Streets, avenues, alleys, roads, I do not mean just any street like the yellow lines that run in between the orange squares and polygones that form the lettered streets on the city plan of some unknown town, but I mean the cobbled street, with the pothole at the end, in the old city with the blue street name sign reading Osman in faded, white letters, hidden behind the branches of an old chestnut providing shadow for a group of old men playing backgammon, with the ornamental lighting crossing overhead during national celebrations, forming decorative constellations of imaginary stars at holidays commemorating formative dates in the country’s history, with colored, striped sails hovering above, tightened between the antenna poles and street lanterns, broad red and yellow lanes, keeping the space in which shoppers scurry from store to store, cool on a hot, arid Friday afternoon, streets with the aluminum kebab cart parked on the curb, smoking lines of lamb sticks damping under a brightly yellow parasol, the pink faces of mannequins with their fiercely blue eyes and blackened eye lashes, with their chins pointing at the sky. Street corners, not the wholesome idea of street corners anywhere in the world, where similar but separate events take place, not the shared abstractions of any street corner, but that one, single street corner in every color of detail that makes it recognizable by its own fragments, apart from any other, at which you need only the unique smell of roasted chestnuts, like the street corner across from the bridge with the entrance steps leading to the mosque. And shops, not shops in general, not the type of shop every always goes to for their daily shopping, not any shop you will find in any other city, but this one shop in particular, where I always go to buy my grocery shopping, lettuce, a piece of feta and some tomatoes for a salad, the shop with one out of many, that specific owner with his thick, straw mustache and his glancing eyes that always express a continuous joy or pride perhaps, and a smile of recognition even though he doesn’t know my first name, with the wooden crates of fruits stapled on convenient wheel-able carts, that every early morning roll out, rattling, coming to a stop in front of the display window that reads supermarket in red, stocky, western style fonts with a yellow lining, the shop that sells the dried figs that I love, with the dairy cooler in the back of the store humming, buzzing absently, where I go and pull a plastic bag out of its carton box and scoop my favorite kalamata olives out of their tin can with a blue plastic spoon, Ibrahim’s grocery store. I can tell the tale of a city only by the particular details that I happen observe, but only then can I keep the city alive.
When I was a child, by my own memory, I was no older than nine years old, when I was still without a notion of consequences of ideas, but only knew the facts of my own world, uncle Meli moved into the attic apartment. He was a man sweet as honey, who had lived abroad where he was tormented by the bitter memories of home. It was only one of many events in my childhood that I only later in life understood to have been defining moments in the lives of the otherwise undefining characters of my family. As a child these events were nothing more than just natural, simply bound to happen as they happened, fully part of the natural cycle of the seasons, some rich of the smell of blossom, others dry and arid. As an adult man, when I was established and well respected by some, but despised by others, my thoughts often returned, escaped to this simplicity of the obvious world. My friends were professors at the university or critics working at the newspaper, and our discussions were drenched in academic analysis, full of the kind of sophistication that elevates doubt to self-consciousness, where hesitation is praised for its swiftness of reflection. All this mature uncertainty seemed meaningless compared to the childish belief in the absolute importance of my family’s grand sagas, of uncle Meli moving in, of grandfather’s tears as he reminisced of his childhood, of grandmother’s voice singing through the house, of the excitement penetrating the rooms on Friday’s after morning prayers, that same excitement that now uneventfully takes place outside, all is subdued, muffled by the ruffling of the maid cleaning the bedroom, the thrill of rowing out on to the Bosphorus, the same water that now is plowed through by the horizontal silhouettes of oil tankers from the black sea. As a child I knew only my family, and only my friends who lived around the corner and with whom I went to school knew me by name. I was free and the world belonged to me. It is a remote world that I try to recreate in the greatest detail, because every little detail that is missing is shattering my childhood and throws me back into the whirling winds of the present, with its hostile voices that deny the evidence of my world, with the passing footsteps of time that do not stop at my doorstep to listen what I am up to, with the missing details of forgetfulness.
