Ours Once More by Michael Herzfeld

Author:Michael Herzfeld [Herzfeld, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History
ISBN: 9780918618320
Google: Vh-4DwAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 923434
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Published: 1982-05-01T00:00:00+00:00

Vivilakis: A Scholarly Response

Lelekos’ works, although largely devoted to songs, contain a limited amount of other material, such as dialect forms, descriptions of customs, and proverbial phrases—a somewhat uneven miscellany. Here, too, a major classificatory problem lurked, as yet unformulated: how could the rapidly increasing laographic corpus be organized so that materials of different kinds might be separately recorded but efficiently cross-referenced? The scope of Lelekos’ interests did not extend to tackling this issue. Others, however, had already begun to deal with it, on the basis of selectional criteria that had once again largely originated in the antiquarian scholarship of Western Europe.

The title of Douglas’ Essay on Certain Points of Resemblance between the Ancient and Modern Greeks spells out the main organizing focus of this endeavor. His account, however, was not a systematic collection; it represents a rather haphazard search for ethnographic evidence, although the search for identifiable parallels certainly acted as a filter through which the experiences of Douglas and other travel-minded authors could be sifted.

In Germany, however, more thorough ethnological research soon began, notably the remarkable work of a Greek scholar. In 1840 in Berlin, Emmanuel Vivilakis (Bybilakis), a Cretan who had lived through the War of Independence in Greece, published a short but significant treatise on parallels between ancient and modern Greek life. His aim was explicit:

… to make an accurate comparison of the manners and customs of ancient with those of modern Greece, and therein to provide irrefutable proof not only that ancient Hellas is as yet far from defunct but that, just as these customs dwelt in her millennia ago, so today they live on in her children’s children; that the preservation of the same manners and customs would have been impossible had there taken place at any one time a complete interruption in the existence of this people (Volk); finally, that the assertions of certain individuals (their number is fortunately quite negligible) are quite as far from the truth as heaven from earth, when they publish its very opposite hōs ek tripodos (“as from the [oracular] tripod [of the ancients]”), “in order,” as they say, “to rescue educated Europe from the erroneous views it has held heretofore concerning the descent of today’s Hellenes from the ancient Greeks.” (1840: viii–ix)

This first real salvo from the Greek side both anticipates Lelekos’ works chronologically and surpasses them in scholarly sophistication. The reference to Fallmerayer is quite unambiguous, and the irritation over his attempt to divide “Greece” from “Europe” stands out sharply.

Vivilakis’ argument, clearly and simply described in a brief introductory passage, is worth quoting in full:

The material for comparing the modern Greeks with those ancestors who inhabited the same places three millennia ago, in relation to their manners and customs, religious festivals, etc., offers itself to us in such rich abundance that it almost causes us embarrassment, not as to how but as to what material we shall begin to solve our task with.

It would seem expedient to us to begin our descriptions with the birth of

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