By Phoebe Sozou
Edited by Jessica Yi and Alloe Mak

Thank you to Emmanouil, whose insight as another Greek assisted in the editing of this piece.

I find it difficult to describe growing up in the Greek Orthodox Church to those outside of it. My experience is by no means a singular one—there are nearly 300,000 Greeks in Canada, and given what I know about our diaspora from spending thirteen years as a part of it, I imagine many of them retain contact with religion to some extent. Faith takes many forms, whether it means turning up to services weekly or letting old habits carry you through your church’s door for holidays and the occasional name day/memorial/particularly-sticky-life-event that your parents would want you to light a candle for. Maybe you haven’t set foot inside a church in years, but you pass by your aunt’s crucifix on your way to her kitchen every time you visit. Maybe your γιαγιά does the sign of the cross over every tray of cookies she slides into the oven. Maybe your little cousin runs around wearing your old Sunday best. Orthodoxy is nearly unavoidable in our community; we’re predictable, us Greeks, which comes in handy until it doesn’t. 

(Fellow immigrants and first, second, etc. generations, check all that apply: you’ve had a little cloth talisman pinned to the underside of your pillow since you were a baby; you’re always finding oddly proportioned icons of Christ, Mary, and assorted saints in various corners of your house; when you were a kid, you’d tie ribbons around tall candles to bring to church on Holy Saturday; hardly a day goes by in your home without a muttered “Χριστέ μου” or “ο Θεός να μας βοηθήσει”; you remember a time when you’d sit in a pew and your feet wouldn’t touch the floor, so you’d swing them as time crawled on at what seemed to be an exponentially decreasing speed; you can’t recite the Lord’s Prayer in English to save your life, but all it takes is one “Πάτερ ἡμῶν—” to bring your right hand to your forehead without a second thought.)

Beyond these specific shared experiences, I’m sure that the Greek diaspora is not the only one that finds itself bound together by the sheer habit involved in the conservation of faith. There’s also the conservation of language, if applicable, and the ridiculous magnitude of joy one’s mother tongue can inspire. Whether you hear it from a few family members at home has no bearing on how different it is to step into a space so full of your language that it bounces off the walls. All 700,000-some-odd words in the Bible aren’t enough to describe the feeling evoked by the chatter of grandmothers gossipping after a service. Religious rituals have nothing on mundane ones—not this far from home—where maintaining faith becomes about maintaining community as a means for a culture’s survival. Iron your dress, go to church, leave a donation, make small talk at the luncheon. Hear your language, see your people. Grasp at the thinning threads that connect you to your country. Do it again.

The thing about Greek services is that they’re in Greek—not my mother’s Greek, which sits sweet on my tongue and rolls around my mouth like a piece of hard candy, but Byzantine Greek, which was spoken between the sixth and fifteenth centuries. A quick glance around any Greek church will reveal three degrees of awareness neatly spliced according to age. There are the grandparents, who have been memorising entire liturgies for six or seven decades, the parents, who were dragged to church regularly enough that they have a firm grasp on the gist but not the specifics, and finally, the kids. If they’re lucky, the oldest kids can somewhat follow along based on their understanding of modern Greek. The youngest spend the better part of three hours staring blankly at the back of someone’s head while an utterly foreign version of their language washes past them. There are exceptions, such as with recently relocated families and less religious ones, but the main groupings are standard.

I only know worship in my mother tongue, and for most of my life, I encountered it in a way which was inaccessible to me unless I could produce a line to God myself. I tried to speak rather than listening—only ever praying in Greek, and only ever that I may fathom or be fathomed in some unattainable manner—in which case the only thing I understood was my own desire and the words I assigned it. Straining to catch bits and pieces of the priest’s sermon, I attended church with the thought that God knew I couldn’t hear Him and a blind belief that this unease was holy. 

My friend recently told me that it seems like my favourite parts of church don’t have much to do with church at all. I go to church so I can sit in the mess hall after the service and be surrounded by the version of my language that I actually learned, rather than the iteration not spoken since the Middle Ages. I go to church because I like singing in the choir, even if the Byzantine hymns don’t make much sense to me. I go to church because I love being able to look up and see a clamouring collection of people my six year-old self, fresh off a plane to Canada, would have recognised. 

I don’t love church—I love Greek. 

I miss home. 

I’ve said it a few times before but it’s worth repeating here: I don’t feel like I grew up religious, I just feel like I grew up Greek. These things become synonymous when my eyes skip ahead on the sheet music for a new hymn, stumbling on words they don’t recognise, or when I miss five minutes of the service attempting to puzzle out the last thing I heard the priest say. There is a difference between hearing and understanding; there is likewise a difference between understanding and believing.

As I have familiarised myself with this dissonance, I have also grown accustomed to a childish question which took root when I was younger and never quite dried up: if you can believe all of that without having a clue what’s being said to you, then why can’t you believe me?

After we moved to Canada, I often reached for mythology when I missed home and felt too alienated by the incoherence of church to look for comfort there. These were the first times I interacted with many of these stories in English, as my love for them was fostered by my mother, who would read me picture book versions in Greek before I learned to do it myself. One of my favourite stories long precedes the nights I spent with my forehead pressed to the cool wood of the pew in front of mine. It starts like this: Cassandra was a Trojan priestess, cursed by Apollo that her prophecies would always come true but no one would ever believe them. 

