Now We Dance

June 24, 2013

Last night was the annual festival called “Glendi,” which is a coming of age ceremony for the young girls in the town.  I’m still not quite sure what the “coming of age” part entailed, but rumor is that it involves the girls picking apples from a well and that these apples have the initials of the man they will marry carved into them.  Not exactly something you’d expect, but well, I’m in Greece!  This land is filled with ancient customs that don’t make much sense to an outsider.  I was especially looking forward to seeing the apple part, but instead all I saw was dancing!  First off, I figured that this festival would start around 6 or 7pm, but no!  The party started at 9pm on a Sunday!  Today was a national holiday for Greece, which means that the party continues all night long!  We arrived, paid our 15 euro to enter and eat, and received MASSIVE plates of food, bags of treats, cups, silverware, etc… so much that I could barely carry it all.  Definitely worth shelling out the dough.  There was a huge slab of some kind of grilled meat (of course), potatoes, dolmades (stuffed grape leaves), fried feta, meatballs, bread (oh so much delicious bread!), baklava-like dessert, cucumbers,… the list goes on and on.  There was way too much food to eat so I ended up taking home a plate of my leftovers, which will probably make about three more dinners this week.  And the most important of all – there was delicious and CHEAP wine.  This wine must be magic because it really makes you want to dance!  Normally I’m not the one to get up and shake it, but I figured, “Hey, when in Greece.”  But before the “shaking it” there was a performance by the children who participated in the mysterious coming of age ceremony.  They recited what I’m assuming were poems (my Greek is not so good!), sang (some kids were definitely going through some changes… and it was not so pleasant for the ears), and DANCED.  They were all dressed in traditional Greek outfits and each had little solos in which they shook it, jumped, slapped their feet and legs, and jumped some more.  It was impressive.  After the kids were done the band kept playing and gradually everyone began to get up to dance as the night went on.  The pier that the festival was held on was packed with Greeks and I’m sure all of them danced at least once last night.  At first I decided that I was just going to take an anthropological view of the events and sit back and watch – after all, I am a foreigner here!  Who wants their town festival taken over by pasty, sunburned, mosquito-bitten, probably still covered in dirt (despite my best efforts I always can find some dirt on myself somewhere) archaeologists?  Well, not only did they not care about this, but they actually welcome our participation and tried to teach us the footwork.  As one of the brave trench supervisors stood up and began pulling people up to the dance floor my wall-flower state melted away (or rather, my liquid courage overpowered it) and I danced the night away with the Greeks and my fellow archaeo-philes.  Usually what you see in the movies is wrong, so I assumed that these dances wouldn’t actually be like the ones I saw on My Big Fat Greek Wedding where everyone grabs a shoulder and dances in a circle, but that is exactly what they did!  By the middle of the song there were several concentric circles of dancers all linked up, kicking and grape-vining in time with the music.  The locals mixed themselves in with us dirt-encrusted diggers (to be clear, we were all looking our best, but like I said, there is always more dirt somewhere!), integrating us into their festival and really making us feel like a part of the town.  It was obvious who wasn’t Greek, regardless of appearance: all of us xenoi (foreigners) were staring at the feet of other Greeks, watching their feet and trying to figure out what the hell to do with ours.  Some songs were easy and only had four or five steps, but one had seventeen!  I pulled my friends up for this one and gave it a shot, but even after watching my Greek neighbor’s feet for three minutes I still had no idea what the seventeen steps were.  I just tried to kick at the same time as him, move to the right when everyone else did, and add a bunch of hops/steps in between.  By the end of the night I had lost track of how many times I’d pulled up my friends to attempt to dance and how many times I said, “One more and then we can go.”

That was truly a night I will never forget; when boundaries came down and Greek and xenoi alike bonded through dance.  It’s true that the Greeks in this town are very friendly to us dig kids and don’t treat us like alien life forms by any means, but last night I really began to feel that I was a part of this town, even if only for the short six weeks that I’m here.  It was a shame that we had to excavate the next day (all the other sites in the area had the day off…) because the music and dancing continued well into the night, at least well after 2am when I finally decided to pull myself away and get a mere four hours of sleep. Despite the fact that I didn’t stay on the pier and dance until sunrise, I’m sure I would have made Zorba the Greek very proud last night.  If there is a lesson to be learned in all of this it’s that even if you feel like you’re an outsider, get up and dance!  You’ll never be so happy to link arms and look like a fool…just try not to step on their feet.  Oh yeah, and don’t forget the wine ;).