Greek? a Turk? used in a battle to the death and winding in the river? We kids liked to imagine that violent contest (and searched for the bones of the antagonists), and I kept the scabbard tucked in my grandfather’s old metal war chest, cause it had a lock, and I would never trust the scabbard to be out in the open—somehow, despite its rusted state, it still seemed violent—and I imagine it even had dried blood on it.

On Holy Week, of course, we would go to our little church every night, Agios Mattheos, with the mural of the saint in a flowing beard. I would join my papou on his side of the church, while my yiayia stood with the women on the other side, and I would listen to the service while hanging on the arm of my papou’s little one-man pew, with a shelf you could flip down to sit on. The service was long, but the incense smelled good, the priest (who normally would be riding his yaidouraki to the fields to work like everybody else and then wore a plain black monk’s hat) now looked resplendent in the sparkle of all his vestments studded with jewels and little mini-icons. And the psalmodia rang throughout the church.

Afterwards, emerging from the glow of the church, like cavemen leaving our fire, and venturing out into the great black dome of the sky, we somehow felt invincible, anyway, because we were part of a great big family protected by an all-mighty God like a papou, and all the panoply of saints, like all your benevolent thious and thitses, who grinned at you with their gold teeth and gave you candy out of their pockets, which always seemed to have candy.

It was a wonderful reassurance to have then, and now.

Have a Happy Easter.

Dimitri Michalakis