Ill fares the land of Greece

In mid-May 2011, I took the bus from Athens to Astakos in Central Greece. The ride was smooth and comfortable. The bus driver was young and master of his craft, though he sporadically made phone calls and smoked.

Aside from such annoyance, the only incidence that disturbed me was his carelessness in going over a pigeon. The crushing of the bird sounded like a small explosion. I raised my voice in protest but the driver ignored me as if killing the pigeon meant nothing to him.

The ride to Astakos lasted from 2:45 p.m. to 7 p.m. I enjoyed the journey immensely because we went through a beautiful region of the country known as Aitoloakarnania. After Corinth we crossed Peloponnesos to Central Greece through the new Rio-Antirio Bridge built in 2004 for the Athens Olympics. Central or Sterea (Solid) Greece is largely rural with lush small valleys, villages, and mountains. Nature in May was at its colorful best. Flowers surrounded farms, homes, and villages.

Nikos Papatrechas waited for me at Astakos, a lively fishing village of 3,000 by the Ionian Sea. Its name, Astakos, means ‘lobster’. Nikos worked for years in factories in Germany and the United States. He now lives in a tiny village with the name of Machairas, which in Greek means ‘one with a knife or sword’. Machairas is about 30 minutes by car from Astakos. Nikos has little education but he has the wisdom of a man who learned from experience. He right away introduced me to Greece by saying the country was going through an unprecedented wave of corruption.

We went to a tavern for dinner. The tomato-cucumber-feta cheese salad and a huge plate full with a kilo of roasted kid and fried potatoes were divine. We wished each other good health with glasses full with red wine. But it did not take long for Nikos to become a deipnosophistes: a man who asks serious, nay philosophical questions over dinner, charging the delightful atmosphere with political thought. After all, we were enjoying a feast while the country was reeling with a variety of financial woes.

In 2011, ill fares the land of Greece.

Nikos said as a matter of fact, Greeks suffered from varieties of pathologies associated with things foreign. Indeed, a superficial look at modern Greece suffices to convince an observer Greece and her people are drowned in non-Greek things. Men and women wear blue jeans as if the pants are part of their national identity. Those who smoke, and they are still many, smoke Marlboro or other American brands. Merchants use English names for their stores. This is particularly true in tourist towns or islands. Greek TV stations have names like Alter, Sky and Mega. Advertisements in TV, magazines, newspapers mix Greek and English, printing slogans in English that make no sense in Greek. Even fast food, by far the worst American tradition, had made it to Greece, a country that has probably the best food tradition in the West. Nevertheless, the overwhelming American influence in Greece gives the impression the country is under American occupation.

Greece also imports just about all she needs for food and commerce; cars and all machinery and gadgets. This dependency on foreigners is becoming catastrophic, undermining the Greeks’ self-esteem, colonising them as much as Europeans and Americans colonised Africans and Asians.

In addition, the Greeks’ reliance on foreigners for their way of life has put them in the catastrophic debt to European and American banks now demanding the keys to Greek sovereignty. Such humiliation and the growing impoverishment of Greece are shredding Greek society to pieces. All in all, it is as if the foreign disease of the Greeks is causing loss of self-respect, opening the road to ruin.

These thoughts crossed my mind while Nikos talked across the tavern to some men he knew, ordering wine for them.

At 10 p.m. that evening Nikos drove me to his house in Machairas. We went through the narrow streets of Astakos but, above all, we traveled the lovely roads of the silent countryside. He lavished his home with classical architecture so it is large and beautiful standing like an ancient monument in the fields of Machairas. The house is surrounded by a five-acre garden of fruit trees.

It was next day in early morning that I enjoyed the natural environment around Nikos’ home, its Ionic columns gracing it. The sun god Helios was out in glory, its golden rays warming the earth. Little birds were darting from the roof of the house to the trees of the garden. The flowers, especially the red puppy, shone brightly in the light of the morning sun.

