Yabanaki

In the US, Labor Day weekend marks the end of the summer season.  So here is my farewell to the summer of 2018.

Yabanaki is a beach in Varkiza, a coastal suburb about 23 miles south of Athens.  Translating Yabanaki into English is an interesting exercise.  To Greeks, yabanaki means “for little banio” where banio, as used in modern Greek, means bathroom and bath as in its original Italian word banio or Spanish bano.  But in modern Greek, when you say “let’s go for banio” you can also mean swimming.  And if swimming is mostly in your mind, you can also say “let’s go for kolymbi” meaning for swimming.  My daughter who knows some Greek and is a stickler for literal precision wants to know when exactly you invite someone to go for banio as opposed for kolymbi.  I try to explain the difference, but how do you convince a non-Greek speaker that an invitation to go for banio does not mean to bring shampoo, just in case.   I suppose the godfather of Yabanaki wanted to leave it up to the bathers what they wanted to do in the water and chose Yabanaki instead of Yakolymbi.

When we are in Greece for summer vacation, my family likes to go to Yabanaki.  While they situate themselves in the long chairs under the umbrellas, I take my place under the best and most durable shade I can find in the outdoor cafeteria about 30 feet up from the sandy beach.  The horizontal burlap-like shade that stands between relief from the scorching sun and unbearable discomfort, is not sun ray proof.  There are holes and gaps here and there to allow the air and breeze to circulate.  Unfortunately, the sun in Varkiza doesn’t stay put in the sky.  It likes to move. And as it moves, your shady spot becomes a sweat-yielding hot plate.  I know, I know, to be cosmologically correct I should have said, Varkiza has the nasty habit to orbit around the sun.  But some poetic license, please.

Finding a nice, lasting shade isn’t easy.  If you go around 11 o’ clock in the morning all the prime spots have been taken by the senior citizens of Varkiza.  Better wait until 1 o’ clock, when most of them return home for lunch and siesta. Once I claim possession to the best table I can find, I buy my frappe, sit comfortably in my chair, open the newspaper, or, more often, my summer reading book and enjoy the lazy summer time.  Frappe, for those who are not familiar, is coffee added to an inch of water and beaten up to a frothy liquid to which you add more water, ice cubes, and if you like some cream or milk and sugar.  True coffee aficionados stay away from it.  To them, it’s straight out of a witch’s brew recipe book.  But to Greeks – and me – it’s the best summer beverage modern Greeks have invented to go head to head with the nectar of Olympian Gods.

So here I am, frappe on the table, seated with one leg or both stretched and propped up by another chair, and with book or newspaper in hand.  A good Greek man needs at least three chairs to feel comfortable: one to put his heinie down, a second to prop his leg(s) and a third to rest his (usually) left arm.  After many years of living in America I have become a bit more westernized in my seating habits and I can do with two chairs.  Thus situated, I can enjoy my time in Yabanaki.  It takes a strong will and attention to just concentrate on reading.  First, there is the loud music blared out of two powerful speakers.  The selection includes party versions of pop hits  – you know, those with that rhythmic drum beat.  Actually, it’s not bad.  It adds a care-free celebratory air.

Then it’s the crowd of bathers.  I look at the new arrivals.  Their faces have an anticipatory optimistic look.  They can’t wait to throw themselves into the sea and relieve their discomfort from the nearly-100-degree temperature microwaving their bodies.  I look at those leaving the beach and I see a resignation on their faces that tells me no matter how many times they splashed into the water they realized it was all in vain, an ephemeral break, and now they are returning to what they hoped to escape.  By seven o’ clock in the evening, more bathers leave Yabanaki than arrive.  Actually, late comers have it the best.  The water is still comfortably warm and the heat on the beach is quite friendlier to the human body.

The more interesting and educational diversion, however, is the swimwear of the crowd.  If you are serious about studying the diversity in which human self-image comes, I recommend you spend time in an airport, the New York City subway, or in Yabanaki (or any other beach).  It’s all in how people dress.  In Yabanaki, it’s about what parts of the body bathers choose not to cover.  A friend of mine likes to say “Merciful God gave us clothes for a good reason,” starting, of course, with the fig leaf.

When it comes to swimwear, it seems to me men and women have followed opposite trajectories.  Men’s swimming suits have gotten longer over time while women’s suits have gotten skimpier.  Ever since NBA players switched from real shorts to down-the-knee shorts, men around the world have followed suit (not pun intended) and cover more of their thighs.  (That’s just my own theory.)  The trend for women has been a whole different story.  Except for parts of the Muslim world, where beach fashion has been stuck in the Abbasid Caliphate period, women in the rest of the planet decided several decades ago to save fabric and throw the yarn producing industry in irreversible decline.  A modest exception to that trend are American women.  If you are in a beach frequented by tourists you can tell which of the women age 40 and over are American; those in one-piece suits.  Damn those Puritans. They still have a hold on modern America.

