Abstract
This chapter is composed of ethnographic stories that take place in Paleo Faliro, the center of the fieldwork in Athens. After noting the general aspects of daily culture of the Rum Polites, the chapter introduces the concept of cosmopolitan knowledge, an extension of the notion of metropolitan knowledge (Rotenberg, R., The Metropolis and Everyday Life. In G. Gmelch & W. P. Zenner (Eds.), Urban Life: Readings in the Anthropology of the City (pp. 60–81). Waveland Press, 2002), with a nuanced specification: their practice of everyday life (de Certeau, M., The Practice of Everyday Life. University of California Press, 1988) takes as its reference not the present city, but another city of their non-being but yet belonging, one that is far away in space and in time. It is this connection to an Istanbul past that brings the Rum Polites together in Athens, while it delineates them from the Greeks of Greece. By juxtaposing stories, personal narratives, impressions, everyday observations, and narratives, I stress that cultural life is too complex to be taken as a totality, and too variable to be treated as coherent.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
There are two neighborhoods bearing the name of Faliro: Paleo (old) Faliro and Neo (New) Faliro. When no specification is made, the use of Faliro refers to Paleo Faliro.
- 2.
Population increase in Paleo Faliro intensified during the 1951–1961 period, at 71.84% in relation to the previous decade (41.9%), with the rate becoming stable at around 50% until 1981, when it dropped to 15.20%. This jump in the 1950s is to be attributed to internal migration within the city. The percentage is not very high in relation to other neighborhoods that received migration from rural areas, such as Argiroupoli at 846%, A.Dimitrio at 362%, and N.Liosio at 483%, while the Athens average is around 35% for the period between 1951 and 1971 (Kotzamanis 1997).
- 3.
The official website of the municipality of Paleo Faliro, www.palaiofaliro.gr.
- 4.
Baklava is a pastry dessert that is popular in Turkish and Middle Eastern cuisine as well as in Greece, especially after the influx from Asia Minor. Rum Polites prefer to consume baklava from Istanbul, describing the Asia Minor or Greek variants as “less refined” or “too oily and sweet.” For a long time, baklava from renowned Istanbul stores was brought in by the initiative of individuals, until the ongoing popularity of the product led the companies to open branches in Athens, which were franchised and run by Rum Polites as well.
- 5.
Yufka is a very thin pastry used for the making of pies and sweets, which needs to be used when fresh. Although similar kinds of pastry, such as phyllo pastry, are basics in Greek cooking, fresh yufka cannot be obtained in Athens and is flown in by daily morning flights from Istanbul.
- 6.
The Greek name for Istanbul’s Princes islands , a group of islands in the Marmara Sea.
- 7.
Anthropologists have provided much ethnographic evidence indicating the importance of meat consumption in Greek cuisine (see, e.g., Herzfeld 1985; Sutton 2001). Recent work also suggests that attitudes toward food are changing—for example, with the increasing popularity of the idea of healthy Mediterranean cuisine (see Trichopoulou et al. 2003; Yiakoumaki 2006; Kizos et al. 2011).
- 8.
For a brilliant discussion on non-historian historians, see Papailias (2005, 47–53).
- 9.
For dictionaries and other literature on Politika in Greek, see Zachariadis (2014).
- 10.
- 11.
- 12.
See also Cowan for similar “sweet tooth” situations in Northern Greece (1990, 66).
- 13.
Greek Easter bread differs from similar types consumed in other Orthodox countries. The conventional day for eating tsoureki (often decorated with red-dyed eggs that symbolize Jesus Christ’s blood and resurrection) would be on Easter Sunday according to the Christian Orthodox calendar. A similar version is popular and is available for a longer time in Rum Polites patisseries in Athens, famously known as politiko tsoureki , and all year round in many patisseries of Istanbul, where the religious connection has been lost despite the ongoing use of the name (Paskalya çöreği).
- 14.
Some two years after the anecdote took place, a renowned baklava chain from Istanbul opened branches in Athens. It carries kaymak that is flown daily from Istanbul. Some Rum Polites still claim that it just does not taste the same as it does in the City.
- 15.
See forthcoming publications by Renee Hirschon, who is conducting a research project on this very topic in 2017.
- 16.
Maintenance of regional preferences in marriage patterns is also common among Mikrasiates and other populations in Greece (Hirschon 1989, 160).
- 17.
A rather complicated pastry dish traditional to Istanbul cuisine.
- 18.
Phrase in Turkish that is used when it needs to be underlined that a person is not able to appreciate something nice due to ignorance. A near translation would be: How would a donkey understand anything about [the taste of] hoşaf [a sweet fruit juice]?
