Dreaming and Historical Consciousness in Island Greece 9780226425382

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Dreaming and Historical Consciousness in Island Greece

Dreaming and Historical Consciousness in Island Greece With a New Preface

Charles Stewart

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2017 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2017 Printed in the United States of America 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-13: 978-0-226-42524-5 (paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-42538-2 (e-book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226425382.001.0001 This book was originally published by the Department of the Classics, Harvard University, in the series Cultural Politics, Socioaesthetics, Beginnings. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Stewart, Charles, 1956– author. Title: Dreaming and historical consciousness in island Greece / Charles Stewart. Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2017. | “This book was originally published by the Department of the Classics, Harvard University, in the series Cultural Politics, Socioaesthetics, Beginnings” | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016025378 | ISBN 9780226425245 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226425382 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Greece—History—Philosophy. | Historiography—Greece—History. | Dreams—Greece—History. | Islands—Greece—History. | Consciousness. Classification: LCC DF755.S74 2017 | DDC 949.5/85—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/201625378 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Deena and Adam

Contents Preface to the Paperback Edition

ix

List of Figures

xiii

Transliteration

xv

Preface

xvii

1

Historical Consciousness and the Ethnography of History

1

2

Dreaming and Temporality in Greece

23

3

Dreaming of Buried Icons in the Kingdom of Greece

37

4

An Epidemic of Dreaming

67

5

A Cosmology of Discovery

109

6

The Fortunes and Misfortunes of Emery

131

7

Dreaming Life, Living the Dream

143

8

Buried Objects: Dreaming, Excavating, and Imagining the Past

169

9

Affective History

189

10 Conclusion: Agency and Imagination in Historical Change

207

Appendix: Sample Dream Texts

219

References

227

Index

247 vii

Preface to the Paperback Edition

T

here can be no doubting that history and anthropology are closely related subjects. Both seek to understand the world from the viewpoint of people, whether separated from us by time or space. Complementarities between the two disciplines have been encapsulated in well-known formulations: historians study history going forward while anthropologists approach it from the present and go backward; historians study the conscious and anthropologists the unconscious dimensions of social life; or, historians start from event and go to structure, whereas anthropologists proceed from structure to event. Dreaming and Historical Consciousness in Island Greece exposes another point of separation between history and anthropology, one that has not yet assumed proverbial form. It goes like this: Historians produce histories according to Western standards of evidence and rational argumentation while ethnographers study any given community’s production of histories.1 In between these approaches the important matter of truth lies unsettled. Villagers in the mountains of Naxos accept, on the basis of dream visions, that Egyptian Christians came to their area in late antiquity. As an ethnographer I could see that local society has taken its historical scenarios seriously, and some villagers even claim to have been eyewitnesses at miraculous events such as the sudden gushing forth of a spring (holy water) on a dry mountainside in 1930. This book attempts to understand the poetics, the cosmology, the politics, and other social practices that make such accounts of the past credible for a community. It could be said that whereas historians subscribe to a correspondence theory of truth in which assertions must correspond to verifiable evidence, ethnographers work with a coherence theory that observes how propositions about the past mesh with local expectations and come to be accepted. 1

Anthropologists may also write histories according to the same protocols as historians. The formulation here applies more to ethnographers pursuing, as I do in this book, an anthropology of history that concentrates on a community’s procedures for knowing the past. ix

Dreaming and Historical Consciousness in Island Greece

Reviewing this book, one historian2 objected that I was recommending histories produced by dreaming over the accounts of professional historians. The mountain district of Kóronos on Naxos and academic history are certainly two very different communities with divergent ways of knowing the past. The researcher—whether historian or anthropologist—must decide which epistemology will guide their study and what their attitude will be toward other epistemologies. For some, this might be a point where history and anthropology must necessarily part ways. In contrast to rigorously researched histories, indigenous histories may be viewed as marginal curiosities, if not as substandard and false. I think, however, that the friction here indicates an area of creative interchange between anthropologists and historians that has not yet been fully realized. One might approach local sensibilities about the past as ontological—as grounded in a different reality—and consider how they might inspire new ways of thinking about our own relationships to the past. One may dive into other epistemologies of the past and attempt to retrieve local histories in a manner consistent with indigenous precepts and practices, perhaps representing them in novel forms. Or, to consider just one more option, one may view other histories within a postcolonial framework and consider the circumstances of their subordination and the possibility of reasserting them. Histories can expand into myths and myths may contract into histories; truth can become fiction, and vice versa. Historians who have written about topics such as witchcraft or anti- Semitism have dealt with dubious propositions that have been taken as truths with profound consequences. In Dreaming and Historical Consciousness I move from establishing how and why the people of Kóronos considered the Egyptians as actual forbears, through the Greek state’s rejection of the villagers’ Christian historicity, to an examination of how the community activated the Egyptians again and again as elements of a myth-dream. In so doing, I bring an anthropological idea of historicity (as a social relationship to the past) into dialogue with the historians’ sense of historicity as accepted factuality. These matters are not all in the past, and probably never will be. When I completed this book the Kóronos myth-dream was still smoldering. The large pilgrimage church prophesied in the 1830s was inaugurated in 2010. Built with donations totaling over 3 million euros, the interior still requires considerable work, and, despite the fact that Greece is mired in a deep financial crisis, an2 Peter Thonemann, “Teeth and Hair,” review of D. Harris-McCoy, Artemidorus’ Oneirocritica and C. Stewart, Dreaming and Historical Consciousness in Island Greece, Times Literary Supplement, 8 March 2013, 3–4.

x

Preface to the Paperback Edition

nual donations averaging 50,000 euros have continued to pour in. Pilgrims make many of these contributions during the annual saint’s day when they flock to the site where the bones of the Egyptians and their wonder-working icons were dug out of the ground, ritually reactivating historical consciousness in the process. The current economic crisis has plunged a large portion of the Greek population into a precariousness similar to that felt by the people of Kóronos during their two major economic catastrophes. In Kóronos, these crises provoked temporal excursions, often in dreams, where people communed with the Virgin Mary and figures from the past in order to find bearings in the present. While the current Greek financial crisis has not apparently led to any epidemics of dreaming, it has sparked an intensification of temporal thought. Researchers such as Daniel Knight3 have found that crisis has activated historical consciousness just as it did on Naxos. In flights of emotional thought amounting to a collective nightmare, austerity-imposed hunger has driven Greek citizens to contemplate the famine endured under the Nazis during the 1940s. Helplessness in the face of European Union demands makes people feel as if the period of Ottoman domination, which finished over a century ago, has returned. The analysis of this interrelationship between crisis, temporality, and historical consciousness is one of this book’s main contributions, and this nexus continues to be explored in studies of other crises in Greece and elsewhere.4

3

Daniel Knight, History, Time, and Economic Crisis in Central Greece (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 4 Daniel Knight and Charles Stewart, eds., “Ethnographies of Austerity: Temporality, Crisis, and Affect in Southern Europe,” special issue, History and Anthropology 27, no. 1 (2016). xi

list of Figures Photographs are by Charles Stewart unless otherwise noted. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

Anarchist graffito Kóronos Naxos Church at Argokoíli Argokoíli icon First page of Evdokía’s dream notebook Marina Drawing of 17 July 1930 Drawing of 19 July 1930 Kóronos bible Drawing of 20 July 1930 Drawing of 30 July 1930 Drawing of 23 July 1930 Drawing of 28 August 1930 Drawing of 6 September 1930 and comparable embroidery St. Phanoúrios and Argokoíli Kóronos communal district Staging point for the aerial transport network Transport of emery Emery miners Aerial transport in operation Drawing of 11 September 1930 Ladder of Divine Ascent Icon of St. Anne, the Panagía, and Christ Destruction of cells Ceremony for laying the foundation stone Church at Argokíli, 2005 Wall painting, “Saint Gavriíl Rescues the Holy Icon from the Sea”

26 32 34 55 65 77 81 90 92 93 95 96 97 98 103 109 116 131 134 136 137 151 152 153 161 164 167 172 xiii xi

29. 30. 31. 32.

xiv

Church of the Panagía Kerá Markos Kapíris, ca. 1910 Koúros statue in situ at Mélanes Article from To Víma, “ ‘Ghost’ Guards the . . . Treasure”

175 181 193 205

transliteration Αα

a

Νν

n

Ββ

v

Ξξ

x

Γγ

g

Οο

o

Δδ

d

Ππ

p

Εε

e

Ρρ

r

Ζζ

z

Σσ

s

Ηη

i

Ττ

t

Θθ

th

Υυ

y

Ιι

i

Φφ

ph

Κκ

k

Χχ

kh

Λλ

l

Ψψ

ps

Μμ

m

Ωω

o

αυ, ευ = af, ef (before unvoiced consonants), av, ev (before voiced phonemes) μπ = b (initial) ντ = d (initial) Pronunciation according to general English-language phonology will yield a reasonable version of Greek. The main exception is oi (οι), pronounced [i] as in “machine.” Argokoíli, for example, is pronounced “Argokíli,” oi oneirevámenoi as “i oneirevámeni.” I use the stress accent on polysyllabic transliterated words and names with the exception of some familiar personal names if this corresponds with standard pronunciation (e.g., Maria, not María; Marina, not Marína). xv xiii

Preface

O

n the last day of summer in 1823, a hardscrabble New York farmer named Joseph Smith experienced a sequence of dreams and visions in which an angel cloaked in white appeared at the foot of his bed. In Smith’s words, “He called me by name, and said unto me . . . that his name was Moroni; that God had a work for me to do. . . . He said that there was a book deposited, written upon gold plates, giving an account of the former inhabitants of this continent, and the source from whence they sprang.” This angel showed him a vision of the place where these plates lay, and the next day Smith went and found them buried on a mountainside, inside a box. With the help of special lenses (“seer stones”), Smith translated the text, which was written in an Egyptian language in a variety of Near Eastern scripts. Upon completion of the translation, the angel Moroni reclaimed the plates. In a reverse alchemy, valuable gold was transmuted into a religious text; material wealth converted into spiritual values. For millions of Mormons today, the Book of Mormon is both holy scripture and a history of the peopling of the New World. Not long after Joseph Smith launched the Mormon church, poor farmers in the mountains of Naxos, an island in the Greek Cyclades, began to have dreams and visions in which the Panagía (Virgin Mary) urged them to dig up an icon depicting her. After five years of repeatedly dreaming and digging, the villagers did unearth several icons in 1836, and this discovery inaugurated a pilgrimage that continues to this day. In contrast to Joseph Smith, who began with six followers and established a new church independent of the Presbyterianism of his parents or the Methodism that had previously attracted him, the villagers on Naxos succeeded only in founding a new cult of the Panagía within Greek Orthodoxy. One might suppose that news of Joseph Smith’s discoveries reached Naxos and sparked events there, but the people of Naxos were drawing on independent local traditions. At most, the practices of dreaming for buried objects in upstate New York and island Greece may have arisen from a common European xv xvii

Dreaming and Historical Consciousness in Island Greece

tradition stretching back through Paracelsus and alchemy to ancient magic and hermeticism (Quinn 1987). The story of Joseph Smith’s discovery of the Book of Mormon introduces several key themes of this book: dreaming of buried objects; digging as a religious practice; the establishment of sacred texts and charismatic religious movements through dreaming; prophecies; the tension between believers and skeptics; and the struggle to authenticate dreams and archaeological discoveries. Most suggestive for this study, the Mormon case reveals how dreams produce histories. Joseph Smith processed the sedimented past of his local area through dreams of topographic features and holy figures calling for the excavation of artifacts. Smith and his followers contemplated an American landscape filled with burial mounds and other remains of the Native Americans. The Book of Mormon, itself originally buried in this landscape, told the story of how migrants from the time of the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem (600 BCE) and even earlier sailed to America and populated the continent. In digging up the gold plates Smith reconfigured the underlying history of this landscape and the social relationship to it. Now Mormons could view this land as already having been inhabited by migrants from the Old World, followers of the Old Testament and of Christ like themselves. The buried plates simultaneously furnished them with a history, evidence of spiritual autochthony in America, and a mission—in short, a past, a present, and a future. The dreams on Naxos, remarkably enough, also involved Egyptians. These dreams announced that the bearers of the buried icons were early Christians from Egypt who had settled on Naxos to escape persecution. Whereas Mormon history was delivered all at once in the Book of Mormon, on Naxos the history of the Egyptians developed bit by bit over the following century in the face of surrounding skepticism and on the basis of continuing dreams. By late 1930 so many dreams of the saints had been recorded in notebooks that people contemplated the compilation of one large tome, a new holy book. These preliminary examples expose a deeper relationship between dreaming and history than has generally been noticed and studied. The historical consciousness of my title is not limited to what people have already learned about the past; it includes the dynamic articulation and reception of previously unknown pasts envisioned in dreams. In line with the growing interdisciplinary interest in the ways people all over the world perceive the past and produce “histories,” I examine here how dreams engage the past of the landscape and of the society, how they yield novel stories about this past, and how we might xvi xviii

Preface

understand this capacity of dreams to produce histories. I address these topics through a case study focusing on the “myth-dream” that has been developing over the past 180 years in Kóronos, a village that has been preoccupied with receiving saintly prophecies in dreams and fulfilling these prophecies in waking life. This is both a history of dreams and a study of dreaming as the involuntary, nonconscious underside of historical consciousness.

• I began research on Greek dreams while a fellow at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina. The Center’s director, the classical historian W. Robert Connor, encouraged my interest in Greece over the longue durée, and I drew lasting inspiration from the other fellows, in particular David Armitage, Paul Berliner, Constantin Fasolt, Susan Guettel Cole, Donald Lopez, Paul Strohm, and Chris Waters. This book approached its final form when I presented the various chapters as the Evans-Pritchard Lectures at All Souls College, Oxford, in 2010. The faithful audience inspired me to extend my thinking, and for this I would like especially to acknowledge Marcus Banks, Louise Braddock, Angelos Chaniotis, David Gellner, Lucia Nixon, Lola Martinez, Robert Parker, and Rosalind Thomas. I also presented sections of this book in Athens, as Venizelos Chair at DEREE—The American College of Greece, where I exchanged ideas with my long-lost fellow students Katerina Thomas and Haris Vlavianos, among many others. In writing this book I have incurred many more debts than the above, and I thank the following: Patricia Barbeito, Vangelis Calotychos, Jane Cowan, Patricia Gilson, Janet Hart, Laurie Hart, Michael Herzfeld, Martin Holbraad, Kostis Kalantzis, Sophia Karavias, Mark Mazower, Sarah Morris, Galina OustinovaStjepanovic, John Papadopoulos, Penelope Papailias, Stratis Psaltou, Jenny Roussou, David Sutton, Karen van Dyck, and Eleana Yalouri. Without Tatiana Halidou’s palaeographic assistance I would not have passed the endurance test of reading Marina Mandilará’s dream notebooks (ca. 1,000 pp.), written in the early 1930s and badly faded by time (see Chapter Four and the appendix). Deena Newman shaped this book profoundly by sharing her many interesting insights into the imagination, unconscious mental processing, and the spectrum of states of consciousness. As a scholar at the Getty Research Institute I profited greatly from discussions with Ian Balfour, Robin Cormack, Whitney Davis, Yannis Hamilakis, Ken Lapatin, Claire Lyons, James Porter, and Susan Siegfried. I am xvii xix

Dreaming and Historical Consciousness in Island Greece

deeply grateful to the British Academy for a Senior Research Fellowship that enabled me to write the major part of this study. Yannis Hamilakis, Laurie Hart, and David Sutton read the full manuscript of this book and provided invaluable comments. To the people of Kóronos, who offered me hospitality and shared their stories with me, I say “Hyper-thanks!” (ypér evkharistó). Long conversations with my “psychoanalyst,” the septuagenarian Dímos, kept me balanced during fieldwork. Markos Kapíris, the homonymous descendant of the man whose dream notebooks are studied in Chapter Eight, got in touch with me via e-mail after finding an unpublished paper of mine on the web. He took me to meet his relatives and provided me with pictures and further materials relating to his great-uncle. Manólis Sérgis, Sérgis and and the the late late Nikos Kephalliniádis kept me in touch with the growing body of scholarship on Naxos. Manólis Manolás and his wife, Genovépha, introduced me to the village and spent countless hours discussing Kóronos with me. They first alerted me to the existence of personal dream notebooks. My debt to them is enormous. Without the support of Iánnis Khouzoúris, this study would not have developed as it has. He provided me with important historical documents, and he was himself a huge archive of information. He features as one of the major figures in the latest episode of the Kóronos myth-dream studied in Chapter Seven. Marina’s daughter Flora Kondopoúlou made Marina’s dream notebooks available for me to study. At one point, after hours of discussion, when she asked me if I thought the dream notebooks were important (as documents to preserve, as texts for people to know about), we both pretty much burst into tears. So much anxiety, hope, and faith, filtered through the imagination of a fourteen-year-old girl and left moldering in a storage room for over sixty years and now the object of interest for a foreign academic and who knows what audience—in a moment of silent intersubjectivity, we wondered what we stood on the brink of. Finally, this book has required my own absorption in states of quasi-reverie that I like to think of as creative scholarly thought. My partner, Deena, and my son, Adam, watched me carefully and did not hesitate to reintroduce the reality principle when necessary, usually with the right amount of irony. This is their book.

xviii xx

Chapter One historical Consciousness and the ethnography of history

T

he term “historical consciousness” opens fascinating vistas even when its precise meaning remains vague. In common usage it refers to the historical information that people know, the narratives of the past that they maintain in consciousness. Such stories can come from professional historiography or from communal traditions, personal memory, or imaginative speculation (taken seriously). These diverse sources can make historical consciousness an arena of contest in which rigorously documented histories joust against cherished opinions sometimes labeled “memory” or “collective memory”—names suggesting that they may lie outside the franchise of “history” (Seixas 2004: 10). Historical consciousness can also refer to a set of general assumptions about the temporal relationship of events, a sensibility about how the past and time in general are organized. For example, current happenings may be seen as outcomes of prior events and present events as belonging to the past as time flows on. This is the logic of historicism, the paradigm governing academic historiography and widely shared as a form of common sense in Western societies. Historical consciousness is often conflated with this perspective, according to which the past is over and done with but recoverable as an object of research. Historical consciousness, in this usage, refers to a general opinion about the linear relationship holding between the past, the present, and the future. Consistent with Enlightenment ideas of causation and progress, professional historiography works according to a linear historical consciousness—a chronological view. The adage “Time is nature’s way of making sure that everything does not happen at once” generalizes a historical perspective that could be phrased: “Chronology is the historian’s way of making sure that everything does not happen at once.” 1

Historical Consciousness and the Ethnography of History

I proceed here on the assumption that the historical consciousness examined above is a culturally specific Western development that arose during a particular period in a certain area of the world. This historical consciousness could be considered one of the signature concepts of Western modernity: it seeks to understand and relativize the past rather than obey it (Gadamer 1979: 110). Yet linearity must be one of Western history’s “least intuitive devices” (Clifford 1997: 338). People the world over, including many living in the West, might find more resonance in Kierkegaard’s “Why bother to remember a past that cannot be made into a present?”(quoted in Chakrabarty 1998: 24). Modern Western historical consciousness arose as a novelty, circumscribed in its sphere of influence, but is now globally dispersed to the point of naturalization, as the adage about “time” shows. In this book, I take a step back and use “historical consciousness” to refer to whatever basic assumptions a society makes about the shape of time and the relationship of events in the past, present, and future. The particular form of historical consciousness in a given society is an open question, requiring empirical, ethnographic investigation. World societies before the sixteenth century entertained various ideas about temporality, seeing it perhaps as a circle or a spiral or, as in the case of the Maya, an alternation between linearity and cyclicity (Farriss 1987: 568). During the Middle Ages, under the influence of Christianity, even Western historical consciousness was rooted in notions of eventual redemptive return to a paradisal beginning (Eliade 1971: 130) or hierarchical stasis (Fasolt 2004: 224). In contrast to the code of dates that structures Western history by linking events in series, Lévi-Strauss (1966: 263) identified a principle of timelessness by which small-scale, non-Western societies (my sanitization of his expression “the savage mind”) “grasp the world as both a synchronic and a diachronic totality” by means of “analogical thought.” The past, in these cases, may be activated in the present by means of affective images and symbols. Affective resonance rather than chronology holds various events together. Whereas archives and chronologies objectivize and fix the past, in these cases the feeling tone of the past, its mythic power, may be mobilized and reexperienced in the present. An example would be the Western Apache practice of describing landscape features in the course of everyday conversations as a way of evoking stories of the ancestors— histories—that impart moral direction and wisdom. A good narrator can cause listeners to see the past from the ancestors’ perspective and “perhaps hear [the] ancestors speaking. [A person] could reknow the wisdom of the ancestors” (Basso 1988: 110). 2

The Ethnography of History

The Ethnography of History This examination of a 180-year-old tradition of dreaming in the mountains of eastern Naxos takes on the task of investigating the historical consciousness of a particular community. On Naxos, dreaming has been a salient mode of producing historical narratives, thus affecting the field of historical consciousness in the simple sense of known stories about the past. Dreaming violates the historicist separation of past and present and offers temporal simultaneity or multitemporality. This raises the question, which will be considered below from various angles, of how such dreamt histories sat next to alternative histories produced according to other paradigms of investigation. The opportunity presented by the Naxos dreams has enabled me to develop an anthropology of history1 that asks what a society assumes the past to be (in relation to the present or the future) and investigates when, how, and why people produce stories about this past. What, in other words, is their idea of what we would call “history,” and what modes do they resort to in learning about and representing the past? I use “history” throughout in the sense of a category of knowledge production about the past and/or a specific example of this category such as a narrative, a book, a dream, or a dance. I distinguish “the past” (everything that happened in past time) from “history” (the representation of the past) (White 1981). In order to capture indigenous histories and historical consciousness I have found it necessary to define “histories” very generally as “representations of the past” or even “communications of the past,” since in dreams and other altered states of consciousness the past may at first be sensed nonobjectively. The essential criterion for a “history” is communication about the past. It need not necessarily be “true” in the sense of “verifiable by Western canons of evidence.” If history were restricted to work done within the paradigm of Western historicism, alternative forms such as the Naxos dreams would simply be dismissed as “fantasy,” “fiction,” “religion,” or irrelevant. This is the traditional dividing line between “myth” and “history” (Stevenson 1975: 3). The former are “false” according to the standards of the latter. Yet, myths may be true in their poetic coherence even if they do not correspond entirely with external facts. They may capture the affective quality of a past event or impart moral truths and thus motivate and guide people as they proceed to make the events of recorded history. 1 Already in 1961 Evans-Pritchard (1962: 56–57) called for just such a “sociology of historiography” and even a “sociology of social anthropology.”

3

Historical Consciousness and the Ethnography of History

The communication of historical episodes such as the battle of Gettysburg or the Alamo can have affective resonance or deliver moral meaning that performs roles other than the provision of factual information about the past. The signing of the Declaration of Independence and the long march of the Mormons are both history and myth. The Naxos story of finding icons, aspiring to build a church, and entertaining prophecies that life would be transformed show the interplay of myth and history and the power of dreams to sustain a “myth-dream” (an idea taken from the study of millenarian movements in Melanesia and elaborated in Chapter Four). This study works in the mode of “mythistory” (Mali 2003) to capture the compelling truth of the myths and dreams that the villagers of mountain Naxos have “lived by” (Samuel and Thompson 1990). The salient feature of myth is that it need not—indeed, should not—be submitted to verification. Myths often structure thought and feeling without explicit recognition, in which cases they merge with what might be termed “cultural ideology.” It is precisely the capacity to formulate and impart guiding truths—in a range of forms or modes extending from narrative and art to bodily states or the internal imagery of dreams or other altered states of consciousness—that characterizes myth. A myth need not be an elaborated sacred story. It is, rather, a shared formulation of how to understand the world or how to proceed in the face of perennial human experiences. The ethnography of history identifies forms of historicization that have become invisible to the trained Western historicist eye. In the process it rejects the dichotomization of societies into “hot” and “cold,” those with and without history. All societies have histories even though they do not share the Western version of historicism. The word “historicization” becomes important in this study as a substitute for “historiography” that allows the recognition of history production.2 In Sakalava (Madagascar) spirit possession séances, spirits from different historical epochs simultaneously possess several different specialist mediums and debate with each other the merit of current community initiatives, as if they were at a town hall planning consultation. This is a dramatic, performed history. Precolonial indigenous spirits swilling alcohol to mark their historical epoch argue with reserved French-speaking spirits representing the colonial period. As Michael Lambek (2002) contends, these possession rituals do not just perform history as a form of entertainment; they are an unscripted 2 Terms such as “the poiesis of history” (the making/formulation of history) used by Lambek (2002: 15ff.) or the neologism “historification” (Greek istoriopoíisi) are largely synonymous alternatives.

4

The Ethnography of History

form in which the past, mediated by the body of the possessed specialist, comes into the present. These dramas create novel understandings of the past, present, and future. Such séances are a culturally accepted epistemology that yields valid information for decision making. Greece is a European country in which one might be surprised to find evidential value being given to dreams as late as the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Post-Cartesian reasoning clearly did not eliminate oneiric historicizing and prophesying on the eastern border of Europe.3 The Naxos case offers particular insight into the collision between these two distinct paradigms of historical consciousness. The Naxos villagers of 1830 were embedded in an Orthodox Christian (Romeic)4 historical consciousness rooted in Byzantium and maintained through the period of Ottoman domination (fifteenth to nineteenth centuries). They conceived time as cyclical (on a long plan), with a golden past returning in scenarios of various magnitudes such as the defeat of the Turks and the return of Byzantium or the Second Coming. From the eighteenth century up to the eve of the Greek revolution in 1821 the inhabitants of Greece spent considerable energy prophesying and looking for signs of their impending deliverance (Clogg 1988: 263; Politis 1998: 2). With independence came Bavarian rulers who brought with them tenets of rational progressive government, a plan to lessen the influence of mystical Orthodoxy, and a model of linear historicism imported directly from Prussia, where the discipline of history was assuming its modern form. The first dreams thus occurred at a moment of transition in national historical consciousness. This is not the first ethnography of historical consciousness. Michael Lambek’s (2002) exemplary study has already been mentioned, and G. P. Makris (1996) has shown how the tumbura spirit possession cult in Omdurman (Sudan) activates a historical consciousness of enslavement and transportation to the North. In contrast to these African cases, the apparent “burden” that motivates oneiric expressions of historical consciousness on Naxos is the future, not the past. In keeping with the stream of Romeic redemptive thinking 3

Claims based on visionary or ecstatic experience have continued to be expressed elsewhere in Europe. Parallels to the events on Naxos occurred in Catholic visions (not dreams) that have inspired pilgrimages at Lourdes (in 1858) and Medjugorje (in 1981). For neo-pagan ecstatic rituals relating to sacred sites in the UK see Wallis (2003: 6). 4 Because Byzantium was the Eastern Roman Empire, the people were referred to as Romans (Romii). The adjective “Romeic” (Roman) refers to the Eastern Christian heritage of the postByzantine Greeks. It contrasts with “Hellenic,” the pre-Christian, classical strand of Greek heritage (Herzfeld 1982, 1987). 5

Historical Consciousness and the Ethnography of History

identified above, people were looking forward, trying to divine what might be to come, while also taking steps to ensure that this would be beneficial. Historical consciousness followed hard on the heels of a futuricity. Both of these temporal vectors of thought arose from a present situation and ultimately fed back into it. Within Greek ethnography, David Sutton’s (1998) Memories Cast in Stone opened the way for the study of unconscious modes of historicization. Without directly asking the residents of the island of Kalymnos for their versions of “history,” Sutton observed how people deployed key words such as “tradition” and “modernity” in everyday discussions concerning values and acceptable practices. His account of their historical consciousness thus emerged from a deep immersion in local culture and careful collation of oblique statements and actions that revealed the people’s suppositions about the past and its relation to the present and the future.5 Granted the risks, Sutton’s islanders wondered whether it was still acceptable to throw dynamite sticks at Easter. This practice celebrated brave sponge divers who used to harvest unexploded bombs on the seabed to be used as fireworks that might annoy Italian colonizers. The explosions evoked this past, yet such explosions also killed four people in 1980. By throwing dynamite they were communicating history to each other through profound concussions comprehended by the body. The islanders wondered, however, whether they could live with their customary form of historicization. Sutton traced the impetus to study “non-literate, or non-articulated historical consciousness” (1998: 14) to John and Jean Comaroff, who, in Ethnography and the Historical Imagination (1992: 157ff.), challenged researchers to discover modes of historical production in other societies that do not take the recognizable form of Western historiography. This idea was explored earlier still by Michael Taussig in “History as Sorcery” (1984), in which he contended that the spirits of the subjugated and brutalized Huitoto Indians (Colombia) marshaled in shamanic rituals could be considered historical interventions. In an analysis illustrating Lévi-Strauss’s idea of timelessness, he described them as “mythic images reflecting and condensing the experiential appropriation of the history of conquest, as that history is seen to form analogies and structural correspondences with the hopes and tribulations of the present” (1984: 88). Taussig considered such cases to exemplify an embodied, active historicization that does not pass through rational formulation but “flashes up in a moment of danger,” as Walter Benjamin expressed it (quoted in Taussig 1984: 88). He argued that 5

Matthew Hodges does something similar in The Ethnography of Time: Living with History in Modern Rural France (2007). 6

The Ethnography of History

these historical flashes produced enigmatic, powerful “picture puzzles” (Freud’s term for the manifest content of a dream) that shocked and compelled attention—images of past violence, the undead, became sources of power in the present (Taussig 1984: 89). Powerful imagery of the past, then, may barge into consciousness and create affective tensions and identifications between the past and the present. This can be invited, as in the warrior dance of the Ohafia Igbo (Nigeria), who establish in this dance a linkage to past warriors in an alternative epistemology that cannot be reduced to words (McCall 2000: 7–8), or cultivated, as in the dance of the Tumbuka healers (nchimi), which prepares them for dreams in which “future, past and present are collapsed” and they achieve “access to a wider and deeper world than that of their fellow human beings” (Friedson 1996: 27) and the ability to understand the historical causes of illness. In Zanzibar, as in Madagascar and Sudan, Larsen (1998) found spirit possession to be the mode in which people addressed their past. At the time of her research, the country was following a policy of Africanization that sought to hybridize the diverse strands of Islam, Christianity, and African culture. The possessing spirits belonged exclusively to one or another of these historical pasts, and the policy forced people to reconsider their discrete, sectarian identities in the present. Pious Muslims possessed by Christian spirits had to rethink their positions and acknowledge a Christian dimension to their past. For Cubans, the past is brought into the present via ghosts such as Tomás, a slave from the nineteenth century seen hovering behind the anthropologist Stephan Palmié while he conducted fieldwork in Miami. Rather than dismiss such phenomena as irrational, Palmié asks if we should consider them as “pertaining to a discourse on history merely encoded in an idiom different from the one with which we feel at home” (2002: 3). These examples show that (1) people may gain knowledge about the past via epistemologies that diverge greatly from the protocols of evidence and objective scrutiny enshrined in Western historical research and documentation; (2) they may produce histories in forms quite different from Western historiography, which presupposes verbal representation, whether oral or written; (3) they may not consciously and willingly enter into these historicizations (they may be possessed by a spirit or haunted by a ghost without wanting to be); and (4) the acquisition and representation of information about the past may take place in altered states of consciousness. Labeling these productions “histories” takes seriously the variety of modes in which people learn about and represent the past. It enables a deeper appre7

Historical Consciousness and the Ethnography of History

ciation of these practices as parallel to Western historical practice rather than sectioning them off as categorically different (myth, ritual, dance, etc.) or exotic. If such alternative histories can be found in Greece, they may be found everywhere. This book thus offers an example that increases understanding of such heretofore-unnoticed modes of historicizing. The cross-cultural diversity of assumptions about history has already intrigued Western historians (Rüsen 2002, 2007). Archaeological and historical studies of how past societies understood the past (Burke 1969; Mayor 2000; Bradley 2002) necessarily venture into the methodological territory of this book, the ethnography of history. The discoveries made need not be taken as a postmodern or relativist subversion of the rationalism of professional historiography; rather, they are an invitation to expand its sphere (Chakrabarty 1998). This involves not just the appreciation of the way things are done elsewhere but the recognition that comparable alternative historicities flourish also in the West, both outside and inside the gates of professional historiography. People respond to histories that move them. This may be recognized in cases ranging from the renowned historian presenting history on popular television and bigscreen versions of the past in the mode of entertainment through dramatized (sometimes “documentary”) histories in creative forms on stage or television to battlefield and other historical reenactments undertaken by actors at historical sites. This study of dreams on Naxos should sensitize readers to parallel, familiar modes of historicization in their own communities. The divide between legitimate (rational) and illegitimate (irrational) histories needs to be questioned. A continuum runs from the historian’s creatively imagining how things were in the past to ordinary individuals’ seeing the past in a trance or as disclosed in a dream—all forms of historical imagination. People in and out of the academy often apprehend the past immediately, viscerally, emotionally, dramatically, synesthetically, and visually, as participants. The future of history as a discipline may lie in the ability to engage audiences affectively as they themselves already engage the past, and not just because of the social demands for understanding the past in an increasingly market-driven environment but also as a means of overcoming the exclusionism whereby historicism overrides the historical consciousness of others (Chakrabarty 2000: 41). The conflict over the nine-thousand-year-old remains of Kennewick Man6 suggests that the future portends ongoing clashes between different types 6

8

Human remains found in Washington State in 1996. Scientific opinion held that the bones

Dreaming and the Temporality of Being

of historical consciousness. American scientists and the U.S. judicial system approached these skeletal remains as a matter of factual determination (whether the remains could be connected genetically to the Native American groups claiming them). This approach clashed fundamentally with an indigenous historical framework that assumed autochthony and continuous presence in North America as unquestionable truths. The divide in epistemologies could be compared to that between creationism and evolutionism. For Native Americans, notions of migration and genetic difference, not to mention scientific investigation of sacred remains, belonged to an alien system of thought. The authority of Western science to remove human remains, fossils, and meteorites from Native American lands for display elsewhere with natural-history labels such as “Mastodon tusk, late Pleistocene” has been in running conflict with Native American attitudes toward history, which are steeped in presentism rather than historicism. As the Oglala leader Holy Rock expressed himself in 2002, “Fossil bones should be left in the ground as they were found. It is not good to take them away and put them in a museum. If we want to understand them, shouldn’t we go to see the animals where they lived and died?” (quoted in Mayor 2005: 299). The Naxos case that will be examined here similarly involves objects buried in the earth, ranging from natural mineral formations through human remains to cultural artifacts such as icons and antiquities. As in Native American cases, the local people conceived these objects in a manner—indeed, a variety of manners—often incompatible with scientific archaeology and history. The reaction of the Greek scientific community, served by politicians and the police force as well as the official Church at the time, was to confiscate these objects, deligitimating and ridiculing local opinons in the process. This study of island Greek historicity may instigate, through recursion (Holbraad 2008: 597; 2012), a reformulation of our own basic assumptions as to what qualifies as history.

Dreaming and the Temporality of Being Such a reformulation might develop from the recognition that linearity does not accurately capture the experience of time and historical consciousness even in the West. People “at home” in the West may experience the past in the present; they are not immune from seeing ghosts, experiencing the uncanny or déjàwere evidence of migration from Siberia of people having features consistent with the Ainu of Japan. Native Americans claimed ownership of the bones, but the court turned them down, saying that DNA evidence did not show that they were related to the remains. Kennewick Man is now in the Burke Museum in Seattle. 9

Historical Consciousness and the Ethnography of History

vu, or having premonitions. Perhaps we are not as modern as we think we are. Alternatively, perhaps the historicist fixing of past, present, and future was not the definitive turning point of modern thought. Another turn has been taken beyond it—the contradictory realization that all three temporalities frequently coexist in the present even though they are not logically supposed to. Modernity may more accurately be conceptualized as a posthistoricism, a state of surprise or shock that the expectations of historicism are not met in experience. So great is the force of historicist expectation, however, that experiences of multitemporality are often excused as anomalous or go unrecognized altogether. Historicism thus operates as a “normal science” (Kuhn 1962) against which numerous exceptions and anomalies have been accumulating but have not yet been systematically articulated into a revolutionary overthrow. Historicism continues its business as usual despite a steady lack of correspondence with actual personal experiences of time and the past. Since the beginning of the twentieth-century physicists have discussed the nonlinearity of time depending on the velocity of an object and the position of the observer. Theoretically time could go backward or stand still. Freud’s idea of the unconscious and auxiliary ideas such as the uncanny and deferral (Nachträglichkeit) drew attention to the power of the past to reappear in the present. In literature, modernism begins with the mythical method of Joyce and Eliot, who explored the continuing vitality of ancient myths in modern life (Mali 2005: 11). In the plastic arts cubism and surrealism also explored temporality, as in Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase and in his ready-mades, in which different temporalities encountered one another. Husserl furnished one of the most elaborate descriptions of the nonlinearity of time in his study of internal time consciousness (1991), contending that the present could not be strictly divided from the past or the future but contained a moving interpenetration of retentions from the past and anticipations of the future. The insights of these various thinkers and schools will be developed and applied to an understanding of the Naxos case. The contention is that dreams, in particular, constantly violate the dictates of historicism. They may furnish dreamers with novel scenarios that disorder the past, present, and future. Insofar as dreams occasionally offer scenarios of the past that are then communicated socially in narrative or some other form, they impel the production of “histories.” The study of dreams thus allows an unusual perspective on historical consciousness as it takes shape in everyday social life.

10

Dreaming and the Temporality of Being

This study is not rooted in a biological approach, but a brief glance at recent research in neuropsychology offers a starting point for grasping dreams as a multitemporal experiential mode. According to the neuroscientists MacDuffie and Mashour (2010: 190), “When we dream, the past, present, and future are no longer perceived as three discrete, easily separable dimensions.” In waking life we have a sense of the continuity of time; when one goes to sleep one expects to wake up in the same place at a later time, and each moment succeeds the preceding. Dreams take us out of this everyday cumulative temporality. Each time they begin in a new place, and internally a dream can jump backward and forward. The discovery that neural networks for remembering and planning are the same (Schacter, Addis, and Buckner 2007: 657) suggests that human relationships to the past and to the present are integrally related. To project the future is to consider relevant information from the past—which is why amnesics are not good at imagining. Evolutionary psychologists have contended that dreams evolved to simulate threats (e.g., from large animals) and thus prepared our distant ancestors to survive actual attacks (Revonsuo 2000a, b). This threatsimulation function continues despite the change in human life circumstances. Dreams present a theater in which the individual’s cognitive framework is exposed to strong doses of anxiety, the predominant emotion in all dreams and dreamers (Hobson 2001: 327). Temporally, the past and the present are subordinate to a salient concern with the future. Laboratory research has also shown that dreaming helps the mind consolidate information and thus solve problems, hence the advice to sleep before exams rather than try to study through the night.7 The cognitive neuroscientists Crick and Mitchison (1983) proposed that dreams were by-products of the random discharge of extraneous information accumulated during the day. Dreams, according to this view, amounted to mental rubbish with no ulterior meaning, a mere epiphenomenon of the disposal process that keeps the brain from overload. The influential researcher J. Allan Hobson similarly argued that dreams represented random neuronal firing originating in the pons (brain stem) and sent to the forebrain, where they might be converted into stories and dramas (Hobson and McCarley 1977; Hobson 1989). Dreams in this model were Rorschach-like patterns projected up by one part of the brain and given meaning by another part. Hobson (2009) has subsequently postulated that this brain 7

See, for example, Smith and Lapp (1991) and Barrett (2007). This correlation between REM sleep and learning has come in for criticism (Vertes and Siegel 2005). 11

Historical Consciousness and the Ethnography of History

activity in sleep is preparatory to waking consciousness rather than a recovery from it as in the Crick and Mitchison model. REM sleep thus extends the development of waking consciousness by undertaking virtual-reality simulations in an off-line mode; it functions as a protoconsciousness that prepares us to inhabit the present. This survey of neurophysiological studies of the dreaming brain shows that dreams may organize the past, prepare for the future, or simulate the present; and more than one of these operations may occur simultaneously. This multitemporal picture of dreaming from neuropsychology accords with Freud’s insight that the unconscious has no chronicity. Desired objects can represent wish fulfillment or any prior stage of lack and desire. Yet it does not accord with Freud’s view of dreaming, since he viewed dreams as arising from infantile wishes stored in the unconscious and activated periodically by emotions and events in an individual’s life like “the ghosts in the underworld of the Odyssey—ghosts which awoke to new life as soon as they tasted blood” (1976 [1900]: 705). Freud began by considering dreams largely as offering insight into an individual’s deep childhood past, but gradually he came to see them as reflecting the more recent past. After World War I, as cases of shell shock (“traumatic neuroses”) became familiar, he revised his view to account for dreams as compulsive repetitions of recent traumas in an attempt to master them (1956 [1920]: 13). Still he did not really factor in the role of the present and the future in the production of dreams. Several of his early followers did insist on the importance of the present and the future in psychoanalysis, and their contributions led to the development of post-Freudian schools of thought that are more apposite for this study than the ideas of Freud alone. Wilhelm Stekel was one such disciple. Breaking with Freud, he published a tract on telepathic dreams in which he asserted that “dreams always seek to explore the future, they show us our attitudes toward life and the ways and aims of life” (quoted in Ellenberger 1970: 598).8 Alfred Adler was also convinced that dreams were more positive and prospective than Freud allowed. For Adler, psychic life was future-directed and goal-driven (Ellenberger 1970: 609). Jung also departed from Freud by seeing dreams as giving direction for fuller self-realization or “individuation” (2002 [1948]: 80). Instead of looking back to find the source of a neurosis, Jung and Adler looked at the individual’s current situation (goals, strategies, and tasks being avoided). For Freud the goal of psychoanalysis was to reveal and understand troublesome, lingering emotions and colonize the 8

Freud rejected this view in two articles, “Dreams and Telepathy” and “Psycho-Analysis and Telepathy,” both written in 1921. 12

Dreaming and the Temporality of Being

unconscious with reason: “Where id was, there ego shall be,” he proclaimed, likening psychoanalysis to a project of land reclamation such as “the draining of the Zuyder Zee” (Freud 1933: 79).9 Jung and Adler saw more continuity and complementarity between the conscious and the unconscious, which for them formed an indivisible person. These debates opened the way to Ludwig Binswanger’s existential analysis10 of dreams, laid out in his tract “Dream and Existence” (1986 [1930]). Rejecting the libidinal-drive theory of Freud,11 Binswanger considered dreams to be unwilled moments of imagination in which individuals are exposed to their own being. To dream is not to know what is happening. “This,” he explains, “is the basic ontological element of all dreaming and its relatedness to anxiety” (1986 [1930]: 102). As Foucault encapsulated it in his first major publication, an introduction to Binswanger’s “Dream and Existence” (Foucault 1986 [1954]: 47): “In dreams he [a person] encounters what he is and what he will be, what he has done and what he is going to do, discovering there the knot that ties his freedom to the necessity of the world.” This perspective is a new angle from which to view agency as a challenge permeating both waking and sleep. The social science idea of agency has been developed to analyze how people act at any present moment in order to implement their projects. People generally coast through daily activities such as commuting and provisioning themselves. Agency really becomes an issue in the face of obstructions or at moments of uncertainty such as the 1830s, when the villagers of Kóronos were incorporated into the Greek state and saw their emery resource nationalized and their religious wishes denied, or again in 1930, during the Great Depression (considered in Chapters Six and Seven), when they felt anxiety over what lay ahead and reached into their tradition of dreaming to find responses. In both cases they dreamt of saints commanding them to dig for buried icons, and they began to dig for buried icons over protracted periods of time. How and why dreams provide a source for agency will be pursued in detail in the conclusion of this book. 9 The Zuiderzee was a shallow bay of the North Sea located in Holland. In 1932, the year before Freud wrote these lines, the Dutch completed work on a dam sealing the bay off from the sea. Draining it converted the Zuiderzee into a freshwater lake and allowed large tracts of land to be reclaimed for settlement. 10 Known in variations as existential psychology, existential psychoanalysis, or Daseinsanalyse. For overviews see May, Angel, and Ellenberger (1994) and Ruitenbeck (1962). 11 “No one has yet succeeded and no one will ever succeed in deriving the human spirit from instincts (Triebe)” (Binswanger 1986 [1930]: 101).

13

Historical Consciousness and the Ethnography of History

For the moment it is relevant to observe that existentialism is part of the genealogy of the social scientific concept of agency, and central theorists such as Bourdieu (1990: 42), Giddens (1979: 54), and Emirbayer and Mische (1998: 968, 997) acknowledge the influence of an idea of temporality that can be traced back to Heidegger. Drawing on Husserl, Heidegger (1996 [1927]) offered a description of existence in the key of time. By “temporality” he did not mean the linear unfurling of life from birth through past and present and on into a future or the mere fact of there being three temporal categories. Rather, he intended the convoluted, subjective relationship to time that was definitive of Being (Dasein).12 Being constantly races ahead of itself into the future, to the moment of its own death. From this bearing it bounces back to the past to find models for action and into the present, carrying the resolve to do something now. This was the “being toward death” (Sein zum Tode) that Heidegger wrote about—the idea that imaginary temporal excursions were vital for uncovering new possibilities for being. By countenancing death and realizing that time is finite we find the impulsion to act in the present. Although oriented toward the future in the first instance, Heidegger’s idea of temporality entailed the fusion of the future with the past and the present in human being. As Binswanger put it, “[the futurity of being] is through and through implicated with its past. Out of both of these temporal ‘ecstasies’ the authentic present temporalizes itself ” (Binswanger 1963: 214). Heidegger’s concept of temporal “ecstasies” as experiences in which people venture beyond their everyday world has particular relevance for the present study of dreams. His usage played on the Greek roots of this word, which literally mean “standing out” (ek – stasis), a coincidental match with the roots of the word “existence” (ex – ist), which also mean “standing out.” He employed “ecstasy” to refer to those temporal elements that “stand out” for the existential potential that they disclose in the present. “Ecstasy” also carried more straightforward connotations of being in a sort of rapture, of standing outside of oneself. Heidegger (1962 [1927]: 387) considered the fusion of ecstasies of temporality to occur in a “moment of vision,” a pun on the German word for “the present moment,” Augenblick (lit. “blink of an eye”). In other words, the past and the future create the present in a moment of ecstasy/existence. As Levinas wrote in 12

“Temporalizing does not mean a ‘succession’ of the ecstasies [more on this concept below]. The future is not later than the having-been [the past], and the having-been is not earlier than the present. Temporality temporalizes itself as a future that makes present, in the process of havingbeen” (Heidegger 1996: 321). 14

Dreaming and the Temporality of Being

an essay on sleep and existence, “Through ecstasy man takes up his existence. Ecstasy is then found to be the very event of existence” (1978: 81). In other words, we are never so much ourselves as when we step outside ourselves. These ideas seem purely philosophical at first blush, but psychiatrists like Binswanger adapted them to address individual and social situations in their clinical work. Binswanger thought of existential psychoanalysis as an “anthropology” in that it analyzes what it is to be human, and his psychoanalytic case studies root it in actual lives. Where are people placed, and what are they trying to achieve? In dreaming, these anthropological issues intersect with the nonlinear Heideggerian temporality of existence, in which the future and the past emerge out of and feed back into the present.13 Anthropology, history, and ontology14 combine. With Adler and Jung, the existential analysts considered the unconscious to be part of a person’s coherent “being,” continuous with the self and responsive to current events. They departed from the inclination to read unconscious material regressively. As Heidegger expressed it in a letter to Boss, “Dreams are not symptoms and consequences of something lying hidden behind [them], but they themselves are in what they show and only this. Only with this does their emerging essence [Wesen] become worth questioning” (Heidegger 2001: 245). As the future predominated in existence, so it also came to the fore in dreams, which registered the inner movements of existence (Binswanger 1962: 21). The characteristic approach to a dream or a person, therefore, was to examine the present failure to find meaning in life or the inability to take action rather than focus on past traumas (Ellenberger 1994: 119). Dreams offered solutions for the present and suggestions for the future, as well as representations of the past. As doctors, the existential analysts focused on pathologies, which they often diagnosed as arising from failures in the regulation of temporality—inability to keep the three time zones in open relationship. The past could be closed off in pathologies of temporality such as amnesia or the future rejected as in the anorexia of Binswanger’s patient Ellen West, which he interpreted as her attempt to escape physical time (the rejection of food being a refusal to gain weight and 13

Binswanger knew both Freud and Heidegger, although neither one endorsed his work. Another Swiss psychiatrist, Medard Boss (1903–90), also played a major role in synthesizing Heidegger’s ontology with psychoanalysis. Boss convened numerous seminars at his home in Zollikon, Switzerland, where Heidegger engaged with psychiatrists (Heidegger 2001). Boss wrote two books on dreams (1957, 1977). 14 To avoid confusion, the word “ontology” in this book is only used to refer to the existential idea of being as temporality. 15

Historical Consciousness and the Ethnography of History

grow older; 1994: 304). In Ellen West’s case, the ordinarily fused temporal ecstasies fell apart (1994: 358). Similarly, Minkowski (1994 [1923]: 133) treated a schizophrenic man whose temporal disorder consisted in being unable to sleep because he thought he would be executed at sunrise. He lived by a purely passive regime, unable to connect his present to a future. Binswanger (1994: 358) saw such temporal blockages as “kinks” in the lifeline in which freedom became constraint. These disorders of time serve as extreme cases that define the rule, which is that human being requires an open relationship to the past, present, and future. On Naxos, individual dreams and the perennial myth-dream took shape in order to work through the constrictions successively placed on village futurity by nationalization and the depression. The histories produced by their dreams figured a past in the effort to work toward a future and allow life in the present.

Dreams, Visions, and Imagination Historical dreams reported by contemporaries of the dreamers or recorded in notebooks by the dreamers (or dictated by them) stand at the center of this book. In some cases the sources refer to dreams and at other times to visions. I use the word “dreaming” in the title because the people involved described the majority of cases as dreams. The Naxos visionaries referred to themselves and still are referred to by others as “dreamers” (oneirevámenoi). Locally, at least, “dream” seems to be the “unmarked” term in that it has been generalized to refer to dreams and visions, just as the word “man” can, albeit increasingly rarely, refer to “men and women.” Whereas in English one says “I had a dream” and “I saw (or had) a vision,” in Greek people exclusively use the verb “to see” for both experiences. Historical texts often only state that so-and-so “saw” and then proceed directly to the description of what was seen. The reader is thus left to decide on contextual grounds whether this was a dream or vision, but sufficient detail may sometimes be lacking, leaving one to guess. That Greek writers at all stages of history have not always troubled to draw a clear dividing line between dreams and visions could be taken as an indication that they were not worried about this distinction.15

15

Björck (1946: 312), Casevitz (1982: 72), Hanson (1980: 1406), and Kenny (1996) show the difficulties of distinguishing dreams from visions in the archaic, classical, late antique/early Christian, and Byzantine periods respectively. Valtchinova (2009: 207) notes the difficulty of separating dreams and visions in contemporary ethnographic studies of visions. 16

Dreams, Visions, and Imagination

This ambiguous Greek cultural arrangement of visions and dreams throws the question back to us. Why is it important to make a distinction between dreams and visions? Does something happen in the one state but not in the other that could have any particular implications for this study? On the side of disjuncture one might cite the Freudian view that dreaming involves a unique form of imagination, “primary process,” an emotional maelstrom generated by primal wishes and images in the unconscious. Primary process is regressive in that it accesses the prelinguistic psychology of infancy, and this distinguishes it from other types of imagining or thinking (Freud 1976 [1900]: 763). The French neurophysiologist Michel Jouvet identified another distinguishing feature of dreaming when he explored the long-observed phenomenon that cats move their paws or twitch their whiskers while lying otherwise immobile, asleep. Having identified the area of the brain stem responsible for this relaxation of the body, Jouvet devised one of those experiments that dismay antivivisectionists: he surgically removed this part of the brain (the locus coeruleus). Upon entering REM sleep, some of these cats then ran around their cages, hissing and scratching as if attacking another animal. Jouvet ( Jouvet and Delorme 1965, Jouvet 2001) proposed the name “paradoxical sleep” (sommeil paradoxal) to capture this simultaneity of mental stimulation and muscle atonia. Something similar happens to humans in REM dreaming, a sort of temporary auto-pithing that allows the mind to become a theater of intense emotional realism while the body is neutralized.16 Dreaming thus transpires in a physiological state distinct from other intense and absorbing forms of imagining such as hallucination, delusion, or visions. Contemporary dream researchers further observe that REM-state dreams involve relatively fantastic, nonlogical, highly associative imagery coupled with a lack of self-reflection. In dreams one usually lacks meta-consciousness, the ability to reflect on and monitor one’s own thoughts as in waking consciousness (Rechtschaffen 1978). These observations make the case that dreams differ qualitatively from waking visions. There are many reasons, however, to see a continuum between bizarre and intense dreaming at one pole and ordinary rational consciousness at the other. 16

In cases of REM-sleep behavior disorder, the bodily paralysis normally accompanying REM is incomplete or absent. Dreamers may thus thrash about while acting out dreams, causing potential injury to themselves or bed partners. In narcolepsy, REM muscle atonia may activate during waking, sometimes causing sufferers to fall down. 17

Historical Consciousness and the Ethnography of History

Even these putative “polar opposites” are characterized by nearly identical brainwave patterns, pointing up the impossibility of trying to define all the various states of consciousness by entirely discrete criteria. It may be that we are always dreaming but in states of waking perception we do not attend to these dreams. Visions and hallucinations can involve lack of meta-consciousness, and in lucid dreaming meta-consciousness is achieved in REM dreaming (Kahan 2001). Dreams—and the very definition of “dream” is debated by specialists (Hunt 1989: 69)—can occur in non-REM sleep, but these exhibit relatively logical thought and less intense emotional content than REM dreams. Imagery not always classified as dreams but sometimes quite bizarre and emotional may occur at sleep onset (hypnagogic hallucinations) or on transition to waking (hypnopompic hallucinations). To summarize, the dream and the vision are both activities of imagination (as opposed to perception). When considered in the context of various other modes of imagination such as hallucinations, non-REM dreaming, reverie, daydreaming, fantasy, creative artistic imagination, and everyday imagination, they are relatively close to each other in terms of the intensity, nonvolition, and autonomy of the imaginative process. This array of subtly different states, some of which can be identified only with laboratory equipment or sophisticated diagnostics, shows the limitations of “self-evidence.” Lay people may not reliably discriminate or even comprehend the criteria for the various states listed above. They simply have the vocabulary available in their everyday language, which in a Greek village in 1830 or 1930 would have included chiefly phantasía (imagination), remvasmós (daydream), oneiropólos (daydreamer), phótisi (divine illumination), and optasía (illusion, vision) in addition to the standard óneiro (dream) and órama (vision). In other words, our highly analytic clinical vocabulary creates expectations that cannot be met by historical materials or ethnographic data. This raises a skeptical reflection. What if there were no actual dream experiences at all? Perhaps those claiming to have dreamt were reporting dreams that they had fabricated to gain some advantage. The Naxos dreams involved visions of the holy figures of the Orthodox Church, indicating the divine election of the dreamers and endowing them and their community with spiritual authority. Such dreams would have been worth forging. Once people had reported one or two dreams (real or fake), they may have felt pressured to continue to have dreams in a scenario similar to that of the Salem witch trials. In that case, a group of teenage girls described to the court visionary experiences (so-called spectral 18

Dreams, Visions, and Imagination

evidence) of witches’ attacking them. When this evidence secured convictions and capital punishment, the girls did not (could not for fear?) retract the visions. Instead they proliferated them. Perhaps similar public pressure of expectation caused the epidemic of dreaming among fourteen-year-old boys and girls to spiral out of control in Kóronos durng 1930? That people dream cannot be doubted. The question is whether the dream accounts we have correspond to any actual dreams. In the Naxos case, the dreams occurred repeatedly over months and years, both in the 1830s and in the 1930s. Even if it is conceded that some of the dreams were fabrications, these narratives (circulating as “dreams”) may have been so impressive and inspiring as to stimulate actual dreams. In this view, even if the dreams started out as fakes, they may soon have become real, and the fake and the real could alternate. In the resulting corpus one might not easily be able to tell which were which. The situation approximates to the model proposed by Kracke (1986: 50) on the basis of his research among the Amazonian Kagwahiv. He observed that the emotive and dramatic “primary-process”17 quality of myths is consistent with dreams, which makes myths quite likely to find their way into dreams, where they are reexperienced. This returns us to the earlier consideration of myths as compelling models of experience reactivated over time. Perhaps the only way to judge the reliability of a dream is to assess its resemblance to dreams one has had oneself (States 1988: 5). If the narratives on Naxos did not represent actual dreams, they were, at the very least, products of the imagination. The situation may be clarified by reference to the case of George Psalmanazar, an eighteenth-century rogue who pretended to be a native of Formosa (present-day Taiwan) and wrote a completely invented historical and ethnographic account of this island. Rather than throw this fraudulent description of a society into the trash, Rodney Needham (1985) showed how it reveals the common structuring principles of the human mind, which “invents” societies according to the same deep-seated logic (notably binary opposition) that goes into the internal historical formation of actual societies and that would also, therefore, be identified in “real” ethnographic accounts. In other words, society forms and expands by imaginative inventions that are 17 Kracke has the same reservations as I have about the importance of regressive thinking in Freud’s “primary process.” He has retained this term but recast it as a type of highly metaphorical bricolage characteristic of right-brain thought (1986: 40). Dramatically enacted myths engage this type of thought, as do dreams. As Kracke observes, various psychoanalysts have also suggested revising Freud’s idea of “primary process” to see it as a spatio-imagistic medium for problem solving and self-integration (39).

19

Historical Consciousness and the Ethnography of History

consistent, at a deep logical level, with the imaginative inventions of literature. Psalamanzar’s Formosa was a fraud, but it revealed common structuring principles of the human mind. I am not concerned here with the universal level of the “human mind” addressed by thinkers such as Lévi-Strauss and Needham, but, mutatis mutandis, forged dreams (if, indeed, they were forged) may tell us just as much about the particular socioculturally informed imagination of historical Kóronos individuals as would their actual dreams. As Freud noted, all dreams come to be known only as formulations of the waking mind, which presents them after “secondary revision.” They are thus a type of narrative on a continuum with literary creations. The imagination of creative artists, like dreaming, creates a space of “play”—an imaginary world bracketed off from everyday life.18 Ultimately, some of the “dreams” analyzed in this book may have been visions, others confabulations of the waking imagination, and still others reports of actual dreams, and all of them might be variously classified in the fine-grained terminology of academic psychology. By labeling the majority of them “dreams” people are, I think, calling attention to the compelling and paradoxical feelings accompanying the acquisition of visual imagery. Dreams seem absolutely real during their occurrence. This feature of “vivid dreams” (zontaná óneira) corresponds to what Lévy-Bruhl (1912, see Tambiah 1990: 86) termed “participation” (minus his inessential imputation of primitivism) or what Csikszentmihalyi (1991) captured with his term “flow.” The paradoxical nature of the dreaming experience makes the dreams extraordinary and potential conduits for mystical and revelatory communication. This mystical quality may combine with the existential search for ways to go beyond the present. “The dream, like every imaginary experience, is an anthropological index of transcendence,” Foucault wrote (1986 [1954]:49). In this transcendence—a bracketed space of imaginary “play”—people go beyond the constraints of their world as it is given and reconfigure this world and themselves both within it and outside it. According to the psychoanalyst Fairbairn, “dreams are representations of endopsychic situations over which the dreamer has got stuck (fixation points) and often include some attempt to move beyond that

18

In his endeavor to model the emotionality, symbolism, and nonlinear time of the dreaming unconscious, Freud looked to the works of artists for understanding. The work of art, along with children’s games or jokes, created a “game” (Spiel) space where one could temporarily entertain ideas and whole worlds otherwise incompatible with daily life (Freud 1959 [1908]: 144; Khryssanthópoulos 2005: 143).

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Dreams, Visions, and Imagination

situation” (quoted in Fosshage 1983: 654). The Naxos dreams, as will be seen, carry this up to the ultimate transcendence of the Second Coming.

• At the core of this book is the story of dispossession and persistent hope in a local community. My analysis wraps around historical and ethnographic description to produce conclusions about dreaming of occluded objects, agency in the face of historical change, and transcendence. After contextualizing Greek cultural traditions of dream interpretation and introducing the village of Kóronos in Chapter Two, I proceed to the story of the way dreams led to the discovery of icons in the 1830s in Chapter Three. As two different systems of knowledge and proof collided in aggressive mutual miscomprehension, the state confiscated these icons. Chapter Four continues the historical narrative through the 1930s, when, as the Great Depression set in, four fourteen-year-olds began to dream nightly of another buried icon. Their scenarios of an imminent return to prosperity did not translate into reality, and rather than relinquish their investment in finding the icon of St. Anne they produced ever more elaborate millenarian scenarios. Chapter Five steps back to take an ethnographic overview of the layering of village communal values and economic value as revealed in the village preoccupation with discovering buried objects. Kóronos has been economically dependent on one particular buried object, the heavy mineral stone emery, which they mine in large quantities for a living. Chapter Six charts the rise and fall of the emery business in the twentieth century, thereby contextualizing the dreams of 1930 and the ongoing development of the myth-dream. Chapter Seven covers the most recent episode of the myth-dream, in which the villagers are building the long-prophesied church even though they have not had any further dreams or discovered the requisite icon. Through the analysis of the dreams of Markos Kapíris, Chapter Eight returns to one of the central themes of this study, the relationship between historicism and alternative paradigms of historical consciousness. Over the centuries, Western historicism and Romeic historical consciousness have conditioned one another to create a fluid, hybrid historical consciousness in mountain Naxos. Chapter Nine considers the abundance of valuable artifacts, indexes of the eventfulness of the past, embedded in the Naxos landscape. Dreams of these treasures process the historicity of the earth and render affective histories tying the past, present, and future together.

