Clogs (Τσόκαρα)

When I was in Holland, I visited an open-air windmill museum in Zaanse Schans. One of the windmills was being used to show the history of the clog, and there was a display in the windmill of how clogs were made. Dutch clogs look kind of strange, and I didn't think anyone would wear them now, as they look so dated, stemming back from a time when people had less and didn't have access to much else - until I saw an older-looking gent wearing a pair of bright yellow clogs as he was riding his bike in a quiet suburb of a Dutch town in the north.


When I decided to buy a pair of clogs (in the Swedish style and not the Dutch, even though they are made in Holland, because I'd really stand out if I ever chose to wear the latter in Crete), my husband thought I was mad. But they suit my kind of lifestyle - I only wear shoes when I have to, and if I can slip them on and off easily, all the better. I was given instructions at the clog windmill as to how to wear them "Always with a thick pair of socks, so they don't cause you any discomfort."

I began wearing my clogs in Hania in late autumn. I noticed that they made a lot of noise as I walked on the bare tiles of the floor, but I only put them on just before I was ready to leave the house. They were relatively quiet on the carpeted areas. But still, they did not pass by unnoticed. I wore them yesterday as I was taking a piece of moussaka to yiayia (which we cooked in the wood-fired heater). She looked down at my feet and said "So it's you who's been wearing tsokara!"

"Oops," I started apologetically. Yiayia lives downstairs from us, so I was obviously making quite a clatter as I walked about the house in them. "I  didn't realise they were that loud, mama, sorry."

"I haven't heard that noise in years," she continued, as if she hadn't heard me. "They were the only shoes we had when I was a young girl, and throughout the war years. Our fathers would hew them out of wood, and nail a piece of leather on top for your feet. Most people didn't actually have any shoes at all, so I was very lucky that my father had made me a pair. And my mother never let me wear them without socks, unlike other children, whose feet were always looking red and sore, because they had no socks to wear with their clogs. And they had no other shoes, so if they didn't wear them, then they'd have to go barefoot. So many children had dirty feet in those days."

"They must have been useful in the fields, mama," I said, hoping to coax her memory to tell me more.

"Well, they never got left stuck in the mud, but if you were walking on the flat road, you often tripped because they were quite slippery. They needed a bit of rubber on the sole, but we didn't have anything, especially when the war broke out. We had nothing, not even any food. And I walked in those clogs without socks to the neighbouring village where we took refuge with another family. By the time we got there, my legs were so red and sore that my ankles had swelled and I collapsed."

Although she went through a terrible ordeal during WW2, she still has the courage to talk about it. Even though she says she'd like to forget those times, it seems that in her older age (my mother-in-law is 88), she remembers those days even more clearly. 

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Little shoes (Παπουτσάκια)

Children quickly grow out of their shoes much more quickly than their clothes. I knew my son needed new shoes, but not because I had seen the holes in his old ones. Up until last week, he had only one pair of shoes, which were close to a year old. So he really did need another pair of shoes. The made-in-china boots that we'd bought him on sale (21 euro) from a large shoe warehouse in Hania came apart after a week of being worn. We stuck them down twice with super-glue, but in the back of our minds, we knew that those boots could not really be classified as a decent pair of second shoes.

Unlike little girls, little boys don't always tell you they need new shoes. They don't always realise that having holes in your shoes is a not a good thing. Sometimes, they get attached to the comfort that a pair of old shoes offers, even if their socks get wet (which is how I realised that there were holes in his shoes). Little girls don't need to wait to feel the discomfort. They will have the finger pointed at them, or more likely, down to their shoes, by other fashion victims, who will say: "Look, your shoes have got holes in them!" and they'll come straight to mummy and daddy and tell them that they need new shoes.

Shoes are not really a top priority in my house because both mummy and daddy in this house know that their mummies and daddies grew up with no shoes. In fact, yiayia doesn't have a pair of shoes, only a pair of slippers and a pair of muddy old shoes with holes in them that she uses for the garden. When we mentioned to her that she needed a pair of shoes, she insisted that she didn't. "I never go anywhere, I am always at home, and if I go into hospital, I won't need shoes there," she answered. Her first pair of shoes, like all my children's grandparents, came when she was nearing her teens.

We now wear shoes because everyone else does, and we don't always mind if our shoes are old, as long as we have something covering our feet, because it looks more civil. Greeks are not like Kiwis, where people like to walk barefoot in the street after work before they go to the pub, or even at work like one of my maths professors at university, who came to the lecture theatre barefoot (right throughout the year). And in Greece, there are appropriate shoes for the appropriate time of the year, so another of my lecturers in the TESOL department would have looked quite out of place in her jandals (that was her only pair of shoes throughout the year). Wearing shoes in Greece is not necessarily about making a fashion or lifestyle statement; it's all about appropriateness.

Although it is a priority to wear shoes in Greece, it isn't a priority to wear shoes without holes in them. Priorities these days have to do with preserving our health (especially in this cold winter that we're having), eating healthy food (which has probably helped us to preserve our health), keeping safe and out of harm's way (like not entering areas where protest marches are scheduled to take place), and paying our bills, so that we don't have to feel threatened by having our communication and electricity supplies (aka in Greece as OTE and DEH) cut off. Priorities differ among us, but this kind of lifestyle has suited us so far, and surely I can't be so special that I am one of a small minority who lives like this in Greece. After all, only about one or two hundred-thousand Athenians thronged the streets on that fateful Sunday when Athens was razed. The other four million or so citizens of Athens were presumably keeping out of harm's way.



Last week, we found some time to go into town and buy some new shoes. It was cold and wet; umbrellas don't do much for you on narrow streets, like those in the commercial heart of Hania. The rain was coming down too quickly and heavily for the drains to cope, and we all got soaked as we tried to avoid the puddles, especially my own feet; despite the heavy rains we have had in Crete, I still buy very cheap shoes which I know look fine at an office job, but in essence, they are not appropriate for walking around in wet weather.

We had a few problems finding a good pair of shoes for my son because we were looking for them late in the sales period, which meant that the most popular sizes and colours had run out. Finally, we found a store that offered good sports shoes (this is what most Greek kids wear to school, except the girls whose parents doll them up in their grandparents' and godparents' presents) at reasonable prices. My son could choose between a lace-up and a scratch pair; he chose the latter (for obvious reasons, as lace-ups mean more work), at a cost of 45 euro (his old shoes - the same brand, an almost similar pair - had cost 50 euro the previous year).

Papoutsakia (little shoes), cooked in the wood-fired oven

The next day, when he returned home from school, I asked him if his new shoes were as comfortable as his old pair.

"Yes, these ones are really good," he said. "They even keep my feet warm."

Now that he knows the difference between his old and new shoes, I wonder if he will remember to tell me when he needs a new pair. If this happens, I also wonder whether I'll be in a position to buy him a new pair of shoes when he needs them. At the moment, it doesn't look that way, unless I change the order of my priorities: first I buy new shoes, then I pay my electric bill - or simply convert our savings account into a current account.

Right this minute, Modern Greece is a tale of two cities, or rather, two camps:

"The good thing is that the dividing lines are becoming clearer: There are those out there are working hard to drag us into another civil war, isolation, and financial misery. The others, particularly the silent masses who have for years tolerated useless politicians and a corrupt power system, must think with their heads but also with the Greekest part of their hearts, to show the world -- even our most skeptical critics -- that we have the strength to turn things around, but also to show to ourselves what we are really worth."

What most people don't care to admit is that this crisis is survivable. I know this, because I know what I'm worth. I'm sorry to say, but not all my fellow compatriots do.

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