Adults otherwise tend to ignore the purpose of the day: they don’t much bother about attending the show of military muscle flexing its arms on the avenues of Athens, preferring a drive out to the country to tuck away stacks of codfish cakes and mountains of garlic puree.
Fortunately, a blistering attack on this abject lack of national spirit became the focal point of President Sartzetakis’ national address this year.
In attempting to give even a wan reflection of this sulphurous harangue, an apology must be offered to the reader in trying to render Mr Sartzetakis’ verbal dexterities to so limp, thin and watery a medium of communication as English.
Here at least are some blind stabs at the highlights.
“In today’s times the dangers which encircle us carry not racial, but chiefly other names. In the great society of all nations and in the narrower but still substantial European Community, the danger of our total extinction appears as threatening and literally imminent if we are to abandon ourselves passively and in utter carelessness to the unthinking enjoyment of consumer products. Because, once again, worse than at any other period in our national existence – since destiny and our own errors have resulted in a dangerous demographic diminishment – the comparison of figures shows that we are at our weakest numerically: a meagre and insignificant morsel.”
“As not to be transformed into a pitiful flock of unwilling, bleating servants always and continually at the beck-and-call of others who are multi-multitudinous and powerful, the only path to salvation there remains for us is illuminated by our history over the millennia, especially in the 1821 War of Independence and other struggles of liberation, since these alone reveal to us the secret of our national survival. Thus this can only be secured by a continuously deeper pursuit of national self-knowledge and of living effectively by the values through which Hellenism has managed to survive through difficult times.”
“Therefore, this survival of ours presupposes the rejection of everything that undermines our martial spirit, of any decay of our traditional values, of every form of corruption such as this deplorable mimicry of foreign models and oblivious, complaisant amusements.”
After recovering from the thunderous splendor of this diatribe against the unholy foreign influences on Hellas, one is still left with the President’s apocalyptic vision. It isn’t just that Athens at best has been turned into a string of fastfoodadika run by local kowboythes wearing Ί Love to Make Love’ T-shirts and Adidas jogging shoes. It is the lurid nightmare that would make even St John the Divine blanch of a post-1992 Greece whose hotels are all run by Belgians, its restaurants managed by French with Portuguese waiters serving Spanish olives, whose policemen are Irish, whose football teams are made up exclusively of English and Italians, and whose .government by that time will consist of ministers hired as ombudsmen from Denmark. And with Turkish entry not far off, it takes little imagination to foresee guards in fezzes and Ottoman slippers becoming the custodians of all our ancient and Byzantine sites, serving instant Turkish coffee at canteens at the foot of the Acropolis to hordes of Greeks on holiday from jobs in Dusseldorf, Charleroi and Cardiff. The President has made it amply clear how to avoid this fate-worse-than-death. That is, instead of spending half the night grossly overeating at tavernas, smashing piles of plates at discos and screaming ourselves hoarse at basketball games, we should all be retiring to bed early in the evening and getting down to the serious business of repopulating this country with latter-day Bouboulinas and Karaiskakises.
Years ago Mr Karamanlis drew an apt simile when pressing the country towards the EC, remarking that it was like throwing a baby into the sea: it would have to learn to swim in order to survive. But his successor to the presidential throne sees it another way: namely, that the baby has been squawling, gurgling, flailing, gulping down and throwing up sea water these last eight years and that now it should be fished out of the waves, swaddled in fluffy piles of blue-and-white striped chauvinism and rocked to sleep in the ample arms of Mother Hellenism.
But where is this beautiful vision of Greece to be realized? Mr Sartzetakis has said that we are not threatened by the EC alone. No, we are encircled by dangers. The First World is corrupt, but the Second world is mostly Slavic (at least nearby) and the Third World isn’t even Orthodox. There was a song composed during the junta called “We’ll go into the jungle with Tarzan” which has always remained popular. But that was some 15 years ago and environmentalists warn us today that even the jungle is fast disappearing.
Perhaps, with luck, it isn’t necessary to go anywhere. It will take a great deal more than the EC to change Greece much. And as for Greek reality; it only lies in one’s head, doesn’t it? So long as there’s sand on the shores of the Aegean there will always be a place to take one’s head and bury it.