21

Chapter Two Dreaming and temporality in greece

W

hen I first embarked on this study of dreaming I would ask general questions to anyone I met: “Tell me, what do you think about dreams?” and “Have you had any dreams lately, or heard any dreams being discussed?” People often countered with their own question, actually more of a challenge: “Do you believe in dreams (esý pistéveis sta óneira)?” This perplexed me at first. Dreams are a fact, they just happen. There is no option but to believe in them. Why would anyone ask this? In part, I had misunderstood the intention behind their use of the verb “believe.” I took people to be asking if I believed that dreams exist when they were really asking if I believed in their predictive value. Their question emerged from a deep popular assumption that dreams foretell the future, and I had underestimated this to the point that their question blindsided me. They were gauging how to talk with me because they knew that the predictive approach to dreams had opponents both within Greek society and outside it. Perhaps they themselves had doubts about it. Rationalists might consider dreams to be random and insignificant, while psychotherapeutic approaches treated them as messages from the self conditioned by individual personality and life experiences. I had entered a turbulent space of contested knowledge. The divergent opinions within the social field could be cast as the clash between different rationalities. Were dreams to be considered as products of human physiology, as messages from divine or occult forces, as memories of the past, or as premonitions? From my perspective these uncertainties over the nature of dreams all come down to a basic question about temporality. In this section, as a way of providing historical and ethnographic context for the case study that follows, I examine these alternatives as they have developed and coexisted in Greece. 23

Dreaming and Temporality in Greece

In the small mountain village of Kóronos on the Cycladic island of Naxos, a retired man named Yórgis told me about a time in the late 1940s when he and his friends were making lime (asvéstis). Slaked lime is used as whitewash for houses and to trace the cracks in stone walkways or courtyards, imparting that bleached white look associated with island Greece. The making of lime requires a kiln (kamíni) to superheat limestone or marble, which decomposes at high temperatures to yield quicklime, which is slaked in water. The interior of the kiln is like a wood-burning pizza oven with space for firewood around which is built up the pile of stones to be burned. The exterior of the kiln (called the xoýri, “outer perimeter,” in local dialect) was built around this with other rocks that could withstand the temperatures generated in the interior and packed with mud as cement and insulation. As Yórgis and his partners waited around for the rocks to disintegrate—a process that takes several days—he lay down near the kiln for a nap. His sleep was disturbed by a dream in which a large man appeared and urged him to get up and move to another spot. This dream recurred, and the third time Yórgis got up and moved to another location a few meters away. Shortly thereafter, the kiln exploded, showering the area where he had been sleeping with white-hot rocks. If he had not moved, he might have been killed. The dream, he reckoned, had saved him. Yórgis’s brother, Dímos, told me several similar predictive dreams. In one of them he entered a room where people were eating and asked for water. They poured him a glass, but the stopper from the jug fell into his cup. He removed the stopper and drank the water. The following day a woman interpreted the dream to mean that obstacles to his landing a job had been removed. The very next day papers arrived informing him that he had been appointed to a rare salaried position in the local mining industry. These are the types of dreams that people had in mind when they asked me if I believed in dreams. In their future orientation, such dreams are consistent with the vast category of dreams that people interpret according to dream books (oneirokrítes). This tradition assigns standard meanings to dream symbols and requires identifying the key symbol(s) in the dream. The larger dream narrative is not important for interpretation. Losing a tooth presages illness or death; ascending a staircase is good, while descending stairs is bad. The meaning of dream symbols is often determined according to a logic of reversal. For example, weddings mean funerals and vice versa. On Naxos, many people said that buses represented coffins (perhaps a restricted, local interpretation prompted by the narrow and

24

Dreaming and Temporality in Greece

winding road network on the island). Patricia Storace explored these dream book codes to amusing effect in her travel book Dinner with Persephone (1996). If asked how or why dreams predict the future, people have no consistent answer. To oblige the questioner they may refer to human premonitory instinct, the clairvoyance of the soul, or spiritual contact with Christ, the saints, or dead relatives (Seremetakis 1991: 54; Handman 1996: 84; Xanthakou 2002: 81). A comparable uncertainty would likely be uncovered if one were to ask the average horoscope reader in America how such predictions work. Greek oneiromancy and popular astrology are not topics for systematic reflection with widely known supporting theologies or rationales.1 Furthermore, they exist in an ambiguous conceptual space where the playful and the serious transform into one another unpredictably. The dream-key approach has a long history stretching back to ancient Greece and even farther back to Egypt and Mesopotamia. In the second century CE the professional dream interpreter Artemidorus epitomized this tradition in his Oneirokritika, a comprehensive consideration of dream symbols, the latter part of which was as an instruction manual to enable his son to carry on the profession. This is possibly the closest we may come to a theory of oneirocriticism. Today oneirokrítes circulate in cheap editions, and short versions often appear in almanacs or popular magazines. Yet people also retain a core of symbols in memory. Some popular interpretations are held together mnemonically by assonance: virtually everywhere in Greece people know that to see fish in a dream predicts yearning (psária = lakhtára) or that dreaming of eggs foretells arguments (avgá = kavgás). The dream-key approach is an oral as well as a literate tradition. Some set interpretations of symbols may be very widespread. A prime example would be dreams of receiving money or finding treasure. A modern dream book says that “if you see yourself gathering up unlimited money and getting wealthy, be careful, because many things are being said against you and how you conduct yourself. Your illegitimate actions have been discovered and people are mocking you” (Zambouke n.d.: 77).2 Dreams of gaining wealth apparently illustrate the semiotic principle of opposition mentioned above. The graffito daubed by anarchists on a wall at the University of Thessaloniki (fig. 1)

1

They did once belong to earlier “scientific” practices, but these “sciences” have not withstood the test of time. Like alchemy or phlogiston, they have been rejected and replaced. Horoscopes and dream book oneiromancy carry on as practices no longer tied to a vital, empirical process of derivation that ordinary people understand. 2 All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated. 25

Dreaming and Temporality in Greece

exemplifies how dream book symbols may become broader cultural reference points.3

Figure 1. Anarchist graffito on a wall in the basement of the Humanities Faculty Building, University of Thessaloniki, 1995: “Shit in your dreams means money.”

As there is no sacred text or individual authority that pronounces what is standard, there is margin for disagreement. One day I joined a group of villagers who had congregated around a table at a cafe in the port town of Naxos, waiting to take the bus back to the mountains. Exceptionally, they were already talking about dreams when I joined them. They had fastened upon the interpretation of the red color of an object. One man argued that it meant that something bad 3 Seremetakis (1991: 60) comments on the dream-symbolic connection between excrement and money in the Mani region, and Xanthakou (2002: 109) quotes the popular Maniat aphorism: “‘Ídhies ston ípno zou skatá, tha ta yiemíssis ta pouguiá”’ (If you see shit in your dreams, you will fill your purses). Freud and Oppenheim (1957 [1911]) and Kuper (1989) consider this theme in Balkan folklore, psychoanalysis, and anthropology.

26

Dreaming and Temporality in Greece

was going to happen soon, others said that something good was imminent. After spirited debate, all agreed that the color red just meant that something was going to happen very soon. The momentary variation in understanding actually highlighted the striking agreement about the temporal orientation of dreams: they predict the future. The future orientation of the oneirokrítes is consistent with the prophetic tenor of many Christian dreams, going back to Constantine’s dream on the eve of the battle of Milvian Bridge (312 CE). Constantine saw a waking vision of the cross and, according to Eusebius, heard the words “By this [sign], conquer” (Nicholson 2000: 310). That evening he had a dream commanding him to use this sign (a cross) as an emblem in battle. Constantine subsequently became one of the most prominent saints in Eastern Orthodoxy, and the dream epiphany has developed into a standard theme indicating divine election in the stories of saints’ lives from the Middle Ages to the present. The nun Pelagía, who, in the early nineteenth century, had dreams of the Panagía that directed the discovery of an icon and the construction of a famous pilgrimage church on Tinos, belongs squarely within this tradition. The Church eventually canonized her. Yet for every case in which dreams receive official validation scores of other epiphany dreams circulate only in local communities, below the level of formal Church recognition. Danforth’s (1989) study of the Anastenárides, followers of St. Constantine in a northern Greek community, captures this grassroots social receptivity to epiphany dreams. In one case, a villager migrated to Australia, where he fell ill. One night he dreamt of St. Constantine “looking down upon him from the sign above the entrance to a movie theatre” (Danforth 1989: 34). This assured him of the saint’s protection. Another man mocked the Anastenárides, who dance over hot coals holding icons above their heads on the feast day of St. Constantine and his mother St. Eleni (Helen). That night he dreamt of an icon with a big “K” on it.4 It spoke to him and said, “If you need me, you will find me in Langadas [site of the Anastenária]” (Danforth 1989: 22). A separate study of the Anastenárides related the case of a man who was preparing to migrate to Germany when St. Constantine appeared to him in a dream in the form of a priest who called him his “child” and implored him not to leave (Christodoulou 1978: 115). These dreams belong to the plethora of everyday dreams throughout Greece in which saints appear to people, advise them, and even heal them, as in the case of the Macedonian woman who began to suffer pathological levels of anxiety 4

Konstantínos = Constantine. 27

Dreaming and Temporality in Greece

after marrying and moving to live with her husband in his natal home with her in-laws. Her brother dreamt that St. Raphaíl was calling her, and ultimately she made a pilgrimage to St. Raphaíl’s church on the island of Mytilíni and returned completely cured (Handman 1996: 95). Such dreams also point up the democratization of dreaming. One need not be of noble birth or positioned in high office to receive dream communications from holy figures. The official Church accepts such dreams as expressions of popular Christian devotion. The Orthodox Church has long considered that dreams come from three possible sources: God, demons (the devil), or the human body (Le Goff 1988: 211). Clerics often cite the New Testament passage stating that Satan may disguise himself as an angel of light (2 Corinthians 11:14). For the Church, the faculty of “discernment” (diákrisis) acquired by advanced monks and priests through long years of devotion must be applied in order to determine the true source of a dream. Ordinary people may assert that they have holy dreams but only religious adepts can assess and validate such claims. While the Church may have left the door to peripheral Christian dreaming slightly ajar, it has slammed it shut in the face of dream interpretation of the sort practiced by Artemidorus. The First Council of Ankara (314 CE) decreed that “all who observe auguries or auspices or dreams or divinations of any kind according to the customs of the pagans . . . shall confess and do penance for five years” (quoted in Le Goff 1988: 211). Over the centuries the Orthodox Church has held to this position, condemning all forms of divinatory or magical practice aimed at knowing the future. The future is for God alone to know and reveal. The Greek National Church recently published a book on dreams (Karakovoúni 1996) in which, beginning on the first page, the author excoriates those engaging in “occult” forms of dream interpretation such as oneiromancy. He points out that many practitioners think that the dream books are part of Christianity and that accurate predictions indicate the grace of practitioners when in fact they are just “puppets of the devil” (ypokheíria tou diavólou). This book assumes the pastoral task of rescuing people from their error, something that 1,700 years of proscription have not managed to accomplish. The word “occult” (apokryphistikó) refers to the fact noted above that followers of the dream books do not have an articulated model of the mechanism by which popular oneiromancy works.5 This opacity or inconsistent reference to “energy,” “instinct,” or ghosts is charac5

The domain of the occult has been traced back to late antiquity in the Greek-speaking world and defined generally as “extraordinary natural phenomena whose exact causes are unknown” (Magdalino and Mavroudi 2006: 20).

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Dreaming and Temporality in Greece

terized as occult in contrast to the mechanism at work in acceptable Christian dreams, namely, the power of saints who communicate with the human spirit in dreams. Readers may reflect on how they would articulate the mechanism at work behind their own concept of “luck.” Up to this point two dream interpretive paradigms have been at issue. The Orthodox Christians of Greece are steeped in both of these, one (prophetic dreaming of saints) by virtue of their religion, the other (the dream book approach) by virtue of their cultural tradition. The oneirocritic tradition has no leaders or doctrinal boundaries, and this makes it amenable to symbiosis with other approaches to dream interpretation. As the Church writer pointed out above, a great many followers of the dream books do not even realize that the Church opposes this practice.6 Greek Orthodox Christianity would ideally eliminate oneiromancy, but it has not managed to do so. The dream book approach thus remains a “superstition” opposed only sporadically. Into this uneasily shared field of dreams psychoanalytic and other psychological perspectives of American or Northern European origin have entered over the past fifty years. One of the initial impediments to the spread of psychotherapies was the fact that the “psycho-” part of the word comes from the Greek word psykhí (soul). This confusingly references the domain of religion. Normally priests, usually confessors, are in charge of analyzing a person’s soul. The Church is critical of psychotherapies for not recognizing the existence of God, angels, or demons, and this renders such therapists unable to recognize the spiritual messages sent to humans (Karakovoúni 1996: 25).7 The psychotherapeutic and Orthodox Christian approaches to dreaming do, however, share the basic premise that dreams reflect an individual’s habitual thoughts and practices; they originate in the self. Even if God or the devil communicates the content of a dream, making it seem exogenous, it actually results from the private life and morality of the individual because God chooses those who are pure while the devil exploits those who are weak and sinful. The oneirocritic tradition, by 6

A similar situation holds for the evil eye. People know that the Church recognizes the existence of the evil eye. Most people do not, however, realize that the Church considers that only priests may perform ceremonies to remove it. In practice, people resort much more frequently to lay unbewitchers, and the Church deems this to be an illegitimate superstitious practice (Roussou n.d.). 7 As Jung points out in his Psychology and Religion (1960), the development of modern psychology rests precisely on the transition from religious explanation of mental states in terms of animate, exogenous supernatural forces such as demons and angels to explanation in terms of dynamic endogenous emotional forces described in inanimate analytic terms. 29

Dreaming and Temporality in Greece

contrast, focuses on dreams that predict the future and that do not stem from the personality of the dreamer. According to Artemidorus (1.1), The óneiros [dream], then, differs from the enýpnion [another word for “dream”] in the following way: the first indicates future occurrences, while the second indicates a present state. One may understand it more clearly as follows: the passions, by their nature, tend to come to the surface where they are registered by the mind, resulting in dream imagery and sensations [oneirogmoús]. For example, it is natural for a lover to seem to be with his object of desire in a dream and for a frightened man to see what he fears, or for a hungry man to eat and a thirsty man to drink. . . . It is possible, therefore, to view these cases in which people experience bodily passions not as predictions of the future, but rather a reminder of the present. Óneiroi contained arbitrary “symbols” requiring interpretation in order to learn the future, but enýpnia were direct symptoms of personal psychological conditions or states of health. This personal psycho-physiological dimension, the target of contemporary psychology, held relatively little interest for a professional interpreter such as Artemidorus. His interpretations focused on the socioeconomic situation of the dreamer and what the dream vision portended for this person’s health or social standing.

Neither Freud nor Artemidorus By titling his book The Interpretation of Dreams8 Freud alluded to Artemidorus’s Oneirokritika, which is also rendered as The Interpretation of Dreams in its English translation. Granted the fundamental differences in orientation between psychoanalysis and oneiromancy, what might he have intended by this? The historian Simon Price considered just this question in a well-known article entitled “The Future of Dreams from Freud to Artemidorus.”9 He concluded that, although Freud liked to think that he carried on the tradition of Artemidorus,10 he was 8 Die Traumdeutung. This title also played off the German term for astrology, Sterndeutung, flirting doubly with the discredited. 9 Originally published in 1986 and revised as Price (2004). See also the illuminating study by Khryssanthópoulos (2005). 10 Consider his opening to “Delusion and Dream in Jensen’s Gradiva”: “Science and the majority of educated people smile if they are set the task of interpreting a dream. Only the common people,

30

Neither Freud nor Artemidorus

actually standing it on its head. He was enlisting Artemidorus in his campaign to assert that dreams carried hidden meanings that required interpretation, but the similarity ended there. In the first pages of his monumental study Freud began to distance himself from the futurity of ancient dream interpretation, and he pointedly returned to this matter in its final paragraph: “And the value of dreams for giving us knowledge of the future? There is no question of that. It would be truer to say instead that they give us knowledge of the past. For dreams are derived from the past in every sense”(Freud 1976 [1900]: 783).11 For the present study of historical consciousness, Freud’s instruction to look toward the past would seem to be the most relevant, but I follow neither Freud nor Artemidorus. In line with the existential approach developed in the preceding chapter, dreams are not exclusively oriented toward the past or the future but rather in all three temporal directions at once: past, present, and future. If anything, dreams are about the present, but this present is always emerging from a past and heading into a future, which the individual projects. Freud’s impact on Euro-American culture has changed our language, and this carries dangers for a study such as this one. The word “unconscious” in relation to a subject like dreams creates the assumption that a Freudian notion of the unconscious is in use. Here I relativize Freud’s repressed unconscious and place it alongside other bodies of unconscious material: ideas we have simply forgotten but could recall without distress (termed “preconscious” by Freud), who cling to superstitions and who on this point are carrying on the convictions of antiquity, continue to insist that dreams can be interpreted. The author of The Interpretation of Dreams has ventured, in the face of the reproaches of strict science, to become a partisan of antiquity and superstition. He is, it is true, far from believing that dreams foretell the future, for the unveiling of which men have vainly striven from time immemorial by every forbidden means” (Freud 1959 [1907]: 7, Khryssanthópoulos 2005: 89, 135). 11 To be fair, the sentences immediately following attempt to maintain some validity for the ancient tradition, but this is a strained nod: “Nevertheless the ancient belief that dreams foretell the future is not wholly devoid of truth. By picturing our wishes as fulfilled, dreams are after all leading us into the future. But this future, which the dreamer pictures as the present, has been moulded by his indestructible wish into a perfect likeness of the past.” This suggests that dreams involve the future of the past (up to the present moment of the dream) rather than the future from the point of view of the present. Freud’s attitude toward predictive dreams is clarified by his analysis of a sample predictive dream written up just six days after he completed The Interpretation of Dreams and included as an appendix to it in the Standard Edition (1950 [1899]). A woman dreamt that she would meet a man, and she did. Freud determined that this was a nostalgic dream of a past rendezvous with a lover, cast as a prophetic dream after the event but retrojected before it by a trick of the mind.

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Dreaming and Temporality in Greece

ideas that are incorporated into the body as relatively automatic modes of operation such as Bourdieu’s (1977) habitus and Damasio’s (1994) bodily distributed thought, the “adaptive unconscious” which has developed to manage complex decision making (Wilson 2004), and the creative unconscious thinking identified by Dijksterhuis and Nordgren (2006). None of the above is created by repression, and Freud himself recognized that the unconscious was much broader than the area created by repression. He referred to this as the “descriptive sense of the unconscious” (1964 [1933]: 70–71; LaPlanche and Pontalis 1973: 326). Rather than avoid Freud by using a term such as “nonconscious,” I use the term “unconscious” (in the broadest descriptive sense).

The Ethnography This study draws on field research conducted since 1995 in the mountain village of Kóronos (η Κόρωνος) in eastern Naxos. Kóronos lies about ten kilometers farther along the road past Apeíranthos, where I carried out previous research (Stewart 1991). To get to it you pass though a gap in the mountains that forms the gateway to “the high places” (ta anoúmera in the local dialect). At this veritable “gate of the winds” authorities recently built a new monument to Aeolos, a wind farm (Aiolikó párko) of towering steel windmills (fig. 2).

Figure 2. Kóronos, with wind turbines rising above it on a flank of Mt. Amómaxi. 32

The Ethnography

The district of Kóronos looks eastward across the Aegean to the small islands of Donoússa and Mákares, and Amorgós sometimes appears on clear days. The current year-round population of Kóronos is approximately five hundred. In summer the number of residents swells to over two thousand as Koronidiátes who have moved to Athens or abroad come back for the summer holidays. Many have homes in the coastal hamlet of Liónas, which lies within the communal district. Kóronos is built on the sides of a ravine, with a stream running seasonally through the center of the village. The main island road passes above Kóronos, and therefore visitors typically descend into the village. Before 1928 the village was known by a variety of different names. Many called it Trikokkiés (the name of the neighborhood around the parish church of St. Marina). In historical documents it is more frequently referred to as Vóthroi (initially the name for just the lower part of the village). In pre-twentieth-century Greek, “Vóthroi” meant “ravines.” Over time this word came to mean “cesspit,” an unwelcome association that prompted alteration in the 1920s to the present name Kóronos (after the local mountain). In the past, Kóronos and its outlying hamlets fell within the administrative unit (dímos) of Koronída. Residents of Vóthroi/Kóronos thus came to be called Koronidiátes rather than Koroniótes as one might have expected. I knew that Kóronos had a tradition of dreaming from my earlier field research, when I attended the largest annual pilgrimage on Naxos at a remote spot in the Kóronos district named Argokoíli. At that time I heard about the discovery of icons through dreams and visions. During my time on Naxos in the 1980s I also came to know various people from Kóronos. I established a good relationship with Manólis Manolás, who was then president of the Association of Koronidiátes in Athens. In 1991 Manólis moved back to the village with his family and was elected mayor. When I began the field research for this study, which I carried out in a series of summer and other occasional visits between 1995 and 2005, he helped me to secure accommodation in the village guesthouse, introduced me to a wide range of people, and assisted me in locating and copying documents. How many foreign researchers are fortunate enough to be long-standing friends with the mayor of the village where they conduct fieldwork? On Naxos (fig. 3), the mountain village of Kóronos is famed for its traditions of dreaming and prophesying. This reputation represents a double-edged sword. On the one hand, Kóronos has the responsibility for overseeing the largest annual pilgrimage on Naxos. Every year on the Friday after Easter Sunday, the feast day of the Panagía12 of the Life-Giving Source (Zoödókhou Pigís), thousands of pilgrims 12

Panagía means “All-Holy,” short for “All-Holy Mother of God.” Hirschon (1989: 152) points 33

Dreaming and Temporality in Greece

from all over the island flock to Argokoíli, where villagers discovered a miraculous icon of the Panagía.13 The villagers are accorded respect for their involvement in the original events and their ongoing custodianship of the shrine. Many pilgrims receive hospitality from the Koronidiátes, who accommodate them overnight in the many cells built at the pilgrimage site for this purpose.

Figure 3. Naxos.

At other times, people from other parts of the island may, however, refer to the Koronidiátes disparagingly as oneirevámenoi. A coarse-sounding dialect variant of the standard term oneirevómenos, it literally means “those who see (religious) dreams”; broadly, it could be rendered as “visionaries.” Delivered in a out that Greek Orthodox Christians focus on Mary as mother while Catholics tend to represent her “as a young girl, and to dwell on her virginal quality.” The Orthodox Church also diverges from Catholicism in not accepting the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception promulgated by the pope only in 1854, according to which Mary was, exceptionally among humans, born free from ancestral sin. Orthodox Christians do, of course, accept that Mary conceived Christ while remaining virginal. My consistent use of the name “Panagía” calls attention to the particularity of Orthodox Christian worldview (Dubisch 1995: 236). 13 In Stewart (1991: 90) I offered a brief account of the events. See also Seraïdari (2007: 184ff.). 34

The Ethnography

derisory tone, it connotes people who are out of touch with reality—dreamers, verging on insanity. This negative attitude was apparent, for example, in the words of an educated Naxiote woman whom I chanced to meet in the relatively cosmopolitan port town of Khóra. Upon learning that I was about to take a bus up into the interior mountains and stay there for a period of weeks, a look of shock and displeasure came over her face. She turned to me with mocking scorn: “Come off it, Charles, what are you going to do way up there in the middle of the ditch (lákko) together with those crazies (me tous oneirevámenous)?” The different views of Kóronos reflect different reactions to a long history of dreaming there. Since the early nineteenth century the village has basked in moments of glory and endured phases of prophetic failure during which the dreamers stirred up factional strife in the village and provoked the ire of the Church and other islanders. They are still living the consequences; indeed, the process has not finished.

35

Chapter Three Dreaming of Buried icons in the Kingdom of greece

A

t the beginning of the nineteenth century most of the Balkans and the eastern Mediterranean lay under the control of the Ottoman sultan. Greece was the first country to rebel and gain its independence. This chapter concerns events on Naxos and the nearby island of Tinos during the war of independence and in the twenty years thereafter, when a Bavarian king ruled Greece. Historical dates are given to clarify the sequence of local events, place them in relationship to national political developments, and permit the comparison of village efforts to control their religious affairs with their parallel efforts to retain control of their natural resources. My resort to chronology demonstrates the degree to which this study works in the mode of historicism even as it examines nonhistoricist modes of historical consciousness.

The Discovery of the First Icons We know the events of the 1830s in Kóronos from several different sources, the most illuminating being the account by a local priest, Geórgios Korrés, dated 23 April 1836. Drawing on the eyewitness testimony of five of his fellow clerics, this same priest also compiled a separate, earlier description of events occurring during the period between 1831 and the end of 1835—that is, before the discovery of the icons.1 This report was copied on 26 January 1836 by a notary in Khóra and sent by the local government on Naxos to the Holy Synod of Greece 1

In 1835 the mineralogist Karl Gustav Fiedler (1841: 303) visited Kóronos at the behest of King Otto to evaluate the emery deposits of eastern Naxos. He reported an area (Argokoíli) that was off-limits to mining because people were digging there to unearth “a wonder-working icon or cross.” Furthermore, they told him that “a church should be built” there. I thank Dorothy Scharlau for alerting me to this source. 37

Dreaming of Buried Icons in the Kingdom of Greece

in Athens, where it recently came to light.2 In addition, we possess a report filed by Theodóritos Marmarás, a canon (protosýngkelos) from the bishopric of Attica, who was sent to Kóronos to investigate on behalf of the Holy Synod in late spring 1836, shortly after the icons were discovered. There is also a brief account of a visit to Argokoíli in April 1836 by a skeptical cleric from the highland Naxos village of Drymallía (Sérgis 2000: 26). Other documents found in the archives of the Holy Synod, consisting of communications between the bishop of Naxos and the Holy Synod and between them and various government authorities, further illuminate the events in question.3 The events of concern here commence in 1831, when the Panagía began to appear to three shepherds from Kóronos, siblings named Maria, Geórgios, and Nikólaos. She instructed them to dig for an icon depicting her that lay buried in a mountainside. In his two accounts, Father Korrés (1962: 4; 2002a: 23) states that these were not dreams but rather waking visions (phótisi, orámata). The surrounding community debated whether these might be cases of demonic possession, and this remained a speculation on all sides over the years to come. Fellow villagers and officials could dismiss the visionaries with this charge. The visionaries’ defenders contended that everyone in the village (and beyond) was already currently tyrannized by the devil. The manifestation of the Panagía represented the beginning of a benevolent but painful reversal of that condition. Father Korrés himself took the view that God had sent demons among the men and women of the village on account of their many sins. This he did in his “infinite wisdom in order to return the deceived and unrepentant to the straight road of [his] commandments” (2002a: 21). The visions continued for years, and the shepherds dug away on a hard, “immovable mountainside” (asálefto vounó). With opinion split over whether these were holy or demonic visions, the bishop of Paros and Naxos came and blessed the excavation site with holy water. The following day a local priest performed a liturgy there “so that either the truth would appear or the superstition [deisidaimonía, lit. “demon fear/worship”] would disappear” (Korrés 2002a: 23). The Panagía subsequently assaulted (evíaze) still more people. They 2 The Holy Synod, established in 1833, is a council of bishops headed by the metropolitan of Athens. It is the highest ecclesiastical authority in the Greek Orthodox Church. 3 I thank Iánnis Khouzoúris for providing me with photocopies of some of these documents. He has now published them all in his quarterly magazine, Argokoiliótissa (“I istoría” 2001a–d, 2002a, b; “Poreía” 2005). The Korrés account of 23 April 1836 is cited as Korrés (1962) and that of 26 January 1836 as Korrés (2002a, b).

38

The Discovery of the First Icons

joined the original diggers but did not uncover anything more than the foundations of some old (possibly ancient) houses. A new sequence of events began in 1835, when the Panagía began appearing to two new visionaries. The first of them, Khristódoulos Manolás, a young, illiterate farmer, owned a plot of land at Argokoíli. The search for the icon had been going on near his property, and several of the faithful had asked him not to plant crops on his land that year. He had replied skeptically that unless the Panagía manifested herself directly he would go ahead and plant. On 13 November 1835, Khristódoulos went to bed at midnight, and while still awake he felt two heavy blows delivered to his knees. He shouted for mercy, at which point a voice asked. “Are you convinced now that my home is at Argokoíli?” (Korrés 2002a: 23). On 15 November, the commencement of the forty-day fast before Christmas, the Panagía appeared as a light mist (leptótatos aír) enveloping Khristódoulos. “Taking his mouth as her instrument” (Korrés 2002a: 23), she held forth about the location of her icon and enjoined people to construct for her a church and a monastery. She even supplied the architectural dimensions of both of these buildings. When he asked her how her icon could come to be buried in solid rock, the Panagía explained (Korrés 1962:4) that it had belonged to an Egyptian family that had fled persecution during the period of iconoclasm (eighth and ninth centuries CE) and settled on the remote hillside at Argokoíli. Rather than face further persecution, the Egyptians had prayed for the earth to swallow them up. The Panagía added that if people would dig faithfully the first thing they would find would be the bones of this couple and their child, which should be preserved as holy. Hearing this, a crowd of people went to Argokoíli and began digging. Over the course of a long day, they found nothing. As they were gathering up their implements, Khristódoulos saw a vision (ephotísthi) indicating where to strike with his pickaxe. With one blow he opened the way into a cavern. Digging inside, people quickly found some bones. All present raised their hands and praised the Panagía. She descended in the form of a holy cloud (theía episkíasis) and told Khristódoulos that the earth in which the bones were buried could heal the faithful. Reports circulated that the bones and surrounding earth had a pleasant smell, were warm to the touch, and could cure illness. Khristódoulos responded with a request for further divine manifestation; he asked the Panagía to reveal herself there and then on top of the dirt and bones. She replied, “How can I possibly come out, since you have not prepared my place? There is no throne for me should I come out now. Do not neglect the building of my house (oíkos) but keep working with solid faith” (Korrés 1962: 5; 2002a: 24). 39

Dreaming of Buried Icons in the Kingdom of Greece

On another occasion Khristódoulos had an ecstatic vision (ílthe eis ékstasin) inside the parish church of Kóronos, St. Marina. A divine power invisibly bound his hands (in a position of supplication across his chest), and he stared skyward. Coming at him he saw a fiery wheel with the Panagía in the middle accompanied by numerous saints all dressed in white like snow and singing. Christ appeared as well, and villagers possessed by the devil began to scream and shout. One demon-possessed girl cried, “The [Panagía] Argokoiliótissa and St. Marina have arrived along with a great number of angels, and they are tormenting us.” A demonized man named Iánnis began to foam at the mouth (Korrés 1962:6–7). The bishop of Naxos, according to Korrés, permitted a thirty-five-year-old itinerant monk named Gerásimos Mavromátis to travel to Kóronos, ostensibly to take confessions, impose regimes of prayer and fasting, and, granted the state of affairs in Kóronos, perform exorcisms. Once arrived in the village, Gerásimos began to have his own dreams, in which the Panagía told him the same things as she had told Khristódoulos.4 When one demon boasted (via a possessed girl) that he would not come out till the icon of the Argokoiliótissa was unearthed, Gerásimos took this as evidence that the icon was indeed there. In one dream the Panagía appeared to Gerásimos and told him that she wanted to give a pledge (arravóna) that she would appear. He went to Argokoíli the following day and discovered a silver coin with Constantine the Great on it. Gerásimos took this coin with him and left the village to spread the word to other villages on Naxos.5 On the eve of St. Nikólaos, 6 December, a party of three men went out from the village to Argokoíli to burn incense at the cave of the Panagía. Among them was a man named Manouíl Sakhás, like Khristódoulos a local farmer/shepherd, married and with children. On the way, the party was set upon by a horde of demons transformed into animals. The men all made the sign of the cross and beseeched the Argokoiliótissa, whereupon the demons disappeared. On reaching the cave, they saw a light and smelled a pleasant smell. Others subsequently sighted celestial lights projecting into the cave (Korrés 2002b: 21). Father Korrés refers to a cell (kellí) that had been built at the site of the cavern where priests and other faithful occasionally stayed overnight. Enveloped in a descending cloud and in a state of ecstasy, Khristódoulos saw another vision of the Panagía. She told him to tell everyone “that they should build me a residence (katoikían), a spacious dwelling (evrýkhoron xenodokheíon),6 a 4 5 6

40

Canon Marmarás to Holy Synod, 18 June 1836 (“I istoria tis Panagías” 2000a: 21). Canon Marmarás to Holy Synod, 18 June 1836 (“I istoría” 2000a: 22). Xenodokheíon means “hotel” in contemporary Greek, but in theological and liturgical contexts

The Discovery of the First Icons

special (xekhóriston, “separate”) place to set me where those coming to visit may rest. Then I will come out. Do not forget, people, and lose faith. But where am I to dwell?” (Korrés 2002b: 21). Soon thereafter the Panagía spoke via Manouíl to the assembled and gave instructions for building her “monastery,” which would be “large enough to hold all the inhabitants of the island” (Korrés 2002b: 21). Manouíl delivered further messages in a state of possession. Speaking through him, the Panagía instructed people to repent and cease from sin. In that way her monastery would be built. Father Korrés expressed his astonishment that a simple, illiterate farmer like Manouíl could deliver the eloquent sermon and the intricate hymn to the Panagía that he records.7 A third phase of the story began in February 1836, when a new visionary appeared on the scene, a man named Ioánnis Maggióros (nicknamed Doumbrogiánnis). Like Khristódoulos and Manouíl, he was a poor, unlettered shepherd from Kóronos, and as had Khristódoulos he initially expressed his disbelief in the reported workings of the Panagía, declaring Manouíl’s visions words of the devil. Then one night he suffered a seizure in all of his limbs that lasted until daybreak, and he changed his mind and went to dig at Argokoíli along with the others. After work on his first day he went home, and during an afternoon nap he saw a vision (vlépei eis to oramá tou) of the Panagía. She told him that there were three icons in the cavern: the Panagía, the Lament for Christ, and St. John the Forerunner. On a subsequent occasion he began to sing a hymn about the Resurrection in a very sweet voice, and he instructed Manouíl to go and tell the Panagía that it was time for the icons to have their own resurrection, having been in the ground for 1,350 years (Korrés 1962: 11).8 The news of these events reached the bishop of Naxos, Gavriíl, who, although previously well disposed toward the discovery of the icons at Argokoíli, now withdrew his support. Undeterred, Ioánnis saw a vision instructing him that all three icons would be uncovered on 25 March, the day of the Annunciation of the Panagía. On that day seven priests celebrated the liturgy in the village’s parish church. Immediately after services they took the major icons from the church it connotes a hospitable dwelling rather than a commercial hotel. The Greek word for home, spíti, derives from Latin hospitium, “hospitality, inn.” I am grateful to Yannis Hamilakis for the insights drawn upon here. 7 Shortly after this point Korrés’s first report comes to an end. He lists the names of six priests who were witnesses to the miracles described. The document is dated 30 October 1835, but, as we have seen, the events described go into December 1835, so this date must be inaccurate. Perhaps further details were inserted before the document was copied by a notary on 28 January 1836. 8 This would place the deposit of the icons in 486 CE, too early for iconoclasm. 41

Dreaming of Buried Icons in the Kingdom of Greece

and carried them in procession with a flock of villagers to Argokoíli. There at the site a crowd numbering in the thousands had assembled. Ioánnis descended into the cavern and found the three icons.9 These were passed among the priests and placed in the cell that had already been built. At the moment of discovery it began to drizzle, and there was thunder and lightning in the sky. Miracles of healing occurred, and those still in thrall to demons suffered violent fits and spontaneous exorcisms. One doubting priest in the mountain village of Philóti was blinded (Korrés 1962: 13). The first pilgrim from beyond Naxos, a man from the neighboring island of Paros, heard the news and came to Argokoíli, where he was cured of a terrible rash on his hand. That very day, on the crest of these wondrous events, Ioánnis had a further vision—that on 23 April, the day of St. George, one further icon of the Panagía would be discovered at Argokoíli. Excavations began at another spot called Thólos, two kilometers down the hill, to the east of Argokoíli, and a deaf-mute boy from the island of Syros, who was digging in the hope of receiving a divine cure, found an icon. Claimed to be the work of St. Luke, it was described it as one-eighth the size of a sheet of paper and executed as an impression (anáglypho) in the unusual medium of wax and mastich (kiromastíkha). This icon is the focus of the pilgrimage to Argokoíli today. On its discovery the boy handed this tiny icon to the bishop in full view of the thousands assembled.10 On this same day, 23 April 1836, his own name day, Father Korrés ended his second account (1962). Four icons had been discovered in the space of a month. The Birth of the Greek State The first visions of the three siblings—Maria, Geórgios, and Nikólaus—coincided with major transitions in the government of Greece. The war for independence from the Ottoman Empire had broken out in March 1821. In popular traditions the date of the uprising was 25 March, the day of the Annunciation of 9

According to contemporary oral traditions he descended wearing only a robe so that no one could say that he had planted the icons. 10 In what appears to be a damage-limitation exercise on behalf of the bishop, the Holy Synod’s investigator, Canon Marmarás, asserted that the bishop was “unable to refuse”” an invitation to attend on 23 April on account of the level of popular involvement. He went to Argokoíli on that day and with the crowd looking on could not do anything other than enter the cell and revere the previously discovered icons, but he left right away without speaking to anyone. News that an icon had been discovered reached him the following day while he was still in the vicinity officiating at a private ceremony. His first reaction was to try “to “hide the icon,” that is, confiscate it (“I istoría” 2000a: 24), but he was forced to give in to the crowd’s demand to have it back—an event independently reported by a cleric from the village of Drymallías (Sérgis 2000: 26). 42

The Discovery of the First Icons

the Panagía—the gestation of Christ serving as a sacred analogy for the inevitable emergence of an independent Greece. The decisive moment in the war came at the battle of Navarino (October 1827) off the southwest coast of the Peloponnese, where a joint French and British naval force destroyed much of the Ottoman fleet. It became clear at this point that Greece would gain independence but also that France, Britain, and Russia would decide upon its national boundaries and form of government. While these matters were being worked out Count John Capodistrias, a former diplomatic adviser to Russia, served as head of the Greek state. Capodistrias set about repairing the shattered economy and laying the foundations of a national infrastructure. He established the National Bank of Greece, inaugurated a currency, and tried to distribute land to landless peasants. His assassination in September 1831 plunged Greece back into a state of chaos. In May 1832 the three Powers (France, England, and Russia) and Bavaria signed the final treaty paving the way for Greek independence under the rule of a seventeen-year-old monarch, Otto.11 He arrived in Greece early in 1833 along with three Bavarian regents, advisers, and administrators who would serve until his twentieth birthday in June 1835. Otto was Catholic, and throughout his rule he resisted Russian and Greek pressure to convert to Orthodoxy (Frazee 1969: 94). The regent in charge of the Ministries of Justice and Ecclesiastical Affairs, Professor Georg von Maurer, was a Protestant. The two of them lost little time in establishing a Greek national church under the direction of a Holy Synod of bishops elected and overseen by the king (Frazee 1969: 113). This represented a major shift from the status quo ante, in which the patriarch of Constantinople oversaw the Orthodox Church throughout the Ottoman Empire. With Constantinople still firmly in Ottoman hands, the patriarch was effectively in “enemy territory.” Having just fought a war of liberation against the Ottomans, the Greeks welcomed the decision to form an autocephalous national church, although the number of traditionalist opponents grew with time (Frazee 1969: 132). What worried the Orthodox population of the Kingdom of Greece—a territory consisting only of the Peloponnese, a portion of continental Greece, and the western Aegean islands—was that their rulers were riding roughshod over venerable Orthodox institutions. Greece was possibly becoming Protestantized or Catholicized.12 Such a specter would have 11 Frederick Otto von Wittelsbach, second son of King Ludwig of Bavaria, known in Greek as Óthon. 12 As Frazee (1969: 114) has noted, Maurer’s blueprint for the separation of Church and state in

43

Dreaming of Buried Icons in the Kingdom of Greece

been keenly sensed on islands such as Naxos or Tinos, which the Venetians had governed for centuries. These islands still had Catholic populations.13 The historian Charles Frazee characterized the relations between Catholics and Orthodox at this time as one of “simmering resentment and hatred” (1979: 319). Among the first ecclesiastical reforms pursued by the regency government was the closure of all monasteries with fewer than six monks and the nationalization of all property. An exception was made for Catholic monasteries and Church properties, which, on Naxos, were substantial.14 This preference quite probably irritated the local Orthodox population. It punctured their sense of equal entitlement as fellow citizens and members of the dominant religion of the country.15 In addition, the synod placed restrictions on the movement of monks outside their home monasteries. Previously, itinerant monks had been prominent spiritual reference points in the countryside, praying for people, often carrying with them sacred icons and relics, and dispensing spiritual advice while raising funds for their monasteries. The new synod curtailed such activities and along with them the practice of allowing weddings and baptisms to be celebrated at monasteries (Frazee 1969: 126). These reforms destroyed a dimension of Orthodox spirituality that stretched back deep into the Middle Ages. The changes sweeping independent Greece, all packed into a few years, resembled those that had occurred in northern Europe during the Reformation and the French Revolution. In addition to closing down monasteries the new government imposed restrictions on the building of private chapels and new monasteries. The erection of any such structures would henceforth require the king’s permission. New laws aimed at protecting archaeological remains on Greek soil placed the very activity of digging under increased scrutiny. As Maurer (1976 [1835]: 544) wrote,

Greece paralleled closely the 1818 Constitution of the Bavarian Protestant Church. 13 Maurer put the number of Catholics in independent Greece at between fifteen and twenty thousand (1976 [1835]: 325). By far the largest community lived on the island of Syros. On Naxos the Catholic population numbered around three or four hundred, mainly residing in Khóra, in the kástro (fortified citadel) built by the Venetians. This was the seat of the Catholic archbishop of Greece and the site of an Ursuline convent (see Frazee 1978). 14 At the Conference of London in 1828, France had extracted the promise that in the new Greek state Catholic lands and freedom to worship would be protected (Frazee 1979: 324). 15 Beginning with the earliest provisional constitution drawn up by the revolutionaries in 1822 and confirmed in the official constitution of the Greek state in 1844, the “Eastern Orthodox Church” was recognized as the dominant religion of Greece. 44

The Discovery of the First Icons

Beyond the fact that they hold great interest for archaeologists and historians, Greek antiquities have enormous significance, most of all, for the Kingdom of Greece. This is because it was the idea of ancient Greece that inspired general European interest in the heroic battle for modern Greece. . . . This spirit of Greek antiquity must be maintained into the future as a magnetic bond between contemporary Greece and European civilization. With this aim in mind, Maurer oversaw the passage of laws in May 1834 aimed at safeguarding the Greek cultural patrimony. The first article in the section on laws governing antiquities (Article 61) stated that “all antiquities inside Greece, as works of the ancestors of the Greek people, are considered the national property (ktíma ethnikón) of all Greeks in general” (Petrákos 1982: 132). Article 65 clarified the issue of ownership: “As regards objects discovered on privately owned land, whether beneath it, inside walls, below piles of rubble, or however else hidden: After the date on which the present law comes into force, whether these antiquities are found by chance, or intentional excavation, the State shall own half of their value . . . ” (Petrákos 1982: 133). And Article 100 decreed that no one would be allowed to dig for antiquities without first obtaining official permission (139).16 A fine of between 25 and 200 drachmas and confiscation of any antiquities discovered were to be imposed on offenders. These laws redefined many of the activities then in process deep in the interior mountains of Naxos. What had begun as a local instance of a type of visionary practice familiar throughout the Orthodox world suddenly stood in a different light. The voice of the Panagía instructing people to unearth her icon and build her a “spacious dwelling,” or a monastery, could now be construed as an incitement to break the law on several counts. Various official inquiries into these activities were made, and the documents they generated provide another perspective to set against that given by Father Korrés.

16 In an encyclical issued under Capodistrias on 23 June 1830 the government had already taken steps to require permission to dig for antiquities (Petrákos 1982: 116). In September 1833 officials on Naxos (notably customs officials) had been informed that all commerce in or excavation of antiquities was forbidden (“I istoría” 2000b:21). For an overview of Greek legislation on antiquities up to the present, see Voudouri (2010).

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Dreaming of Buried Icons in the Kingdom of Greece

Containing Charisma During the period of visionary activity in the 1830s, amidst the flux in state government and legislation, Naxos received a new bishop. The Cretan Gavriíl Sylivós arrived in late 1833 to take up residence in the episcopal quarters next to the metropolitan church in Khóra. His small see comprised only the islands of Paros and Naxos.17 Gavriíl came from nearby Tinos, where he had served as bishop from 1810 until 1833. During that time he had played a central role in validating the dreams of the nun Pelagía, whose visions had led to excavations culminating in the discovery of a buried icon of the Annunciation of the Panagía in 1823, the construction of a large church (finished in 1831), and the establishment of a pilgrimage. Gavriíl was therefore no stranger to charismatic visionary phenomena such as were occurring in Kóronos at the time of his arrival. Gavriíl’s transfer to Naxos was ordered by the new government, which had just taken over the reins of the Greek Church and had reduced the number of bishops to ten, corresponding to the ten departments (nomoí) into which it had divided the Kingdom of Greece. The move to the see of Paronaxía was certainly a step down, and Gavriíl left Tinos full of disappointment after having been accused by his second in command, Amvrósios Phrantzís, of “most unexemplary cowardice” (aparadeigmátisti deilía) during the war for independence (Vitális 1973: 150).18 Gavriíl would have well realized how times had changed. He was no longer contributing to an independence movement by feeding popular spiritual and political hopes for redemption. Now he was operating with tarnished patriotic credentials under the thumb of a national church within a government run by non-Orthodox Christian officials at the highest levels. Gavriíl first appears in his own right as the author of a letter dated 6 February 1836 exhorting his local priests in Kóronos and the surrounding villages to persuade people “to desist from these fantasies (phantasías) and from disturbing the peace” to avoid being “punished by the government.”19 He enclosed with that letter a warning notice from the local police to be read aloud in the villages. The Holy Synod matched the pressure from secular authorities by demanding to know why Gavriíl had not informed them of the ongoing excavations in search of icons, which were disrupting the regular working routines of people in the village. They castigated him further for allowing his priests to take part in 17 18 19

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The official title of this see is Mitropolítis Paronaxías (Metropolitan of Paros and Naxos). Vitális documents Gavriíl’s patriotism and rejects this allegation of cowardice. Bishop of Naxos to parish priest of Vóthroi, 6 February 1836 (“I istoría” 2000b: 22).

Containing Charisma

activities arising from “superstitions,” which “injure the soul and body of true Christians.”20 Father Korrés asserted that at least six priests had witnessed the various events and validated them as credible manifestations of the Panagía. The synod ordered Gavriíl to take action to stop this movement from progressing.21 Gavriíl immediately distanced himself from the events in Kóronos, claiming that those involved were suffering from a severe form of epilepsy and had been for many years.22 He insisted that none of his priests were involved, only “simple people.”23 Evidently, however, either the Holy Synod had already seen a copy of Father Korrés’s first report or a popular account of the miracles of Argokoíli had come into its possession.24 Gavriíl was caught in a bind between fostering a visionary movement as he had on Tinos and doing the anticharismatic bidding of the synod. As a result, his position fluctuated. As seen above, Father Korrés perceived Gavriíl as initially supporting the search for the icons but withdrawing this support in the run-up to the discovery of the first icons on 25 March 1836. Father Korrés also thought that the bishop had encouraged the monk Gerásimos to come to Kóronos, where he stimulated faith that the icons would be discovered. Under pressure from the synod, which had found out about the presence of monks at Argokoíli, Gavriíl sent Gerásimos and another monk back to their monastery on Paros. The synod applauded this action in a letter of 17 March 1836 and for good measure urged Gavriíl to instruct the abbot of this monastery not to let his monks wander “whenever and wherever they want” (“I istoría tis Panagías” 2000b: 24). This instruction reflected the new legislation on itinerant monks mentioned above. By mid-1836, after the discovery of the icons, the beleaguered bishop and the Holy Synod no doubt hoped that the inhabitants of Kóronos would return to their normal lives. In a step to insure this outcome, the synod’s investigator prevailed upon two of the local priests to sign a document promising, “upon pain of being defrocked” (poiní kathairéseos), not to celebrate offices using the new icons and not to take the icons back to the discovery site (“I istoría 20

Holy Synod to Bishop of Naxos, 21 February 1836 (“I istoría” 2000b: 22–23). Holy Synod to Bishop of Naxos, 21 February 1836 (“I istoría” 2000b: 22). 22 In his report filed in June 1836, the Holy Synod’s investigator wrote that Vóthroi (Kóronos) had been beset by an epidemic of epilepsy (seliniasmós, epilipsía), which “became almost infectious among all women with many children and among many men” (“I istoría” 2000a: 21). 23 Bishop of Naxos to Holy Synod, 21 February 1836 (“I istoría” 2000b: 23) 24 Holy Synod to Bishop of Naxos, 11 March 1836 (“I istoría” 2000b: 23). The synod referred to this popular account as a “handwritten pamphlet” (kheirógraphon phylládan) and sent its copy of it to Gavriíl so that he could identify the author(s) and priests involved for disciplinary action. 21

47

Dreaming of Buried Icons in the Kingdom of Greece

tis Panagías” 2000c: 23). These measures did not, however, succeed in defusing the charismatic excitement. Shortly after the departure of the investigator, two men from Kóronos who had recently been released from a five-month prison term for theft on the nearby island of Syros returned to the village, where they dreamt (oneirévontai en orámati) about further icons still buried at Argokoíli. Over the summer Manouíl and Ioánnis broke their promises and instigated new excavations. They asserted that on 14 September 1836, the day of the Holy Cross, people would find more icons, a gold cross, and a font of holy water at Argokoíli. When word of this reached Bishop Gavriíl, he wrote to the civil authorities denouncing the activities of these two “scoundrels” (atheóphovoi; “I istoría tis Panagías” 2001a: 22) and calling for their activities to be halted. The correspondence at this time refers to the Naxos visionaries as “soothsayers” (khrismológoi),25 a category of heretic that the Church had identified and sought to eradicate since the earliest councils in the Middle Ages. The Panagía’s command to build a church or some other more or less grand structure to house her icon remained strong in village consciousness. The villagers delegated two representatives, Anagnóstis Manolás and Ioánnis Khouzoúris, to submit a notarized petition (dated 25 February 1837) to the king of Greece requesting permission to build a new church to the Panagía Theotókos at Argokoíli (“I istoría tis Panagías” 2001a: 24). Three local priests signed the petition in support. The request was denied. For the ensuing year the sources contain little information, and one is tempted to assume that things grew quiet in Kóronos. Gavriíl wrote to the synod about an incident of “night excavations to find new icons” undertaken by the “deceitful soothsayers and daydreamers (oneriopoloúntes)” in the spring of 1837.26 A certain amount of digging and prophesying undoubtedly continued, because on 25 March 1838 another icon was discovered. This greatly irritated the bishop, since the local priests broke the promise they had made in May 1836 by taking icons from the village in procession to Argokoíli and officiating there at the cave. The church council of Naxos named three priests and ordered them to appear before a board of inquiry shortly after the new discovery. These same three priests—Father Korrés among them—were the ones who had earlier signed the petition to build the church.

25 Govermental Secretariat for Ecclesiatical Affairs to Holy Synod, 4 October 1836; Bishop of Naxos to Holy Synod, 24 October 1836 (“I istoría” 2001a: 23). 26 Bishop of Naxos to Holy Synod, 6 April 1837 (“I istoría” 2001a: 24).

48

Containing Charisma

In their testimonies at the inquiry, the priests concurred that Ioánnis had instigated the latest discovery through his visions, and they all referred to him with the epithet oneiropólos (daydreamer), as if to distance themselves from him. They claimed that after celebrating the liturgy for the Annunciation at the parish church of St. Marina in Kóronos a crowd numbering in the thousands had forced them to take the icons in procession to Argokoíli. Ioánnis had entered the cave and emerged with an icon, which they put into a glass frame and carried back to St. Marina. At the moment of the discovery, they reported, lightning flashed in the sky (“I istoría tis Panagías” 2001b: 20–22). The ecclesiastical and civil authorities reached the point of exasperation upon learning of these events. The police chief of Naxos sent a letter to the public prosecutor of the first court of appeals on Syros asking that a case be brought against the principal visionaries, Ioánnis, Manouíl, and Khristódoulos. The Naxos authority specified the crime as “spreading harmful superstitious practices (prolípseis) and ideas with deceit and disdain for the sacred; plunging the souls of the peaceful populace into a state of turmoil and anxiety; and inciting the populace to disobey the decrees of the government” (“I istoría tis Panagías” 2001b: 23). Various high authorities in the Justice and Ecclesiastical Departments of the Kingdom of Greece now debated how best to criminalize this Naxiote charismatic movement and successfully prosecute its chief exponents. The relevant authorities commenced by kicking themselves for not having followed through a year earlier on a case initiated against Anagnóstis Manolás (one of the two villagers delegated to present the petition to build a church to King Otto) for disseminating “wretched visions and fabricated prophecies in order to sway the uneducated populace.”27 That case had collapsed when the local policeman on Naxos charged with gathering evidence left service and no one took over the job in his stead. Such a prosecution would have been exemplary, but instead the door was left open for Ioánnis and the other visionaries to expound further prophecies leading to the discovery of the fifth icon in March 1838. This time the justice authorities planned to charge the perpetrators with violations of the Penal Code. The Athens prosecutor began advising the local authorities on how to arrest the suspects without stirring up any unnecessary local incidents or outcry (“I istoría 2001c: 14). Apparently the authorities thought that the strongest case they could make would be on grounds of 27

Public Prosecutor of Court of Appeals, Athens to Justice Department of Kingdom, 12 April 1838 (“I istoría” 2001c: 14). 49

Dreaming of Buried Icons in the Kingdom of Greece

fraud, that is, deceiving people and privately profiting from the collection of pious donations/devotions in cash or in kind. In his detailed summary of the events of March 1838 the Syros prosecutor attempted to determine whether their crime could be classified as a misdemeanor (plimmélima) or a less serious offense (ptaísma).28 He decided that although there was room for suspicion that they had personally profited, they had mainly given incoming funds to a committee that funded charitable causes and was overseen by elected local officials. The more serious charge thus could not be substantiated, and the prosecutor suggested that they be charged only with a petty crime. Such a case would normally have been heard on Naxos, but in order not to create a rallying point for their followers he suggested that the trial be held on Syros (“I istoría 2001c: 15). At this trial some fifty character witnesses from Naxos testified that the accused were truly inspired by God. All were exonerated (“I istoría” 2001d: 22). Unable to jail the ringleaders, the authorities thought of another way to defuse the movement: confiscating the icons. The followers of the visionaries in mountain Naxos conceded wonder-working power to these icons, and it was therefore essential for people to visit them periodically. Certainly the Panagía Argokoiliótissa would be resorted to annually on days such as the Annunciation (25 March, also the anniversary of the discovery of the first three icons) and the Dormition of the Panagía (15 August), while the other icons called for devotion on other dates. The Panagía Argokoíliotissa was becoming far too active a religious cult for the authorities’ comfort. The Department of Justice accordingly proposed that the icons be moved to a distant place on the island, thereby “removing the excuse for annual comings and goings in memory of the discovery.”29 The secretary for church affairs suggested removing the icons from the island altogether in order to quell “the scandals” (“I istoría” 2001c: 16). Ultimately the Naxos police chief gave the order to confiscate the icons in late 1838. They were placed in two boxes and sent to the metropolitan church in Khóra for safekeeping. In one box they placed the icon of the Panagía Argokoiliótissa, mounted in a plating of gold and silver. The other box contained “the various fragments of old icons, including a small relief.”30 28 These two categories of offense are described in Article 2 of the original Greek Penal Law (Poinikós Nómos, 1834). They are based on the German legal categories Vergehen and Übertretung. The former carried a corrective punishment (imprisonment or financial) while the latter involved a police-imposed penalty of detention or fine. 29 Secretariat of Justice to Secretariat of Church Affairs, 31 August 1838 (“I istoría” 2001c: 16). 30 Naxos Police Chief to Church Committee of Naxos, 2 November 1838 (“I istoría” 2001c: 16).

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Containing Charisma

This action may be compared with the bishop of Serres’s confiscation in 1971 of the holy icons used by the Anastenárides in their annual firewalking ritual in northern Greece (Danforth 1989: 135, 205). The Church considered the Anastenária a demonic superstition that should be stopped, much as it cast the visionaries on Naxos as heretical soothsayers and deceivers of people. In the case of the Anastenária the official Church opposed a particular form of local Orthodox Christian worship. The state did not get involved but appeared basically sympathetic to the Anastenárides. Folklorists had contended that the Anastenárides continued the ancient Greek cult of Dionysos. As an example of Greek national continuity from antiquity, the Anastenária provided valuable support for national ideology (Danforth 1989: 206; 1984). The visionaries on Naxos arose in a different political moment and provoked different worries. The newly established Greek state had recently implemented a first body of laws. The events in mountain Naxos flagrantly violated many of these strictures. Still in the first flush of legislative power, the state sought to bring the Naxiotes into compliance not only on its own behalf, through the agency of local police and public prosecutors, but also exercising its newfound authority over the Church. It got the Church to do its bidding and help suppress the movement, even though many in the Church were sympathetic to the visionaries as carrying on valid Orthodox traditions. This was variously the predicament of Bishop Gavriíl and many of the local priests. The alignment of powers in the Anastenária case was thus quite different from the Naxos case. Whereas the Church was resolutely against the Anastenária while the state was quietly supportive, on Naxos many clerics sided with the visionaries while the state opposed them. In the 1830s no one paused to consider the national political value of the visionaries’ activities. From the perspective of the state in 1836, dreaming of icons, seeing saints, and appealing to build churches were annoying aspects of Orthodox Christian folk culture that needed to be curbed and rationalized. Such activities did not look like continuities from antiquity at the time, nor have they been claimed as such subsequently. The irony is that dreams of saints arguably do reflect the transformation of a continuous tradition stretching back to Asclepius (Stewart 2004). The firewalking of the Anastenárides, in contrast, has no ancient Greek antecedent whatsoever (Danforth 1984). Placing the holy icons in a box and hiding them was doubtless a harsh measure. For Orthodox Christians, icons are charged objects with human-like attributes. They can “suffer” and must, for example, never be hung on a nail, but 51

Dreaming of Buried Icons in the Kingdom of Greece

rather set on a shelf (Danforth 1989: 27); they are like guests in one’s house. The well-being of icons affects the well-being of the household, the neighborhood, or the village that venerates them. Icons may move by themselves, especially if set in the wrong place. They also require light. Danforth writes of an ill woman who was told to move her family icon to “a bright sunny place so that it could look out the window” (1989: 26). An “unsleeping” (akoímito) light should ideally be maintained before an important icon. Placing the Argokoíli icons in a box plunged them into darkness and confined them in an attempt at neutralization. Instead of display on an icon stand illuminated by a steady procession of candles lit by the faithful, the icons were sealed shut, an action analogous to reburying them in the earth from which they had been retrieved a few years earlier. The secretary for education and religion acknowledged that this treatment was “neither rational nor respectful” (oúte éllogon out’ evsevés). He recommended that they be displayed but with strong security in place to guard against their being removed and taken back to Argokoíli.31 The police chief felt that the public display of the icons in Khóra would only further stir fanaticism and make the situation worse than before.32 In the midst of these debates a priest at the metropolitan church, Vikéntios Giannoútsos, was charged with having removed the icon of the Panagía Argokoiliótissa surreptitiously at night and taken it to a private home to perform a religious service.33 From this point on the icons were kept, presumably still in their boxes, inside a cupboard (doulápa) in the space behind the icon screen of the metropolitan church in Khóra. This cupboard was nailed shut and sealed with a special tamper-proof episcopal seal.34 The power of the icons and the cult of the Panagía Argokoiliótissa were now, supposedly, contained.