- 19.
Kourides literally means Kurds. Here it is used as part of a larger discourse against villagers, uneducated or unmannered masses who migrated to Istanbul from rural parts of Turkey, mainly from the Eastern regions where Kurds are omnipresent. The notion of Kurd is adopted here as a negative stereotype of a person who would not have manners because he is a newcomer to the city, thus does not have cosmopolitan knowledge. The waiters they refer to here would not actually be Kurds; the term is stretched to mean villager in a wide sense that would also include Elladites or Athenians.
- 20.
Taking off one’s shoes at the doorstep can be a form of politeness but is also a matter of informality (one would not take off one’s shoes when invited to a formal dinner party and wear borrowed slippers under a nice dress or suit) and of comfort (one might take off one’s shoes at one’s own or a close relative’s house for convenience), yet it is not necessary unless the host lays much importance on this custom. Later, when I visited this informant’s house, I did not forget to take off my own shoes, on which he commented, “This is an Ottoman house, as you know” (Burası Osmanlı evi biliyorsun), invoking a self-stereotype about his behavior, which he also accepted to have rather conservative connotations. Ironically, in Istanbul today, leaving one’s shoes outside the entrance door of a house (as in a mosque) might also be interpreted as a kind of conservatism that is associated with a Muslim or rural household.
Bibliography
Alevropoulos, F. (1982). Nora. Athens.
Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Aslan, S. (2007). ‘Citizen, Speak Turkish!’: A Nation in the Making. Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, 13(2), 245–272.
Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Çağaptay, S. (2006). Islam, Secularism and Nationalism in Modern Turkey: Who Is a Turk? London: Routledge.
Chalkousi, X. (2002). Mirodies kai yevseis tis Polis … kai stin korfi kanela. Athens: Tsoukatou.
Cowan, J. K. (1990). Dance and the Body Politic in Northern Greece. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
De Certeau, M. (1988). The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Goonewardena, K. (2005). The Urban Sensorium: Space, Ideology and the Aestheticization of Politics. Antipode, 37(1), 46–71.
Herzfeld, M. (1985). The Poetics of Manhood: Contest and Identity in a Cretan Mountain Village. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Herzfeld, M. (1991). A Place in History: Social and Monumental Time in a Cretan Town. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Hirschon, R. (1989). Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe: The Social Life of Asia Minor Refugees in Piraeus. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Kizos, T., et al. (2011). Survival Strategies of Farm Households and Multifunctional Farms in Greece. The Geographical Journal, 177(4), 335–346. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4959.2011.00403.x.
Kotzamanis, V. (1997). Athènes, 1848–1995. Revue de Recherches Sociales, 92–93, 3–30.
Lefebvre, H. (2003). The Urban Revolution. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Orum, A. M., & Chen, X. (2003). The World of Cities: Places in Comparative and Historical Perspective. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers.
Papailias, P. (2005). Genres of Recollection: Archival Poetics and Modern Greece. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Rotenberg, R. (1992). Time and Order in Metropolitan Vienna: A Seizure of Schedules. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Rotenberg, R. (2002). The Metropolis and Everyday Life. In G. Gmelch & W. P. Zenner (Eds.), Urban Life: Readings in the Anthropology of the City (pp. 60–81). Chicago: Waveland Press.
Sutton, D. E. (2001). Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and Memory. Oxford: Berg.
Trichopoulou, A., Costacou, T., Bamia, C., & Trichopoulos, D. (2003). Adherence to a Mediterranean Diet and Survival in a Greek Population. New England Journal of Medicine, 348(26), 2599–2608.
Vaios, C. (1998). Anthologia Konstantinoupoliton poiiton tou eikostou aiona. Athens: Tsokatou.
Vaios, C. (2000). H Konstantinoupoli diigetai… (Anthologia tou eikostou aiona). Athens: Tsoukatou.
Yiakoumaki, V. (2006). Local, Ethnic, and Rural Food: On the Emergence of Cultural Diversity and Its Integration in the European Union. Journal of Modern Greek Studies, 24(2), 415–445. https://doi.org/10.1353/mgs.2006.0030.
Zachariadis, N. (2014). Lexiko tou Konstantinupolitikou Idiomatos. Athens: Gavrilidis.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Örs, İ.R. (2018). Cosmopolitan Knowledge: Impressions from Everyday Life in Athens. In: Diaspora of the City. Palgrave Studies in Urban Anthropology. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55486-4_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55486-4_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-55485-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-55486-4
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)