I don’t exactly know how women in other countries switched to bikinis and less, but I have my theory regarding Greek women.  (OK, I know I am committing a big mistake; a man trying to explain female habits.)  When I was growing in Greece, I would spend my summers in my mother’s village.  Back in the fifties and sixties swimming was not popular among the grown-ups.  It was less so for women.  Many middle-age and older village women that ventured into the water wore a black light fabric robe over undergarments, resembling the Muslim women’s dress of abaya.  You could tell the female city vacationers from their regular one-piece swim suits.  But then two things came to the Greek countryside: TV and contact with the rising number of foreign tourists.  Greek women were never the same again.  Of course, there were movies that offered a window to foreign cultures, but movie theaters were practically not existent in small towns and few people had cars.  Besides, TV offers a sharper, more direct look into everyday contemporary life than movies.  Once Greek women saw how women lived and dressed in Europe and America, they embraced liberalization in earnest. First came smoking.  My otherwise socially conservative aunts were early adopters.  Second, came more fashionable clothes and quick following of western trends – the mini skirt being one of them.  Next came dating. No more strict curfews and nagging from parents.  No more match-made marriages.  By the late seventies, foreign tourists had established de facto nudist beaches in several Greek islands, like Mykonos.  Predictably, showing more skin was the next step toward the full liberalization of Greek women.  It also had to be an equal opportunity liberalization.  Not only for young but for older women as well.  I have kept going to the village in the summer.  The abaya-like swim wear is a faint distant memory.  Hardly any young females wear one-piece suits anymore.  Even older women, in their seventies, sometimes in their eighties, wear two-piece swim suits.  Body shape seems to be the least of their concern.  I remember what my friend says about God and clothes, but I personally say, Bravo.  How you look is your business. If you feel comfortable, screw what others think.  After all, we are in Greece, the ancient land of nude statues and nude athletes (gymnasium was where naked (gymnoi) male athletes practiced and competed).  That’s the land that gave us Aphrodite of Milo in all her glorious semi-nude beauty.  If not in Greece, where else are the women of the world supposed to declare their self-confidence in their bodies?

I wonder whether it is the exposure to western swimwear styles and habits that explains why Greek women gave themselves so unreservedly to their no-holds-barred beach fashion.  Could it be a subconscious re-connection to ancient Greek norms about nudity though now with an egalitarian approach across the sexes?  Maybe, maybe not.  What about the opinion of Greek social commentators that Greeks are avid imitators of foreign life styles?  There is no part of western life style (especially European – with Italian and French having the greatest impact) that Greeks don’t like to adopt.  I had read that in 2008 (just before the Greek debt crisis erupted) Nielsen ranked Greeks second to Hong Kong consumers in the relative consumption of brand items.  Reportedly, one area in Thessaly (in central Greece) had the highest number of Porsche Cayenne vehicles relative to its population, more than what you could find in Germany.

By now, you have an idea what the crowd looks like in Yabanaki.  At the sight of some female bathers, my wife leans over and whispers “They don’t leave much to the imagination. Do they?” I roll my eyes and retort: “You mean there is more?”  Beaches can have an egalitarian order, and Yabanaki is not different.  Besides Greeks, there are quite a few foreign bathers, most of them from East Europe.  You cannot tell, though, from the swimwear.  Even more, you cannot tell who is rich, who is not.  Or, who is famous; who is ordinary.  All you see is one swim piece for men, and one or two for women, that’s all.  The beach obliterates so many differences in social status.

After three or four hours, my family decides they have had enough sea, sand, and sun.  We pick up towels, sunscreens, water bottles, books, cell phones, Kindles and leave.  The last day at Yabanaki, I took stock of my accomplishments there besides enjoying frappe.  Between reading, observing and reflecting I had learned a lot.  I finished a book (the now familiar to you Factfulness), a book on the history of modern Greece, and Calypso by the humorist David Sidaris.  Not bad, given all the movement, the noise, the music, and the bathers.

The sunset in Yabanaki, when it comes, is beautiful.  The bright white sun turns into a huge orange pancake.  If there is a moon, it stretches the reflection of its elongated silhouette on the calm sea across the bay.  Yabanaki falls asleep.  The next morning, the party music will blare again, the frappe will flow, and hordes of bathers with bring their bodies in all their many different shapes and swim covers for another day of escape from the heat and the worries of the day.

Author: George Papaioannou

Distinguished Professor Emeritus (Finance), Hofstra University, USA. Author of Underwriting and the New Issues Market. Former Vice Dean, Zarb School of Business, Hofstra University. Board Director, Jovia Financial Federal Credit Union. View all posts by George Papaioannou