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March 22, 2006

Talking with people in Grecia Salentina

Translated from very broken, amateurish Italian (on my part) with an old man named Antonio in a town called Castrignano de' Greci:

Me: How many people are there here?

Antonio: About 4,300.

Me: How many people understand Griko?

Antonio: All of them.

Me: All of them?

Antonio: Of course, all of them. This is Castrignano de' Greci

Hard to argue with that reasoning there. :) What I have learned while traveling around Grecia Salentina:

My Greek is creaky enough that trying to switch between Greek and Italian is a bit difficult.

Given my creaky Greek, trying to understand the vowel-sound differences in Griko and still understand what they're saying to you is even more difficult.

A lot of these men in these towns worked in Switzerland in their younger years and learned to speak modern Greek by speaking with the migrant workers in Switzerland who were from Greece.

In all seriousness, though, this trek to Grecia Salentina has been pretty interesting. It seems that it's quite a living language, but I hardly ever heard it spoken in the streets-- it was more common for me to hear old men speaking amongst themselves in the local Leccese dialect of Italian. Only in Corlignano d'Ortanto did I hear a couple men speaking Griko to each other.

Also, since it's the off-season, many of the information booths and such things that would provide more information to tourists such as myself were closed.

In Martignano, the people were the most friendly, and I spoke Greek for a while with a few old men who told me about the town and the local people. Martano was the most tourist-friendly and most commercially active and, it would seem, the center for the "Grecia Salentia" tourism.

Posted by Dean at March 22, 2006 5:40 PM

Comments

That is so very awesome.

Keep blogging! I'm enjoying the adventures vicariously.

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