Conjunctural Misunderstanding Miracles, visions, dreams, and faith itself take shape in historical time in the context of particular political, social, and cultural arrangements. Further ques31

G. Glarákis, Secretariat of Church and Public Education of Kingdom of Greece, to Holy Synod, 30 January 1839 (“I istoría” 2001d: 19). 32 I. Ambrosiádis, Police Chief, Naxos, to Royal Secretariat of the Interior, 20 February 1939 (“I istoría” 2001d: 20). 33 Church Committee, Naxos, to Holy Synod, 14 July 1839 (“I istoría” 2001d: 21). 34 “The Committee, having pondered the matter, reached a decision, and promptly nailed shut (ekárphose) the cupboard containing the icons behind the icon screen and [secured] this with the seal of the Bishop (dia tis sphragídos tis Episkopís).” Church Committee, Naxos, to Holy Synod, 14 July 1839 (“I istoría” 2001d: 21). 52

Conjunctural Misunderstanding

tions remain to be asked, such as why the events at Argokoíli occurred when they did and not earlier or later or elsewhere. Can key elements in this case such as buried icons, the obligation to build a church, or the contents of dreams and visions be understood in the light of local social arrangements and preexisting cultural forms? Political pressure cannot by itself explain the first incidences of important dreams and visions. Bernadette’s visions of Aquéro35 in the grotto at Lourdes cannot be attributed to her personal experience of the pressures of state secularism. According to Ruth Harris (1999: 77), encounters with nebulous supernatural beings were occurring all the time in rural France, and Bernadette’s visions were continuous with folk visions of fairies at caves and water sources as much as purely Christian traditions. What happened in this and other cases was that local paragons and national figures supported or opposed the visions according to their own religious convictions and political agendas. Bernadette fed this politicization by continuing to see visions on a regular basis over a period of months, thereby allowing sides to form in an escalating debate over their veracity. Likewise, the earliest dreamers on Naxos had not, I think, been deeply affected by opposition to the Bavarian king and his regents. They were, rather, expressing perennial ideas consistent with the local Orthodox Christian belief that miraculous icons could be found via revelations in visions. For several years their visions did not bring any results, but they did percolate as ideas that locals could endorse or reject. What began as familiar local religious expression subsequently took on a political hue as clerics such as Father Korrés and Bishop Gavriíl became involved. Once the dream-directed search for icons blew up into a contested event, the dreamers came to be affected by political ideologies. The situation was processual. Much of what we know about the movement in mountain Naxos comes from the records of governmental and ecclesiastical attempts to suppress it. Had the villagers been left alone to dig the earth, keep their icons, and build their church—as they would have been allowed to do under the Ottomans (Frazee 1978: 238)—it is possible that the movement might have petered out after a few years or quietly left its mark by contributing one more local manifestation of

35

Bernadette first identified the apparition by this patois term, the equivalent of French cela or Spanish aquello— an indefinite, neutral being, neither human nor divine. The point is that she did not first see the Virgin Mary but her visions were coaxed in this direction by popular interpretations and promptings (Harris 1999: Chap. 2). 53

Dreaming of Buried Icons in the Kingdom of Greece

the Panagía to the Orthodox repertoire.36 Instead state suppression and popular expression locked into a spiraling reciprocal logic of social action. Consider, for example, the matter of building a church for the Panagía as she had ordered, via Khristódoulos, on 15 November 1835. Two years previously the state had made it illegal to build new churches without permission. At Argokoíli this did not entirely inhibit building activity. Father Korrés, referred to a cell there as of December 1835, indicating his conception of the building as part of a religious site. He also mentioned that the icons were placed in a cell at Argokoíli after their discovery in March 1836. In April the Church’s investigator reported three small cells in addition to a larger, “so-called cell” that, in his opinion, was really a church. It measured forty paces (vímata) by fifteen, onequarter of which was vaulted (tholoskepasménon), and contained an altar.37 The first church was built at night, “secretly” (kryphá), as a contemporary Naxiote proponent of the pilgrimage (Khouzoúris 2003: 4) recently observed, because the people were not given official building permission. Strategies for avoiding building restrictions by claiming to be building a different kind of structure are met with today on Naxos.38 The faithful in Kóronos did not give up on the construction of a church. After the petition filed in 1837, they submitted another request to the Holy Synod in 1840 via an Athenian lawyer (of Kóronos descent on his mother’s side), Panagiótis Georgiádis. Georgiádis stressed that the activities of the movement were pleasing in the eyes of God and should meet with similar grace from the synod, which should allow the building of a church and the installation of the discovered icons.39 Following the refusal of this request, a new visionary appeared in the village in 1841, having just been released from prison for theft, and he proceeded to stir people to build a church. Finally, in 1851 the large cell at Argokoíli was officially consecrated as a church of the Panagía, quite possibly using the bones found at the site when digging first began (fig. 4).40 If the matter of building thus played out as a protracted struggle in which political repression dictated the course of events and even the form of the architecture, then governmental restrictions on digging also shaped new understandings and forms of social practice. Prior to 1821, objects dating to Greco-Roman 36

Kephalliniádis (1990: 83) lists more than one hundred epithets for the Panagía on Naxos. Canon Marmarás of Attica to Holy Synod, 18 June 1836 (“I istoría” 2000a: 24). 38 In one case a circular foundation was claimed to be for a well but at the last moment became a cafe, for which no building permit had been granted (Stewart 1991: 64). 39 P. Georgiádis to Holy Synod, 25 November 1840 (“I istoría” 2001d: 23) 40 The consecration of an Orthodox church is ideally done on the bones of a saint or martyr. 37

54

Conjunctural Misunderstanding

Figure 4. The cell inaugurated in 1851, which has been the focus of the pilgrimage ever since. The lack of a semicircular apse and the absence of a transept that would have made the building recognizable as a church were accommodations to the prohibition on the building of churches at the time. Below, the vaulted interior, which did raise initial suspicions as to the ultimate use of the building.

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antiquity did not convey the national historical message that the Greek state would eventually formulate for them. In the early nineteenth century, the architects of Greek nationalism, most of them living outside the Ottoman Empire, had begun to articulate the idea that antiquities had to be protected as part of Greek national patrimony, yet Lord Elgin could still succeed in carting off the Parthenon marbles. Even after the outbreak of the war of independence, a Dutch colonel named Rottiers, in the face of local protest, removed a large quantity of antiquities from the Cycladic island of Milos (Kókkou 1977: 39). Once the Greek state came into being, it claimed “antiquities” as the national heritage of Greeks. They were recast as part and parcel of what the war of independence had been fought over. In 1835 the Greek Archaeological Service was created to oversee “the conservation and restoration of archaeological works” (Kókkou 1977: 34). And in 1837 the Archaeological Society at Athens held its first meeting in the Parthenon. During that meeting the president of the society and then minister of education, Iakováki Rízos Neroulós, famously pointed to the ruins of the Acropolis and said, “It is to these stones that we owe our political renaissance” (Yalouri 2001: 35). As emery miners, the villagers had a parallel set of concerns about digging and ownership of the land and the mineral resources within it. Prized for its hardness, Naxiote emery has been used since antiquity as an abrasive. The ancient Greeks said that the god of war, Ares, once escaped the powerful giants pursuing him on Naxos by hiding in the rock. This contact made emery a martial stone, “iron-eating” (sidirovrós), used for sharpening swords. During the Venetian and Turkish periods emery mining was a small industry but one that nonetheless provided valuable income to the mountain villages of Kóronos and Apeíranthos. Venetian feudal lords asserted ownership of all emery mined in their fiefs (thirteenth–seventeenth centuries), but after Naxos fell to the Ottomans the mountain villagers gradually gained autonomous control over the production and sale of emery (Stewart 2008). In 1812, as emery became more profitable and began to be exported in larger quantities, the villagers leased the export rights to a merchant named Vassílis Láskaris for a period of twelve years. Láskaris paid 500 grósia annually to the local mountain communities. In addition, he paid local workers by weight for the emery they mined and also for loading it onto boats (Arkhontákis and Giannoúlis 2001: 81). The villagers renewed Láskaris’s contract in 1821, before it was due, apparently to assure themselves of a good payday just as the Greek war of independence broke out. 56

Conjunctural Misunderstanding

In 1824 the revolutionary government canceled Láskaris’s contract to export emery and gave the rights to another entrepreneur, who paid the much needed rental money directly and entirely to the government. Under Capodistrias the emery of Naxos, along with the mineral deposits on Milos and the currants of Corinth, were, like antiquities, declared “national property” (ethniká ktímata; Arkhontákis and Giannoúlis 2001: 82). And in 1835, the year before the discovery of the icons, the government solicited bids for a ten-year contract for the concession on mining and exporting Naxiote emery. At this point, the villages of mountain Naxos sent two representatives to Athens to petition King Otto, who had just reached his majority and assumed full rulership over Greece. The representatives contended that they should hold full rights over emery production: The emery that is exported from the island of Naxos is the property of the inhabitants themselves of the two villages Apeíranthos and Vóthroi. Since it comes out of the fields and they are owners of these fields, the necessary conclusion is that they must also be the owners of any products that are extracted from this land. Emery, the product of their fields, must belong exclusively to them. We beseech Your Majesty, with the tears of our eyes and the sighs of our hearts: That you deign to revoke those actions taken by the Administration against our ownership; and that you leave us the free and unfettered right that we enjoy by natural and political law in relation to the products of our land. The cold reply from the Secretariat of the Economy refused to return the rights to the villagers but assured them that they would remain free to regulate production with the help of a state overseer. The poor independent state clearly needed revenue, and this motivated it to dispossess the mountain villagers of Naxos. It must have been doubly distressing to the Naxiotes to learn that the winner of the 1835 export contract was an Englishman (Protopapadákis 1903: 16). The specter of Greek Orthodoxy’s becoming alien through Western Christian influences was now matched in the industrial sphere by foreign exploitation of natural resources. The new contract owner, Rothfel, trebled the price of emery on the international market, a strategy that backfired against Naxiote

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interests by forcing the market to look for cheaper sources (Glézos 1989: 92). Emery deposits (of lesser quality) were located in Asia Minor, and new mines opened in the Smyrna region in competition against Naxos. When Rothfel’s contract expired, the villagers sued to regain full rights over emery production. The High Court ruled against them in 1846. The final nail in the coffin of local autonomy with regard to emery resources came in 1852, when a non-Naxiote man named Korgialénios bought some emery-rich land in eastern Naxos and began to export it on his own account. After the government overseer reported him, the state issued a new law clarifying that emery would henceforth be mined and made available exclusively to the state.41 From that moment on the Naxos emery miners were “proletarians of the state” (Glézos 1989: 84).

• The dreaming and digging at Argokoíli thus occurred during a period in which local relationships to the land, the past, and the nation’s ancestors were rapidly being superseded. The stories of buried icons, some of which were considered works of the Apostle Luke and/or possessions of the early Christians, expressed a Byzantine Christian historical identification that was now on its way to marginalization as Hellenism took precedence (Morris 1994: 20ff.). In the 1830s the rational, historical, and nationalist suppositions of the Kingdom of Greece came into collision with this local worldview. Research in ancient history and classics offered a different and deeper ethnic past to contemplate, and classicizing nationalism set about implementing the transformation of the moderns into the inheritors of Pericles and Socrates. To use the terminology of Marshall Sahlins (1985), this was a conjunctural period of paradigm clash, involving, in the case of mountain Naxos, a phase of mutual misunderstanding between local people and state institutions. In this conjuncture, which Sahlins has illustrated by reference to the encounter between the Hawaiians and Captain Cook, misunderstandings arose because the two parties held fundamentally different assumptions about the world. They did not, however, clearly realize that they were operating at cross-purposes (Sahlins 1985: 125). From the sailors’ point of view, sharing a meal with local women was a sociable thing to do, while from the Hawaiian viewpoint this broke a taboo; it made the women impure 41

“To kath’ ólin tin Náxon paragómenon oryktón Smýris exorýssetai kai diatíthetai apokleistikós dia logariasmón tou Dimosíou” (Nómos ΣΒ’, 17 July 1852, quoted by Zevgólis 1989: 67). 58

Tinos: Dreams and Icons

and showed the sailors to be mortals. The Hawaiians offered Cook precious objects, which they considered gifts or sacrifices because they viewed him as a god. The British interpreted these objects as trade overtures and responded in kind. The one group was operating with ideas of the sacred, the other on entirely economic assumptions. Sahlins’s example involved an early moment of cultural contact in eighteenth-century Hawaii. In the case under consideration here, state Hellenism, formulated by Greek intellectuals in diaspora with the collaboration of northern European scholars and then imported into the new Kingdom of Greece, clashed with the village worldview. Out of such situations of creative misunderstanding culture emerged transformed.

Tinos: Dreams and Icons Catholic European visions and pilgrimages of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries show a pattern of contagious influence. At Lourdes, many thought that Bernadette envisioned the Virgin as she was depicted on a medallion executed according to the vision seen by Catherine Labouré in Paris in 1830 (Harris 1999: 81). The events in Marpingen (German Saarland) in 1876 looked back at Lourdes, and people immediately spoke about it as a “German Lourdes” at the time (Blackbourn 1993: xxiii). Lourdes itself drew increasing numbers of pilgrims north across the Pyrenees from Spain following the fiftieth anniversaries of the proclamation of the Immaculate Conception and the visions of Bernadette (1904 and 1908 respectively). This heightened level of devotional consciousness formed the context for the witnessing of a moving cross in the town of Limpias in Cantabria, northern Spain, in 1918 (Christian 1992: 11). The events at Limpias, together with the visions at Fatima, Portugal, in 1917 and the continued influence of Lourdes, prepared the ground for the visions in the Spanish Basque town of Ezkioga in 1931 (Christian 1995: 6). The obvious forerunner for the Panagía Argokoiliótissa may be found on the island of Tinos, just a few hours’ boat journey north of Naxos. There, in the last days of March 1821, an elderly man named Mikhális Polyzóis dreamt one night that the white-clad figure of the Panagía stood by his bed and instructed him to dig for an icon of hers in the field of Antónis Doxarás. The following night he experienced a further vision while in bed, just before falling asleep. A woman entered his room garlanded in white light, illuminating the whole space. She repeated her request from the previous night, adding: “Build a church

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there as there was in the past.”42 On awakening Mikhális went to the priest, who thought that this dream could be a work of the devil. Bishop Gavriíl likewise did not accept the vision as true. Mikhális went at night with some friends and dug covertly in the field, but after finding nothing except some foundation stones from an older structure he gave up. More than a year later, in July 1822, Pelagía, a nun at the Kekhrovoúni convent on Tinos, had a series of dreams and waking visions of the Panagía. In the first incident, asleep in her cell, Pelagía sensed an unusual and pleasant smell and then saw a woman dressed in gold, “like a queen,” enter and stand beside her bed. This figure instructed Pelagía to excavate her icon from Doxarás’s field and to build her “house” (Lagourós n.d.: 21). According to another version, she ordered that “a church be erected just as was there before” (Perigraphí 1982: 4). Monastics are trained to be skeptical of dreams, and Pelagía disregarded this dream and a similar one a week later. A subsequent waking vision of the Panagía, however, persuaded her to transmit the message. This time Bishop Gavriíl took the dreams seriously. Antónis Doxarás was away at the time, so his wife was approached for permission to dig. Mrs. Doxarás hesitated. Granting public access to one’s property was not an easy decision. That night, she dreamt that an angry soldier wearing a phoustanélla (the emblematic “kilt” worn by the Greek revolutionaries) came into her room and threatened to kill her if she did not grant permission (Lagourós n.d.: 33). This episode closely parallels the nighttime torments of the initially skeptical Khristódoulos and Manouíl in the Naxos case. Excavations began in September 1822. The ruins of some earlier structures, some pre-Christian, some the remains of a church, were found, but the excavation soon stopped for lack of funding. An epidemic of the plague (panólis) then began to sweep Tinos. Pelagía experienced a further dream of the Panagía urging that the search continue. Seeking to galvanize popular support, Gavriíl stressed the urgency of the situation. The current plague epidemic resulted from this incomplete task, he said, as well as from the general lack of piety among the citizens. In a letter to the public (dated 28 November 1822) he noted that when the excavations started “some were looking for an icon, while others were after antiquities, and others still spoke inappropriate words (which are shameful to speak) and in this way the initial fervor evaporated” (quoted in Lagourós n.d.: 37). 42

I draw here on various accounts of the discovery of the icon, which are sold on Tinos (e.g., Lagourós n.d.; Perigraphí 1982). For substantial accounts of the events on Tinos see Dubisch (1995: 134ff.), Seraïdári (2007: 134ff.), and Mazower (2008).

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Work recommenced with the more circumscribed goal of building a chapel. As this building neared completion, a dry well miraculously filled with water, and the church was dedicated to the Panagía of the Life-Giving Source. As the work continued, more antiquities (e.g., stone capitals) were found, and then, on 30 January 1823, a worker struck a piece of wood, which his spade cleft in half. On closer inspection this was identified as an icon of the Annunciation—the angel had been preserved intact on one piece of wood, the Panagía on the other. The Tiniots declared it to be a work of St. Luke (the Apostle) and one of the three oldest icons in the world (Perigraphí 1982: 12). The icon was taken to the home of one of the political leaders at the time, Stamatéllos Kangkádis, who placed it in the household icon stand. That night his daughter, Phlorezó, dreamt that she was piously gazing at the new icon when suddenly the figure of the Panagía moved, grew larger, stepped out of the icon, and stood right before her in the room. She said, “Go tell your father to build me a large and beautiful house” (Lagourós n.d.: 49). Although the Panagía took on a severe attitude, her voice was calm, and Phlorezó was not afraid. The church of the Panagía was inaugurated on the site by the next year, but the structure was not completed until 1831. Donations to the church registered for 1831 amounted to 24,600 drachmas, and this practically doubled the following year to 42,000 (Sakellíon and Philippídis 1928: 58). The Panagía of Tinos had become Greece’s most important pilgrimage site. Catholics and Muslims reportedly benefited from miracles worked by the Panagía, and they, too, made large donations to the church. King Otto visited the church in 1833, as did many of the heroes of the Greek war of independence: Kolokotrónis, Makrygiánnis, and Miaoúlis.43 Just as the fame and glory of the Panagía of Tinos reached full fluorescence in the early 1830s, the visionary movement on Naxos began. Even in the interior mountains, villagers would have heard about Tinos. King Otto visited both Tinos and mountain Naxos on his 1833 tour of the new kingdom. It is entirely possible that their own search for icons was stimulated by the example of Tinos in a copycat, competitive movement aimed at tapping into some of the grace, pilgrims, and economic benefits then accruing solely to Tinos (Stewart 1991: 90).

43

Considering the large Catholic population of Tinos and the fact that a large French military force was present in Greece during the late 1820s, it is possible that news of the Tinos miracles filtered back to France, where it may have had some role in inspiring Catherine Labouré’s influential Catholic vision of the Virgin in 1830. 61

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In the Catholic visions surveyed earlier, the participants characteristically saw visions of the Virgin, heard her speak, and relayed these messages to the community. At Limpias they saw a cross move. On Tinos visionaries saw the Panagía and conveyed her message to dig and find an icon. This icon was indeed found. The pilgrimage to Tinos thus involved and continues to involve more than visiting a place where a hierophany once occurred; it is also an encounter with the material token of this hierophany. The icon in question is at once something old (in that the people believe it to have been executed in the distant past) and something recently discovered, therefore new. Although the Tinos example may have served as the archetype for future miracles in independent Greece, it was not easily repeatable in practice. For one reason, the Tinos model required a period of autonomous oneiric archaeology. After the foundation of the Greek state, as we saw, such activity could no longer be sanctioned. Professional archaeologists authorized by the state would have had to oversee any digging for buried artifacts.44 Argokoíli emulated the Tinos legend but only with considerable struggle.45 Subsequent miracles had to stay within the boundaries of the law. A close look at the icons involved reveals how closely Argokoíli was in dialogue with Tinos. Although four icons were found at Argokoíli, the icon of the Annunciation (found in April 1836) has become the focus of the Naxos pilgrimage. The icons of the Panagía Holding the Infant Christ, St. John the Baptist, and the Holy Cross found in March 1836 did not much figure, and what the icon found in 1838 represented is not recorded. One possible reason the icon of the Annunciation should have been promoted in importance at Argokoíli is that the Tinos icon also depicted the Annunciation and both are claimed to be the work of St. Luke.46 It may seem bad strategy to launch an upstart competing pilgrimage focused on precisely the same manifestation of the Panagía, but this does conform to a 44 For example, as soon as dreamers began to dig for artifacts on Mytilíni in the 1950s, archaeologists got involved. There was no possibility of a charismatic phase of “dreaming and digging,” with the dreams directing the pace and places of excavation, as on Naxos and Tinos. The St. Raphaíl case is studied by Rey (2008) and Psaltou (2004) and discussed in Chapter Nine. 45 The search for the icon of the Panagía at Períssa, on Santorini, in 1836 also involved dreams and a lengthy period of digging (Kephalliniádis 1990: 194). Those supporting the excavation were ridiculed as charlatans by the Catholic priest Pègues (1842: 566). 46 According to tradition, St. Luke painted an icon of the Panagía holding Christ (an iconographic type subsequently known as “Hodegetria”) that was sent from Jerusalem to Constantinople, where it became the most venerated icon and the palladium of the city, carried in processions and onto the battlefield (Vassilaki 2005).

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cultural logic explicated by the anthropologist Michael Herzfeld (1990). The distinctiveness and authenticity of a community usually rests not upon alignment with a unique saint or a novel artistic representation of a saint but on the local appropriation of the same saints and iconography found elsewhere. In the numerous accounts of events on Tinos or Naxos, the formal and aesthetic qualities of the central icons receive hardly any attention.47 Archskeptics furnish our most detailed descriptions. On Naxos, the police chief commented as follows: The icon, which in reality does not have the least appearance of an icon, is actually an oblong rectangle of utterly rotted wood. In size, it measures only two-tenths of a v. píkhi [píkhi = forearm, measure of 64 centimeters], upon which the faces of the All Holy Mother of God and that of Christ are just barely depicted. The silver frame allows only these [two faces] to be seen.48 The cleric from Drymallía,who visited Argokoíli in 1836 reported that “the image on the icon had been ruined by age” (Sérgis 2000: 26).49 Describing the first three icons discovered, the synod’s investigator wrote: “They were the size of a half-sheet of paper, rotted, and worm-eaten. One could not discern the resemblance to any prototype.”50 The people, he went on to say, did not hesitate to revere them the moment they were unearthed. According to the community’s legal representative in the petition to build a church, the first three icons were, indeed, unrecognizable on account of their age but became recognizable after being washed with wine.51 The people treated them like the bones of the 47 Compare the eighteenth-century icon of the Panagía Myrtidiótissa found on the island of Kythera. The features of the Panagía and the infant Christ are both completely blackened by age, making it an aniconic icon (Paspalas 2008: 199). Other communities in Greece have, nonetheless, embraced this famous icon. The Panagía and Christ are usually given some recognizable features in the course of appropriation (212). 48 I. Ambrosiádis, Police Chief, Naxos, to the Royal Secretariat for Internal Affairs, 20 February 1839 (“I istoría” 2001d: 20): “I eikón, i opoía alithós den ékhei oudemían morphín eikónos, allá tetragónou epimíki sesathroménou xýlou, to mégethos tou opoíou mólis eínai to 2/10 tou V. Píkheos epí tou opoíou eskhátos apikonísthi to prósopon tis Yperagías Theotókou kai tou Despótou Khristoú, móna ta opoía to argyrón perívlima syngkhoreí na theoróntai.” 49 “Diephthári ti palaiótiti.” 50 Canon T. Marmarás to Holy Synod of Greece, 18 June 1836 (“I istoría” 2000a: 22): “ekhoúsas imíseias typographikís kola khartioú, sesathroménas skolikovrótous, khorís na diakrínetai ep’aftón omoíoma prototýpou . . . ” 51 P. Georgiádis to Holy Synod, 25 November 1840 (“I istoría” 2001d: 22).

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deceased, which are routinely washed in wine after the customary exhumation of graves (Danforth 1982). They stood somewhere between saintly relics (leípsana) and icons. What the elaborate stories of the discoveries of icons on both Tinos and Naxos convey is that these autochthonous icons represent the local, the particular; they are the property of communities that have endured doubt, disease, dissension, and harassment in order to recover them. As objects buried during fraught moments such as persecution or pirate raids, they testify to the painful struggle to remain in place as an Orthodox Christian. Once discovered, they become symbols of an inchoate but highly significant conglomeration of local affect, morality, aspiration, and identity. The aesthetic iconographic features of such icons take second place to this significance as indexes of communal identity, dignity, and staying power. What matters is not that one icon of the Annunciation is a finer work of art than the other but that one is ours and has more meaning and power than yours (Herzfeld 1990: 116–17). A comparison of the Annunciation icons from Tinos and Naxos further substantiates this point. Accounts of the miracles of the Panagía circulate in cheap or free editions on both Tinos and Naxos. Actual close-up photos of the central icons are, however, relatively rare because the icons are so low in pictorial content. The Tinos booklets contain many more photos of the large nineteenthcentury church, with its wide steps, shots of processions of the icon, and scenes of the church precinct crowded with pilgrims. Photographs of pilgrims and churches also far outnumber close-ups of the icon of the Panagía Argokoiliótissa in Naxos publications. Both icons are plated in silver or gold, encrusted with jewels, and framed behind glass, all of which make it difficult to photograph them and even to see them, as the Naxos police chief remarked more than a century and a half ago (fig. 5). On feast days, when thousands of pilgrims file past to revere these icons by making the sign of the cross and kissing them, the combination of heat and humidity in the chapels fogs these glass frames, which are further smudged by the pilgrims’ ministrations. On such occasions—the only moment in which most people will ever be close to an icon—even should one try to appreciate the form depicted, it would be impossible. As Herzfeld put it, “The treatment of icons in churches—notably their progressive encrustation with silver and the smoke-generated obliteration of their features—places greater emphasis on ritual use rather than pictorial representation” (1990: 117). These are performative icons, activated synesthetically by the smells, sounds, and tactile sensations of the ritual context (Pentcheva 2010). 64

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Figure 5. Panagía Argokoiliótissa.

The framing in precious metals and jewels objectifies and literalizes the value that these icons manifestly have for the community. Threat of theft further underscores this value. On 15 December 1842 the Tinos icon was stolen, jeweled frame and all, by twenty-five-year-old Khristódoulos Dimitriádis. The authorities apprehended him the following day, and the court handed him a multiyear sentence (Lagourós n.d.: 26). On Naxos, through the end of the 1990s, oral accounts concurred that the Argokoíli icon had also been stolen shortly after its discovery. As a security measure the icon was thereafter kept safe inside the village church of St. Marina for most of the year and taken out only on the feast day, a time when police and soldiers are present. Only in the past few years, with the publication of the Holy Synod’s archives, have we learned that the icons were not stolen but rather confiscated at the direction of Church and state officials. The officials’ fear of the icon points up the power and efficacy and hence the “value” of the icon every bit as much as stories of theft. One significant difference between Tinos and Naxos is that the former has not developed its own ongoing local tradition of dreaming. Tinos became a national pilgrimage center attracting pilgrims from all over Greece. These faithful followers would experience dreams or visions of the Panagía in their own places of residence and then travel to Tinos to discharge a vow or to express gratitude and reverence in person. Argokoíli never attracted the same volume of nonlocal 65

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pilgrims, and it developed in strong relation to place. Furthermore, the foundation of the Kóronos pilgrimage was not completed. The Panagía had called for more elaborate buildings, and the people held onto hopes of uncovering still more icons. The people of Kóronos have, thus, over the decades, actively elaborated the cult of the Panagía Argokoilótissa through further dreaming and digging for icons. In contrast to the situation on Tinos, where the stolen icon was returned to its place in the church after an absence of only three days, on Naxos the confiscated icons eventually disappeared altogether. The task of finding them plunged the visionaries of Kóronos and their descendants back into the process of dreaming. Dreams became a mode of engagement with the village past.

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Chapter Four an epidemic of Dreaming

B

y the early 1850s the cult of the Panagía Argokoiliótissa was in an odd predicament. The authorities had reversed themselves and allowed a church dedicated to the Panagía to be consecrated, but they had confiscated all the newly discovered icons, thereby removing the focus of reverence. The rise of influential healers and prophets in mountain Naxos after the disappearance of the icons may be understood as a response to the obscurity of the situation. A forty-year-old widow named Aikateríni Khalkoú, for example, set herself up as a healer in the village of Apeíranthos. The local church committee criticized her for engaging in unacceptable activities such as conversing with the Panagía and benefiting personally from devotions given by the faithful. When the committee visited her, she showed them an icon of the Panagía with the inscription “Argokoiliótissa” on it and with six silver votive offerings hanging from it. A priest’s stole and two scarves hung over the icon. During healing sessions she would drape the stole over the head of her patient and interpret the instructions of the Panagía as a spirit medium. A woman from the lowland village of Engarés was waiting for a consultation at the moment of the committee’s visit. With the assistance of the police, the committee confiscated Mrs. Khalkoú’s paraphernalia and reported the case to the bishop of Naxos.1 The bishop relayed this information to the Holy Synod, along with the observation that the cult of the Panagía Argokoiliótissa was spreading despite its efforts. Numerous replica icons bearing the name “Argokoiliótissa” were now circulating, he reported, and local people did not hesitate to intone the name “Argokoiliótissa” during moments of illness.2 The repressed was returning all too quickly, having proliferated “in the 1 Church Committee of Apeíranthos to Episcopal Committee, Naxos, 10 July 1841 (“I istoría” 2002b: 18). 2 Episcopal Committee, Naxos, to Holy Synod, 25 July 1841 (“I istoría” 2002b: 18)

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dark” just as Freud described in his classic essay on the subject (1957 [1915]): 148).3 A Kóronos woman, Kalí Psarroú, popularly known as Kouphítaina, emerged as the most famous prophet of the latter half of the nineteenth century. I have heard stories about Kouphítaina’s prophecies in various villages on Naxos since my earliest visits to the island. Kouphítaina died in deep old age around 1900. During the mid-nineteenth century she lived with her family (four children) at a spot near Argokoíli. Current stories about her represent a long oral memory (for this area), stretching back more than a century. In form, Kouphítaina’s prophecies resemble riddles (ainígmata) but with a historical delay. For example, “One day winged monsters (phterotá thiría) will appear in the sky.” Decades later people realized that she had meant airplanes. Again, “One day the world will be connected by a string,” the telephone. An icon of St. Spyridon mediated Kouphítaina’s visionary knowledge, much as the icon of the Argokoiliótissa had channeled the spiritual knowledge of her contemporary Aikateríni Khalkoú. Many people still know the story of how she acquired this icon. One day, while gathering wild greens in the countryside, Kouphítaina met an old man (géros), who instructed her to go to a certain icon maker in Khóra and to commission an icon of St. Spyridon. The old man specified the dimensions of this icon and even the day on which she should take delivery. She duly placed the order and returned to collect it on the appointed day. The icon maker was caught unprepared. He said that he had readied the wood but not yet found the opportunity to paint the image. When he picked up the board to show her, an icon of St. Spyridon had already been executed on the panel. Kouphítaina recognized the image as that of the man she had met in the fields. “My old man (o géros mou)!” she exclaimed. Like many other miraculous icons in the traditions of the Orthodox Church, this image of St. Spyridon was acheiropoietos (not made by human hands). Kouphítaina placed the icon in her sitting room, which only she would enter to consult St. Spyridon. She followed the saint’s instructions by keeping an oil lamp perpetually lit before it. When her “old man” came, the icon would rattle and perspire, and she would wipe this moisture away with a piece of cotton and receive diagnostic and prognostic information. According to some, she would dab the moist cotton on her eyelids. Kouphítaina was not always successful. She did not, for example, manage to locate the missing icon of the Panagía 3

The object of repression “proliferates in the dark, as it were, and takes on extreme forms of expression.” 68

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Argokoiliótissa, and many of her best-remembered prophecies remained unfulfilled: “The place will fill with sieves, and they will sift emery” (an emery refining factory at the local port, Liónas); “Liónas will become a flower (phióri)”; “Argokoíli will one day be inhabited and become a rich and wonderful place.” These prophecies capture the air of expectancy in late-nineteenth-century mountain Naxos, and their transmission has preserved some of this atmosphere over the years. That many of her predictions lingered unfulfilled clearly did not discredit Kouphítaina as a prophet. On the contrary, local people have carried the memory of her prophecies forward to today and periodically ask if current events might be their fulfillment.

Dreaming Tradition From the 1851 consecration of the church at Argokoíli on, the site remained a focus of popular devotion, attracting numerous pilgrims. By the beginning of the twentieth century, according to estimates in the local press, approximately 2,000 visitors were attending the annual celebration at Argokoíli.4 In 1904 the newspaper Aigaíon reported that a blind man regained his vision during the annual pilgrimage and a woman suffering for decades from “hysterical symptoms” (ysterikón nosimáton) was healed completely. A mute boy from the lowlands recovered his speech, and “bowing down he kissed the ground below the wonder-working icon.”5 Apparently the absence of the original icons had been remedied by a replacement focal icon, possibly an icon of the Panagía Argokoiliótissa dating to 1869 that is still to be found in the church at Argokoíli alongside numerous other icons donated or commissioned by pilgrims. By the early 1900s the main pilgrimage to Argokoíli had been set to occur annually on the Friday after Easter Sunday. Around 1920 the church at Argokoíli, which had been consecrated to the Panagía (Annunciation) in 1851, was reconsecrated to the Panagía of the Life-Giving Source. The icon of this manifestation of the Panagía, which is today found on the main icon screen in the church, dates to 1914 (Khouzoúris 2003: 4). Apparently, lacking the originally discovered icon of the Panagía Argokoiliótissa, the faithful had gradually shifted their focus to an altogether different manifestation of the Panagía. The Life-Giving Source is a manifestation of the Panagía associated with healing, and the miraculous cures mentioned above occurred on this feast day, 4 Manólis Sérgis (1997, 1998) excerpts the relevant articles from the newspapers Aigaíon and Paronaxía. 5 Aigaíon, no. 130, 10 April 1904, p. 2, and no. 253, 5 May 1907, p. 2 (Sérgis 1997: 8–9).

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which remains the date for the annual pilgrimage to the site today. Prophecies circulated predicting that a spring of healing water would emerge at Argokoíli. On Tinos a source of water had mysteriously appeared in Doxarás’s dry field, leading to initial work on the construction of a church to the Panagía of the LifeGiving Source there. The subsequent discovery of an icon of the Annunciation at that site prompted a switch to building a church of the Annunciation. This alternation between the Life-Giving Source and the Annunciation presents one more instance of a dialogue between Tinos and mountain Naxos. The order of events was reversed between the two places. On Tinos water gushed forth early on, but the initial focus on the Life-Giving Source changed to the construction of a church of the Annunciation. On Naxos, initial emphasis on the Annunciation gave way to veneration of the Life-Giving Source, and, as will be seen shortly, the water appeared last of all. The annual pilgrimage celebration at the turn of the nineteenth century involved pilgrims’ arriving the evening before the feast day and assembling for the evening liturgy. After this, they would celebrate the festival (panigýri) of the Panagía deep into the night, fueled by music and drink. At the festival in 1905 a man knifed a fellow villager to death for cutting in on his dance.6 Ever since, celebration with music and drink has been forbidden at the Argokoíli site. It takes place instead in Kóronos and other villages. The sacred and profane dimensions of celebration have been separated (Stewart 1994).

• A significant train of events began in early 1930 when a young schoolgirl from Kóronos named Katerína Legáki experienced a sequence of dream visions of the Panagía.7 She and her brother, Nikiphóros, were lodging in the home of a Mrs. Xénou in the port town of Naxos. Nikiphóros was teaching at the newly opened high school (gymnásio), the first on the island. On 31 January Katerína had a dream in which she was informed that the Panagía Argokoiliótissa was to be found in Mrs. Xénou’s icon stand. The dream further disclosed that Mrs. Xénou had already suffered in life and that she would suffer more if she did not 6

Aigaíon, no. 173, 24 April 1905, pp. 2–3 (Sérgis 1997: 8). The documentary sources for these events comprise local newspaper reports, personal memories, and oral histories. As in the case of the events of 1836 studied in the last chapter, a local priest, Gavriíl Legákis in this case, furnished a detailed eyewitness account of events through August 1930 (Legákis 1932). 7

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surrender the icon to be taken back to the mountains where it was originally found. Nikiphóros was at first reluctant to raise this issue directly with his landlady lest he ruin their relationship. But then he himself dreamt that he arose from his bed and went into the next room where Mrs. Iríni [Xénou] kept her icons in order to confirm his sister’s dream. As he approached he heard a loud rumbling, and suddenly he saw the door to the room open. A black-clad woman stood in the middle of the room and spoke to him. “Do not fear, my child. I am St. Anne. Do what I tell you: Take the icon that your sister told you about and take it yourself to your village.” She said this much and left. He took the icon from the stand and left. On the road, however, he began to have doubts, and a frightening beast appeared to him, an enormous bull the size of a large room, which lunged at him. In fright he shouted, “Panagía of mine, prevent . . . ,” and immediately the beast disappeared. He continued on the road to bring the icon back to the village as St. Anne had said. About an hour out from Kóronos he was met by approximately fifty children who had come from Kóronos as an advance party to greet the icon of the Panagía Argokoiliótissa. As he continued on the road, little by little he began to encounter women holding censers and many more people besides. The church bells of Kóronos, Skadó, and Keramotí were ringing magnificently. The priests of Kóronos, dressed in white raiment, were awaiting with incense at the gates to the courtyard of the church of St. Marina . . . and he handed the icon over into the hands of the Archimandrite Gavriíl Legákis.8 The following day they located the tiny icon9 behind larger icons in Mrs. Xénou’s icon stand where they had seen it in the dreams. Mrs. Xénou said that she had inherited the icon from her mother and that she had given it to her son 8

This was the very same priest who recorded this dream in his general account of events (Legákis 1932: 5–6). Presumably, Nikiphóros Legákis narrated the dream directly to Father Legákis. 9 This was, evidently, the wax-mastich relief depicting the Annunciation that was found by Doumbrogiánnis in 1836 (see Chap. 4). The icon measures approximately 2 × 2 inches (5.2 × 5 centimeters). 71

An Epidemic of Dreaming

to wear as a phylactery when he went to fight in the Balkan Wars in 1912–13. Her son’s wife had, during this time, experienced repeated dreams of the Panagía telling her that her husband would be safe because of the phylactery. After his return from the war Mrs. Xénou had placed the icon in her icon stand and forgotten about it. She gave permission for it to be taken back to Kóronos, and this was done exactly as Nikiphóros envisaged in his dream. The icon arrived in Kóronos on Sunday, 2 February, in the afternoon. The movement, short-circuited by the 1838 confiscation of the icons, was now reconnected to its power source. The following Sunday, a religious procession transported the icon on foot from Kóronos to the site of its original discovery. Large numbers of faithful converged on Argokoíli to celebrate the restoration of the icon. Just as the Sunday liturgy finished, at around 11:30 a.m., water gushed forth from the discovery site, and people collected this holy water (agiasmós) in whatever containers they could find. The newspaper Phoní Náxou-Párou (16 February 1930)10 carried a report of the events, and currently circulating oral traditions largely corroborate this account. The newspaper further reported that this water healed a girl suffering from a nervous disorder. These events excited religious fervor throughout the island. Journalists predicted that thousands would attend the religious services scheduled to take place at Argokoíli on the festivals of the Annunciation and the Panagía of the Life-Giving Source (Phoni Náxou-Párou, 9 March 1930). Worried that it would not be able to accommodate the surge of pilgrims from all over Naxos, the church council of Argokoíli directed the rapid building of cells to house visitors. These were not the only major works being carried out at Argokoíli at this time. Shortly after the return of the icon to Kóronos there occurred an epidemic outbreak of dreaming among thirteen-year-old schoolchildren, the age-mates of Katerína Legáki. Four children began reporting dreams: Geórgios Legákis, Photeiní Konstantáki, Dimítrios Manolás, and Pétros Moutsópoulos. These children claimed that the Panagía appeared to them in nightly dreams and informed them that an icon of St. Anne and a spring of holy water were still to be found at 10

Of course, the reporting of these events in the newspaper does not make them “true,” but it does point to the consistency and historical depth of the conviction that a stream of water gushed forth on 9 February 1930. In the late 1990s I interviewed an elderly man who said that he was present and actually saw the flow of holy water. A separate news item in Phoní Náxou-Párou, Sunday, 16 February 1930, p. 4, reported that a small earthquake had struck Naxos the previous Friday at 8:30 p.m. Perhaps general seismic activity at the time may account for the flow of water and/or the perception of rumbling sounds in the earth? I am grateful to Vassílis Sphyróeras for enabling me to find the relevant issues of Phoní Náxou-Párou in his personal collection.

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Argokoíli. Although the issue did not surface in the documents examined in the preceding chapter, according to Father Legákis (1932: 10) the prophecy that an icon of St. Anne would be found had been circulating since the initial discoveries of icons in 1836. The appearance of St. Anne to Nikiphóros in his momentous dream in Khóra revived this tradition and resonated with the community. Over the ensuing weeks these children consistently had dreams indicating where the icon lay. The actual rediscovery of the long lost icon of the Panagía via dreams completed a cycle of events begun nearly a century earlier. That Katerína and her brother should have had these dreams nearly a century after the icon disappeared indicates that villagers were still ruminating on historical events. The activities of prophets, the circulation of oral traditions, and the ritual activity of attending the yearly pilgrimage at Argokoíli all promoted a vital historical consciousness. Sentiment-laden oral traditions of divine illumination, miraculous discovery, and painful loss of the icon, as well as collective participation in pilgrimage rituals of embodied devotion, had grounded knowledge of the past within the body, in dispositions not fully accessible to consciousness or cognitively processed into representations. This was an “active historiography,” to use the expression coined by the anthropologist Michael Taussig (1980: 153), in which the concern for the the missing religious images carried over into sleep. Many Koronidiátes found themselves recursively dreaming about their accumulated history of prophetic dreaming. Once these dreams began to circulate socially as narratives in 1930, they furnished a starting point for conscious historical elaborations of the themes expressed in dreams. That dreaming had been a prominent and successful mode of locating the icons in the 1830s no doubt increased the social validity accorded to this activity in 1930. Nikiphóros and Katerína were descended from the early visionary Khristódoulos (their mother’s father’s father) and also from Doumbrogiánnis (their father’s mother’s father), the discoverer of the first icons in 1836. Through family memories, they would have been intimately familiar with stories about icons, dreams, and the events of the 1830s. The search for the missing icon of St. Anne, the mother of the Panagía, now opened a new cycle in which dreaming clearly implicated the past, present, and future fortunes of the village. As an object previously owned by earlier inhabitants, the icon of St. Anne belonged to a complex of past events that the dreams brought into active consciousness. Its potential discovery involved looking ahead into the future to anticipate the enhanced fortunes of the village, and the 73

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process of dreaming and digging for it provided a running drama, as well as a diagnostic commentary on spiritual and economic life in the village present. Through dreams the visionaries scanned the contents of their individual and communal existence in all of its temporal dimensions. Villagers seized on the information provided by the young dreamers to begin extensive excavations. The columnist for Phoní Náxou-Párou (30 March 1930) estimated that in the last two weeks of March 1930 some three thousand days of labor (merokámata) were poured into the search for the missing icon. By the end of 1930 the workers had cut a wide level terrace into the side of the mountain. The search for this icon required full application of all their emerymining skills. Indeed, it could be said that the digging at Argokoíli sanctified their profession by making it a necessary means for revealing the holy icon. The emery miners worked for free at Argokoíli, their labor transformed from economic activity into religious devotion and further diverged from their normal professional mining because they used not their own tools but those provided by the church. Furthermore, the Panagía gave instructions, via dreams, that the miners not employ their usual emery mining techniques of blasting with dynamite or lighting fires to open exploitable fissures. The child dreamers initially predicted that the icon would be found on the day of the Annunciation (25 March) and that holy water would spout forth on the same day. Between four and five thousand faithful gathered on that day at Argokoíli. As they awaited expectantly, a girl from Skadó, Katerína Korré, went into a state of ecstasy (ékstasi) and shouted to the assembled that she saw the Panagía in the sky, approaching. Father Legákis reported that from dawn until about noon there could be heard deep rumblings below ground, as if a volcano were about to erupt. At the same time a ring of light appeared in the sky (Legákis (1932: 11–12).11 The assembled, most of whom were fasting in preparation for the moment, spent the morning on their knees repeating the “Kýrie eléïson” while Katerína Korré continued imploring them to see the Panagía. When the heavenly sign disappeared after noon, Katerína came out of her state and retired to the small cave of the discovery of 1836. There she privately complained that the expected revelations had been thwarted by the presence of a party of faithless villagers, curiosity seekers, who had spent the morning entertaining themselves

11

Phoní Náxou-Párou (30 March 1930, p. 4) also reported that a light had appeared in the sky beginning on the evening before the Annunciation and that it had approached the site and then broken into three pieces and disappeared.

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with vulgar stories, stuffing themselves with food, and generally mocking the devout. A few days after these events a sixty-year-old Kóronos man, Ioánnis Melissourgós (nicknamed Goumenogíannis), was warming himself at his hearth fire one evening when suddenly a black-clad woman appeared before him. She identified herself as St. Anne, and she described the exact spot at Argokoíli where the workers should dig to find her icon. After this more and more people joined the dreaming children—oi oneirevómenoi paídes, as Father Legákis refers to them in formalistic language (1932: 12). The newcomers included a fifty-year-old man from Skadó and three women from Kóronos including thirteen-year-old Marína Mandilará and forty-year-old Evdokía Melissourgoú.

Evdokía Evdokía assumed the role of organizer of the dreamers. The children gravitated to her because she already had a reputation as a visionary prophet in the tradition of Kouphítaina. Finding hidden objects happened to be one of Evdokía’s particular talents. Her daughter told me that two men had once stolen two large sacks of cloth (for weaving) and hidden them at a remote house in two large clay vessels of the sort used for storing food. Evdokía had seen the location of the stolen goods in a dream and duly reported it to the police, who had apprehended the thieves and recovered the cloth. Her grandson told me that she also had dreams that directed miners which way to turn as they tunneled deep within the earth in search of emery. Evdokía convened daily gatherings at her house in the center of the village during which the children would read their recent dreams to those assembled in the overflowing courtyard. The children recorded their dreams in little blue school exercise books (tetrádia). An adult, Emmanouíl Manolás, helped the children to read out their dreams if they faltered (Legákis 1932: 14). By the middle of 1930 Kóronos was awash in these dream notebooks.12 During the course of field research I came across only one notebook recording the dreams of Evdokía. This notebook covered the period between 5 February and 27 June 1930. Evdokía’s daughter, seventy-seven-year-old Margaró Kouphopoúlou, who was still living in the same family home in the heart of the village, lent it to me for study. I explore this notebook now for the insight it provides into Evdokía’s 12 Father Legákis (1932: 13) remarked that “so many of these [school exercise books] have been filled up that one would be able to compile a thick tome out of them (ékhoun de plirothí tósa toiáfta, óste na dýnatai di’aftón n’apotelesthí ongkódes vivlíon).”

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personality as a prophet and organizer of the dreamers and for the information it contains on events during the early period of dreaming in 1930. Illiterate herself, Evdokía dictated her dreams to a copyist. The fifty-page notebook was, in fact, transcribed by at least three different and unknown hands. The notebook begins with a dream dated to 5 February (initially 5 March and then changed), that is, after the icon had been rediscovered and taken to Kóronos but before it was taken to Argokoíli. It is possible that the dreams were initially copied onto disparate sheets of paper after they occurred and then transcribed all together into this single notebook periodically or all at once at a later date. Or it may be that Evdokía decided only sometime in June or later to compile her notebook, possibly in emulation of the children’s notebooks. In this latter scenario she would have “remembered” her dreams from the preceding months, assigning them specific dates while dictating them to a copyist. This may explain the corrected date of the first dream and the fact that the dreams are not all in chronological order. The dream of 1 May, for example, is followed by a dream of 20 April, and a dream of 27 June is followed by dreams of 4 and 28 May, the last two dreams in the notebook. So this notebook is not a straightforward dream diary compiled on a daily or weekly basis but a document put together retrospectively. It established Evdokía’s credentials as a chosen prophet who was present at the start of events and who could match the children by having her own notebook. Her first entry (fig. 6) begins with a vision in which a local church councillor brings the Holy Cross to her house, where she censes it and lights a candle to it “as one should” (ópos éprepe). She then interrupts her account to say that this was a waking vision; that evening she had a dream. In this dream the Holy Cross marches into her house on its own and breaks into three pieces. It stops in front of her table and speaks to her, but Evdokía confesses that she “did not understand anything.” The church councillor from her earlier vision then told her that the Holy Cross would “leave” (phýgei) on the twenty-third of the month. Evdokía is not clear which month is intended. On 7 February she dreams that a woman named Maria tells her, “The things that you have are mine” and she should take care of them. “But I didn’t mark what she said, and when I awoke I had lost them.” In the following dream of 11 February “another” Maria declares that the things Evdokía has are her (Maria’s) dowry (príka).13 Again, Evdokía does not pay careful enough attention, and the 13

In quoting from the dream notebooks I transcribe the Greek exactly as it is written. The word for dowry is proíka in standard Demotic Greek. 76

Evdokía

Figure 6. First page of Evdokía’s dream notebook, dated 5 February March 1930, transcribed in the appendix.

things are lost. These early dreams portray her as a fledgling visionary, singled out by investment with the Holy Cross but struggling to interpret messages and failing to recognize fully the grace bestowed upon her. In subsequent dreams the Panagía takes Evdokía under her wing and asks her to win over village skeptics. In a dream of 17 February the Panagía conducts her to the chapel of St. Spyridon near the site at Argokoíli.14 She shows her the holy water there, and a chasm (kháos) opens in the earth. Upon entering she finds herself in the mines, surrounded by emery miners. She emerges positive and enthused (katenthousiasméni) by this revelation that the holy water and the icon are really there. This dream opens the continuing theme of divine encouragement to believe that the icon and holy water will emerge at Argokoíli.

14

This was a chapel founded to revere St. Spyridon in the wake of Kouphítaina’s introduction of this saint to the village. The site of the chapel is near where Kouphítaina once lived. 77

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By 1 March it appears that Evdokía is sharing her dreams with the village at large. Her fellow villagers believe that she possesses some holy objects (the cross and perhaps an icon), and they ask why she does not present them publicly. On 21 March an itinerant merchant named Stéphanos asks to see her Holy Cross, and she refuses. Shortly afterward she falls ill while eating. By implication, Stéphanos has put the evil eye on her, and she cannot speak or eat. One of the village priests, Father Panagiótis, comes to her house and unbewitches her, using her cross. She recovers and dreams that the Panagía appears with three apples, gives them to her, and tells her not to speak nonsense in the future. Apparently in an effort to deflect public interest in her Holy Cross, Evdokía had told people that all crosses were equal. On 23 March her Holy Cross leaves (by its own mystical power) and joins the rediscovered icon of the Panagía in the church, thereby clarifying the date learned in her first dream. In a dream of 18 April, shortly after the failure to discover the icon on 25 March, Evdokía sees people using dynamite to assist their excavations. The Panagía enters the dream and says that this is not allowed. St. Anne appears for the first time in a lengthy dream of 20 April. Evdokía meets up with various saints including Ágioi Saránta (forty saints) and the evangelist Matthew. They go into the cavern at Argokoíli, where they meet St. Anne, who is sitting down to a meal of boiled poríkhi (a type of wild green like spinach). They ask her if she is ready to emerge from this dark place. St. Anne responds in a rage (me thymó) that she cannot emerge because people do not listen to her or to her daughter. Evdokía and the saints kneel and beg St. Anne for forgiveness. This moves the Panagía, who intercedes with her mother on their behalf and asks her to take pity. St. Anne gives no further reply. In another dream, also dated 20 April (an indication of the disordered compilation of this book), Evdokía meets Photeiní, one of the dreaming children, who tells her that the Panagía has forgiven them. These dreams reveal a conception of the saints as bound together by strong family relations. One may influence St. Anne by strategically appealing to her daughter, husband, or grandson. In the dream recorded for 1 June the Panagía appears bearing a letter. Evdokía cannot read, so the Panagía reads it aloud. The letter instructs people how to display piety. Later in the dream the Panagía transports Evdokía and Photeiní to the central Naxos town of Tragaía in order to disseminate the prophecies from Argokoíli and to attract followers around the island. St Anne’s vow not to emerge until everyone shows faith and piety has dictated this course of action.

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The dreams from this point on revolve around visits to Argokoíli, along with some of the other dreamers, where they gather more information about the eventual discovery of the St. Anne icon and/or events linked with that discovery. One dream (5 June) gives the dimensions of the huge monastery that will be built. Evdokía does not recollect the exact measurements, but she guesses that it would take a decade to build it. The Panagía corrects her: “It will be built swiftly. Builders will build by day, and angels will build at night.” Overall, the dreams concern the finding of the St. Anne icon, which will result in the building of a monastery and general prosperity for Kóronos. Consecutive dreams, however, jump from topic to topic; they do not form a continuous narrative thread: Evdokía is told to baptize a child (8 and 10 June); the story of the nineteenth-century disappearance and finding of the icon is narrated, and it is revealed that a “stranger” (xénos) will be the one to find the icon of St. Anne (11 June); St. George passes by on his horse and offers her a lift to Argokoíli, which she declines (13 June); the dreaming children are dressed in white robes (24 June), then gold robes, (27 June), and the Panagía reveals a golden tap that controls the flow of holy water (27 June); a church councillor holding a knife threateningly is refused entry to the cave because he is not one of the dreamers (27 June); and Evdokía is physically attacked by the Panagía, who pulls her hair and makes her go back and tell her dreams to the assembled at Argokoíli after she has refused to do so (4 May). In the very last dream in the notebook (dated 28 May) the Panagía invites everyone to a meal at the discovery site. The Panagía tells the church councillors “to venerate, respect, and show love for the dreamers because they are her faithful.” She singles out Evdokía as custodian of her cross and recipient of her messages via dreams. The church councillors ask when the icon will be found, and they are told that the time has not come yet for them to learn this. The Panagía then takes the assembled down into the cave to show them the holy water. They take off their clothes and bathe in it as a sort of second baptism. That ends Evdokía’s notebook.

Marina and the Dreaming Children Evdokía’s dreams refer to a consistent core of dreamers. Nikiphóros and Katerína Legáki receive special mention as the first dreamers. Over time, Nikiphóros emerges in the notebooks as the authoritative leader of the dreamers. As an educated adult male, he carried weight. Photeiní, Geórgios, Pétros, and Katerína Korré from Skadó are all mentioned by name, and, of course, Evdokía stakes out a role for herself as a chosen dreamer and custodian of the Panagía’s “things.” 79

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Marina Mandilará is mentioned only once, in a dream of 24 June concerned with taking the children to recite dreams in other villages. In this dream Evdokía relates that all the children except Marina appeared with their notebooks in their hands. This dreamt absence is compensated for by the fact that more than thirty of Marina’s school notebooks have survived.15 One may wonder if Evdokía’s portrayal of Marina did not stem from a feeling of threat at Marina’s productivity. Born on 7 June 1916, Marina Mandilará was on the verge of her fourteenth birthday when she wrote her earliest surviving notebook entry (fig. 7). Father Legákis mentioned that she joined the dreamers after the beginning of April, so it is possible that she wrote earlier notebooks that were lost. The first line of this notebook reads: “Dreamer (oneirevoúmeni) Marina I. Mandilará” and is followed by “I dreamt on 3/6/1930” on the next line. In this dream the Panagía appears to her and requests that she go to the lowland village of Engarés on an apostolic mission, since people there do not believe. The Panagía then conducts her to the cave where her icon was discovered and shows her a golden goose and the golden tap mentioned in one of Evdokía’s dreams. The tap opens by itself, and she bathes in the holy water. Marina asks when the water will flow so that all those who are ill may be cured, and the Panagía replies, “When the time comes the holy water will flow (ótan tha érthi i óra tha vgí to agíasma).” The Panagía then gives Marina something that looks like a golden egg, which Marina proceeds to eat. St. Anne appears and takes Marina to paradise, where they enter a garden in which everything is green and see little angels holding golden candles. The Panagía explains that these are infants who have died. Marina recognizes two children, apparently deceased children of a villager named Stamáta, and kisses them. The abrupt switches in theme and imagery within this dream typify Marina’s dreams and dream experiences generally. On this ground it is quite possible that Marina’s accounts do represent actual dreams. Marina herself, whom I met on several occasions before her death in 2003, insisted that she recorded actual dreams that she had had at night or during afternoon naps. Another of the dreamers, Pétros Moutsópoulos, told me that he dreamt at night and recorded these dreams in notebooks (now lost) the following morning before breakfast. Marina was in her eighties by the time of our first meeting, and she had given no 15 This represents a fraction of the total number of notebooks that she wrote. Marina’s sister tossed out many of her notebooks during general housecleaning sometime around 1970. These notebooks remain in the possession of Marina’s daughter, Flora Kontopoúlou, in the family home in Kóronos. I am grateful to Flora, Marina’s granddaughter, Marina, and her husband, Nikos, for their assistance and support in this research.

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Figure 7. Marina Mandilará (center) at the age of thirty-five. Her mother, Flora, is on the right.

thought to her notebooks during the intervening years. They had been entirely set aside, and she had forgotten this whole episode in her life. Marina professed a complete inability to elucidate the meaning of any of her dreams. When asked if she had any similar dreams later in her life she said no. In 1930 Kóronos the structuring influences guiding the formulation of the dream narratives were consistent and readily identifiable: (1) The expectation that the dreams would lead to the discovery of the St. Anne icon dictated that the action often proceeded into the caverns at Argokoíli and involved communications from St. Anne and other holy figures.(2) The social context of reading the dreams aloud to believers and skeptics alike imbued them with a proselytizing tone. (3) The coaching of Evdokía and the participation of the other dreaming children generated a social pressure (or inspiration) to keep producing dreams. (4) Sharing the dreams publicly on a regular basis familiarized all the dreamers with a current pool of images and themes, thereby synchronizing the plots of the various dreams both in relation to each other and in relation to developing everyday local events. The dreamers were all singing from the same hymnal, not in unison but in multipart harmony.

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Aside from the notebooks of Marina and Evdokía, we possess only a single notebook from one of the other children, that of Dimítrios Manolás.16 This notebook covers a period from 20 July until 17 December and contains twenty-eight short dreams. The most significant overlap between dreams occurs during the month of June 1930 between the notebooks of Evdokía and Marina. Both notebooks have entries for 10, 11, 13, 24, and 27 June, but none of these match up even approximately. On 13 June, for example, Evdokía dreamt that St. George rode up on his horse to the place where she was threshing and offered her a ride to Argokoíli, which she at first refused and then accepted. On the same day, Marina dreamt that the Panagía came and took her, the other children, and Evdokía on an airplane ride and then transported them to a beautiful house with many rooms, where they could not find a way out. The Panagía showed them a trap door, through which they descended but found themselves in a cistern. They could not emerge, but many people appeared along with them, and the Panagía bade them farewell. Some striking scenes do appear in both dream notebooks during June. For 5 June Evdokía records a dream in which she and Photeiní enter two new caves at Argokoíli. There they meet St. Anne and Ioakím. St. Anne is thinking aloud: “Should I emerge, or not emerge? Let me emerge (na vgó na mín vgo, ás vgo).” Then St. Anne says to Evdokía, as if by way of apology, “Since I am about to emerge, I haven’t tidied up my cave, and I have let it go like this.” For 16 June, part of Marina’s entry reads: “Inside the cave St. Anne was sitting and she was saying, ‘Should I emerge? Or not emerge? What should I do?’” And then she said, “‘How can I emerge when the villages are so faithless? When I am convinced that they are believers, then I will emerge. But all of them had better believe, not just one or two.’” This image of St. Anne represented the crux of village speculation. When would the icon be found? The motif and phraseology are repeated, but Evdokía’s dream makes St. Anne’s emergence seem imminent—a decision already made— while Marina’s dream shows the emergence to be subject to hard-to-achieve conditions. This issue remained a topic of speculation throughout Marina’s dream notebooks well into 1931. This scene of St. Anne paraphrasing Hamlet 16

This notebook came into my hands shortly before this book went to press, and I have not been able to incorporate it fully into this study. This notebook contains fourteen dreams from the period of 20 July to 2 August and fourteen dreams from the period 5 December to 18 December. The dreams are short, rarely more than one page of exercise book. In a dream of 26 July the Panagía appears in a dream and says to him: “My child, I wanted you to see bigger dreams, more important ones, but you don’t sit still, but you go out and about with your father and they will forget them, and that is why I give you such short ones. . . .” 82

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got into circulation—perhaps via Evdokía’s dream, perhaps via orally circulating visions, dreams, or waking conversations—and reverberated in dreams of the succeeding weeks. This precise scene and dialogue do not, however, reappear later in Marina’s notebooks. Certain images apparently gained currency in the dreams for short periods of time. The golden tap that would turn on the flow of holy water, for another example, featured in the dreams of Marina (3 June) and Evdokía (27 June) and only once thereafter (22 July). In addition to focusing on certain images, the dreams were also synchronized around current events. In the first phase of the dreaming, between March and the end of June, the dreams of the visionaries appeared as awe-inspiring testimony to the power of the saints and of Orthodox faith. Pétros and Marina told me that the local church councillors did take them to other villages, outside mountain Naxos, so that people could witness the unfolding miracle and share in the divine grace. According to Pétros the mountain villages were generally entirely credulous, while the villages of the middle highlands (the area around Philóti, including Kalóxylos, Tragaía, and Moní) were receptive and the lowland villages demonstrated a mixed response. In Evdokía’s dream of 1 June the Panagía instructs her to go to the town of Tragaía in central Naxos, where she reads a poem composed by the Panagía to a crowd of people, who kneel and weep. Marina dreams on 4 and 6 June that she and the dreamers go to the lowland town of Engarés to spread their message. In her dream on 7 June the Panagía says that she will take them to Engarés on the following Sunday, and on 9 June she records a dream that she had while in Engarés. The dream theme of proselytizing in other villages reflected actual experiences of traveling to villages on Naxos. The children were collectively dreaming in the sense that their dreams all concerned the same unfolding subject and the same dream space. They participated in the same imaginary, but no one explicitly claimed that the visionaries simultaneously shared the same dreamscape such that, upon waking, they could independently give identical accounts (known as “mutual dreaming”). The case bears comparison with the sixteenth-century benandanti of Friuli, northern Italy, who claimed that while their bodies lay asleep in bed, their spirits traveled out to the village fields in bands and fought against witches (Ginzburg 1983). If they defeated the witches, the harvest would be good and the village prosperous. The benandanti testified to inquisitors that a fellow villager would come by their houses in the dream and collect them to take them to find the witches. This compares with Marina’s and Dimítrios’s dreams, which characteristically begin with a preamble such as the following: “The Panagía, St. Anne, and Jesus Christ 83

An Epidemic of Dreaming

came and took me, Goumenogiánnis, Evdokía, Nikiphóros Legákis, and Katína [Legáki], Stéphanos, and all the dreaming children, and we went to Argokoíli and entered the church there.”17 Inquisitors took the activities of the benandanti as absolutely “real,” with the result that numerous of these self-denominated “good-doers” found themselves on the sharp end of witchcraft accusations. The authorities did not seriously countenance the idea that the activities described were seen in dreams and therefore did not explore the features of mutual dreaming in their interrogations. They simply assumed that all of the benandanti voluntarily participated in actual encounters with witches. They therefore took it for granted that the benandanti would have been aware of each other and independently able to verify the events that took place (in dreams). In Kóronos people did recognize the key role of dreaming in generating the prophecies of the children. Some people may have assumed that the visionaries interacted on a different plane of reality, one where the saints could be contacted. If so, this was never openly discussed and examined; it remained implicit and unanalyzed. In the Italian example, another reason (aside from the fact that “dreaming” was not recognized as an issue) that the mutual awareness of dreamers in the dream was never established in court was that in the early proceedings the authorities tried only a single benandante from a given group. When, decades after these first hearings, more than one benandante finally gave an account of the same group’s activities at the same trial, the accounts of their nighttime sorties differed in various details (Ginzburg 1983: 132), much as the accounts of Marina and Evdokía differed. Ginzburg commented that “each benandante relived in a different way, presumably during the course of their mysterious fainting spells, the traditional beliefs . . . ” (1983: 133).18 In Kóronos the children and their adult supporters dreamt in terms of a set of local models set up in the previous century by the dreamers of 1836. The force driving them in 1930 was their historical condition (see Burke 1997: 27–29). The dramatic, 17

Example from Marina’s notebook, 19 August 1930. See appendix for other examples. A comparative example from contemporary southern Europe would be that of the mazzeri of Corsica. Certain villagers reportedly experience dreams in which they kill (Corsican ammazzá, It. ammazzare) an animal. Upon examining the face of the animal in the dream they recognize a fellow villager who will die in the coming year (Carrington 1974: 51). Once a year the mazzeri of neighboring villages fight each other on the borders of the communal districts. The village of the victorious mazzeru will be prosperous while the defeated community will suffer misfortune. The possible implication is that two individuals might enter into the same dream to fight one another (Ravis-Giordani 1979). 18

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unfolding present of early 1930 activated this embodied sense of local history, which received articulation in dreaming. The benandanti went on their night battles only four times a year. The oneirevámenoi convened and traveled every night over a period of months, making collective dreaming an intensive and interactive endeavor.