The pine covered mountain disappeared in a flighty cloud of thick mist, enclosing the surrounding bushes and schist rocks wildly in an apparently chaotic curling and drifting wind within seconds. Eye sight became impossible beyond a few meters, disintegrating the basic notion of direction, even when walking down the hardened channel of the asphalt road I had walked down a hundred times. The wind started singing and dancing around the house, knocking on the doors, trembling the glass panes in the window frames, slamming them out of their places, rattling the shutters and hinges, breaking off every obstacle on the house. The mountain spirit remained silent during this engorging prelude, but once hidden by the full cover of its breath, the air started to rumble and grumble like a ravenous lion. At ever increasing intervals, the lethargic drumming rhythm of loud bangs could be heard in the sky, falling down like meteores, as if the wind picked up the schist rocks that had broken off the mountain skeleton, and threw at the concrete boxes that caused it to itch, immediately dying out while lingering in the air all around, absorbed by the mist again, diluted in its void, the intestines of the mountain that had turned inside out. No lightning, the sky itself had been swallowed, imploded, vanished, never existed but in the fata morgana of a temporary breach, like a gap in the weather, a glitch of lucidness that allowed for only a day a view of the coastline and the horizon.
A man grabs the wooden case of a backgammon game from the pile of boxes on the corner table. He opens it on the small wooden table where his friend is seated, and sits down himself. They place the white and red stones in their respective corners, and throw the dice. His friend collects the dice and throws again, the pieces start to hit the board with loud splashes, followed by a short silence. The conversation falls silent but for the mocking comments that accompany each move. On the small table inside the taverna two little children play cards. In the kitchen a woman pulls up her socks and straightens her dress. She picks up a booklet of cross word puzzles and a pencil. Stares at the list of hints, at the grid of randomly placed, checkered black and white squares and puts the pencil’s end to her lips. With a sharp reflex her hand jumps to the paper and scribbles a word down, and she crosses the hint out with a firm stripe. At each side of a narrow, fold-able table four black men sit down to play domino, their feet pointing outward at the table’s legs forming an uninterrupted eight pointed star from tow to crotch. A snake pattern of white plastic squared stones emerges on the table, under the nervous rattling of stones being shuffled in their hands. Loud voices shout over another, followed by a deep, billowing laughter. How light must they look upon life, how meaningless does their existence become, to play games and avoid any serious effort to pursue a higher dream. They fill their lives with rolling dice and forming meaningless patterns of endless silliness in these children’s games; Life must bore them utterly, they must bore life. How are you doing? Good, good, but they bore me. How is he? What is he doing now? He’s winning, losing maybe. Playing poker, smashing a card with a dull echo on the table as if he battles on life and death, with an expressionless stale face. There is the pride to remain stoic, what stoicism has become, to not flex a muscle, to hide the inner excitement, the crunching disappointment at the randomness of the hand being dealt, to vein control over chance in life. But it is a philosophy without sophism. I find it impossible to withhold my boredom, it gusts out, to not express remaining absolutely unstirred by this silliness. To live life to gamble on a lucky lot to fall into your hands.
One day I will write a novel with ordinary protagonists and common antagonists, with a neighbor of whom we only are informed about the shape of his face but come to know nothing else, and where the only events take place on or around the corner near home or inside the living room of an apartment on the second floor, and the twists out of which the plot is constructed form a straight red thread around which the characters with their simple tics and predictable habits are build, the only actions that the characters undertake consist of the collection of their waste in their trash bin in the kitchen or the bathroom or bringing their garbage to the general red or yellow dumpster on the street corner, meeting one another casually on their way to post a bill payment or while washing their hands in the public bathroom, listening to the flushing of water from the toilet cell next to them staring at the shuffling of two pair of unknown brown leather shoes, a man reflecting on his laundry spinning in the laundromat, looking at a woman folding her colored knickers on the plastic table top, the heroine taking her clothes off before taking a bath, in the morning the day starts with a shower of lukewarm water on a cloudy day, a line of people waiting for a stranger rummaging in his purse for the exact change at the grocery store, while the fingers of the cashier run over the where the drawer of the cash register, then the plot seems to unravel, tension is building when the ATM is out of order and the protagonist has to walk half a mile for the nearest bank office in order to withdraw cash, where one sits in an office with beige desks and white walls all day watching the price of stock going up and going down again, where the main topic of conversation is the weather of that day and the coming weekend, where the critical dialog takes place during a flighty meeting where a shallow greeting is exchanged without any feelings attached, while someone walks through a red light and a car beeps its horn while everyone goes their own way, except for one blurred face staring out of the window from the third floor, drawing nobody’s attention at all, with a preface thanking this and that unknown person, and finally culminating in an ending at the last line of the last page with the words ‘to be continued’ and three single dots.
