Peasant Homes in Greece, 1911
From Greece and the Greeks by Z. Duckett Ferriman, 1911.
From: 1911 C.E. To: 1911 C.E.
Location: Greece
Note: This article has been excerpted from a larger work in the public domain and shared here due to its historical value. It may contain outdated ideas and language that do not reflect TOTA’s opinions and beliefs.
From Greece and the Greeks by Z. Duckett Ferriman, 1911.
We have seen the shepherd at home in his mandra, a rude shieling or a goat-hair tent. That is the most primitive Greek home. The tiller of the soil is better off. The standard of comfort—or rather of discomfort—varies. The best peasant homes are in the Peloponnesus, the worst, perhaps, in Thessaly.
Let us take the average and it will be something like this. A one-storeyed cabin somewhere between thirty or forty feet long. It may be of wood or stone, according to locality. The roof in some instances will be tiled, but more frequently thatched with reeds or maize-stalks mingled with brushwood. The interior consists of a single apartment. One end is occupied by the domestic animals, the other by their owner and his family. Sometimes, but not often, a low screen divides the two. Only the human end of the dwelling has a raised floor of dried and beaten clay, or of planking if the neighbourhood is timbered. The fire-place is a flat stone, literally the hearth. If the cottage boasts a chimney this is set against the wall beneath it. If not, it is placed in the middle of the floor, and the smoke escapes as best it can through holes in the roof.
The baking, the only important culinary operation, is done outside in a clay oven shaped like a bee-hive. There are beehives, but their form is not that of a beehive. They are hollowed trunks of plane trees, sawn into sections about two feet long. In these cylinders the bees are quite at home. Their habitat in a wild state is the hollow trunk of a tree. But let us return to the dwelling.
It is simply furnished. Tables and chairs there are none. The bedding stacked in a corner occupies the largest space. It consists of mattresses stuffed with maize-husks, coverlets quilted and wadded with cotton, and cushions which serve as chairs when the family dines, seated in a circle round the repast spread on the floor. There is a cupboard perhaps, and shelves, a long chest, but no drawers.
There is always a large earthen pipkin for water, and a few smaller pots and jars for cooking or storing provisions. And there is always a loom. But that, like the oven, is outside. If there are trees it is placed underneath them, if possible in such a manner that two stems serve as foreposts. In any case the trees afford shade during the long hours the women pass at the loom, for all woven material for clothes or bedding is home-made.
One all-important object must not be forgotten among the contents of the household. It is the eikon, the little picture, tarnished and grimy, with its lamp, carefully replenished, ever burning before it. It is usually a representation of the Panaghia. If not, it is the saint whose name is borne by the head of the family, a copy of some stiff Byzantine model with long straight nose and eyes devoid of expression.
On holidays it is decked with flowers, and in case of removal to another dwelling the greatest precautions are taken lest its lamp should be extinguished. There is no abode, however humble, without this tutelary deity, the palladium of the household. A touch of colour is given to this interior by the strings of purple onions and gerbes of golden maize that hang from the roof.
Men, women, and children live together in common—often three generations. When bedtime comes—and it comes early—the mattresses are unrolled, and the members of the family enjoy a repose which would not be ours, under the circumstances. At dawn they rise—a simple process, for it is not their custom to undress—at most they throw off their outer clothes in summer—and the men go to the fields.
The women, if there is no field work for them, spin or weave. This is all done out of doors. In fact the house is never used except at night or in bad weather. The women will loll against their doorways, or against a tree, and spin for hour after hour, or seated at their loom in the shade, they weave through a summer day. The dye for their homespun is either brown obtained from the sap of the plane tree, or red from the prickly oak—a disease of the leaf, called prinakokes— the kermes of the Arabs, from which we have our word crimson.
Most peasants have a small vineyard, enough to make wine for home use. Then they rear silkworms. There are few districts without mulberry trees. If they do not spin silk for sale, they spin enough for kerchiefs or sashes, or perhaps a skirt. Some keep sheep enough to supply them with wool sufficient for their clothes. If they do not, they obtain the wool from the shepherd in exchange for grain.
There is scarcely a cabin without an olive tree or two and a fig. Thus they buy neither food nor clothes. The luxuries for which they have to pay are coffee, sugar, and tobacco, and one necessity, salt. Sugar is excessively dear in Greece. Honey takes the place it holds with us in household economy. But honey is not suitable for sweetening coffee, and though Greek peasants are frugal, few deny themselves this indulgence. It is not a breakfast beverage, as with us.
The far less costly wine, with bread, and perhaps a few cloves of garlic, suffices the husbandman until sunset. If anything passes his lips meanwhile, it is more bread and a few black olives. Bread and olives are his staple food. Bread is really the staff of life of the Greek peasant, and it is made of pure wheaten flour, and varied occasionally by maize cakes.
