Europe’s Trojan horse
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 35: Surviving
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Jorge Sotirios
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Jorge Sotirios’ biography and other articles by this writer
HESIOD might have written the script. The 2004 summer was Greece's last Golden Age. The Athens Olympics focused the world's attention on a small but thriving country in the Mediterranean. In no other nation could the Olympic flame be lit and returned home, as though Zeus's eagles had once again found the centre of the earth. A brilliant opening ceremony reminded the world of Greece's ancient glory. The marathon began in the outer-lying suburb of Marathon, exactly 42.195 kilometres from the finish line in Athens (provided you took the old road). Medals awarded in gold, silver and bronze even replicated Hesiod's hierarchy of Ages that befell humankind.
Added to this were supporting acts like Euro 2004, when the Greek soccer team flew back from Portugal, victorious, and was garlanded with laurel at the Pan-Hellenic Stadium used for the inaugural 1896 Olympic Games. Commentators drooled on TV: ‘May this axehasto - unforgettable - summer never end!' When Eurovision and Miss World success came promptly after, it only brightened the glow.
Departing Athens for Buenos Aires as the clouds rolled over Mount Lycabettus, my Argentine amigos put it to me bluntly. ‘Is there anything Greeks haven't won?' they said in unison, as though a tragic chorus, minutes prior to the hero's downfall. How different the two countries were. Abandoned shops with graffiti sprayed over boarding, a devalued peso, and social and industrial unrest were the norm in Buenos Aires's once-fashionable streets. Athens, by contrast, was scrubbed up, its art-deco buildings renovated and freshly painted. Newly planted trees in Syntagma Square sprouted over tiled walkways that led to an underground station doubling as Metro and Museum of Archaeology, due to finds made during excavations. Even the steel scaffolds had been removed from the Parthenon, as though the Acropolis's tenant - a senior citizen known as Athena - had been freed of her Zimmer frame, and was proudly standing upright.
As recently as early 2004 George Papandreou, then the Minister for Foreign Affairs, boldly announced that Greece had thrown off the Ottoman shackles and was no longer a Balkan country in Europe: the country had blossomed into ‘a European nation in the Balkans'. Greece had become a regional power, exporting expertise in telecommunications, transportation and agriculture to its poor Balkan neighbours - so the mantra went. Greek modernity had reached a pinnacle: a new international airport, fast highways, swanky bars and restaurants. And its privileged position at the crossroads of East and West made it a vital commercial hub for global trade. The stock exchange, advancing like a rampaging bull, proved Greece had acquired economic clout to match its cultural capital.
AS HESIOD MIGHT have predicted, there was an almighty fall. In Syntagma, where the Greek parliament beams a bright golden yellow, there has been a running battle between the riot squads and their tear gas, anarchists and their Molotov cocktails, the aganaktismeni (indignant) and their flags scrawled with Kleftes! (Thieves!). Even senior citizens like the traditional yiayia are railing against the failures of the political class, left and right, in bankrupting Greece.
Just as Napoleon believed that whoever controls Paris controls France, so the contemporary media thinks that if Athens is burning, the rest of Greece is too. The images of clashes juxtaposing ancient statuary with urban warfare have been a boon to the media. Daily popular assemblies that use a lottery for speakers to address the indignant camped in Syntagma reinforced the connection, but also the distance, between ancient and modern. Not even Aristophanes could have come up with this scene: portly politicians audaciously deflecting Greece's ills onto all Greeks because ‘We all ate from the same EU trough.'
The failure of democracy was best articulated by the besieged, and now former, Prime Minister George Papandreou holed up in parliament, rustling up ballots to enact legislation demanded by the European Union, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund. ‘Not only are these measures an affront,' one dissenting MP said at the dispatch box, ‘they're embarrassing to even read.' Cutbacks on welfare, wages and other entitlements have been forced through. The 2010 bailout came with stringent conditions from the European Union: the GST was upped from 19 to 23 per cent and the holy trinity of Greek pleasure - fuel, cigarettes and alcohol - has been significantly taxed. The 2011 austerity package underpinned by the IMF called for even harsher measures: a one-third reduction in public wages, a one-tenth cut in public spending, pensions slashed by almost one-third and the retirement age raised by two years. The late Tony Judt called these draconian measures an attack on the very idea of the welfare state. Papandreou assented to harder work and longer hours, with a minimal safety net - perhaps he used Hesiod as a model? In Works and Days ‘men who never rest from labour and sorrow' must accept their backbreaking struggles as the price for falling from the Golden Age.
AMID THE CARNAGE of 2011 my parents decided to undertake a voyage sentimental to their homeland. Another face of Greece emerged. Yes, there was turmoil in Athens, but the riots were a spectacle seen by Greeks on TV, just as they were for the rest of the world. Family feasts, religious fetes devoted to saints and apostles, and swims at pebbled beaches in the Peloponnese all ran counter to the media narrative.
My parents saw changes for the worse. They noted far too many empty stores with ENOIKIAZETAI (FOR RENT) scrolled in bold red, West African immigrants hurriedly selling contraband Versace and Prada before fleeing when police emerged, and the wildfires that scorched Laconia, an echo of the 2007 fires that killed fifty-three people around Father's ancestral village of Zaharo.
Other things hadn't changed. Mother's claim for resumed land in Neapoli, three hours' drive from Sparta, was still on hold. Given she filed for compensation in 1979, a mere thirty-year wait was considered fast processing by the slow-moving bureaucracy. The supreme indication of how inefficient Greek bureaucracy has become is the state rail system. It has run at such a loss that it would have been cheaper to transport every passenger by cab.
Costas Markos of the Greek Community in Victoria has observed a ‘reverse exodus' streaming from Greece to Australia again. Those who were born in Australia and lived in Athens or Crete or Kozani are returning with their children in tow. Skilled professionals and tradespeople, including engineers, teachers, doctors and electricians, are arriving at Lonsdale Street in Melbourne's CBD, armed with their ticketed luggage straight from the carousel.
One such person is Kathryn Koromilas. Fed on a diet of Greek philosophy and drama, the books of Nikos Kazantzakis, Greek songs extolling golden summers and films depicting bleak winters, Koromilas was lured from Australia to Athens, as were many twentysomethings whose parents had emigrated here years before. A bohemian existence within reach of the Aegean sounded as inviting as the siren's call to Ulysses. These reverse émigrés, romantic to the bone, strapped themselves to an airline seat and journeyed towards adventure.
Greece gave Koromilas the place and space to write her engaging first novel, Palimpsest. Greece taught her life lessons, although she was never quite sure where she stood in society. Frustrated by the Byzantine bureaucracy and limited employment, Koromilas has now returned to Australia, as have many of her compatriots.
Previous generations of single men arrived by ship eager for opportunities in Australia's emerging economy. Hardly any of the current arrivals will find work in their more specialised fields. Archival photos line the interior of the 1920s Greek Community building in Melbourne: men in dapper suits wait portside with bouquets of flowers for intended wives. By contrast today's intake is restricted to young families seeking the security Greece cannot provide. As the poet George Seferis wrote prophetically: ‘Wherever I go, Greece wounds me.' That wound, articulated in the 1940s, has reopened in the twenty-first century.