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The air was thick with the smell of rosemary as chickpeas boiled behind me on an aging industrial-sized stove. Multiple long tables sat empty in the front of the room except for a scattering of coffee cups, abandoned once the thick sludge at the bottom was all that remained. Icons, at varying levels of completion, looked over the scene as three women navigated the small kitchen space. It was my second time at the sussitio, or social kitchen, of a large parish in a southern suburb of Athens. On my first visit, the priest—Father Antonis—who would become a key interlocutor and friend, had introduced me to Elena, the manager of the sussitio. Elena invited me to return so that she might introduce me to the other women of the kitchen. I hoped that I would soon begin cooking with them on a regular basis as part of my field research on church-based care projects.
Elena brought me to the counter where two women in their late 50s, Eleni and Aggeliki, were preparing food containers to be distributed later that morning. As I explained that I was an anthropologist from Ameriki, they asked why I would choose to come to Greece. After briefly describing the nature of my research, my years living in Athens after college, and the fact that my godmother’s childhood home was not far from the parish, Eleni interjected:
“So you are Greek, then? But you don’t have a Greek name! You should have told us.”
“No, Kyria [ma’am], I am not Greek. I’m only Orthodox.”
“Aahh almost Greek then…”
Through the course of my 16 months of research, I would be told things like this again and again. Some would claim that my religious affiliation and church attendance made me “Greek enough” or—for those more agnostic people with whom I conversed—“even more Greek than [them]” in an ethnoreligious frame that is common to the country; others would say that my Greek godmother must have been a good influence. Eleni herself would go on to say things such as “I am your Greek mother,” “Our American girl will become more Greek,” and “Even Annoula mas [our little Hannah] comes to church, good girl.” Constantly, the women in this parish called attention to both my Americanness as distinct from Greekness and my status as a young practicing Orthodox woman. Doing so placed me in a liminal category of simultaneously foreign and recognizable. This status as what I call a knowable or ideal stranger thus brought together my ethno-national difference with my religious sameness in order to facilitate my entry into the community as well as dictate the bounds of my belonging.
The stranger as a general category of analysis stands out within the social sciences precisely for what Georg Simmel dubbed this “constellation” of “near[ness] and far[ness] at the same time.” And while all strangers exist within a realm of “a specific tension around the consciousness that only the quite general is common, stress[ing] that which is not common,” my experience in the field drew attention to levels of this tension which correlated to degrees of knowability. My own relatively high level of sameness put me in a prime position to witness the kinds of engagement with strangers that are idealized and performed in certain spaces.
In Greece, specifically, the nearness and farness of the stranger is rooted in claims of filoxenia (literally “love of the stranger,” but usually translated as “hospitality”) as a cultural and historical value. Since the earliest Greek village study by Ernestine Friedl, filoxenia has been foregrounded as an important expectation in social interaction between locals and strangers. And although later works, such as those of Herzfeld and Papataxiarchis, have shown the capacity of hospitality to be inverted and used for exclusion, the conventional understanding remains a substantial piece of popular discourse about modern Greece. Filoxenia is splashed across newspaper articles, tourism websites, and travel blogs. My own interlocutors at times referenced this value as crucial to their work and belief systems. Even Barack Obama, in his 2016 remarks at the Stavros Niarchos Cultural Center in Athens, expressed a desire to witness “the legendary hospitality” of the Greek people during his final international trip as president.
But the application of filoxenia and the role it plays in the integration of strangers into Greek social worlds as they “settle down in places of activity, instead of leaving it again” (Simmel) has grown even more complicated in light of increased migration to Greece and right-wing political shifts. Officials and politicians have used the discursive power of hospitality and its presumed cultural roots to describe and justify humanitarian engagements with migrants at the same time that actual policy has restricted migrants’ mobility, siloed them in hostile living conditions, threatened their legal statuses, and reduced access to aid. Katerina Rozakou describes this contradiction as a “biopolitics of hospitality” in which the privilege of receiving filoxenia becomes tied to some fragments of the xenos (stranger or guest) and not others, thus determining varying possibilities of inclusion.