“But what about the Greeks? Their national character is based on the idea of the impoverished and downtrodden little man getting the better of the world around him by sheer cunning.”
Lawrence Durrell, Prospero’s Cell (1945)
The Greek crisis has exposed existential weaknesses in the Greek economy and revealed shortcomings in the larger European system of financial checks and balances. But the often emotional responses have also proven a cultural polarity between north and south. The German magazine, Focus, captured this antagonism by an image of the Venus of Milo suggestively sticking up the middle finger at Germany. Angered Greeks in return reminded Germans of the Nazi looting of Greek gold reserves and unpaid war retributions.
Beyond this populism in the media, there exists a fundamental rift in policy views between Mediterranean countries on the one side and Atlantic countries on the other side. In his influential book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), the German sociologist Max Weber studied already the relationship between culture and economic performance. Weber considered the Protestant working ethic a pivotal element in the development of capitalist modernity. Behind the state of affairs of the Greek crisis lie causes rooted deeper in Greek culture than the immediate problems of government and economic structure. The traces of these historic roots carve an individual psychology and shape social norms that are difficult to change with measures of policy by politicians responding to the market’s wits.
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In traditional Greek dances a group of dancers, interlocked arm over shoulder, form a circle and move with a set of prescribed steps. The Greeks do not easily break with their tradition and they do not possess an innate curiosity for the new like Western culture. Greeks depend on the bonds with family and their community. Arms locked, only the leader of the dance improvises, while the rest do not break the line of the circle.
The eyes of the international financial markets are on the fiscal measures announced by George Papandreou, the first citizen of Athens, and the reforms to be implemented by the central government. The response of Greek society and the economic support by the European Union members will be decisive in their success. The question is if the government can enforce the new policies in a country so geographically scattered and with a history of tax evasion as Greece. Historically Greeks dislike central government and have relied primarily on local self-governance, strengthened by the geographic distance of the islands from Athens and the isolation of mountainous villages. Not even the chief-god Zeus could rule the lesser Greek gods from the peaks of Mount Olympus, the highest mountain in the country. Greek history justifies mistrust in a Greek success. Measures to centralize government and constitute an efficient modern state have always been resisted, from classic times with the Delian League that ended in the Peloponnesian War, the occupation by the Ottoman Empire that gave birth to the palikare, the Greek folk hero, or the rise of the current government for which corruption and tax evasion are emblematic.
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When the Persian empire threatened the independence of the Greek city states, Athens and the allied Greek city states formed the Delian League in 487 BCE. Members of the League were obliged to contribute soldiers for the defense of Greek democracies or could alternatively pay taxes to the League. When Athens started to control the League, Athens forced other city states to continue paying taxes to the League solely for its own benefit. When cities refused, they faced the wrath of the Athenian army and were simply annexed by Athens. But when the famous statesman Pericles moved the treasury holding the paid tax contributions, from the island of Delos to Athens, the rest of the Greeks defied. The resistance against dominance by Athens resulted in the Peloponnesian Wars and finally in the defeat and surrender of Athens in 404 BCE. Can Athens ensure a different outcome now?
