Community Values
Some people love Greece the way others love a language they weren't born to: imperfectly, seriously, for life. What follows is written for them, and it doesn't pretend to want nothing.
The older word
Before hospitality was an industry it was a law. The Greeks called it xenia and put it in the keeping of Zeus Xenios, god of strangers: the traveller at the door is owed a seat, a meal and safe passage before anyone asks his name, because he may be a god in disguise and because one day you'll be the stranger.
Much of the Odyssey is a running test of hosts. Nestor and Menelaus feed Telemachus before they ask who he is. The Cyclops eats his guests, and the suitors eat their absent host's stores, and Homer's audience needed no help seeing which of those was the crime. The duty fell on the host. It was never owed by the guest.
The word that survived is philoxenia, love of the stranger, and it is among the oldest ideas Europe has kept. Greece keeps it still: in the plate that arrives at a village table nobody ordered, in the man who won't take money for the ride across the water.
None of this is the house's invention; it was inherited, as it is by anyone Greece lets in far enough to see it. And a duty attaches to whoever accepts it, at any distance from the Aegean. That is the part that matters here.
The words we keep
Greek says in one word what other languages need a paragraph for. These are the words the house works by, set down here because they are worth having whether or not anything else on this page is for you.
- Philoxenia: Love of the stranger. The guest is given the best of the house rather than the surplus of it: fed first, questioned later. It is the only one of these words that was also a law.
- Filotimo: Untranslatable; roughly, the love of honour. Doing what is right because it is owed rather than because it is paid or watched. Greeks will tell you it cannot be explained to a foreigner, which is itself part of the definition.
- Meraki: Leaving something of yourself in the work. On Chios the mastic growers cut each tree by hand from July, wait for the resin to harden, and then sort the tears through the winter one crystal at a time. UNESCO listed the know-how in 2014. Nobody has found a way to hurry it.
- Kefi: The high spirit that arrives on its own. It can't be arranged, only allowed, which is why no venue has ever managed to advertise it.
- Parea: The company you keep, and what that company becomes over a long table. A parea orders for the table and pays as one. It isn't incidental to the evening. It is the evening.
- Nostos: The homecoming, and with algos, the ache for it. In 1688 a Swiss medical student, Johannes Hofer, needed a name for what was killing Swiss mercenaries posted far from home, and he went to Greek to find one: nostalgia. Most people who love Greece have had cause to use it about a country not their own.
What is being lost
A country can be admired into a postcard. Greece is being reduced to three images — a blue dome, a white lane, a rented deck at sunset — and nobody decided it should be. It is a hundred million small repetitions, each one meant kindly.
What goes first is the specific. The cheese has a name and a place: graviera from Naxos, protected in law the way a wine is. The chapel faces east because Orthodox churches face east. The wind is the meltemi, it blows hardest from mid-July to mid-August, and by September it has gone, which is why September is the month to ask a Greek about. Lose those and what is left is a backdrop.
The house is not innocent here. It publishes photographs of white lanes and blue water like everybody else, and some of what it puts out is the same three images in better light. The difference it can honestly claim is narrower than it would like: that it names things, checks them, and doesn't describe a place as empty when it isn't.
Against that the house keeps four disciplines, and asks the same of anyone who stands with it.
- Name the person. Not "a local artisan" — the name, spelled correctly.
- Keep the quiet places quiet. Some things are told to a person and not published to a feed. Getting that line wrong is the commonest failure in travel writing, and it is almost always committed with enthusiasm.
- Honour the seasons. Greece in February is not a lesser Greece. August is not its truest month, only its loudest.
- Say what is true, including when it is ordinary. Not every village has a secret, and most tavernas are ordinary tavernas.
The philhellenes
This is an old habit, and you are not the first to have it. There is a word for it, and in the 1820s it was meant seriously: philhellene, a friend of Greece.
From 1821 some 1,200 foreigners — Germans, French, Italians, Swiss, British, Americans, Poles, Danes, Spaniards — travelled to a country most of them knew only from books, to fight in a war that was not theirs. Around 400 never went home. Byron died of fever at Missolonghi in April 1824, having spent his own fortune and most of his health on it.
The movement was never chiefly the ones who sailed. It was the committees in London, Paris and Geneva: people who stayed exactly where they were and wrote, translated, argued and raised money until what their own countrymen believed about Greece had changed. None of them fired a shot. They moved governments.
That is still the work, and it is still done from wherever you happen to live.
What we give away
A creed is cheap if nothing follows from it. What follows from this one is that most of what the house learns about Greece is published, and nobody is charged for it.
The Stories archive. The destination guides. The House Notes and Anchorage Notes kept island by island. The Calendar of festivals and occasions, held current the year round. None of it behind a fee, and none of it written only for those who can already afford Greece.
Some of that is marketing, and there is no use pretending otherwise. But a country is better served by being understood than by being sold, and what a house comes to know about Greece was never its own to keep.
Standing with us
There has never been one way to be a philhellene. The committees of 1821 held poets and translators, and they held bankers, merchants and shipowners besides: some sailed, some wrote, and some paid for what the others could not. All of it counted, and it counts the same way here. What you have to give is not for the house to prescribe.
- Carry the work. Read what the house publishes and put it in front of the people who ought to see it. It costs nothing, and it's the one door on this list that is open to everybody.
- Open a door. An introduction outruns any amount of research: to a family, to a maker who has never had a website, to whoever holds the key to the chapel. If you know Greece from the inside, you hold something the house can't reach on its own.
- Write it. Writers, translators and photographers contribute to the guides, the notes and the Stories. Remote, in your own time, and unpaid, which is said here rather than left for you to find out later. Your name goes on what you make.
- Underwrite it. Everything here is given away, and none of it is free to make. If you have the means to see more of it made than the house can manage alone, write to us. There is no fund, no tier and no figure named: only a conversation, which is the oldest form this friendship has taken.
It is early. There is no crowd here to join, and whoever comes now will be setting the terms the later ones arrive into. What it should become is a parea in the oldest sense: the company that turns, over enough hours, into something with a character of its own.
It asks nothing about where you are, or what you were born to. It is for Athens and for the diaspora — New York, Melbourne, London, Alexandria, Johannesburg — and as much for the reader in a country with no Greek in it at all, who decided on their own that this one mattered.
It is not for everyone, and nothing is lost by deciding it is not for you. But if Greece is something you love rather than somewhere you've been, and if you have ever quietly corrected a stranger about it, there's a seat at this table kept for you.