The Dreamers and the Local Community As the search for the icon carried over into the summer of 1930, the dreamers and their followers ran into opposition from unbelieving fellow villagers. The saints in the dreams often commented on unbelievers, as we have seen. Consider, for example, the full text of Marina’s dream of 9 June: The Panagía appeared, and she told me to tell the villagers of Engarés to adopt, she said, faith in their lives. Because if they don’t believe I will send cholera into their village, and I won’t spare anyone. Because everyone, down to infants, blasphemes the Panagía. Then St. Anne appeared . . . and St. Anne told me to tell the Engarítes not to blaspheme because she would leave no one alive when she emerged. Then I hear a buzzing, and I asked St. Anne what this buzzing noise was. She told me that it was Christ coming in an airplane, and I turned and I saw Christ in the airplane, and the moment I saw him there appeared a sign in the sky. This sign was sent by the Panagía. And the moment it entered Engarés this sign broke into four. And all those who saw it repented and believed. And Christ climbed down from the airplane, and he told me to tell the Engarítes to repent. Because, he said, only the old women believe, and after them, the rest are all faithless. And he told me that even our village [Kóronos] was like this, but it had repented. And we said good-bye to each other and he left. In a dream of 25 June (repeated on 4 July) the Panagía tells the dreamers to travel to the other islands to broadcast the message that the time is nearing. And eventually the dreamers claim to be taken on dream excursions to proselytize in Athens, Turkey, Australia, England, and Germany (28 July). On these latter missions the Panagía causes people in these faraway lands to dream of her icon 85

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and Argokoíli so that selected locals are prepared for visits by the visionaries (23 August). As in 1836, the participants in 1930 drew on the idea of demons to explain the differences between the visionaries and skeptical fellow villagers. On 14 July St. Anne declares in an afternoon dream: “Now, children, tell [people] not to come out of their houses at night; not even to open their doors, because there are many demons in the village. And they should not curse (vlastimoún), because the demons congregate even worse if people curse.” In another dream (18 July) Nikiphóros tou Milonogiánni, an opponent of the visionaries, appears with a demon next to him. The demon assures him, “Everything you say is true, because I do my work.” To Evdokía the demon says, “Everything you say about the Panagía is a lie.” St. Anne then appears and causes Nikiphóros and his demon to vanish into thin air. Father Legákis reported that one morning in July the father of one of the dreamers screamed “with all the might of his lungs” that no one should go to work because the “Megalókhari [epithet of Panagía] has released thousands of demons into the village.” The dreams were shaping daytime thinking and vice versa. During the fifteen-day period leading up to the feast day of the village church and patron saint, St. Marina (17 July), the saints imposed severe demands on the faithful. There was an air of urgency: “Now I will come out soon . . . at most in one month,” St. Anne declares in a dream of 4 July. She instructs villagers to fast on Wednesdays and Fridays from meat, fish, and oil. On the day of the feast itself the dreamers urged people to eat only a little meat and then to finish this the following day to begin a new fast leading up to the Metamorphosis of the Savior on 6 August (Legákis 1932: 18). St. Anne orders that no music be played on the day of St. Marina because people would effectively be dancing to the demons’ music and murders would occur (14 July). People should spend their days in prayer at the parish church or digging for the icon at Argokoíli. Those who go to the mines to work will die in terrible accidents, say St. Anne and Ioakím. The Panagía chimes in that “the demons of the mines gather, and they fight to defeat Christians” (4 July). When Goumenogiánnis protests that people are too poor not to work, St. Anne assures him that everyone will get wealthy (tha ploutínoun) “when I emerge. Do they think they will get rich from emery?” Prophecies had, by this time, been circulating that upon discovery of the icon the village would prosper from donations of pilgrims and the discovery of treasures. In contrast to the situation in the Bolivian tin mines described by Taussig (1980), here the demons in the mines do not represent the devilish 86

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temptation of capitalism that lures villagers away from a bucolic, traditional way of life governed by barter and domestic production. The alternative to acquisition via work in the demon-infested mines in the Kóronos dreams is the acquisition of even greater wealth through spiritual work. In any case, mining was not to be rejected but deployed exclusively in the service of the Panagía by digging at Argokoíli for a different kind of valuable resource. The choice in Kóronos was not between capitalism and an alternative to it (such as precapitalist agrarianism) but between adherence to the mundane world and its routines and a religiosity that would make possible the revelation of divine messages and the advent of a new, redeemed world—a millenarian capitalism in which the trickle-down effect of pious enterprise would make the whole society wealthy and blessed. In Kóronos, the dreamers’ messages created an intolerable amount of social disruption. Not everyone accepted the moral strictures and the economic hardship that the visionaries advised. Father Legákis attributed the children’s intensive visions during this period to an incipient delirium brought on by fasting (1932: 23). The very word oneirevámenos began to take on the exasperated, negative overtones that it retains today. The crisis point was reached when the dreamers and their followers accused a respected and long-serving parish priest (ephimérios) of scheming to steal the icon of the Argokoiliótissa in order to sell it for his own profit. The villagers had placed the icon with this priest for safekeeping inside his home in the village for fear that it might be stolen. Some said that the bishop of Naxos was planning to ask to examine it and not return it. Another rumor circulated that outsiders (xénoi) would come to the village with the pretext of worshipping on the feast day of St. Marina and then steal the icon and sell it to foreigners (xénous). People felt comfortable with the icon at the priest’s house until a woman living in the mountain village of Komiakí dreamt that the Panagía Argokoiliótissa appeared to her and said, “Tonight, tonight, tonight. I’m leaving, I’m leaving, I’m leaving.” This woman rushed to Kóronos, stirred up a crowd behind her, and at 10 p.m. banged on the priest’s door while he was entertaining guests. The angry mob humiliated him by demanding that he turn over the icon then and there. From the pulpit the following Sunday this priest excoriated those who had impugned his honesty. In this sermon he acknowledged that he did not believe in the dreams (Legákis 1932: 20). Escaping the tense atmosphere in the village, the young dreamers took up residence at Argokoíli after the feast of St. Marina. There, living in the cells, they were in the midst of their most faithful followers, those digging for the icon. 87

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With the help of two or three sympathetic local priests they led prayers three times a day: in the morning inside the church at Argokoíli, at noon in the little cave where the icons had been discovered in 1836 (called the agía évresi [holy discovery] or just évresi), and in the evening at the spot where people were digging (called the érgo [work]). They sent their dreams back to the village to be read out, but soon the police forbade these gatherings. The dreams prophesied a specific chain of events already largely familiar from Evdokía’s notebook. First the icon of St. Anne would be uncovered. In Marina’s notebooks the date for this fluctuates between 1 August (a feast day of Christ) and 15 August (the Dormition of the Panagía). According to Father Legákis there had been prophecies that the icon would be found on the feast day of St. Anne (25 July). When this failed, the date was pushed back to 6 August (the feast of the Metamorphosis of Christ). When nothing occurred on that day, the children claimed that the date meant was the Metamorphosis of Christ according to the Old Calendar, which would place it on the 19 August.19 Father Legákis, who seemed well disposed to the visionaries in the early part of his account, now remarked dryly, “Out of necessity, you see, the dream maniacs (oneiromaneís) became Old Calendarists” (1932: 33). The priest’s verbal transformation of oneirevámenoi into oneiromaneís encapsulated mounting public opinion in a nutshell. Father Legákis equated the adherence to dream visions of the Panagía and other saints with a form of idolatry. The visionaries were worshipping false images, because if the dream images had been true the prophecies would have been fulfilled (Legákis 1932: 33). Another local priest, one of two priests in the area authorized to hear confessions, considered the dreamers to be in heresy and declined to offer them communion until the bishop pronounced on the matter (Legákis 1932: 35). The bishop, in Athens serving on the Holy Synod at the time, issued a proclamation urging the dreamers and their followers to return to their normal daily lives. His announcement was read in the church at Argokoíli on the feast day of 15 August and again on 17 August at the Sunday morning service in the parish church of Kóronos. In a move reminiscent of 1836, the bishop forbade his clerics to officiate at any service initiated by the visionaries.

19

The Old ( Julian) Calendar is thirteen days behind the New (Gregorian) Calendar. When the Greek Orthodox Church adopted the New Calendar in 1924, a vocal “Old Calendarist” movement arose within Greece in opposition to the change, and it was particularly active at this time (Ware 2002).

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These pronouncements did little to derail the movement to find St. Anne’s icon. Some dreams during August mention erstwhile followers’ defecting (e.g., 19 August). The majority of dreams, however, show that prophetic failure led to further elaborations of the dreamers’ convictions. This accords with the hypothesis put forward by Festinger, Riecken, and Schachter (1956: 25) that rather than rejecting cherished beliefs when prophecy fails, followers will likely move the revelation later in time. Their prediction (1956: 28, 214) that prophetic failure will lead to increased recruitment certainly held true in relation to the failed revelation on 25 March 1930. In the wake of that disappointment many new visionaries, such as Goumenogiánnis and Marina, joined the movement. Prophetic failures expose a “dissonance” between what one expects to happen and what actually transpires. Rather than eat humble pie and jettison belief in a particular prophecy altogether as a way of eliminating this cognitive dissonance, followers may dig in deeper (1956: 28). Thus, instead of weakening prophetic movements, failures can actually strengthen them. In a dream of 28 August a heckler mocks the dreamers and is struck down by St. Anne, leading Nikiphóros Legákis to boast: “Did you see? We have superior friends (anóteri paréa) with us.” Instead of abandoning their position in the face of public and ecclesiastical opposition the visionaries inserted the motif of martyrdom into their prophetic narrative. St. Anne tells them that they will have to serve time in prison in order for the icon to come out (7 August); persecution becomes a sign that revelation is imminent. As the prophetic failures mounted, the dreamers elaborated new prophecies directed particularly at the emery miners, whose support they wished to retain. In August, however, disenchanted supporters finally began to drift away. This ratcheted up the stakes of belief still further. The dreamers and their followers were reduced to a hard core developing ever more elaborate symbols and narratives of redemption.

Signs, Drawings, Icons Marina’s first drawing illustrates a dream of 17 July, her name day. Her drawings begin relatively small and are executed in the same blue ink used to write the texts of the dreams. After early August she often drew these dream signs in elementary crayon colors, generally filling one page of exercise notebook on a regular basis. Between mid-July 1930 and the last surviving entry of 15 April 1931, Marina entered some 195 drawings in her notebooks. I turn now to examine Marina’s drawings to see how they relate to her dream texts and what both the texts and the drawings reveal about the dreaming movement. 89

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In the dream recorded on 17 July (transcribed in the appendix) a number of saints come and whisk Marina and her fellow dreamers away to Argokoíli. Upon entering the church precinct they hear a voice and turn to see a sign (simeío)—a cross that is “shining like the sun.” They ask the Panagía why it shines, and she explains that it has her mother inside. Later a voice from inside the cross bids them farewell, and the cross disappears in a flash of fire. They go into the church and pray for it to reappear. St. George says, “But, do you think it is a cross? It is St. Anne, and she takes the shape of a cross (eínai i Agía Ánna kai skhimatízetai stavrós).” Emerging from the church, they see the cross again. The Panagía commands them: “Make the shape of the cross that people may see it.”20 Then a second cross appears beneath the first one. St. George instructs them to draw (skhediásete) both crosses, “because these crosses will be very useful as icons (eikonísmata).” At the end of this dream narrative appears a drawing of the two crosses (fig. 8).21

Figure 8. Drawing of 17 July 1930: “The first cross that appeared” and “The second cross that appeared.” 20 There is a double-entendre here between “making” the sign of the cross as one does with one’s right hand when entering a church and drawing or “making” a material representation of a cross. 21 Exceptionally, this dream is followed by two drawings. The second drawing of 17 July is a rudimentary sketch; apparently the front elevation of a church with three crosses on it.

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This image picks up several prominent themes in the story of the search for the icon of St. Anne. The idea that a bright, shining sign should appear in the sky draws upon the events of 25 March, when Katerína Korré spent the morning directing people to look at a bright sign that she saw approaching in the sky. A cross that moves mystically and “selects” the dreamers references the cross that selected Evdokía (as detailed in her notebook studied above). And the general image of a cross in the sky has already been articulated in prose numerous times during June, for example, in the dream text of 9 June presented above, where Christ appears above the village of Engarés in an airplane. A sign appears next to him. Like the airplane, itself a flying cross, this sign may well have been in the form of a cross. In that dream the second sign breaks into four, possibly the four arms of the cross coming off. The drawing of the second cross on 17 July, with its four extra arms, may be interpreted as an animation of a cross breaking into four. Signs coming from above with voices and/or saints inside them will remain a constant theme of Marina’s drawings. The reason to draw these signs, as St. George instructs, is so that they will serve as “icons.” The drawings themselves will, like icons, be a means of communicating with the transcendent world of the saints. They transmit messages, but it may be implied as well that they will have their own talismanic power, like amulets. The form of the first cross calls to mind the carved wooden crosses made locally as amulets (phylakhtá) against demonic assault (Stewart 1991: 5). Such crosses are themselves “little-tradition” versions of the fine engraved metal crosses that are prized and powerful possessions of any parish church. The appearance of these illustrations introduces a new source of power in the visionaries’ arsenal. One icon has already been recovered. While awaiting the discovery of the next there will be intermediary, drawn icons (eikonísmata). These drawings take divine manifestations or signs that are not visible to people in normal consciousness and transform them into recognizable shapes (skhímata), thus mediating between the unseen and the seen world. A few days later, in the dream of 19 July, the Panagía directs attention to a heavenly sign in the “form of the sun” (fig. 9). They learn from St. Anne that Christ is inside the sign; that is why it appears “bigger than the sun.” The Panagía concludes by instructing them: “From now on, you must draw (skhimatízete) all the signs that you see.” In tone and subject matter the dream notebooks emulate the Revelation of St. John, in which one consistently encounters variants of the formula “I saw yet another sign in the sky, large and wondrous” (Rev 15:1: Kai eídon állo simeíon en to ouranó méga kai thavmastón). In the Revelation these radiant signs often 91

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Figure 9. Drawing of 19 July 1930: “The form of the sign.”

represent angels, the Panagía, or Christ, described respectively as having a “face as if it were the sun” (Rev 10:1; kai to prósopon aftoú os o ílios), “clothed with the sun” (Rev 12:1; perivevliméni ton ílion), and possessing a countenance “as the sun shineth in its strength” (Rev 1:16; os o ílios phaínei en ti dynámei aftoú). As does the Revelation, which begins and ends with the statement that “the time is at hand” (Rev 1:3, 22.10, 22.20; o gar kairós engýs), Marina’s notebooks repeat the idea that “the time is drawing close” (18 July; simónei o kairós). Indeed, Marina makes a folk etymological connection between the unrelated words simónei (to draw near) and simeía (signs), to emphasize that the appearance of signs implies imminence (e.g., 13 July). The discovery of the icon will amount to a Second Coming. The sick will be healed and nonbelievers punished (19 and 21 August). At the start of his Revelation a voice tells St. John, “What you see, write in a book” (Rev 1:11; O vlépeis grápson eis vivlíon) for dissemination to the world. Marina’s dream notebooks and those produced by the other dreamers replicate this mission of recording visions in writing. In the dream of 20 July the Panagía reads a prayer from a gold-plated bible and then turns to Evdokía and says, “Do you see this bible, Evdokía? Just like this bible you must make your dreams. You must print them (na ta tipósete) and make them gold gospels (khrysá evangélia). . . . From now on you will print them, because when my mom emerges I want all 92

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of them printed. If by chance they are not printed . . . I will punish you.” Father Legákis’s earlier-quoted comment that enough dream notebooks had been written to create a large volume now takes on different overtones—the dreamers were already aiming to compile just such a volume. Most Greek Orthodox parishes have a special silver- or gold-plated, sometimes jewel-encrusted copy of the bible for display during the Sunday liturgy and special processions (fig. 10). Such volumes take a revered place as religious objects in themselves, which may be kissed or greeted like icons. The visionaries’ tome-in-the-making was yet another item in their stock of tangible objects for mediating the transcendent realm.

Figure 10. The Kóronos bible, displayed in a procession at Argokoíli in 2005.

The project of compiling a book also built upon the growing local fascination with reading and writing. The dreaming children attended the same village school, and writing in the blue exercise books resembled homework. They were placing their newly acquired literacy skills at the service of the cause, much as the emery miners offered their excavating know-how. They represented a new, post–World War I generation that was growing up literate, in contrast to Evdokía’s generation. Ability to read and write transformed one; it opened up 93

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intermediate and higher education and new possibilities for advancement in society (Stewart 1990). The symbolic leader of the oneirevámenoi, Nikiphóros Legákis, a high school teacher in Khóra, emblematized the transformative effects of education. Various scenarios in the dreams clearly expressed the miracle of education. For example, the alphabet itself became a medium of revelation in a dream of 20 June in which a rock drops from the sky with writing on it. Evdokía laments her inability to read it, whereupon the Panagía bestows literacy upon her and she reads the letters “better than one who had studied” (kalítera apó éna spoudasméno). In a dream of 9 July “almighty god” appears holding a writing board with capital letters on it, which he interprets (each one is the first letter of a word) as if in a school lesson. The dreamers presented the community with a set of material objects that evidenced contact with the sacred and also facilitated further contact with it. The promised church at Argokoíli was certainly the grandest such object predicted to appear. The dreamers envisioned that this church would be 70 meters long, 45 meters wide, and 100 meters high (Legákis 1932: 18).22 This prophecy of a large church seems to have influenced Marina’s drawings, a great many of which appear to be architectural, such as that for 20 July (fig. 11), which shows a structure with figures inside. ”23 Many of the subsequent drawings present variations on this image of the front elevation of a church. Alongside images of shining signs and crosses (in the sky or on/in structures), this architectural image of the church is one of Marina’s stock motifs. In the dream of 30 July all of the visionaries are transported to England, where they collect red flags and bring them back and set them up in the courtyard at Argokoíli. From this point on flags appear as a regular visual motif alongside shining stars and crosses. St. Anne tells them that the red flags mean “joy.” During the contemporary annual pilgrimage to Argokoíli, the square in front of

22

In Dimítrios’s dream of 7 December, the saints take him to Argokoíli and reveal the monastery already built on a large scale, covered in frescoes, and with three vaults, one each for the Panagía, St. Anne, and Christ. 23 In the preceding dream Marina wrote that Ioakím and St. Anne appeared in the sign. I think that she got distracted as she wrote the label of the drawing and after writing the word “‘St.”’ she neglected to write in “Anne” and then she signed the page with her own name, giving the inconsistent “‘St. Marina”’ attribution to the image. Marina periodically signed pages of her dream notebook, an indication of her pride in authorship. Perhaps she was subconsciously identifying herself with St. Anne (David Sutton, personal communication). 94

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Figure 11. Drawing of 20 July 1930: “Inside were Ioakím and St. Marina.”

the church is strung with banners, and perhaps such flags expressed celebration at the site in the 1930s and earlier. The drawings also frequently recur to an iconographic motif of “channels,” whether depicted as chains of crosses or as parallel lines filled with stars or crosshatched as in the drawing for 30 July (fig. 12). These channels might be taken as an allusion to the irrigation ditches (avlákia) that would be necessary to channel the gush of holy water once it began to flow. Systems of such irrigation canals and trenches are essential to terrace cultivation as practiced in mountain Naxos. In the dream of 4 September the dreamers visit the discovery site, where they find workers in the process of digging a ditch (khantáki) for channeling the expected flow of holy water. In 1962 a small chapel to St. Anne was constructed opposite the original 1851 church of the Panagía. This chapel took advantage of the foundational digging and leveling work done during the 1930 search for the icon. It is built into the hillside, and one may exit through the back of the chapel directly into the cave of the discovery to emerge, via a narrow stairway, on the hillside above. The plaza area between the two churches was constructed with grooves to funnel the still-predicted flow of holy water. Whether in drawings or as landscape architecture, these channels represent faith in the eventual discovery of the holy water.

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Figure 12. Drawing of 30 July.

The appearance of a figure or voice inside a sign, familiar from the earliest dreams, continues as a narrative theme throughout Marina’s dream notebooks, but it is developed iconographically only during the late summer of 1930. The 20 July image (see fig. 11) of Ioakím and St. Marina/Anne inside a sign in the form of a church structure (or possibly an icon stand) was followed by a dream on 23 July in which Christ and Ioakím arrive in an airplane, distribute red ribbons to the assembled, and instruct the villagers to heed the dreams of the visionaries. The drawing of this dream, however, looks more like a ship (fig. 13). The planks on either side of the vessel could be gangplanks or wings. In 1930 airplanes had just come into public use, but there was no airport on Naxos, and a fourteen-year-old was unlikely to have seen one at first hand.24 The picture represents a more generic “vessel” (skáphos can refer to both aircraft and seacraft), possibly even a baptismal font. Inside this vessel Marina has drawn seven shining

24

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The Athens airport, Hellenikon, began operating in 1921.

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Figure 13. Drawing of 23 July 1930: “Ioakím and Christ were inside the sign.”

stars, a departure in the direction of abstraction from the quasi-anthropomorphic figure of Ioakím sketched on 20 July. In the dream for 28 August St. Anne presents the dreamers with a book of dreams, which they read to a restive village audience. The saints promise to stand by the oneirevámenoi even though much of the village opposes them in the wake of the failed predictions. They see a large sign at Argokoíli at the end of the dream. The Panagía remarks that “it is the largest sign.” Marina draws it across two pages of her notebook (fig. 14). The writing within the sign is vertical, in contrast to the horizontal writing of the dream text at the top of the page, raising the question whether this picture is to be viewed as I present it here or rotated 90 degrees clockwise so that the writing can be read normally. If the picture is to be viewed as I have it, then this image may be Marina’s most specific drawing in terms of orientation. It shows the ground as a grouping of pitched rooftops at the bottom with the sky above it. The village of Kóronos is densely built, and although the majority of roofs today are flat cement structures, the oldest houses have pitched roofs with terracotta tiles. Exceptionally, this drawing does not conclude the dream. The narrative continues on the following page, describing the return of Christ and Ioakím from a visit to Germany. The sign depicts their aerial apparition. St. Anne then speaks up and describes the sign: “Do you see, where the black and red are [at the bottom] was the darkness that was inside the village when my daughter was in Khóra. Now the darkness has gone and the red 97

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Figure 14. Drawing of 28 August 1930: (in the two triangles at lower left) “This is the darkness that was inside the village when the Panagía was in Khóra.” (in the tip of the diamond at center left) “Here was Jesus Christ with Ioakím.”

has remained.” The unusual juxtaposition of the domains of earth and sky in this image makes it clear that the vast majority of Marina’s drawings depict only the sky. The dream accounts repeatedly state that signs come from “above.” Thus, even when shapes resembling church elevations or flags appear, they are to be viewed as floating in the sky, as if looking at the ceiling in a planetarium. Up to this point I have explored the building blocks of Marina’s iconography: radiant stars, crosses, flags, books, canals, and church facades. Marina’s objective was to transform heavenly divine manifestations (simeía) into mundane forms (skhímata, skhédia). Temporally the signs implied imminent change, while spatially they stood above the village. The people of Kóronos lived 1930 under an unceasing succession of signs that promised a redemptive transformation of village life. For the most part the dreams relay revelations from the saints; they do not require interpretation because they clearly transmit their messages in straightforward speech. The appearance of the color red, as seen, for example, in the dream of 30 July belongs to an entirely different category of dream symbolism, 98

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the dream-key system, in which the color red in a dream means that something will happen soon. The red flags indicate the imminence of the discovery of the St. Anne icon. In the dream of 23 July, Christ gives red ribbons to Evdokía and Goumenogiánnis, and the Panagía says, “Do you see that the signs are red, as are the gifts that we gave you? This means that my mom will come out soon.” And again on 11 August Christ calls attention to red flags that have been distributed and says, “You see that the flags are red. This means the quickness with which everything will emerge.”25 As time passed without any actual discovery, the dreamers began to reach hand over fist for expressive symbols that the community and they themselves could believe in. Their accelerated sign-making and prophetic signifying activities went into semiotic overdrive, spiraling out of control into hypersemiosis. In the case of the color red, this involved employing two ideologically opposed systems of dream interpretation within the same dream in order to drive home the message of urgency. Marina had already forged a new, idiosyncratic meaning of simeía as connoting imminence. Now red signs double- underlined this urgency by activating an auxiliary framework of dream interpretation. The dreamers gave still further novel meaning to the concept of signs by interpreting them as punitive. This extension may have been conditioned by the cognate verb simadévei, one of the meanings of which is “to mark, scar” as in “to punish or stigmatize someone with a physical blemish.” The dreamers pushed the verbal form of “sign,” simeiónei, which normally means “to note down,” in the same direction, so that Katerína Korré from Skadó could say to St. Anne, “If they make fun of me, mark them (ná tous seimeiónis) but cure them again” (15 July a.m.). In the dream of 12 September the saints reassure the dreamers that they will stand by them and deliver the promised miracles. To shore up the dreamers’ social position the Panagía assures them that “those who will suffer signs26 are unbelievers. In order to make them believe we will hurl signs. Then we will cause the holy water to emerge so that they may be healed. Then they will believe.”27 Dimítrios dreamt (25 July) that the bishop, who had begun to oppose the dreamers, would be struck by a sign “because he is not performing his duty” (dióti den kánei ta kathíkonta tou). 25 “βλεπέτε καὶ τής σιμέες πὼς εἳνε κοκήνες θά πὴ εἲνε τό γρηγορο πού θά βγουν ὃλα.” As in the sample texts in the appendix, I present Marina’s language exactly as she has written it. 26 This unusual expression,”to suffer signs” (na páthei simeía), is very close in sound to “to suffer harm, accident” (na páthei zimiá). 27 “καὶ λὲη ὴ παναγία μά αὐτή πού θὰ παθούν σιμία είνε ἅπηστη καὶ γιά νά τούς κανομε νά πηστευουν θὰ ρηχτομε σιμηα καὶ κατοπη θά βγαζουμε τό ἂγιασμα νὰ γηνοντε καλα καὶ τότε θὰ πηστεψουν.”

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In the entry for 4 September people “with a mark” (me simeío) are pictured coming to be cured by the holy water that has begun to flow in the dream. The very concept of a sign, which shares the same roots as the English term “semiotic,” has fragmented into a polysemic resource: good signs of divine manifestation and grace, bad signs of divine punishment, near/urgent signs, and signs as scars or harmful accidents.

A Naxiote Myth-Dream After the beginning of September the children returned to school. The days grew progressively shorter, daily readings at Evdokía’s balcony are no longer mentioned, and we may suppose that the circle of supporters contracted. 28 The priests had been forbidden to officiate at any ceremonies concerning the icon of St. Anne, and the various saints complain about this in the dreams (21 November, 5 December). As their prospects of success waned, the visionaries’ semiotic production nonetheless remained high. From September until the middle of April 1931, when the notebooks end, Marina drew 170 pictures. The sheer volume of illustrations and dream texts offers a further dimension of the hypersemiosis identified above. During this period the handwriting in the notebooks changed at least four times. The dream drawings appear relatively consistent, but one or more of these other scribes may have executed some drawings, the majority of which are in color. Furthermore, the visionaries were riven by internal and external dissent. A dream on 20 September predicts that the boys (Pétros and Dimítrios) will desert the cause because they are “malicious” (kakoképhala). Then Stéphanos, a young man whom the visionaries believe will be instrumental in “lifting” the icon, threatens to leave the group because “nothing is happening” (7 October). A voice within a sign informs the assembled that the discovery is so distant that the dreamers will drift away one by one and then the movement will begin all over again. The voice tells Evdokía that she might see the holy water only in the afterlife. In another dream (21 September) the dreamers descend into the cave, where they find a note that reads “In 1936 Ioakím and the other icons will emerge. And on that day St. Anne will emerge.” The community already understood the basic message of the visions. Simply generating new versions of it, however impressive and promising these might 28 Father Legákis ended his account of events in late August 1930. Marina’s dream notebooks thus furnish our main insight into the visionaries’ movement after this point. The notebook of Dimítrios Manolás contains dreams dated to December 1930 that parallel Marina’s dreams.

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be, could not attain success at this stage. The dreamers required that people embrace their messages with belief, and there was little chance of achieving that unless their prophecies came to pass. They had burned through their prophetic capital. The semiotician Peirce observed that every sign system implies an infinite regression of signs in what he termed “unlimited semiosis” (see Eco 1976: 71). Signs produce interpretants (mental, interpretive signs), themselves potentially expressible by new signs, which recursively elicit further interpretants and signs ad infinitum or until, through habit, a “final interpretant” is settled upon. The dreamers’ profuse production of signs represented a particular slightly different case of semiosis. The dreamers failed to elicit the emotive final interpretant (belief, conviction) that they sought (Kockelman 2007: 378), and therefore they intensified their sign production. By the autumn, however, they were mainly talking to themselves. A sign of this solipsism is that after late September the drawings become increasingly disconnected from the content of the dreams. Labels and writing inside the drawings disappear, voices speaking from within the signs cease, and very little reference is even made to seeing signs in the dreams beyond just the location where the sign appeared, such as “in the east” or “above the érgo.” After December the drawings appear without any clear relation to the topic or action of the preceding dream; they are literally free-floating signifiers. The dreams nonetheless insist on the general importance of signs. The dreamers frequently beseech the saints in the dreams to keep sending signs as an indication that they still care about the movement. The rapid-fire appearance of signs means that the moment of cataclysm or discovery is approaching. In the terminology of the art historian Whitney Davis (1996:2), the drawings comprise a “replicatory chain” of physical and psychic assemblages; a progression from dream to drawing (simeío to skhédio) and back again. Without the synchronizing, structuring guidance of the public readings, the dream narratives became more childish, repetitive, and lacking in substance. A lengthy sequence of dreams beginning in late September concerned pilgrims who arrive to pray inside the church at Argokoíli. These visitors are actually saints in disguise, and dream after dream involves the visionaries’ guessing their true identities. Evdokía and Nikiphóros prove to be the best at this game of charades, and their performance is praised in the same terms as a student’s performance in the classroom. Another story line that extends over numerous dreams involves encounters with the last Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI Palaiologos, who is still alive 101

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and in hiding. The dreams (e.g., 1 November) predict that he will emerge in 1933, at which time there will be a war between Greece and Turkey. The Hagia Sophia in Istanbul will revert to Orthodox Christian control (8 and 14 November). Dimítrios also dreams of King Constantine leading the Greek nation back to Istanbul and reclaiming Hagia Sophia (27 July, 5 and 9 December).29 All of this is contingent upon the finding of the icon of St. Anne and the construction of the church/monastery at Argokoíli. In the meantime St. Sophia and Emperor Constantine will frequently come to Argokoíli for refuge and to give encouragement, since their own fortunes depend on successful dreaming by the oneirevámenoi (17 November). In variations of this story Marina inserts fairy-tale elements such as the appearance of princes and a princess (14 and 23 November). One last story motif that is replicated from December through to the end of the notebook is that of a man’s attacking a wealthy fellow villager out of envy (e.g., 20 December, 10 March). This simple allegory is meant to illustrate the predicament of the dreamers surrounded by mean-spirited fellow villagers. Ultimately the dreams and the signs grind to a halt, collapsing under the weight of relentless sign production with no substantial information to communicate. The pictures and dream narratives became purely phatic—nonmessagebearing representational place markers of the movement’s continued existence. At the height of the eventful summer a typical dream might take up four or five pages of notebook beginning with a half-page litany of the names of the dreamers and the saints they encountered. In 1931 these litanies grew to as much as two pages in length. On 25 February Marina presented a dream that covered one page of litany and only a half-page of content. In the dream of 20 March the Panagía pulls out a card with golden writing on it instructing the dreamers to record dreams only on Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays. Within a month the dream notebooks peter out altogether. One of the other dreamers, Pétros, told 29 This story represents a version of the Megáli Idéa (Great Idea) that one day Greece would reclaim Constantinople, which had been lost at the end of the Byzantine Empire in 1453. According to folk legends the Emperor Constantine disappeared on the frontlines but was turned into a marble slab (o marmaroménos vasiliás) to be brought back to life when the city is recaptured. Shortly before the episode of dreaming on Naxos, the Greek state did fight a war with the Ottomans, but the war ended catastrophically with the expulsion in 1922 of the sizable Orthodox Christian communities in what is now Turkey. This would seem a dramatic, final end to the Great Idea. Yet, in these dreams its fulfillment is poetically matched with the discovery of the St. Anne icon, thus further illustrating how failed “dreams” catalyze semiosis. Relations between Greece and Turkey were actually improving at the time of Marina’s dreams. In late 1930 the two countries signed an agreement on compensation for property lost by refugees in 1922.

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me that he ended his dream notebooks in June 1931 when his family moved to Athens. By the end, Marina’s dream notebooks are going round and round in circles. The dreamers constantly question the saints for details of when the icon will be found, and the saints cagily avoid giving any direct answers. The stories and the drawings have become embroideries on an empty story. Embroidery may be exactly what the drawings were emulating (fig. 15). Girls Marina’s age learned embroidery at home in order to produce, alongside their mothers, items for their dowry trousseaux. Working away in the enclosed space of the home, imagining the moment of their marriage and the departure from their natal families, they saw their embroideries as betokening a future. The drawings of signs seen in dreams, icons indicating village transformation, portended an even more momentous future.

• During 1930, the dreams of Katerína Legáki, Nikiphóros Legákis, Evdokía, Marina, and the other oneirevámenoi shaped a myth. This myth told how the fortunes of the village would be radically changed by the discovery of the St. Anne icon. The myth validated dreaming as a conduit for receiving true messages from the beyond and the reality of the saints who actively communicated with

Figure 15. Drawing of 6 September compared with a Naxos embroidered curtain (Photo © Victoria & Albert Museum, London).

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individuals. Application of the term “myth” draws attention to the power of the narrative to shape and guide aspirations in Kóronos.30 This narrative had a sacred dimension, and people lived within it and participated in it. It entailed social and ritual practices such as digging for the icon with church-provided tools, attending religious services at the discovery site, the production of dream notebooks, and dream-sharing sessions at Evdokía’s balcony. In short, the myth informed a whole set of suppositions about how life was to be lived in the present and the future. Many thinkers have conceptualized the relation between myth and dream as one of homology. The early ethnologist W. H. R. Rivers, still following the precepts of Victorian evolutionary anthropology in 1918, held that “the dream of the civilised individual” represented an early stage of mental development and therefore an understanding of the mechanism of dream formation would shed light on the “rites and customs of savage man,” including myth (1918: 24, 26). Contemporary anthropologists have argued that similarities between myths and dreams arise because both partake in a visual-emotional form of thought (Kracke 1992) or are structured by a common dialectic problem-solving logic as identified by Lévi-Strauss (Kuper 1979). Freud and his followers, notably Abraham (1955 [1909]) and Rank (2004 [1909]), considered myths and dreams to express the same latent, unconscious wishes. With the ancient myth of Oedipus in mind, Freud wrote in The Interpretation of Dreams that “there must be something which makes a voice within us ready to recognize the compelling force of destiny in the Oedipus [of Sophocles]. . . . His destiny moves us because it might have been ours. . . . Our dreams convince us that this is so” (1976 [1900]: 364). The Oedipus complex can give rise to a dream (usually considerably disguised) or a myth (variably disguised). The reality and intensity of this complex within the human psyche account for the perpetual production of Oedipal myths and dreams over time; the two are versions of one another. Since they have the same latent content, the human mind may recognize this and align them. Personal dream narratives may gain circulation as myths, and already circulating myths may influence the formation of dreams. There is no denying that the Naxos myth possesses force at the psychological level. It springs from a desire for grace, dignity, and enrichment in a situ30

Myths can simultaneously be histories if they represent knowledge about the past, and histories can simultaneously be myths if they provide exemplary ethical guidance. History aims for the truth, while myth begins from the truth. There is a difference in epistemological attitude, but the two categories are not mutually exclusive. 104

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ation in which these have been blocked by external forces. Rather than leave the analysis here, with myth and dream as homologues, the Kóronos case offers an opportunity to consider the dynamic historical articulation and interaction between myth and dream (Tedlock 1992: 464). In 1930 a set of dreams generated a myth, but these dreams were already reacting to an earlier myth of 1836, which itself had been brought into form by dreams. Those dreams of the 1830s, in turn, were stimulated by the story of the discovery of the icon on Tinos a decade earlier. We see, then, a diachronic interaction between myths and dreams of lost icons stretching back through the fall of Constantinople, past iconoclasm, and coming to rest in the paradigmatic myth of the life and resurrection of Christ. This myth began to be elaborated by dreams/visions already in the first century CE, as we can see in the Revelation of St. John of Patmos. Marina’s visions and language are very similar to those of St. John, yet her scenario of redemption is much more limited and different in its concern for lost icons and the dream apparitions of saints. From one point of view these may be transformations of a basic structure. I am more interested, however, in seeing them as alterations and extensions of a basic myth that arise in specific historical moments—viewing dream not as mimesis of myth but as dialogic distorter of it. Kenelm Burridge offers an instructive comparative case in his study of the Tangu people of Papua New Guinea (1995 [1960]). In the early twentieth century, as the Tangu came into increasing contact with whites, they developed what Burridge termed a “primal myth” to account for the situation. In this myth, two brothers originally live in proximity and equality. One brother kills a fish, and then a flood comes and separates them by an ocean. When they finally reestablish contact, one brother has mastered technology and thus the secret of kago (manufactured goods and the wealth deriving from them), while the other has remained in a primitive condition. Granted the kin relationship, the advanced brother has the moral obligation to help his sibling to gain the knowledge and ability to reestablish equality. Yet he refuses to do so and remains distant. This myth structured the understanding of the social situation of contact with Western economies, but it did not just give rise to dreams. It furnished an implicit background against which people heard the messages of charismatic individuals, understood rumors, and interpreted everyday happenings. As did the Kóronos myth, the Tangu myth formulated “connexions between various kinds of experience, and attempts to express relations between past, present and future” (Burridge 1995 [1960]: 150). 105

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As in the Kóronos case, the various activations of the Tangu primal myth were unsuccessful. The prophetic figure Mambu in the 1930s was jailed by the Australian administration for siphoning off taxes and advocating rejection of white rule, and a decade later Yali stirred up similar antiwhite sentiments and was also thrown in prison. These leaders did not refer directly to the primal myth, but, according to Burridge (1995 [1960]: 148–49), the surrounding society saw them as tapping into it and thus giving it new form and animation. The primal myth went from being just a myth to being instantiated in charismatic activities and ultimately in dreams such as those of one youth, which related a set of orgiastic rituals to perform in order to get cargo. All of these different instantiations indexed the primal myth implicitly without replicating it; they were the polar opposite of a sacred text repeated verbatim in formalized ritual. The primal myth had become socially and generically dispersed and made into a “myth-dream” existing “in an area of emotionalized mental activity which is not private to any particular individual but which is shared by many. A community day-dream as it were” (148). The myth-dream, in Burridge’s conception, posits myth and dreams not as analogues that restate the same point but as different modes of expression in processual interaction. “Myths contain truths, dreams are avenues for perceiving the truths which are later contained in myths” (253). Dreams are certainly not the only conduit for adding to myths. Charismatic figures such as Mambu and Yali added to the myth-dream by their actions or whatever meanings people imputed to those actions. The myth-dream may be activated and expanded by daily events such as the arrival of a boat, the appearance of a stranger, or the occurrence of a natural phenomenon. The myth-dream in Kóronos must similarly be seen as a broad social phenomenon rather than just a case of dreams’ creating a myth or indexing an existing one. The dreams no doubt activated the myth as well as a host of other social activities. From that point on, everyday events inflected the myth-dream in new directions. The dreams of Evdokía and Marina introduced numerous additions to the previous version of the myth: crosses that existed and moved about, the spring of holy water that would gush forth, the role of emery miners in the process, the good fortune that would come to emery miners; and the significance of astral signs and dream drawings of them. When this effervescent moment finally fizzled out with Marina’s last notebooks, it had gained new elements, most notably the theme of a still-buried icon of St. Anne and the dramatic economic redemption that would accompany its discovery. Elements of the earlier myth, such as the fate of the other original icons, had disappeared. 106

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After 1931, the myth-dream went back underground into the half-light of occasional, partial recollections. Yet, reflection on the unsuccessful suppression of the nineteenth-century movement of the Panagía Argokoiliótissa or the parallel “failures” of Mambu and Yali suggests that the myth-dream of Kóronos was still far from dead.

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n a hilltop rising above a region dense with emery deposits sits the whitewashed chapel of St. Phanoúrios (fig. 16), the saint who helps people find lost or hidden things. Located halfway between the village and the discovery site at Argokoíli, this chapel centers a village cosmology that revolves around mystical revelation and discovery. An emery miner built this shrine, the first church dedicated to St. Phanoúrios on Naxos, in the early 1960s after the saint appeared in a dream and showed him the mouth (boúka) of a cave at a place called Lakkiá. The man entered the cave, as instructed by St. Phanoúrios, and found a massive seam of emery. Together

Figure 16. The communal district of Kóronos, looking eastward from the village, with St. Phanoúrios (circled) in the middle and the edge of the Argokíli complex (circled) in the upper right corner. 109

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with his company of miners (paréa) he successfully exploited the mine, building the church on the hilltop above it once the profits began to flow. Eventually the company dissolved, but individual miners still venture into the gallery at Lakkiá to forage for chunks of emery to add to their lots for shipment. Emery is a heavy, flaky rock prized according to the amount of corundum (aluminum oxide) it contains. High-quality emery contains 55–60 percent corundum. The collocation of emery and marble on Naxos made it a center in ancient Greece for marble quarrying and sculpting; the one stone refined the other, pushing the aesthetics of sculpture to a new level (McGilchrist 2011). In the nineteenth century emery cloth emerged as an early form of sandpaper, and “emeries” were pin cushions or small boxes filled with emery powder into which people stuck needles to keep them sharp. “Emery board” was a common generic name for a nail file well into the twentieth century. Emery has been found in only a few places worldwide, and it is mined in quantity only on Naxos and in western Turkey. The emery of eastern Naxos is the highest-quality emery in the world. The miners of Kóronos are effectively self-employed individuals, although they operate under heavy constraints. They may sell their emery only to the Greek state, which continues to exercise the complete monopoly it asserted in the nineteenth century. The state annually sets the price for emery and declares how many tons will be purchased. The miners have the latitude to decide where they will dig and which equipment and extraction techniques to use.1 Only a very few miners—those who scavenge the surface for emery rocks or chip away at exposed veins—work on their own. At present, the state purchases relatively little emery, and the miners work in groups of two or three, generally in existing mines. Because of the decreased demand and the low price of emery on the international market, few mines have been opened in recent decades. In the past, especially during the boom period of emery production (twenty years either side of World War I), miners formed companies of ten or more in order to supply the labor power needed to open and operate large tunnel mines. One of the best-known mines in the Kóronos district, Sarandára (Forty), took its name from the group of forty miners who worked it; another was called Eikosára (Twenty). Membership in these companies required the purchase of a share (merídio), with the proceeds applied toward the purchase of the equipment (picks, barrows, dynamite, rail track, wagons) 1 Because of safety concerns over the collapse of interior mines during the wet winter season and the decreased amount of emery purchased annually, the government now restricts emery mining to a period of around one month, usually in late summer.

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necessary to operate. Because the state buys emery only from individuals, a company divides its output by the number of miners in the group and credits each miner by name at the point of sale with the appropriate percentage of the total weight delivered. Emery mining in Kóronos thus lies somewhere between collective and individual enterprise. Successful mining has perennially depended on efficiency and on good luck. The effort to open a new gallery is immense, and a string of unsuccessful exploratory digs could exhaust, demoralize, and even bankrupt a mining group. Experienced miners thus developed a keen sense of where they might expect to find worthwhile deposits. Alongside rational calculations, a certain amount of prayer, dreaming, and mystical divination accompanied the process. In their comprehensive study of the verse composed by emery miners, Poetry Carved in Stone (Poíisi kharagméni stin pétra), the Naxiote writers Arkhontákis and Giannoúlis (2001: 110) present oral accounts of miners from Kóronos that show that opening a mine on the basis of dreams was commonplace. One of their examples involves a man named Zazanomanólis who claimed to have regularly seen Christ dressed in traditional village clothing in his dreams. In one case this Christ figure told Zazanomanólis and his company to leave the mine they were digging in and move twelve paces higher up the mountain. They did this and, after some debate over the length of Christ’s stride, struck a solid core of emery (2001: 112). A sixty-two-year-old Kóronos man named Níkos told me that, while posted as a soldier in Asia Minor during the early 1920s, his father dreamt that he saw himself in his emery mine drinking a glass of water. On his return, he went with a cousin to the precise spot he had seen in the dream. There they found a vein of marble, which they quickly ripped through to uncover a rich seam of emery. (All miners know that a sheet of marble often covers a deposit of emery.) Over the next twenty-four hours the two extracted an enormous weight of emery. I asked if the water referred to the cool white marble. “No,” replied Níkos, “it meant something pleasant (evkháristo).” This is a standard interpretation for “drinking a glass of water” in the dream book tradition. The miners evidently took guidance from this Panhellenic oneirocritic system. Their dreams of hidden objects were not always revelations from their own local pantheon of saints, nor were they exclusively referable to a particularistic, local system of interpretation. Were they to work for a mining company at a fixed wage, the miners’ concern for finding emery would probably be less acute. As it is, their work involves definite risks, much like that of the local fishermen who beseech the saints to safeguard them on their small boats at sea and rely on intuition and 111

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luck for finding fish. In his study of Cretan gamblers Thomas Malaby (2003: 18) observed that card and dice players operate with particular “tropes of accountability” such as “fate,” “luck,” “odds,” or “purity.” These various schemas govern the understanding of success or failure in the face of uncertainty; they frame both thought and social performance. Drawing on one or more of these tropes, people account for results and, at the same time, are accountable themselves for actions performed. Among the Hamtai-Anga of highland Papua New Guinea, success in gold mining derives from observing rules of purity and moral uprightness and, crucially, establishing conjugal relations with the nature spirits known as masalai. Miners interpret gold variously as the female spirits that give themselves in love to the miner or the bridewealth given by the kin of a female spirit to the man she marries. The spirits visit the miners in dreams and show them the location of gold deposits. As Daniele Moretti (2006) explains, the HamtaiAnga understand mining as analogous to gardening, in which the act of clearing a field shows a man’s readiness to marry. In clearing the land and opening a mine, a man attracts spirit brides, who often appear in seductive and erotic dreams. The moral expectations and gender relations involved in gardening inform the understanding of mining and explain success or failure in what is at once a trope of accountability and a broader analogical structuring of distinct social domains. Among Kóronos miners the operative trope of accountability would surely be “divine providence,” an idea broadly consistent with Orthodox Christian precepts but elaborated into the particular village cosmology being described here. The performance of prayers, devotions, religious services, pilgrimages, and dreaming are social actions aimed at positively influencing and sensitively attending to saintly beneficence. This Kóronos mining cosmology is distinctive even at the micro level, and the villagers of neighboring Apeíranthos recognize it as such. As one experienced Apeíranthos miner observed, “We did not sprinkle the mine with Holy Water or set up icons with oil lamps before them in the mine. The Koronidiátes were more zealously religious (thriskóliptoi) in this matter” (Arkhontákis and Giannoúlis 2001: 127). Apeíranthos mining groups might occasionally go so far as to dedicate an icon to a church. The religious devotional complex surrounding mining in Kóronos was much more extensive. At the entrance to every mine in the Kóronos region the miners chiseled out a niche for an icon and an oil lamp, which they kept burning continuously. At the Sarandára mine they placed an icon in every gallery (spitáki) (Arkhontákis and Giannoúlis 2001: 126). 112

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Miners from Apeíranthos and Kóronos might curse freely in the open air, but from the moment they entered the mine and lit their torches all blaspheming stopped, to be replaced by short spontaneous prayers to Christ and the saints under whose protection they now fully placed themselves.2 The Bolivian tin miners described by Nash (1979) and Taussig (1980) completely reverse this. Above ground, they worship the Virgin and Santiago, but in the mines they propitiate the devil, known as Tío (uncle), offering him daily cigarettes and swigs of aguardiente and, in periodic rituals of sacrifice (ch’alla), the blood, palpitating hearts, and fetuses of llamas. These various acts insure their safety and productivity; Tío satisfies himself with the animal blood and leaves the workers alone (Nash 1979: 7; Taussig 1980: 143). The pervasive appeal to Christian saints in Kóronos indicates that mining practice is consistent with mainstream religion and Greek ethnic identity. The contrast with Bolivia may be read, at one level, as the result of different Christian trajectories. In Bolivia, the miners come predominantly from local Indian communities that converted to Christianity in the past few hundred years. They have been drawn into mainstream society via mining, yet they remain ambivalent toward both the Hispanic dominant society and the rural Indian background they left behind. The selective retention of preconquest ideas of nature gods roots them in a separate, cholo identity. The mines lie under the control of indigenous spirits of the land such as the female earth goddess Pachamama or the male Supay or Huari (known as Tío; Nash 1979: 122). Since the sixteenth century the Church has categorized such indigenous spirits as “demons,” agents of the devil, enemies of Christian values (Cervantes 1994). In propitiating the devil in the mines, then, these miners appeal—despite the negative Christian nomenclature (which they consider superficial)—to powerful pre-Christian earth spirits. The Bolivian miners’ embrace of the devil, furthermore, as Taussig has argued, articulates the sense of alienation arising from daily wage labor in mines run by large companies on capitalist principles. In short, Tío and the rites surrounding him express the continuity of indigenous, pre-Hispanic ideas in the face of state expropriation and industrial exploitation of the earth. In Bolivia “the mine is enchanted, but it is the antithesis of a Christian enchantment. . . . It is 2

Companies of miners sometimes swore oaths of common commitment. One of these, dating from the mid-1930s, begins: “In the name of the Holy Trinity we agree and we swear.” Included among the six topics is “It shall be forbidden, inside and outside of the mine, for the members of the group to blaspheme the holy figures” (“Ó órkos” 1981). Miners also swore to abstain from work on the day of St. Spyridon (Kouphítaina’s patron saint) and promised to “fix up a cell for the Panagía Argokoiliótissa and furnish it . . . after the first payment when we find emery.” 113

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opposed to Christ; it is of the antichrist” (Taussig 1980: 147). One must not make the sign of the cross in a Bolivian tin mine. The dream notebooks of Marina and Evdokía reveal that in the emery mines of Kóronos one makes, sees, and is protected by signs of the cross all the time. The villagers of Naxos converted to Christianity at least a millennium earlier than the Indians of South America. The Greeks of antiquity did have developed ideas of chthonic gods, spirits of place (stoikheiá), and demons (daímones) that governed both the surface and the interior of the earth. Over the long intervening period these pre-Christian spirits have been subsumed within Christianity (Stewart 1991). Thus the Greek and Bolivian cases stand at opposite edges of the semantic field of “syncretism”: virtually completed synthesis, in which the earth has been Christianized (Greece), and compartmentalization, in which the earth is the domain of pre-Christian gods (Bolivia). On Naxos, reference to earth spirits does not activate an opposed cosmology the way the invocation of Tío may in Bolivia. Paganism no longer exists as a vital, independent alternative. The spirits are largely interpreted as emissaries of the devil, which although a force of evil, lies wholly within Christianity, subject to the will of God. Among the Bolivian miners the preconquest nature religion of Pachamama remains current and occupies a distinctive domain from Christianity: it operates below ground and is worshipped on Tuesdays and Fridays, at Carnival, and during the month of August. The domains are so well demarcated that one might contend, as Nash does (1979: 121), that no mixture occurs between the two cosmologies and thus syncretism is not an accurate description. It is, rather, a case of bi-religiosity, a dual system in the terminology of contemporary missionaries (Schreiter 1985). Having been Christian for just as long as anyone else in Greek society, villagers in mountain Naxos do not doubt their ethno-religious enfranchisement in the state. They are not motivated to oppose the state by stepping outside the dominant religion. Instead they use the dominant religion, in a localized version, to claim authority and power. Christ and the saints are, thus, undoubtedly in the mines, while the devil figures in a different capacity. He is, as we have seen, in the village stirring up skepticism against the visionaries and their efforts to find the icon of St. Anne. He performs his archetypal duty of spreading calumny.

Finding Hidden Objects St. Phanoúrios is for Orthodox Christians what St. Anthony is for Catholics— the preeminent saint for finding lost or hidden things and thus an obvious patron 114

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saint for miners.3 His name appears to derive from the Greek verb phaneróno (to reveal), and the expression “Ágie Phanoúrie phanerosé mou” (St. Phanoúrios reveal to me) is heard throughout Greece as a reflex exclamation whenever people have misplaced things as trivial as a hairbrush or set of keys. Along with St. Phanoúrios, the Panagía Argokoiliótissa also presides over the mining region of Kóronos and has done so since her discovery in 1836. Carrying on from the cells that were initially built at the Argokoíli site before and after the discovery in the 1830s, miners regularly built cells at Argokoíli as devotions to the Panagía for allowing them to find emery or escape accidents in the mines. The ostensible purpose of these small, square rooms was to accommodate pilgrims from the lowlands who arrived at Argokoíli on the eve of the feast day. As the cells accumulated over the years, the complex grew haphazardly to monastic proportions. This gradual architectural accumulation indexed the continuing viability of emery mining and the relationship of reciprocity between the Panagía Argokoiliótissa and the miners. The dream monastery, however, was not meant to be erected gradually over the decades, tracking the extraction of thousands of tons of emery. In any case, although the number of cells increased steadily over the twentieth century, no one yet lived at Argokoíli. No one mistook it for a monastery. The place came into full life only during the annual pilgrimage. This perspective on building at Argokoíli places the St. Phanoúrios chapel in perspective as a relative latecomer, a mere variation on a cell. Earlier I referred to it as a center of gravity for the village ideology of miraculous discovery, but now it can be seen as more akin to a booster antenna for the main transmitting station at Argokoíli. A look at the map of the Kóronos district (fig. 17) shows that Argokoíli lies nearest the geographical center of the communal district. The chapel of St. Phanoúrios placed the Argokoíli message in architectural form in permanent view of the village and directly above the important mining and staging point at Stravolangáda. Construction of this chapel attests to the perco3

St. Phanoúrios appears to have been invented on Rhodes and Crete in the fifteenth century (Vassilakes-Mavrakakes 1981:238). At this time both islands were under Catholic rule, and it is possible that the Orthodox became familiar with the role of St. Anthony as a revealer of lost objects for Catholics and were thus motivated to create an equivalent saint of their own. St. Phanoúrios remained noncanonical, however, and Orthodox officials have opposed the dedication of shrines to him such as the one constructed in Pangkráti in central Athens in 1947. Chapels to him did, nevertheless, proliferate in rural areas after the 1950s, and the chapel on Naxos belongs to that wave of cult expansion (Kaplanoglou 2006: 64). In 2001 another chapel to St. Phanoúrios was consecrated along the road leading from the village to Argokoíli. 115

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Figure 17. The communal district of Kóronos.

lating vitality of the Kóronos myth-dream, which continued to expand and adopt new modes of expression. This facet of gradual historical accretion makes Burridge’s myth-dream idea particularly appropriate for understanding Kóronos. The myth-dream did not emerge ready-made and complete in the 1830s. At that time the villagers could meet the demand for emery by collecting it from the surface. There were no underground mines until demand increased in the late nineteenth century. Marina’s elaborate visionary world of constant movement back and forth between the deep excavations for the icon and the existing emery mines represented an adaptation of the myth-dream to current realities. Novel events, persons, and objects were continually and opportunistically conscripted into the service of fluid and often underarticulated village aspirations.

Treasures Thus far the village cosmology of discovery has been seen to focus on saints who appear in dreams and reveal two main objects: emery or icons. But this nexus of ideas lodges within a larger set of more general ideas about vresímata, a word that literally means “findables” but might be translated as “finds” or “treasures.” The 116

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term derives transparently from the verb vrísko (to find). Most Greek-speakers would readily comprehend it, but it does not circulate in common usage. I had never encountered it until I began research in Kóronos, where it enjoys unusual currency. Grammatically the word carries an ambiguous temporality, referring to objects that can be but have not yet been found. It can be compared to the expression “treasure trove,” the second term of which derives from the French trouvé (found)—a fact that does not prevent this expression’s being used for treasures not yet found. This temporal contradictoriness calls to mind one of the defining aspects of “treasures” in English law: they are objects buried by people with the intention of recovering them (animus revertendi; see Addyman 1995: 164). Vrésimo carries connotations of things currently unavailable but known about via oral traditions, members of previous generations who hid them, or omniscient saints (the latter two appearing in the present via dreams or apparitions). Vresímata have an inviting aura of knowability. Introducing me to the concept of vrésimo, Níkos said that when he was growing up people often used it to refer to the girl of one’s dreams; the woman one would fall in love with and aim to marry—an object of desire not yet glimpsed, something intended for one but not yet known. As he grew into young manhood his male friends would teasingly ask him if he had found his vrésimo yet. This usage illustrates the tangled time frames of the “already promised” and the “anticipated” underlying the idea of vresímata in Kóronos. By far the most common usage of vresímata is in reference to a general category of buried treasures, gold, jewels, or other (now valuable) artifacts left by earlier societies on Naxos stretching back to the Bronze Age Cycladic civilization and including classical Greece, the early Christian and Byzantine periods (to which the 1836 icons were said to belong), the Venetian and Ottoman periods, when the threat of piracy forced people into mountain villages, and the World War II occupation of the island by Italian and German forces, when people once again hid their valuables. The acquisition of these treasures often involves the help of saints, as when Nikos dreamt that a woman named Maria told him where to dig in order to find a cache of gold and instructed him to keep half and give half to her “for her house.” He understood this as a visitation of the Panagía and the orders as referring to the church at Argokoíli. Sporadic everyday dreams thus participated in the Kóronos myth-dream, in the process weaving the ideology of finding buried treasures into an ever-larger fabric. This fabric contained strands drawn from the domains of emery dreams and the building of cells, the specific icon-finding prophecies of the visionaries, and everyday treasure dreams such 117

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as another one Nikos had in which a deceased man named Geórgios told him where to dig to find an ancient lamp (lýkhnos). Marina’s notebooks fused these domains, referring on several occasions to emery as a vrésimo. In a dream of 27 July St. Anne took the children to “an unknown place” that she said was “full of vresímata.” “When the time comes,” St. Anne informed them, “I will tell you the name of the place so that you may go find (sikósete [lift]) the vrésimo.” Christ then gives them a little preview of the treasure, revealing “a solid gold body” (éna sóma ólo khrysó). Dimítrios refers in his dreams (e.g., 25 and 26 July) to “a large vrésimo.” This is not buried treasure or the icon, so it may possibly be an emery deposit, the gold statue, or some other ancient artifact. Nikos and several other villagers told me that the scenic area above a nearby road junction called Stavrós Keramotís contained many treasures, possibly because it had been an area of ancient habitation. This knowledge had presumably been in circulation long before the appearance of Marina and the dreaming children. After 1930 it would have been hard to keep local history such as this apart from the expanding myth-dream. Although there was a chance of finding vresímata in the present, most villagers were convinced that the majority of treasures would be unearthed only when the St. Anne icon was discovered. The potential finds at Stavrós Keramotís fell uncertainly under these strictures. Perhaps they could, perhaps they could not be discovered without a prior miracle. The active social rumination upon such topics indicates the processual reframing of the local sense of landscape in relation to prophecy. The sacred history of the mythdream was absorbing secular history. Father Legákis (1932: 19) skeptically summarized the expanding mythdream of 1930 on the basis of his direct encounter with the visionaries: To the riches that the pilgrims [a reference to the anticipated swell of devotion-bearing pilgrims after the icon discovery] will bring, they say that there will be added treasures (thisavroí) that are in the earth, hidden since ancient times. The Megalokhári [Panagía] will illuminate the visionaries and those who believe in the dreams to discover these treasures in the ground so that, with these proceeds and the donations of the wealthy, a church may be constructed—the most majestic and luxurious possible. And the large city (megaloúpolis) to be settled at Argokoíli will be unprecedented, a wonder of a city in its majesty and wealth. 118

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Spirits and Treasures To the above conceptions of treasures another entire dimension must be added—the long-standing idea that numerous treasure troves guarded by demonic spirits such as Móros or the Arápides dot the landscape.4 Such treasures are usually found along outlying rivers, in caves or on threshing floors, or in the ruins of old churches, houses, or towers. For example, a Kóronos man said that his grandmother (as a young girl in the early 1900s) had frequent dreams in which Móros appeared. The spirit told her to come to an outlying stream, where he would give her a treasure “that I have been holding for you for years.” She went many times, at night, to the stream, but she could not cross over to the far side because it was in such a steep ravine. The Móros then agreed to bring the treasure to her side on the following evening. The girl could not, however, keep this plan a secret. Many villagers learned what was going on, and people began to follow her. Even the mayor visited her house to claim a share. She agreed with the Móros to let things die down. Then they fixed a new rendezvous, but at the crucial moment a villager hiding in a bush jumped out, snatched up as much gold as he could, and ran for it. The Móros caught him, beat him brutally, and took back the gold except for one florin, which the man managed to clasp in his bloody hand. Another time she went to get the treasure but villagers rained down stones on her and the Móros. Finally the Móros told her that after so many failures she would not receive the treasure. Instead, it would become the property of a future granddaughter bearing her name. This knowledge relieved her disappointment, but the family then moved to Athens and she died with the great regret that the treasure had been lost.5 The fact that a grandson narrated this story some fifty years later meant that the family still entertained the idea of “its” treasure in the ancestral village. This account reveals some of the distinctive features recurrent in stories of Arápides and treasures. Once one comes to know about a treasure, typically through a dream, one must proceed to recover it without telling anyone. The 4 Móros (Moor) and Arápides (sing. Arápis, lit. “Arab,” black man, Moor, bogey) mean basically the same thing. They possibly refer to Saracen pirates who raided the Aegean during the Ottoman period and earlier. By a sort of transference, the historical agents who provoked the hiding of wealth have metamorphosed into the latter-day guardian spirits of treasures. 5 A local schoolteacher, Emmanouíl Psarrás (1979d: 5–6), collected this account after World War II. He compiled a substantial corpus of treasure tales from all over Naxos (1978a, b, c; 1979a, b, c, d; 1980), and the Naxiote folklorist Oikonomídis wrote a commentary on these stories (1985, 1986).

