“I fell in love with the layers and textures and life of the city.” A modern philhellene: Interview with Amy Muse

Strolling through Athens’ old streets, you feel you’re stepping into the past. “Walking with the Philhellenes” makes you feel history even more. This new outdoor exhibit honors philhellenes, as the name was first used, for foreigners who admired or loved Greece, or Hellas, enough to help the country in its 1821 war of independence from centuries of Ottoman rule. The heroism of the Greeks (Hellenes) inspired poets, writers and artists like Goethe, Shelley, Byron, Pushkin, Chateaubriand and Delacroix. In many parts of Europe and the U.S., philhellenic committees gave moral and financial support, holding fundraisers and distributing relief supplies, while some philhellenes even volunteered to fight.

So here in the Plaka, where Shelley Street turns into Vyronas (Byron) Street at the Lysicrates Monument, we’re gazing up at two of the 62 new smart signs around the city, these two commemorating poets Percy Shelley and Lord Byron.  The signs, created by a team of historians, architects and journalists, have QR codes so you can read up more on their stories.

You really have to be looking for these particular signs to see them.  Notice how they blend into the front of the tourist souvenir shop!

The name of the noisy traffic-filled street that goes from Syntagma Sq. out to Amalias Avenue has the name of “Filellinon” Street, (of the Philhellenes).

What about modern day lovers of Hellas? Meet Amy Muse, professor of English at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul Minnesota, who visits Greece whenever she gets a chance. Happily for her, this chance comes every other January when she leads a group of students on a travel and study term abroad in Athens.

I met Amy last month for a glass of wine and some mezes at the cozy Salute Bistro in Koukaki, the pleasant slightly funky neighborhood that mixes decaying neoclassical buildings with cement apartment structures of the 80’s, along with small bars, ouzeries and restaurants, all in the shadow of the Acropolis.

It was a fairly warm night, though the temperature was about to plunge and Athens was in for a rare major snowstorm.  Here are some in the group a few days later, wondering why Minnesota weather was following them…

I asked Amy some questions about the term abroad, her connection with Greece and about travel and transformation.

*Can you tell me about the Study Abroad program, when you began it and what are some memorable January terms in Athens for you?  Do you feel that you transmit your love for Athens/Greece to your students?

We’ve been doing this January study abroad since 2004, except for last year because of the pandemic.  This year it was really touch and go, even up to the check-in at the airport whether all 26 of the participants (and us) would test negative and fortunately it happened, so here we are.

Students are always moved by the warmth and generosity of Greek people. That’s what sticks with them, even more than [generally] springy weather and fabulous food and layers of history, and makes Greece mean much more to them than a beautiful holiday destination. The courses are always designed to help them get closer than a tourist generally would; the organization I’ve been working with for nearly twenty years, the Athens Centre, is wonderful at pulling students into daily life in Athens by taking them to the central market, helping them learn to see the street art, and engaging them in conversation. If I transmit my love for Athens and Greece to them, I think it’s more through observing my friendships and my pleasure at just being there than anything I formally say in class.  

*Getting out of the classroom and into the country you’re studying is of course the best way to learn and appreciate the culture. Are the participating students mostly English and classics majors?

Actually they’re from all disciplines, science, math, history, business etc.  They’re fulfilling a humanities credit. The only thing really uniting them all is their interest in Greece.

When I started the program in 2004, my emphasis was on Lord Byron — I’d recently read the book In Byron’s Shadow—  and other travelers perhaps influenced by him who romanticized Greece like Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller.

Over the years we’ve had different emphases and the last few years it’s been theater, my background and sports, the specialty of my colleague Liz. [Liz Wilkinson later also joined us.] This year’s theme is Performance:  Theater, Sport, Self and Society in Greece.  One of the end of term writings we have is a sports project, based on “Pindaric odes,” where the students in small groups write three part odes to famous athletes in the style of 5th century Greek lyric poet Pindar.

Besides Sounion, we visited other important sites, like the Temple of Aphaia in Aegina and the ancient theater of Epidavros.

Unfortunately the weather didn’t let us get to Delphi, but we did some offbeat things here in Athens.  We went to the “Topos Allou” theater (“the place elsewhere”) where we had a mask making workshop and the students made masks of their faces and put them on others. It was fun to watch them embrace the mask-making; the first masks were a little tentative and plain, but then one after another started experimenting, adding expressive eyebrows or cat whiskers. Their aesthetic was more The Lion King than ancient Greek drama but gave them a good sense of the power of masks onstage.

