When the occasion has called for it, he has swooped into Athens and taken over the air waves to pronounce his disapproval of plays, films and anything likely to arouse even the most feeble flicker of lust among the members of his flock, and to steer them back on to the road to Righteousness. So it was that as newspaper accounts of nude bathing, adultery and rape grew bawdier by the day during the summer, we waited expectantly for a thunderous blast from the North — which never came.
Meanwhile, swimming and sunbathing in the nude captured the headlines, providing many of the dailies with ample opportunity to illustrate the bare facts. Nudity, which is against the law even though it has long been tolerated on the beaches of the more sophisticated islands such as Mykonos, continued to spread despite determined law enforcers who arrest the offenders, and outraged villagers who have been known to drive the invaders off their local beaches. A three column (plus photographs) article in TaNeareported on July 22 that on Rhodes entire families can be seen in areas such as Pefki and Faliraki, partaking of ‘sun therapy’ — hardly the sort of Family Solidarity the Bishop has in mind. What was more, nudity received official sanction from the Secretary General of the National Tourist Organization who was quoted in Ta Nea as saying that it is acceptable in ‘far out places where there are no clothed swimmers’, discreetness being the guideline, it would seem. (Nudity has remained absolutely forbidden on busy streets, however, and so has lovemaking, a point made clear to a young native and a German tourist who got carried away on a busy street in Rhodes. They were sentenced to three months in jail.)
Adultery — if we are to judge from the columns of the major dailies — was reaching epidemic proportions. In Evritania, a wife was caught by her husband in the act of making love to a shepherd under a bridge. She justified the transgression on the grounds that the shepherd had threatened to reveal to her husband her relations with three other men. Reports of rape proliferated, but even here we could not help but raise an eyebrow over the peculiar turn some of the latest, less-sinister cases have taken, many of which seem to have been lifted from the pages of The Decameron or Canterbury Tales. In one case, both mother and daughter were attacked while asleep in bed. In another, an inebriated husband came home and raped his mother-in-law. In yet another, a nineteen-year-old girl who spent the night in the apartment of two young men said she was ‘indecently assualted’. In each of these cases, curiously enough, the victims did not realize ‘what had happened’ until the next day. This was not the case, however, of a twenty-five-year-old nun who withdrew charges against her assailant and was quoted in The Athens News as saying that although using force, he had aquainted her ‘with earthly paradise and offered me love which I have never known in my life’.
As these Boccaccian and Chaucerian tales multiplied, we waited expectantly to hear from Bishop Avgoustinos. But while the Philistines sinned, even penetrating the holy orders, where was the Saint of Fiorina, as he is affectionately known? He eventually did surface in a short news item from the north—in the new role of environmentalist. He had joined forces with the Mayor of Ptolemais and other public officials, it transpired, and was busy launching appeals to the Government to save the country from the ‘slow death’ of atmospheric polution! Although we share our ecclesiastical leader’s concern about pollution, we cannot help but feel that he has abandoned his ever-meandering flock which, in the absence of his vigilant attendance, has wandered from the straight and narrow path and is blissfully making its predatory way along the road to Iniquity and Damnation.
The Case of the Innocent Minister
THERE is little that will arouse the ire of the press more readily than a public official who pulls rank—and gets caught. It was therefore with a touch of indignation that To Vimaon Aug.13 reported an incident involving the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, Constantine Trikoupis. According to their initial account, Mr. Trikoupis, having arrived at Ellinikon airport forty minutes late for his flight to Frankfurt, ordered the plane, which had already started down the runway, stopped. When airport personnel refused to comply, the undaunted Minister leapt into his limousine and set off in pursuit of the plane, coming to a halt forty metres in front of the Boeing. The pilot, who barely managed to avoid ramming into the car, refused to allow the Minister to board. Back at the transit lounge the Minister was told that the pilot’s actions were in accordance with airport regulations. The airline had stuck to its guns, the article noted approvingly.
A few days later, the newspaper printed a revised account of the incident. Not only was the Minister innocent, but he emerged as the unfortunate victim of the airport inefficiency usually inflicted on more plebian travellers: he had been ignominiousiy bumped from his seat after he had checked in. Mr. Trikoupis, it was revealed, had not arrived late at the airport. On the contrary, he had arrived early, checked in himself and his luggage, and gone off to the VIP lounge to await the boarding announcement for his flight. After forty-five minutes and no notification, the Minister made inquiries and discovered that his seat had been given to another traveller and that the plane was about to take off without him —presumably with his luggage on board. It was at that point that the Minister leapt into his limousine and set off down the runway in frantic pursuit of his baggage. What precisely became of it is not clear. According to the airline officials, they had thoughtfully removed Mr. Trikoupis’s luggage after giving his seat to someone else, a statement bound to raise scepticism. A greater likelihood is that Mr. Trikoupis’s belongings are at the moment in the Lost and Found section of the Tokyo airport. The Deputy Minister has remained silent, and the explanations reported in To V/mawere drawn from a letter from the Director of Ellinikon Airport. This is probably just as well. Mr. Trikoupis’s comments, we feel certain, are unprintable.
