(rough draft of documentary script)

The Question
"Why do Greeks break plates?"
I don't know.
I must have had been asked a thousand times working in my Greek restaurant
these last 20 years.
And each new day, again, people ask me.
Why do Greeks break plates?
"I do not know"
"But your Greek" They say.
"I am Greek, a lot of Greeks are Greek
but a lot of Greeks don't know why they break plates,
They just ..break plates."
I began thinking about this whole Greek thing.
Why was I born into this particular culture,
the only one that I know of, that likes to break plates.
Anyway, I started asking the question. I asked my Grandfather, my Uncles
and aunts and fellow Greeks, what the deal was.
And even though most of them said that there was no story, that there was
really no reason why we break plates,
Something inside me said: Go Nikos, you must uncover the story, you will
find out the reason
So I said Ok, lets go.

THE JOURNEY
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Personally, I started breaking plates when I was around 8 or 9 years old.
I was visiting my relatives in Greece.
Greece was a magical place for a young boy to be in. Sacred ceremonies,
smoke filled churches. Traditions. Ancestors. Music. Food and dancing.
It was at a wedding, My uncles and aunts prompted me to throw one and I
must say I caught on right away.
It was fun to see them smash.
They were loud, noisy, messy and even a little dangerous, but somehow even
then I realized that breaking them was terribly exciting.

TECHNIQUE
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When you break a plate, there are really only two things to keep in mind.
One, don't aim it at anyone, because it can really hurt.
Two, turn it upside down, so that when you throw it on the floor it
explodes downwards along the floor instead of upwards into peoples faces.

The young man
I went back to Greece when I was around 20. It seemed that all around me,
there was music and dance. I have 2 uncles, the Frangidakis brothers who
make musical instruments. Their father taught them, and now they are
teaching their sons. Laoutos, lyras, violins. Each hand crafted. And at my
uncles shop I met one of his customers, Georgios Tzimakis, music teacher.
Self proclaimed export in 7 musical instruments. He taught me to play Lyra
and bouzouki. and he would repeatedly remind me of how he played the
nightclubs in Chicago and New York in the 1950's. And is eyes would begin to
widen as he recounted the times when hundreds of plates were broken at
these nightclubs in his honor, as the lead musician. For him, as a
musician, to hear the breaking of plates was like hearing a thousand
clapping hands applauding and acknowledging his contribution to the audience
and his own mastery of music.

But the music I discovered in Crete was not always about bands of
musicians in nightclubs, nor even about playing instruments, it was also
about the Rizitika songs. These were the traditional revolutionary songs of
Crete which have been around for centuries. These songs were song during
Venetian, Turkish, Ottoman, and even German occupations. They were sung
without musical accompaniment. The instruments were the souls of a people
committed to seeking freedom. The lyrics were about independence, death,
honor, battle, freedom and pride that gave hope to the people and ignited
the rebellions.

And out of those heroic times there was born a new kind of music and an new
kind of dance.

In 1755 the Cretan rebel chief Daskologianis commissioned a musician named
Stephanos Triandafilakis to write for him a song to encourage his men in
the battle against the Ottomans. He composed the fast paced and spirited
Pentozali. The last music that many men heard before they fell. But it was
not forgotten, it is alive today, and played and danced all over Crete,
Greece and the world. And perhaps, like myself, there are thousands who
dance it but don't know the history behind the music, that it was created to
take men to freedom. And what are we doing with it, if it is only
entertainment, isn't it a waste of the legacy of freedom and death that
went into it. I don't mean that we should celebrate the battle and the war
and the killing, but we should consider the freedom that was the motivation
for all that. And even though we are fortunate, in this country to not have
invaders to take arms against, can we not celebrate our freedom and our
lives at this moment. In this way the dance becomes appropriate to dance
again, not as entertainment or as trite tradition but as an acknowledgment
that yes, we are dancing, yes we are fighting, fighting for our lives,
fighting that our lives mean something.