*I’d like to find out a little more but first let’s go back a bit.  What was your initial connection with Greece and how did you become a “philhellene?”

It was love at first sight. I first came to Greece in the year 2000 on a 10-day tour with my father.  We didn’t see Athens right away, we immediately got a boat to the island of Poros, then explored some of the Peloponnese. It was only the last few days of the tour that we were in Athens and I was awed.  I fell in love with the layers and textures and life of the city—the friction of it. Like so many, I was charmed by the bougainvillea spilling over balconies and the visual stimulation of layers of time and architectural style, ancient and Byzantine and neoclassical and graffiti-covered concrete. But most of all I just like the way I feel in Greece—and  I vowed to come back, which I did the next year, three times! The third time I stayed most of the summer and studied Greek at the Athens Centre; mostly I spent the summer walking the streets of Athens, exploring neighborhoods, but I also took a road trip to Kalambaka to see Meteora, navigating mountain roads by myself, proud of being able to use my newly-learned Greek to get a hotel room and translate taverna menus.

It might sound cliché, but here I felt so much more alive than I did in Minnesota, I feel that I was awakened and for me, such an introvert that I am, I loved talking and meeting people. As Lawrence Durrell wrote, “Other countries may offer you discoveries in manners or lore or landscape; Greece offers you something harder—the discovery of yourself.” Back in Minnesota, I started planning for how I could spend study time here.  And in 2010, I came here in Athens for one semester on a Fulbright.

*Tell me about your Fulbright. What did you work on in your research and writing?  

I was researching depictions and commemorations of the 1821 Greek War of Independence in theatre and tourist attractions, arguing that they were designed to give spectators the sensation of freedom. Some of my research was based in the Gennadius library in Athens, but traveling around and researching the tourist attractions was especially fascinating and fun: I visited Bouboulina’s house on Spetses, attended a March 25 panegyri  (festival) in Missolonghi, and went to Ioannina to visit all the Ali Pasha sites. [Note: Ali Pasha was a “colorful” despot who ruled Ioannina and the area around western Greece in the years before the war for independence]

Apparently Ali Pasha really caught the imagination of playwrights in the 1820’s.  I was amazed to find that they staged a number of plays on him.  I wrote up my research about the London plays in an article on Ali Pasha and the theatre.

In Ioannina I was directed to the Zalongo Monument, which I’d never heard of. It was such a surprise and delight and the highlight of my Fulbright project findings. 

[Note: The 13 meter (42 feet) Zalongo monument of cement and limestone by sculptor George Zogonopoulos, commemorates the “Dance of Zalongo,” which refers to the mass suicide of women and children in 1803 on Mt. Zalongo in western Greece, as they preferred death rather than submit to the Ottoman troops that were chasing them.

In her fascinating essay, “Encountering a Divine Dance of Solidarity at the Zalongo Monument,” Amy notes that when the revolution got underway, the dance caught the imagination of philhellenes in western Europe — with the idea of it being a “sacred suicide.”

The dance has a highly mythologized place in the history of the War for independence, writes Amy in the essay, in that it’s a story that was passed down through oral folk legends and certainly still remains in the Greek collective cultural imagination. To give an example, during the economic crisis when the Greeks were given a referendum in 2015 about accepting the EU memorandum, a woman who voted “ohi” (no) is quoted as saying “It might be political suicide but I finally feel free. I feel like a dancer of Zalongo.”]

*Your specialized field is drama and 19^th century Romantic literature. So it was natural that you were “introduced” to Lord Byron.  How did your reading of “In Byron’s Shadow” affect your interest and love for Greece? Historically too.  

In graduate school I specialized in drama and Romantic literature, although I was much more a fan of Keats and Coleridge than of Byron. It was falling in love with Greece that led me to read Byron more intently, and In Byron’s Shadow had an enormous influence on my philhellenic research and the development of my first study abroad course, which I called, in tribute, In Byron’s Shadow: Romanticizing and Realizing Greece. That book is a stupendous work of scholarship and a great read; and its author, David Roessel, happens to be a very kind and gracious person as well.  

*Speaking of modern philhellenes, how did you meet writer Christopher Bakken?  And then he told you about the writing program on Thasos that you joined?  

I returned from the [2010] semester in Greece wanting, naturally, to go back as soon as possible, and sought out books that captured the essence of the country. I read Bakken’s Honey Olives Octopus very soon after it was published in 2013 – it was a perfect travelogue of eating around Greece — I loved it, interviewed him for my blog.  Re: the blog, I had started it as a way to help me stay connected to the feeling of being in Greece.  I’ve since neglected it. The reason? Well, always lack of time, but most of all a feeling that I couldn’t add anything new about Greece.

