Etté, simero ce avri (Yesterday, today and tomorrow)

I had full knowledge of the Grecian nature of my being on 12 January 2000, the date of my grandfather Sebastiano’s death. Until then, I only suspected a concealed, recondite, trampled-on diversity.
My grandfather died on a cold winter’s day, at six o’clock in the afternoon. I was sitting on the bed in my room and at a certain point I heard my grandmother screaming for help on the stairs from the second floor where we lived and we rushed down to the ground floor, my grandmother’s house. My mother was in front of me and I was behind her but one landing farther back…she entered along the narrow hall and when I heard a heart-rending cry I knew something terrible had happened. I didn’t imagine in the least that my grandfather could have died, even though he had been seriously ill for many years. My mind had discarded the idea of his possible death a priori.
I went into the room and tried desperately to talk to my grandfather who was on the bed in the throes of death. My mother was weeping and screaming, along with my grandmother and my aunt until he breathed his last. After exactly five minutes my grandmother’s house was filled with neighbours and relatives; the kitchen was full and my mother was screaming and crying. She was inconsolable, my aunt fainted, my grandmother sat dazed on a chair, she shed no tears, she was completely stupefied.
People began to arrive, I sat beside my mother and wept as I embraced her while my father stayed near us and held her hand. He was weeping too. My brother Sebastian was upstairs, not having the courage to come down. People gave sugared water to my mother, they tried to get my aunt to regain consciousness and slowly they started to talk about grandfather as though he had been dead for many years, with my grandmother talking about his deeds in a strange heart-rending chant. My mother whispered in my ear: “Go upstairs and get these clothes…make sure they are all completely black, they must have nothing white and you change your clothes too”. At the time I was 17 years old and in June I was to sit my school-leaving exams. My grandfather’s dream had been to see me attend university: “You must become a lawyer”, he used to say.
We all dressed completely in black, we couldn’t use make up, laugh or take things lightly. We couldn’t cook for a week and we couldn’t turn on the television or radio for a month. My mother – as the daughter of the deceased – was to wear mourning (clothing that was entirely black, and there was to be no type of fun or celebration) for a year, while my grandmother – as the widow – was to remain in mourning clothes for seven years.
That year we didn’t put up a Christmas tree and we didn’t get together for any kind of party or celebration. In October I turned 18 and my mother made a dinner with no singing or dancing. My grandmother couldn’t participate.
I didn’t go to school for almost two weeks and my friends and companions said that my family’s attitude was exaggerated.
At the time I was still living with my family in Reggio Calabria. We lived in a neighbourhood (where my family still resides), in a side-street where we were all related. I couldn’t understand why. My family comes from an isolated little town in the province of Reggio Calabria called “Chorio di Roghudi”. In 1972 when my mother was in high school, the town was hit by a flood and the inhabitants had to abandon it. They all moved in a mass to Reggio Calabria and populated entire areas of the city which became ghetto neighbourhoods, areas where only these people lived. I lived there and did not know this.
The peculiar nature of these people resided in the fact that they had always lived in that town perched in the mountains. My grandmother saw the sea for the first time at the age of forty-five, after the move to Reggio Calabria because of the flood. They had never gone outside the town – one of the reasons being the scarcity of means of communication – and they did not know the outside world.
Moreover they spoke a strange language, a dialect that the residents of Reggio Calabria did not understand and which they mistook for ignorance in using the language. We were outsiders and I was unaware of it.
My mother and my father worked and they were perfectly integrated in the society. It was important to my mother that I had an education, that I was at the top of my class, but in the evening when we had to discuss important things, my parents used that strange language.
For me it was normal and I thought that the parents of my friends also knew it. I thought it was a dialect of Reggio Calabria.
One day I went to the market with my grandmother and she said: “Pe favuri aviti n’achieri? “ (“Please have you got “achieri”?”). The woman immediately understood the “pe favuri “ part, but the “achieri” escaped her and she asked me: “What does your grandmother want?, and I immediately replied, “l’achieri, una tuvagghia – a tablecloth”. “Ah, a tablecloth”, exclaimed the lady at the market.I immediately understood that the word for tablecloth in the dialect of Reggio Calabria was “tuvagghia”. Why then did we say “achieri”?
Also when I joked at school with my friends and used words which for me were in common use, I noticed that they didn’t understand them.
One day we were talking of trips we had gone on and I told them about my trip to Greece with my family when I was little, without a guide. “Did you speak English,” asked one of my friends. “No,” I replied. “So what language did you speak then?” “Greek.” “How come your parents studied modern Greek?” “Actually, they never studied it, and now that I think about it, I don’t really know how they came to know it”.
I was perplexed.
Every time we went to the mountains for the holiday feasts, my father took out a hand-organ which he played as everyone danced the tarantella. I was very embarrassed. It was a folkloristic mountain dance. That was the only way my family knew how to amuse themselves.
My mother never let me go to parties, birthdays, trips, she never let me put on make-up and go out with friends. She would say, “You’re not going to anyone’s house and no-one is coming here”. I couldn’t say any bad words or swear and I was not to accept anything offered me and I was to always say thank you.
I was to respect strangers, the elderly and my relatives. I had to use the polite “voi” form of address with all of them. I could never remember the degrees of kinship with which I could use the more familiar “tu” form. I was always confused.
No boy was allowed to telephone me or come to pick me up at home and I wasn’t allowed to go out with him except in the company of other friends.
Study and absolute seriousness. Those were the rules.
I slowly realized that my upbringing was different to that of others, my language was different, my life was much stricter.
At university one of the professors told me that the “voi” was no longer used. It was the “lei” form that was used. Slowly I became aware that I was different and I didn’t understand that this diversity was a value; at the time I experienced it as a non-value – a disvalue.
My friends with their freedom, their modern and free-thinking families, stumbled into drugs, alcohol, they abandoned their studies…I got my degree in a very short time and was a model of behaviour for everyone even though in actual fact the narrowness of my family life caused me suffering.
I dreamt of being one of my girlfriends full of make-up and designer clothes. At home – even though nothing was lacking – we didn’t look at the form, but the substance. We tried to save on everything and for everything. We never asked for designer clothes, we never went out to a pizzeria or to have an ice-cream. My parents did not walk holding hands like those of my friends, they exhibited no show of affection either in public or private, between themselves or in front of us, their children. Everything was always so rigid and strict.
I longed for a little transgression and a lot of freedom.
After I had finished university, during my practice training period for the bar exam I saw a public announcement for a competition, put out by the Province of Reggio Calabria and funded under Law 482/1999, for the protection of linguistic minorities, which offered paid job opportunities to 50 young people who knew the Greek language of Calabria called “Grecanico”.
I came 25th. I had no qualifications or publications on the subject. I knew the language a little and I was the daughter of Grecanic-speaking parents, which was probably the highest qualification. I had done the pre-selection exam almost as a joke, motivated more by the opportunity of an internship/job than by the real issue of protection and preservation of the language and culture of my people.
Instead, a whole new world – hitherto unknown – was opened up to me, and it was since that that I have gained consciousness of myself and my Grecanic being.

