Embedded In the local community, there was a distinct fringe group: of primary school teachers, a few shopkeepers (of the café and the tavern, the grocery store, the square kiosk and the small stationery and bookstore at the main junction), the rural doctor, the village priest and a police constable, belonged to this group, and all subsisted in the periphery of an agricultural in its core society. A hardcore Marxist would have promptly noted that this unproductive and some of it parasitic group, which, although the farmers accepted it as a ‘super-structure’ complementary to the main occupation, lived off, imperceptibly to them, from a fair portion of the exchange value of their hard labour products, that is, largely thanks to the sweat of their brows.
On a different note, the
community although aware of its status at the base of the national economy and class
society, it had, nevertheless, conscience of ‘the nation’ -the adhesive of its classes
and strata, as everywhere else in the modern world. A predominantly Slavic-speaking
population, once a relative majority in the region, had long since been
assimilated by an a-historical Hellenism. Some protestations about maintaining their
language and heritage had been decisively suppressed, condemned in post-civil
war Greece for pro-communist links, and the once predominantly slavic past of
the region fell into obscurity. In the ‘Cold Trough’, known by the slavic toponym
Plasnitsovo before the war, there were no distinctively rich or poor, neither
nobles or plebeians, nor space in the conscience of its people for ideological analyses
and arguments of the kind. After all, such thoughts and arguments would not have
helped anyone more than ignorance and apathy, during a politically turbulent period
and an oppressive national environment.
The peasant families cultivated
their allocated plots of an equitably divided land and got on uncomplainingly with
their lives, coexisting harmoniously with the guests of their hospitable community,
welcome strangers of their own respectable ways and culture, in full knowledge
of everyone concerned that they who would relocate away at the first opportunity.
Village residents, permanent or temporary, converged in the square and its one café
and tavern on Sunday afternoons or watch traveling troupes in the evenings. The
children were drawn to the primitive amusement park set-up during school holidays
-like flies drawn to a honey pot. They endured long, solemn patriotic speeches
by the headteacher and visiting officials, before parading reluctantly, in
front of a more enthusiastic squad of National Guard volunteers, through the
main street, before the laying of wreaths at the statue of the local hero. They
joined the celebrations on the village patron’s saint day, organized by the parish,
for its own and neighbouring communities, and attended tortuous church liturgies,
which on Good Friday was followed by the Epitaph procession. And they participated
in laboriously rehearsed gymnastics displays, for the proud eyes of their
parents and teachers, at the end of the school year.
All these ethnic and religious
festivals and celebrations, in form and content mandated by the Colonel’s junta
and its dictatorship, established since 1967, were attended, by believers and non-believers,
by nationalists or genuine patriots or covert renegades alike. The slogans ‘Fatherland,
Orthodoxy, Family’ and ‘Hellas of Christian Hellenes’ encapsulated an ‘ideology’
devoid of substance and were promoted as mottos in a vassal nation's course to
a dead-end. In most communities of the Greek Macedonian countryside, at least, such
‘ideals’ had long since begun to be interwoven with its social and cultural
reality and behaviour. However, they barely affected the daily life and routines,
which hardly deviated from national and religious traditions and norms that had
been established for decades.
No comments:
Post a Comment