Those familiar with the story of Troy in any capacity know it as a fallen city. Chances are that you’ve encountered it from an Achaean (often translated as “Greek,” though that’s an oversimplification) perspective as an object of conquest. You’ve probably heard about the wily, heroic Odysseus, and how he devised a trick in the form of a false surrender and the gift of a massive wooden horse. While the Trojans celebrated, believing that they had won, Achaean soldiers slipped out from a hidden compartment inside the belly of the horse and slaughtered the inhabitants of the city in their sleep. It was Cassandra who foresaw her people’s fate and shouted it from the rooftops. In Quintus Smyrnaeus’s The Fall of Troy, she tore through the streets of Troy with an axe and a torch, but she was caught and dragged away from the wooden horse the soldiers had hauled past the city gates before she could do anything about it. Everyone heard; no one listened. Troy fell.

The playwright Aeschylus composed a trio of plays, collectively referred to as the Oresteia, which took place in the aftermath of the Trojan War. The first play, Agamemnon, follows the titular Achaean general as he returns to his home of Mycenae, bringing a captured Cassandra with him. After Agamemnon’s wife murders him in retribution for an earlier misdeed, she kills Cassandra as well. Cassandra goes to her death having foreseen it. She dies alone and she dies doubted, miles from the corpses of her brothers and the rubble of a home that wouldn’t listen no matter how much she raised her voice. There is a difference between being heard and being understood; there is likewise a difference between being understood and being believed. 

Here’s the kicker—in Agamemnon, the chorus does believe Cassandra. For the uninitiated, a chorus is a host of performers in ancient Greek theatre who play a uniform set, like sailors or soldiers, speaking as one to react to the play’s main action on behalf of the audience. The chorus bridges the gap between character and spectator, fiction and reality. They are observers, commentators, and audience surrogates who typically have little impact on the story as it unfolds in the hands of the main players. 

The chorus of Agamemnon represents the elders of Mycenae. “The price I paid was that no one listened to me,” Cassandra tells them, and they reply, “Your prophecies seem credible enough to us.” This seems, at first, impossible. If Cassandra bears the curse of an all-powerful god, then how are these elders able to bypass it, and why is it never addressed by the text? 

My amateur theory as a fledgling Classics student consists of two options. The first is that the elders are not affected by Cassandra’s curse because they have no autonomous control over the events of the story. Their roles include bearing witness, commenting, heightening dramatic tension, provoking an emotional response from the audience, and echoing the views of the public. Aeschylus did sometimes centre his choruses in the action but the elders of Mycenae are afforded no such individual will. There is nothing they can do to help Cassandra, and therefore the curse does not care if they believe her or not.

The second possibility has to do with the last role I listed. Unlike Cassandra’s people, the audience knows she is right—this story has been told a thousand times before. If the audience believes Cassandra, then by extension, the chorus must too. The tragedy isn’t that no one believed her at all, it’s that the only people who did were powerless to save her. 

I wrote this article on a selfish and dramatic impulse, for the version of myself who first learned that language alone was not always enough. There is a twelve year-old girl in my head and she is still asking why she wasn’t believed, having grown up trusting that, if understanding and believing were to be mutually exclusive, the same principle would be extended to her. When it wasn’t, she turned to stories where courageous characters in far more dire predicaments told the truth at any cost. She watched Cassandra dance across the page and she was spellbound. Years later, I can’t help but find my church beautiful regardless. In many ways, I feel like it gives me back a piece of my language every Christmas, Easter, nameday, and Sunday choir rehearsal. In just as many ways, I feel like I’m leaving some small part of myself in the nave every time I stand to go home.

I often wonder if I would have believed Cassandra. Countless stories have been written about mortals who dared to presume they could defy the will of the divine, but God knows I’ve never never been very good at changing things. I like to think that I’d be a member of the chorus, unimportant enough to hear her. Of course, that’s the issue with reading tragedies. We like to think that we could have done things differently, that we would have listened, that the characters could have rewritten the ending if they had somehow grasped the incommunicable truth of the matter before it was too late. On a level almost too profound to articulate, this is the point of reading the tragedy but decidedly not the point of the tragedy itself. It doesn’t matter that someone could have listened. It matters that they didn’t. 

I find hope in the tragedy of Cassandra despite this—rather, I find hope in her story because of it. There is a peculiar optimism to the grief of the reader who misses the point and thinks they would have done differently. Troy is dust between the pages and the boundaries of the stage; the story is over and Cassandra is gone. Still, the audience hears, understands, and believes what the characters could not. The audience eulogises the Trojan girl with the curse of foresight. The audience writes two thousand-word articles about her. As far as my relationship to religion through language goes, my preoccupation with Cassandra culminates in two questions: how do you believe, or believe in, something you don’t understand? What makes one unbelievable thing more acceptable than another?

I’m not sure I’ll ever know the answer, but I have managed to excavate some reassurance from the tragedy and its reception. I am holding onto this: if no one believes you now, someone will believe you later, and it won’t matter to them that they can’t change what happened. They will listen to you anyway.