Sometimes the most memorable dancing was the simplest. Some mornings I
would wake up in my Thea Marika's house and I would wake to see my Uncle
Manoli dancing around the kitchen table, slowly, gracefully, with small but
accurate steps, listening to the Cretan music on the tinny radio that sat
above the refrigerator. He would be snapping his fingers, slapping his feet
and sometimes singing along. And my aunt would be smiling and complaining
all at once as she was trying to set the cheese, eggs and goats milk for
breakfast. Music, dancing, food! Passion at 8 o'clock in the morning!
The music in Crete was captivating and it became part of me. As I walked, I
could feel its tempo in my footsteps. And when it came time to dance with
my relatives, I found myself dancing with my ancestors, primitively, openly.
There we would be, outside at a table at some taverna or restaurant
somewhere, music would begin, and we would kick into dance.
I would never be the one to start it, but once the first plate was broken,
It was an invitation for more.

It was intoxicating to see the large round plates, freshly wiped of food
minutes before with rich Cretan bread, leaving your fingertips as it took
flight through the night sky, like Icarus escaping the confines of a mortal
jail and flying into a freedom we ourselves could never find.
It was addictive.

To take something that was a worthwhile piece of china with some kind of
materialistic value attached to it and fling it against a wall, or floor,
or stone, watch it shatter,
and know that it would never be put back together again.
There was something finite about all that.
There was something cathartic
Something liberating.

Back to Canada

I came back to Canada. Shortly after returning I remember watching Zorba
the Greek. And I was so reminded and excited by the words of Kazantzakis
and how they were portrayed. The philosophy about living, about undoing
your belt and looking for trouble, about the need to reaffirm life within
you own bones.

I remember driving down to my restaurant about 12 o'clock at night, there
was about two people there, a couple of waiters. I remember walking over to
the stereo, putting on some Greek music, taking some plates off the tables
and letting them fly up into the air and break all around me as I danced
for myself.

Why did I have to break those damn plates?
Why did I have to dance?
It was my inside saying to my outside, yes, we are alive, lets remind ourselves.

ADVANCE TECHNIQUES
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Flinging it with a snap of the wrist it the most common plate breaking technique
If you're dancing and someone places a plate on the floor, it's an
invitation to jump up and land on it, destroying it completely.
One of my favourite ways to break plates it to take a whole stack,
preferably more than twenty, walk over to where they are dancing, crouch
down, and with one of the plates, continue to smash each plate in the pile
till your hand is holding nothing but broken shards of once politically
correct porcelain.

Back in Crete
The ultimate plate breaking I have seen, was one time in Crete. It was a
bitterly cold morning and my mother and father and I were attending a small
religious festival, a panigeari, on the mountain of Omalos with some of my
Cretan relatives.

After the church service, about 10 in the morning, a middle aged blue eyed
priest gave us shelter in a house where there was a fire and some food and
wine. They had lamb cooking in huge blackened pots. There were two
musicians, one playing Laouto and the other Lyra, the typical Cretan duo.
After some singing and some dancing, my uncle Nikos Tzizmeni, who was
always a symbol to me of someone drunk with life itself, Nikos grabbed a
large dinner plate off the table, now you must remember this wasn't his
own house or his own plate, but Cretan hospitality would never impede this
action anyway, uncle Nikos grabs this plate, and breaks it over his
forehead. The plate smashes, the pieces fall over his face and onto the
ground, on his unscathed head, the complete circular crown of the plate had
remained, we stood there and adored him momentarily as if he were the
patron saint of life, come to life from a 13th century Icon, his head
crowned not in a halo of heavenly light, but in the remaining portion of
the Priests porcelain dinner plate.

HISTORY
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If you look for real hard history on the origins of the Greeks breaking
plates, you may have better luck than I have, because I have looked and I
have found nothing that officially explains its origins.
We know that it was predominately part of nightclub life in the Athens of
the early 1900's.

This was the time of the Rebetis. There were Greeks living in Turkey. There
were Turks living in Greece. And everyone was trying to make a living. Let
me try to explain if I can.

My own Grandfather, Nikos Theodosakis lived in Smyrni, in what is now
Izmir, a port on the west coast of Turkey. He was a Greek. And though I
don't know if he broke plates or not, I have to imagine that as a young man
he sang with his army buddies, and songs lead to dance, and surely that
would have led to a plate or two...

Anyway, his father was a Greek from mainland Greece who moved to Smyrni in
search of a future. My grandfather grew up in Izmir, married my
Grandmother, and had a house that even had a well, which in those days, was
a big thing.

