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Zdravka Mihaylova
Exclusively for GRReporter

A literary gathering at Plovdiv University brought Greek writer of Plovdiv descent Theophano Kalogianni to this town on three hills, the ancient Trimontium. Translator Zdravka Mihaylova presented Kalogianni's story collection The Death of the Knight Celano and Other Stories (Ciela Publishing House, 2013). The book is dedicated to the author’s grandmother (whose name she bears) who was born in Plovdiv in 1906 and died in Thessaloniki in 1975, "in the hope that she will learn about it." The cover of the Bulgarian edition is illustrated with a drawing of the knight Celano and his retinue, by the author.

Theophano Kalogianni not only cherishes the stories of her Plovdiv grandmother and her four sisters, all of them converted Jews who emigrated from Tsarist Russia, but also re-animates them in the preface of the book that she wrote especially for its Bulgarian edition: "... since I was a child I have been constantly listening to her, speaking about that magical place, Filipoupoli, with its phaetons and dances, about her cousins ​​from Odessa, their vacations in Varna, their meetings, engagements, dowry of French lace, affluence and prosperity. All the good things were there and then, and all the trouble was here and now. The Tahchievi sisters who had already accepted the Greek name Stavrou ("stavrós" in Greek means cross), being true and zealous proselytes, did not discuss hard times and wars, but their afternoon walk... Kalogianni writes, "This is how I learned about our home on the hill with the Roman amphitheatre, the house with the curved eaves and the attic rooms with ghosts, about the Jewish grandfather, a cloth merchant who had taken his wife Olga to the international exhibition in Paris in 1900, but ultimately had not taken her to the top of the Eiffel tower, for which omission Olga had been reproaching him until his very last day; I learned about the French lessons, now completely forgotten, as well as about the first bob haircuts and the drop-waist dresses."

In his review of the book in Kultura newspaper Bulgarian literary critic Marin Bodakov wrote, "Little Kalogianni overheard next door the various memories of her grandmother and her sisters from the beginning of the world, and she turns them into myths, apocrypha, hagiographies, sagas, stories... The holy scripture comes to life through the eyes of an astonished and wise child. We could read the short stories in The Death of the Knight Celano as a reprise of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button; while dying, the character gets the chance to live out his days in reverse, correcting three mistakes to bitterly establish that he, a ruler and murderer, will remain in the memory of mankind just as an image in the immortal Giotto fresco”. "Important dead persons such as dukes, popes and Maecenas stand out at their funerals. However, important living persons are buried informally, sometimes coming back to life after a few years. And from then on they become incontestable," says Kalogianni.

The Death of Knight Celano and Other Stories, inspired by the eponymous fresco by Italian painter Giotto, seamlessly combines different narrative genres, including myth, fairy tale, chronicles, story and parable. The linguistic imagination of the author intertwines joy with unexpected melancholy, creating a bizarre world laden with all the gifts of fabulous storytelling (knights, wizards, king's sons, princesses, gods, talking animals, teratomorphous plants and paintings that come to life, wars, sacrifices and pilgrimages) presented in a language that brings sharp surprises.

Theophano Kalogianni was born in Thessaloniki in 1967 but grew up in Sweden, where her parents were immigrants during the dictatorship of the colonels. After the repatriation of her family she studied conservation of art works, Byzantine music and sculpture; she also has an interest in palaeography. Today she lives in Athens, where she translates from Swedish, Norwegian and English. She has pursued many professions, from chanter of Byzantine hymns and icon-restorer, to singer of songs in the rebetiko style. She tries to write only when, in her words, she cannot do anything else. Her authorial biography shows that she has just four books published. She turned to literary expression aged twenty with the novella The Death of the Knight Celano (Estia Publishing House, 1988), which was awarded the Kostas and Eleni Ouranis prize of the Athens Academy (1991) for a debut fiction author. Her collection of short stories Tales from the Scriptures (Okeanida, 2001) appeared thirteen years after her first book. Critical opinion defined her as a "child prodigy" because of her youth and the fact that she uses the Greek language in a refined manner, although she did not attend Greek schools until she returned to her homeland.

For you the visit to Plovdiv was a kind of pilgrimage and homecoming. During the meeting with the audience at which we presented the Bulgarian edition of the stories, you said you are "a person of the past." What did you mean?