Your blog inspired me to start my own! Bakken’s book on traveling, eating and writing, sounds pretty ideal. So you could add him to your writers who romanticized Greece. 

Definitely. And then he told me about his program Writing Workshops in Greece. (This summer they’ll be on Crete!) It was an extraordinary workshop: very well organized, the perfect mix of instruction and feedback and stretches of writing time with excellent food and conversation and dancing. I found it inspiring and productive. Thasos is like a little paradise and we were in a tiny village with plenty of time to swim in the crystalline sea.

Sounds like the sea would have been a big distraction for me!  Did you get writing done?

It was actually very productive! That’s where I drafted my essay on the Zalongo monument. 

*What are some of your favorite Greek authors?  How have they influenced your writing/your view of Greece etc. 

Here’s where my embarrassment kicks in. I actually know very few modern Greek writers; of course I’ve read some Seferis and Cavafy and Kazantzakis (need to read much more of all three!) but my knowledge is very basic. I liked Amanda Michalopoulou’s I’d Like and God’s Wife and Ioanna Karystiani’s Swell is in the stack next to my bed, but my views of Greece and desire to know it more intimately have primarily been shaped by philhellenic writers, from Henry Miller and Philip Sherrard to A. E. Stallings and Natalie Bakopoulos and Christopher Bakken. All of them share my always-slightly-outside perspective and the longing to get closer. 

*Interesting, I think even if you’ve lived here for years like me, that always-slightly-outside perspective is there and  you still long to get closer! Even if you become familiar with the culture, I still feel that the language is a constant struggle.. Well, let’s go back to your January study abroad. In your blog interview, Bakken warns against the stereotyping you get by being a ‘tourist.’ He says that “when I lead students abroad I always ask them to consider the difference between the tourist and the traveler, which ultimately comes down to a desire for transformation.”  Would you say that you try to achieve the same with your term-abroad students? 

Christopher Bakken, like most of the philhellenic writers I admire today, is one who romanticizes Greece but doesn’t overromanticize.

*About overromanticizing, Henry Miller has been criticized for being over-the-top naïve and overromantic about Greece, but he in fact experienced a spiritual and moral renewal and was absolutely transformed by the country.

He certainly was and that makes him a true traveler in that sense.  To go back to Bakken, he and other modern writers I think are able to see the complicated realities in Greece, and they love it because of that: they love its aliveness. His distinction between the tourist and traveler—the desire for transformation—is very much what I hope my study abroad students will experience. That would be the ideal for their learning. One way I try to stir up that desire is by having them read a chapter of Alain de Botton’s The Art of Travel where he discusses the phenomenon of finding something abroad that feels much more like the real me (the person I want to be) than I can find at home, which creates a sense of longing for the travel to transform us. I ask them to identify what those things have been for them in Greece; they range from the wonderfully mundane (e.g., the beautiful placemats at all the cafes) to the substantive (the generosity of Greek people). 

************************

This generosity and need for personal relationships struck one of the January group participants, Emily, in a profound way, as she described in her synthesis essay “Greek Cats, the Exotic, and the Human-ness of Everyday Life.” She writes about the group’s visit to the Central Market and realizes how important it is to establish a buyer seller connection, with the customer trusting that the food will be of good quality and the seller trusting that the customer will come back every week. So, as she expresses it, “You want to buy your oranges from Dimitris because they’re always incredibly juicy and he has a daughter on the way, you want to buy your pistachios from Arianna because her pistachio butter is heavenly on Elena’s bread and she’s always interested in how your schoolwork is going.”  

And her title?  The cats that you see everywhere is how she got into the theme, noting how well cared for they are wherever you go, thanks to personal generosity.

Thanks Amy, I  wish you a good spring semester, and a speedy return to Hellas!   Next visit we can walk among the philhellenes of old...

If you like what you read, hit the like button and subscribe. Please share with your friends and I’d love to hear your comments below.

There’s no need to log in to leave a comment. Just give an email address and your name.

Get new blogs delivered directly to your inbox! It costs nothing to subscribe. Olivesandislands does not share email information.

Sherri Moshman Paganos is a writer and former educator, inspired by her life in Athens, where she and her husband are happily retired and enjoying their travels in Greece and abroad. You can check out her writing — fiction, non-fiction, poetry and articles here.