As a volunteer in a variety of church-based sussitia, I witnessed firsthand the ways worthiness was assigned or removed from different strangers. Turning off a busy main road down a small pedestrian street, I arrived at a crowded and dirty sussitio where a table blocked entry through the doorway. A mix of people—young and old, sober and drunk, some noticeably unhoused—congregated in a loose approximation of a line near the entrance. I squeezed around the table in the doorway, put on an apron, and took my place in the food packaging line alongside Ahmed and Amir. As I did so, I waved to the manager, Giorgos. I could hear Jawad in the kitchen, preparing the special meal—most likely yemista, a traditional dish of tomatoes stuffed with rice, which is too laborious to consider making for the non-Greek beneficiaries of the kitchen—that would be delivered to the priest and his associates later in the afternoon.
This kitchen, along with the three small shelters on the same street, is overseen by a small, but mysteriously wealthy, parish in the center of Athens. Unlike the other parishes I visited over the course of my fieldwork, this one not only feeds a larger population and wider variety of ethnic groups but also is serviced mostly by young migrant men rather than elderly Greek women. Perhaps ironically, Father Efthymios, the head priest of the parish, a nationalist notorious for his alleged corruption who rails against refugees, Muslims, and Jews, daily eats meals prepared by an Afghani migrant there. One day at the sussitio, Father Efthymios inspected the food, spoke with Giorgos and Ilias, the only Greeks and the only paid employees, and told the men handing out food to make sure “Greeks eat first,” “more food goes to the Greeks,” and “save the milk for Greek families.” In his formulation, then, the Afghani families, Albanian workers, and Roma youth who stood in line were not worthy of the same filoxenia. They were strangers, yes, as so many of us were, but they were not recognizable enough to convince this priest of the equal value of their specific needs. Instead, an inverse form of filoxenia developed, as “non-Greeks” handed out food to “Greeks.”
As I became more involved at multiple church sites, the contrast between this treatment and my own made me increasingly uncomfortable. Compared to more unknowable strangers, my own experience of filoxenia replicated the classic ideal upheld in tourism. Arguably less “Greek” than many in line, I was still never included in the population that could so easily be denied. And when I tried to refuse gifts, my protestations were ignored. Women reserved sweets for me when they made them for their own children or brought them in to celebrate a name day. Priests bought me coffee, juice, breakfast pies. Volunteers forced bags of pantry goods assembled for Christmas, Pascha, and summer holidays into my hands to carry on the metro ride home.
I even began keeping a list of things I was given because I found it so overwhelming; that list is four pages long. It details not only the nearly uncountable food items I was given, but also books, Christmas ornaments, religious icons, flowers, notes, a prayer bracelet, masks, at-home Covid tests, and more. It references the gifts of service and time I received, such as when Giorgos installed a ceiling fan in my flat during the oppressive heat of another Athenian summer as well as rides home on the back of Ilias’s scooter.
It was only when I placed this pattern of hospitable giving alongside the kinds of characterizations my interlocutors made of me that I began to see the mobility of the parameters of knowability that guide interactions in many charitable spaces. When I tried to refuse items at times, they would often chuckle, saying things like, “Take it, you are young and single,” “You are a good girl, so we take care of you,” and “Ah but does an American know how to cook like this?” By virtue of my liminal status across multiple identities, especially vis-à-vis the intersection of my questionable Greekness and Orthodoxy, the people in the sussitia viewed me as just strange enough to inspire assistance. They felt comfortable engaging with me, but simultaneously held me at enough of a distance to become an object of care. In other words, as opposed to the less-knowable strangeness of those determined to be never-Greek, my knowable strangeness—as represented by my age, gender, religious affiliation, and race—made me the ideal vessel for many older, religious Greeks to pour their filoxenia into. Through becoming such an object, the act of receiving itself also became a multidimensional fieldwork site, thereby highlighting filoxenia and its presumed antonym, xenophobia, as both processual and relational rather than a static binary trapped in time.
Agnieszka Pasieka is the contributing editor for the Society for the Anthropology of Europe.