AGAIN, THERE IS THE question of differences between rural and urban communities. The Christian tradition first spread within the cities of the Eastern Mediterranean, and the city—whether in Augustine’s City of God or in the symbolism of ‘The City’ (Constantinople) in the Greek East—became in some ways the paradigm of a Christian community. Philip Sherrard’s description of Constantinople from this perspective is full of insights, (42) and similar resonances have been found among the Asia Minor refugees, described by Renée Hirschon, (43) who were settled in Kokkiniá and other urban areas of Athens and throughout Greece after the exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey in 1923, and had sustained, throughout the emigration, a deep Orthodox tradition. Indeed, Constantinople as the Christian City has exercised a powerful nostalgia in Greek culture, although it has not always engendered wise politics. (44) It is true that there has been a long-standing tension between the people of the towns and those of the villages, the villagers feeling—for the most part correctly—that urban people patronize and look down on them, and at times countering this, in private, by robust comments and gestures which are not entirely polite. But it is probably fair to say that cities with a strong Orthodox tradition have also been cities which had a deep link with the surrounding countryside, and have had the images of village life deeply impressed in their way of thinking. Even now city people in Greece still refer to their patrídha (πατρίδα), their family village of origin, and return there on symbolic occasions; and with the growth of secularism, of which cities have become the chief dispensers, village Christianity has become in its turn prototypical. This means that it should be possible to find transpositions of village themes in the culture of the cities where faith remains alive. The monasteries and the intellectual centres have also been key elements in generating and preserving the tradition, and we could probably say also that an essential prerequisite of a deep Orthodox tradition is that it is not peculiar either to urban or to village life, either to the monastics or to the folk, but represents a level at which people in all walks of life and in all occupations understand each other’s experience as one. A great tradition seeks always to find what is universal in town and country, monastery and shepherd’s hut, seeking to make both aware of one another and of the part both play in the welfare of all. Rural Orthodoxy can offer to the cities the natural world and its symbols, while urban Orthodoxy can offer to the villagers its metaphysical and intellectual tradition.

The question then remains as to how far it is permissible to extrapolate from a book of this sort to the wider world beyond the Greek borders. Certainly those who have travelled in the Balkans will recognize some elements in this book, and this suggests that there may be certain common elements which will be found wherever the Orthodox tradition is found. Some of the aspects discussed may also have links with village life in Russia before the Revolution, if descriptions of nineteenth-century Russia are any guide. (45) Of course increasingly, as one moves further from the kind of village about which I have written, there are going to be more and more details which differ—the agricultural cycle, kinship patterns, staple foods, economic activities—but it is nevertheless likely that the way in which Orthodoxy fits these changing elements together is going to result in recognizable patterns at a deeper level. And it is possible, too, that the potential for comparison could be extended to the Christian world beyond Orthodoxy, for Orthodoxy is descended from the united Christianity of the first thousand years, and in Western Europe continuities with this world of the first thousand years of Christianity can be discerned in rural life till well after the Reformation. (46)

As to the extent to which the picture I have drawn can be extrapolated back in history, again I have to leave this question to those with more historical qualifications than I have. Charles Stewart has pointed to Orthodox images of the heavenly and demonic worlds which have remained constant from the fourth century AD to the present day. (47) Concurrences of village patterns of thought and practice with the Orthodox liturgy, and with some of the writings of the Church Fathers, are also a sign that many of the themes brought out in this book are ancient. Liturgists say the Orthodox liturgy was already by the fifteenth century substantially as it is now. (48) Examples are given in this book of village story and song which have come down from Byzantine times, like the story of Kassiane already quoted. And going even further back, it is not difficult even for an amateur to notice pre-Christian images in, for example, ideas about death. It is not unlikely that we are dealing here with what has been called the history of ‘la longue durée’, (49) but how much of this continuity has been preserved in the contemporary Greek and foreign cities to which villagers have gone, and whether and in what form it can be re-asserted, is a question which remains to be answered.

This point having been made, however, my focus as I wrote the book was not on how far it could be generalized, but on how deeply I could give expression to what I found in the village itself. My life in Ambeli gave me a direct and individual experience of what it is to live in such a community, and the wish to write about this for its own sake. I was the only foreigner in the community—was unmarried at the time—and I depended on the people for everything, not only for information about how they lived and what they believed and valued, but for those things without which any life there would have been impossible—hospitality, love, laughter, comfort and companionship. And nothing can replace for me the living experience of this way of life—the rapidity of the people’s voices with their soft Boeotian accent, the high-pitched torrent of invective against some erring child or hapless goat, the scent of pine smoke in the winter and the chill of the water under the plane tree in the summer, spring nights filled with the song of the nightingale and with the crowing of cocks and outbreaks of dogs barking, the September air pungent with dried herbs and rotting figs, the long walks over the mountain paths accompanied by the kaleidoscope of the people’s talk, the extraordinary charity of their acceptance of myself as a stranger in their midst, the winter evenings sitting with them in the light of the blazing fires and hearing the deep echoes in the drama of their discussions and reminiscences, their intuitions, their stories, their silences. At such times I would feel, as people in such communities do feel when their confidence is undamaged, that I, with them, was at the centre of the world. I hope that something of this experience can be conveyed to my readers.