My father used to say that people (and writers) are divided into two categories: people of the future and people of the past. The first are fascinated, captivated by what lies ahead, they plan it, expect it, putting their hopes in it, in the wonderful things that have not yet happened. The latter, the people of the past, are overwhelmingly attracted to everything old, ancient, of bygone times and are convinced that they will be able to understand what will happen only by recovering the past and explaining what has already happened. They are convinced that the miracles of the past are much more than what we know and feel, that it depends on us to find them. They see the present day and the coming day as a continuation and consequence of yesterday. Just as the people of the future are excited by the new and expect the coming day to provide solutions to today’s problems, the people of the past feel that the old days have already made available the solutions to us but we have not been observant enough to notice them. For them, new, is namely, the old which they have not recognized to this day. Their favourite pastime is to bury deep into the memories, both in their own and in other people’s memories, often to the detriment of reality and everyday life. This distinction is more or less true for writers too. There are writers of change and writers of nostalgia. "Only Homer wrote equally well in both categories", again in my father’s words.

What truths did you learn from your Plovdiv grandmother Theophano while you were growing up close to her in Thessaloniki? Can fairy tales sometimes be more real than reality?

My grandmother was a practical woman and abstract wisdom could not be heard from her. She spoke and acted using examples and allegorical stories, which were extremely specific, with a very pronounced anecdotal character, in order for her to hold the attention of the listener. In the majority of cases, she believed that experience is far preferable to admonition. She used to say, "Let the child (ie, me) burn her fingers or she will never learn to be afraid of fire and to have respect for it." When she was busy and did not want me to get in her way, she took an embroidery thread, twisted it as much as possible and gave it to me to disentangle it. Only then had I the right to speak again, after I dealt with the thread. To be brought to patience, as she said. So, I grabbed the thread and I was occupied with this activity for hours, not uttering a word. In the end, what we played was a game of wisdom. In the same sense, just as the thread was the symbol of life's complexity and intricacies that can only be untangled with patience, fairy tales are a form of "condensed" truth and wisdom. As the thread of my grandmother, something seemingly simple and routine, represents life itself, the story, something also simple and easy to digest, is a collective wisdom, mellow and sure of itself. The most important things are said in the simplest words.

In the conversation with the Plovdiv audience, you compared the memory of older people and that of the younger, technologically distracted generations, examining the memory-image-words connection and the fragmented personality of today's youth. What does the comparison between the older generation (that of oral memory) and the modern young generation of electronic information make you think?

I have always had the feeling that the people of the old days remember more than the young do, because their memory is trained. In the past there were not so many ways to store memories as today, for example, there were no photographs (or they were a rare thing in itself which turned them into memory: when they were taken and on what occasion, how the persons in them found themselves in the particular place). In more ancient times, many could not read and write. So, people carefully preserved everything in their mind, they could not "unload" their memory, arranging it on a sheet of paper, in a drawer or in an album. By the way, let us not forget that, before being written down in the 6th century BC by order of Peisistratos, the Homeric epics were an oral poetic tale and were recited by heart by the rhapsodes. And they were not short poems....

This kind of memory of the old people may be chronologically inaccurate but it reflects the experience of generations and past centuries, sometimes in quite surprising details. For example, my grandmother on my father's side said her family, who were masons, had moved from Epirus to Edirne to "build the grand mosque", ie the great Selimiye Mosque, masterpiece of the architect Sinan commissioned by the prematurely deceased Sultan Selim II not in Istanbul but in his favourite city Edirne, the first Ottoman capital. When I told her that this was not possible because that mosque was built between 1569 and 1575, and it was impossible for her to remember this with such confidence, she stuck to her guns. Who knows, maybe I am wrong....

Nowadays, as we have more and more ways of registering information and storing past events, including cameras, microphones, computers, we are susceptible to the luxury of quickly forgetting them. We jump from one thing to another with the assurance that someone else will deal with recording things. This not only "puts memory to sleep" but also makes it increasingly difficult to recall and retell an event. Thus, while seemingly communicating with ever greater ease, we struggle to describe things with the emotional charge and accuracy that are typical for older people. Our drawers are full with information that is not arranged by priority, important things coexist with insignificant ones, because no one has undertaken to sort it out and arrange it, and memories accumulate without any selective approach. Human memory has a natural tendency to codify, i.e. to hierarchize, and evaluate information, throwing out what is unnecessary and storing what is essential. No photo or hard drive can do this instead of us. This leads to putting things off, we start living at a great pace, confusing the important things with the insignificant, and communication sinks in the mire. They say that a picture is worth a thousand words, but if there are no words, a picture is just an incomprehensible, and ultimately meaningless, image on paper. This is because, for better or worse, we still think in words.

What other qualities must a writer (or the artist in general) have in addition to talent?

