By “Gabriel Rhys Simerson,” if you please...
Like many Americans, I was raised with stories of “the Old Country.” Some were part of a precolonial ancestral chapter long closed: the Highland Scotland of eighteenth-century Jacobite Simersons, the seventeenth-century Ireland of Crooms who may have had something to do with modern-day Croom Castle. But another looms much closer in history: Greece, home to my maternal family for centuries, and which my grandmother and her family fled after World War II.
The genealogist in me is lucky to have my grandmother still alive and still lucid, still expanding on stories of the Old Country that she’s been telling for as long as I can remember. For me, our Greece was a distant fantasyland of donkeys and lambs, poppies and herbs, self-sufficiency and grit. It was also a land of fraught history and, for Yiayia, backyard war. Every story of an idyllic lentil harvest is tempered by one of fire and murder. To finally visit is to set foot on ground zero, both as war monument and as hereditary celebration. I think I’ll always remember the feeling of watching the Athens runway approach on the airplane screen’s camera feet, pointing excitedly, and proclaiming “the Motherland!” (perhaps to the confusion of others in my row).
We were no urban Greeks; Yiayia hails from a small Pelopponesian village nestled between some rolling hills in the regional unit of Lakonia, as yet unelectrified when she left. But even in Athens on day one, I saw our history on prominent display.
On the Acropolis, six female figures, acting as columns and supporting a frieze with baskets on their heads acting as capitals, adorn the side of a temple wall. These are “caryatids,” derived from the name of my grandmother’s village: Karyes or Karyai (itself referring to walnut trees). An evolution of Archaic-period korai sculptures, the caryatids depict the women from Karyai who danced with baskets on their heads in honor of Artemis (which, I should mention, is the name of women in my family including my mother). Even hundreds of miles away, in a metropolis (a word that, as I’m wired to remind you, “comes from the Greek!”) of tourists, our history stands triumphantly on a shining hill, and I couldn’t help but feel compelled to claim it, in some sort of way, as my own.
Such a feeling raises questions about the quintessential part of Americanness that is enthusiastically identifying as something else. I was asked during my time in Scotland why we can’t just call ourselves Americans, and it occurred to me that in few other nations do families still call themselves “Scottish” or “Irish” or “Greek” generations after the first immigrant landed. My inclinations to proudly be Scottish were practically laughed out of the room in Scotland, not least because the last Scottish Simerson was in America by 1760. In Greece, the reaction is the opposite, and instead I end up disappointing enthusiastic people when they find out I can only say things like “grandma,” “I want butter,” and a few numbers. Nonetheless, how “Greek” am I allowed to be...how Greek am I? When, in America, does heritage stop being blood and start being artifact?
For me, this question in the Greek sense is still being worked out. After the tour, I’ll be meeting back in Athens with my cousin Dimitris and his mother Maria (my grandmother’s niece), and they’ll take me south to Karyes. It’s a point for the “heritage is still blood” team that I still have family here to receive me, even if the town I’ll be visiting is no longer home to my direct line. While I figure out how to be an American and whether I’m still Greek, I’ll eternally thank this tour for bringing me to the Old Country, and acting as a luxurious prelude to my ultimate pilgrimage: “the village.” Onward!