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dream in this instance is a conduit for private knowledge. Sharing the knowledge or taking a companion along to find it causes the gold to turn to coal. Successful recovery of a treasure may call for the sacrifice of an animal or for the finder to cut him- or herself and drip blood on the treasure to appease the guardian spirits. The Arápides transport their treasures around at night. In some stories the treasure itself is animate like a flock of sheep, which the Arápis shepherds. In the above-mentioned story the Móros would take the treasure out at midday “to sun it” (liázei) as a person would sunbathe or as if drying raisins or figs. In other cases the Arápis channels a treasure that flows like a river or like grain, which he enjoys sifting. Similar ideas about money as an organic, living thing that may grow or shrink depending on conditions may be found throughout South America, including among the Bolivian miners considered earlier. But the Bolivian miners hold that raw ores and metals in the mines may also “grow” or exhibit other animate qualities such as sleeping or screaming (Taussig 1980: 147). Likewise, Papuan miners may conceive of gold as a female who voluntarily establishes social relations with the miner, as seen earlier (Moretti 2006), or as the flesh of a totemic python and thus one’s ancestor (Biersack 1999: 77). In Kóronos only the gold coins of the guarded treasures are granted this kind of animation. Raw minerals in the earth remain inanimate, although spirits, saints, and miraculous dreams may show where they lie. By and large the recovery of spirit-guarded treasures is an antisocial enterprise, involving solitary, secret acts that, if successful, result in one’s becoming wealthy, thus socially unequal and an object of envy. In Greco-Roman antiquity the god Asclepius not only healed people in dreams but also revealed the location of treasures and lost objects. The god performed this as a service for all and sundry, and the ancients carved the tales of his exemplary successes in public inscriptions (LiDonnici 1995: 119, 39). After the rise of Christianity the mystical recovery of treasures was designated a superstitious activity that involved coercing demons to reveal the locations of hoards.6 The creation of St. Phanoúrios at the end of the Byzantine period brought this sphere of activity

6

The medieval compendium of demonological and magical lore known as the Testament of Solomon (McCown 1922), for example, contains the following information for users: “[The demon] Asiél . . . acts to reveal stolen objects, and thieves and some treasures, which are known to lie in a place, but not in which specific part of the place (Ἀσιέλ…ἐνεργεῖ δὲ εἱς τὸ φανερωθῆναι τὰ κλεπτόμενα καὶ κλὲπτας καὶ Θησαυρούς τινας, ἐπιγινωσκομένους μὲν εἱς τόπον, μὴ γινωσκομένους δὲ ἑν ποίῳ μέρει κεῖνται τοῦ τόπου)” (C X 38). The demons Astraóth and Setariél also reveal treasure (C X 21, 31). 120

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closer to but not completely within the Christian mainstream, as is apparent from the Church’s opposition to the spread of the Phanoúrios cult. The account of the girl and the Móros presented above illustrates the intensity of public envy and the multiple forms that it may assume, as well as the necessity of keeping secrets where treasures are involved. The grandson narrating the story even inserted his own comment that inability to keep personal matters private was his grandmother’s lifelong failing (eláttoma). Two opposed dynamics generate this and other similar accounts: the personal desire to attain wealth and the censure of people who become wealthy. George Foster viewed similar stories in a Mexican village context as reflexes of what he termed “the image of the static economy” (1964) and later “the image of limited good” (1965). In agrarian village society where prosperity and status are equally distributed, the acquisition of wealth from outside, such as discovering a treasure, makes such windfalls palatable. Otherwise one person’s profit is considered to be gained at someone else’s expense in a zero-sum logic. On this account, dreams of treasure or of a winning lottery number serve as convenient fictions. This was so, in Foster’s view, until migrant work, smuggling, and mafialike criminality replaced treasure tales with pragmatic alternatives in Michoacán. Already in 1964 Foster noted that “classic treasure tales had not been attached to anyone in the last twenty years” (1964: 42). Treasure stories on Naxos no doubt provide moral instruction, reminding people to keep personal business private and not to grasp too eagerly for wealth lest they suffer punishment. Once a Móros appeared in a dream and told a man from Khóra to look for treasure in the ruins of a church. The man obeyed, and on his way home, with the treasure in a sack, he met a friend and told him the whole story. When he opened the sack to prove it, there was only rusted iron. After this the man went mad and died within a few days (Psarrás 1978b: 5). In another case, a Kóronos man dug up a treasure in a medieval ruin as instructed by a Móros in a dream. The Móros told him that he would meet a fellow villager on the way home and that he should give him a handful of florins. He did meet a person but kept quiet. The bogey then came to him on the road, smacked him, and took all except a handful of the treasure. The man returned home distraught, but with the money he bought land and became a big landholder (Psarrás 1979d: 5). This account resembles the Faustian bargain with the devil, a story well known in European folk traditions before Goethe made it famous. One may take possession of a treasure, but this may be at the expense of present and future happiness. A man from the lowland town of Glynádo found a treasure 121

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while ploughing, became wealthy, but then died from eating tripe soup (patsás) cooked in an untinned (agánoto) pot. His son inherited two large containers of gold coins and hid them in the rafters of his house. When they were stolen he blamed his wife’s brothers and cited it as a reason for divorce (Psarrás 1979b: 4). The problem with Foster’s approach is that it envisages societies as straining to remain stable and projects this desire for maintenance of the status quo onto the individual psychology of the villagers who dream of treasures and envy the prosperity of others. According to this model, the moment society begins to change by opening to the outside, through emigration, for example, the social necessity of the treasure tale is undermined and treasure stories disappear. This does not hold true for Naxos, where substantial labor migration stretching back into the 1800s had made remittances from afar a long-standing part of the local economy. This situation did not eliminate the treasure tale but rather fed into it. Women used to go to Istanbul (Constantinople) as domestic help, and men would work as laborers or traders in Vourlá and Smyrna on the western coast of Asia Minor (Psarrás 1978b: 5). This traffic began in earnest with the outbreak of the Greek revolution in 1821 and tailed off after the 1897 war between Greece and the Ottomans. The migrants often used their earnings to buy land on Naxos. Catholic landholders on Naxos had fallen on hard times after independence and were selling off. The story is told of a man from the mountain village of Philóti who found agricultural work in the Greek-speaking town of Vourlá (Psarrás 1978b: 1). One night, while sleeping outside in a vineyard, an Arápis appeared to him in a dream and offered to make him rich. The man agreed to give the Arápis his wife in exchange for the treasure. The next day the Arápis appeared to the man’s wife as she was bringing food to workers employed in their own village vineyards on Naxos. “You are mine now,” he said, “because Khatzipétros sold you to me.” The Arápis knocked her down on the path, and she took to her bed and died shortly thereafter, just at the moment when Khatzipétros returned to show her his newfound wealth. Khatzipétros bought much land, remarried, raised a family, and richly dowered his daughters, who danced at weddings with strings of gold florins around their necks. Everyone called these “the florins of the Arápis.” Rather than enforcing social stability as Foster contended or critically mediating the imposition of capitalist production as Taussig has suggested (1980: 17), the stories of haunted treasures on Naxos express the emotional bond with place. They open a window onto a spiritualized landscape that is literally the ground of village existence. The communal district is divided into zones controlled variously 122

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by saints and non-Christian spirits of place, as it is in neighboring Apeíranthos (Stewart 1991: 84). Villagers establish special relations to these saints and spirits through personal naming, ownership of fields, place of residence, mining sites, burial grounds, visions, and dreams. Belonging to the village involves one in this matrix of animate connections between land and the community. The arrangement is different from that found in Aboriginal Australia, where the association of gods or heroes with certain places arises from the activity of these figures in the distant dreamtime, when ancestral spirits originally created the landscape, moved about in it, and set their marks on it. In Kóronos the spirituality of place arises through dwelling and developing emotional resonances with specific locations and stories about them. The land begins as an unmarked, chaotic wilderness that the community gradually colonizes with churches and chapels, yet parts of which nonetheless lie under demonic control (Nixon 2006). These feelings for place result from the unfolding experience of the now, the Jetztzeit (to borrow Benjamin’s language), rather than reverberations from a foundational illo tempore (in Eliade’s terms). The experience of migration, far from negating this connection to place, highlights its importance. The man working in foreign vineyards and engaging hired help to work his own vineyards on Naxos precipitates the misfortune of his wife. Emigration may be all right so long as one does not forget home; indeed, one purpose of emigration from Naxos in the nineteenth century was to return home to become a landowner. Prosperous landownership required sacrifices. Stories such as the one of an émigré grandson in Athens about the treasure offered to his grandmother reveal the spiritualized overtones of the linkage to one’s natal or ancestral village. That story says that the treasure lost by the grandmother will, in the fullness of time, be recovered by one of her descendants, and if they are in Athens, they will have to go to the village. The story as it circulates in the family is, thus, a perennial invitation to return home. Home is where the treasure is. When a gnarled old man appeared in a dream and told a lowland villager to dig for a treasure in the middle of a neighbor’s field, the man did not take it seriously. A few years later he migrated to America, where he again had this dream. The old figure said to him, “Get up and leave this place, and go there where I told you to find the treasure. You will be saved and you will save your family” (Psarrás 1979b: 3). The treasures in these tales are, effectively, out of circulation, since no one can lay hands on them. In this case treasures serve as metonyms for one’s natal land and a “home” that can never be abandoned. In Apeíranthos they told 123

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me of a fellow villager who went to America to seek his fortune (na vrei tin týkhi tou). He had not been there for more than a few days when he dreamt of a pot of gold buried at a recognizable place near the village. He returned, found it, and lived out his life on Naxos. The devotional relation to icons that came out of the ground such as the Panagía Argokoiliótissa, which hundreds of émigrés return to revere during the annual pilgrimage, also fit into this scheme. Although attempts have been made to confiscate them, they are destined to return, and the one already-returned icon activates a mystical relationship to village land and identity. Even lowly emery fits into this logic. It is said that when preparing to emigrate people would take a chunk of emery with them “to serve as a sharpener for the mind” (gia na tin ékhei o nous gi’ akóni). Perhaps what is at stake is not so much the alienation of objects through exchange as the alienation of people from their objects via their own mobility.

Formations of Value Clearly many different buried materials—some secular (treasures) and some religious (icons), some intrinsically valuable (gold coins) and others valuable only in bulk or in specific contexts (emery, water)—may be dreamt of. These objects belong to different orders, and people treat them very differently in isolation. Icons are normally objects of reverence, and stories about them command respectful attention and a credulity underwritten by faith in Orthodox Christianity. Treasure tales involving Arápides, in contrast, while widely circulating at the time of the rediscovery of the icon, must have stirred a more mixed response. Such stories were on their way to becoming the stuff of fairy-tale fantasy. Villagers today do not refer to them explicitly as “folklore,” in the sense of quaint, outmoded stories, although they may begin to do so soon. The English-language term is spreading into Greek (φολκλόρ) in precisely this sense (Skouteri-Didaskalou 1992: 31). Certainly these kinds of stories have been collected by Greek folklorists on Naxos and published as such (e.g., Oikonomídis 1957). Yet, even though the term “folklore,” in its contemporary English-language connotation, now comes close to capturing the attitude toward treasure tales in mountain Naxos, in the 1920s such tales were not dismissed out of hand. They contained the power to shape the imaginary worlds of young children, who formed their primary audience. There are easily perceptible differences in the performance, context, and social reception of tales about sacred icons, haunted treasures, and emery, 124

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but the fortuitous coexistence of these parallel domains in the circumscribed community of Kóronos has led to mutual influence and some collapse between categories. The striking passage in both Marina’s and Evdokía’s notebooks in which St. Anne rhetorically asks, “Should I come out?” recalls a widely known Naxos treasure tale (Psarrás 1979a: 3). A passerby spends the night in a haunted house and in his sleep hears a voice calling out from inside a wall, “What do you think? Should I come out or not?” The man shouts, “Come out (évga)!,” whereupon the wall breaks open and gold coins pour out. Stories such as this apparently influenced the themes and verbal formulations of the dreaming children of Kóronos even though they were addressing the different subject matter of buried icons. The umbrella term vresímata and the general resort to St. Phanoúrios and the Panagía Argokoiliótissa brought all manner of buried and hidden objects into relation with one another. Cross-predications abounded linguistically and conceptually, not least in dreams. In Marina’s notebook for 7 December 1930 the Panagía says that “soon the workers will extract a treasure of emery (thisavró smirígli),” and one Kóronos man dreamt of a chest full of money to be found at a certain place in the emery mining area. Those listening realized that the chest containing thousand-drachma notes actually represented a lode of emery. They got the specifics of the location and dug up a rich supply of the stone (Arkhontákis and Giannoúlis 2001: 110). These examples should not be taken to mean that the various types of hidden treasures are all reducible to one another. Rather, they illustrate dynamic interdependence.7 The transference of theme and verbal expression from the genre of treasure stories into the domain of everyday emery mining or that of Christian miracle accounts exemplifies what Hymes (1975, cited in Briggs and Bauman 1992: 141) has termed “metaphrasis” (a term meaning “translation” in Modern Greek). I find the idea of “genre” problematic if it aims at establishing a set of formal features definitive of mutually exclusive types of text or utterance such as laments, riddles, legends, myth, or history (Briggs and Bauman 1992). The case at hand demonstrates that no sooner do we identify genres than we see them violated, crossed with other supposed genres. Not only did the oneirevámenoi 7 Something similar may be seen in the Lunda area of the Congo, where diamond mining became immensely profitable beginning in the 1980s. This new source of wealth mapped onto old schemes about fecundity. Dreams of diamonds took their place next to dreams of baskets of cassava roots or corrugated iron roofs as dreams of good fortune. People also conceptualized mining in terms of hunting and trapping wild animals. To be successful, mining required appeal to nonancestral Laamb spirits (de Boeck 1999: 185).

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synthesize across diverse domains (such as religion and mining) but also they placed their dream prophecies within the tradition of the original dreamers of the 1830s. Social strategies and power struggles often require the absorption of one speech genre by another in what Bakhtin termed “complex” genres (1986: 65). By indexing the social movement of 1836 the visionaries of 1930 continued it, took control of it, developed it, and effectively subsumed it under their own authority-claiming formulations. The entire burgeoning myth-dream can thus be understood as a dynamically developing complex genre in the Bakhtinian sense. Perhaps a better way of conceptualizing this is to leave the dubious term “genre” out altogether and focus instead on the “tropic,” domain-crossing referentiality of the myth-dream as consistent with influential accounts of “culture” such as those given by Wagner (1986) or Fernandez (1986). Rhetorical and performative juxtapositions, predications, and elisions give rise to creative, novel expressions that may carry powerful meanings as a consequence. Emery miners used to send messages back and forth to each other via the aerial gondola system for transporting emery. In one case an emery worker stationed in Moutsoúna sent a message to another worker at the staging point of Aspalathropós, halfway up the mountain to Apeíranthos. Written in verse, the text read (Arkhontákis and Giannoúlis 2001: 173–74): Now that work is ending, Why don’t you come down to Mamouliá, I know some graves, That we could dig up one night, And with the first strike of the pickaxe We would find gold coins.

Τώρα που σώνετ’ η δουλειά νά ‘ρθεις ποπά στου Μαμουλιά ξέρω κάτι μνημόρια, να σκάψουμε μια βραδινιά, που με την πρώτη-ν- αξινιά κι εμείς θα βρούμε φκιόρια.

And if God and the Panagía wish it, We will bid farewell to poverty, Then you will see real songs . . .

Κι α’ θέλει ο Θιός κι η Παναϊά θ’ αφήσομε στη φτώχεια ‘εια τότες θα δεις τραούδια . . .

At Mamouliá, near Moutsoúna, the villagers had discovered a prehistoric cemetery, which had already been looted by the time this poem was written in the early 1960s. The verse conflates antiquities with treasure (gold florins) and offers this clandestine digging as an alternative to the poorly paid work of emery

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extraction, which is now “finishing.” Mining and treasure hunting parallel and illuminate each other by their differences. The semantic traffic among emery, antiquities, and icons did not, of course, give rise to the whole of Kóronos culture, only to a strand of it that has been dramatically mobilized by the myth-dream. The centrality of dreaming as the consistent mode of consciousness in which people found buried objects not only points to the visionary, imaginative state in which metaphorical connections were made; it also reminds us that the myth-dream rumbled along subliminally over long stretches of time. Only partially articulated or apparent at any given time, it nonetheless organized thought and created local dispositions to particular courses of action, especially in moments of general confusion or excitement. This oneiric unconsciousness modeled the location of its objects of rumination. Both lay beneath the surface. The myth-dream as identified here drew together a narrative, a morality, and a teleology that informed village political subjectivity. When it did occasionally receive articulation, not everyone entirely agreed with it or accepted it to the same degree. This was often a situational matter. Few locals, however, were entirely free from participation in it. In Marina’s dream notebook for 1 December 1930 (transcribed in the appendix), Evdokía asks the Panagía for information about “our” mines, by which she most likely means the excavation that the visionaries have been directing at Argokoíli in search of the St. Anne icon. The Panagía begins by informing Evdokía that what she is about to divulge should be understood as a “favor” (khári) in return for the favor the visionaries had earlier performed when they suspended devotions (khaïmaliá) on the saints’ icons. Tit for tat. Do ut des. Then she continues: At that time, when the things we have been telling you about will happen, the Anglo-French (Ánglo-Gálloi) 8 will come. First, the Anglo-French will go to Moutsoúna, and they will seek out workers there. Only one man will be found there, and they will ask him, and he will tell them, and they will leave again and come to the village.” And St. Anne says, “Evdokiá, go ask the old-timers who lived when Kouphítaina was alive to see what she said about the mines. She said, ‘Joy to those who have mines when St. Anne comes out and the flow of holy 8

This refers to the Great Power allies who came to Moutsoúna to safeguard the emery supply lines during World War I. 127

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water. What wealth will come to people and afterward it will come from the mines.’” Then Evdokía says, “Well, go on, tell us already about our mine.” And the Panagía says, “What can we say? Your mine will turn out to be the best mine, and the most thousands that will come out of the mines will be from yours. Do you want us to tell you more? This is enough. And one more thing. That your mine is really sturdy. It has no need of anything. And we [say], again, the treasure [vrésimo] will be the best of all. This passage illustrates the way in which the unfolding genre of dream recitation in 1930 references the earlier tradition, thereby rolling it into the new, complex genre. The influential nineteenth-century visionary Kouphítaina, in fact, appears in a quote within the quoted language of St. Anne. The visionaries speak with the voice of village forebears and the saints at the same time—a triple voicing expressing a triple claim to authority. The bestowal of grace and of reward wrap around each other, as do the forms of reward: icons, emery, and money. The latter two are so compressed that it is impossible to tell which is being referred to (thousands of tons or drachmas). The geophysical formation of emery offers one large analogy for the metaphorical compressions of social time and disparate objects considered above. The mountain Naxos imaginary worked within a space of unusual mineral resources that has attracted and held people in this area for millennia. The Naxos emery deposits formed over 25 million years ago from the metamorphosis of aluminate material, probably bauxite. In this transformation not only did bauxite become emery but surrounding limestone crystallized into marble, which, as we have seen, miners recognize as an indication of emery deposits. Where it has undergone more dramatic geomorphic processes involving higher levels of heat and pressure (on the order of five gigapascals), corundum metamorphoses into gemstones. In slightly different metamorphic circumstances, the emery on Naxos, with fewer iron, hematite, and magnesium impurities, might have turned into sapphires or even rubies. From the point of view of the Kóronos community, emery is so valuable and economically essential that it might as well be sapphires. In the myth-dream they inserted emery into an intertextual web of tropic relations (metaphor, metonymy, etc.) with other valuables (in all senses of the term). This submitted emery to the equivalent of many gigapascals of heated pressure in the dreams, stories, and predictions entertained by the communal imagination. Emery 128

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emerged from this process subjectively transmuted from common ore into gemstones gleaming within a cosmology of discovery. The Kóronos cosmology of treasure specifically interrelated the three main types of value that Graeber (2001: 1–2) identified in his work on theories of value: (1) the ultimate moral and religious ideas of the good and proper, (2) exchangeable economic worth in the marketplace, and (3) the Saussurean linguistic sense of place within a system by contrast with other, alternative objects. In the Kóronos myth-dream the saints reward the visionaries for their exemplary faith in Orthodoxy (value 1) with valuable objects of both a religious and an economic nature (value 2), and precisely the fact that so many different items may mark this enrichment and substitute for each other calls attention to their place within a system (value 3). The productive fusion of economic value with moral values created a powerful synthetic “value” that we may also see instantiated in the current success of “ethical products” (e.g., nonexploitatively produced, fair-trade, organic, green) within market capitalism (Miller 2008).

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Chapter Six The Fortunes and Misfortunes of emery

I

f one had stood at St. Phanoúrios in the 1990s and looked down on the landscape, one would have seen a ruined, deserted complex of structures in a little valley known as Stravolangáda. These buildings have recently been restored and the whole area tidied up with European Union funding to create a museum of Naxos emery (fig. 18). At the time of Katerína Legáki’s initial dreams of the Panagía in 1930, in contrast, the area was a hive of activity. The emery business

Figure 18. Aerial system staging point at Stravolangáda after conservation work done in preparation for the opening of the Emery Mining Museum in 2005. 131

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was thriving. Here salaried government clerks oversaw the quality control, storage, weighing, and loading of emery. Some of them resided in stone houses right at this spot, making it a living community in the middle of the mines. A large British-built Blackstone diesel motor powered an aerial transport system that ferried the emery in 280-pound (127- kilogram) bucket loads across the mountains through the neighboring communal district of Apeíranthos and down to the harbor at Moutsoúna to be shipped to market. The emery boom and subsequent bust in the first half of the twentieth century contextualize the 1930 epidemic of dreaming and contribute to an understanding of what has happened since.

The Emery Boom By 1930 emery had become indispensable to the Kóronos economy. The international market had begun to demand it in large quantities for industry. After diamonds, which rate a maximum 10 on the Mohs scale of hardness, goodquality emery rated a 9. The hardness that made it valuable also made it a struggle to mine. As the twentieth century progressed, extraction with the traditional tools of sledgehammer and wedge became ever more painstaking and dangerous in the deepening mines. Market demand dictated intensive mining year in year out, which led to lung disease and increased accidents against which the miners had poor safety precautions and no health insurance or social security. They extracted huge lots of emery, quantified in 56-kilogram measures known as statíres or kandária. At the end of the 1920s ordinary miners were each shipping in the vicinity of 500 such units annually. Emery had become their lifeline, and a good one at that. In 230 days an emery miner could make what it took an industrial laborer 320 days to earn (Zagoúras and Ioannídis 1988: 139). In order to cope with demand, the government built an aerial system (to enaério) to transport raw emery from the mines to port. This was one of the largest engineering projects in the eastern Mediterranean in its time. Built at a cost of 12 million drachmas, it transported emery a distance of nine kilometers over 71 columns, using 180 cars running over 18 kilometers of steel cable (Khouzoúris 1953: 3). The money for it was raised by a tax levy of one pound sterling on every ton of emery exported beginning in 1923. After three years of construction, the aerial system began operation in 1929. The Apeíranthos writer Pétros Glézos wrote a short story about its opening. First published in 1943, it draws upon his memories of the time. The story begins with the first wave of surveyors condescending to explain the project to the incredulous shepherds whose pastures they are tramping through (Glézos 1988: 307–8): 132

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“OK! They are going to put in place a railway (sideródromo) that will run overhead on columns along an iron rope straddling the mountains and carrying the emery to Moutsoúna.” The shepherds laughed at this in their turn. A railway, on top of columns, running on wire ropes, straddling the ridges and mountains! Surely these educated men had lost their minds. . . . Later the conversation continued at the village kapheneíon. Tradition battled progress and won. Yes, definitely, the Ministry of Public Works, the MP, and the civil engineers were certainly stupid. For centuries now, from grandfather to grandson they had loaded the emery onto the strong backs of noble animals of the Lord. The innards of our mountains never refused to send its valuable stone into the light of day. The tunnels of the new mines never missed their marks. And the mules— simple, patient, light-eating—never slipped on the paths while carrying their heavy load to the harbor at Moutsoúna [fig. 19]. From there they shipped it to the edges of the earth. Outside the mines at Griá Spiliá, Kakóryaka, Amerikániko, Roúkhouna, Katóa, Tounéli, and Pelório the emery had no time to pile up. The mules reduced the stacks of emery every night. What use did they have for aerial transport systems? Such instruments of the devil are only for losers and fools. The local critique of industrialization as a demonic incursion responds to the rupture of relations with the land and animals (“of the Lord”). Such relations had become woven into a liturgical system graced by God, much as du Boulay (2008; 2009: 160) has contended for the cultivation of wheat or the practice of pastoralism on the Greek island of Évia. Any force disrupting this holy order was necessarily demonic. In the wake of the government’s monopolization of emery in the nineteenth century, it had been decreed that only the inhabitants of the nearby mountain villages had the right to mine. Because the mines were located in two different village districts, Apeíranthos and Kóronos, the inhabitants of those two villages constituted the main workforce, although miners from several small villages in the vicinity of Kóronos (Skadó, Mési, and Keramotí) were also allowed to mine in the Kóronos region and men from Danakós could mine in the Apeíranthos district. With richer deposits in its territory and a larger workforce, Kóronos 133

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Figure 19. The transport of emery to Liónas by donkey and loading at the harbor onto a small boat that transferred the emery to a steamship, ca. 1910 (courtesy of Manólis Manolás).

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supplied the lion’s share of emery to the government. Eventually the ratio of supply between the two villages was formalized in the late 1930s at two-thirds for Kóronos and one-third for Apeíranthos (Khouzoúris 1997: 62). The market for emery went from strength to strength. In the last part of the nineteenth century emery sales averaged 4,300 tons per year with approximately five hundred miners (Arkhontákis and Giannoúlis 2001: 91). In 1903 Pétros Protopapadákis, a native of Apeíranthos, was elected a member of Parliament, and he proposed measures to improve efficiency and profitability for the miners and government alike. In the decade from 1900 to 1909 emery sales rose to an average of 7,152 tons per year, the following decade to 11,503 tons per year, and in the 1920s to an average of 16,856 tons per year. There was clearly a livelihood to be made, and the number of registered workers increased to eight hundred in 1910 and fifteen hundred in 1935. The population of Kóronos rose from 766 in 1896 to 1,330 in 1926 and eventually peaked in 1940 at 1,903. Between 1926 and 1928, during the period of the construction of the enaério and with emery sales buoyant, the population of Kóronos increased by 377, close to 25 percent in the space of two years. It was a gold rush. World War I catalyzed emery sales. As an abrasive, emery was necessary for weapons manufacture, and the Naxos mines took on strategic importance for the Allies. A French detachment landed at Liónas with the mission of securing the mining region and the ongoing shipment of emery. Anyone who worked in the mines was exempted from national military service as essential to the war effort (fig. 20). While other regions of Greece suffered shortages, the freighters arriving to transport emery brought in food and supplies for the French garrison as well as the inhabitants of Kóronos. When the war ended, the government began to discuss ways to improve emery production; the foreign-currency revenue it brought in became even more vital to the government when the international market for Greek currants began to dry up around 1920 in the face of new competition from California and Australia (Mazower 1991: 85). For emery production to increase, the bottleneck of transportation from mine to port had to be overcome. One early proposal called for a railway running from the mines, across the whole island, to Khóra (Khouzoúris 1997: 442). Pétros Protopapadákis had, meanwhile, risen politically until he became prime minister in 1922. Ever concerned for the emery of his native island, he proposed that a smaller railway line be built connecting the mines with the two ports, Liónas and Moutsoúna, along with some auxiliary service roads. This construction was to be paid for entirely by government 135

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Figure 20. Emery miners in the early twentieth century (courtesy of Manólis Manolás).

investment, and Protopapadákis allocated 1 million drachmas for this work in the budget for 1922. Ultimately this plan was shelved and the expensive aerial system constructed (fig. 21). By 1930, then, the enaério was fully operational, and government profits from emery had hit highs of 1 million gold drachmas in preceding years. This amounted to twice as much as the income generated by all other mining industries in the country combined (Arkhontákis and Giannoúlis 2001: 93). The villages of Kóronos and Apeíranthos were thriving and with a deposit of emery estimated at over 3 million tons lying in the ground (Phrangískos 1990: 576), the future looked bright. The emery juggernaut appeared to be gathering speed. In reality, however, unfortunate policy and engineering decisions were already combining with unforeseen world events to the economic detriment of emery. The wheels of the juggernaut were about to come off. In terms of engineering, the enaério proved very quickly to be an albatross. Not only did the levy for its construction raise the price of Naxiote emery but the salaried labor of the twenty employees required to operate it— including a director, foremen, guards, mechanics, and a doctor—placed a large payroll burden on emery, thus preventing the price from dropping. The strong winds that 136

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Figure 21. The enaério in operation in 1936 at Moutsoúna. A stockpile of emery may be seen at right and a gondola bucket in the upper foreground (courtesy of Manólis Manolás).

frequently blast the eastern side of Naxos unpredictably overturned the aerial gondolas, spilling out their loads in remote mountainside spots. The extremes of climate meant that teams of oilers and mechanics constantly tended to the aerial system, and the cost of service and spares bit into profits. A railway system would have cost much less to build and would have been more economical to run and more effective year-round. In any case, investment in emery transport should not have been limited to the stretch from mine to harbor. The harbors of Moutsoúna and Liónas lacked sea walls and docks to accommodate freighters in all weather. Loading onto small scows that transferred the emery onto freighters remained costly and time-consuming, as did the delays caused when freighters waited out high winds at nearby safe havens. In the mid-1920s it may not have been clear that the era of the motor vehicle was at hand. Asphalt road construction would have cost a fraction (perhaps onetenth) of what the enaério cost to build and would have linked these remote villages to the rest of the island at an early stage. As time wore on, the enaério became a ludicrous white elephant. It is possible that Kazantzakis, who spent a formative period of his childhood on Naxos, had it in mind when he wrote Zorba 137

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the Greek, in which Zorba builds an ill-designed and ultimately disastrous system for transporting logs down a hill. In 1978 the enaério was decommissioned, and emery is now transported to port by road. The policy and engineering mistakes detailed above might have been avoided, but no one could have predicted the global economic depression that began in 1929. The historian Mark Mazower evoked the situation in the first lines of his Greece and the Inter-War Economic Crisis (1991): “In November of 1929 . . . everyone in Athens seemed to be asking the same question: was there an economic crisis in Greece or not? A year or so later there could be little doubt.” As the depression hit the major international consumers of emery—Germany, France, and Britain—they lost their ability to purchase emery or, for that matter, Greece’s other major export item at the time, tobacco. Total Greek exports fell by 20 percent in 1930 and a further 28 percent in 1931 (Mazower 1991: 113, 312–13). Greece had joined the gold standard in 1928. In 1932 it withdrew from it and watched its currency plummet. In 1933 an opinion writer for the Naxos newspaper Phos tis Paronaxías published the following analysis (Manolás 1933): There are things that decline, but the decline of these things is not always felt because their peak was not that great. When something peaks at a very high level, however, its decline, should this happen, is deeply felt. . . . Pinnacles of prosperity leave traces of the grandeur of the situation, but these traces appear to us as hideous nightmares when we fatefully enter into decline; when from happiness we fall into misfortune and poverty. Without doubt, something very much like this is happening now with emery, which formerly accounted for the vitality of all Naxos. Naxiote emery, once the life of the mountain districts of Naxos and more generally of the whole island has now died (símera ékhei nekrotheí). It has been buried beneath the ruins of the global crisis. . . .

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Naxiote emery, we would say, is dead! And in dying it has dragged with it to the grave the means of livelihood of thousands of inhabitants. The Naxiotes, furthermore, had lost their political clout when coup leaders ordered the arrest of Pétros Protopapadákis in late 1922 on charges of treason for his role in the catastrophic war with Turkey. Protopapadákis was scapegoated and executed along with six others in November 1922. Perhaps the most decisive blow against the Naxos emery industry came when chemists in Scotland and France opened the way for the production of synthetic emery. In 1902 the French chemist Verneuil developed a two-stage process for producing synthetic sapphires and rubies. The first stage involved heating bauxite to produce alumina, which had the same properties as corundum (heretofore obtained from emery) and could be used as a replacement for it in industry. At first this discovery was mainly a curiosity, since natural emery could be produced much more cheaply. Paradoxically, World War I, which increased Naxos emery sales, was actually the first nail in the coffin for this industry. The difficulty of transatlantic transport in wartime conditions meant that the American market and weapons industry were forced to explore synthetic emery more seriously. During World War II, the Naxos and Turkish emery mines were both completely cut off from American markets, and once again this stimulated improvements in the production of synthetic alternatives. Whereas in 1910 10,000 tons of artificial emery had been sold on the international market, in 1925 80,000 tons were sold and in 1950 400,000 tons (Khouzoúris 1953: 5). A contrast between magic and technology drawn by Alfred Gell (1988) illuminates the relationship between the village myth-dream and commercial scientific developments. Both magic and technological innovation begin with imagination. A child spreading his arms and pretending to be an airplane performs an action akin to magic (or religion). The imagination of the results “works” by itself. An engineer must also imagine flying before designing an airplane; such imagining is necessary to extend the bounds of the possible. The dreaming children and the shared myth-dream conceptualized the transformation of emery into a valuable treasure through imaginative thought alone. Scientists such as Verneuil also imagined the transformation of common stones into valuable material, but their fantasy inspired the construction of boules and kilns, which heated base materials and produced real synthetic gemstones in a modern alchemy. The divergence between the two paths of imagination in this case carried heavy consequences for the Kóronos dreamers. The scientists sold 139

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their processes and products, while the followers of the myth-dream continued, in declining economic circumstances partially caused by this marketing of artificial emery, to imagine a miraculous ultimate transformation. Thus much the same initial imaginative impetus ultimately placed the two groups in very different social places. The continuing local investment in millenarian transformation is illustrated by the case of a Kóronos visionary named Stávros Manolás. In early 1939 he went to Athens and persuaded a reporter for the Athens daily paper Acropolis (26 January 1939) to cover his prophecies. He claimed to be speaking “for the Panagía” in a manner reminiscent of the nineteenth-century mediums Aikateríni Khalkoú and Kouphítaina. He brought with him an icon of the Panagía, which he whispered to and in front of which he would thump his cane on the ground three times before transmitting her message. He warned that a cataclysmic Second Coming was approaching. There would be a world war lasting a year and a half during which Paris and Rome would be obliterated while London and Berlin would be saved. Communications systems would be completely destroyed, and people would communicate by thought alone. Stalin would die before this war finished, and a new earth with only 45 million inhabitants would emerge. There is no mention of Argokoíli or emery, but the reporter probably focused on large predictions of national and international concern. The Naxos newspaper Naxiakón Méllon (15 February 1939) picked up this story with embarrassment and expressed pity for the people of Kóronos who would follow such prophecies. The reporter noted that Kóronos was falling into ill repute on the island and people were avoiding attending its festivals. He called on the bishop to make the Koronidiátes cease claiming to speak on behalf of the Panagía and attend to their own daily work and welfare instead. This episode shows that the mythdream continued to proliferate after 1930–31. Focus on it diverted people from attending fully to their own well-being.

World War II and Its Aftermath The villagers of Kóronos were victims of their dependence on emery for all the global technological and economic developments just described, and one might write this off as an unpredictable fate that befell many the world over during the Great Depression. The people of Kóronos, however, suffered during World War II in ways that far exceeded the bad luck and unanticipated developments sketched above. Rather than beneficiaries of a unique divine grace as they imag-

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ined themselves to be, they seemed to have been singled out above and beyond the odds as victims of divine improvidence. As World War II approached, emery sales to the government increased from 8,000 tons in 1938 to 10,000 tons in 1939, and in 1940 the government initially took 10,000 tons but then increased the order by a further 5,000 (Khouzoúris 1997: 177). People thought back to the good fortune brought by World War I and the French occupation. When the Germans overran Greece in the spring of 1941, villagers who had migrated to other parts of the country filtered back into Kóronos, thinking that they would ride out the war in safety. The opposite proved to be the case. The Italians occupied Naxos and posted a relatively large number of troops on the island. In order to feed the troops they requisitioned 50 percent of all local food, oil, and wine. Italian soldiers were posted all over the island, even in Kóronos, where they could keep the village under watch and constant exploitation. The one thing that local memory retains about the Italians is that they stole. The Germans, who came later, are recollected as more honest although more uncompromising and severe in their punishments. The Italians shut the mines and shipped all the emery stockpiled at Moutsoúna to Italy and Germany. The enaério was left twisting in the wind. There was even talk of dismantling it (Arkhontákis and Giannoúlis 2001: 103). Eighteen kilometers of steel cable must have looked very inviting during wartime. With population at an all-time peak around two thousand and no mining employment, the Koronidiátes became extremely vulnerable. Their communal district is much smaller than that of the other big mountain villages Philóti and Apeíranthos and contains much less farming and grazing land. It can sustain perhaps six hundred inhabitants through local agriculture and animal husbandry, and this is what the population was in the nineteenth century before the emery rush. Now, with the Italians expropriating and stealing what little the inhabitants could produce, the village suffered. Close to four hundred people died of starvation in Kóronos, mainly during 1941 and 1942. There were no deaths from starvation in any other village on Naxos. This fact is well known, and a monument has recently been erected in the village to those who perished. People do not, however, go into very great detail in remembering this period. One major exception is Iánnis Khouzoúris, who wrote a poem of over ten thousand lines, practically the same length as the Iliad, covering the history of Kóronos, including the occupation. First published in 1997 by the Association of Koronidiátes of Athens, this poem contains disturbing details that I had never 141

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before encountered during more than two decades of field research on Naxos. He describes the villagers fighting each other and the vultures to claim the rotting meat of a donkey that fell off the side of a road. His mother died at this time, leaving seven children, two of whom eventually died of starvation. He recounts going to the lowlands to steal potatoes so that his siblings would have food. He then had to physically fight his own father in order to overcome the latter’s moral objections to stealing. Deprivation presented a stark choice between personal dignity and starvation. In 1943 the Red Cross relieved the village. The deaths ceased, but people had endured severe malnutrition. A skin rash overcame the survivors, causing them to itch and burn in constant agony. They tore the metal doors and tin roofs off their houses to barter for food. Kóronos finished the war in battered condition, its buildings yawning at the elements. The village counted 1,200 residents in 1950. The population decreased to 750 by 1971. Government purchases of emery gradually climbed back up to 8,000 tons per year (down 50 percent from the 1920s) and remain there at present, with a total of some 350 registered miners (25 percent of the number in 1930). Sales of Asia Minor emery now top 100,000 tons annually, and artificial emery production far exceeds that. Greek emery has lost its market share through a combination of bad management and bad luck, which continued after the war when the United States declared emery a strategic material and prevented Greece from selling it to Eastern Bloc countries. On a recent visit to Naxos I observed a huge mound of emery in a large field at a spot called Kambí on the mountainside between Apeíranthos and Moutsoúna. Heavy trucks now unceremoniously dump the annual government purchase of emery there. No buyers can be found for it, and the harbor at Moutsoúna has been purged of its industrial infrastructure and made into a pleasant waterfront where people sit at fish restaurants and enjoy the view. The only hope is that new uses for natural emery will be found and that the government will aggressively market the stone. One emergent use is as an admixture to asphalt to create nonslip road surfaces. The price the government pays for emery has declined to the point that miners can no longer make a living. In 1953 the miners did, fortunately, negotiate national health insurance and pension coverage. For every two kandária they ship they receive a day’s pension credit. Two hundred forty days make up one year, and active miners can complete their pensions in twenty years. The once promising emery industry has become a Byzantine system through which politicians buy votes for pension and health care plans. 142

Chapter Seven Dreaming life, living the Dream

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ánnis Khouzoúris’s epic poem about Kóronos contains the following lines: “Observe the coincidence, how everything changed/Beginning in that annum, the year of 1930 (Κοιτάχτε όμως σύμπτωση, πως άλλαξαν τα πάντα/Απ’ την χρονολογία αυτή, το έτος του τριάντα)” (1997: 449). This was the year in which the village children recounted their dreams daily to crowds assembled at Evdokía’s balcony. As the whole country watched the depression set in with ever-increasing apprehension, Marina and her classmates were dreaming of a lost icon, hidden treasures, and the future prosperity of the village. Those dreams certainly aimed at retaining the favor of the emery miners who already supported the oneirevámenoi, but we can now see that the constant theme of emery’s becoming more profitable spoke to all miners and to the main economic concerns of the entire village. The fantasy of the dreams also redressed government neglect. Inadequate safety measures and poor mining equipment had precipitated a strike in 1912 and remained recurrent complaints. Marina’s dreams envisaged the free distribution of tools and divine protection for those who dug for the icon at Argokoíli. Dream forecasts of large emery finds increased toward the end of 1930 as the reality of the depression became incontestable. In a dream of 25 November Marina saw Nikiphóros, who transmitted a message from the Panagía to the assembled villagers: “And he said, in a very loud voice, ‘In the year 1933 there will be a war. And the king will send the Anglo-French to come and purchase emery. All the villagers will become rich. And one thing further, when King Constantine1 comes to Greece everything will happen.’” The term “Anglo-

1 From preceding dreams it is clear that this is an apocalyptic reference to King Constantine XI Palaiologos, the last Byzantine emperor. It may also be an (equally apocalyptic) allusion to a more recent King Constantine. Constantine I came to the throne in 1913, went into exile in 1917,

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French,” which we have seen in a dream quoted near the end of Chapter Five, refers to the World War I French garrison force posted at Kóronos, with the British lumped in as Great Power allies. The “war” forecast in this dream presents a pretext for their return. Marina’s dream thus offers a historically informed model of economic recovery, however unrealistic. The dream pictures the past in the future; 1933 will be another 1917. Elaborating on this scenario in a dream of 2 December, the Panagía says to Marina and the group of dreamers: “At that time the Anglo-French will buy emery by the oká [a 1.27-kilogram measure], as many okádes of emery as you may give them. They will pay you thousands.” And Evdokía says, “Tell me, how will they find these thousands to pay us?” And the Panagía replied, “Well, why don’t you tell me? Where will you find the emery to sell to them?” And Evdokía says, “Well, we find the emery in the ground. Do they also find money in the ground?” And St. Anne says, “After they buy the emery here, they go elsewhere in order to sell the emery in order to get the thousands that they leave behind in the village. And one thing further: At that time, all the iron will have been used up. And they will come, then, to Kóronos to ask the emery workers to give them emery. Then an ironworker may come and say to you, “Do you have a mine?” You should tell him, “I have a mine, and it produces vast amounts of emery.” He will then tell you, “If I pay you a million, will you sell me the mine with the emery?” Then you will say to him, “But this mine will produce the equivalent of five million.” And then he will begin to offer you more than five million, but it will not be in your interest to sell him the mine.” And Evdokía says, “But what would he do with the mine?” And the Panagía replies, “They will be eyeing the emery, and they will try hard to buy mines and to have villagers to work them. And they will make an agreement with the villagers to send them five thousand a month to Khóra, and the villagers will go there to collect it.” And Evdokía says, “What can you tell me about our mine?” returned (by popular vote) in 1920, abdicated in 1922, and died in exile in 1923. He was king at the time of the French occupation of the emery mines. 144

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And the Panagía says, “Well, what can I tell you? Only that it will produce a huge amount of money.” And Evdokía says, “Ah, if only we could get rich in our old age!” In the dream St. Anne dispenses adult-like advice to help the village at the same time as her redemptive icon remains hidden. The discussion in this dream reveals the degree to which anxious village debates about the emery business had penetrated into the mental world of children. Much the same thing can be seen in the case of the nine-year-old Crow Indian Plenty Coups. In the mid1850s, as the Crow came under increasing pressure from the Sioux and settler expansion, he experienced a dream in which buffalo poured out of a hole in the ground and disappeared. Then cattle came out of the same hole and stayed, lowing on the plains. The tribal elders debated the meaning of this dream, and it played a role in making them realize that they would not be able to withstand the white man in the future (Lear 2006: 73). The dream thus instigated what became a beneficial Crow strategy of cooperation with the U.S. government over the coming decades. According to the philosopher Jonathan Lear (2006: 77), “It is not unreasonable to suppose that a sensitive nine-year-old was attuned to the anxiety of his community and that he was able to dream what he was not yet in a position to think. And he dreamt it on the tribe’s behalf.” The dreams thrown up by the oneirevámenoi similarly derived from and fed back into public debates. In contrast to the Crow case, however, the dreams of 1930 did not lead to a determinate and useful political-economic strategy, just to further dreams and digging in hopes of a decisive revelation. The community did not align itself behind a single interpretation or implication of the dreams. Earlier I commented that in 1930 the visionaries dreamt their historical condition, meaning that their activities were predicated upon the initial events of the 1830s, which had come down to them in the form of the pilgrimage, local stories, and the genealogical relation to the original actors. Now it can be seen that they were also dreaming about their recent past and the present. In the dreaming imagination they synthesized the personal experience of life conditions with imagery and meanings from the collective past. The 1930 dreams articulated anxiety over what lay ahead for the mining community. The dreams took shape in a problematic present, looked forward to a better future, and drew on the past for models of understanding. The prophecies of the visionaries, like the predictions made by Stávros Manolás in the national press, failed to come true. There was no war in 1933, and when war did come no Anglo-French materialized, just rapacious Italians and 145

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oppressive Germans. The visionaries may have failed at predicting the future, but they succeeded in diagnosing the present. They amplified what the majority of people had not quite recognized or had the confidence to articulate directly. In the face of anxiety, the children’s dreams brought the present, the immediate future, the mediate future, and the remote future into emotional relationship (Crapanzano 2003: 9; 2007: 423). It would be wrong to classify the dreams as “predictions” if this implies an exclusive future orientation and an investment in accuracy. Responding to a “crisis of presence,”2 the ecstatic temporality of the dreams opened a clearing3 within the pressing concerns of existence and offered figural representations and solutions. Like the canaries formerly used in Welsh coal mines to indicate the presence of gas in advance of human perception, the children sensed hard times and gave the public a forum for talking about this, even if obliquely. Their bizarre narratives were “surreal” in the sense developed by André Breton, which included dreaming as a mode for the production of surrealist works (1972 [1924]: 12).4 Surrealism implied the “hyper-real,” intensifications of reality. Surrealist works, like the children’s dreams or Marina’s embroidery-like drawings, eschewed the logical presentation of reality (realism) and made incisive, novel statements by amplifying and distorting elements of this reality or the emotional resonance of the situation. Dreams of saints, emperors, and demon-possessed opponents navigated ways out of the ineffable emotional tangle of hope and anxiety that suffused 1930 Kóronos society. These dreams were an affective response to history, the engine of a mythistory. This role of dreams in registering present conditions at early stages may be discerned in a case from the same historical period: the dreams of Jews living in Germany just after Hitler came to power. In one dream of 1933 a factory owner dreamt that Goebbels entered his factory and forced him to give a Nazi salute. It took him five hours to raise his arm, whereupon Goebbels said, “I don’t want your salute!” In a recurrence of this dream, the effort to lift his arm was so great 2

“Crisi della presenza,” De Martino’s (1956; Saunders 1995) formulation, adapting Heidegger’s ideas in Italian. 3 Heidegger introduced the idea of the Lichtung, an opening in a dense forest where light comes in, to capture the moments of vision, perception, and potential in which Being is disclosed to itself and able to orient itself socially (1995 [1927]: 125, 375). 4 On surrealism and dreams Bastide (1972:51) observes: “In the face of destabilizations, tensions, and facts of destruction, utopia [i.e., the dreamt utopia] reacts by proposing new solutions for ‘being with’ that ‘push in the opposite direction (sont à rebrousse-poil), if I may put it that way, against the conditions thrown up by the present.” 146

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that the man’s back broke (Beradt 1968: 5, 8). According to Charlotte Beradt, who collected the narratives, the dreams were “existential statements” of life under totalitarianism (1968: 23). For Reinhart Koselleck (1985: 218) these dreams reveal an “inner truth which was not only realized, but was immeasurably outbid by the later reality of the Third Reich.” The dreams were fictions, yet they captured the factuality of the present situation. Other concerns besides emery cast shadows over the Kóronos present of 1930. If children could finish high school they qualified for coveted civil service jobs and the possibility of university studies. Prior to 1920 the nearest high school was on the island of Syros, and few went. In 1921 the first high school (gymnásio) opened in Khóra. Nikiphóros Legákis taught there. At the time of his sister’s dreams, imposing new premises were under construction. That building opened the following year and remains in use today. The new gymnásio loomed in local consciousness like the enaério or the depression. Education placed children in a larger world and encouraged them to join it at an emotional cost to tightknit villages such as Kóronos. It offered bittersweet prospects: social mobility on the one hand, departure from the village on the other. Children would have to follow in the footsteps of Nikiphóros and Katerína and move to lodgings. Upon graduation their careers might require a further move to Athens, often with a parent along for support. The marriage pattern was uxorilocal, with men moving into a home provided by their wives. Women, in particular, traditionally remained rooted in the village. Education for women threatened destabilization. In time education did, in fact, become one of the chief reasons for leaving and not returning to live in the village. The dreaming children and their parents could imagine what lay ahead. Katerína dreamt her homesickness in the form of a lost icon that yearned to go home and ultimately did get taken home in 1930. The double threat of migration for education and the collapse of emery mining placed Kóronos under a dark cloud in 1930. The village was still full, but its abandonment could be sensed. Up until this time the mountain villages had been more populous and economically dynamic than the coastal area of Naxos around Khóra. The transportation of the icon from its point of rediscovery in the port town up to the mountains, the renewal of the pilgrimage to the Panagía Argokoiliótissa, and the search for a still-buried icon in 1930 can be understood as symbolic statements that fixed the hierarchical superiority of the mountain region in religious terms just as its socioeconomic superiority was ebbing away.

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Our Own Private Millennium The Kóronos dreams, like those of Jews in the early stages of the Third Reich, accurately diagnosed a threatening present and expressed emotional responses. The difference between the two corpora of dreams is not so much that the German Jews’ premonitions proved to be more accurate as that the Koronidiátes responded with more hope. They imagined overcoming their hard times and emerging triumphant, whereas Nazi totalitarianism provoked such deep fear that Jewish dreamers were afraid, even in the fantasy of dreams, to imagine their own liberation. One woman dreamt that she attended a performance of The Magic Flute. When they sang the line “That is certainly the devil” the police burst in and arrested her because inwardly she identified Hitler with the devil and a negative thought about Hitler had crossed her mind (Beradt 1968: 25). The regime had monitored her inmost thoughts and might punish her.5 Bettelheim (1968) observed that dreams may continue daily thought and/ or fantasize an escape from reality. Typical children, for example, have anxiety dreams of helplessness or suppression, but these alternate with dreams of power in which they triumph as invincible superheroes. In the early phase of the Third Reich Jewish dreamers became so anxious that they could not overcome their anxiety even in dreams. The Nazi regime had destroyed the balance between submission and self-assertion. An increment beyond this lay the dreams of concentration camp prisoners, which lacked hope or resistance entirely because “most of what mattered had already been destroyed” (Bettelheim 1968: 155; 1986: 151). Against this extreme baseline the Jewish dreams of the early 1930s reveal the ability to think of alternatives to the present even if the will is largely broken. The Naxos dreams alternate anxiety with hope and victory to a much greater degree, as do the dreams of resistance fighters and ordinary children (Bettelheim 1968: 160). The scenarios in Marina’s dreams vacillated between plausible economic thinking rooted in historical understanding (the Anglo-French will return and buy emery), and apocalyptic religious scenarios involving the Second Coming 5

This theme has been perennial since Roman times, when Emperor Claudius had two knights killed for dreaming of his death (Tacitus, Annals, 11.4). Kadare’s depiction of life in Communist Albania in his novel The Palace of Dreams (1993 [1981]) portrays a government ministry that vets the dreams of the populace. The totalitarian desire to control the freedom to dream is clearly exemplified in an account of a Greek friend of mine whose commanding officer had shouted at him, “I will interpret your dreams for you (Egó tha sou exigíso ta óneira)”—in other words, “you will have no independent, private plans or ambitions while you are here.” 148

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(e.g., 19 and 20 August) in which the sick would be healed and unbelievers punished. These options were not always kept discrete; there were considerable elisions and continuities between hopeful forward thinking and millenarian prophecies. This can be seen in the passage quoted above from the dream (25 November) in which Nikiphóros foretells the coming of the Anglo-French and King Constantine Palaiologos, thereby linking the present with the central political myth of the post-Byzantine Christian, Greek-speaking world—that Constantinople would become “ours once more.”6 The Kóronos myth-dream was expanding by linking up to larger myths, both ethno-political and religious. To quote the same dream again from the point where we left off earlier, Nikiphóros continues: “And one thing further. When King Constantine arrives in Greece, everything will become as in the olden days. All the people will become virtuous (agathós), and it will not be like now, where each one struggles to ‘eat’ the other.” In a dream of 18 September the dreaming children assemble at Argokoíli and the Panagía takes them to Hagia Sophia. They meet a crowd there, and St. Anne announces: “The time is approaching for us to recapture Hagia Sophia and to make it ours.” And the people ask her, “But who are you that you can recapture Hagia Sophia?” And the Panagía says, “We are the Panagía Argokoiliótissa!” And at this the people fell silent. Subsequent dreams depict King (Emperor) Constantine leading his troops against the Turks, getting wounded in the foot, and seeking refuge at Argokoíli (1 and 7 November). He brings his family to Argokoíli and urges the divided local community to believe in the dreams (14 and 17 November). In their dreams the children traveled to the upper and lower heavens, where the saints revealed important information that they relayed to the village community. The instructions from beyond, if followed, were expected to lead to a reversal of village fortunes, a return to better times, or possibly a theophany that would make Argokoíli a major pilgrimage center and even refuge in a cosmic apocalypse. The 1930 dreams thus stand at the junction of several major topics in the anthropology of religion: shamanism, “revitalization movements” (Wallace 1956; Harkin 2004), and millenarianism. The dreamers imagined reversing their fortunes not just by the miraculous discovery of icons and hidden treasures but also through the mundane mining of emery and the proprietorship of what would become a popular pilgrimage site. The visitors to this site would leave donations aplenty. In one of Marina’s dreams 6

Herzfeld (1982) has chosen this line from a popular folksong as the title of his book about national(ist) folklore. 149

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(22 August) the dreamers go to Argokoíli, enter the church, and meet St. Anne there just inside the door, at the pangkári, a desk where church officers distribute candles and devotions (usually made of tin, but people could bring their own made of gold or silver) to be hung on icons and where visitors typically leave donations of money: And we went inside the church there, and St. Anne was at the pangkári. And she opens a drawer and she pulls out all gold and silver items [coins, devotions?] and shows them to us. And she says, “Do you see how many gold things they have brought me?” . . . And St. Anne says to us again, “Do you see all of those gold things? When the spring of holy water gushes forth we will tell you what to do with them.” The overflowing drawers of the pangkári present yet one more variety of treasure alongside the buried coins, icons, and emery considered earlier. The Kóronos dreams occasionally suggested a global apocalypse by tapping into the imagery and language of larger predictions (e.g., the Revelation of St. John). But they elaborated this millennium in parochial terms, stressing their own integral relationship to the events in millennium-local formulations. King Constantine comes to reside at Argokoíli, but this remains their exclusive knowledge. They converse with him privately in numerous dreams and learn that he will fight a war to help them recover their icon (19 and 20 February). A celestial sign reveals that the children themselves will be worshipped like saints, and Marina draws this sign (fig. 22). In the dream narrative preceding this drawing, the children go to St. Marina church in the village, where they meet two people who ask them if they are visionaries. They are becoming known, even famous. St. Anne assures everyone that many oneirevámenoi will come in the future. Their movement will develop a following. Then they see “a sign with lots of steps (skáles) in it, and on all of the steps were written the names of the visionaries.” The drawing uses the lines of the paper to list the dreamers interspersed with saints. On the highest step Marina wrote: “Here was I, with Pétros.” On the steps below are the Panagía, then Evdokía and Goumenogiánnis together, Jesus Christ, Stéphanos, St. George, Nikiphóros and Katerína, St. John, Photeiní and Geórgios, St. Anne, St. Nikólaos, St. Marina, and St. Spyridon. The steps thus alternate dreamers and saints. Living villagers mingle with the dead paragons of ecumenical Orthodoxy; the local merges with the transcendental. Marina’s drawing calls to mind the 150

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Figure 22. Drawing of 11 September 1930: the children and the saints.

ladder of divine ascent elaborated by the early monastic writer John Climacos into a basic figure of Orthodox thought (fig. 23). This image of the ladder itself derives from the description of the Last Judgment, in which the good are separated from the sinners. Marina shows familiarity with this idea in a dream (15 November) in which she sees sinners going up a black staircase and the righteous up a white stairway. The positioning of Marina and Pétros at the top of the ladder portrays them as nearest to sainthood. St. Anne has already told the dreamers (8 August) that “[everyone] will revere you just as they revere us.” The special relationship between the children and the saints receives further expression in Marina’s New Year’s dream of 1931. The saints take turns making New Year’s wishes for the visionaries and then proceed to give them presents. The Panagía gives Evdokía a crown, Jesus Christ gives Nikiphóros a cane made of gold, St. Anne gives her crown to his sister Katína (Katerína), St. George gives his lance to Stéphanos, St. Mámas gives Goumenogiánnis one million (gold sovereigns, drachmas?), and St. Marina gives each of the children one hundred sovereigns (líres). With disappointment Nikiphóros establishes that they will possess these objects only in the dream, not when they awaken. The saints ask for return gifts, but the children put that off to another time.

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Figure 23. Ladder of Divine Ascent: a monk ascends the ladder and receives his reward (Byzantine manuscript illumination, vat.gr 394 folio 155recto, © Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana).

In the dreams, the family relationship between the various saints is frequently expressed in the usage of kinship terms, even hypocoristic forms such as “mom.” Christ refers to his grandmother and grandfather (St. Anne, Ioakím), the Panagía to her mother (St. Anne), St. Anne to her daughter (Panagía), and Ioakím to his wife (St. Anne). Their churches or the places where their icons are hidden are “home” for these holy personages. The emphasis on family and home reveals what we would expect—that Marina and the dreaming children construed the saints on the model of their own kinship universe. They also conceived the relationships within the group of visionaries from the kinship perspective of children. Goumenogiánnis is called “grandfather” (Legákis 1932: 17) while Evdokía is a mother figure and Nikiphóros something of a father figure even though he is in reality an elder brother. Relations among the saints and among the visionaries are both organized according to the cognatic principles that structure everyday kinship in most parts of Greece. A cognatic system embraces ancestors on both male and female sides ascending two generations and descending two generations; it counts all of those relatives whom one could know during a lifetime. The 152

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Figure 24. Fifteenth-century icon of St. Anne, the Panagía, and Christ (© Byzantine Museum of Zakynthos, MZ 85).

dynamic core of the system is the three generations that know each other at any moment in time. This arrangement has achieved synthesis in Orthodox iconography (fig. 24). Marina’s drawings do not precisely replicate this embedding of three generations, but she does tap into the logic of embedding various saints in the same image in her illustrations of the vessel (fig. 13) and the large sign (fig. 14), both of which contain Christ and Ioakím, grandfather and grandson.7 That Greek Orthodox holy figures should be comprehended according to Orthodoxy-imbued cultural schemata comes as no surprise. What is more to the point is that the idea of saintly revelation was thoroughly localized and personalized to the children and their world. Many millennial movements begin as local and then become more general. This particular Naxiote millennial movement remained local in its circumscribed diffusion, and its narratives remained couched in terms of Kóronos topography, economy, and interests. The myth-dream aimed more at the rectification of village misfortunes than at global apocalypse. (The Kóronos myth-dream might have been recrafted as a more ecumenical narrative had the movement spread widely beyond its point of origin.) General apocalyptic themes were touched upon only sporadically. 7

Other examples of embedded signs are 29 August, a sign with St. George, St. Marina, and St. Nikólaos inside it, and 17 September, one with St. Gregory, St. Mámas, and St. George. 153

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Cosmic apocalypse was subordinated to the more important local apocalypse and practically reduced to a metaphor for it. The global was thus parochialized. The Kóronos myth-dream was millenarian in flavor, but it was not seriously about the end of the world. It concerned, rather, change in the near future of the local world—a “millennium-lite.”

