...And Dreams Are Dreams

takes on the meaning of “in a respectable way”? But what does it mean to be Greek? If we believe Fallmerayer: “The destruction of the ancient Greek world started under the reign of Justinian, when the enormous column of nations between the Danube and the Baltic, shaken by the great historic events, dragged itself over the Greek soil like a dark cloud propelled by a raging storm, and there was not a single valley, mountain or ravine that it did not devastate. The first act of this invasion lasted three centuries. This fact finally sheds light upon why in the Greek Chronicle of the Morea , the mountain range of Taiyetos is preferably referred to as the Slavic Mountains. And the localities of Plátsa, Statsa, Loutsaina, Chloumitsa, Levetsova, Zitsova, Vársova, and Polonitsa attest to these invasions. In act II of the drama all the towns and villages of Greece were persecuted and stripped of their population. A new race of people settled in, into which, every now and then, there slid, like foreigners, the small remnants of the ancient masters of the country. Until, at last, the rejuvenated Byzantine Empire, strengthened by the addition of the vital barbaric power, once again subjugated a Greece that was now Slavic, and, by grafting her with the Christian faith and the modern Greek language, created a completely new Greece.” (He meant in relation to the ancient one.) “Nowadays [1844], the Albanians, ancient neighbors of Greece, constitute the majority of inhabitants of the new kingdom.”

Therefore, concluded the narrator (and

psychoanalysis can take a flying leap), could it be that the words to suffer this ordeal in the Greek way take on a much more complex meaning in the captain’s mind, a meaning that contains all these ordeals, invasions, insults, and deteriorations that the foreigners brought to our country? And the captain of the past cries out the ever-topical slogan of national accord, which is always used during the nation’s difficult moments: “For the sake of our nationality, let us forget for a moment the crimes of the past.”

“And how did the story with Pacifico end,

Grandfather?”

“He was finally given a small compensation, instead of the 800,000 drachmas he had asked for.