A Very Simple Process
OUR FRIEND Arianne light-heartedly announced one day that she was going to get a drivers licence. She had already located an instructor who assured her that securing a learner’s permit would be a simple procedure involving two photographs, a medical examination, and a brief visit to the Holargos branch of the Ministry of Transportation. Bureaucratic processes are a source of frustration in most countries; here in Greece, however, civil servants have developed the technique of tormenting citizens into a fine art. We murmured our doubts but our young friend was confident that she would encounter no problems. A week later she appeared in our office a pitiful shadow of her former vigorous self. The simple process, as we feared, had not been simple after all.
Merely collecting details about the precise requirements was a piecemeal affair that took several days even though some Good Samaritans tried to forestall difficulties by providing information based on their own experiences. The photographer she went to told her she would require ten photographs, not two. A friend warned her that before visiting a doctor authorized by the Ministry to perform the necessary medical examination, she should arm herself with a four drachma tax stamp (hartosimo), which she could purchase from any pharmacy, a ten drachma stamp which she could get from any kiosk, and a deposit slip for three-hundred and fifty drachmas from the National Bank of Greece since the doctor would accept neither cash nor personal checks. By amassing these things ahead of time she would save herself several unnecessary trips to the doctor.
With photographs, stamp taxes, and the receipt from the bank in hand, she made her way to the doctor’s office. He gave her a cursory examination, poked her here and there, and then waved his hands in her face asking how many fingers he was displaying. She successfully counted his fingers and he presented her with a green pencil and a red pencil and asked her to identify their colours. She was not colour blind and he declared her ‘safe’ for the roads. He then pulled out some forms, adorned them with two photographs and the two stamp taxes, requested two more photographs for his own records, and handed her the documents.
Arriving at Holargos the next day, she wandered down one corridor after another past unmarked doors until she came to a room with clusters of lost, weary-looking people, and took her place at the end of a long line. She noticed that the young man in front of her was clutching a folder labelled ‘Declaration or Certificate’, which aroused her curiosity, but before she could ask him about it he reached the head of the line and presented his papers to the female clerk who, after briefly glancing at them, burst into voluble, high-pitched screams of abuse. Whatever that form was, he had not filled it in correctly and the clerk was telling him in no uncertain terms that he was a fool. As the victim retreated red-faced our friend stepped forward prepared for the worst; but the clerk, without acknowledging her presence or offering a word of explanation, simply turned her back and walked away. It was one o’clock and business, it seems, was at an end. Determined that her trip would not be entirely fruitless, she bravely persisted until she gained the clerk’s contemptuous attention and wrested information as to where she could get the application forms and the ‘Declaration or Certificate’.
A half hour of wandering up and down the dimly lit staircases brought her to the tiny ka fen ion where the necessary forms were sold. Making her way through an assortment of elderly men drinking coffee, she approached a waiter and requested the documents. He reached under the counter and pulled out a folder that appeared to have been refrigerated along with the soft drinks and cheese pies and gave her the forms in exchange for forty-five drachmas.
She made her way home to tackle the forms only to discover that although in her second year of university, she is apparently illiterate because she could not decipher the confusingly footnoted forms written in an incomprehensible bureaucratic jargon. She promptly contacted a family friend, a government official familiar with the lingo, who obligingly translated them. The ‘Declaration or Certificate’ reduced to simple Greek asked for straightforward information such as her name and age and included the warning that she would be prosecuted if she gave false information. At this point she panicked. It was one thing to make a mistake and hazard the wrath of the clerk, but quite another to run the risk of going to jail by inadvertently giving false information. To be on the safe side she consulted a lawyer to make sure that the official had not made any crucial errors.
Bright and early the following day she made her way back to Holargos armed to the teeth with papers and documents only to be turned away by the clerk with the colourful vocabulary who told her that there was yet another fee of three-hundred and seventy drachmas, payable through a bank ‘just around the corner’. Presumably the clerk was just being disagreeable because when we called the Ministry to ask about this fee they told us it can be paid to the cashier on the premises. Unaware of this, however, our friend went in search of the bank ‘just around the corner’ and, some corners later, found herself back at the Ministry where she asked a man lounging at the entrance to direct her to the bank. He swung into life and treated her to a tongue lashing about the stupidity of people who expected him to spend his entire day directing them to something so obvious as the bank. She quickly fled and approached another man who told her impatiently to go down the street a few blocks, and that ‘she couldn’t possibly miss it’. An hour later she was still on the road looking for the bank. She flagged a cab and went home. She had devoted five days and almost eight hundred drachmas and still did not have her learner’s permit, and was firmly convinced that subsequent visits would only bring to light yet other required documents or fees and invite further abuse.