Demythologizing the Myth-Dream? By the time I arrived to do my first fieldwork in Apeíranthos in the early 1980s, the emery business had been moribund for some time. The enaério had just closed, and arguments were erupting over who should get the lucrative contract for the transportation of emery to Moutsoúna by heavy truck. The mining villages faced economic misery and depopulation. The pilgrimage to Argokoíli, by contrast, flourished. The feast day of the Panagía Argokoiliótissa annually attracted thousands of pilgrims from all over the island. The particular history of the icon, which had spent many years in the lowlands and then made its own processional “pilgrimage” back to the mountains, arguably grounded this wide appeal. Naxos society normally cleaves between mountain and coastal dwellers. The mountain villagers consider themselves much tougher and cleverer than the lowlanders. They perceive themselves to live lives of purity and austerity in the cool dry mountain air that make them morally superior to the lazy, fat, slow-witted plains dwellers. Similar distinctions between mountain and lowland people are drawn in other parts of Greece such as Crete (Herzfeld 1985). The Argokoíli icon’s strong associations with both major regions of Naxos make the pilgrimage appealing to all islanders. Individual pilgrims often set out early in the morning on foot in fulfillment of a vow made at a moment of need during the preceding year. Walking long distances like this is a penance; hiking is not a pastime in a rural, largely agrarian society. Many come xypólitoi (not wearing shoes, although often wearing socks). Even the people of Apeíranthos, who generally hold themselves aloof from the activities and festivals of other villages, participate with fervent devotion. They told me early on that the Panagía Argokoiliótissa truly worked wonders and that I had to go and see for myself and learn the whole story of the icon. I first went to Argokoíli on the evening before the feast day. As the pilgrims arrived they were assigned to one of the sixty or more cells that local volunteers had cleaned, aired, and supplied with fresh linen. Many visitors preferred to spend the night on the floor of the church, where they kept vigil, singing hymns late into the evening. Here people from all over the island traded stories of the 154

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miracles of the Panagía. I imagined that many dreams of the Panagía must occur at Argokoíli, in a modern form of the ancient practice of incubation (Edelstein and Edelstein 1998; Stewart 2004). After all, the most faithful of the faithful were here gathered in the precinct of the Panagía to spend a night under her aegis. This supposition was incorrect, however, as I discovered by speaking with the pilgrims over the years. Very few reported significant dreams of the Panagía while sleeping at Argokoíli. Dreaming did, nonetheless, remain a common mode of apprehending the Panagía Argokoiliótissa. A man from the lowlands reported, in a letter to the Argokoiliótissa (no. 12, 1998), that he had planned to go to Tinos for the celebration of the Dormition of the Panagía on 15 August. Because of rough seas he could not go, so he decided to worship at a church of the Panagía in a nearby lowland village on 23 August. He booked a taxi to collect him and his wife in the morning. He continued: “That night, just after going to bed, I saw a vision. I saw the Panagía lying down, asleep. I had seen the Dormition of the Virgin. I immediately woke my wife and told her. She said to calm down and go back to sleep. For the rest of the night I continued to see the same image (eikóna).” The taxi came the following morning carrying other passengers who were headed for Argokoíli, which was (exceptionally) going to celebrate a liturgy on this day. As soon as the man learned this, he decided to go there instead (commenting that he had not visited Argokoíli for twenty years). At Argokoíli, he said, I made the sign of the cross and went up to revere the icon. The moment I bend down to kiss the icon I say to my wife that this is the same icon that I saw in my dream. I completed the visit filled with joy, the grace of the Panagía . . . She is a great wonder worker. . . . I thank the Panagía for her miracle. No, she did not heal a paralytic or a blind person, but she brought joy to a household after twenty years. One of the points of this dream that probably appealed to the magazine’s editors was the replacement of Tinos by Argokoíli. Why travel when you have a wonderworking saint on your own island? The publication of this dream in the magazine placed an otherwise oral account in print, but the magazine has not subsequently become a major repository for the reporting of dreams and miracles as is the case of the newsletter publications of other pilgrimage and healing centers such as that of St. Eiríni Khryssovalándou near Athens.

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On a visit to Argokoíli in 1986, Markos Legákis offered to guide me. A descendant of Doumbrogiánnis, the discoverer of the icon in 1836, Markos spoke with enthusiasm. Clearly the myth-dream retained vitality for him. He recounted the discovery of the icon, its loss (a church helper fallen on hard times stole it and sold it in Khóra), and its rediscovery. (At the time people did not talk about the discovery of other icons or their confiscation by the state.) In Markos’s version, Katína Legáki had been praying nightly to the Panagía Argokoiliótissa to help her with her schoolwork. The Panagía had obliged, and she knew the answers to all of the assignments before they were even assigned. This preliminary contact opened the way to her subsequent vision of the small icon in the landlady’s icon stand. The icon rediscovery thus tied in even more closely with the struggle for education. Markos spoke in considerable detail about the nineteenth-century prophet Kouphítaina. Some of her prophecies had nothing to do with Argokoíli. For example, “There will come a time when you will not be able to tell men from women.” The fashion for long hair, according to Markos, meant that this had come true. The majority of the prophecies that Markos recounted did link in more closely to the Argokoíli myth-dream, and that was his point in recalling them: “A bell will be installed at Argokoíli that will be audible in England; a trisypóstato8 monastery will be built, and as soon as mass is celebrated there and the bells rung, then St. Sophia in Istanbul will also celebrate a mass.” Numerous prophecies swirled around the further events that would take place on completion of the church: when they complete the first floor (anóphli) of the church/ monastery a world war will erupt; people will migrate to Kóronos in great numbers seeking salvation; even Khóra will empty as everyone comes to the mountains; the sea around Naxos will fill with ships; there will be so many people in the village that the houses will overflow; a city will come into being9 and a king will be installed; a factory will open at Liónas. The children’s dreams (29 June, 24 August) had mentioned that a person of “another nationality” (állis phylís) would be instrumental in finding the icon and building the monastery. Marina’s later notebooks described how the Panagía would illuminate people in faraway lands so that they would be receptive to the 8 This term escaped my vocabulary at the time. It literally means “triple-based” or “with three hypostases.” I asked Markos what it meant, and he clarified that it would have three aisles. Another listener added that it would have three vaults or domes (thóloi). 9 In various versions this city would be an expansion of Kóronos in its existing location or a new settlement either at Argokoíli or at a place named Lioíri a few kilometers south of Argokoíli.

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message of the oneirevámenoi when they traveled to those places on proselytizing missions. According to Pétros Moutsópoulos, one of the dreaming children of 1930 whom Marina placed alongside herself on the top rung of the ladder above (fig. 22), the foreigner would be an American, completely unrelated to Greece, who had seen the Panagía Argokoiliótissa in a dream. Indeed, he said that this American (a World War II veteran) had already come to him but he had sent him away, saying that “the time had not come.” When Markos touched on the general prophecy that an American would come, the burly, blond villager at his side began to stare, awestruck. Indicating me, he managed to murmur to Markos, “Maybe he is the one?” The myth-dream was enveloping me. I shrugged this suggestion off at the moment of this encounter, but the idea gradually came to fascinate me. Why not? Or what if? In 1991 Amvrósios II arrived as the new bishop of Paros and Naxos. A native of Paros, he brought a strong understanding of the region and an energetic commitment to promoting local Orthodox traditions. Within a year he had elevated the celebration of the Panagía Ekatontapylianí, an early Byzantine church in the port town of Paros, to a Panhellenic pilgrimage. Also in 1992, he raised Argokoíli to a Pan-Naxos pilgrimage, and this officialization allowed the pilgrimage to hold pilgrims’ donations tax-free. It also entailed the formation of a committee to oversee these funds and the administration of the pilgrimage. Headed by the bishop with the parish priest of Kóronos as second in command, this committee included three lay parishioners of Kóronos. At about this time Iánnis Khouzoúris, the author of the epic poem about Kóronos, retired from his job as an accountant for the Athens transport system. He began to assume an active role in the Association of Koronidiátes in Athens, known to everyone as simply the sýllogos (association). This conjunction of new bishop and ambitious lay enthusiast with power behind him proved decisive for coming developments. The post–World War II depopulation of Kóronos translated the majority of émigrés to Athens, where they pursued education and employment in an expanding economy. By the late twentieth century there were at least four times more self-identifying Koronidiátes in Athens than in the village. Iánnis Khouzoúris typified the constituency. A university graduate and professional, he had raised a family in Athens. Parallel associations grew up in Athens to represent practically every Naxos village.10 These sýllogoi contributed money and ideas for works in their villages 10

Associations representing mountain villages were the first to form (in the 1970s) and became the largest. The mountain villages had endured more depopulation for longer than the lowland 157

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and lobbied for larger projects (such as expenditure on infrastructure) with members of Parliament and other national politicians based in Athens. A sýllogos is a civil-society institution with elected but unsalaried officers. In size, prestige, and disposable wealth each village association wielded considerable power as a lobby in relation to national, regional, and village politicians, not to mention the village population itself (with which it had multiple kin ties). Many sýllogos members remained registered in their villages and on election days traveled to Naxos to cast their votes. Shortly after the promotion of Argokoíli to a Pan-Naxos pilgrimage, new proposals came in advocating a further “upgrade” (anaváthmisi) to a Panhellenic (i.e., national) pilgrimage and, furthermore, the building of a large church at Argokoíli in fulfillment of the prophecies. Some referred to this as the “new Hagia Sophia,” with dimensions on a par with those of the greatest church of Orthodox Christianity. The mighty federation of all Naxos village associations, the Omospondía Naxiakón Syllógon, embraced this initiative. At a meeting on 29 May 1995 (the anniversary of the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople/ Hagia Sophia), the proposal to build a large church at Argokoíli was accepted as a cause to be supported by all Naxos village associations. Iánnis Khouzoúris was one of the driving forces behind these initiatives. He explained that while reading an article about Tinos he had realized that Argokoíli was much more remarkable. On Tinos a nun had found an icon in the ruins of a church. On Naxos, by contrast, illiterate villagers, after years of searching, had found four icons on a hillside. Argokoíli had not realized any advantage from this but should. Why had the Tinos nun Pelagía been canonized (in 1970) and none of the Kóronos visionaries? And, for that matter, why had Paros been awarded a national pilgrimage site and not Naxos? Through its membership and their contacts, the sýllogos consulted surveyors, civil engineers, and architects. Plans for a monastery complex were unveiled in early 1997. The church would be on a grand scale: three floors totaling 2,200 square meters, making it one of the largest churches in Greece. The main floor would be the sanctuary dedicated to the Panagía Argokoiliótissa. The middle floor would have three aisles leading to shrines for the other three icons discovered in 1836 (Panagía Holding the Infant Christ, John the Baptist, Lament for Christ). As Khouzoúris explained, this qualified the church as trisypóstato.11 On villages, and the loss of person-power at the island level had resulted in a larger population and power base in Athens. 11 In theology, “hypostasis” refers to the entities comprising the Holy Trinity, each entity being 158

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this and on many other points the movement to build the church aligned itself with earlier prophecies, dreams, traditions, and historical events, thereby positioning itself as the authoritative agent of the myth-dream acting to fulfill the village’s mandated destiny. The planned church would be capable of holding up to five thousand people, roughly the total number of pilgrims in a given year and thus, in a sense, “the whole island.” This fulfilled the command the Panagía had given in 1836 to Manouíl Sakhás, one of the early dreamers. The new complex would have a bell tower equipped with enormous bells in acknowledgment of Kouphítaina’s prophecy, and a large surrounding complex would be built containing many new cells, a library, an auditorium, and a museum in fulfillment of the prophecy that a great monastery would arise at Argokoíli—an area that the bishop and others now began to refer to as “the holy places” (oi ágioi tópoi) of Naxos. During the period when the design and siting of the new church were being discussed, many villagers dissented from the plans favored by the Committee for the Erection of the Church (answerable to the Committee for the Argokoíli Pilgrimage and including Iánnis Khouzoúris as a member), which ultimately became accepted. The mayor of Kóronos, Manólis Manolás, argued for building the church in the flat space between the 1851 church and the chapel of St. Anne and encompassing both structures. Such a construction would be cheaper, if smaller, and keep the site anchored to its historical center. Another proposal called for building the church on an entirely new site to the north so that none of the old site would be demolished or altered. Others objected on different grounds altogether. They said that the time to build the large monastery had not come and would not arrive until the icon of St. Anne was found. One supporter of this line was Pétros Moutsópoulos, who lived in Athens and occasionally visited the village. In the 1830s and again in 1930 the village had been divided into supporters and opponents of the myth-dream. In this current reprise, proponents of the new church, including the bishop and the influential sýllogoi, operated according to rational planning and fiscal realities, not on the basis of illumination through dreams or miraculous discoveries of occult treasures. They aimed solely to fulfill the long-standing goal of building a proper “house” for the Panagía. They embraced one of the primary aspirations of the myth-dream but left other a hypostasis. The term occurs in the 1823 oath of allegiance to the Greek revolutionary cause: “I swear in the holy name of the three-hypostatic Divinity (tis trisypostátou theótitios)” (Skopetéa 1988: 31). At Argokoíli the concept was being stretched to conform to the terms of the prophecies. 159

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tributaries and overtones out of account. Ignoring these aspects meant rejection of the temporal logic of the 1930 version of the myth-dream: the idea that events could only happen at a “right time.” They were rationalizing the myth-dream by asserting that the church could be built exclusively by executive decision and with the donations of pilgrims and faithful supporters. In declaring the pilgrimage Pan-Naxiote the bishop had cleared the way for local control of funds by the Committee for the Erection of the Church. When the sýllogoi lined up behind the project, donations began to pour in, and Argokoiliótissa published lists of benefactors. More than 900,000 euros were collected between 1997 and 2001 and a further million euros in the following six years. By 2008, more than two hundred individuals had made contributions of more than 1,000 euros. The use of modern fund-raising strategies was a necessary development in view of the fact that the wealthiest members of the community resided away from the village, not only in Athens but in diaspora outside Greece. It resembled a university campaign to raise money from alumni in order to build a new campus library. One man contributed the proceeds from his emery mine over a fifteen-year period, in keeping with older practices. In novel departures, however, another man offered his boat to the pilgrimage to be raffled off, and still another contributed a car. Adherents to a stricter version of the myth-dream felt that these carnivalesque fund-raising practices made a mockery of the true spirit of the prophecies. The construction of the projected church, furthermore, led to the destruction of numerous cells built as devotions by the emery miners over the years. Worse than just departing from traditional modes of fund raising, the new movement destroyed earlier contributions. The myth-dream was literally steamrollering its past (fig. 25). The proponents of the grand church found themselves criticized from the other side by a large, skeptical, less religious contingent that considered it unnecessary to spend so lavishly on a church when the island and Greece as a whole already had so many churches. These rationalist critics were defeated by liberal democratic process: no one could stop the building of a church if the relevant authorities agreed to permit it and the money for it could be independently raised. As for those critics occupying prominent positions within the orthodox myth-dream, Khouzoúris neutralized them by casting doubt on the spiritual authority of the child dreamers of 1930. Dreams/visions, he explained, could be (1) prophetic, (2) divine possession (mediumship), or (3) paroxysm. The dreams of the 1830s fit into category 1 as prophetic (and true, since the icons were found); the prophecies of Kouphítaina, which derived from her medium160

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Figure 25. The destruction of cells as the new church is erected.

istic relationship with St. Spyridon, exemplified the second category, while the copious dreams of Marina, Pétros, and their peers amounted to nothing more than the “paroxysms” of children lacking the requisite maturity and spiritual clarity to receive divine messages. It followed, then, that Pétros Moutsópoulos possessed no authority and that the 1930 modifications to the myth-dream could be ignored. In any case, Pétros was by this time a very old man, and he died around 2000. Marina died in 2003, but she played no active role for or against the plans to build the church. Still there remained opponents, mainly in the village, who subscribed to a stricter and more spiritual version of the mythdream than was being promulgated in the 1990s. The visionaries of 1930 had elaborated a scenario in which additional objects had to be discovered for events to unfold successfully. If a further icon and treasures had been discovered, they would have constituted historical objects, part of the real past of the island, providing usable material wealth and tangible spiritual power. Instead, historical objects of a different sort unexpectedly came to light, and these assisted Khouzoúris’s counternarrative. After arriving on Naxos, Bishop Amvrósios set his archivist the task of organizing the episcopal archives. In the process he came across documents 161

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indicating that there had been correspondence in the 1830s between the bishop of Naxos and the Holy Synod over confiscating the Argokoíli icons and sending them to Athens in order to extinguish local fervor. A new history thus came to light not in the form of icons, gold coins, or jewels but in the prosaic form of documents. This new history exposed the Church’s opposition to the Argokoíli pilgrimage, and some thought that it would be acutely embarrassing for the Church should it be aired publicly. For Khouzoúris, the documents further enlarged the sense of unfinished business that already motivated the building of the church. If the other icons had been transported to the Holy Synod in Athens, perhaps they could be found and returned to Argokoíli. The joy and grace that would be unleashed by such a return could scarcely be imagined. This spurred Khouzoúris and his coworkers to push for the immediate release of all documents relating to the events and for a thorough search of both the metropolitan church in Khóra and the synod’s storerooms in Athens to see if the icons could be found. For a number of years hope simmered that the objects would be recovered. Ultimately, they were not found, but numerous illuminating documents were, and Khouzoúris published these expeditiously in Argokoiliótissa.12 The people of Kóronos thus learned that the loss of their icons amounted to state theft. But now the bishop was clearly on their side, and they were on moral high ground in demanding and expecting his continuing support. The excitement generated by the discovery of new information about the 1830s helped Khouzoúris to focus on this episode as the foundational reference point for the myth-dream. The events of 1930 could be swept aside as subsidiary and distorting. What mattered now was that in 1837 the village had petitioned King Otto to build a church at Argokoíli as the Panagía had commanded. Stressing the transcendental appropriateness of the current movement, Khouzoúris pointed out that the two representatives sent 160 years earlier were ancestors of his and of the current mayor, Manólis Manolás. Permission had been denied (wrongly, unjustly), and ultimately the villagers had made do with consecrating a much lesser cell and using it as the main church. The time had now come to uphold the Panagía’s command to build her majestic “house,” which had been the village’s original intention. Khouzoúris and his followers remained within the myth-dream, but they were reappropriating, reinterpreting, and reorienting it. I would contend that it 12

I drew on these to present the story of the 1836 discovery and subsequent treatment of the icons in Chapter Three. 162

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was, nevertheless, still very much a continuation of the myth-dream rather than the abandonment of it. The millions of euros given to the movement since 1995 represent money not donated to medical, educational, or other public projects that languish for lack of private benefactions. A broad spectrum of people thus expressed faith in the wonder-working Panagía Argokoiliótissa. But far-flung donors did not necessarily subscribe to the whole of the myth-dream, the full details of which remained matters of Kóronos local knowledge. For many, the pilgrimage stood as an emblem of island tradition; possibly it aroused nostalgic childhood memories. Pride in Naxiote identity made them wish to see the pilgrimage site upgraded to take its place among the largest and most famous pilgrimages of Greece, where it deserved to be on account of its long and unique history. Expatriate enthusiasm for the construction of the church expressed “belonging” against the fact of displacement. Earlier, in comparing 1930 Kóronos with the situation of the Crow Indians of Montana in the face of American expansionism (Lear 2006), I doubted the suggestion that the villagers’ social world and cultural way of life became irretrievable. They could migrate to Athens yet continue to be Koronidiátes, visit the village, vote there, and even decide to return there. No return was possible for the Crow once they converted to Christianity and ceased to pursue a life revolving around hunting and warfare. Their former way of life disappeared at that point, whereas in Kóronos village life continued but people disappeared. The difference between the two cases may not, however, be so extreme. Perhaps villagers resident in Athens and abroad did begin to feel their grip on village reality slipping away by the 1990s, some two or three generations after they had migrated. They were losing the competency and the feel for being villagers. The realization began to dawn that they might be no longer Koronidiátes but indistinct bourgeois Athenians, Americans, or Canadians. The specter of absorption into generic middle-classness instigated a delicate identity crisis that the building of the large church helped to resolve. The Panagía had originally commanded construction of a “spacious dwelling,” and this well describes the structure’s emergent function as spiritual pied-à-terre for all villagers abroad, a place where they affectively lodge right at the spiritual center of the community even while still residing far away. As we have seen in the matter of fund-raising and the focus on accurate historical understanding, the appeal to broad island-based, Athenian, and expatriated diaspora constituencies pulled the myth-dream in the direction of secular history and rationality. Investment in the mystical, revelatory power of dreams 163

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also had to be marginalized. Those centrally involved resignified the term “dreamer” to mean “someone who dares to imagine a goal or ambition” rather than someone who, literally, “sees visions at night” and still less someone who is “out of touch with reality, or crazy.” As the movement picked up momentum in the 1990s, one professional after another (architects, university professors, civil engineers) was quoted referring to the erection of the church as the fulfillment of our “dreams.” In metaphorizing “dreams” they converted them into important “ambitions” such as all self-actualizing individuals and communities should have. Khouzoúris and his followers thus managed to continue to be visionaries while actively de-oneirifying the myth-dream. Marina’s daughter Flora, in contrast, had long refused to refer to her mother as an oneirevámeni because of its pejorative overtones. She persisted in calling all of the dreaming children photisthéntes (illuminated). Khouzoúris pursued the different objective of transvaluating the term oneirevámenos, just as the words “black” or “gay” have been converted from negative epithets to terms of positive identification. “Let them call me oneirevámenos!,” he often said. In his speech at the laying of the foundation stone for the new church (fig. 26) he said (1997b: 12), “And it [the divine command to build a church, with bells] became a tradition, and it became a legend, and it became

Figure 26. Iánnis Khouzoúris delivers his address at the laying of the foundation stone in 1997. To his right is Manólis Manolás, to his left Bishop Amvrósios. Between them a cleric holds the icon (courtesy of Iánnis Khouzoúris).

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a dream with which we live and die. And it became our one and only dream (to monadikó mas óneiro).” Developments beginning in the 1990s have pushed the myth-dream in the direction of rationalization, but they have not completely effaced the fundamental conviction in the miraculous power of the Panagía Argokoiliótissa and the mystical force of the pilgrimage/discovery site. At times parts of the mythdream have come to appear excessive, untenable, or simply not useful (for attracting adherents) and so they have had to be sloughed off. Current developments reflect a set of transformations brought about by the need to criticize the myth-dream and yet the desire to have it.

The Poetics of History The scale of the church now under construction, the kinship relation of presentday protagonists to original protagonists, the reference to Hagia Sophia, and the construction of a trisypóstato church with huge bell tower all evince historical awareness and the conscious intention of alignment with this history. Whereas before the miraculous inhered in awe-inspiring dreams that revealed hidden objects, now it inheres in the ability of historical research to identify uncanny coincidences, frame the continuation of interrupted and/or forgotten plans, and link current events with past prophecies. The new miraculous emerges from awe at the poeticity of history, itself a function of increasing historical consciousness. At times, the movement has overreached in its effort to perform its historical poetics. In the effort to connect the Argokoíli church more closely with Hagia Sophia, the committee invited the patriarch of Constantinople, Vartholomaíos, to preside at the laying of the foundation stone on 21 May 1996.13 It would have been the patriarch’s first ever visit to Naxos, a major coup for the proponents of “the new Hagia Sophia.” The patriarch had to cancel the first date, and the event was moved a year later. Once again the patriarch canceled, but this time he offered to send a representative in his stead for the ceremony scheduled for 23 August 1997. In the event, the representative did not show up. The foundation stone, however, had already been engraved declaring “Vartholomaíos the First, Patriarch, with the blessing of Naxos, and as represented by the Metropolitan of Ephesos, Khrysóstomos, laid this foundation stone of the Pan-Naxos pilgrimage of the Panagía Argokoiliótissa in the year of the Savior 1997, in the month of August, on the 23rd day.” There was no option but to cement the stone in 13

The feast day of St. Constantine, the patron saint of Constantinople. 165

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place. The attempt to conform to history thus generated a “history” that never happened. One of the defining features of the myth-dream concept is that it points to a goal. It is not just an etiological description of existing objects or social arrangements like a myth that relates how the leopard got its spots or the Pleiades came to be in the sky. It encourages action and the dynamic interpretation of unfolding events.14 Actors elaborate the myth-dream in the teeth of novel situations and in relation to the successes and failures it produces. This plasticity is evident in the current revival of the myth-dream. One of Kouphítaina’s prophecies declared that a world war would erupt when the building of the great church reached the anóphlia (lintels), a stage of construction somewhere above the ground floor and not yet the second floor. For a building as large as this one this stage lasted several years. On my visit in 1999, as the war in Kosovo raged, with NATO jets striking Serbia, some wondered if this were the predicted war. Then, two years later, people wondered if 9/11 was or would precipitate the war. Kouphítaina’s prophesied bell that would be heard in England furnishes an even better example of the dynamic, serial attempt to align current developments with prophecy. First a man built a bell tower on a hill opposite Argokoíli (fig. 27), but this bell rarely worked and people soon realized that it was not the answer. The Greek navy later built a radar station just above the discovery site, and people claimed that this answered the prophecy (despite the fact that radar listens rather than makes a noise that is heard). More recently, as we have seen, the church-building committee at Argokoíli directed the building of a large bell tower as part of the new complex. In 2005 six bells were installed. One of these, at 650 kilograms and with a diameter of just over one meter, is the largest bell in Greece. These bells are certainly loud, almost deafening for those standing nearby, but this was not considered the fulfillment of the prophecy. The uniqueness of these bells generated media interest, and several television news channels reported on their installation and actually broadcast them ringing. This 14

Wallace’s (2005: 6) concept of “historia” parallels the myth-dream idea. By this Latin term he intends the “program of collective destiny that the leaders of tribes, nations, and empires use to inspire, to rationalize, to legitimize, and to guide policy.” The early American idea of “manifest destiny” and the still-vital idea of America as a “redeemer nation” shouldering the mission of spreading democracy, free speech, human rights, etc., to the rest of the world exemplify Wallace’s conception. A historia maps future action in relation to a past and a present. Although rooted in large-group politics, secular history, and rationalized ethics, historiae may easily become sacralized and/or claim a divine mandate and thus merge with or subsume myth-dreams. They are a prime example of the mythicization of history, history as myth. 166

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Figure 27. The church at Argokoíi in 2005, with the old bell tower in the distance on the left.

was pointed to as fulfilling the prophecy; satellite subscribers in the UK could receive some of the channels. Yet even when a prophecy has apparently been fulfilled it may go on accumulating subsequent fulfillments. Overdetermination does no harm; certainly “closure” is not possible until the prophecy has been fully realized. In 2007 I visited Iánnis Khouzoúris at his home in Athens, and he attended a lecture I gave at the Panteion University. In an opinion piece in Argokoiliótissa written shortly thereafter he reflected that perhaps the book I was preparing and I myself were fulfillments of Kouphítaina’s prophecies. I reside in England, and my book, written in English, would insure that Argokoíli and its bells were “heard in England.” Anyone reading these lines in England has just now contributed to completing the prophecy. Khouzoúris went on to recollect that I had earlier published an article recording the local tradition that an American would come and play an instrumental role in the construction of the church. This was, and remains, a bona fide local tradition, as we have seen, but in this case I had been a key node of its transmission. The myth-dream thus acquired an awareness of itself as an object of study. Certainly it exemplifies what most anthropologists 167

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have come to accept—that ethnographers are drawn into the life of the community whether they will it or not. Reflecting on my research, Khouzoúris added (2007): This book [i.e., the one you are holding] will be read by English-speakers. It will describe the progress of the church, photographs of it, and the whole history of the dreams, visions, prophecies, and attempts to erect the new, holy church. Maybe a wealthy and devout American person will come forward, and be moved to support it [the building]. Perhaps this prophecy will come true. Or perhaps it is to be interpreted by the interest shown by Mr. Charles Stewart (who is a true American, “born and bred,” as we say) in disseminating information about the pilgrimage in England. Through his books and lectures, he has introduced the prophecies and visions into the international scholarly literature in exuberant fashion. Will this result in the development and increased stature [of Argokoíli] so that it becomes a global religious center? Only time will tell.

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Chapter Eight Buried objects: Dreaming, excavating, and imagining the Past

T

he foundational miracles on Naxos and Tinos in the nineteenth century involved prolonged digging and dramatic discoveries culminating in the display of novel artifacts. In their emphasis on material objects, these two pilgrimages differ from the major Catholic pilgrimages of Europe, which have sprung solely from apparitions or visions. At Lourdes, Knock, Fatima, and Medjugorje, the initial theophanies did not involve the discovery of any material tokens.1 Even in Spain comparable events did not lead to the discovery of new objects. At Limpias in 1919, for example, a crucifix already in the church was seen to roll its eyes, change complexion, and sweat (Christian 1992). Buried objects incite historicization. A tangible object comes to light. Its discovery signifies “miracle,” but its material existence sooner or later raises questions about possible pasts, thus stimulating historical accounts. This would be the difference between European Catholic and Greek Orthodox miracles. Catholic cases can only be given a history back to the moment of theophany. Antecedent sources lie in the ether of transcendence. The Greek cases, by contrast, begin at the moment when the objects were first created; their discovery in the present activates a historical imagining of the land and its former inhabitants.

Buried Objects and Plausible Pasts On Naxos and Tinos, the original miracle stories themselves (Chapter Three) included considerable detail on the excavation and discovery of the icons. The newfound icons signified divine grace for the community and became the focus 1

Carroll (1986: 133), surveying the major Catholic encounters with Mary that have spawned pilgrimages, notes that Marian shrines in Spain were more likely to center on tangible objects. 169

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of veneration. At the same time, they instigated an “abduction” such as Gell (1998: 14) has identified at work in the contemplation of artifacts generally. Abduction is a logical operation that infers the antecedents of the object at hand by speculating on questions of provenance and production. In the case of the Naxos icons, Who made them? For whom were they made? How did they come to be here? According to the philosopher Charles Peirce, to whom Gell traces the idea, “The abductive suggestion comes to us like a flash. It is an act of insight although of extremely fallible insight” (1940: 304). An abduction is a hunch, a rapidly formed working hypothesis about something at hand. At Argokoíli the idea of buried icons set off an abductive flash that fittingly occurred in a moment of vision when Khristódoulos suggested that the icons had been the property of persecuted refugees from Egypt. Father Korrés reported the 1835 dialogue between Khristódoulos and the Panagía as follows (1962: 4): [Khristódoulos says:] “Virgin, Mother of God, how did you come to be underneath this immovable mountain? Poor sinner that I am, I cannot comprehend this. No one can believe it, looking at the rocks here solidly joined together; no one can distinguish any space where you might be located.” The Panagía then replied . . . “A poor and blessed couple from Egypt brought me here, displaying great piety toward me. In a period of disorder and fear they fled to this place here. Building small houses, we lived in them. But then, persecuted here again by the enemy, frightened of falling into the hands of the tyrants, we prayed to my one and only son, to cover us over. Then, immediately, we split the mountain, covering the couple and food enough for three days. They lived ten days and then gave up their souls into the hands of the living God. And as proof (kai dia pístosín sas), begin digging at the spot and you will find the bones of this couple and the child. The bones of their animals, even those should be preserved together with the sanctified bones.” Abductive reasoning appears as a first, faltering step that may be explored through further investigation, in this case by excavation. As Peirce put it, “Abduction, or the suggestion of an explanatory theory, is inference through an Icon,2 and is thus connected with Firstness” (1997: 276). A historicizing logic is 2

By “Icon” Peirce means a likeness or image of novel phenomena that enables one to proceed rationally into the immediate future in the face of this novelty. This idea fits squarely within Peirce’s 170

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produced to comprehend the artifacts. “Abduction” thus emerges not only as a key concept for the anthropology of art (see Davis 2007) but also for an anthropology of history, as Ginzburg (1989: 103) has shown in his study of clues and traces. In the case of Tinos, books on the pilgrimage written by local scholars cannot resist questions of antecedents in considering the icon. They tell us that there was an early Christian church on this site. According to the traditions of the miraculous discovery, the ruins of earlier buildings were found, but knowledge is vague. Indeed, “knowledge” may be too grand a term. Detailed excavation records were not kept (in this period before the advent of modern archaeology), and any remains were built over and obscured by the large church that grew up on the spot. Therefore accounts vary. Scholars assume that the icon must have or could have belonged to a church on this site and that the church was destroyed in, alternatively, the eighth century, by Leo III, an iconoclast (Sakellíon and Philippídis 1928:26), the tenth century, by Saracen pirates (Sakellíon and Philippídis 1928: 26), or ca. 1200, again by Saracens (Seraïdári 2007: 32). These various assertions seem plausible. Material discoveries led to a tangle of traffic between supposition and knowable historical factuality. Factoring in the traditions that an ancient temple of Dionysos stood on the site before it was converted into a church (Seraïdári 2007: 32), it becomes clear that we are facing an even wider gamut from documentable knowledge through plausible inference to unsupported fantasy.

The Meaning of Buried Icons Tangible relics and icons have been part of Eastern Christian religiosity since late antiquity, when people began to collect pieces of the true cross and relics of martyrs. During the period of iconoclasm (ca. 730–840), when the Orthodox Church momentarily opposed figural representation on icons, stories of icons hidden in caves or thrown into the sea—either to protect them or to destroy them—proliferated. Such traditions were revitalized when Christian icons again came under threat with the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in the fifteenth century. Oral traditions throughout Greece told of icons that could fly or withstand centuries of floating on the sea intact. In 1004, a dream vision instructed a monk from Ivíron monastery on Mt. Athos to walk on water and

pragmatism. In the case at hand, the envisioned (but still buried) Orthodox icons at Argokoíli stimulated the formation of an abductive Icon that offered a tentative explanation (hypothesis) in the form of postulations about historical provenance. 171

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Figure 28. Eighteenth-century (1774) depiction of an eleventh-century event: “Saint Gavriíl Rescues the Holy Icon from the Sea” (wall painting, Ivíron Monastery, Mt. Athos) (Photo by Father Geórgios, Ivíron Monastery; courtesy of Stratís Psáltou).

retrieve an icon at sea (fig. 28). A widow in the Asia Minor town of Nicaea3 had committed this icon—the Panagía Portaítissa, as it came to be known—to the sea to save it from iconoclasts two centuries earlier (Stewart 2008: 98). The floating or flying icon indexed the connection of far-flung localities to centers of Orthodox spirituality such as Constantinople or Nicaea. These icon discovery stories and the icons themselves represented the cohesion of the Orthodox Christian community under Byzantium and into the ensuing Ottoman period, when authority radiated from the patriarch of Constantinople. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries one after another floating icon (of the Panagía) was found and enshrined on the Cycladic islands of Andros (Theosképastos), Kythnos (Kanála), Amorgos (Khozoviótissa), Siphnos (Khryssopigís), Sikinos (Pantánassa), and Ios (Gremniótissa; Kephalliniádis 1990).4 On Tinos itself, in the century before the revolution, some fishermen 3 Site of a major church council (787 CE) that pronounced favorably on the use of icons and Byzantine Imperial seat during the Latin occupation of Constantinople (1204–61). 4 A survey of popular Greek icon traditions (Dimitrakópoulos 1971) lists no pre-1800 cases of buried icons requiring excavation. Among the scores of traditions surveyed by Dimitrakópoulos, the closest to a buried icon was that of the Panagía Makhairá on Cyprus (1971: 64). According

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heard something thump against the side of their boat. They fished an icon out of the water, made land at a promontory called Pánormos, and built the little monastery of the Panagía Prostátisssa ton Xénon (Protectress of Strangers) there to house the icon. On Naxos, so many icons have washed up that a special church service honors them all (Stewart 1991: 89). Even mountain villages such as Apeíranthos have churches dedicated to water-borne icons. In this case, a shepherd pasturing his flocks by the coast saw an icon flashing near the shore. When he went closer, the icon jumped onto his shoulders and accompanied him on his walk back to the village (Stewart 1991: 84). The buried icons discovered on Tinos (in 1823) and at Argokoíli (in 1836) represented a major thematic change. When the revolution broke out in 1821, the patriarch, seated in the sultan’s capital, could not support the Greek cause. Indeed, as punishment for not stopping the revolution, the Ottomans executed Gregory V and left his body hanging for three days at an entrance to the patriarchate (Clogg 1992: 36–37). The earlier theme of floating or flying icons connecting the periphery to the center disappeared in this period to be replaced by dreams of buried icons. In the revolutionary period and immediately after, autochthony urgently required statement, and the Tinos and Naxos discoveries offered prototypes of a new genre. Digging became a spiritual enterprise that enacted a new vision of proprietorship comparable to the activities of the renegade Protestant “Diggers” or “True Levellers” of the English revolution, who performatively leveled out iniquitous social hierarchy when they dug on St. George’s Hill in Surrey (Hill 1972: 98). Whereas under the Ottomans the vast majority of Orthodox Christians were landless peasants working on estates, in the 1830s they were in transition to potential owners of the land. In 1835 the new state passed the Law for the Dotation of Greek Families, which allowed all native-born Greeks to receive up to 2,000 drachmas of national property (McGrew 1985: 162). Social and historical circumstances disposed people to think of their land and its past with a new intensity. Dreams of buried icons allowed these ideas of autochthony and ownership to develop. Abduction operated in this social context to propel thought in the direction of the past. A buried icon indexed the historical inhabitation of the place and connected people to local predecessors (not necessarily biological progenitors). Its to legend, an ascetic brought this wonder-working icon from Asia Minor and died with it in his possession in a remote cave. Centuries later, two monks saw a light flashing from the cave and used a knife (makhaíri) to cut down the bushes and find the icon. This was a pruning rather than an excavation of history. 173

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discovery involved dedicated excavation, which resembled archaeological practice; indeed, it may have mimicked this prestigious national discipline, which emerged during the same period (Hamilakis 2007: 82; Hamilakis and Yalouri 1996). The buried-icon traditions involved uncovering ancestral connections, but the history being celebrated was Christian, not the glorious antiquity that the state sought to connect to as directly as possible. By the end of the nineteenth century, traditions of long-buried icons had become standard in communities throughout Greece. After mentioning the discovery of the famous icon of Tinos, the folklorist Lawson went on to comment (1910: 301–2): And this is no solitary example; the number of icons exhumed in obedience to dreams is immense; wherever the traveller goes in Greece, he is wearied with the same reiterated story. . . . During my stay in Greece a village schoolmaster embarrassed the Education Office by applying for a week’s holiday in order to direct a party of his fellow-villagers in digging up an icon of which he had dreamt, and to build a chapel for it on the spot. It was felt that a body concerned with religious as well as secular instruction ought not to commit the impiety of refusing such a request, but it was feared that other schoolmasters would be encouraged to dream. Although cynical, the latter part of this quote points to the conflict between religious motivations and “enlightened” secular logic. Should digging up the past be approached as a spiritual activity following saintly commands and dependent on divine benevolence, as Bishop Gavriíl of Tinos asserted in his open letter of 1822? Or should it be part of a scientific exploration of the past guided by principles of objectivity and analysis? In the practice of history or archaeology the researcher is consciously trying to find out more about the past. Practitioners have singled out the past as an object of study. Intention and agency work in that direction, from subject to object. An archaeologist, even a rank amateur, even a looter starts with a contextual historical idea of what might plausibly be found and where (Antoniadou 2009: 252; Koumarianou 2007: 171). Instead of coming at the object with a surrounding historical narrative, the Tinos and Naxos dreamers began to spin narratives around icons from the moment they envisioned them. The Panagía who appeared in the visions of 174

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Naxiote shepherds in the 1830s was understood to be an emanation from the icon in the ground; the object was speaking, demanding its own discovery. On Tinos, people similarly followed holy commands delivered in dreams. According to Bishop Gavriíl’s letter, that is the way things should have remained. Secular history and, worse, antique hunting polluted the enterprise. On Naxos people dug on a remote hillside not previously associated with any settlement or building. Their initial assertion that they would find icons possessed by early Christians from Egypt may have seemed fantastic to many outside observers; certainly Argokoíli is a remote and isolated spot today. In the 1830s, however, people lived in the hamlet of Atsipápi, located less than two kilometers from Argokoíli. It had grown up on a prior Byzantine settlement dating from the ninth century, and Byzantine house structures can still be observed there. A few kilometers south stands the church of Panagía Kerá (fig. 29), which had a surrounding Byzantine settlement dating to the same period. A little farther south still lies the church of Agía Kyriakí, also dating to the

Figure 29. Byzantine church (ninth–tenth century) of Panagía Kerá in Kóronos district.

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iconoclast period and containing aniconic designs and depictions of birds that reveal possible Islamic influences (Mastorópoulos n.d.: 231). Naxos surpasses all other islands (with the possible exception of Crete) in the abundance of Byzantine churches, particularly those which, like Agía Kyriakí, contain aniconic paintings executed before, during, and immediately after the period of iconoclasm (Mastorópoulos n.d.: 71; Khatzidákis 1989: 11). In the 1830s art historians had not begun to catalogue or analyze Byzantine art, and it is not probable that illiterate shepherds had been primed with any detailed historical knowledge. They did, however, have their own living Orthodox tradition, with its succession of weekly church services telling the story of Christ and the persecution of early Christians. The struggle over icons forms the subject of the first Sunday service of Lent, known as the “Sunday of Orthodoxy.” Local people in the 1830s could see that earlier Christians had built churches in their vicinity, and they could make assertions about buried icons that were more informed than they appear at first glance. Once they formed an initial abductive “Icon” (which, we can now see, had a logical basis), a different type of thinking took over—an imagining that extended the initial hypothesis. Their thinking shifted in the direction of what Collingwood has termed “historical imagination,” which works in the realm of the plausible, “not capriciously as fancy” (1971: 241). Because the distant past is not present to perception or available to personal memory, it must necessarily be imagined, but this is done according to assumptions constrained by intuition and a priori reasoning, just as we routinely imagine the flip side of a coin or the inside of an uncracked egg (Collingwood 1971: 242). The Naxiote dreamers and the average historian came to occupy similar positions insofar as they made inferences about the past. The icons and bones were ore, the raw past, given over for historical processing by emplotment (White 1992). The Naxiote dreamers, however, came only partially into line with standard historical practice. Both began from abductions and moved on to employ historical imagination, but then their trajectories radically diverged. The villagers did not engage in further historical research into the persecution of early Christians or iconoclasm on Naxos or the study of other places in the region in order to support their hypothesis. For the dreamers, the historicity of the icons was subordinate to their sanctity and, like the authenticity of the icons themselves, already a matter of conviction rather than of empirical investigation.

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Contemporary historians would regard the story of the Egyptians as little more than speculation that has not undergone proper investigation. At the time of the initial discoveries, Enlightenment canons of proof and reasoning were being put into practice by the Bavarian-led state. In the context of independent Greece, with its national church now subordinate to the king, officials viewed the objects discovered at Argokoíli as detritus rather than holy icons. Earlier I examined this as resulting from the contravention of new laws, but now we can see that those laws stood upon the foundations of a new systematic rationality that informed a different orientation to the world. As Greece struggled toward independence, modern historical practice was receiving important elaboration in the Berlin seminars of Leopold von Ranke. Under Bavarian rule, Rankean historicism rapidly diffused into the disciplines of history and archaeology as these emerged in Greece. The Bavarian regent Maurer showed familiarity with historiographical trends in Prussia and invited Ranke’s protégé, Zinkeisen, to take up the first chair in ancient history at Athens University (he declined). Ludwig Ross (born 1806 in Schleswig-Holstein) became ephor (superintendent) for general antiquities in 1833 and the first professor of classical archaeology at Athens University in 1837. The principles of historicism5 included the Cartesian distinction between fantasy and reality and between subject and object. The historical researcher stood apart from the objects of study (i.e., past events) and tried to understand them on the basis of evidence of various types. Historical time came to be conceived as linear and progressive, and this entailed a view of the past as definitively separated from the present (Koumbourlís 2005: 145; Plantzos 2008: 254). Consistent with its opposition to grand philosophies or theologies that claimed to identify set patterns in history (Ranke 1973 [1831–32]: 36), historicism stood fundamentally opposed to Christianity-infused indigenous historicization of the sort proposed at Argokoíli. The Naxiotes focused on returning the past to 5 For an overview of the meaning of “historicism” including Ranke’s contribution, see Iggers (1995). Historicism reached Greece with force immediately following independence in 1832, when diaspora Greeks returned from northern Europe and Bavarians ruled the country. Many recognize this as a moment of colonization (e.g., Gourgouris 1996; Herzfeld 2002). In this period, ancient Greece became the national reference point; the language was purified and infused with ancient grammar and the people redefined as Hellenes (formerly a derogatory term for “pagan”). The past was separated from the present, and continuity with this past was claimed in academic historical writings.

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the present in a cyclical logic in which the recovery of lost possessions restored divine grace and made it present. The icon discoveries all dated to saints’ days, notably the Annunciation, and the finds were made in the company of priests after the performance of repeated prayer services. The engine of history in the local, Romeic view was divine will, not human-derived progress. According to professional, Rankean tenets, the past could be understood through meticulous research, but historians had to be careful not to commit the sin of anachronism. They needed to hold their contemporary values and logical assumptions apart and not impute them to past peoples as operating assumptions. As Ranke put it, “There is not alive within us an interest similar to that of the past” (1973 [1831–32]: 41). Too close an identification with past actors also collapsed the subject-object distinction. Past protagonists could be addressed via objective source materials (e.g., documents, artifacts), and the imagination of the historian could work artfully to portray these actors’ motivations and context. The past could not, however, legitimately speak to/through the historian by means of subjective revelations in dreams or states of ecstasy. Producing an unattested quotation of a past personage that was received in a dream violated the boundary between history and fiction. Past thought could not be reenacted. “If it could,” Collingwood wrote, “time itself would be cancelled and the historian would be the person about whom he thinks, living over again in all respects the same” (1971: 303). By speaking with the voice of the saints or dialoguing with figures from the past, the Naxiote dreamers violated the historians’ injunction that the past be treated as an object of thought. Historical imagination optimally worked meta-imaginatively, that is, in full conscious awareness that it was imagining the past—a mode of present experience sub specie praeteritorum (under the aspect of the past), as Oakeshott (1933: 111, 118) phrased it. In the early nineteenth century, professional historians came to view the reexperiencing and reanimating of the past in trance or dreams as illegitimate, and this principle has remained enshrined in the discipline of history ever since. In 1830s Naxos modern historical principles of research and epistemology collided with local Christian, Romeic modes of historicization. The discipline of history would section off the stories of Egyptians as “myth” or “sacred history” to indicate that they were not based on acceptable evidence or were held on the basis of faith, preventing proper investigation. These local accounts continue,

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nevertheless, to function at the local level as credible accounts of the past, and I treat them as “histories.” Opposition to anachronism made historicism fundamentally consistent with the projects of rational governance and progress (Chakrabarty 2000: 12, 237). Anachronism meant not just keeping the present out of the past in historical representations but also eliminating outmoded practices from present social life in the name of progress. Commenting on the outbreak of the Greek war of independence in the 1820s, Adamantios Koraes, one of the leading ideologues of Hellenism, wrote that changing times make political change necessary and a nation must not hold “supersitiously to its political system, just because it inherited it from the forefathers. . . . Whoever acts thus resembles someone forced to wear baby clothes in adulthood just because those are what his parents dressed him in” (quoted in Koumbourlís 2005: 145). Not only is this “ridiculous,” Koraes maintained, but it leads to worse problems later. In the case at hand, indigenous forms of historicization and archaeology were themselves identified as retrograde practices to be jettisoned in the name of rational development (Chakrabarty 2000: 243). Bavarian-mediated ideas of government and rational knowledge delegitimized local, haptic modes of historicizing in areas like mountain Naxos. Dreams or visions revealing information, the smell of bones, or the warm feel of the earth could not be accepted as methodology or as reliable evidence. The temporal assumptions of science, with its physical mechanics, squelched popular Orthodox Christian apocalypticism. The state suppression of the cult of the Panagía Argokoiliótissa in the 1830s exemplified this brute relationship between the imported historicist paradigm embraced by the Hellenic state and local Romeic relationships to the past (which fused ideas about the present and the future). From this point on the tide turned in the direction of the Hellenic, but Romeic suppositions among the populace were not completely washed away.

Romeic Temporality in Hellenic Times In the fastness of mountain Naxos the apocalyptic, Romeic orientation toward time continued relatively impervious to surrounding changes and developments. Even though the icons were confiscated in 1838, the pilgrimage continued, as

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did the activities of visionaries such as Aikateríni Khalkoú and Kouphítaina. Stories about the Egyptians who brought the icons to Naxos are not recorded, but they must have remained in circulation, for no sooner was an icon rediscovered in 1930 than these early Christians reappeared in Evdokía’s dreams. On 20 April 1930 she dreamt being taken to the site of the discovery at Argokoíli, where she encounters various saints. A man appears carrying a large bone, which he is using to drip holy water onto himself. They discuss whether it is human and decide that it is from a calf. This prompts Evdokía to ask how the bones got there and how those people who had the icons got there as well. The saints explain that they had calves, goats, patched clothes, and a jug of water. “Everything you see here belonged to those blessed people,” say the Ágioi Saránta.6 “When they thought that people were coming to persecute them, they took their things and entered the holy cave.” In another dream a couple of days later (22 April 1930), Evdokía recorded that she met the Panagía. They went to Argokoíli, where the Panagía showed me all of those people who lived in the holy cave. They were unfamiliar (agnostoi) people. Their dress had changed (állaxe) a lot from ours.7 Just like [the wool] of the black lamb, which is soft and curly, that’s how their dress was, both the men and the women. And I was looking at them, and another one ran past, his forehead covered in blood, and another one bleeding from the hands and another from the leg. . . . And the Panagía told me that each one of these people carried an icon (eikonismataki) and lived in the cave. When they understood that the idolaters were about to find them, they prayed to God to throw down the stone to cover them. Immediately after this prayer the boulder fell down and covered them. Then they were injured, and blood flowed from their bodies. The Panagía then said, “Did you see them?” And I replied to her, “I saw them.” Marina’s voluminous notebooks of the same year, compiled with Evdokía’s support, contained no reference to Egyptians. The Egyptians resurface, however, in another set of dreams. This is a handwritten, unpublished “book” entitled 6

Ágioi Saránta means “Forty Saints. “I phoresía tous állaxe polý apó tin dikiá mas”—with “changed” implying that they are a future and not (just) a past people. 7

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Figure 30. Markos Kapíris, author of the dream book “Holy Visions,” photographed ca. 1910 in the United States, where he lived for more than five years (courtesy of Márkos Kapíris).

“Holy Visions” (“Ieraí optasíai”) by Markos Kapíris (fig. 30). Kapíris was born in the village of Keramotí, near Kóronos, in 1885 and migrated to America at the age of twenty-one. Like many Greek migrants to America, he returned to fight in the Balkan Wars (1912–13). After that he remained in Greece, married, and moved into his wife’s house in Kóronos, where he lived until his death in 1974. In 1988 Kapíris’s daughter handed the manuscript to one of the leaders of the current movement to build the church. The text contains various dreams and visions that Kapíris had beginning just four years after the epidemic of dreaming among the schoolchildren. The visions begin in November 1934, and then there is one dated 4 February (no year given, p. 31) and another dated 1 August 1937 (p. 41). Subsequent dreams date to 1934 again. Kapíris was illiterate, and he dictated the dreams to his wife, who wrote them down. Apparently this manuscript was compiled in 1937 from notes or memory. “Holy Visions” begins by saying that Kapíris and his wife, Athiná, had lost their ten-month-old son, a child for whom they had felt “indescribable love,” in the autumn of 1934. Thirty-nine days into the Orthodox mourning period of forty days, they are still grieving for him. Against this backdrop Markos has his first dream (13 November 1934), in which Jesus, the Panagía, St. Anne, and Ioakím visit him. He thinks that they are ghosts, but they point to the crosses they are wearing; ghosts do not wear crosses. They show him a cross of his own 181

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(a family possession) and instruct him to wear it always, removing it only in the evenings to hang it on his icons with a candle lit before it. They tell him that St. Daniíl (Daniel), a goldsmith who lived for 350 years around the time of Christ, made this cross and that it has a bloodstained relic of the true cross in it. In a later dream Kapíris learns that this cross is 1,760 years old and that it will enable him to exorcise “demons of the earth and the aerial telónia.”8 He will have the power to heal and the ability to see “evil demons, and good ones, and the treasures of the earth (thisavroús tis gis).” The cross works like Aladdin’s lamp. Through it he can summon good spirits to do whatever he bids them. Not least, it gives his family mastery over its own misfortunes. Athiná, who is transcribing the dream, inserts: “And from these beautiful, saintly words I tried and things began to end; I was forgetting my child. . . . I assure readers that I have not added or subtracted a single word from that which came from the mouth of my illiterate husband.” This is the introduction to Markos Kapíris: like Evdokía the possessor of a holy cross and an intermediary of divine messages, and like the dreaming children (to whom he makes no explicit reference) a prophet who will save humanity—or at least his fellow villagers—from damnation. The saints take him on numerous tours of hell and the heavens, all the way up to the sixth heaven, where the holiest saints and angels pray for the salvation of the world (p. 12), and the seventh heaven, where Christ resides (p. 59). The means of travel include a marble ship, a cloud, a golden cubicle/pod (kouvoúklion), and an elevator (ansasér; p. 10). Along the way he has several opportunities to raise his cross and scatter demons and telónia (pp. 6, 41). Consistent with the myth-dream, Kapíris frequently dreams of himself at Argokoíli; he communicates with the hidden St. Anne icon and sees “treasures” described as “earthly” and “heavenly.” In an early dream (undated, p. 9) St. Anne invites him: “Come, my child, and see the heavenly treasure (ouránios thisavrós) that is hidden in the immovable mountain.” They travel into the earth at Argokoíli, and he learns that there are eighteen icons there. The icon of St. Anne alone among these is lying face down (bróumyta), and she tells him that this is because her eyes are so large that they might frighten people. St. Anne goes on to say that in order for her icon to be discovered the people of Kóronos and the neighboring villages will have to become pure of heart, like doves. Then she will

8

Popularly thought to be the souls of unbaptized children that return as winged demons. Normally spelled teloneía (lit. “toll houses’). All words are quoted exactly as spelled in the manuscript.

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emerge and with her a font of holy water that will heal the sick. Non-Christians will convert. In a dream of February (presumably 1935) he delves into the topic of central interest here: the history of the icons: One Wednesday in the month of February, I set off with two staunch supporters as the holy inspiration had ordered. We went to a cave called Za.9 We lit incense there and then set off for a peak where there is a ruined church called Mazókipos. We censed there . . . [Then follows a description of other churches visited and saints met. Then they return to Argokoíli.] We lit incense, and then her Holy Grace called me, and she told me how the holy icons came to the holy place (ierón tópon), Argokoíli. “Fifteen hundred fifty years ago, my child, the holy icons arrived here, carried from the divinely touched (theopátita) land of Egypt. It was in the year 385. There were three families. They boarded a ship and traveled fifteen days, and on the sixteenth the vessel landed at a harbor called Limnárion on the island of Naxos. The three families got off the ship here and walked through the woods to find an appropriate place to dwell. After two hours they reached a place called Thólos, where there was a good cave. One family stayed there. The other two carried on. A quarter of an hour’s walk up the hill they came to a place called Xyvouní. There they found a large, sturdy cave. On the eastern side it was very large. On the western side it is more private (idiaíteron), joined to the other, but smaller. One family occupied the large cave. Kostas Lisaraios [Lisarakos??], as he was called, had a wife named Maria and Sophia. Two godparents had baptized her, which is why they gave her two names. They had a son named Pávlos and another named Christóphoros and also an unbaptized infant. They had eighteen icons, which were the works of the Apostle Luke and of St. Daniíl. The other family had three icons: the

9

There is a well-known cave on Za (Zeus), the island’s highest mountain. Archaeologists have discovered Neolithic remains in it. The cave is located some 20 kilometers over rough terrain from Kóronos district. 183

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Panagía Evangelístria, St. John the Forerunner, and the Holy Cross. After a year had gone by, they learned that evil people had arrived at Limnárion and that they were hunting down icons together with Christians (eikonísmata me tous Khristianoús). Once they established this as true, they raised their hands to heaven and said, “God, if we are about to fall into the hands of these evil people who will torture us and take our icons, then it would be better if the mountains collapsed and covered us.” O, the wonder, the mountains fell down and covered them. Thus, my child, it was ordained (peproménon) by the heavenly God. Then God said—as the illumination of the Panagía told me—that after 1,450 years [i.e., in 1835], God will illuminate people to find three icons. And every century thereafter three more, so that the people will see, believe, and repent. In 1837 [1836], the three icons of the one family that lived in the small cave on the western side came to light. This family consisted of one Dimítris, his wife Sophia, and one daughter, Eiríni. After the mountains fell in and covered them, these three found a seam (armón), and they began and walked slowly, slowly, for three days. After three days they arrived at a large cave called Za. No sooner did they arrive than they gave up their souls. Their bodies, however, remained unharmed and intact. In 1837 [1836], my child, I illuminated your forebears, and they unearthed the three icons, which were thirty-two steps beneath the surface. And from that point another thirty-two steps deeper lie the other eighteen icons. The time is approaching when another three will come out: St. Anne, the Holy Cross, and St. George o Koudounás [bell-ringer], so called. A river of holy water will rush forth, and mills will turn. Healing water will surge forth to cure the sick, and other nations will be baptized. All people who exist in the world will come here. They will see, they will be awed, they will be amazed, they will believe, they will be baptized, and they will be healed. Only the Bedouins will not come. But aside from them, people will 184

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come from all of the nations on earth. A monastery will be built that will surpass the monastery of Sion.” The text then goes on to describe the dimensions of the monastery in great detail. The entry ends with the words “Her holy Grace illuminated these things to me at the holy spot, Argokoíli” and is signed “Markos Kapíris.” In an earlier dream/vision (18 December 1934) Kapíris again goes with two assistants to Za. On the way they encounter fourteen demons (telónia) “that have lived here for eight hundred years, and he exorcises them, sending them 800,000 miles away (p. 21). Inside the cave he encounters three bodies of Egyptians wearing the clothes that they wore in the period when they lived. The Egyptians emerge in single file: I ask, “Who are you? What are you doing here inside the solid mountains (asálefta vouná)? And how do you live?” They reply, “We are, my child, the people who came from Egypt. My name is Dimítris, this is my wife, Sophia, and here (indicating with his finger) is my daughter, Eiríni. We have been dwelling here 1,550 years. Our spirits are in heaven, and All-Holy God commanded us, and we came and joined our bodies, which were undecayed, and we entered them and came out for you to see us as you commanded. 10 Then they proceed to repeat a version of the narrative about fleeing capture. In this account, they refer to the persecutors as “iconoclasts” (eikonomákhoi), describe the “seam” (armón) as “like a road” leading to Za cave (underground), and explain that soon three angels will come by cloud to take their bodies to the fourth heaven to join the ranks of the great saints and holies. “Now,” they say, meaning very soon, this very day, St. Anne will ascend and “we will also ascend” (tha analiphthoúme kai imeís). At the date of this dream (1934), the centenary of the discovery of the first icons and bones (which were the bones of the very people to whom he is speaking) was approaching. Kapíris set the anniversary in 1937.11 This dream thus looks forward into the near future to predict the discovery of the St. Anne icon in three years’ time. 10

In Greek Orthodox theology, the spirit is reunited with the body at the Last Judgment. This is one reason the Church opposes bodily mutilation (e.g., embalming) and cremation. The bodies of saints are thought not to decay and to exude a sweet smell of basil when exhumed. 11 As seen in Chapter Three, the initial discoveries were made in 1836. 185

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In the Orthodox Church, exhumation after four to six years of interment marks the end of mourning rituals and the final laying to rest of the deceased. In this case, the exhumation of the bones after 1,450 years has led to an extraordinary further ritual, one century later. The Egyptians are described as saints, wearing what appear to be saintly clothes. St. Dimítris wears a cape down to the ground and sandals tied with golden laces and St. Sophia a golden waistcoat and an embroidered dress in the Vlach style. Their daughter is dressed like the mother, with two bracelets on one arm and three on the other. The overall message is that resurrection is nigh. Kapíris’s dream book appears to have been produced in its current form in 1937 to give final warning in the year of the impending apocalypse.12 Kapíris is off by a year in his dating of the original discovery, an indication that the events of the Kóronos myth-dream had not been stabilized in an official, scholarly history but circulated in oral forms among the partially literate villagers. Accurate chronologies and written histories fix the past and allow the present to differentiate itself consistent with the goals of historicism and modernization mentioned above. The myth-dream of Kóronos had arisen out of a different ideology of apocalyptic Christianity. Kapíris carries this forward, but after a century of state-endorsed historicist approaches to history and archaeology in the schools and social life in general his version of the myth-dream also incorporates features from this initially alien mode of historical consciousness. His is a Romeic version of the past circulating during Hellenic times. Although he makes mistakes in dating, including assigning iconoclasm to the fourth century CE, he displays obsessive interest in the chronology of the icons and the people who brought them to Naxos. He is invested in the trappings of the historicist paradigm even if he does not master its established periodizations and conventional dating. Chronology in his hands is labile. The arrival date is given as 385 CE, but this is not fixed, much as the bodies and souls of the early Christians are not stably located— dead for 1,450 years, then dug up in 1836 as bones, then reformed as bodies and reunited with their souls just prior to Kapiris’s encounter with them, after which they will ascend to heaven. Chronology, the apparatus of linear history, gets bent to the demands of a Romeic temporality that has past characters come to life and dictate the future.