Already under the Ottoman empire the Greeks resisted taxation, which was a symbol of oppression. From the fifteenth century they suffered heavy taxation by the Ottomans. As Christians under Islamic rule they were obliged to pay a land tax and the jizya, a tax for non-Muslims which was symbolic for subjection to the Ottoman rule. Heavy taxation reduced most Greeks to subsistence farming, while large estates fell into the hands of Ottoman nobles. Resentment against such taxation accumulated over almost five hundred years of occupation. The problems of modern Greece cannot be understood without understanding this Ottoman occupation of Greece and the long struggle for independence that lasted over a century, only ending bitterly for the Greeks in the disastrous defeat of 1922 against the forces of Atatürk’s modern Turkish state. The 1922 defeat meant an end to the Greek megali idea or great idea of a larger Greece that included Asia Minor and Constantinople, current day Istanbul. This defeat of the Greek state in Asia Minor was a failure by the central state with traumatic consequences.
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The Museum for the Macedonian Struggle in Thessaloniki is a very small museum but with a deeply significant meaning for Greeks. In a corner mansion behind Aristotle Square, it showcases the history of the Macedonian Struggle, the guerrilla war against the Ottomans from 1900 to 1908, which annexed the Greek populace in Macedonia to the independent Greek territory. In 1821 the Greeks had won independence but it did not extend far beyond the Peloponnesos and Attica. The annexation of Macedonia gave the Greek state a renewed confidence that defined the Greek national identity and placed a claim on all territory in the greater region with Greek populations.
One room in the museum is devoted to Pavlos Melas who fought in the Macedonian Struggle. Behind a vitrine lay on view relics of Melas and part of his former personal belongings, a Smith and Wesson 38 revolver, an invitation card to his wedding, ribbons from his memorial wreaths, and a tin cup. He is a national symbol for the enosi or union of Greece that was hard fought and thereby of the Greek national identity. He is the embodiment of the traditional Greek folk hero, the palikare. As a lieutenant he left the regular service in the new army of the Greek state in order to fight as a brigand or irregular fighter against Ottoman occupation in Northern Greece. Greece was confined largely to the Peloponnese and consisted of a patchwork of people with different dialects. The irregular fighters became folk heroes to the Greeks, where the regular Greek army seemed incapable to protect the occupied Greeks in the north.
The irregular fighters fought in the same tradition as the Greek Klepths. These men had fled to the mountains in the eighteenth century to avoid the rule of the Ottomans and had formed bands of outlaws that later fought in the Greek War of Independence from 1821 to 1829. But also the Ottomans had used irregular forces to control impenetrable mountain areas. They allowed powerful local captains in these lawless areas to rule at will under oversight of distant Ottoman overlords. Even in our time, the use of irregular fighters was widespread during the recent Balkan Wars.
The palikare was in essence not more than a small brigand, who in groups roamed the mountains under the banner of irredentism and liberation of the Greeks. They evaded the rule of law and depended often on captains that exercised local power. The Greek national writer, Nikos Kazantzakis, describes this archetype colorful in his novels. In Freedom and Death the palikare Captain Michales refuses to swallow the occupation of Crete by the Turks, and the unruly Zorba is described in the novel Zorba the Greek, brilliantly enacted by Anthony Quinn in the 1964 film. The mountain freedom fighter, evading authority and growing a beard in defiance, this is the Greek traditional spirit.
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The palikare is a symbol of the current Greek financial crisis, reflected in a popular sentiment that rejects the centralized modern state and commends the outlaw. The Greeks do not identify with the politics of central government, despite the fact that one out of every four Greeks is a public servant and is directly dependent on the government for their income. The central government is considered wasteful and corrupt, from which it is justified to extort money. While the citizen rejects subjection to the rule of the central state, the central state is a corrupt body that accommodates a game of lies in order to accumulate monetary gain.
The Greeks cunningly receive an income from government, while evading taxes and participating in the informal economy, defrauding the central state. This lack of loyalty extends to the even more remote European Union. Greeks gladly accept the EU subsidies paying lip services to its demands, but resent any interference in their lives. This practice goes back to the times of the Ottoman state, where Greek subjects evaded being taxed but sent representatives to Constantinople to request fiscal favors. While Ottoman rule had instituted local self-governance as the means for tax-assessment and tax-collection, the system developed local councils that were dominated by powerful local captains and wealthy families with a patron-client dependence.
