Dinner with Persephone by Patricia Storace
The Unwritten
Greece, with its some twenty-five hundred islands, is, like the human body, made up mostly of water, and like the body of someone you love, is finite, but inexhaustible. Now that my time here is getting short, I realise that the literal size of this country is deceptive, that I will leave here having never seen much that I dreamed of seeing.
I cannot resist another brief but strenuous mountain trip to a region called Agrapha, partly because I am drawn by the meaning of its name, the unwritten, although it does not fit the intricate, if hidden, logic of my other routes. Agrapha borders Thessaly, and is famous guerrilla country, the site of savage medieval battles between the Byzantines and the Bulgarians, the boyhood training ground of one of the most famous strategists and soldiers of the War of Independence, Yiorgos Karaiskakis, the home of the national leader and soldier Nikolas Plastiras, whose role in the Asia Minor disaster saved many refugee lives after the war was lost, and a center for the Greek resistance during the Second World War.
The region is called “the unwritten,” according to the most of the explanations I’ m given, because the Turks never controlled the region, and so didn’t include it in their tax books, as opposed to grammena, or “written,” regions. It is, many say, still the least developed part the country.
Patricia Storace
American poet.
She is the 1993 winner of the Witter Bynner Poetry Prize by the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a 1996 recipient of a Whiting Award.
In a story, you must always listen for the voice you cannot hear, the one that has been ignored or silenced. In that crushed voice, there is a strain of truth, as a crushed grape yields a drop of wine.