12 In a dream of 4 February 1935 Kapíris meets one of the Egyptians, who says that he will be swept up to heaven in 65 years (i.e., in 2000), so multiple time schemes for resurrection were at work.

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Dates litter the text in the clumsy attempt to speak in the idiom of educated historiography.13 Kapíris refers to a “heavenly treasure” (ouránios thisavrós) half of which has been hidden at Argokoíli for 1,450 years (i.e., since 485, but perhaps he is only counting back from 1836, when the first icons were discovered) and the other half for 636 years (i.e., since 1300). Then, in the very same entry, he receives a divine message that the treasure is 1,760 years old (i.e., dating to 175 CE—earlier, his cross, fashioned by St. Daniíl, is dated to this year). Later he declares that all treasures of the earth hidden 9,937 years ago (i.e., in 8000 BCE) will be recovered. Alongside dating, his describing the clothing worn by the Egyptians may also indicate the influence of historicism. The recognition of different clothing in earlier periods may be taken as an indicator of a strong awareness that the past is different from the present. Getting the dress right shows an investment in accuracy and claims authenticity for historical representation (Burke 2001), although in one encounter they seem to be dressed in the rough costume of cave dwellers while in the other they are clothed as saints. Ultimately we find a hybrid historical consciousness in Kapíris and Evdokía; they manage both to perpetuate the myth-dream and to historicize it. The finding of material objects, one of which had just been returned to the village in 1930, prompted a new wave of historical speculation. The adoption of historicism helped to justify the myth-dream to skeptics by answering historical questions about how the icons came to be buried at Argokoíli. In the process the defenders of the myth-dream appropriated the rational methodology of their adversaries just as, for example, contemporary advocates of the creationist “intelligentdesign” position have incorporated a good deal of evolutionary theory into their version of creation. Kapíris’s history fuses the normally discrete domains of Christian and scientific history. 14 As Latour (1993: 11) has pointed out, proponents of “modern” thought would like to resolve such “hybrids” into purified components. Indeed, that is precisely what people who have internalized a more historicist version of Hellenism have been trying to do since independence. Kapíris’s account, from a Hellenic perspective, amounts to a confused local story in need of correction. 13

An indicative mismatch between Christian faith and historicism is discernible in the longrunning debate over the date of the Genesis creation of the world, initially placed at 4004 BCE by Bishop James Ussher in 1654. 14 This was not a completely local, isolated predicament. National school history textbooks at this time uncritically described the miraculous icon discovery on Tinos as a true event (Seraïdári 2007: 53). National historiography had not, from its side, made a clean break with Romeic historical consciousness. 187

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Kóronos indigenous history, however, remained mixed and continuous with “indigenous archaeologies” (Hamilakis 2008: 280) that also fused Orthodox Christian piety with the scientific pursuit of the material past. The Romeic and the Hellenic have long been recognized as alternative modes of self-presentation in modern Greece at a number of levels varying from personal dress and speech to architecture (Herzfeld 1987; Faubion 1995). Historicizing the Hellenic and the Romeic as I have done here reveals them less as semiotic options than as ontological alternatives characterized by different notions of temporality. In the case of Kapíris, the Hellenic and the Romeic filter each other in an emergent, hybrid temporal ontology.

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Chapter Nine affective history

I

n a parallel to the Kóronos case, the villagers of Thermí on the Aegean island of Mytilíni (Lésvos) found some bones when digging the foundations for a church in 1959. They placed these bones in a sack and left them under a tree. Shortly afterward they began to hear moaning sounds in the night, and various villagers reported dreams telling them, over the following years, that these were the bones of a monk named Raphaíl, martyred by the “Turks” (i.e., Ottomans) in 1463 shortly after their arrival on Mytilíni. Further excavations uncovered a coin and a seal dating to the fourteenth century. These finds and the fixing of a named identity to the “saint-martyr” (Rey 2008: 59) encouraged further dreaming on the part of more and more people. The dreams elaborated ever more specific historical details: Raphaíl was born Geórgios Laskarídis on the island of Ithaca and had been a soldier or a doctor before becoming leader of a monastic community near Thermí. The Ottomans tortured and killed him on the Tuesday before Easter in retribution for his support of resistance fighters. As excavations continued, more bones came to light, and these were identified through dreams as the remains of Raphaíl’s deacon, Nikólaos, and of a twelveyear-old girl named Eiríni. As the anthropologist Séverine Rey (2008) explains, the local people collectively produced the historical narrative of Raphaíl, building on each other’s dream narratives and the news of occasional archaeological finds. Ultimately, according to the canons of professional history there is no basis for asserting that a monk named Raphaíl lived and was martyred on a hillside above Thermí. The Church of Greece nonetheless canonized Raphaíl, Nikólaos, and Eiríni in 1971, and a popular monastery stands on the site today, receiving pilgrims from all over Greece. The story of Raphaíl has been claimed successfully for Christian history even though it is not accepted by academic history.

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This case puts Argokoíli in perspective as a recognizable type of indigenous historicization generated by dreams of saints and digging in the earth. The precise dating of events and the seemingly fantastic assignment of personal names to protagonists is not completely extraordinary. In Thermí, however, the dreams developed a more and more nuanced story in response to continuing material discoveries, while on Naxos the discoveries made in 1836 remained the sole and unchanging point of departure. In response to the dreaming children in 1930 the villagers dug a wide terrace on the mountainside at Argokoíli, but they did not find any new artifacts that could contribute to the story of the Egyptians. What is remarkable on Naxos is that Evdokía and Markos Kapíris should still have been expanding the history of the original discoveries a century later. Knowledge of the Byzantine period on Naxos had increased in the interim, and this might have reinvigorated dreams about early Christians. The Byzantine Museum was founded in Athens in 1914, but, of more immediate significance, the archaeologist N. D. Kalogerópoulos published a series of three articles entitled “Thirty-Five Unknown Byzantine Churches of Naxos” in the popular literary journal Néa Estía (1933). Little had been written about Byzantine Naxos, and these churches, including the Panagía Kerá, had not been established as Byzantine. The original frescoes in many churches had been covered by later layers. These articles would have stimulated discussion on Naxos, but they hardly compared in immediacy to the successive material findings at Thermí. Ultimately, it was the overarching myth-dream in Kóronos that continued to motivate dreaming from one century to the next. The possible existence of underground springs and networks of caves was tested in due course by the drilling of deep holes when the construction on the contemporary church began in the 1990s. No water was found, but the geologists did locate a hollow space in the solid rock, possibly a cave, approximately fifteen feet below the site of the large church currently under construction. The indigenous historical imagination continued, very slowly, to test its own hypotheses. The historical consciousness displayed in Kapíris’s account is quite different from linear historicism. In the story of the Egyptians and their icons, time is not a progressive dimension with predictable outcomes. The direction of events is variable, ordained and known by God and the saints and sometimes, to a degree, by prophets like Kapíris. Time may be suspended1 or go backward and forward, 1

Kapíris’s dreams recognize this phenomenon of sacred time whereby physical time can be suspended or reversed. The Holy Spirit tells him in an entry near the end of his dream book, “Don’t you see, my child, what the power of God is? How you passed all the night in prayer and

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as we have seen with the word állaxe (changed) in Evdokía’s dream. Interviews with the Egyptians or the saints scramble the past and the present. The Egyptians are the past, but they are present and also the future. Within this sense of time various potentially discrete historical periods are compressed and conflated: the Egyptians at once represent early Roman persecution and iconoclasm. They flee “idolaters” (second–fourth centuries CE) and “iconoclasts” (eighth and ninth centuries CE) interchangeably. They are ultimately an archetypal representation of times of persecution. Rey (2008) discerns a similar analogical role in the histories of St. Raphaíl. The key dreamers had come as refugees from Asia Minor after the disastrous war between Greece and Turkey in 1922, known in Greece simply as i katastrophí. Many of their relatives had been killed by the Turks and not received proper burial in the headlong flight from Anatolia. The recovery of the bones of St. Raphaíl, martyred by “Turks” nearly five hundred years earlier, thus resonated with their own more recent history and activated pangs of mourning. In caring for Raphaíl and properly honoring his remains to the point of sanctifying them, they fulfilled obligations that they had been unable to discharge for their own kin. For the Naxiotes, who had their icons confiscated and were prohibited in the 1830s from building a proper church as commanded in the earliest dreams, the dreams of Kapíris and Evdokía allied the villagers with historical victims of iconoclasm and persecution. Their indigenous history doubled as an analogical expression of their predicament. Rather than just connecting them to a past, the gradual articulation of past events amplified their present predicament as oppressed and unable fully to express their faith in their icons. It may even be possible to see the underground armón as a reference to a still earlier historical template of oppression: the tribute of youths paid by the Athenians to the Cretans and fed to the Minotaur. The winding path of the underground tunnel from Argokoíli to Za recalls the underground labyrinth negotiated by Theseus and Ariadne in escaping the Minotaur. This story also belonged to Naxos because, according to the ancient myth, Theseus took Ariadne from Crete to Naxos, where he abandoned her. In a late dream entry, Kapíris introduces this connection (pp. 68–69):

you did not realize it? And then you were amazed when you saw daylight. In this way He can have you for five hundred years standing and praying and you finish innocent and unharmed at the same age and you would think that you were only there for one evening” (p. 67). 191

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One day her Divine Grace told him [Kapíris’s wife writes] that Kóronos has many treasures, and she showed him the locations. She showed him that the gold statue of Ariadne exists and that now archaeologists, scientists, will come in order to find it. But they won’t find it. When St. Anne comes out, then she will illuminate [people] and they will open all these treasures. In fact, archaeologists have come and dug for a long time, but they did not find anything. We cannot dismiss the gold statue of Ariadne as a bizarre product of Kapíris’s individual imagination.2 Tales of gold statues and vases circulated on the island, an example being a story from the mountain village of Komiakí in which a man claimed to have found a statue while out collecting wild greens. It disappeared on his way home because he neglected to shed blood on it (Psarrás 1980: 6). Marina’s notebook entry for 16 June 1930 had already reported a dream in which the Panagía showed her an underground spot in which there was water and “a solid-gold body (éna sóma ólo khríso) and other gold things.”3 These were the “earthly” (epígeia) as opposed to the heavenly treasures (icons) in Kapíris’s scheme (p. 61). Periodic finds of Cycladic statues may have combined with the myth of Ariadne to create this object of thought. During the course of my field research Pétros Moutsópoulos, one of the child dreamers from the 1930s, told me that already in the nineteenth century Kouphítaina and others had spoken of an ancient gold statue honoring Ariadne.4 It was supposedly the size of her body, an idea perhaps conditioned by the presence on Naxos of two larger-thanhuman-sized statues (koúroi; fig. 31), sculpted in place and left in the marble bedrock when the ancient quarries stopped working. Echoing Kapíris, Pétros told me that many archaeologists had looked for the Ariadne statue and people had dreamt of it, but no one would find it until the St. Anne icon was discovered. Proceeds from the sale of the statue would go to the monastery. Certainly 2 At least five girls from Kóronos are named Ariadne, a name not found in other villages on Naxos. 3 Mentioned also in a dream of 27 July, as seen in Chapter Five. 4 Visiting the Cyclades in the mid-nineteenth century, Count Gobineau met a local noble on Antíparos who, having unearthed various figurines when building his villa, still hoped to find a major statue. Gobineau commented: “The famous discovery of the masterpiece sculpture [Venus of Milo], which was found in 1821 on Milos, had been enshrined as a favorite legend throughout the Cyclades. And there was no longer even the least little rock, beneath which people did not dream of making the next discovery of some . . . Venus” (quoted in Lekákis 2006: 17–18).

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Figure 31. Koúros statue in situ in an ancient marble quarry, now a tourist attraction, near Mélanes in central Naxos (photo by Eléni Karavía).

archaeologists did come to Naxos over the years to study the Cycladic remains found on the eastern side of the island. In Chapter Five I showed how various “findables” on Naxos (emery, icons, “treasures”) could stand for one another in a genre-breaking system of value. Now it becomes apparent that discrete temporal moments may also be conflated with each other to create a chronology-busting historicity that provides a moral interpretation for the present. This Romeic-influenced historical consciousness is timeless and disordered like the Freudian unconscious. Freud had initially conceived psychoanalysis to be perfectly analogous to archaeology, where the analyst delved into deeper and deeper stratigraphic layers of the unconscious. Later he revised this to a position more applicable to the current case (Armstrong 2005: 198). The diabolical thing about the unconscious, he decided, was that it jumbled all periods of the past together—an ancient Rome, for example, where temples to Jupiter, churches of the Virgin, and Renaissance villas were all present simultaneously and juxtaposed (Freud 1961 [1930]: 69ff.). Rational historicism would consider this situation intolerable and set about separating earlier from later. Romeic historical consciousness, however, does not in the least oppose this sort of temporal juxtaposition, and dreaming delivered it perfectly. In Naxiote historical consciousness in Kapíris’s time and earlier, the ancient Greeks did not necessarily count for much.5 The statue of Ariadne ranks as but one more treasure, and its fortunes are subordinate to the icon of St. Anne. 5 In the Peloponnesian villages studied by Forbes (2009) and Deltsou (2009) the residents showed more interest in local geological phenomena such as caves and mountains than in the remains of classical antiquities in their areas. They did not prioritize the ancient archaeological remains in line with the national historical narrative connecting the present to the ancient past. The urban middle classes embrace this national history more strongly and express surprise and disappointment that rural villagers do not have the same view.

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Consequently, this particular Ariadne is deemed inaccessible to Hellenic thought and the rationalist methodology of archaeology; it must be approached through Christian reverence and saintly illumination instead. Villagers told me the story of the gold statue of Ariadne without connecting it to the classicizing national history of the modern Greek state. Their views carried forward a line of thought apparent during the period prior to independence, when many of the Greek-speaking Christian inhabitants of the area thought that the “Hellenes” (Éllines) who had built the imposing monuments and statues still visible in the landscape were a race of giants or supernatural beings completely unrelated to themselves (Kakridis 1959; Hamilakis 2008: 277). In the very year that Kapíris began recording his dreams, a ninety-year-old man in the neighboring mountain village of Apeíranthos was heard telling stories about ancient Hellenes who had built large monuments on Naxos such as the koúroi at Mélanes and Apóllona and the Portára, a lintel of the Temple of Apollo, at Khóra (Oikonomídis 1957: 536). He said that these Hellenes had been mentioned in the New Testament, thus placing them within a Christian framework that somehow verified them. Beginning in late antiquity, the Orthodox Christian, Greek-speaking population had developed a Romeic mode of being that was governed by a redemptive Christian orientation to time (du Boulay 2009: 370–72; Schmemann 1979: 64). Meanwhile, a Hellenic mode of being, based on a rationalist orientation toward time, developed in northern Europe from the Renaissance through the Enlightenment. Hellenism embraced this orientation as it was formulated in the post-Enlightenment historicism that gave rise to a “modern” being grounded in a sense of time as linear, progressive, and fundamentally unpredictable. It carried no assured answers in terms of divine plans or other patterns that could give intrinsic meaning to events. At independence, this Hellenism entered Greece with force. Thus two different temporally defined modes of being began to cohabit in the Greek state from 1832 on. At first they clashed, as when the state attempted to close down the cult of the Panagía Argokoiliótissa in 1838. Since 1850 they have steadily merged into a Helleno-Christian synthesis6 that fused the two possibilities but left an unstable temporality among the population, one that vacillated between the linear and the cyclical, between rational progres6 The synthesis of Christian and Hellenic history was not restricted to local formulations. The major nineteenth-century historians Zambélios and Paparrigópoulos championed a synthetic Helleno-Christian history that stretched back through Byzantium to ancient Greece, embracing both as sources (Koumbourlís 2005). This remains the most widely accepted historical framework in Greece.

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sivism and spiritual redemption. Yannis Hamilakis and Eleana Yalouri (1999) have documented the development of a professional Greek archaeology that manages to sacralize the objects it finds and treat them like Christian relics. One of the premier archaeologists of the twentieth century, Manolis Andronikos, for example, not only listened sympathetically to dreams but carefully orchestrated the discovery of the tomb of Philip II to fall on the day of the archangels Gabriel and Michael, guardians of the underworld. This exemplifies the poetics of “indigenous Hellenism” (Hamilakis 2007: 142). The dating of the outbreak of the Greek revolution to the day of the Annunciation (25 March, Greece’s national holiday; Hatzopoulos 2009) and the mid-nineteenth-century political formulation of the Great Idea of retaking Constantinople reveal how pervasive Christian-Hellenic syntheses became in modern Greek life.

Unconscious Historicization Not every buried object incites a response that could be described as historicization. A Kóronos man, for example, told me about a woman from the central part of the island who dreamt that she should dig in one of her fields at a place called Toumbakádes (near Sangrí) in order “to find her fortune” (na vrei tin týkhi tis). She went and dug up a marble plaque with the carving of a crowned horseman on it. Disappointed by her “fortune” she returned home, and the story soon found its way into public knowledge. Others understood that this was a gravestone. The next time this woman visited her field she saw that all of the ancient graves on her property had been dug up and looted. This story concerned an ancient site, but it did not activate the historical imagination as in the case of the discovery of the bones and icons in Kóronos or the graves at Thermí. Perhaps this was because no objects were publicly recovered, perhaps because of local (Romeic) lack of interest in the ancient Greeks. Whatever the reason, this account circulated exclusively as a treasure story similar to those considered in Chapter Five. The earlier story of finding an ancient oil lamp in a dream similarly worked as a treasure tale, not as an entry into historical thought. I would suggest that even in the absence of explicit, verbal articulation, dreams of buried objects, whether artifacts or bones, may reflect a subliminal, unconscious relation to the past. I use the word “unconscious” in four senses: (1) independence from conscious volition,7 (2) occurrence during 7

I consider “lucid dreams,” in which one becomes conscious and controls the dream by will, exceptions that prove the rule that one normally lacks consciousness of self while dreaming. 195

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sleep, (3) emergence not from the executive, self-conscious self but from an unconscious part of the self, and (4) lack of awareness that one is engaging in a type of historical thought, which makes dreams of treasures unconscious historicizations. On this last point, not only the people under study but also the researchers may be unaware of the historicizing dimension of treasure dreams. As seen earlier, Foster (1964: 40) discovered a lively set of ideas about treasures in Michoacán that he considered a device for explaining acceptable wealth acquisition in a society that otherwise censured individual economic success according to a zero-sum logic. Only buried treasures did not come at someone else’s expense. Whereas Foster’s approach considered treasure stories as stabilizing the present—indeed, as part of a static present—such stories may equally be approached for what they reveal of indigenous ideas about the past. Rose (2009), for example, has shown that on the Caribbean island of Dominica knowledge of buried treasures connects tellers to the heroic Kalinago warriors who fought the Spanish and sequestered treasures taken from disabled galleons. Underemployed men telling these stories to each other implicitly ruminate on the glory of the island past. In Michoacán people had specific ideas about treasures and how they came to be hidden, among them the burial of gold ornaments by Tarascan kings, the burial in moments of danger of colonial gold or silver being freighted from mines, and the burial of silver pesos by army generals during the Mexican revolution (Foster 1964: 39). These ideas amount to a chronicle of the major historical events in the area, and it could be argued that these dreams of treasure were unconscious musings on the historicity of the land. The same may be said of the various “treasures” imagined by the Koronidiátes. Virtually every phase of the region’s history is represented, from Cycladic civilization through classical antiquity, early Christianity, iconoclasm, and the Ottoman conquest to Greek independence and World War II. When people tell stories of such treasures or dream them, they implicitly address their historicity in an affective expression of relationship to the place they live in. This is because treasures stem from past invasions and expulsions. The treasures dotting the landscape are secretions of history, ready-made periodizing devices, indexes of the eventful past. The people themselves and professional researchers may not always recognize this historical dimension; it may be “unconscious” in sense 4 above. For this reason, standard Western historiography has not recognized these devices as real forms of historicization. Thinkers in the historicist tradition such as Collingwood and Oakeshott, as we have seen, 196

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argue that proper historical thought occurs as a conscious, intentional application of imagination to past events. Awareness and intention make history a disciplined exercise. Western historicism is, however, but one specific and recently developed principle of historicization (Rüsen 2002), with peculiar ideas about linear temporal succession, homogeneous time units (days, weeks, minutes), causation, and anachronism (Olivier 2008; Chakrabarty 2000). This historicism must not be allowed to exclude alternative modes of thinking about and representing the past as forms of “history.” In areas such as Greece, which repeatedly suffered conquests and expulsions, the correlation between violent rupture and treasures has become part of a generalized common sense traceable to antiquity. When, after a long siege, the Romans finally captured Rhodes in 42 BCE, Cassius immediately killed fifty citizens and seized all of the gold and other forms of wealth he could lay his hands on. Then he issued an order that all citizens should bring him all of their wealth. He declared a death penalty for anyone who did not comply and a reward of onetenth or (for slaves) freedom to informers. At first many concealed their wealth, but when they saw their peril and realized that they had a grace period, they went and retrieved their buried treasure. According to Appian (Roman History 4.9.73), “some of them dug their money out of the ground, others drew it out of wells, and others brought it forth from tombs, in much larger amounts than the former collections.” Treasures were often buried in graveyards, either because those burying it thought that their deceased would protect it or because anyone searching for it might be reluctant to dig there (Morrisson 1981: 326). Invasions, occupations, and ethnic cleansings produce treasures. In the eastern Mediterranean this has been a commonsense view of treasures continually reinforced by experience. Immediately after the Nazis deported the Jewish community from Thessaloniki in 1943, a witness observed that the streets were strewn with mattress stuffing as looters broke into the vacant houses and slit open sofas and beds looking for concealed money (Lewkowicz 2006: 181; Mazower 2004: 413). This is a reflex of a treasure-sensitive society conditioned by events such as those that took place in 1903 in Kruševo, a mountain town in present-day Macedonia, just north of the Greek border (Brown 2003). In the Ilinden uprising of that year the local people declared their independence from the Ottomans and killed about twenty Ottoman officials and soldiers stationed in their village. The Ottomans brutally crushed the rebellion, and irregular forces (bashi-bazouks), mainly Muslims from the region, pillaged Kruševo. In one reported case, the bashi-bazouks jumped over the courtyard 197

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wall of a home, tortured the householders until they revealed where they had buried their wealth, and then shot them and left them for dead in the basement of their home. The mother survived to tell the story to her children, and it has been passed down (Brown 2003: 77). Violence and the recovery of treasures took on legendary forms in the region, such as the story that guerrillas would kill reluctant donors, make a candle out of their fat, and then search the house for hidden money. The candle supposedly went out when the hiding place had been reached. Unsurprisingly, people in Kruševo today sense that there are numerous treasures still buried in their area (Brown 2003: 229). The adjacent northern areas of the Greek state have been some of the most often conquered and reconquered areas of Europe in the twentieth century, and the area is one of the hottest places for treasure hunters today (Koumarianou 2007). The explosion of interest in the past twenty years has led to coinage of the term thisavromanía (treasure mania) and captured the attention of the international press, where it has been reported that amateur diggers often consult professional archaeologists to determine the likely position of objects: “Some say they have been spoken to by saints, or old men in their dreams” (Smith 1998). The popular Greek film Valkanizatér (1997) opens with a scene of two men on a motorbike riding through the Macedonian landscape discussing how to find buried treasures.8 A Greek-Australian man recently received official permission to use a drilling machine to dig for the treasure of Ali Pasha in central Greece.9 These examples indicate how and why the idea of treasures works in the present to connect to a past. Treasures may also be past attempts to preserve and communicate a history to the future, like a message in a bottle or a time capsule in the cornerstone of a building. In the final days of the village of Anakoú in central Anatolian Cappadocia, which had been a Greek-speaking area for millennia, the inhabitants were forced to leave after the 1922 war with Turkey. Researchers from the Center for Asia Minor Studies in Athens collected the following testimony in 1962 from an eyewitness, Elisávet Xirostylídou, who had been resettled in northern Greece (Kitromilídis 1982: 180): 8 In the novel on which this film is based, O Syndyasmós: Édessas – Zyríkhis (The Connection: Edessa – Zurich) by Sákis Tótlis (1991), the characters have a longer exchange about metal detectors: “It [the metal detector] will have to detect things deep down, because there aren’t any gold coins near the surface. Everyone hid their gold deep—the Turks, the resistance fighters (andártes), and the ancients. The detectors normally available on the market here are worthless” (16). A fervid treasure mania has also broken out in Bulgaria (Bailey 1996). 9 http://greece.greekreporter.com/2011/01/16/greek-australian-treasure-hunter-begins-newali-pasha-excavation/ (accessed 9 August 2011).

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We packed our things. We gathered the bones of our fathers from the graves. Outside the church of Saint Elias we dug a pit. We put the bones in there. In the same pit we put the old icons from the churches. The elders also put four bottles in this pit, inside of which they placed papers on which they wrote the history of the village, the year in which the exchange occurred, and other similar things. They sealed the bottles and put them in the pit and shoveled earth on top. You see, glass does not dissolve. However many years might pass, if you dig up that pit you will find the bottles. You unseal them and you can read the history of the village. This account deepens the appreciation of the history contained in buried objects, something that people understood when looking forward into the future from the moment of violent expulsion. Consistent with the Naxos case, icons formed part of the buried patrimony for the people of Anakoú. The termination of the Greek-speaking communities of Asia Minor, like the fall of Constantinople five centuries earlier, invigorated the theme of hiding and finding icons. The icon known as the Panagía of Soumelá furnishes the best-known example. This icon had been kept in a monastery in the Pontos area (on the Black Sea coast) for centuries.10 In 1923, with the official population exchange, the monks were not allowed to take it with them, so they buried it near Ankara. After diplomatic rapprochement between Turkey and Greece, they returned and dug it up. Initially kept in the Byzantine Museum in Athens, this icon has now been placed in a monastery near Véroia in northern Greece, where Asia Minor refugees (Dimitrakopoúlou 1971: 16) come in numbers to revere it. I have used nineteenth- and twentieth-century examples as evidence of general sensibilities about treasures that would have been in effect in the period of independence, when the Koronidiátes first dreamt of the buried icons. Buried treasures had been recognized in legislation extending back to Plato’s Laws (913a–914a), where they were considered accumulations of personal wealth, like savings accounts. The recovery of a treasure not belonging to a family member was therefore equivalent to theft and incurred both divine and social punishment. After Christianization, the Byzantines viewed the quasi-capitalist 10

According to tradition the icon, executed by St. Luke, had been in Athens but then flew away to Trebizond on the Black Sea in the fourth century CE. It came to rest in a cave on a high mountain called Melá. A monk saw its location in a dream, went there, and founded a monastery on the mountaintop (Dawkins 1936: 167). 199

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accumulation of wealth as a sin of avarice. Money was expected to be in productive circulation. The rules on treasure discovery held that on private land treasures belonged to the owner or should be shared between owner and finder, while on public land it must be declared to the state and shared, although with time the government took an ever greater share (Morrisson 1981: 343). In Venetian-controlled Cyprus in the sixteenth century, an epileptic village-idiot figure named Zorzin dreamt that a treasure was buried in the local church of St. Simeon (Arbel 2002). He persuaded some workmen to remove the stairs, and they found three clay jars filled with more than 1,700 Venetian gold ducats. Ultimately the state allowed Zorzin to have 300 ducats. As Benjamin Arbel (2002: 9–10) points out, the law code in force at the time, known as the Assizes, contained copious detail on treasure discoveries, including the consideration of situations in which individuals dreamt of treasures.11 In the centuries before independence, connoisseurs of ancient Greek art and literature began to visit Greece, where they spent long hours copying inscriptions or studying statues. The local Muslims thought that the classicists and travelers were descendants of those who had lived on this land earlier, the ancient Greeks and Byzantines (Polítis 1904, 2: 1021), and had fled far away to northern Europe to escape the Ottoman occupation, burying their treasures in their haste to flee. Their kinship with the former inhabitants was proved by their ability to read the ancient inscriptions and thus to find the hidden treasures—a view entirely consistent with the Balkan treasure-rupture correlations seen above. The Christians of the area thought that the philhellenes (mylórdi) were just treasure hunters who came with their maps and books to locate hidden troves, which everyone knew lay hidden in ancient ruins. If these foreigners happened to disturb, destroy, or even take away bits of the monuments, this was all just part of the job of getting at the wealth that was presumably hidden beneath or in them (Polítis 1904, 2: 1020–21). The first dreamers in Kóronos, then, had been conditioned by all of the various ideas about treasures and history surveyed above. Their discoveries of 11 The passages read: “If any man or woman should learn [the location of a treasure], whether because someone told him that there is a treasure at a certain spot or it appeared in a dream (i ephánin diá oneírou), and then if he should go dig it up without the consent of the king or the local lord . . . the law judges that this person commits theft.” Again, “If any man or woman says that there is a treasure in a certain place, or that he saw it in a dream (eidén to eis to óneiro tou), and then that person goes and digs it up without consent of the owner of the land . . . the law judges that this person commits theft and that everything that he has [discovered] should go to the owner” (Sathas 1877: 221, 472).

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icons and bones broke new ground, setting off an activity of historicization that grew out of an initial abduction. The objects were traces of the past in the present, not “memories” as Olivier (2004: 207; 2008) asserts in his otherwise excellent account of archaeology and history. The Egyptians took on form through historical “poiesis” (Lambek 1998) or “historification”—the production of affective, internally compelling dramatic accounts of the past. The Naxiotes were expanding the range of stories about the past as a professional historian would do on the basis of new documents or an archaeologist upon making finds.

The Secrets of History With the exception of gold, other precious metals, and even emery, buried objects can make people rich only in societies that value the past; they are dependent on particular ideologies of history, the degree to which societies and individuals “open themselves to history” (Lévi-Strauss 1983: 1218). The Byzantines would have been likely to smash up ancient Greek statues as demon-infested (Mango 1963: 56). From late antiquity up to the nineteenth century people reused ancient structures as building materials (called “spolia” by researchers; Papalexandrou 2003). Much of the temple of Apollo at Khóra on Naxos went into the walls of the Venetian kástro; indeed, the Venetians wheeled up a cannon and fired (unsuccessfully) at the one remaining lintel in order to use it as rubble. Many fine marble columns and inscription-bearing stelae were burned to make whitewash. Cycladic figurines remained outside the Hellenic narrative and little valued until the 1920s, when they came to be historically situated within the “Western tradition” both historically and by their influence on artists such as Modigliani and Picasso. Then prices for them began to skyrocket (Gill and Chippindale 1993: 604), and the residents of Naxos began to loot them.12 These examples show how the past can, somewhat unpredictably, become valuable in the present.  The past is constantly being reevaluated and revalued as a source of interest and thus wealth.  In his study of local perceptions of the past in a southern French town, Matthew Hodges (2007) tells us that, in the early 1970s, a historian collected novel documentation and published a book showing that the town had a Roman past.  The Roman potsherds that could be found all over the village offered proof of this. As part of his research, he would go on pottery-hunting expeditions with his son and local children. The chil12

In the late 1980s a Cycladic statue measuring just over 9 inches in height was sold for $2.09 million and later resold for $3 million. It had originally been purchased in the 1960s for $12,000. 201

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dren eagerly set about hunting for the sherds, and then, as Hodges put it, “Their enthusiasm gradually spread . . . to some of their parents, and oral accounts testify that during the late 1970s there was a minor explosion of interest in the village regarding the relics of its Gallo-Roman past” (334).  This led not only to the founding of a museum but also to acrimonious charges of theft when some sherds were removed from a construction site. In other words, the sherds became valuable property. Although the Greek state offered them a linear ideology of history linking them to their illustrious ancient ancestors, the dreams and stories of Kóronos did not mobilize a narrative of national history of the Hellenic variety. The Egyptians may or may not have been their “ancestors” in a literal genealogical sense, and certainly St. Raphaíl on Mytilíni was not a direct forebear of the Asia Minor refugees who dreamt of him. In the southwestern United States, European-descended Americans dream of and find remains from Native American societies. They can hear the messages of the Native Americans, sometimes in dreams, and recognize a real spiritual connection to these predecessors even if they were not ethnic ancestors (Colwell-Chanthaphonh 2004: 591ff.). Buried objects in this example, as well as on Naxos, are like rivets pinning together the socio-temporal fabric of a place. They open shafts into time as does the axis mundi (Eliade 1964: 259) of shamanic cosmologies, which connects this world with that of ancestors, spirits, and gods and along which the shaman travels. In contemplating buried objects, people fall into the ground, out of present time and into the past, not into an ordered chronologically layered past of historicism but into an Alice in Wonderland rabbit-hole vortex of analogical and emotionalized time in which a Euro-American can be an Indian, a dispossessed mountain villager an eighthcentury iconoclast, and one’s murdered grandfather a martyred post-Byzantine saint. In line with current anthropological understandings of kinship (Schneider 1980; Carsten 2000), these predecessors are “relatives” for affective reasons. The power of place may be seen on Naxos, where even mineral deposits or prehistoric fossil remains stimulate historical imagination. On the eastern coast of Naxos in recent times, people noticed fossilized bones, possibly human, and devised the story that a cave-dwelling Christian ascetic had been turned to stone for molesting a woman. In another small cave by the sea, treasure hunters noticed an unusual conglomeration of stones studded with animal fossils, and, thinking that there was treasure buried beneath, they dynamited the rock forma-

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tion and blew the fossils into the sea, where they were later recovered (Bardánis 1989: 111).13 Why do people on Naxos and elsewhere so often dream of treasures as opposed to just telling stories about them? The production of these dreams, in my view, has little to do with the principal mechanism of Freud’s theory of dreams—the disguised return of repressed memories from childhood—and rather more to do with other factors that Freud recognized: the revisiting of happenings, emotions, or thoughts from the preceding day, desire and wish fulfillment, and the return of traumatic memories. The first two of these cannot be kept apart in this case, because treasures are both fascinating and desirable. The landscape of Greece, its eventful past, and the ideology of history that valorizes it create many situations in which people come into contact with the idea of treasures. Certainly numerous stories about finding treasures circulate. Many of these stories involve dreams, but even if they do not, their telling may stimulate future dreams in listeners as fascinating information moves from the social to the psychological level and back again. That people might desire wealth is wholly expectable, and evidenced by the number of lottery tickets sold every week in Greece. Finally, in a society in which Hellenic ideology has succeeded so well in making history an important and prized possession, dreams of treasure may reflect a desire for history itself. That history can be treated as a commodity emerged clearly during the Macedonia issue of the early 1990s, when Greek patriots accused the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia of “stealing” Greek history by adopting the name “Macedonia” (Brown 1994; Sutton 1997). Greek statements that Greece has more history than other places ( Just 1995: 295) reveal a sense of proprietorship and quantification of the past. This brings us to the issue of trauma. Violent traumas can readily be collectivized and are a recognized stimulus for historiography (Ankersmit 2005: 359). Although in places such as Kruševo or Thermí these recent traumas may be remembered personally or maintained in collective memory, on Naxos the pasts represented by treasures are more distant and vaguely known. They are not “remembered.” Memories of more recent events, such as the confiscation of icons in 1838, may, however, condition historicizations. In such cases “memory” forms part of the presentist position from which people historicize. The memory of a recent trauma such as the expulsion from Asia Minor in the Lésvos case can inform novel historicizations. 13

Mayor (2000) offers a rich study of the “geomythology” that the ancient Greeks spun around their fossil discoveries. 203

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The Tie Between Souls When people die on Naxos, close friends and relatives often see them in dreams during the forty-day mourning period. Those not buried and mourned properly may return over longer periods of time. The spirits, such as Arápides or drákoi (dragons, ogres), that guard treasures link into this idea that treasures belong to someone who may have suffered a “bad death.” The wealth of such a person, who is unable to spend it or transfer it as inheritance to the next generation, remains buried in the earth, the domain of chthonic spirits. For Artemidorus (2.13), a dream of serpents (drákoi) meant treasure because serpents guard treasures. In order to recover the treasure one had to gain control over these spirits by a variety of means: magic such as the Solomonic texts (Polítis 1904, 2: 1007),14 animal sacrifice,15 human sacrifice, or, most commonly, remembering to drip blood on the treasure to appease demons (Psarrás 1979a, 1980; Polítis 1904, 1: 232). Ghost stories, like dreams of treasure or cases of spirit possession, furnish one more example of an involuntary, affectively powerful engagement with the past—one further genre of unconscious historicization (fig. 32). Yet they have been little explored for what they might reveal about a society’s sense of history, although recent studies indicate the potential of such an approach. The ghosts of old Recife (Freyre 2000) haunt the residents of modernizing Recife with intimate and frightening reminders of the social fabric of the past at the moment when this past is being obliterated through urban renewal and expansion (Benzaquen de Araújo 2011). They transform the material past into a spiritual presence. Daniel Miller (2001) considers haunted houses in Britain as arising from the inability to come to grips with the material past of domestic spaces. When one moves into an old house (as opposed to one newly built), one takes possession of a variety of material features that one may not like or may not understand and many more that one may not notice. To the extent that new owners cannot possess a property fully by force of their own ground-up design plans, they may end up possessed by it. These analyses indicate that ghost stories reveal intimate social ideas about the past in an affectively charged mode that 14

The appeal to gods to help find treasure goes back to antiquity. Asclepius helped find treasures (LiDonnici 1995: 119), and anyone who could pull a hair from the furry nightmare demon (incubus) would find a treasure (Petronius, Satyricon, 38). Plato opposed enlisting the help of the gods to find treasures (Laws 913a). 15 According to Koukoulés (1948: 192) the only recorded goal of sacrifice in the Byzantine period was for finding treasures. The sixth-century-CE Justinian Code (Chaps. 10 and 15) allowed the search for treasures but not by means of sacrifices (Morrisson 1981: 331). 204

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Figure 32. An article from To Víma (6 February 2001) entitled “ ‘Ghost’ Guards the . . . Treasure.” The story is of two resistance fighters in the Greek Civil War who argued over the possession of thousands of gold coins. One killed the other, threw the body in a well, and buried the treasure. Since then anyone attempting to dig for the treasure has been frightened off by the strange noises made by the ghost.

can burst upon people in dreams or visions that do not receive recognition as forms of historicization. The spirits guarding treasures or contained in them are like the spirit (hau) that inheres in Melanesian prestations until the proper cycle of exchange has been completed (Mauss 1990: 12). A secretary in Athens told me that her maternal grandfather had died and her mother had inherited his furniture and installed it in her home. One night her mother saw her deceased father in a dream, and he told her that he had hidden a packet of money inside a chest of drawers. The next day she went and found the money. Like the packet of money, treasures in the ground signal a Maussian lien des âmes (tie between souls) carried forward

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diachronically and amplified to involve a relationship between communities and their surrounding land. Unlike other objects in constant circulation, which come into the present moment along a continuum of presents, buried objects intrude on the present from “elsewhen” (cf. da Col 2007); they have “past” written all over them. Uneroded by circulation, such buried objects may convey the authentic past, as is the case of the Tibetan buried treasures known as terma or gter-ma.16 Like the materials buried at Anakoú, the Tibetan treasures were deposited in the past with latter-day discovery in mind. They are “inalienable possessions” in the sense developed by Weiner (1992). They may not be physically possessed at a given moment, but they are intensely present to the imagination through dreams and stories—another reason people dream of treasures. They provide what Weiner calls “cosmological authentication” as do the totemic churinga bull roarers of the Australian Aborigines or the Torah of the Jews, passed down the generations in its closed ark. Treasures link individuals to a transcendent authority and “bring a vision of permanence into a social world that is always changing” (1992:4, 8). This clarifies why the treasures at issue are so rarely recovered and dissipated through spending. Even when found and removed from the earth in 1836, the Naxos icons were soon reinterred first in a sealed box and then in the depths of the Holy Synod’s storerooms in Athens, whence they could still emerge. The one rediscovered icon is a constant reminder that more icons and treasures remain hidden. Dreaming of treasures maintains knowledge of these objects and continually posits new discovery locations and moments of return. The objects may be lost or hidden, but the community continues to assert virtual possession of them as inalienable objects of the imagination. Dreaming of buried objects, then, is a mode of addressing past, present, and future fortune in a situation in which these domains cannot be controlled and determined. The Naxos villagers share in this human predicament, and the dream of treasure has developed over time as their way of conceptualizing and confronting it.

16

The Buddhist master Padmasambhava formulated the Tibetan terma in the eighth century and “ensconced them” (Gyatso 1986: 16), to be discovered later by reincarnated disciples. The concealment of treasures occurs on two planes: the mind (such treasures are discovered as sacred texts that come into mind) and in the earth as material objects such as scrolls or statues. A dream or vision usually announces the location of the treasure. Discovery of these treasures reconnects a beleaguered present to a golden Tibetan past (see Germano 1998; Gyatso 1993; Gayley 2007).

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T

hree salient moments in the development of the Kóronos mythdream have been examined here: the first one in the 1830s, when the villagers found four buried icons and sought to fulfill the Panagía’s command to build her “home”; the second in 1930, when Marina and the other children dreamt of an icon of St. Anne still buried in the mountainside and predicted windfall good fortune for the community if it were found; and the third in the mid-1990s, when the sýllogos undertook the building of the church at Argokoíli. The first time villagers were reacting to nationalization, the second to global economic depression, and the third to their physical displacement. Each event transformed local perceptions of temporality and causation (Sewell 1996: 262), which went from prophetic to apocalyptic to rational historicist in the space of a century and a half. The history of the Naxos myth-dream confirms the recursive relationship between events and structures (Giddens 1979: 69): events alter existing structures of thought, which then provide new contexts for subsequent transformative events. Like the Suva people of Fiji, who for the past century have persisted in demanding the return of their ancestral land, the Naxiotes have deployed a “method of hope,” “a performative inheritance of hope” (Miyazaki 2004: 128). Over the course of time, hope may have replicated across generations, but exact expectations and practices for achieving them have taken new forms. As did Hawaiian values after colonial contact (Sahlins 1985: 153), the Kóronos myth-dream continued as it changed during conjunctural moments such as the three studied here. While offering a history of dreams in the context of a myth-dream that includes visions, prophecies, and social action, I have also pursued the more ambitious goal of analyzing dreaming as a mode in which people discover 207

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novel information about the past. The dreams on Naxos in the 1830s and the 1930s offered scenarios of Egyptians’ arriving on the island in the distant past. Attention to the production of such dreamt “histories” exposes a previously unrecognized dimension of historical consciousness.

Resistance and Existence In the 1830s, the vexed question of resource ownership contributed to the imagining of buried icons, which mystically refigured the land as the villagers’ own, transcendentally assured them by guardian saints such as the Panagía Argokoiliótissa, St. Anne, and latterly St. Phanoúrios. The state expropriation of village resources and the criminal charges of charlatanry brought against them by the public prosecutor contributed to creating the pressurized social situation in which the people of Kóronos first began to dream. Parallel studies of similar visionary phenomena treat such macro socioeconomic factors as the cause of miraculous visions. The historian David Blackbourn (1993), for example, sees the visions at Marpingen as a reaction to Protestant domination. After unification in 1870, Bismarck initiated the Kulturkampf (Struggle for Civilization), in which the Protestant majority insisted on renewed expressions of Catholic allegiance to the state. This heightened reactions to the visions of three eight-year-old girls who saw the Virgin while gathering berries in the Saarland village of Marpingen in 1876. They became a Catholic rallying point and a provocation for further Protestant repression. This type of political interpretation is also evident in major analyses of twentieth-century pilgrimages. In his comprehensive study of the visions at Ezkioga in the Basque region of Spain, William Christian points out that the visions began to occur nine days after the foundation of the Second Spanish Republic in April 1931 (1995: 13). They continued intensively over the succeeding months, with more than one hundred individuals reporting visions. Under the monarchy, the Catholic Church played a prominent role in public life, and many in the Basque country felt apprehensive about the demotion of the Church under the Republic. The new government, for example, ordered crucifixes to be removed from public schools. People embraced the visions as affirmations of Basque identity and piety in the face of moral laxity and Castillian bureaucratization. In another study Christian correlated Catholic visions in Europe with the threat of communism during the cold war (1984: 241). The general assumption behind these studies is that visionaries register opposition to oppressive forces and succeed, to varying degrees, in galvanizing 208

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opinion. In both of the above cases, the visions “failed” to achieve any lasting outcomes. No regimes changed, and the events of Marpingen and Ezkioga were completely forgotten until Blackbourn and Christian rescued them. Medjugorje in Bosnia Hercegovina differs on this detail. Here, in 1981, six young people playing on a hillside saw Gospa (the Virgin). She told them only to come back on the following day. Thereafter she appeared daily to them, and they transmitted her messages to an increasing number of visitors, arriving in the thousands by charter flights. The Medjugorje parish was under the authority of the Franciscan monastic order, but the bishop of Mostar had begun the process of subsuming Franciscan parishes (against their will) under his jurisdiction (Bax 1991, 1995). As the end of Franciscan control drew near, one of the monks, Father Branko, received prophecies that divine help was at hand, whereupon he instituted a regimen of lay asceticism in the parish. The first visions occurred shortly thereafter. At first the Yugoslav state sought to suppress the cult by prohibiting public assembly and sealing off the hillside where Gospa was seen. The bishop, for his part, charged the cult with deviation from Church doctrine and fraud. The state soon realized, however, that the pilgrimage supplied too valuable a stream of income and withdrew its support from the bishop. To succeed in labeling the visions fraudulent or superstitious would have amounted to killing the goose that laid the golden egg. The Medjugorje case involved political contestation entirely within the Catholic Church. Rather than being purely expressive cris de coeur, the visions proved pragmatically effective in helping the Franciscans to retain control of their parish, and Bax speculated that they might cease once the monks’ position was secure (1991: 47). Blackbourn and Christian treat the visions as perennial occurrences that are periodically, for particular historical political reasons, amplified into public events. Bax’s studies are in line with this, but he draws an even closer functional relationship between political pressure, the commencement of visions, and the regulation of the political situation. All of these works leave an unanalyzed “black box”1 between politicaleconomic forces, on the one hand, and individual experience and its expres1 A “black box” in this case is a social or psychological process left unexplained and occluded. An observer can see the information being fed into the box and the very different material coming out of it, but no precise account is given describing how the input is converted into the output—how, for example, deprivation may be converted into dreams of buried icons. As Bateson (1972: 39) put it, “A ‘black box’ is a conventional agreement between scientists to stop trying to explain things at a certain point . . . usually a temporary agreement.”

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sion in local cultural terms, on the other. By what specific means does political pressure become converted into visions? A similar black box may be seen in early anthropological studies of spirit possession interpreting it as a product of oppression or social marginality that served as a way for socially weak actors to redress their situation. By speaking with the voice of a god or spirit, neglected wives, for example, could command the attention of their aloof husbands and demand care and presents such as soaps and special foods (Lewis 1996: 44). In the various scenarios above, socioeconomic stressors are “converted” into bodily automatisms—and dreams and visions as products of “autonomous imagination” (Stephen 1989) may be counted as automatisms—that serve instrumentally to resist and redress this oppression. I use the word “converted” to evoke Freud’s analysis of hysteria, in which “unwanted ideas” were converted into hysterical symptoms in what he termed “conversion hysteria.”2 Yet Freud did not leave the mechanism of conversion a black box. He specified the forces at work behind it as libidinal energy activated by experiences in the individual’s past, lodged in the unconscious, and subsequently redirected to another part of the body. The example of Freudian psychoanalysis encourages the effort to shrink the black box. The Naxos dreams require a solution in different terms, however, since they did not result from individual psychosexual histories (such in-depth life histories for visionaries such as Marina or Khristódoulos are, in any case, unavailable). They grew, rather, out of an intermediate level of communal anxiety and apprehension generated as the villagers processed the contingent socioeconomic shocks of history. This is why various individuals dreamt similar dreams serially and collectively. We must place individual imaginative processes within society and in relation to ongoing historical developments to account for collective dreaming. Recasting the situation in terms of agency opens it up from the position of actors situated in a present. At the two relevant moments on Naxos, political and economic forces threatened life as the villagers had known it. The future became uncertain, and this destabilized the present. Many individuals shared an anxiety about what would happen next and what one might constructively “do.” The widely held definition of “agency” considers it the ability to make other

2

“In hysteria, the incompatible idea is rendered innocuous by its sum of excitation being transformed into something somatic. For this I should like to propose the name of conversion” (Freud 1962 [1894]: 48). In the words of LaPlanche and Pontalis (1973: 90), conversion involved “a leap from a mental process to somatic innervation.” 210

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people do things or to carry out a project successfully.3 I take a minimalist view here and consider agency to be the decision and ability to act tout court, especially in situations of uncertainty and in the face of multiple possible courses of action. The opposite of agency would be passivity or inaction, not unsuccessful action. Agency becomes an issue when the everyday autopilot is disrupted and novel decisions need to be made in moments of duress. During times such as those lived in Kóronos in 1930, it was as if the community had been “singled out by history” (Benjamin 1976: 255). The sociologists Emirbayer and Mische (1998: 963) stress the factor of temporality in agency—not the “tempo” of socially apparent promptness or delay in gift return or revenge as discussed by Bourdieu (1977: 7)—and thereby provide an existential perspective for examining action in moments of destabilization: Theoretically, our central contribution is to begin to reconceptualize human agency as a temporally embedded process of social engagement, informed by the past (in its habitual aspect), but also oriented toward the future (as a capacity to imagine alternative possibilities) and toward the present (as a capacity to contextualize past habits and future projects within the contingencies of the moment). The agentic dimension of social action can only be captured in its full complexity, we argue, if it is analytically situated in the flow of time. The issues of temporality highlighted by Emirbayer and Mische were felt internally and informed the content of Marina’s dreams, in which she and the other dreaming children saw the future (discovery of icon, profitability of emery, millennial fortunes of village) and looked into the past (1917, saintly 3 Gell (1998: 16) considered agency as the ability to initiate a causal sequence through an act of will or intention. Laidlaw (2002:315) cautions against identifying agency with effective action, since effectiveness can be hard to define; it becomes a matter of retrospective evaluation by social scientists in alignment with what they consider to be significant achievements. Such a scorecard approach to agency often assumes liberal Western goals of autonomy and equality, which need to be relativized or “parochialized” (Mahmood 2001: 206). Ortner (2006: 139) usefully identifies agency in the pursuit of “culturally defined projects” (cf. Weber’s Wertrationalität “value rationality” as opposed to Zweckrationalität “goal rationality”) thus encouraging a focus on actions in the context of local value systems even though these may appear ineffective in the arena of power, or nonutilitarian within “our” system of goal rationality. In a nutshell, we must avoid measuring others’ Wertrationalität with our Zweckrationalität.

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figures, Constantine the king) on the way to envisaging a course of action in the present (dig for icons, build a church). The dreams thus related to agency in two ways: (1) They furnished a source for social action/agency, offering a plan and the exhortation to act. In dreams began action.4 (2) Temporal bizarreness, a common feature of dreams, matches up perfectly with the task of capturing the temporal simultaneities at the roots of agency. As seen earlier in Freud’s modification of the archaeological metaphor of the unconscious, time may be overdetermined in dreams. Distinct temporalities can co-occur, just as in Freud’s original illustration of overdetermination (1976 [1900]: 399) one person may at once be several different people. In sum, the Naxos dreams, both in their interior form and in their social performance, work through the problem of agency where a future must be faced using knowledge of the past. Exercising agency involves temporalizing, and although another researcher might have used the materials assembled here to compose a study of prophecy and futuricity, I have been most interested in the point where, in addressing the past, temporalizing tips over into historicization. This is not to attribute primacy to the past or to assert that it is separate from the other temporalities but simply the reflection of my particular interest in engaging with the field of history. Rather than a study of history exclusively, this has been an ethnography of “historicity” in the sense that Eric Hirsch and I (2005: 262) have given to this term: pastness in indissoluble connection with the present and future as produced in ongoing social situations. These considerations shift the focus away from a mechanistic concept of resistance in the study of visions. Just as the study of spirit possession has moved away from instrumentalist analyses (Boddy 1994), which understood actors as entering into possessed states in order to redress social imbalances, so studies of Christian dreams and visions must theorize beyond socioeconomic reductionism. In situations of crisis, people must, in the first instance, make choices, and they do so informed by local values and particular historical positioning. Resistance may well be an accurate description of acts such as continuing to dream of icons and excavating for them after being ordered to desist. Taking shortcuts to this conclusion may, however, lead to the ethnographic “thinness” that Ortner (1995) has critiqued.5 Michael Brown has made much the same 4

A paraphrase of Yeats’s “In dreams begins responsibility” (“Responsibilities” [1914]). Ortner (1995:177) criticizes as “ethnographically thin” studies that do not attend to the dissension within subaltern groups, picturing them instead as resisting domination in unison. She labels this lacuna “an ethnographic black hole” (190). The “black box” offers a similar image, but in this

5

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observation in an auto-critique of his study of shamanism and insurgency in Peru. After publishing a book in which he analyzed the Amazonian Asháninka as primarily resisting the oppressive domination of the Peruvian government, he reconsidered, recognizing that in following their shaman leader they were “also advancing their own vision of existential redefinition or transcendence” (1996: 731). In Orthodox Christianity, the transcendent future of redemption structures the internal system of values in the mundane present. Social crises are thus also crises of values. The dreams of 1835 and 1930 criticized moral lapses and urged reaffirmation of religious commitment. The protagonists asserted that otherwise the entire present, not just the mundane, economically viable community order, could vanish. Dream narratives of the end of the world such as the dreamers of 1930 produced portray only a select few (themselves and their followers) gaining entry into the blessed future. The others will suffer the painful cataclysm of hell. Images of the heavens such as those purveyed by the dreaming children or Markos Kapíris evoke the transcendent, thereby activating (not necessarily successfully) a tighter embrace of communal religious values. These ideas return us to an expression invoked in Chapter Seven, De Martino’s “crisis of presence” (1956).6 De Martino observed the importance of rituals in these situations. In addition to performing values, rituals dealt with the quandary of agency. By requiring submission and dictating actions they solved the problem of choice. Rituals impose both micro and macro time frames by regimenting present activity and by invoking futures and pasts that set the present in perspective. In Kóronos the children’s daily recitations of dream visions on Evdokía’s balcony structured daily life, while the narratives reminded people of the grander cosmic temporality of the apocalypse. The physical activity of excavating a wide terrace on the hill at Argokoíli, often blessed by priests, became another regimented, ritualized activity cast as essential for the discovery of the icons and the opening of the future. Instead of being swept away by the force of the depression and their economic crisis, the villagers made decisions and

study of dreaming the lacuna is the underdescription of internal, subjective processes. Ortner (2005: 33) has also recognized this area of neglect and extended her charge of “thinness” to the scanting of “subjectivity,” defined as “a specifically cultural and historical consciousness” (34). 6 At his death De Martino was working on a major study of apocalyptic movements similar to the one that developed in Kóronos. This volume was published in 1977 as La fine del mondo (The End of the World), a disjointed but fascinating glimpse into his ideas. For a good account in English of De Martino’s idea of a “crisis of presence” see Saunders (1995). 213

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acted on them. They kept active, digging for their future.7 They promoted their everyday form of labor, sacralizing it at the very moment when mining was on the verge of being discontinued as economically infeasible. In their own way they discovered what Franklin Roosevelt decided in the face of the same depression: People have to work even if it means that one person will dig a ditch and another will come along and fill it in. As De Martino (1977: 662) has noted, in moments of crisis the coherent historicity of the present comes under threat. The social continuity of kinship, property ownership, and work, alongside other mundane activities, all of which carry an implicit social repetition linking the present to a past communal world, fall into danger.8 Religion, in this case Christianity, is drawn upon in such situations to ensure the historicity of the present by momentarily dehistoricizing it through ritually induced excursions to the end of time. This stepping out of history—carried out in dreaming, which delivers dreamers each time anew into novel nonhistoricized worlds—enables the reacquisition of the present and reinsertion into history (De Martino 1977: 663; Saunders 1995: 333). The chaos provoked by the collapse of the present creates the acute predicament of agency, with a reflex in salient dreams involving temporality. Insofar as these dreams offer credible solutions, they do so not simply by abstractly picturing the temporality of agency back to the individual but by expressing this temporality in Christian imagery “in an act of self-assertion in the face of risk” (in atto di farsi valere contro il rischio; De Martino 1977: 670). The mundane socioeconomic future portends annihilation, but the transcendent Christian future palliates this and allows one to soldier on. Living in the present thus 7

Viktor Frankl observed that, among concentration camp prisoners, life structure changes when one ceases to live for the future (2004: 79). A study of unemployment conducted in the Austrian village of Marienthal in 1931 in the wake of the depression, which shut down the textile mill that employed most of the village, found that deprivation caused resignation and apathy in a large portion of the population. Lack of any hope for the future led to passivity and the absence of plans in the present. Only some villagers managed to remain “unbroken” by keeping tight order in family life while searching for new ways to earn money ( Jahoda, Lazarsfeld, and Zeisel 2002 [1933]: 53–54). Unemployment led to the lack of structure in time and passivity in the face of time encapsulated by one man’s comment on the time sheet the researchers asked him to fill in: “10–11[a.m.] In the meantime midday comes around, 11–12 Empty.” (68). 8 Sutton’s (2008: 92) examination of local debates over the value of traditional cooking as opposed to fast or frozen food on the Greek island of Kalymnos illustrates the historicity embodied in everyday practices. Du Boulay (2009) presents an extensive account of how quotidian shepherding, cultivating, or breadmaking have not only “historicity” but also a liturgical place in a coherent religious cosmology. The elimination of any of these practices directly disrupts the cosmological balance. 214

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occasionally requires taking a step outside it, as when village women dream of the grassy meadows of paradise in moments of serious illness (Stewart 1997: 883, 889). To use Minkowski’s terms (1970: 105, 161), when the “immediate future” (normally approached with activity and expectation) provokes a stymied anxiety, resort to the “remote future” of divine providence may overcome it. One future triumphs over the other.

Dreaming and Historical Consciousness Earlier I observed that this book has tackled two separate, if thematically related, subjects: the history of dreams on Naxos and dreaming as a mode of historicizing. The intervening consideration of agency and existential temporality exposes a fundamental connection between these two topics. Major historical events generated acute challenges to the village of Kóronos. These challenges threw the villagers into a desperate uncertainty about what to do. Dreaming gave them the inspiration to do something: dig for icons. The dreams were thus a source of agency at the same time as their imagery and narrative scenarios modeled the existential temporality that underlies human perception and decision making generally (Laughlin and Throop 2008: 162). This involved looking into the future and into the past to find ways of acting in the present. The dreams flashed up remembered events such as the French occupation of Liónas in 1917 but also images of theretofore-unknown pasts such as the arrival of iconbearing Egyptians fleeing persecution in late antiquity. These glimpses of the past gave the community grist for historical thought, and people built on the initial dreams with waking speculations and in further dreams such as those of Markos Kapíris. This extensive elaboration of previously unknown pasts—the reason I consider the dreams to be offering historicizations rather than memories—completed the connection between dreams in history and dreams about history. The threatening eventfulness that put the dreams in the historical record in the first place (to be historicized by me) created a pressurized search for a way to act that involved the Naxiotes in unconscious oneiric temporalizing and the production of histories in narratives and further dreams. The convoluted temporality of the dream narratives replicated the underlying future-past-present temporality at the heart of agency. This example thus reveals the transition from unconscious temporalization to historical consciousness, from the firstness of temporal ecstasy and abduction to elaboration in the historical imagination, from internal temporality to articulated history.

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Conclusion: Agency and Imagination in Historical Change

In discussions of agency the word “unconscious” is usually taken as the bearer of “structure,” understood as frameworks inherited from the past. Bourdieu’s concept of the habitus (1977: 79), for example, captures the manifold unarticulated, embodied dispositions and competencies that are absorbed by individuals during socialization and guide them without conscious processing. Giddens (1979: 57) allots the Freudian unconscious an auxiliary role in his description of agency in order to capture how people are often motivated to act for deep personal, psychological reasons. Bourdieu’s unconscious is social, consisting in embodied competency, while Freud’s is psychological, an individual unconscious formed in personal histories. Both derive from the past. The former is unconscious because not ordinarily reflected upon, the latter because it is held beneath the surface by the force of repression and not (easily) admissible to consciousness. This book calls attention to yet another type of unconscious, an existential temporal unconscious that responds to unfolding situations, especially those perceived as threatening. This unconscious may, in dreams or visions, produce “solutions” by formulating perspectives or courses of action that can be implemented. As Sartre (2004 [1940]) contended, in imagination lies the beginning of the ability to change the present by thinking beyond current reality: “For consciousness to be able to imagine, it must be able to escape from the world by its very nature; it must be able by its own efforts to stand back from the world. In a word it must be free” (2004: 184). Dreams of treasures, icons, or the Final Judgment figure possible worlds, and momentarily the mind ventures on unrealities that, in Sartre’s argument, negate the actual world. The imagination underlines the fact that treasures, icons, and the end of time are not perceptible in the present. Imagination may thus ignite the passion to make the world other than it is, to live beyond it or against it. The imagination—encompassing dreams and hallucinations (159)—provides that capacity to hypothesize and to transcend the present. Sartre’s early work on the imagination laid the groundwork for the characteristic existentialist assertion that people were free to make choices and take actions to determine themselves according to their own goals. Anthropologists have been little influenced by this view, which Bourdieu (1990: 42) dismissed as “subjectivism.” For the most part they have sided with Lévi-Strauss, who derided Sartre’s existentialism as “a sort of shop-girl metaphysics” (1975: 58). In the effort here to understand dreaming as a response to worldly situations and as a source of agency, however, Sartre reenters through the side door, albeit in 216

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modified form. To be clear: individuals are not completely free to decide and act and effect change as they wish. In some cases, such as the catatonia identified by De Martino or the apathy seen by Jahoda and her associates, they are not even able to imagine, and in other cases such as the German Jews of the 1930s studied by Beradt (1968) they may imagine their own inability and hopelessness. To imagine does not necessarily mean to visualize oneself positively, nor does it entail an ability or commitment to act. Kóronos is thus a particular case. When the habitus of routine life ran into the buffers thrown up by exogenous events, the imagination came into play to picture alternatives. People began to dig and find icons, and now they are building an enormous church. The dreaming did not aim at a return to the status quo ante, as homeostatic functionalism might suppose, but rather worked to mediate change moving into a future in which the arrangement of life would be different. Finally, we are left with the central imagery of the dreams and the mythdream, which strikingly concerns occluded objects: icons variously buried, confiscated, or stolen and treasures mainly buried, hidden, or forgotten. These objects are periodically discovered, then lost again, as when the state confiscated the four newly unearthed icons in 1838 or when people dream of treasures, find them, and then lose them in the process of trying to possess them. The mythdream of Kóronos has revolved around the discovery, rediscovery, and permanent possession of these objects. The much-dreamt-of buried icon of St. Anne is a lost key that would open the door to the discovery of many more hidden objects. For the past 180 years, Kóronos has been under the shadow of pending objects and similarly pending transformations. The history of thefts and rediscoveries reveals how deeply invested the villagers are in these objects; indeed, their activity can be interpreted as deposits on their stake in a virtual future— service in expectation of payment. As Bachelard (1969: 88) observed, “There will always be more things in a closed, than in an open, box. To verify images kills them, and it is always more enriching to imagine than to experience.” The people of Kóronos are rich in the imagination of that which they do not have and virtuosi at negating their benighted present. In the internal experiential theatre of their dreams they have perennially replayed the nondiscovery of cherished objects. The box remains closed, but the villagers continue to transact, transcendentally, with its contents, their future.