If he keeps goats he has milk, which he consumes mainly in the form of yaoorti, a word he has borrowed from the Turks. It means sour curd, and is an exceedingly wholesome viand. If there is milk to spare, it is made into a cheese, excessively salt and hard, and of the appearance and consistency of plaster.
Butter he knows not; olive oil takes the place it holds with us. Meat he tastes at Easter in the form of lamb roasted on the spit, and seldom else throughout the year. This is the diet of the poorest class of peasant, the man who cultivates land on the system of paying one-third of the produce to the owner. It is monotonous, but nutritious and easily assimilated. It might be made more varied if he grew vegetables, but he seldom has either the time or the inclination.
Meals are eaten by the family out of a common receptacle. Plates are undreamt of; knives and forks are unnecessary, owing to the character of the food. One knife only is needed to cut the bread. It is usually the one employed for purposes of husbandry. Spoons are provided for the curded milk, or the mess of maize, or broth of wild herbs.
The standard of living with respect to food is better than that of the urban poor in Western Europe, but as regards the rest—the sleeping, for instance, and the stabling of the animals in the dwelling—well, the abode of the English cottager is not a model for imitation from the point of view of sanitation, but there is a gulf between it and the cabin of the Greek peasant. The peasant who owns and farms his patch of land and lives in a two-storeyed house has a higher conception of comfort and cleanliness than the one just described, but his home cannot be compared with a modest English farmstead, though he is probably better off than the occupant of the latter.
The art of making a home is unknown to the Greek. The nearest approach to it that I have met with is in the islands, especially in Andros. One may meet with exquisite cleanliness, with beautifully embroidered bed-linen scented with rosemary, but never with what we mean by cosiness. Climate may have something to do with it. The Greeks are far less in their houses than we are, and when they are at home they appear to spend most of their time in looking out of the window. They are not given to inviting their friends to their houses. It is not that they are niggardly, for they will gladly entertain you at a restaurant at far greater cost to themselves. But it does not enter into their ideas to ask you home to dinner, even after an acquaintance of many years. They do not ask each other, so it can hardly be expected that they should make an exception in the case of foreigners. The cafe is a second home to them. There they meet friends and gossip. That is one reason, perhaps, why they dislike country life. It offers no alternative to the home. There the hearth is the social centre, whilst in town it is the cafe.
In Athens, those who do not own the house they dwell in seldom remain long in the same abode. Two or three years is quite a long tenure. Many people make a point of moving every year. Most Englishmen shrink from the idea of a removal and all that it implies, and submit to it with reluctance. The Greeks, on the contrary, enjoy it. With us, the creation and gradual growth of the environment which we call home is one of the greatest pleasures in life. It possesses no interest for the Greek. Indeed, it has no place in his scheme of existence.
The imposing facades of Athenian houses conceal, for the most part, a bare and comfortless interior, and a well-kept garden is rare. The reason is not far to seek. A garden is not made in a year, and a person who changes his residence every twelve months does not want to be troubled with much furniture, nor is he particular as to its arrangement, seeing that it will be carted away in a few months. Of course instances may be cited to the contrary, and there are delightful homes in Athens. But they are the exception, and they belong in nearly every case to people who have lived many years in Western Europe, or who come from Hellenic lands outside Greece.
Next door to the house in which these words are being written dwells a professor of the University. He does not possess a foot of garden ground, yet he has turned his courtyard and exterior stairway into a bower of climbing plants, and his flowery windows are all the more brilliant in contrast with the blank casements on either hand. He does not occupy his house merely, but lives in it. But he is a native of Samos, and his taste for flowers is derived from the Turks, though perhaps he would not admit it.
The foregoing remarks apply chiefly to the Greeks of Athens and the larger towns. In the matter of hospitality, for example, a country Greek makes you free of his house and offers you his best, but he would not do so if there were a cafe and restaurant handy, and he would live in a town if he could.
Home life has no resources for the Greeks as it has for us. It affords them little occupation and no amusement. They like to eat and drink in crowds, where there is noise and movement. Hence the popularity of the Panegyris or village festival, to which the country folk look forward so eagerly as a relief from the daily round. Their instincts are too gregarious to allow them to appreciate the domestic intimacy which we prize. But though home, as we understand it, is a sealed book to them, family holds a greater place in their lives than it does with us.
They make more of family events, and these are the only occasions on which they entertain. And they do not lose sight of their relatives as we are apt to do. They keep in touch with all, even the distant cousin in America, and there are few families in these days of emigration who have not at least one member on the other side of the Atlantic. Family affection and national pride are the leading Greek characteristics.
Ferriman, Z. Duckett. Greece and the Greeks. James Pott & Co., 1911.
About TOTA
TOTA.world provides cultural information and sharing across the world to help you explore your Family’s Cultural History and create deep connections with the lives and cultures of your ancestors.
