Meeting Greek Mail-Artists in Tourist Hotels

Meeting Greek Mail-Artists in Tourist Hotels

Jon Foster

February 2020

Commissioned by Picasso Gaglione (Knoxville TN) for an upcoming mail-art show about Greek mail-artists.

I work at a community college in North Carolina. One of the best things about my job is my ability to travel, and mostly for free. Over the years I’ve had trips to The Dominican Republic, China, Japan twice, and Greece and Italy. I’ve also paid for a couple trips I haven’t been a guide on. These trips are educational and mostly for the students, mostly. While I think its important students get to go on trips and see another part of the world, I really like going on trips too. In fact, it’s one of my favorite things. If I have to hold a young woman’s hand as we push through the Paris airport yelling at the locals, or if I have to tell a seventeen-year-old to “stop drinking” and designate his friend to watch him, I do it. I help them and then I go out exploring. It’s like having an eight-hour shift at a great but stressful job and then it lets out in a grand city center.

A Greek post box.

As soon as I get the dates for a trip I post where I’m going to various mail-art groups. If I can meet up with folks and talk about mail-art while on a paid trip, it’s like winning twice. Normally these inquiries don’t work out, I’m either too far away from where the people are, or they’re out of town, etc. I can’t ever seem to get something set up in Japan.

The first successful attempt to meet mail-art people happened in Budapest Hungary at Artpool. Getting to hang out with György Galántai and the wonderful people who were milling about that day, wasn’t easy. Viktor was my contact, and although I had him on the other line, I was in a city that didn’t have reliable internet. I wondered away from my group during our free time with only memories of our short city tour in my head. Some homeless lady by a train station grabbed me, I got kicked out of a McDonald’s for using their internet to screenshot maps, and then when I got to the place, the massive door was locked. I did the slipped through when someone came out, just like in the movies.

I hung out at Artpool for two hours. I was shown around to their collections, and given a couple books and some flyers from old mail-art shows. Everyone was so nice. When I walked out I didn’t care that I had no idea how to get back to my original location, and I had nothing to ward off the torrential downpour that had started.

In Greece, all the good stuff is ruined.

Two years later I was a co-leader for a trip to Greece and Italy. This was in 2018. Setting things up to see mail-art friends there was easy. It was easier because I’d been sending things to Katerina Nikoultsou in Thessaloniki for years. I doubt she was one of the first people I corresponded with (around 2009) but she was nearly one of the first. I distinctly remember sending her a random package for her 70^th birthday. I really liked that box. Why do I remember that box? It was blue. Anyway, Katerina was more than excited to see me. She had to travel from Thessaloniki to meet up with us near Delphi. Before I left for Europe, she gave me a brief rundown of her travels, I couldn’t believe that she’d make such an effort to come see me. I was honored.

Our group landed in Rome and then over a few days, made our way to Greece by a chartered bus. Our first stop was in Athens. My initial feeler to see who wanted to hang out, also snagged Chorianopoulou Maria, someone I’d exchanged mail with before, but didn’t know very well. She lives near Athens so the trip out to my hotel wasn’t too much of a burden. The two of us went back and forth through Facebook. She said she’d come to my hotel in Athens. That morning she wrote me the following message, “Good morning Jon! Are you in Athens? Do you have the time to drink a coffee or a beer?” Full of excitement I wrote her back, “Yes. I’m in Glayfada at the London Hotel. I’ll be out all day without internet, but I’ll be back around 7pm.”

The morning of Maria and I’s meet up, my group toured around Athens. We saw ruins of ancient things I can’t remember the names of and walked around on the Acropolis on the uneven stones thinking about the past five thousand years of history. It was hot, I can see why people liked wearing robe like clothing back in the day. I felt like we were in North Africa. All the buildings were three to five stories tall, brown to beige, and many of them had wonderful patios with small gardens of ivy like plants that danced over the streets below. We ate potatoes and lamb at a sidewalk café and tried as many of the sweets we could find from street vendors. A nice breeze kept catching us from every cross street we passed. By the time I got back to the hotel, I was sunburnt and tired.

Right at eight o’clock in the evening, Maria showed up at the hotel. Maria has an air and an unmistakable beauty about her. She glided around and smiled, her shoulder length hair swooping from side to side. She was charming. Accompanying her was Nik Agortsas, her partner. His English was limited, and my Greek is non-existent, so the two of us spoke through Maria’s translation.  

The three of us first went to the hotel’s roof to talk. Just off in the distance was the Saronic Gulf that eventually leads into the Mediterranean Sea. We watched the sun slowly disappear from the roof, sitting in white plastic chairs. Maria spoke a lot about trying to establish strong mail-art networks in Greece. She told me about the events she’d organized in the past and about some of the Greek folks who were sending things on a regular basis. I could tell she was a little frustrated, but I understand that frustration since I occasionally ask my mail-art acquaintances to help me with various projects. It’s easy to get excited about your own project, not easy to get others as excited. Whenever you’re trying to make things happen you hope for the best and often end up slightly disappointed. Nowhere in her voice did I feel that she was about to give up, she felt like a lifer, the real thing.