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T

he transcriptions below render the texts of the dream notebooks exactly as they were recorded. I have not edited or amended any words or diacritic marks. From the point of view of standard grammar such as would have been taught in elementary schools at that time, there are many misspellings and errors in punctuation. Presenting the texts in this way allows readers to appreciate the local struggle for literacy and to hear the voice of the writers. These are ethnographic as much as philological documents. Evdokía is regularly called Evdokiá (and even Eddokiá), for example, consistent with village practice. Panagía is not capitalized. The writing in the notebooks has faded over the years, and I worked from photocopies. Where words were difficult to read or illegible, I indicate this in braces ({ }). Page breaks in the notebooks are indicated by two slanted lines (//). My own elucidations are in brackets ([ ])

Evdokía’s Dream Notebook Ἐν Κορώνῳ τῇ 5 Φεβρουαρίου Μαρτίου 1930 Εἶδα τὸ πρῶτο Ὄνειρο Ὅπου ἐτότε ἐφέρανε τὸν Τίμιον Σταυρό ἀπό τὴν {…} καί εἴπα τοῦ ἐπίτροπα ὅτι δεν φὲρνεις τον Σταυρό στὸν σπίτιμου τὸν ἔφερε λοιπόν ἀπό τό πρωί καὶ τὸν εἴχα στὸ σπίτιμου τὸν εθήμιασα τοῦ ἄναψα καντήλι καὶ τόν περιπηὴθηκε ὅπως ἔπρεπε καὶ {ἤρθε} ὁ ἐπίτροπας τὸ μεσημέρι καί μὰς τὸν μπῆρε. Αὐτό τό {ἔσηζα} στό ξύπνομου ὅπου τὸ βρὰδυ {ἄρχισαν} τά ὅνειρα. Πρὠτο Ὄνειρο αὐτό ποῦ γράφω Ὅπου ἔρχετε τὸ βρὰδυ ὁ τίμιος σταυρὸς καί μπένει μές στό σπίτι τόν χωρὶς νὰ τὸν κρατὰ κανένας καὶ ἄνοιξε καί ἔγεινε εἰς τρία ἐσηκώθηκε τό τσάμι καί τό {στὲτιλο?} καί μπαὶνει μές στό σπίτι καὶ πὲρνει τρεις βόρτες καί πάει καί σταματὰ 219

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μπροστὰ στό τραπαίζει καὶ μου λὲγη Ἐδδοκιὰ ἐχτὲς ποῦ μὲφερες ἐδῶ ἡ {χὰρἴεχει} κιἔτσι ἤρθα τώρα νὰ σοῦ πώ μοῦ εἴπεκάμποσα λόγια ἀλλὰ ἐγώ δὲν κατὰλαβατίποτα κιέφυγε ὁ τὶμιος Σταυρός ἀπό μὲσα στό σπίτι. ἀλλὰ ἀφτι στιγμή πὰλι ἀκούω τὰκ τὰκ στὴν πὸρτα καί βλέπω τὸν ἐπίτροπα ποῦ τὸν εἶχε τὸν Τ Σο. Καὶ μοῦ λὲγει ὅτι στὰς 13 του Μηνὸς // θὰ φύγη ὁ τίμιος Σταυρός καί νά εἲσε ἒτιμη, δέ μοῦ ὂρισε ὃμως καὶ τὶνος μηνός ἂλλά αῦτό τό ὂνειρο πραγματικός μου φάνηκε σπουδέο στά 7 Φεβρουαρίου ἂλλο ὃνειρο…. In Kóronos, 5 February March 1930 I saw the first dream. When, at that time, they brought the Holy Cross from { . . . }, and I said to the church councilman, “Why don’t you bring the Cross to my house?” So he brought it in the morning. And I had it in my house. I censed it and lit a candle before it, and I cared for it as one should. Then the councilman came at midday and took it away. I experienced this while awake. Then that night the dreams began. First Dream that I write. In this dream the Holy Cross comes at night and enters into my house without anyone carrying it. And it opened up and split into three. The window opened and the { . . . }, and it entered into my house and took three turns and went and stopped in front of the table, and it says, “Eddokiá, yesterday you brought me here { . . . } and thus I came to speak with you.” And it told me a number of things, but I did not understand anything. Then the Holy Cross left from inside my home. But at this moment I hear “tak, tak, tak” at the door, and I see the councilman who had the Holy Cross. And he says to me that on the 13th of the month the Holy Cross will leave and that you should be ready. He did not specify, however, which month, but this dream seemed really important to me. On the 7th of February, another dream . . .

Marina’s Dream Notebooks Ὄνειρο τής 17 Ιουλιου Ἤλθε ἠ παναγία ὀ Ιωακήμ ὀ Ιησους χριστος ὀ ἀγίος γεωργίος ὀ ἀγίος σηδώρος ὀ ἀγίος μάμας ἠ ἀγία Ἠρηνη ὀ ἀγιός γιανής καί πήραν τόν γουμενογιανη τήν εὐδοκιά καὶ ὄλο τό ἐπειτελειο και πηγαμε στό ἄργοκηλη τήν ὤρα πού μπαίναμε μές τόν περειαβρίο τής ἐκκλησίας ἄκουμε μιά φωνη καί καί ἔλεγε ὤ παραστεκουμενη μας ἄκουμε καὶ δὲφτερη καί ἔλεγε τήν ἰδιά κουμεντα ὀ παραστεκουμενη μά γιά 220

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γηρησετε νά δητε ἔνα σημείο γήρησε ἠ παναγία καί ὄλη ἠ ἄλλη ἀγίη καί εὔδοκια τό σιμειο καἱ μὰς λέη ἠ παναγία νὰ τό τό σιμειο γηρησαμε καί μείς καί εἴδαμε ἔνα στάβρο καἱ ἔλαμπε σάν τόν ἵλιο καὶ // λέμε τὴς παναγίας καί γιάτι λαμπη ἔτση αὐτός ό στάβρος καί μὰς λέη ἠ παναγία αὐτός ὁ σταβρος λαμπη ἔτσι γιατι εἴνε μέσα ἠ μάνα μου καί καναμε ὄλη τον σταβρό μᾶς καί χαθήκε ἠ παναγία καὶ σέ λίγον ἤλθε ἠ παναγία καὶ κρατουσε στό χερη τής ἔνα χρισο σὰ μπαουλακη καί τόν ἄνηγη καὶ τή νά δουμε τήν ὥρα πού ἅνηχτη τόν μπαουλακη ἔλαψε ὄ κοσμός καὶ ἔβγαλε ὅλο χρισες φορεσίες ἠ παναγία ἀπό μές τό μπαουλάκη καί ἠ πρότη φορεσιά ἦτάν τής εβδοκιάς κατόπη τού γουμενογιάνη καί κατόπη ἔμας τόν πεδιό καὶ ἦρθε και ἠ σηρα τὸν παρασιμα το καὶ ἔβαλε παλή τής εὐδοκιὰς τὸ προτο παραιμο κάτοπι τοὺ γουμενογιανη καί κατο // πή ἔμας και μάς λέη ὁ Ιησους χριστός πλεπετε τώρα μέ τής χρισιές φορεσιές πὼς ἔλαμψε περησοτερα ὀ κοσμος καί σε λίγο ἄκουμε μιά φωνη από μές τὸ σταβρο καί ἔλεγε σὰς χερετω ὀ παραστεκουμενη μού καί εὐλογημενη νά εἴστε καὶ ἔφυγε ὀ σταβρός καί τὴν ὤρα ποὺ ἔφυγε ὀ σταβρός ἦλθε μιὰ φωτιὰ καί μᾶς σκεπασε καί δέν μπορουσαμε νά δουμε πού ἔπειγε και ρωτουμε τὴν παναγία μά γιάτι παναγία μού ἦλθέ αὐτή ἠ φωθιὰ καί μάς σκεπασε καί δέν μπορουσαμε νά δουμε καί λέη ἠ παναγία δέν εἵθελε νά δητε πού θά παη ὀ σταβρος καί γιαφτό καί μάς λὲη ἠ παναγία ἔλατε να παμε μές την ἐκλισία νὰ προσκηνησομε πού θα παρουσιασθη παλη ὀ σταβρός καί // λεὴ ὀ ἀγίος γεωργίος μά νωμηζετε ὄτη εἴνε σταβρός εἴνε ἠ ἀγία ἄννα καί σχιματηζετε σταβρος μπηκαμε μές τὴν ἐκκλισία καί προσκηνησαμε τήν ὤρα που βγέναμε ἀπό μὲς τὴν ἐκλισία βλεπομε παλη τόν σταβρό και μὰς λὲη ἠ παναγία τὸ σχιμα του σταβρου νὰ τόν καμετε γιά νὰ τόν δουνουν ἠ ἀννθρόπη κατωπη παρουσιασετε ἀπό κάτω σὲ αὐτόν τόν σταβρόν ἄλλος ἄλα ἄλο σχεδίο ἦχε ὀ ἔνας και ἄλο ὀ άλος καὶ μάς λέη ὀ ἀγίος γεωργίος καὶ της διό αὐτη τής σταβρη νά τής σχεδιασετε διοτί χρισημεβουν πόλη αὐτή ἠ σταβρη ὥς εἰκονησματα μιὰ καί ἐφερε ἠ παναγὶα ἔνα ἔνα στά πεθιά καί χερετησε καὶ ἔφεγε // Dream of 17 July The Panagía, Ioakím, Jesus Christ, St. George, St. Isídoros, St. Mámas, St. Irene, St. John came, and took Goumenogiánnis, Evdokiá, and the whole group, and we went to Argokoíli. At the moment we entered the courtyard of the church we heard a voice that said, “Our supporters!” And we hear a second voice and it said the same thing, “Supporters! Turn around to see a sign.” The Panagía turned, and all the other saints, and Evdokiá, in order to see the sign. And the Panagía says to us, “There is the sign.” We turned and we saw a cross, and it was shining like the sun. We say to the Panagía, “Why does this cross shine so?” And the Panagía says to us, “This cross shines like that because my mom is inside it.” And we all made the sign of the cross. And the Panagía disappeared. And then after a little 221

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while the Panagía appeared, and she was holding a gold object like a small chest in her hand. And she opens it and what should we see the moment the chest opened? Everything lit up, and the Panagía pulled out gold uniforms from inside the trunk. And the first uniform went to Evdokiá, next to Goumenogiánnis, and then to us, the children. And then it was time to pass out medals. Again, Evdokiá got the first medal, then Goumenogiánnis, then us. And Jesus Christ says to us, “Do you see now how the place is more lit up by these gold uniforms?” And then, after a short while, we hear a voice inside the cross, and it said, “Greetings to you, my supporters! May you be blessed.” And the cross left, and the moment it left a fire came and covered us, and we could not see where it went. And we ask the Panagía, “But why, Panagía of mine, did this fire come and cover us so that we couldn’t see?” And the Panagía says, “ It did not want for you to see where the cross would go, that’s why.” And the Panagía says, “Come on, let’s go inside the church to pray so that the cross will appear again.” And St. George says, “But, do you think it is a cross? It is St. Anne, and she takes the shape of a cross.” We entered the church and prayed. At the moment we were coming out from inside the church we see the cross again. And the Panagía says to us, “Make the shape of the cross so that people may see it.” Then, beneath that cross, another cross appeared. But one cross had one design, the other another. And St. George says to us, “Make drawings of both of these crosses, because these crosses will be useful as icons.” [The image drawn for this dream is reproduced as fig. 8.] And the Panagía brought them one by one to the children. She said good-bye and left. Ὂνειρο τήν 1 Δηκεμβριου, πρωίαν, δεφτερας 1930. Ἢλθε ή παναγία ή ἃγια άννα, ὁ Ιησους Χριστός ὁ Ιωακημ ὁ ἃγιος γεωργιος ὁ ἃγιος Νικολαος ὁ ἃγιος μάμας ὁ ἃγιος εἴσηδορος ὁ ἃγιος σπηρηδονας ὁ ἃγιος ἔλεφθέριος ὁ ἃγιος κοσταντηνος ὁ ἃγιος Φανούριος ὁ ἃγιος θαλελεος ὁ ἃγιος Ιωαννης ὁ ἃγιος Ἄντωνιος ὁ ἃγιος Στηλιανος ὁ ἃγιος Δημητριος ὁ ἃγιος γεωργιος ὁ βορηδης ὁ ἃγιος Ιωαννής ὁ μαζοκηπος ἡ ἃγια Ἓλενη ἡ ἃγια Κατερηνη, ἡ ἃγια Μαρίνα ἡ ἃγια βάρβαρα ἡ ἃγια Στηλιανη ἡ παναγία ἡ κερα ἡ παναγία ἡ ἃβδελιοτησα ἡ παναγία ἅθελιοτησα και πηραν ἓμενα // τήν Εὐδοκία τον Νικηφορο Λεγακη τον Στεφανον και τήν κατηνα Λεγακη και πηγαμε στὸ ἀργοκηλη καί λέη ἡ εὐδοκια μά τώρα ἄφου δέν μάς λετε τηπότα δηκα σάς θά σας ἃρχησω ἓγω λωγια να μάς πήτε καί λέη ἡ παναγία μά γιά ἂρχησε νά δουμε και σενα τά λωγιά σου καί λέη ἡ εὐδοκιά {σας πουμε καί μείς} νὰ ἅπὸκουραστητε ἔσεις και λέη ἠ παναγία μά ἁυτό σάς λεμε ἐμεις λέη καί λέη ἠ εὐδοκιά μιὰ χαρη θά μού κάμετε νὰ μού πητε γιά τα ὥριχια μάς καί λέη ἠ παναγία ἁυτό περημενουμε και μεῖς ὥρα τήν ὥρα καί λέη πήτε μάς τή νά 222

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σού πουμε ἐνω σού τά ἒιπαμε ὃλα τού ὥριχιου σάς καί λέη ἡ εὑδοκιά // μὰ τά ξέρω και ἓκηνα πού μάς ἥπετε ἅλλα ἕγω θελω νά μάς πητε νεωτέρα ἀπό κεινα καί λέη ἡ παναγία τελος σπαντον σού τήν κανομε καὶ αὐτην τήν χαρη καί θὰ σού ποῦμε καί γιά τό ὥριχιο σάς ἅλλα την χαρην πού τήν κανωμε γιά πώς μᾶς ἒκαμες καί σή τήν χαρη καί μάς ἕδοσες τά χαμαηλιά ἃλλιος ἡ χαρη δέν θὰ γινοτανε καί λέη ἡ ἃγια ἃννα λέη εὐδοκιά καί ἠ παρεμια πώς ὃπιός κάνη τού ἓνως χάρη καί τού ἃλλονου χαρη σὲ κηνόν ἑτσι ληπον καὶ μάς καὶ σας καὶ λέη ἡ παναγία μὰ γιά σωπατε θά σού πώ γιά το ὣριχιο τόν κερόν έκηνον ποὺ θά // γηνουν τὰ πραγματα αὐτα ποὺ σὰς λέμε θὰ ἓρθουν ἡ ἃγγλογαλη ἁλλα πρωτα πρωτα ὃμος θὰ πάνε ἡ ἄγλογαλη στήν μουτσουνα καί θά ζητησουνε ἕκει τοὺς ἕργατες ὁπου θὰ βρεθει ἔκει μονό ἔνας ἃνδρας καὶ θὰ τοὺ ἁρωτηοσουν καί θὰ τούς πεί ληπων καὶ θὰ φηγουν παλη νά ἔρθουν στό χωργιό κεή λεη ἡ ἅγια ἅννα καὶ γιά ἁρωτησε εὑδοκιὰ ἐκηνους τούς παλιους πού ἔχουν σώση τήν κουφητενα νά δής τή έλεγε γιὰ τὰ ὠριχια πού ἔλεγε πως χαρα σέ κηνη πού θά ἔχουν ώριχια ὅταν θά βγή ἡ ἃγια ἃννα μὲ τό ἃγιασμα {ἀφτος} τὸ πλούτος πού θά πέση μές στόν κόσμον καὶ κατωπη θά πέση // ἀπό τά ὥριχια καί λέη ἡ εὐδοκιά μὰ γιὰ πητε μάς δά γιά τό ὤριχιο μάς καί λέη ἡ παναγια μὰ τὴ νά σού πουμε τὸ καλητερο ὤριχιο θὰ γηνη τὸ δηκο σάς καί τις περισοτερες χηλιαδες ποὺ θα βγουν μές στὰ ώριχια θά είνε στὸ δηκο σάς θὲς καί ἄλλα νὰ σού πουμε ἄρκετα εῖνε καί αὐτά καί ἐνα ἄλλο πού εἱνε πολη στέρεο ὰριχιο δέν ἔχη ποτέ ἀναγγη ἀπό τηποτα καὶ εμης παλη το βρεσιμο ἔκηνο παλη εἴνε τό καλητερο απο όλα καὶ λεη η εὐδοκιά νὰ ξεραμε πιὴ θα το σηκοσουν το βρεσημο καί λέη ἡ παναγιά ἄλλη ὥρα θά σού πουμε και κεί βλέπουμε ένα σιμιον από πανω στο ἕργο καί μὰς χερετησαν ἡ ἅγιη καί ἔφηγαν // Dream of 1 December, morning, Monday, 1930. The Panagía, St. Anne, Jesus Christ, Ioakím, St. George, St. Nikólaos, St. Mámas, St. Isidore, St. Spyridon, St. Elefthérios, St. Constantine, St. Phanoúrios, St. Thaléleos, St. John, St. Antony, St. Stylianós, St. Dimítrios, St. George Vorídis, St. John Mazókipos, T. Helen, St. Kateríni, St. Marina, St. Barbara, St. Styliani, the Panagía Kerá, the Panagía Abdeliótissa, the Panagía Atheliótissa came, and they took me, Evdokía, Nikiphóros Legákis, Stephanos, Katína [Katerína] Legáki, and we went to Argokoíli. And Evdokia says, “But now, since you aren’t telling us anything of your own, I will begin to speak so that you will tell us.” And the Panagía says, “Well, go ahead and begin so that we can see [i.e., hear], your words too.” And Evdokiá says, “{We tell you to} take a rest.” And the Panagía says, “But that is what we are telling you,” she says. And Evdokiá says, “Will you do me a favor? Will you tell me about our mines?” And the Panagía says, “This we are waiting to find out ourselves, hour by hour.” And she says, “Tell us what 223

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we should tell you, since we have told you everything about your mine.” And Evdokiá says, “Well, I know those things that you told us, but I want you to tell us newer things than those.” And the Panagía says, “All right, we will do you this favor, and we will tell you about your mine, but the favor that we are doing is because of how you also did us a favor when you gave us devotions.1 Otherwise, this favor would not be happening.” And St. Anne says, she says, “And, Evdokiá, the proverb: Whoever does a favor for someone, and for another, thus favor will come [in turn] to this person. Thus it is, then, between us and you.” And the Panagía says, “Well, shut up now! I will tell you about the mine. At that time, when the things we have been telling you about will happen, the Anglo-French will come. First, the Anglo-French will go to Moutsoúna, and they will seek out workers there. Only one man will be found there, and they will ask him, and he will tell them, and they will leave again and come to the village.” And St. Anne says, “Evdokiá, go ask the old-timers who lived when Kouphítaina was alive to see what she said about the mines. She said, ‘Joy to those who have mines when St. Anne comes out and the flow of holy water. What wealth will come to people and afterward it will come from the mines.’” Then Evdokiá says, “Well, go on, tell us already about our mine.” And the Panagía says, “What can we say? Your mine will turn out to be the best mine, and the most thousands that will come out of the mines will be from yours. Do you want us to tell you more? This is enough. And one more thing. That your mine is really sturdy. It has no need of anything. And we [say], again, the treasure [vrésimo] will be the best of all.” And Evdokiá says, “May we know who will lift the vrésimo?” And the Panagía says, “We will tell you another time.” And there we see a sign above the discovery site, and the saints said good-bye and left.

Dimítrios’s Dream Notebook Ανα δεκεβριον 5 1930 Ὁνειρον Παρασκευής βράδι Ἢρθε ἡ Παναγία ἡ ἁγὶα ἃννα ὁχριστός ὁ Ἰωακημ και πῆραν τόν Γουμενογιάνη τόν Πέτρον καί πήγαμε στό ἀργοκύλι καί εἶδαμε τὸν Κονσταντῖνον τὸν εξαδάκτυλον μὲσα στὴν εκλησίαν. Καί μᾶς λέει ἡ Παναγία ὃτι Παιδιά μιὰ οἱκογένεια χωρίς Πατέρα δέν μπορεῖ νά πάει ποτέ καλά γιαὐτό θὰ ἀφανισθῆ ὁ Μεγάς Κωνσταντῖνος 1

“These devotions” (khamaïlía) possibly refers to votive offerings suspended from an icon. The standard word for these in contemporary Greek is támata. A khaïmalí (standard Demotic Greek) can also be a phylactery worn on the body to protect against evil. I thank Tatiana Halidou for her insights here.

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ὁ Ἐξαδάκτυλος ὠς πατέρας τῆς ἐλλνηικῆς αὐτοκρατοριας καὶ εἶνε σὲ ἓνα ἂγνωστο μέρος καί θά ἐμφανισθῆ ὡς [νεκρος] καὶ ὡς πατέρας τῆς ἒλλαδας καί θά μαζέψη στρατόν διά τήν Ἁγίαν Σοφίαν [καί] θὰ στραφούνε είς τὴν Παναγίαν καί θά βγῆ καὶ ἡ ἁγὶαν ἂννα καί τὸ ἁγίασμα ὓστερα μᾶς ἒφερε στὸ χωριό μᾶς χεραὶτησε καὶ ἓφυγε.// On December 5, 1930 Dream of Friday evening. The Panagía, St. Anne, Christ, and Ioakím came and took Goumenogiánnis and Pétros, and we went to Argokoíli. And we saw Constantine the Six-Fingered2 in the church. And the Panagía tells us that a family without a father will never thrive and that is why it will disappear. Constantine the Great the Six-Fingered, as father of the Greek Empire, is in a secret place, and he will appear as a deceased person,3 as the father of Greece. He will gather together an army to capture Hagia Sophia and they will turn [for help] to the Panagía. And St. Anne will emerge and the holy water. Afterwards, he took us to the village, said good-bye, and left. ῝Ονειρον Πέμπτης βράδι 17/12/30/31 ῝Ηρθε ἡ παναγία ἡ ἁγια ἃννα ὁ Χριστός ὁ Ιωακὴμ καί πῆραν τὸν Γουμενογιὰννη τὸν Πέτρον ἐμένα καὶ πὴγαμε στὸ ἀργοκύλι κάτω στὴν ἐκκλησίαν καί ἐκεῖ μᾶς λέει ἠ παναγία ὃτι ὁπως σᾶς εἶπα ὃτι ὁ καιρός νὰ ανοιχτή τό Μοναστηρι μου νὰ ἐρχονται οἱ χιλιαδες οἱ ἂνθρωποι νὰ μέ προσκυνοὺνε βγίκαμε ἒξω καὶ πὴγαμε στὸ ἒργο καί εἲδαμε τὴν ἁγιαν Μάρινα καί μᾶς λέει ὃτι κοντεύει νὰ ἐρθη ὁ καίρος νὰ πληρωθούν ὁι χωριανοί μας τὸν κόπο τους Ἀφού μᾶς εἶπε αὐτὸ μᾶς πῆρε ἡ ἁγία Μαρίνα καὶ μᾶς ἐφερε στό χωριὸ μᾶς χεραίτισε και ἐφυγε// Dream of Thursday evening, 17/12/30/31 The Panagía, St. Anne, Christ, and Ioakím came and took Goumenogiánnis, Pétros, and me, and we went to Argokoíli. Down to the church. And the Panagía says to us that, “as I told you,” that “the time is nearing for the opening of my monastery so that thousands will come and worship me.” We came outside and went to the work site, and we saw St. Marina. And she said to us that the time is approaching when our fellow villagers will be repaid for their troubles. After telling us that, St. Marina took us and brought us back to the village, said good-bye, and left. 2 According to popular traditions “the marble king” (popularly thought to be Constantine Palaiologos XI), who would come back to life to recapture Constantinople and Hagia Sophia, had six fingers. 3 The Greek word is nekrós (dead, deceased), but it may refer to “resurrected.” Christ arose “from the dead” (ek nekrón).

225

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246

Index

Abraham, Karl, 104 abduction, 170–71, 173, 176, 201, 215; Pierce’s definition of, 170; and historical thought, 171, 173; and imagination, 176–77 Acropolis, 56 Adler, Alfred, 12–13 aerial transport system (enaério), 131–32, 135–37, 141, 147; picture of, 137 agency, 13, 21, 210–15; defined, 211; and dreaming, 13–16, 212; and imagination, 215–16; and existential temporality, 21–12, 215, 217; and ritual, 213 Agía Kyriakí (church), 175–76 airplane, 68, 82, 85, 91, 96, 139 alchemy, xvii–xviii, 25n, 139 Amómaxi (mountain), 32 amulets, 91 Amvrósios II, 157; picture of, 164 anachronism, 178–79, 197 Anakoú, 198, 206 Anastenárides, 27, 51 ancient Greece, 25, 45, 110, 120, 177n, 191, 193–195; continuity of, 51, 58, 202 Andronikos, Manolis, 195 Anglo-French, 127, 135, 143–44, 148–49, 224

Anne, Saint, 71, 78, 86, 90, 144–45, 149–50, 181; icon of, 72–75, 79, 86, 89, 99–100, 103, 106, 159, 182, 192, 208, 217 Annunciation (25 March), 42, 46, 49–50, 62, 69, 74, 178, 195 antiquities, 56, 60, 127, 201; laws protecting, 45, 56–57; and looting, 126, 198, 201 anxiety, 11, 13, 27, 49, 145–46, 148, 210, 215 Apache, 2 Apeíranthos, 32, 56–57, 67, 112–13, 123 126, 132–33, 135–36, 141–42, 154, 173, 194 apocalypse, 143n, 147–50, 153–54, 179, 186, 207, 213 Appian, 197 Arbel, Benjamin, 200 Arápides (bogeys), 119, 122, 204; as guardians of treasure, 119 archaeologists, 45, 62, 183n, 192–93, 195, 201 archaeology, 56, 171, 174, 177, 179, 186, 189, 193–95, 201; indigenous, 188, 195; oneiric, 62 Ares, 56 Argokoíli, 33–34, 37n, 39–41, 52, 72, 79, 101, 109, 149–50, 158, 175, 183, 247

Index

Argokoíli (continued) 190, 207, 223; pronunciation of, xv; picture of, 55, 109 Ariadne, 191–94; gold statue of, 194 armón (underground seam), 184–85, 191 Artemidorus, 25, 28, 30–31, 204 Asclepius, 51 Asháninka, 213 Asia Minor, 58, 11, 122, 142, 172, 191, 198–99, 202–03 astrology, 25, 30n Augenblick (moment, blink of an eye), 14 Athens, 33, 38, 49, 56–57, 85, 88, 96n, 103, 115n, 119, 123, 138, 140–41, 147, 155, 157–60, 162–63, 167, 177, 190, 198–99, 205–06 Australia, 122 authentication, ix–x, xvii, 170, 177, 187, 206 autonomous imagination, 210 Bachelard, Gaston, 217 Bakhtin, M. M., 126 Balkan Wars, 72, 181 Bavarians, 5, 37, 43–45, 53, 177, 179 Bax, Mart, 209 Being (Dasein), 14, 146. See also existence; existentialism being, 13–16, 194. See also existence; ontology belief, 23, 39, 41, 78–79, 82, 85–86, 89, 95, 99, 101, 124, 129, 155, 163, 178, 187n, bells, 71, 156, 159, 164–67 benandanti, 83–85 Benjamin, Walter, 6, 123, 211 Beradt, Charlotte, 147–48, 217 Bernadette, 53, 59 Bettelheim, Bruno, 148 Binswanger, Ludwig, 13–16 248

Blackbourn, David, 59, 208–09 black box, 209–10, 212n Boddy, Janice, 212 Bolivia, 113, 120 bones, 8–9, 39, 54, 63, 170, 176, 179–80, 185–86, 189, 191, 195, 199, 201–02 Book of Mormon, xvii–xviii Boss, Medard, 15n Bourdieu, Pierre, 14, 32, 211, 216 Breton, André, 146 Brown, Keith, 197, 203 Brown, Michael, 213 Burridge, Kenelm, 105–06, 116 Byzantine art, 176, 190, 199 Byzantium, 5, 16n, 58, 101, 102n, 117, 120, 143n, 149, 157, 172, 175–76, 190, 194n, 199–202, 204n canonization, 27, 158, 189 capitalism, 58, 87, 110, 113, 122, 129, 133, 199 Capodistrias, John, 43, 57 Cappadocia, 198 Captain Cook, 58 Catholicism, 169, 208; and visions, 59 Catholics: in Greece, 43–45; on Naxos, 122 cave, 39–42, 48–49, 53, 74, 78–82, 95, 100, 109, 119, 171, 173n, 183–84, 187, 190, 193n, 199n, 202; of Za, 180, 183, 185 See also discovery site cells, 34, 40, 42, 54, 60, 72, 87, 113n, 115, 117, 154, 159–61 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 2, 8, 179, 197 change, 11, 21, 44, 46, 88n, 98, 103, 122, 143, 154, 179, 180, 191, 207–17 Christ, xviii, 34n, 40–41, 43, 62–63, 83, 85, 97–99, 105, 111, 113–14, 118,

Index

150–53, 158, 176, 181–82, 221–25; Metamorphosis of, 88; in airplane, 85, 91 Christian, William, 59, 169, 208–09 Christianity, 5n, 7, 34n, 53, 113–14, 120, 163, 186, 213–14; and dreams, 27– 29; and history, 2, 5, 177–78, 186, 187n, 189, 194. See also Orthodox Christian Church; Romeic chronology, 1, 37, 186, 191, 193 church building: at Argokoíli, 40–41, 69, 94, 158–67, 185; restrictions on, 44, 54; on Mytilíni, 189; on Tinos, 46, 59–61 Climacos, John, 151 collective dreaming, 81, 83–85, 101, 210 collective memory, 1, 203 Collingwood, R. G., 176, 178, 196 Comaroff, John and Jean, 6 communion, 88 Conference of London (1828), 44n confession, 40, 88 conjuncture, 58, 207 consciousness, xviii–xix, 1, 3–4, 7, 10, 12–15, 17–18, 48, 59, 73, 91, 127, 147, 195n, 216. See also historical consciousness Constantine (Saint, king), 27, 40, 212 Constantine Palaiologos XI, 101,143, 149, 212, 225 Constantinople, 102n, 105, 122, 149, 158, 165, 171–72, 195, 199, 225. See also Istanbul conversion hysteria, 210 Corsica, 84n cosmology, 109, 112, 114, 116, 129, 214n Crick, F. and G. Mitchison, 11 criminalization: of digging, 45; of Argokoiliótissa movement, 49–51, 208

cross, 76–78, 90, 106, 114, 181–82, 220, 222; sign of, 90n, 114, 155, 222 crisis, 87, 163, 212, 214 economic, 138–39; of presence, 146, 213 Crow Indians, 145, 163 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, 20 Cubans, 7 cursing, 86, 113 Cycladic civilization, 117, 192–93, 196, 201 cyclical time, 2, 5, 178, 194 Cyprus, 172n, 200 dance, 3, 7–8, 27, 70, 86, 122 Daniíl, Saint, 182–83, 187 Danforth, Loring, 27, 51–52, 64 dates, 2, 37, 76, 88, 165, 178, 186–87, 190; and historicism, 2, 187 See also chronology Davis, Whitney, xix, 101, 171 dehistoricization, 190–91n, 193, 214; and dreaming, 214 De Martino, Ernesto, 146n, 213–14, 217 demons, 28, 38, 40, 86, 113–14, 120, 133, 182, 185, 204 devil, 28–29, 38, 113, 133, 148 diggers and levellers, 173 digging, xvii, 39, 42, 44, 48, 54, 56, 86– 88, 37, 74, 95, 104, 111, 126,169– 70, 173–74, 189–90, 213–4; and dreaming, xvii, 58, 62n, 66, 74, 145, 214 Dijksterhuis, A., and L. Nordgren, 32 Dimítrios (Manolás) (child dreamer), 72, 82, 99–100; dream notebooks of, 82n, 224–25 Dionysos, 51, 171 discovery site, 48, 72, 74, 79, 88, 95, 104, 109, 165–66, 224. See also cave 249

Index

divine providence, 112, 143 Dominica, 196 donations, 50, 61, 86, 118, 149–50, 157, 160 Doumbrogiánnis (early visionary), 41, 48–49, 73 drákos (ogre, snake), 204; dreams of, 204 drawings: of dreams, 89–100, 103, 106, 146, 150–51, 153, 222 dream books (oneirokrítes), 24–27, 99, 111 dream notebooks, 75–84, 88–94, 100–06, 114, 118, 125, 127, 156, 180, 192, 219–225 dreamers (oneirevámenoi), 10–11, 16, 35, 48–9, 53, 62n, 72–107, 126, 139, 144, 149–51, 159–60, 164, 174, 176–78, 192, 200, 207, 213–14; resignification of, 164–65. See also oneirevámenoi; visionaries dreaming: and anxiety, 11, 13, 27, 145–46, 148, 210, 215; evolutionary theories of, 11; and existence, 147, 211, 214; and fear, 146–48, 211; and the future, 10–12, 16, 23–32, 211; and historical consciousness, xviii, 3, 10–14, 21, 73, 176, 215–17; in local vocabulary, 18; neuropsychology of, 11–12; of the past, xviiii–xix, 10–12, 16, 66, 73, 84, 145, 148, 175–77, 206, 211, 215; and political pressure, 53–54, 211; of the present, 10–12, 145–46, 212; as play, 20; psychoanalytic theories of, 12, 20, 104, 203; and surrealism, 146; and temporality of being, 10–16, 21, 73, 214 dreams, 11–15, 16–21, 164–65, 178; of antiquities, 192, 195; of bones, 39, 170, 180, 189, 195, 201; of buried 250

objects, xvii, 38–41, 60, 62n, 73, 109, 111–29, 173–75, 189, 195–96, 206; of buses, 24; of cattle, 145; of the color red, 26–27, 94, 98–99; in the Congo, 125n; of crosses, 27, 90, 94, 181, 222; of the deceased, 118, 204–05; of emery, 109, 111, 143–45; as fictions, 19–20, 147; of flags, 94, 99; of gold, 112, 117–18, 192, 199; of icons, 38–42, 60, 62n, 70–71, 87, 173–75, 199n; of losing a tooth, 24; of lost objects, 75, 120; of marble, 111, 195; of money, 25, 203, 205; in Papua New Guinea, 112, 120; of saints, 27–28, 39–41, 59–60, 70–71, 73, 80, 85, 87, 117, 155, 219–25; of shit, 26; of statues, 192; in the Third Reich, 146–48; under totalitarianism, 148; in Tibet, 206; and trauma, 12, 203; of treasure, 21, 25, 119, 195–96, 199, 203, 206; and visions, 16–21, 38; of water, 24, 77, 79–80, 83, 99–100, 180, 184, 192, 111; of weddings, 24 dreamtime, 123 Dubisch, Jill, 34n, 60n Du Boulay, Juliet, 133, 194, 214n Duchamp, Marcel, 10 dynamite, 6, 74, 78, 110 ecstasy, 40, 74–75, 178; temporal, 14–15, 146, 215 education, 93–94, 147, 156, 219 ego, 13 Egypt, 25, 170, 175, 183 Egyptians, xvii–xviii, 39, 177–78, 180, 185–86, 190–91, 201–01, 208, 215 Eiríni Khryssovalándou, Saint, 155 Eliade, Mircea, 2, 123, 202 Eliot, T. S., 10

Index

embroidery, 103, 146 emery, 13, 21, 37n, 110, 128, 131–42; history of, 56–58; dreams of, 109, 111; mining, 56, 74, 110–12, 127–28, 223–24; synthetic, 139–40 emery miners, 110–11, 135; oath of, 113; picture of, 136; poetry of, 111, 126 emigration, xviii, 9n, 27, 121–24, 141, 147, 156–58, 163, 181 Emirbayer, Mustafa, and Mische, Anne, 14, 211 emplotment, 176 Engarés, 67, 80, 83, 85, 91 England, 43, 85, 94, 156, 166–68 Enlightenment, 1, 174, 177, 194 epistemology, 5, 7, 178 Evans-Pritchard, E. E., 3n Evdokía, 75–79, 84, 91, 103, 106, 144, 180, 182, 187, 190–91, 213, 223; dream notebook of, 76–79, 219–20 evil eye, 29n, 78 exhumation, 186 existence, 13–15, 74, 102, 122, 146, 213 existentialism, 14, 147, 216; and agency, 13–16, 211–17 existential temporality, 14–15, 20, 215– 16; and dreaming, 14, 20–21, 31, 211–17 exorcism, 40, 42 Ezkioga, 59, 208–09 Fairbairn, W. R. D., 20 fake dreams, 18–20 fantasy, 3, 18, 46, 124, 139, 143, 148, 171, 177, 179 fasting, 40, 74, 86–87, 209 Fatima, 169 fiction, 3 Fiedler, Carl Gustav, 37n

Fiji, 207 flow, 20 foreigner (xénos), 79, 87, 156 fossils, 9, 202–03 Foster, George, 121–22 Foucault, Michel, 13, 20 Frankl, Viktor, 214n Frazee, Charles, 43n–44 freedom, 13, 16, 44, 148n, 197 Freud, Sigmund, 7, 10, 12, 17, 20, 30–31, 67, 104, 193, 210, 212, 216; and the past of dreams, 12, 31, 203; and the unconscious, 12, 31, 193, 216; and archaeology, 193, 212 Freyre, Gilberto, 204 functionalism, 196, 208–210, 217 fund-raising, 160 future, xviii, 3, 5, 10–12, 14–16, 23–31, 73, 103–05, 121, 136, 143–46, 154, 166n, 170n, 179, 185–86, 191, 198–99, 203, 206, 210–15, 217. See also existence; temporality futuricity, 6, 212 Gavriíl, Bishop, 41, 46–48, 51, 60, 67, 174 Gavriíl, Monk, 171–72 Gell, Alfred, 139, 170, 211n gemstones, 128–29; synthetic, 139 genre, 125–26, 128, 173, 193, 204 George, Saint, 90 Germany, 27, 59, 85, 97, 138, 141, 146 Germans, 117, 141, 146, 148, 217 ghosts, 7, 9, 12, 28, 181, 204; and history, 204 Giddens, Anthony, 14, 216 Ginzburg, Carlo, 83–84, 171 Glézos, Pétros, 132–33 Glynádo, 121 Gobineau, Count, 192n 251

Index

Goebbels, Josef, 146 gold, xvii, 48, 50, 64, 80, 83, 92–93, 112, 117–26, 136, 138, 150–51, 162, 192, 194, 196–97, 198n, 200–01, 205, 222 Goumenogiánnis, 75, 84, 87, 89, 99, 150– 152, 221–22, 225 Graeber, David, 129 Great Depression, 13, 21, 138–40, 143, 147, 207, 213–14 Great Idea, 102n, 195 Greek revolution, 5, 44n, 57, 60, 122, 159n, 173, 195 Gregory V, 173 habitus, 32, 216–17 Hagia Sophia, 102, 149, 156, 158, 165, 225 hallucination, 17–18, 216 Hamilakis, Yannis, xviii, 41n, 174, 188, 194–95 Hamtai-Anga, 112 Harris, Ruth, 53, 59 hau (spirit of the gift), 205 haunted houses, 204 Hawaii, 58–59, 207 Heidegger, Martin, 14–15, 146n healing, 39, 42, 67, 69–70, 72, 99–100, 149, 155, 183–84 Hellenes, 177n, 194 Hellenic, 5n, 21, 177, 179, 188, 194, 202 Hellenism, 58, 179, 187, 194 Helleno-Christian, 194–95 heresy, 88 Herzfeld, Michael, xix, 63–64, 149n, 154, 177n, 188 high school (gymnásio), 70, 94, 147 Hirsch, Eric, 212 Hirschon, Renée, 33n historical consciousness, xviii, 1–3, 5, 6, 8, 252

10, 37, 73, 165, 186–87, 190, 196, 208; and dreaming, xviii, 5, 7, 10, 31, 73, 208, 215–17; Hellenic, 5, 21, 187, 194, 202–03; hybrid, 21, 186–88; Romeic, 5, 21, 186, 187n, 190, 193, 195; and temporality, 6, 9, 31; and treasures, 21, 195–206 historical documents, 33, 38, 45, 161–62, 178, 201 historical imagination, xviii, 8, 169, 174, 176–78, 190, 215 historicism, 1–2, 5, 10, 21, 37, 178–79, 186–87, 190, 193–97; alternatives to, 2, 197; origins of, 177–79 historicity, x, 21, 177, 193, 196, 214; ethnography of, 212 historicization, 4, 169, 178, 187, 190, 195, 201, 203–04, 215; alternative modes of, 6–9, 178; and temporalization, 212, 215 historification, 4n, 201 historiography, 4, 73, 187, 196, 203 history, xviii–xix, 179, 215; and affect, 2–4, 6, 191, 193, 196, 201–02, 204; anthropology of, 3; definition of, 3, 7; discipline of, 5, 177–79; dreamt, 208; non-historicist forms of, 2, 6– 9; and trauma, 6, 197–200, 203 Hitler, Adolf, 146, 148 Hobson, J. Allan, 11 Hodges, Matthew, 6n, 201–02 Holbraad, Martin, 9 holy book (bible), 92–93 Holy Rock (Oglala leader), 9 Holy Synod, 37–38, 42n–43, 46–47, 54, 63, 65, 67, 88, 162, 206 holy water, 38, 48, 61, 72, 74, 77–80, 83, 95, 99–100, 106, 112, 127–28, 150, 180, 183–84, 224–25 hope, 6, 21, 42, 46, 66, 142, 145–46,

Index

148–49, 162, 207, 214n, 217; method of, 207 Huitoto Indians, 6 Husserl, Edmund, 14 hypersemiosis, 99–100 hypnagogic hallucinations, 18 hypnopompic hallucinations, 18 Icon: Peirce’s sense of, 170n, 176 iconoclasm, 39, 41n,105, 171, 176, 186, 191, 196 icons, xvii, 4, 13, 21, 39–42, 49, 64–66, 68, 158, 183, 199; as artefacts, 62, 169–71; buried, 171, 173–76, 184, 199; confiscation of, 50–52 180, 203, 206; drawings as, 91–93; floating, 172–73; in the mines, 112; as relics, 64; theft of, 52, 65, 87 id, 13 idolatry, 88 Ilinden Uprising, 197 image of limited good, 121, 196 imagination, 13, 128,176, 197, 216; and dreaming, 13, 206, 217; and existentialism, 13–16, 216; and surrealism, 146–47. See also historical imagination Immaculate Conception, 34n, 59 inalienable objects, 206 incense, 40, 71, 76, 183, 220 incubation, 155 Ioakím, 82, 86, 94n–98, 100, 152–53, 181, 223–25 Istanbul, 102, 122, 156. See also Constantinople Italians, 6, 84, 117, 141, 145 Italy, 83, 141 Jahoda, Marie, 214n, 217 John, Saint (of Patmos), 91–92, 105, 150

Jouvet, Michel, 17, Joyce, James, 10 Jung, Carl, 12–13, 29n Kadare, Ismail, 148n Kagwahiv, 19 Kalinago, 196 Kalogerópoulos, N. D., 190 Kalymnos, 6 Kapíris, Markos, xx, 21, 181–88, 190–94, 213, 215; dream notebook of, 181– 87; picture of, 181 Kazantzakis, Nikos, 137 Kennewick Man, 8–9 Keramotí, 71, 118, 133, 181 Khalkoú, Aikateríni, 67–68, 140, 180 Khóra (port town of Naxos), 26, 35, 37, 44n, 46, 50, 52, 68, 73, 94, 97–98, 121, 135, 144, 147, 156, 162, 194, 201 Khouzoúris, Iánnis, xx, 38n, 54, 69, 132, 135, 139, 141, 143, 157–64, 167– 68; picture of, 164 Khristódoulos (early visionary), 39–41, 49, 54, 60, 73, 170, 210 Khryssanthópoulos, Mikhális, 20n, 30n kinship, 73, 152, 162, 165, 174, 200, 202, 205–06, 214; cognatic, 152 Knock, 169 Komiakí, 87, 192 Koraes, Adamantios, 179 Kóronos, x, xix, 13, 24, 32–35, 46, 71–72, 87, 97, 125, 133, 136, 140, 144, 147, 200, 213; photo of, 32 Korré, Katerína, 74–75, 79, 91, 99 Korrés, Geórgios (local priest), 37–38, 40–41, 170 Koselleck, Reinhart, 147 koúros (statue), 192, picture of, 193 253

Index

Kouphítaina, 68–69, 75, 77n, 113n, 127– 28, 140, 156, 159–60, 166–67, 180, 192, 224 Kracke, Waud, 19, 104 Kruševo, 197, 203 Kuper, Adam, 26n, 104 labyrinth, 191 Laidlaw, James, 211n Lambek, Michael, 4–5, 201 landscape, xviii, 2, 21, 95, 118–20n, 122–23, 194, 196, 198, 203 Larsen, Kjersti, 7 Láskaris, Vassílis, 56–57 Last Judgment, 151 Latour, Bruno, 187 Lawson, J. C., 174 Lear, Jonathan, 145, 163 Legákis, Gavriíl (priest), 70n–71, 73, 80, 87, 100n, 118 Legáki, Katerína (Katína), 70–74, 79, 84, 103, 131, 147, 150, 156, 223 Legákis, Markos, 156 Legákis, Nikiphóros, 70–74, 79, 84, 89, 94, 101,103, 143, 147, 149–152, 223 Levinas, Emmanuel, 14–15 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien, 20 Labouré, Catherine, 59, 61n Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 2, 6, 20, 104, 201, 216 limestone, 24 Limpias, 59, 169 linear time, 2, 9–10, 177, 186, 190, 197 Liónas, 33, 69, 134–35, 137, 156, 215 literacy, 76, 78, 93, 181, 219 Lord Elgin, 56 Lourdes, 5n, 53, 59, 169 Luke, Apostle/Saint, 42, 58, 62, 183, 199n 254

Macedonia, 27, 197–98, 203 Madagascar, 4, 7 Maggióros, Ioánnis. See Doumbrogiánnis magic, xviii, 28, 120n, 139, 204; and technology, 139 Makris, G. P., 5, Makrygiánnis, 61 Malaby, Thomas, 112 Mali, Joseph, 4, 10 Mambu, 106–07 Manolás, Manólis, xx, 33, 159, 162; picture of, 164 Manolás, Stávros, 140, 145 Manouíl (early visionary), 40–41, 48–49, 60, 159 marble, 24, 110, 128, 195, 201; dreams of, 111, 195 Marienthal, 214, Marina (Mandilará) (child dreamer), 79–81, 83, 103, 106, 143, 151, 161, 192, 207, 210–11; drawings of, 89–100; notebooks of, 80, 220–24; picture of, 81 Marina, Saint, 33, 40, 86–87, 94n–96, 150–51, 153, 225; church of, 33, 40, 49, 65, 71, 150 Marpingen, 59, 208–09 martyrdom, 54n, 89, 189, 191, 202 Maurer, Georg Ludwig von, 43–45 Mazower, Mark, 135, 138, 197 mazzeri, 84n Medjugorje, 5n, 169, 209 memory, 1, 201, 203, 215 meta-consciousness, 17–18, metal detectors, 198n Mexico, 121, 196 millenarian movement, 4, 21, 87, 140, 149–154 Miller, Daniel, 129, 204 Milos, 56

Index

mines, 58, 77, 127–28; Bolivian tin, 86, 113–14; emery, 111, 114, 116, 139, 144n, 160, 223–24 mining, 24, 37n, 57, 74, 87, 131–42 Minkowski, Eugène, 16, Minotaur, 191 miracles, 34, 41n–42, 47, 52–53, 61–62, 64, 68–69, 73, 83, 94, 99, 115, 118, 120, 125, 140, 149, 155, 159, 165, 169, 171, 187n, 208 Miyazaki, Hirokazu, 207 modernity, 6, 10, 194 monastery: at Argokoíli, 39, 41, 45, 79, 94n, 102, 115, 156, 158–59, 185, 192, 225; closure of, 44, 47; Ivíron, 171; of the Panagía Soumelá, 199; of St. Raphaíl, 189. See also church building monks, 44 Moretti, Daniele, 112, 120 Mormons, xvii–xix, 4 Móros (bogey), 119, 121; and treasures, 119–20 Moutsoúna, 126–27, 132–33, 135, 137, 141–42, 154, 224 multitemporality, 3, 10–12 Muslims, 7, 61, 197, 200 mutual dreaming, 83–84 myth, 4, 8, 10, 103–107, 125, 149, 166, 191–92; defined, 3–4; and dream, 19, 104–06; and history, 3–4, 6, 125, 166n, 178; and the mythdream, 4, 103–107, 166 myth-dream, xix, 4, 16, 21, 103–107, 116–17, 127, 129, 139–40, 153, 156, 159–64, 182, 186–87, 190, 207, 217; as complex genre, 126; defined, 106, 155n; and demythologization, 164–65, 187

mythistory, 4, 6, 146, 166n Mytilíni (Lésvos), 28, 62n, 189, 202 Nash, June, 113–14 nationalization, 16, 21, 44, 57, 207; of antiquities, 45, 56; of emery, 13, 57, 208 Native Americans, 202 Navarino, 43 Naxos, xvii–xix, 3, 5, 24, 33, 176, 179; map of, 34 Nazis, 197 Needham, Rodney, 19–20 nonconscious, xvii, 32 nonlinear time, 2, 5, 9–11, 14–15, 20n, 31, 117, 123, 178, 180n, 190–91, 193–94, 202, 214. See also cyclical time; existential temporality Oakeshott, Michael, 178, 196 occult, 23, 28–29, 159 Ohafia Igbo, 7 Oikonomídis, D., 119n Old Calendarists, 88 Olivier, Laurent, 201 oneirevámenoi (dreamers, visionaries), 16, 34–35, 85, 87–88, 94, 97, 102–03, 125, 143, 145, 150, 157; pronunciation of, xv, 75, 88. See also dreamers; visionaries oneiromancy, 25 ontology, x, 15, 188 Orthodox Christian Church, 5, 34n, 38n, 44, 51, 57, 64, 88n, 93, 112, 150, 153, 171, 173, 176, 185n, 186, 194; and dreaming, 28–30, 179. See also Romeic Ortner, Sherry, 211n, 212, 213n Otto (First King of Greece), 37n, 43, 48– 49, 53, 61, 162 255

Index

Ottoman Empire, 5, 37, 42–43, 53, 56, 102n, 117, 119n, 122, 158, 171–73, 189, 196–97, 200 The Palace of Dreams, 148n Palmié, Stephan, 7 Panagía (Virgin Mary), xvii, 33–34n; Annunciation of, 42–43; Dormition of, 50, 88, 155; of the Life-Giving Source, 69–70 Panagía Argokoiliótissa (Virgin of Argokoíli), 34, 38–42, 50, 52, 59, 67, 115, 143, 154, 156, 179–81, 194, 208; discovery of icon of, 42, 69–73, 156; confiscation of, 50–52; icon compared to Tinos icon, 62– 66, picture of icon, 65; theft of icon, 87, 156 Panagía Kerá, 175, 190, 223 Panagía Soumelá, 199 Panagía of Tinos, 46, 59–66; discovery of, 61; icon of, 46, 62–66. See also pilgrimage Papua New Guinea, 105–07 paradoxical sleep, 17, 20 participation, 20 past, 1–16, 21, 31, 58, 66, 73, 104n, 144– 45, 160–61, 166n, 169, 173–74, 176–79, 186–206, 208, 210–15 Peirce, Charles, 101, 170 Pelagía (nun), 27, 46, 60 persecution, xviii, 39, 64, 89, 170, 176, 180, 184–85, 191, 215 Pétros (Moutsópoulos) (child dreamer), 72, 79–80, 83, 100, 102, 150–51, 157, 159, 161, 192, 225 Phanoúrios, Saint, 109, 114–15, 120, 131, 208 Philóti, 42, 83 phylactery, 72, 224 256

piety, 60, 78, 170, 174, 188, 208 pilgrimage: to Argokoíli 46, 69–70, 94, 101, 115, 118, 147, 149, 154–55, 157–58; to Mytilíni, 28, 189; to Paros, 157; to Tinos, 61, 155; to Argokoíli and Tinos compared, 64– 66, 155, 158 piracy, 117, 119n plague, 60 play (Spiel): imaginary, 20, 25 Plenty Coups, 145 poetics of history, 3–4, 165–68, 195, 201 police, 9, 46, 49, 63–65, 67, 75, 88, 148 political subjectivity, 127 prayer, 40, 86, 88, 156, 178, 180, 190n preconscious, 31 present time, 123, 146, 214 Price, Simon, 30 primary process, 17, 19 prophecies, xviii, 4–5, 21, 27, 29, 31n, 33, 48–49, 67–70, 73, 76, 78, 84, 86, 88, 94, 99, 101, 106, 117, 118, 126, 140, 143, 145–46, 149, 156–60, 165–68, 182, 207, 209, 212; failure of, 35, 89, 140, 145; of a foreigner coming, 156–57, 167–68; of war, 140, 143, 150, 156, 166 Protopapadákis, Pétros, 135–36, 139 Prussia, 177 Psalmanazar, George, 19 Psáltou, Stratís, 62n Psarrás, Emmanouíl, 119n psychoanalysis, 12–13, 19–20, 29–30, 193, 210, 216; and existentialism, 15–16 quicklime (asvéstis), 24 Rank, Otto, 104 Ranke, Leopold von, 177–78

Index

Raphaíl, Saint, 28, 62n, 189, 191, 202 Recife, 204 recursion, 9 redemption, 46, 89, 92, 98, 105–06, 149, 153, 157, 184–86, 194–95, 213–14, 225. See also hope; millenarian movement refugees, 102n, 170, 191, 199, 202 REM (rapid eye movement), 12, 17 remembering, 11–12 resistance, 208–14 resurrection, 186–87. See also redemption revelations, 74, 77, 87, 89, 109, 153, 178; in dreams, 94, 98, 111, 145, 178; in visions, 53 Revelation, Book of, 91–92, 105, 150 revitalization movements, 149 Rey, Séverine, 62, 189, 191 Rivers, W. H. R., 104 Rízos Neroulós, Iakováki, 56 Romeic, 5n, 21, 178; 187n; vs. Hellenic, 178–79, 186, 194; temporality, 5, 179, 186–88, 193–94 Roosevelt, Franklin, 214 Rorschach, 11 Rose, Deirdre, 196 Ross, Ludwig, 177 Rothfel, 57 sacrifice, 59, 113, 120, 123, 204 Sahlins, Marshall, 58–59, 207 saints, 27, 78, 83, 123, 127, 150–53, 185, 198, 202; and dreamers, 13, 27, 29, 51, 75–103, 114–16, 180, 182–83, 189–90, 219–25; in the mines, 113–14 Sakalava, 4 Salem witch trials, 18 Saracens, 171 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 216

secondary revision, 20 Second Coming, 5, 20. See also millenarian movement; redemption Seraïdari, Katerina, 34n Seremetakis, C. Nadia, 25, 26n shamanism, 149, 202, 213 signs, 74, 91, 98–101; in dream drawings, 92, 98; and hypersemiosis, 92, 99–101; and injuries, 99 Skadó, 71, 74–75, 79, 99, 133 skeptics, xviii, 18, 38–39, 60, 63, 77, 81, 86, 114, 118, 160, 187 smells, 40, 179 Smith, Joseph, xvii Smyrna, 58, 122 soothsayers, 48, 51 spirit possession, 4–5, 6–7, 67, 160–61, 204, 210, 212; and anachronism, 178–79 spirits, 4, 6–7, 83, 112–14, 119–20, 123, 125n, 182, 202, 204–05 spolia, 201 Spyridon, Saint, 68, 77, 113n, 150, 161 starvation, 141–42 Stekel, Wilhelm, 12 Stéphanos, 78, 84, 100, 150–51, 223 Stephen Michele, 210 Storace, Patricia, 25 Stravolangáda, 115, 131 Sudan, 5, 7 superstition, 29, 31n, 38, 47, 49, 51, 120 surrealism, 10, 146 Sutton, David, xix, 6, 94n, 203, 214n sýllogos (village association), 157–58; of Kóronos, 141, 157–58 syncretism, 114 Syros, 44, 48–50, 147 Tangu (Papuan people), 105–07 Taussig, Michael, 6–7, 86, 113, 120, 122 257

Index

Tedlock, Barbara, 105 teloneía (demons), 182, 185 temporal ecstasies, 146, 215 temporality, 2–3, 5–7, 117, 191, 193–94, 207, 212; and linearity, 2, 10, 186, 190; existential, 14, 211–12, 214– 15; and ritual, 213 terma (Tibetan treasure), 206 Thermí, 189–90, 195, 203 Theseus, 191 Thessaloniki, 25–26, 197 Tibetan treasures, 206 time, 1–6, 9–11, 14–15, 19, 20n, 52, 117, 168, 177–79, 190–91, 194, 197, 202, 204, 211–14. See also cyclical time; linear time; redemption; temporality Tinos, 27, 44, 46–47, 37, 46, 59–66, 70, 105, 155, 158, 169, 171–75, 187n Tío, 113 Tótlis, Sákis, 198n tradition, xvii, 1, 6, 33, 53, 65, 73, 75, 84, 87, 91, 111, 121, 126, 133, 163–64, 167, 171, 201, 214n; oneirocritic, 24–25, 29–31; Orthodox, 51, 68, 157, 171, 176 Tragaía, 78, 83 transcendence, 20–21, 169, 206, 213, 216 treasures, 86, 116–29, 139, 143, 149–50, 159, 161, 182, 187, 192–93, 195– 206; dreams of, 21, 25, 117–124, 128, 182; as indexes of history, 196–206; laws governing, 199– 200; and secrecy, 120–22. See also vresímata treasure mania, 198 trisypóstato, 156, 158, 165 tropes of accountability, 112 Tumbuka, 7 Turkey, 85, 102, 110, 139, 191, 198–99 258

uncanny, 9 unconscious, 13, 31–32, 127, 195, 216; descriptive sense of, 32; four senses of, 195–96 Valkanizatér, 198 value, 65, 128, 193, 201–02; and values, 129; rationality, 211n Vartholomaíos (patriarch), 165 vaulted interior, 54, 94n, 156n Venetians, 44, 56, 117, 200 Venus de Milo, 192n verification, 3–5, 27–28, 47, 103, 177, 179 Verneuil, Auguste, 139 village association. See sýllogos visionaries, 16, 35, 48, 51, 72, 75, 77, 83–89, 91, 93–94, 96, 100– 01, 114, 117–18, 126–29, 140, 145–46, 150–52, 158, 161, 164, 180, 208, 210. See also dreamers; oneirevámenoi visions, xvii, 5n, 14, 16–21, 27, 30, 33, 39–42, 46, 49, 59–60, 62, 65, 73, 76, 83, 88, 92, 100, 105, 123, 155– 56, 160, 164, 168, 170–71, 174, 179, 181, 185, 205, 207–10, 212, 216; at Lourdes, 52–53, 169; as opposed to dreams, 18, 38. See also dreams Vóthroi, 33, 46n, 47n, 57. See also Kóronos Vourlá, 122 vresímata (findables), 116–18, 125, 193, 224. See also treasures Wallace, Anthony, 166n Weber, Max, 211n Weiner, Annette, 206 West, Ellen, 15–16 whitewash (asvéstis), 24, 201 witchcraft, 84

Index

work site (érgo), 88, 101, 225. See also cave; digging; discovery site World War I, 12, 93, 110, 127n, 131, 135, 141 World War II, 117, 119n, 139, 140–42, 157, 196

Yalouri, Eleana, xix, 56, 174, 195 Za, 183–85 Zanzibar, 7 Zinkeisen, Johann, 177 Zorba the Greek, 137–38 Zuyder Zee (Zuidersee), 13

Xénou, Mrs., 70–72

259