On a Mother-Daughter Trip to the Peloponnese, I Found New Ways to Carry My Greek Heritage
This essay is part of Companion Fare, a series of personal stories about traveling with loved ones.
I didn’t need to understand what my mother was saying to know the restaurant server had just called us foreigners. They both uttered the word, xenis, in their perfect local-dialect Greek; he in passing to a busboy, she shooting it back at him to dress him down with a knowing smile. “Ne signomi, kyria,” he replied, embarrassed, as he hustled off the restaurant patio. Yes, excuse me, miss.
After several seconds of silence, I goaded her for a translation. “Did you tell him we’re not xenis?” My mother summed up her response coolly without looking up from her menu: “I said, ‘Me sir? I’m not a foreigner. I grew up coming here.’”
We were in the southern Peloponnese, on our final day of exploring its beaches and mountain towns. My grandparents left this wild coastal region of Greece just before my mother was born, and she summered here annually into her early adulthood. Had the man referred to my mother and me as xenis on the first day of our trip, she might not have protested at all. But this was the tail end of our long-awaited pilgrimage to her ancestral home. Something had switched on in her this past week, in all the translating and reliving of past memories. And I could see she wasn’t going to let this man get away with calling her foreign on our final evening in Pylos.
About my mother, the server was wrong. But the fact is, I am definitely a foreigner here. It’s signaled by my name, my blue eyes, and my complete lack of Greek-language skills; my cousins in Athens have derided them all. Thanks to my mom—a third-culture kid who spoke exclusively Greek until she was of school age in Toronto and Brooklyn—I have learned to deeply love her culture. Our culture.
In the five years since my papou (grandfather) died from COVID-19 at the start of the pandemic, which robbed us of a final farewell, I was on a mission to get my mom back to the Peloponnese for the first time in three decades—on a goodbye tour of sorts. It would be my first time beyond the islands and Athens, a city that, from the first time I visited family there as a teenager, felt almost as if it had been home once, long ago. Since childhood, I heralded the thick accents of my quiet yia yia and boisterous papou and relished hearing my mom and aunt speak only fluent Greek with them over long “vacations” spent in their Long Island backyard pool. We’d watch planes fly low overhead, eat horiatiki made with ingredients from their garden, and insist they phonetically teach us Greek phrases as if we would miraculously become fluent in their native tongue too. (My sisters and I missed out on Greek-school lessons in our Irish-Catholic suburb outside of Boston, where our parents met in college, and none of us have gotten over it.) I existentially dreaded the day my Spartan grandparents would no longer be around for me to hear their language. Once that day half-arrived, through one unceremonious pandemic death that made my mom and aunt the caretakers of my yia yia, I decided it was high time to venture to the village, with my mom by my side.
When my mom speaks Greek here, no one can believe she is American. They ask incredulously when she left Greece, and she insists she was born in Canada. This happened constantly on our trip, whether at the flashy Mandarin Oriental Costa Navarino near Pylos, where we took a cooking class with a local yia yia, or in the tiny Byzantine town square of Mystras, two hours away, where we hunted for my great-grandmother’s stone house. It’s still in the family, but the exact location has been lost because of our decades away (and to shoddy Google Maps results in the towering mountains). We finally found our way with the help of warm locals sitting in squares on plastic lawn chairs—near ringers for my papou and his old poolside perch back on Long Island.
“I think they all live in New York City now,” one elderly woman said kindly to my mom at one of several stops for directions. We explained our mission to a shopkeeper named Georgia. Coincidentally, she housekeeps for the property through our relatives and happily handed us the keys to the garden gate.
On the sidewalk beside the house, we paused to light candles at a tiny open-air chapel: My papou’s sister had passed away a few days prior. We got the news at the hotel restaurant, and my mother broke down in tears. As I comforted her, none of the hotel staff batted an eye. This is one of many Mediterranean customs I’ve always associated with my mom, one that has made me who and how I am: the ceremonious feeling and expressing of emotions, but particularly sorrow, so fully and unapologetically.
This might be why in the village, seeing the Byzantine fortress of my papou’s childhood tales and our ancestral stone house for the first time, I always expected the tears to start flowing freely—but instead I felt the opposite, a warm hum of alignment between myself and a place that created the people who raised me. The orange trees were thick with bright fruit and the rose bushes were perfectly pruned into giant pink-and-yellow blooms. A bowl of dried whole walnuts sat beside an emptied ashtray, and heavy terra-cotta pots of sunflowers lined the ancient stone-walled lawn. It was nearly the same as my grandparents’ tidy garden back home, as if they were around the corner in their sun hats waiting for me to arrive.
I intended for my mom’s first time back here in decades to be a girls trip , a break from caring for her elderly mother—and it might have been if it wasn’t for all the translating and scavenger hunting for places we half-knew from family lore. But most of all, what this trip became for both of us was a new beginning, not the farewell I’d positioned it as.
This realization came in waves over the week: that instead of losing the culture and connection we worried about disappearing back home, we could pick it up and carry it for ourselves. My parents are kicking off retirement this year by spending a full month of it in Greece and returning to the village again. I, meanwhile, am enrolling in Greek classes at the Hellenic university a mile from my house in Boston, hopeful that my college-level Spanish will aid some conversation-level Greek—and plan to join my parents for part of their trip, perhaps in one of the five-star spas that have sprung up in town. Beyond this, we’re also reviving old recipes of my yia yia, who passed away six months after we returned from Greece; enough time to show her all the photos and souvenirs from our pilgrimage to her and my papou's true home.
Bleary-eyed at the Athens airport before our early-morning flight home, my only tears of the trip finally sprang to my eyes. After spending days-long conversations rehashing stories and biographies about a generation that was fast slipping away from us, I didn’t want it all to end.
“What do you think Papou would say?” I asked my mom—one final question of so many levied at her that week—as we wheeled our bags toward the gates. “Oh, I don’t think he’d believe it,” she sighed. It had taken us a while ourselves, after all.
Originally Appeared on Condé Nast Traveler
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