One of the many things I learned from Maria is that Katerina is originally from the United States. I didn’t know this. In mail art, sometimes you never know who exactly you’re sending to, whether they’re a man or woman or Greek or American.

We were eventually bounced from the roof by the hotel staff. The three of us ended up in the lobby of the hotel, right next to the bar. Maria bought me a beer, maybe two…I think three. With the beers in hand and the awkwardness completely gone, we were able to talk more candidly. One of the hot topics was the refugee crisis staring to spill over into Greece. I believe Nik was somehow involved in this, he was a go-between, a person acting on behalf of the refugees. We talked about his time in New Orleans and of course mail-art.

Me and Chorianopoulou Maria in Athens

There’s a unique game that mail-artists play when they meet one another. It’s a game where you attach someone’s name and their general aesthetic approach to mail-art together. With non-mail-artists, the game must be undecipherable, impossible to follow the thread between the speaker and the audience. I love the game! Anyway, the game goes something like this, “Do you know X, they make postcards out of cereal boxes…you know the one, they might be from Nebraska…no Nigeria, and it’s not cereal boxes, it’s cream of wheat boxes…they’re called General Mills? The Quaker Man?” The back and forth is the game.

Unfortunately, Maria and Nik had to get back home, they had regular life to attend to. I said goodbye to them and went to the front of the hotel to meet up with some of our group who were all at least three drinks into the evening. For the next few hours, a handful of folks drank on the patio, going back and forth to the gas station beside the hotel to buy the best screw-top wine and Heinekens they’d sell us. The highlight of the evening was watching one of our extended crew pull up in a taxi completely hammered. He’d went out on his own earlier in the day, mostly to get a fresh tattoo, something he does on his international trips. At some point, a point many hours before, he’d found a bar and started drinking. I hope it was after the tattoo. When the cab door opened, he came pouring out, falling into the middle of the street in front of our hotel. We were alarmed by his fall, but it was also immediately funny. It was a laugh first then ask if he’s ok later sort of situation. When he picked himself up and walked over to our group, he’d broken one of his souvenirs trying to get out of the cab. It was a plate. The party continued for at least another hour, the scuffed up and freshly inked travel companion with us.

The next morning the bus moved on after four or five tiny cups of strong coffee. The ride to our next destination, The Temple of Poseidon, was unbelievable. We hugged the coast the whole way there, jutting in and out of the land. The water was always in our field of vision as we went from switchback to switchback. The bus was filled with light. It was one of those moments where you looked around at everyone and saw a smile. Past that smile you knew people were making detailed notes of everything they were seeing. This was a moment.

The general pattern with large groups of travelers is about the same. You get out of the bus, everyone goes to the bathroom, the leader hands out the tickets, the leader tells what time the bus is leaving, and then everyone starts walking towards the big, old, thing. Everyone in the group could see the big, old, thing just in front of us since the temple sits on top of a hill. On the other side of the hill is the ocean. In front of me was one of the trip leaders, a coworker, and a close friend. Before we got to the gate, walking on uneven stones, my friend standing at 6’4” lost his footing and tripped forward. His face came to rest on a rock embedded in the ground. I was right behind him, so I was the first person who saw his injuries. He had two cuts on his face, both close to his eyes. I immediately saw the blood. He sat up to keep the blood from pooling in his eyes. It was a lot of blood. It was alarming.

A crowd gathered in no time. A lady walked up and identified herself as “a Detroit E.R. nurse” and I believed her. She came in and took over, telling us that he should go to the hospital. After a short deliberation about whether he should go to the hospital, and then who should go with him, an ambulance was called and the two of us got in it. I sat on a small chair off to the side in a sparsely furnished ambulance. I figured you’d see more “stuff” in it. I thought I’d see devices to help people…you know, like in the TV shows, but it was mainly a stretcher, some basic things like latex gloves and a few liquids in bottles.

The ride took a couple hours back to Athens. While in the ambulance, I tried to be funny. I tried to play down what looked like a pretty serious situation in my eyes, the same ones that studied literature for six years in college and not medicine. I made jokes and tried to keep his mind off being driven to a Greek hospital while the group he was hired to ferry around Italy and Greece, was moving to their next location.  Being present and emotionally engaging isn’t one of my skills, so any effort might have come off as desperate if we had a third-party present. The Greek ambulance drivers didn’t say anything.  

I stood outside the emergency room for the first two hours of my twelve-hour Athens hospital experience. My friend went right in but wasn’t given a lot of information. Since neither of our phones had service, we were relying on Facebook to move information all around the world. It was much easier to contact people in the U.S. than it was the trip leader who was just a couple hours away.

I eventually moved outside where there were plenty of uncomfortable places to sit down. If I sat on the curb, I could get service to get in touch with our group as well as the international advisor back in the U.S. Katerina was already waiting at the hotel. I sent messages to Maria through Facebook that she’d then relay to Katerina. Whenever an ambulance wheeled into the tiny area outside the emergency room, I had to move from my spot and then lose my hospital internet connection.