"Talent" is a debatable concept since its expression is largely dependent on the conditions and situation. Potentially the greatest writer could die without ever being aware of the fact that he was able to write for the simple reason that, for example, he was born in a village in Transylvania in 1367. Parenthetically, this is a good idea for a story! If we evade the topic of talent, which is difficult to consider and too populist and popular, we will see that it does not take just talent to create a finished work. Creativity requires great concentration and a kind of self-denial, so that the work dominates the creative "I". Only then will it acquire autonomy and self-sufficiency, i.e., it will look as if it was always over there and the artist has just “stumbled over” it. Concentrating on an object outside of themselves is difficult for many talented artists, not only because of narcissism (since it exists too), but also because "I" is their source of images, the "experimental animal" of emotions. It is true that artists go through the world more intensely and are especially sensitive to the good and the bad from the surrounding environment since this is part of their work. Then they have to kill the "guinea pig" of emotions and get into the workshop to deal not with them themselves but with their work.

And to use an analogy of sculpture: In Greek we say that a sculptural work must be "περίβλεπτο", which means, "to stand, be visible and equally perfect from every angle from which a person looks at it," not only frontally or from one side. That is the greatest contribution of ancient Greek sculpture. Similarly, a work of the written word should be separated from its creator and stand out in space, being properly proportioned from every angle one looks at it, without support and explanations. Everything must be justified, explained and motivated by the work itself, as though it has long existed there and the writer has excavated it from dust like an archaeologist. This, I think, is the greatest quality of a writer, the ability to move away from the self and the ego in order to find the work of art.

You mentioned that a writer, as in Sweden, should write secluded in a hut instead of wasting him or herself in the PR of hollow communication in terms of creative thinking and projects relating to his or her own assertion. How important is solitude for a writer?

Firstly, every writer writes in a unique way that is only applicable to him or her. Part of his or her job is to find this mode. However, the majority of writers need solitude to be able to concentrate and listen to their inner voice, which some call talent, others inspiration, and a third group dedication and devotion. Every human activity that requires concentration, not just the creative one, needs some solitude. Artists, however, as they are very vulnerable to their surroundings – they are literally sponges for all kinds of irritants – need solitude to be able to "filter" and process everything that "rushes" into them. Especially the people of the word are even more exposed to the surrounding environment, as speech is the predominant means of communication, it is something we all use by default, something that does not happen in painting or music. Words heard in casual meetings can echo in the mind of a writer for hours, making him or her unable to hear his or her own voice. A violinist or other classical musician can suffer the same if he or she ends up at a rock concert, but he or she could avoid it if they wish, whereas we cannot hide from the speech and words around us. Therefore, a hut in the woods would certainly be a godsend for many writers. A prerequisite, however, is the rare visits to the human world because a voice that hears only itself can become monotonous and authoritarian. Artists in general need to be selective and careful in terms of the manner and frequency with which they expose themselves to the audience. Because if they are "overexposed" they risk losing what has originally made ​​them desirable and interesting, namely their particular voice.

Once, when you jokingly told your 10-year-old daughter that you are an enchantress she believed you and told this to her school-mates. Do you feel that magical powers reign inside you when you are immersed in the universe of words and sculpt them?

"Magician" for me generally means a shaman, a being with a greater degree of identification and insight, that is able to subsume itself in the surrounding world. A "shaman" (or an enchantress) of words must be identified with their own space, namely language, following the example of the shaman of isolated tribes who identifies himself with the surrounding space, i.e. nature. A writer has to listen not only to the meaning of words, but also to their rhythm, the breath of sentences and the taste of punctuation. In this sense, in terms of the rhythm and flow of words, I would answer affirmatively, yes, sometimes I felt like an "enchantress". But not in the sense of the content of a story, of what we call its plot. There I become a craftsman, a plumber of words, who, with the relevant tools, takes care for the story not to overspill and drown the reader. The other magical feeling of words, to feel the audience gripped, anxiously awaiting the continuation of the story, unfortunately is not related to the written word. This type of magic that is very similar to the power of music entirely belongs to oral storytellers, narrators of tales, who are rarely found in our electronic age. In oral storytelling, the listener enjoys the rhythm of speech and the re-creation of the story time and again, as it thus becomes a little different from the previous time, but also the living presence of the breathless audience. The magic of Scheherazade undoubtedly is more compelling than the magic of the computer keyboard.

I cannot help it, sometimes I feel that I was born in the wrong era. Three hundred years ago, I would have been a true enchantress of words, and maybe of other things...