Those Tedious Moon Landings and Greek Orthodox Villagers

With all this incessant and self-congratulatory remembrance about the moon landings going on just now, the tedium of which is most intolerable to those of us unmoved to fetishize floating rocks access to which costs a wholly unjustifiable sum better spent fixing earthly problems, I am reminded of a delightful book I have mentioned on here often before--but not for some time--which deserves a renewed audience: Juliet de Boulay, Cosmos, Life, and Liturgy in a Greek Orthodox Village. 

There are fascinating insights galore in her book--about "hatch, match, and dispatch" customs; the latter, funerary customs, are especially interesting. She shows, time and again, how loosely the villagers wove together their Orthodox Christianity with beliefs and practices one might be tempted to call "pagan."

But along the way Boulay, who was in Greece doing her research at the time of the moon landings, documents how many people there utterly refused to believe in them, thinking the whole thing an enormous fabrication.