Since its independence in 1821 the modern Greek state that emerged out of the Ottoman system has not been able to eradicate this local patron-client system which depends on counter dealings and favoritism. On the contrary, it could only emerge and survive by favoring such interests of the powerful local patrons or captains in return for their support, in a similar process as the centralized power of the European Union only is advanced by returning political favors.
Prime-minister George Papandreou understands the Atlantic European perspective and sensitivities. Like many Greeks who worked in Germany or America for the best part of their lives, he lived and studied in America and in Sweden during the formative years in his life. But although George Papandreou calms European suspicions by vocalizing a firm though nothing but verbal promise of reform, he himself is a vested representative of those powerful families that are symbolic of the centuries-old formalized corruption. Papandreou’s grandfather was three times prime-minister of Greece, his father founded the social-democratic party PASOK and also served as prime-minister, while the Nea Democratia party has been dominated by the patrons of the Karamanlis family.
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Greek promises and measures of reform have pacified international markets and appeased European political leaders for the time being. Since Greece’s accession to the EU, however, Greek promises and assurances have been provided continuously under very similar scandals, and there has been little assurance from recent developments in Greece that this time will be different. The cotton-growers of Thessaly are perhaps exemplary for the problems of the Greek economy which is simply not compatible on the international market and for Greek fraud. Cotton growers depend heavily on subsidies for profitability, not shunning fraud and corruption, like wetting the cotton crop with water to increase the weight of the cotton. In 1992, for instance Greek farmers invented one fifth of its cotton crop in order to claim extra EU subsidies, and in Greece cotton farmers recently blocked most of the highways in Northern Greece, demanding payments from the government to offset loss of income from falling cotton prices on the international markets, while having resisted agricultural reforms for decades.
And even while prime-minister George Papandreou was on a credibility-building tour around European capitals, among other speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos to calm unrest on the financial markets and restore political credibility, his own Minister of Agriculture Katerina Batzeli reached an agreement with protesting farmers to provide financial compensation. Among the key measures was the injection of five and a half billion Euro by the Greek state to boost incomes and liquidity, promising little change in policies at home. And ask a Greek for an analysis of the current crisis, they will without exception point at the corruption of remote politicians, only admitting to some blame themselves in a delayed sub-clause.
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But Europe has always been blinded by its love for Greece and one must fear that this will not change overnight. It has always admired Greece as the ideological and cultural foundation of European values. We learn from Greece the principles of Athenian democracy and copy Greek architecture, our secular thinkers study Heraclitus and Parmenides, our Christian moralists study Aristotle, Plato and Socrates, we learn the mathematics of Pythagoras, Euclid and Archimedes, our intellectuals learn by heart the Iliad and the Odyssey, even European cynics and stoics cling to the Greek. But this impression of Greece is overly romantic and Byronic, and one must hope that it is soon replaced by a more northern sense for Real-Politics.
The Philhellenic idea of a pastoral Greece in perfect harmony with nature disputes the complex reality of a twenty first century Greece. The sentiment of betrayal felt in Europe is as much a self-betrayal by a European Byronic complex. As Greece struggles to reconcile Western austerity with its Orthodox Byzantine generosity.
So, the Greek suitors have feasted and the time for reckoning has come. The return of order must be considered without sentimental attachments or unreasonable demands, while Europe must not be blinded by Greek cunning and abuse. The Greeks must decide to either be part of Europe and respect its fiscal rules or return to the Drachma as a political currency and loose its place at the European table.
“I detest that man, who hides one thing in the depths of his heart, and speaks forth another.”
