Not that warnings of this hadn’t been sounded earlier. At the end of April, the Ministry to the Government had made the following ominous proclamation: “People working a five day, Monday-through-Friday week will have their May Day holiday on May 2 while their Holy Saturday holiday will be postponed to Tuesday, May 10. People working a five-day, Tuesday-through-Saturday week, however, will celebrate May Day on April 30 and their Holy Saturday holiday will be postponed until the following Saturday”.
So far, this was as clear as one could hope for under the circumstances, but when it got round to how people working a six-day week would get the holidays due them, things began to get complicated.
And when it came to the shopkeepers who worked longer hours than usual during Holy Week so that everyone had the opportunity to buy the essential lamb, red dye for Easter eggs and chocolate bunnies, the staggered shopping hour system (uniquely irrational to Greece even in normal times) began to reel under the strain.
This deferring of holidays has become so common under the joys of socialism that a word has been coined for it (first used in regards to wage-increase postponements) which might just as well be adopted bodily into English as “heterochronology”, since it doesn’t make any sense in either language. However, to give one example of the heterochronological phenomenon at work: butcher shops were closed on Monday, May 16, because they had been obliged to stay open on the afternoon of Maundy Thursday ten days earlier. (The idea of a butchers’ staying open on a Thursday afternoon being, for some reason, an unspeakable dietary heresy in this country).
The only unfun thing, therefore, about the first half of May is that there were no strikes to speak of, such as had turned most of April into a commercial write-off, effecting, as it did, taxis, buses, trolleys,
hospital doctors, private school teachers, bakers, and even high school students in the town of Agrinion who loudly protested that they were being given too much homework. Truly, there isn’t much point in striking on holidays, yet, anomalous as it may sound, the General Confederation of Labor did call a national transportation strike on May Day itself, during which its members disported themselves in Athens with a peace demonstration in the Field of Mars and a conference on disarmament and detente held at the War Museum.
But it was not just private enterprise that ground to a stop at Eastertide: state agencies themselves were closed from Thursday to Tuesday. Banks, too, were closed from Good Friday noon until the following Thursday. If this was a stratagem to keep tourists in the country, it could do nothing to alleviate the balance-in-payments deficit since visitors could not get their hands on any money. Furthermore, post offices were all shut for five days, and no telegrams could be sent during this period unless an emergency could be proved. Messages like “Help! I’m trapped in Greece” were rej ected, of course, as an example of a desperate text, and, construed as a congratulatory sort of sentiment like “Happy Birthday. Wish you were here”, they were, therefore, unacceptable until the Wednesday after Easter. Even newspapers went on furlough for three days, leaving the dissemination of current events in the somewhat manipulative hands of state-controlled radio and television. These media piously devoted themselves in the meantime to the liturgy of holy celebrations and reruns of old movies starring Charlton Heston (alias Easton, in Greek) in an assortment of biblical roles.
When the holidays finally came to an end at mid-month, the general exhaustion was so great, at least among adults, that strikes were only resumed faintheartedly, with half the taxi drivers and half the private school teachers perpetuating April’s momentum of social protest.
Displays of public exuberance, however, are so dear to some of the nation’s ideologically noisy young people that they would not so easily surrender to imperialistic calm and bourgeois industriousness. So the last Sundays in May (and there were still three to go), were devoted to peace marches. These were held in memory of Grigoris Lambrakis, a popular leftist deputy, who was assassinated in Thessaloniki on May 22, 1963, following a peace rally. Parties of the left, however, could not agree to unite on a single peace march this year, with the result that several separate peaces were celebrated on consecutive Sundays.
The Sixth Marathon Peace March on May 15 was only endorsed by the Communist Party of the Exterior ( Moscow-line) and boycotted by the Communist Party of the Interior (Eurocommunist) and the Panhellenic Socialist Movement. Starting out from five different points in the purlieus of Athens (one assembling before the grim gates of the American military base at Ellinikon airport), the marchers converged on Syntagma at 8 p.m. In striking contrast to the pervasive spirit of peace which had spread over a depopulated Athens on Easter the Sunday before, this demonstration of peace was a whooping dance of shouting, trumpet-blasting, bullhorn-blowing and traffic-snarling bedlam in which thousands of youths in peace hats, peace T-shirts and peace jogging outfits, eating peace cheese pies and drinking peace Pepsis, participated. Some carried effigies of President Reagan and other peace violators, peacefully hanging from nooses. The jollity continued far into the night, and what’s more, more could be expected the following Sunday when the Non-Aligned Movement for Peace (but only followed by the slenderer rank-and-file of the Communists of the Interior) would have their outing.
The present government, like the governments before it, is deeply concerned with the country’s low level of productivity. Now, if last April was a striking case of non-performance, what are our stern economists going to make of the month of May, during which we produced nothing but holidays and hullabaloo?
