Calimera

Calimera is one of the nine comuni of the Grecìa Salentina, and its name is a greeting: Kalimèra, good morning. Some read it instead as kallá meréa, fine district, and some trace it to Byzantine roots; but the people of Calimera tell it their own way. The founders were said to be the men of Martano, who had their villas here, and who used to say: Pame, pame, ca sìmmeri ene kalì emèra, let's go, let's go, for today is a fine day. Until the early seventeenth century the population followed the Byzantine rite, although the parish depended on the Latin diocese of Otranto; after the rigours of the Council of Trent the Greek rite declined fast, the last Greek papas, Sigismondo de Matteis, was replaced by a Latin parish priest, don Troylo Licci, the Greek temple was pulled down and replaced by the present mother church, and the parish archive was burned. And yet until fifty years ago people still called the parish priest papas.

The language, on the other hand, was lost in one generation. All through the nineteenth century the village spoke only Greek and lived on charcoal and then on sweet potatoes. At the beginning of the twentieth century the first public schools opened, often held in the teacher's own house, and the first families, at first only the noble ones, learned Italian as a second language. After the war the parents, afraid their children would not manage to learn Italian, stopped speaking Greek to them and went over to dialect or to a rough Italian; and with compulsory schooling, from the sixties, no child learned Griko any more. What is happening now is a going back: there are people who learn it as adults, the Passion is sung in Griko again during Holy Week, and the music groups keep the old songs in their repertoire. In the park there is a small monument holding an Attic funeral stele, given to Calimera by the city of Athens in 1960: on it is written, in Greek, that here in Calimera you are not a stranger.