In 1912, the Greeks on the mainland in secret collaboration with King
George of England decided to take back Constantinople, the Turkish capital
with a joint forces attack.

The Greek soldiers landed in Smyrni and proceeded almost unopposed towards
their goal. The British soldiers did not ever come, and the Turkish army
defended their city, attacked the Greeks and forced them back all the way
to Smyrni and literally into the waters of the city's harbour. This is know
as the Massacre of Smyrni.

Tens of Thousands of soldiers and civilians died. My grandmother escaped to
Crete with her son. My Grandfather was taken prisoner.

In 1915 the governments of Greece and Turkey arranged for an exchange of
civilians, decided by religion. This resulted in hundreds of thousands of
Greeks who were living in Turkey to be sent to Greece, mainly in Athens.
It was there that the opium dens of Turkey were introduced into the
underworld of Athens. And with opium, the bouzouki, the songs, or Amanes as
they were called. And there focused the anger and frustration of an entire
uprooted humanity without employment, in a strange land, separated from
their homes, their geography and their history. Here from their tent camps
around Athens, these involuntary immigrants collected at the Tavernas in
the port of Piraeus. They became a meeting place where they could be with
their own people, hear their music, smoke their opium and then dance.
The music and the dancing provided an opportunity to enter an alternate
reality, a break from the despair. And the pain in the clash between these
two realities would often provoke an ordinary man, unable to play the
bouzouki, or join in the bands playing, would provoke him to make his own
noise, a plate, a glass, thrown like an emotional staccato.

For that moment, he was passionately high in his alternate reality. He
could revel in a carefree moment of an otherwise overburdened life.
The moment of passion had to be seized and I think that breaking a plate
can articulate physically that need and therefore claim that moment.
———————————————————————————————
In the 1930's my other grandfather, Girorgio Syskakis found work delivering
plates to nightclubs in Athens. He and a friend would pick up a one ton
truck full of baked, unglazed, ceramic plates (specifically made to be
broken at these nightclubs) and drive them from the little villages that
made them on the outskirts of Athens into the delivery doors and waiting
arms of the maitre'ds of Athens finest Kentra.

By the time they would finish unloading they could hear them inside,
begging to break them. One at a time, six at a time, a dozen at a time. The
real impresarios would have the maitre'd load a whole table with a hundred
plates and then sit back while waiters picked up the table and let them
slide, catastrophically to the ground.
———————————————————————————————
In my restaurant, I get my own plates.
Usually at the Salvation Army and Care Closet. Yard sales are good too.
I like to have them on hand so I can give them out to my customers.
It truly is fun to watch someone let go, and see a huge grin take over
their face, where minutes before you though there could never be.
Sometimes I watch my customers watching the dancing and I give them a plate
and I wait for them to break it. And I wait. And they cant. Some people
just can't break them.

I've gone up to people and asked them to just throw it. But they look at
me, and I'm talking about grown ups now, and they explain how they have
been raised and how they just cant get themselves to throw it. Sometimes
they overcome it, but just as many times, they do not. And then the song is
over, and the dance is over, and the moment is over, and it doesn't matter
as much anymore, they had a chance to be forever part of that moment and
they didn't take it, they didn't dive in.
And I think life is for diving in.

I feel a sense of duty to be inviting others into joining, inviting them to
let go. To let go of the responsibility of owning things which end up
owning the owner, so that they can see past that.
Do you know what I mean?

I mean, when I break a plate from within, and I'm not talking about show
time events or Greek festival days or anything planned like that,
I'm talking about those random days of insignificance which suddenly are
transformed into memories by the spontaneous outpouring of emotion.
On these occasions, and again, I'm not saying this happens every week, but
when it does, when I am filled with emotion, and have everything around me
that I need, be it friends, my children, my family, my inner souls
companionship, whatever, there arrives an urge to just grab a damn plate,
and bring it to life, strangle it, wrestle it into my fingers and when it
surrenders, remind it who is the master by letting it fly though space and
entertain me.

In an instant it will be dust, and I will still be here, with my friends,
and family and my music and my dance. The plate is mortal, the memory will
live forever.

And this reaffirms ones priorities.
The priorities of the intangibles of life over the tangibles.
Of the endearing of family and friends over the futility of anything material.
And the need to capture these moments of passion and claim them for our own.