Nikos drove me to Oiniades, the land of wine, which in the fourth century BCE was an independent polis in Akarnania allied to Athens. But now Oiniades is a small archaeological site with stonewalls, a theater chiseled out of stone, and ship-sheds. Oiniades in antiquity was an island with its own navy. I walked in the ruins of Oiniades and tried to imagine the Greeks who lived in that wild but civilised mountainous country. I asked the lone guard for more information but he had none.

From Oiniades we drove to Mesologgi, the sacred city of Greece. In 1826, Mesologgi defied huge Turkish armies and sacrificed its population in defense of freedom. Our guide, George Apostolakos, put it this way. The 300 Spartan soldiers of Leonidas fought to death against the Persians. But these Spartans waged war with full stomachs. The people of Mesologgi, however, scarified themselves with empty stomachs. Indeed, the heroism of the Greeks of Mesologgi is unparalleled in history. They killed thousands of Turks and chose willingly to die rather than surrender to the enemy.

The experience from Oiniades and Mesologgi was sobering. It reminded me of the price Greeks have paid for freedom. This connection turned my attention to the Greeks of today.

I asked Nikos and several others about Machairas. No one knew the exact number of people living in Machairas. But certain things became clear to me. I noticed uncultivated fields: farms empty of farmers. We visited the elementary school and saw just four children. I talked to the young teacher and she admitted all four children were Albanian.

This revelation confirmed the anxiety and anger I sensed in talking to elderly Greeks at Machairas. They feel betrayed by the government that forced them out of growing tobacco. They will continue to get subsidies until 2014, but they are terrified of what they will do after 2014. The government has offered no alternatives to tobacco and the farmers are paralysed by the prospect of no subsidies. And this is going on in a village in the midst of prosperous land with all the ingredients for growing excellent food and democracy.

But Machairas, in 2011, is a dying village. The demographic crush; the decision of the peasants to have no children, complements the agricultural crush; the abandonment of traditional farming, the growing of crops for self-reliance, for the easy and imported idea of growing cash crops like tobacco and sugar.

The gods of agriculture, Demeter and Dionysos, are having their revenge.

The tragedy, of course, is that these evolving demographic and agrarian crises are engulfing more than Machairas. They are infecting all of Greece. These wounds are deep but no one is doing anything about them. Greece is in so much debt the country is losing its sovereignty. Spreading poverty and the humiliation of depending on foreigners all but cripple local initiatives for self-reliance and independence.

There’s a way out of this slow-moving disaster but it demands a metamorphosis of the country from a colony of the West to a proud country of Hellenes. All the ingredients exist in the country for returning to her Hellenic origins. Even those Greeks who describe themselves as Christian know there’s more than Christianity in their lives. They have heard and probably know of their ancient ancestors that made our world. They live in the land of Homer and speak Greek.

Second, Greeks must exile most of their politicians primarily responsible for the financial meltdown of the Greek economy. These are the people who borrowed huge amounts of money, forcing the country into insolvency. Instead of using those funds to create an industrial infrastructure for the country and spread prosperity, they misallocated the money and, in the process, made themselves rich.

Third, a new government of citizens without party affiliation has to renegotiate the loans and embark on a self-reliance strategy. This means the country must produce all of its food; take charge of its rich tourism so all profits stay in the country; and vigorously start green industries to meet its vital needs in transportation, energy, and national defense.

Greece must also separate church and state: cease paying the clergy salaries. The state should appropriate all church and monastery lands, donating those lands to Greeks able and willing to farm in a traditional and ecological way.  

Finally, Greece must export goods to free herself of debt. There’s no reason she cannot succeed in exporting environmentally friendly technologies. Greece has also the most outstanding historical and archaeological culture in the West. This could easily spark expanded tourism as well as a new Renaissance to save the world from the rising barbarism of warfare and environmental destruction. Thus, Greece could become, once again, the cultural capital of the Western world.