Juliet du Boulay has an MA in English Literature and Language and a D.Phil. in Social Anthropology. After her first degree she worked on a newspaper in London for two years, but in 1961 she went to Greece and remained there, with some breaks, until 1973. During 1961-64 she travelled extensively in the villages in mainland Greece and Evia (Euboea), and also spent some months walking with a donkey in the mountainous areas of Western Crete. She returned to England to study social anthropology at Oxford, after which, in the period between 1966 and 1973, she lived chiefly in a mountain village of northern Evia, at first collecting material on the customs and institutions of the village, and then paying especial attention to the people’s cosmological and religious ideas. She is married to an Orthodox priest and is the author of Portrait of a Greek Mountain Village and Cosmos, Life, and Liturgy in a Greek Orthodox Village, to which this essay is an introduction. It appears in full exclusively in the Fortnightly Review. Cosmos, Life, and Liturgy is the the eighteenth publication in The Romiosyni Series, published by Denise Harvey (Publisher), 340 05 Limni, Evia, Greece. Republished by permission of the author.

NOTES:
(1) Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974.
(2) e.g. John Cuthbert Lawson, Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910).
(3) Margaret Alexiou, The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974); Loring M. Danforth, The Death Rituals of Rural Greece (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982).
(4) For a recent example see Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (London: Bantam Press, 2006).
(5) e.g. Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971).
(6) Michael Herzfeld, Anthropology through the Looking-glass: Critical Ethnography in the Margins of Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
(7) Michael Herzfeld, The Poetics of Manhood: Contest and Identity in a Cretan Mountain Village (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985); ‘The Significance of the Insignificant: Blasphemy as Ideology’, Man (N.S.), 19 (1984), pp. 653–64.
(8) E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1937).
(9) The chief theorist of post-Ottoman Romiosýne has also remarked on this recently: see Michael Herzfeld, ‘The Ethnographer as Theorist: John Campbell and the Power of Detail’, in Mark Mazower (ed.), Networks of Power in Modern Greece (London: Hurst, 2008), p. 153. This essay takes a hint from the work of Charles Stewart, who ‘has consistently and persuasively argued against the conceptual separation of church doctrine from folk practice in Greece’, and suggests that ‘Stewart’s argument should in turn lead us to look for doctrinal principles…and to ask how far those doctrines might determine the shape of social interaction.’
(10) Philip Sherrard, The Marble Threshing Floor: Studies in Modern Greek Poetry (London: Vallentine, Mitchell, 1956); Zissimos Lorenzatos, The Drama of Quality: Selected Essays (Limni, Greece: D. Harvey, 2000).
(11) Steven Runciman, Byzantine Civilisation (London: E. Arnold, 1933).
(12) Philip Sherrard, The Greek East and the Latin West: A Study in the Christian Tradition (London: Oxford University Press, 1959).
(13) John Campbell and Philip Sherrard, Modern Greece (London: Benn, 1968).
(14) J. K. Campbell, Honour, Family and Patronage: A Study of Institutions and Moral Values in a Greek Mountain Community (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964).
(15) Lucy Rushton, ‘Religion and Identity in a Rural Greek Community’, D.Phil. thesis (University of Sussex, 1982).
(16) Margaret Kenna, ‘Icons in Theory and Practice: An Orthodox Christian Example’, History of Religions, 24 (1985), pp. 345–68; ‘Why does Incense smell Religious? Greek Orthodoxy and the Anthropology of Smell’, Journal of Mediterranean Studies, 15 (2005), pp. 52–70.
(17) Jill Dubisch, In a Different Place: Pilgrimage, Gender and Politics at a Greek Island Shrine (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).
(18) A. M. Iossifides, ‘Sisters in Christ: Metaphors of Kinship among Greek Nuns’, in Peter Loizos and Evthymios Papataxiarchis (eds.), Contested Identities: Genders and Kinship in Modern Greece (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), and ‘Earthly Lives and Life Everlasting: Secular and Religious Values in two Convents and a Village in Western Greece’, Ph.D. thesis (University of London, 1990).
(19) e.g. Kyriakos Markides, The Mountain of Silence: A Search for Orthodox Spirituality (New York: Doubleday, 2001), and Gifts of the Desert: The Forgotten Path of Christian Spirituality (New York: Doubleday, 2005).
(20) Charles Stewart, Demons and the Devil: Moral Imagination in Modern Greek Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).
(21) Laurie Kain Hart, Time, Religion and Social Experience in Rural Greece (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1992); Renée Hirschon, Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe: The Social Life of Asia Minor Refugees in Piraeus (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).
(22) Renée Hirschon, ‘Essential Objects and the Sacred: Interior and Exterior Space in an Urban Greek Locality’, in S. Ardener (ed.), Women and Space: Ground Rules and Social Maps (London: Croom Helm, 1981), pp. 72–88, and ‘Women, the Aged and Relgious Activity: Oppositions and Complementarity in an Urban Greek Locality’, Journal of Modern Greek Studies 1 (1983), pp. 113–29.
(23) Hart, Time, Religion and Social Experience.