Homer, Iliad IX, 312-13
All day it had rained, interrupting a hesitant summer that was late already. I pulled out a sheet of rolling paper, picked a tuft of Golden Virginia tobacco with my thumb and finger tops, and rolled a thin tsigaro. I struck the match against the box and lighted the cigarette with its flame. I inhaled a breath of relief, squeezed my left eye and looked around. The house of the community was filled to the last seat. New seats were passed along over the heads of people waiting for their drinks, cocktails in white plastic cups or cans of Mythos, at the bar, three tables covered with a white bed sheet. A half crescent of chairs was lined up on stage with microphone standards at waist length. Three socialist red curtains hung from the ceiling against the back wall, the stage lightened by six colored light bulbs, green, red, yellow, blue, yellow, red, hanging from a thick black electric cord. The pie baker walked to and fro, occupied and nervous, with a wasteful haste. The petrol man sat quietly at the far end table of the bar with the bottles of tequila and Red Label Johnny Walker. He greeted every familiar face with a broad Ikarian smile and dark frowned eyebrows. I recognized the doctor with his long pony tail, his droopy eyes, who studied the high number of cancer occurrence on the island. The room filled with smoke, leaving a hazy air of ashy smell and the tones of a lost era of open markets, crowded streets, tiny waterfront tavernas, passenger ships and refugees disembarking. The melancholic ruffling of the bouzouki, the bass of a classic guitar, the tearing of the violin and the soothing of the accordion, dancing away on the clouds of drifting mist in the early morning.
‘But … where is the frenzy, Frank, the bang, the boom, buddy, the slang, the oof, the awe, man, the puzzling pinnacle, the dithyrambic dazzle, the mind blowing wit! Where is it? I don’t see it.’
‘Because I want to portray the slow digression in the opening, I wanted to introduce the daunting detail of every day, the common element in every one’s life, you know, the benign, the petite, the insignificant, the ordinary.’
‘Well, I can’t publish it like this. You need to drag in the stranger, grab their attention, persuade the casual reader, create their curiosity and awaken their empathy.’
‘That’s exactly why I start so small. Everyone can immediately identify with the plain, the prattle of coffee on the kitchen counter at seven in the morning. It’s a symbolic dripping through the filter of every day life.’
‘But it doesn’t distinguish the antagonist, you must create the extraordinary, the fantastic, what is special, there’s nothing heroic in there now.’
‘Precisely my point, the drama is hidden in every common person, the theater of life is present and enacted in every person’s life, and it starts on an empty stage, the tragedy slowly unfolds, never does the reader recognize when fate takes a turn, by the hour but without notice, the big drama in life is subtle sadness.’
‘No, no, no… I can’t sell such sensitive, gay nonsense, it’s too intellectual, too transgressive, if you want to sell your work, you cannot think like a play wright, think like a Hollywood director, the big picture, bro. Where is the explosive opening, the disastrous event, the fireworks, think Broadway! If no body dies, no body cares.’
I preferred to say nothing. Silently, I sat at the bar, staring, thinking, ideas bouncing off the dancing horde anonymously, my thoughts, a pinball machine jittering visuals of excited pinheads forgotten in the corner, without lust, without interest, my words slammed against the obstacles of bodies, breaking on their surface. In a fraction of a second, the option of a full conversation was fast forwarded, deterring me from approaching, from participation. I had developed a second nature like a mosquito net to avoid eye contact. I hated the buzz of shallow glimpses of conversation, females tittering, males joking loudly, the drum ruffle of alternating bass and soprano, the syrinxes of silliness clamoring their staccato joys. I opened my book and read, interrupted by jotting down notes of thoughts, the mechanical and mistaken association of random impressions in my head. To actualize my self I ordered a Bloody Mary, stirred it with the celery stick and fished out the olives. Quietly I spent around an hour before I decided to leave. I had exhausted my thoughts, letting my frustration freely flow, and I didn’t want to drink too much tonight. I walked home, the streets were empty, the night was unusually dark. No one noticed me, like I noticed no one. Even the most remarkable men were only noticed by their own belief they mattered. The others at most tolerate man. What a man can be, he must be, Maslow wrote. But there was nothing to be, nothing to must. Who was this Maslow but the five strata of a pyramid? Who was this man that took such notice of him self, and is this how we see our self, as the filtrate of random association on a measure of logic? When we see man, we see nothing but his shadow.
other