Four hours into the ordeal, getting intermittent reports from my friend in the emergency room, I got a little bolder with my interactions with the hospital stuff. I got food from a sandwich shop across the street and snuck into the waiting room. It didn’t feel right going through the swinging doors during the first two hours, but after four hours, I didn’t mind. I didn’t mind moving swiftly past the people at the front desk either. They’d yell something at me, and I’d keep moving. No one seemed to listen to those people, I felt sorry for them. Everyone was yelling at them.

The emergency room was full of people on stretchers and in beds, they were on top of one another, old and young and in between. There was no place for me to sit. I gave him the food and then got out of there. He told me that some guy kept screaming at the top of his lungs. Maybe it was the same guy I saw walking around in the parking lot yelling at himself and anyone that came near him.

It started to rain. The main waiting room inside was full of homeless people charging their phones. I stood under the overhang until an ambulance dropped someone off. Every fifteen minutes a group of five nurses would come outside to smoke in their pure white clothing. They did this for seven or eight hours, seven minutes for each break. There was no way they were getting much done, which could have been the reason for the long wait. I got another sandwich. I walked around the hospital. I waited. Periodically one of the homeless people in the waiting room would move long enough for me to charge my phone for a few minutes. The older guy with the large lump on his neck never moved the whole time I was there. His scratching was beyond inappropriate.

Through our spotty internet connection my friend said he was getting discharged. It was around one o’clock in the morning. He appeared with a neck brace and a large manila envelope full of x-rays under his arm. Our group had already moved to our next location in Delphi, so catching up with them when we got out of the hospital was out of the question. The buses and the trains had stopped running. Our last “easy” option was the cabs outside the hospital.

The next few hours weren’t great. We put money in our shoes and asked a few cab drivers if they’d take us to Delphi. We kept saying the name of the town over and over, slower each time. You think you’re saying it right, but you never are. We didn’t get any takers; one even laughed at us. Instead we called it a night and went to the nearest hotel, a nice one. When we walked in the lobby, we looked terrible. My friend was in a neck brace; his face still had dried blood on it. He looked beat the hell up and I was damp and only carrying a book bag. It was a long walk to the front desk, and I was worried they weren’t going to rent us a room. 300 euros later, we had a room. My friend couldn’t sleep, he instead tried to find us a ride to Delphi, which he did that night…that morning. I’m pretty sure he thought about trying to find a pharmacy for his prescriptions. Other than having a doctor look at his wounds, give him a neck brace, and then x-ray him, the hospital did little else. I don’t think they even cleaned the cuts.

In order to get to the group in time, we had to leave early in the morning, like after only a few hours of restless sleep. I don’t think he ever slept. I might have slept a little bit. At seven am we were up and in a Mercedes trying to get back to our group. The driver was wearing a suit. It was a 200-euro cab ride. During the ride I kept battling my brain. I wanted to stay up and see the countryside but I also wanted to sleep, I needed to sleep. I did a little bit of both. I think I saw a lot of olives along the road, but they could have been big brown oranges.

Our cab pulled up to the hotel right as our group was loading the bus. I could see Katerina standing in front of the hotel. When I first saw her, she was standing in the doorway, perfectly in the corner crack. She was clutching a few things in her crisscrossed arms, her cropped hair shining in the Greek sun.

I was saying hello to her as someone handed me my bag to put on the bus. “This is yours” someone shouted at me. Although I didn’t make it to Delphi on time, my bag did. As soon as saw Katerina, I went into my book bag to grab a few things I brought for her. The clock was ticking. I took out a manila envelope with add and passes and a couple board books I was too cheap to mail her. (She’s since mailed back both books filed with her additions) She gave me a couple notebooks, one in Greek blue and white that she inscribed a sweet note, and a pretty book with a colorful cover. I have both in my mail-art room upstairs.

Me and Katerina Nikoultsou in Delphi.

It was difficult to keep a conversation going because I was so tired. I wanted to be present and engaging, but the synapses weren’t doing their job. I remember her saying the next time I come to Greece, I should stay with her in Thessaloniki. In my mind I was already planning the trip. “Misty [my wife] should come to” she said. Katerina often mentions Misty when she writes a note on one of the cards she sends. I promised her that if I make it back to Greece, I will come and see her, and I mean it. We took a few pictures with each other and then I had to leave. If I missed the bus, I was going to get left…again. I looked out the window and she was still standing there as the bus pulled away.

On the bus a dozen people were talking to me at once. They all wanted to know the details from the previous night. All I wanted to do was find a cool corner and go to sleep. Thankfully the drive from the hotel to the Temple of Apollo was only a few miles. As soon as you walk through the gates, the exhaustion starts to melt away when you think of what you’re looking at and what it represents. For better or worse, the ruins represent the importance of Greek mythology in awakening the Western world, or something like that. I’m still working on my roman numerals so I don’t really know.

I made it all the way to the top, slightly out of breath, but with a newfound burst of energy. Although I read many of the plaques and was told over and over how important the ruins were, I wasn’t educated enough to grasp the entirety of the place. Without a lot of context for what I was looking at, I was slightly lost, awash in giant stone pillars that once represented something great. It was a collection of parts, pieces to a bigger puzzle.