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A singing bus - true story


Elena
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This funny scene has happened a few years ago. If I wouldn’t have been a protagonist, I would have said that it could have happened only in a strange old fashioned movie. It really happened to me and my friends in Greece, but you can imagine it in any country and region where there is a bigger minority group.

For example, in the USA, a French tourist who can speak both English and Spanish (in a region in the South, with lots of Spanish-speaking people) and is familiar with Mexican culture, or in UK, in an area with many people of Indian descent, a German tourist who had graduated Oriental studies on this major and had spent a year in New Delhi or Bombay as an exchange student..

I was in Greece with two friends, a few years ago (or more than a few…). We were going through the Thessalian plain, to Kalambaka and, respectively, Meteora, where the famous Medieval monasteries hanging on tops of mountains are located. What less people know is that the respective area is populated, besides Greeks, by Aromanians, how they call themselves, or Vlachs, how the Greeks call them. They are a national minority speaking a dialect of Romanian (or, according to other opinions, a separate language very similar to Romanian). I am speaking both Greek and this dialect.

I had been before to Kalambaka and Meteora; for my two friends it was their first time in Greece. I had with me two tapes of Aromanian music for an old shop-keeper in Kalambaka, whom I had met the other time, four years ago.

We were in the bus. My friends were seated on a double place, and me on the seat across the passage from them. By my side, next to the window, a railways man in uniform, returning from work. Actually about half of the bus passengers were railways men returning from work, including the ones in front of me. My friends were asking me (or I was telling them) about the places we were passing through, which were full of history of different periods. The man in front of me was following us carefully and, at a certain moment, he tried to ask me in a broken English where we were from. He had been trying to guess if we were Italian or Portuguese, actually, and he had a controversy on this subject with his seat neighbour. I answered him in Greek, to his great surprise: “We are from Romania!” Then, he asked me “How are you?” in Aromanian, looking at me carefully to study my reaction. I was smiling and answering him promptly in the language he had asked me in “Very well!”

Another girl, in front of him, asked me something in Aromanian too, and I answered. Actually, they wanted to understand the similarities and differences between Romanian and Aromanian, and I find myself engrossed in the discussion, a little in Aromanian and then back to Greek, which they are speaking better than their mother tongue, with the girl in front (ie two seats in front of me), who introduces herself as Eleni, sharing the same name with me, and with the railways man in front of me, who is her cousin. She told me that the driver was Aromanian too, but he hadn’t learnt the language. After a while of discussion, the railways man is telling me that actually he wasn’t born in this region, but somewhere farther West, from a bigger village.

“Have you heard of Samarina village?” he asks me.

I had heard of it from stories and songs, because it was a big one, with rich men owning thousands of sheep (I am talking in the 1700s-1800s) and with brave rebels who fought against the Turkish occupation. But instead of saying merely “Yes”, my mind, accustomed to “think in songs”, how many people had said about me, found another answer, so I am singing on a low voice, next to his ear, my favourite Aromanian song:

“You, lads of Aromanian villages,
Lads of Samarina, strong and brave...”


His eyes got rounded in wonder, and his grin widened. He shouted at his cousin, excited:

“Eleni, this girl is singing to me in Aromanian Pedia tis Samarinas (the Greek title – the song had been translated into Greek too, and it circulates in both languages), if I told her I am from Samarina!”

He started to sing with me, loudly – the chorus in Aromanian, but the main verses in Greek, because this is the only way he knows them. Eleni sings with us too, and two –three more around us catch the song too – the Greek version. Then the driver takes the microphone and sings with us in Greek:

“You, lads of Samarina, strong and brave…”

My friends have fun, they look at us and chuckle, they can’t understand how I succeeded to start this unusual concert. I am singing in Aromanian, I like the athmosphere, and about one third of the bus is singing it in Greek. This was a scene worth filmed! I wouldn’t have believed it unless part of a movie…

Meanwhile, my brain is still thinking in all directions, and I take a decision: I have two tapes with Aromanian songs, my old friend will receive only one, as I promised to him four years ago for “if I ever return”, and I’ll give the other one to the railways man, with the loud indication to listen to it together with his cousin. I am sure I have done the right thing, even if my two friends, who knew about the tapes and the story of the old man they were destined to, look at me strangely what determined me to part with a tape sooner, to give it to an unknown man. One of them asked me, later that evening, if from my part it was love at first sight, or if I exchanged addresses with him!

But the driver had witnessed it too. He hadn’t missed anything of my words and gestures, and he didn’t like the fact that I offered the man an Aromanian tape. He frowned and started accusing me of propaganda. I got too angry at hearing this to be able to focus, to understand all his words, but he is scolding me. A part I understood was “I know the likes of you! I was at Athens and I got the explanation that we the Vlachs are actually Greeks, and we had been forced to adopt the Latin language…” Yes, this is propaganda – the one he had heard. I had been warned before that these kind of lies were told in Greece since the Balkan Wars of 1912. But I didn’t quarrel with him, it had no use. I was trembling of anger at his undeserved scolding, without answering him, and my friends tried to appease me.

“What happened? Why were you quarrelling with the driver? Was he jealous that you haven’t given the tape to him?”

“No, it was a political dispute, I’ll tell you the details another time”.

This is how a funny, lovely song scene ended not so lovely... Damn all the politics in this world!

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