The Greeks of Calabria are a small linguistic minority (speakers of the language today number more or less 80 people); in fact it is such a small minority that there is no implementation law at regional level dealing with it specifically, although Law 482/99 contains the necessary provisions. Unlike Albanian (in Cosenza) which is even taught at university, mandatory teaching of the Greek language of Calabria is not foreseen even in schools in the towns of the so-called “Grecanic area”, and this is because we do not have a territory. We are a minority without a territory.
The 1972 flood destroyed the little towns in which it was spoken and the few Grecanics left now are scattered in small urban centres and neighbourhoods in Reggio Calabria where they have blended in with the language and traditions of the place, in the process trampling on and removing their own roots.
The elders by now are using a strange form of bilingualism, with the Reggio Calabria and Grecanic dialects in the same sentence.
The elderly – the bearers of the last vestiges of this culture – have been pushed towards homologation and uprooted from their land to be grafted onto a foreign land (as they might well consider Reggio Calabria to be) no longer speak their language, which they perceive to the object of marginalization and ignorance.
They do not know that their language is derived from the settlers of Magna Graecia, and that Grecanic – as recognized by scholars – is a contamination of the Greek of the early Hellenic period, the Latin period and the “Byzantine” Greek of the second Hellenic period.
They do not know they are using the subjunctive mode and the aorist case, and yet they are.
They do not even know where and what Greece is, and yet there is a little Greek in them.
They do not know they have Greek-Orthodox traditions and customs, that they are Greek-Orthodox in their values and the rigour of their life.
They do not know that they are part of a great culture on its way to becoming extinct.
They do not know they are, as someone has called them, “Bronzes in the Flesh”, living monuments and witnesses of a world that is no more.
The Greek language of Calabria does not have the force of other minority languages, it is not recognized like Ladin and Occitan, its teaching is not mandatory in the schools, it lacks a regulatory framework for its preservation and protection and when the last elders are no more, a language and a world of values which no longer exists will die with them.
For me, this last shred of Hellenism is also an example of those European roots which today we find difficult to acknowledge.
“Europe was born of three hills: the Campidoglio, the Acropolis and Golgotha”. (Genzmer)
(Europe as a blending of the Greco-Roman culture with Christianity).



I dedicate this piece of writing to my people, a struggling people that continues to live according to values that no longer exist, to my grand-mothers Lucia and Annunziata, both of whom are living, and my grandfathers Sebastiano and Antonio who look down on me from heaven.

Doste mia fonì ecinì ti den echu!
Give a voice to those who do not have one!

Lucia Zavettieri