(24) Margaret Kenna, ‘Houses, Fields and Graves: Property and Ritual Obligations on a Greek Island’, Ethnology, 15 (1976), pp. 21–34.
(25) Dimitris Theodossopoulos, ‘What Use is the Turtle? Cultural Perceptions of Land, Work, Animals and “Ecologists” in a Greek Farming Community’, Ph.D. thesis (University of London, 1997).
(26) Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order (London: Simon and Schuster, 1996), and The Clash of Civilisations? The Debate (New York: Foreign Affairs, 1996).
(27) Thomas Merton, The Seven-Storey Mountain (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1948).
(28) Sandra Ott, The Circle of Mountains: A Basque Shepherding Community (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981); Joao de Pina-Cabral, Sons of Adam, Daughters of Eve: The Peasant Worldview of the Alto Minho (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986).
(29) Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c. 1400 – c. 1580 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992).
(30) For the recent precedent see Stewart, Demons and the Devil, Ch. 7. Such comparison presupposes the long-term stability of the Orthodox liturgy, for which see Robert Taft, The Byzantine Rite: a Short History (Collegeville, Minn.: The Liturgical Press, 1992). The chief source of variation in recent centuries has lain in the pattern of routine omissions or of transpositions in the sequence which is customary for practical purposes in particular places and periods. In some offices, shortened Greek versions have been in common use in village parishes, including during the period of the fieldwork described here, and in these cases the quotations chosen for translation have aimed to take this into account, and to mark it in a note. For consistency of style in the English translations, the style of the Festal Menaion and Lenten Triodion translations, which form the bulk of the material, and annotate Greek usage roughly contemporary with my fieldwork, has been the exemplar. In some particular rites of passage, matching this style has meant going to accessible English translations of Orthodox services in the Russian tradition which have worked from comparison with the Greek texts, but care has been taken to check that the translations correspond to Greek usage in any places where it might differ.
(31) Stewart, Demons and the Devil.
(32) Romans 8 : 19–23.
(33) C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964); Duffy, Stripping of the Altars; Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year, 1400–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).
(34) Loizos and Papataxiarchis (eds.), Contested Identities.
(35) Stathis Gauntlett, ‘Between Orientalism and Occidentalism: The Contribution of Asia Minor Refugees to Greek Popular Song and its Reception’, in Renée Hirschon (ed.), Crossing the Aegean: an Appraisal of the 1923 Compulsory Population Exchange between Greece and Turkey (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2003).
(36) Iossifides, ‘Sisters in Life’ and ‘Earthly Lives’.
(37) Galatians 3 : 28.
(38) The origin of this story is the 10th c. Byzantine chronicler known as Georgius Monachus Continuatus, the bridegroom concerned being Theophilus (Byzantine Emperor AD 829–42). Versions of the story continue to this day to be circulated both by oral transmission and in popular pamphlets published by the Orthodox Church, for Kassiane (or Casia) became a nun and a celebrated hymnodist. I would like to thank Professor Paul Magdalinos for this reference.
(39) Roger Just has shown that the urban population of Greece became the majority for the first time in 1971: Just, A Greek Island Cosmos: Kinship and Community on Meganisi (Oxford: John Curry, 2000).
(40) Just, Greek Island Cosmos; Muriel Dimen and Ernestine Friedl (eds.), ‘Regional Variation in Modern Greece and Cyprus: Toward a Perspective on the Ethnology of Greece’, in Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 268 (1976), pp. 1–465
(41) Juliet du Boulay, ‘Bread and Sheep: A Comparative Study of Sacred Meanings among the Ambeliots and the Sarakatsani’, in Mark Mazower (ed.), Networks of Power in Modern Greece (London: Hurst, 2008), pp. 209–30.
(42) Philip Sherrard, Constantinople: Iconography of a Sacred City (London: Oxford University Press, 1965).
(43) Hirschon, Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe.
(44) Michael Herzfeld, Ours Once More: Folklore, Ideology and the Making of Modern Greece (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982); Michael Llewellyn Smith, Ionian Vision: Greece in Asia Minor 1919–1922 (London: Allen Lane, 1973).
(45) Vera Shevzov, Russian Orthodoxy on the Eve of the Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Even at the end of the Soviet period, atheist propaganda and forced changes in farming towards an industrial and collectivized model had not by the 1990s destroyed habitual practices in Russian villages which were associated with Orthodox and other aspects of their past, though in the absence in country areas of a fully revived Church, these changes had, curiously, reinforced a reconstruction of many practices as agrarian rituals or expressions of local loyalties. See Margaret Paxson, Solovyovo: The Story of Memory in a Russian Village (Washington D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, and Bloomington: Indiana University, 2005).
(46) Duffy, Stripping of the Altars; Hutton, Rise and Fall.
(47) Stewart, Demons and the Devil.
(48) Taft, The Byzantine Rite.
(49) Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French Village, 1294–1324 (London: Scholar Press, 1978).

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