My Greece

“They are rude, pushy and loud,” said a younger Greek Australian colleague about Greeks in Greece. “They’ll more likely kick you in the gutter than help you” he adds as an over enthusiastic assessment of “their” (Greeks’) behaviour.

I said that I found Greeks with whom I had dealings with over the last two weeks to be polite, almost formal.

I had the benefit of knowing Athens as an ex-resident. I hung out where Athenians did, in little bars in Exarhia listening to cool jazz beats, or ate at Psiri’s charcoal grill at at reasonable prices; or in Fokios Negri at some of the best sweet shops and coffee houses.

In Rhodes, I was with relatives who took me to areas visited by Italian, French and Greek tourists and locals.

Whereas Faliraki was full of 90-pound charter flight English youths, hell-bent on getting drunk, Kalithea Springs was occupied by well-heeled Italians, Greek and French tourists who look like characters out of a 1950s Fellini film.

The behaviour of young drunken English and Australian tourists, flashing their bums and tits, throwing up and urinating in public, common in the low cost tourist areas the young Brits tend occupy, has jaded the Greeks.

The cheaper “touristy” areas of any nation have poor services. Compare the service one gets in the trashier parts of the Gold Coast, Sydney’s Darling Harbour, Singapore’s Boat Quay, or just head to Kuta Beach in Bali.

My colleague was hurt with the suggestion that he was not “genteel” and that given his behaviour and that of his “crew”, he may have elicited rudeness from Greeks.

In truth, I did not know how he behaved, but it was an assumption based on the stories he had relayed to me while we were both working in Australia.

He flew into a tirade: “Greece is not a first-world country and it probably doesn't deserve to be in the EU.”

He went on, “It is so backward in so many ways down to the fact that they still write their official documents with a biro."

Adding he did not like having to “suffer someone else’s smoking while eating” or “being shoved into a bus”.

These kinds of criticisms of Greeks by those born as diaspora Greeks are common. I also feel like that at times, but why?

I am sure if my colleague had visited New York, he would not judge all Americans as rude, loud, or pushy. For that matter, when have Sydneysiders or Melbournians not been considered pushy, loud or rude?

If he was in Paris, or Vienna, where everyone smokes inside bars, clubs and restaurants, and no one lines up, I doubt he would he would fly off the handle about their behaviour. The Viennese would just stare down at him as a barbarian from some other world.

So what is the problem? The issue seems to be that many Greeks living as migrants have a certain level of self-loathing as many of the Jewish diaspora had. Much of the self-loathing is based on a chip on the shoulder, founded on the racism and poverty, our migrant forefathers suffered.

We had to work hard to be part of the mainstream, and in Greece we come with a colonial master’s mentality. We expect better treatment and when we find that the diversity of Greeks in Greece do not bow to our expectations, so we damn them.

How many times have I heard the “wog” in me scream “How dare they look at me like that?”

I am provoked in Greece by even a marginal sense of arrogance, yet in New York, when I am met with aggression, I just put it down to being in New York.

Diaspora travelling to Greece can have the attitude, “Look at me, I left, or my parents left, we struggled, we succeeded.”

Greece, like many late developing nations, such as Turkey, Israel, Southern Italy or Singapore, exhibit a diverse economies, structures and behaviours internally, ranging from elite bourgeoisie lifestyle; village behaviour, to arrogant localism.

Yet, I am far more comfortable having my eight-year-old son play in the streets in Rhodes, than in Australia. Here the family entity and resulting love of children is communal. The recent rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl and a general rise of crime does not bode well and may mean the end of familial localism for more global and cosmopolitan concerns.

Greece is far from being a third world nation, but it may not yet be a first world nation. But, given the assumptions that the term “third world” carries, how would one judge the miserable lives of many of the poor in nations of Australia, the USA or even France?

There is a mix of brashness and fatalism that also characterises Greece but my Greece has always been a mix of the stylish, the humorous, polite and ultimately an intangible sense of life, or zoe, impossible to find in Australia.