A Greecian Weeding
9th
Turning south, via a grueling two day bus and train ride, I left the mud and bleakness of Eastern Europe to enter the Mediterranean climate, where even the sun seems happier. Crossing the border at night, I woke to a bright day in Thessaloniki, Greece’s second largest city after Athens. On the outskirts of Thessaloniki is Zendropotamos, an area of low nondescript houses, known by all as the Gypsy quarter. The shops, bars, fast food places, and kiosks are almost exclusively Roma owned. Most dominant of all shops are the wholesale leather coat outlets, their windows boasting the same black low cut coat. Many Roma here do the same thing for a living, namely sell goods on the street for a high markup. Ironically, using their reputation as thieves, they buy cheap imitation goods (watches, clothing) and sell them on the street as the original, making the buyer think they just got a good deal from a Gypsy who wanted to get rid of stolen merchandise quickly. Who the joke is on, I’m not sure. Other Roma do large quantity transport of bulk goods. A common sight in the neighborhood are huge lorries, decked out inside for long distance travel with the family, used to cargo potatoes, tangerines, scrap metal, whatever, from one place to another. This in mainly in Greece, but not exclusively. The eastern block countries are starved for some goods, while plentiful in others such as whiskey, vodka, cigarettes, some arms, or even drugs.
Even though the houses are modest, the cars are inordinately fancy, BMW’s and Mercedes a common site in the street. Once again the paradox of the Roma (in my Gadge eyes) can be seen: scruffy barefoot children playing on the porch of a small concrete house, whilst the newest luxury car sits beaming in the driveway. But on the whole this is a wealthy neighbourhood, and people are much better dressed than I am.
The day I arrived was the beginning of another Roma wedding. It can often appear that life savings are spent on Roma weddings, and this one seemed to be no exception. Two pavilions were set up, each at one end of the neighborhood, about a kilometer apart. Inside were rows of tables and chairs, enough to seat several hundred, and at the end a stage for the musicians. One pavilion was for the bride’s family, the other the groom’s. The two families were different, I was informed, the groom’s being Roma, the bride’s being Tsingene. What this meant, I was soon to learn.
As night fell, the music began to play, guitar, clarinet, electric synthesizer, violin and drums, all amplified to ear breaking heights through large speakers at all ends of the pavilion. People began to gather, many people. The whole village came, the family members seated and the less connected standing at the entrance. Then the food and alcohol came, lots of it. As soon as a plate was finished, as soon as a bottle was emptied, another was brought, on and on, an army of servers running back and forth loaded with food and drink. Children, ever present, ran around, rolled, danced, cried, screamed and played, weaving through the still relatively calm grownups. This would change as the evening progressed, showing that the grownups were only preserving their strength for what was to come.
As the alcohol began to flow in the revelers’ veins, pushing the blood to their faces, families rose to dance, and this is when the difference between the two clans began to show. The groom’s tent held an air of formality, a feeling that, although people were drunk, very drunk, and stoned, there was control, that chaos still lived somewhere else than in this tent. One at a time, families rose to take the dance floor for a few songs as the rest of the family watched. The women pulsated their hips, and the men rose their arms, circling them. Men stood and threw handfuls of money onto the dance floor, the bills fluttering to the ground to be danced on. Eventually, whenever the risk of getting trampled lessened, scuttering children picked up the money, placing it into a basket on the stage as payment for the band. After a few songs, one family sat back down and another rose to dance and be seen by the rest of the group. For many hours this went on, late into the night, like drunken clockwork. There was a sense of order to them.
Not so for the bride’s tent of Tsingene on the other side of the village. They started much the same way as the groom’s family, each family taking their turn as the rest watched, but soon madness grabbed their souls, wrenching them from the mundane, orderly life and throwing them into a passionate revelry where the music, alcohol and passion of what was happening overtook them all. Their loved child, for after all she was only fourteen, was soon to enter womanhood, and with it, would leave them to live with the groom’s family. This consumed them with joy and sadness, tears flowing as abundantly as laughter. Children danced on tables, adults danced everywhere, hugging each other, some out of happiness, some because they needed a shoulder to cry on, and all caught in a craze that undulated the tent walls. Men fought, punched each other, punched themselves, all out of the madness that needs no reason. The older brother, affected more than most, at one point began lashing out at whoever he could, and had to be held down until his rage subsided into hopeless sobs. The mother wandered around beyond belief that her newly born child was already leaving her to live with a man and make a family of her own. Only a few years ago her daughter was an infant, only recently did she get her period, and now she’s leaving. “Why?” the mother would ask family members as she wandered the tent. But nobody could answer. This is just what happens. The bride, sitting near the dance floor on a throne for all to see, decked in a white dress that dwarfed her small frame, laden with pounds of gold, sat dazed, sometimes crying, sometimes laughing. People fed her beer, putting the bottle to her mouth and tipping it upwards like a milk bottle. On and on the music glared, people screamed, beer bottles broke, and more children cried as their bedtimes passed and the parents danced on into the night.
This went on for two days, then at the end of the second night, in less than two minutes, they were gone. The whole family, bride and all, without warning disappeared into the night with a clash of crying babies, honking horns and screeching tires. One minute they packed the pavilion with madness, the next, they left it, a desolate wasteland. Overturned tables, hundreds of broken beer bottles and half eaten plates of food, scattered chairs, all lying in stark solitary silence, silence that chilled the spine in contrast to what pounded the ears just moments before. What happened? They had decided it was time to go. To somewhere else, only they knew where. Perhaps to bed. In the craziness, nobody had bothered to tell me, the very nice but dumb gadge.
The next day I met the bride on the street. She invited me to her new home with much pride. Her family was sitting on the floor counting money. They counted out large wads of big bills and handed them to the young bride to keep in a pouch around her waist: dowry money that the newlyweds would use to set up house.
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