#dropoli

[gemsofgreece]

Greek bridal dress from Drópolis (Dropull, Albania). The region is part of the officially acknowledged Greek Minority Zone. Photographed by Michael Pappas for VOGUE.

[baeleg]

WIP Albanian Miku in a classic Dropoli costume (Dropulli in albanian)

Reference

[apexart-journal]

Hanna Saarikoski in New York, #Day 17,18&19

It's late Saturday night and I got last week's program in the afternoon. Then I really realized how fast the time passes, somehow the activities of the past days started to interact more in my mind. I was at Gantry Plaza Park, listening to Sounds of Cyprus and watching people of all ages dancing. 

The music was lively, melancholic and soft like the evening air on the East River. Something similar was also in the music they played at the Sabbath service I attended last night.  And yesterday morning I was trying to find the right way to the Million Oyster Project on Governors Island, and I walked with a woman who was going to volunteer at the bee farm, and she told me, even though she's working in a completely different field, how important art is to her, how she recognizes emotions in it, like sadness, and it helps her channel her own emotions in a good way.

Today we met with Nia at the 9/11 Memorial Plaza and we talked about how different generations remember and understand tragedies and extraordinary moments in their lives, as individuals and as a group.

I shared a quote with her from Ross Perlin's book, from the chapter Survivors City, p.65 “Compared to the pressing concerns of daily life, survival is an undercurrent, a common strand at an almost subliminal level, an infrastructure of feeling. “You can hear it in people’s voices, in the accent, in their body language and their facial expressions, and in the kindness and blunt bursts of warmth you’ll suddenly get from where you least expected it. “ writes a contemporary New Yorker, whose family spoke the Greek dialect of southern Albania’s Dropoli Valley, of the sorrow of exile” behind the city’s capacity for tolerance, and more concretely its long unshakable pro-immigrant politics: He may not known a word of whatever it was his great-grandparents spoke or seen even a picture of the land they came from, but every New Yorker carries a bit of that sense of loss in him and an innate knowledge of what drove him and his away and brought them here: the destitution of Ireland, the grinding poverty of Sicily, the fear of just being Jewish in Russia the terror of being Black in Georgia, the violence of Colombia.” 

When I read that on the subway, on my way to Harlem, I thought, well, maybe that explains something I see here, something more than just superficial politeness to a lost stranger.

It's been very warm here, but back home in Finland it's getting colder, I heard the cranes are leaving. At Hamilton Grange they limited the length of the tour because of the heat. For me the most interesting things were outside: flowers growing in the garden, zinnias, much bigger but the same color as at home, marigolds and roses. I studied the details of the architecture, the weathering, the peeling paint here and there, wondering if it was real oil paint or some new mixture. I tried to imagine what it was like when the house was built, in 1802, when the area was more or less rural. 

Yesterday I also did a little fishing, didn't catch anything, which was a relief - I used to fish as a kid in Finland and sometimes later, but then the catch was cooked or given to the cats. It would feel bad to hurt fish just for the sake of sport. On Thursday I had two sports, a cardio class in Brooklyn in the morning, which was intense and fun, and a boxing glass with Maryam in Bryant Park in the evening. After both sports I had to walk and cool down for quite a while before getting on public transportation.