Yet in a decade and a half it has reported on more political change than many other perfectly proper countries have gone through in a century.. This brief time period has seen a military tyranny collapse, a monarchy repudiated, a conservative regime branded by its adversaries as oligarchic (though in fact it had populist leanings) and a socialist government which has been accused of being demagogic. Today’s Greece has now concocted a government of such originality that a new word (the Greek language being adaptive as well as rich in vocabulary) has been coined to describe it: Pamperocracy.
It will be noted that most of the political terminology above derives from the Greek and the reason is not hard to find. As ancient Greece developed the first truly advanced society, so it was the first to have a kaleidoscopic political life. Things haven’t changed so much in 2500 years. Those who refer to Greece as the cradle of democracy sometimes fail to recall that it has frequently been its coffin, too.
If political events, especially lately, have stolen the greater attention over most of these years, they are but foam rising from the deep ground swell which has transformed a deeply rooted, brave, tense, often violent, tenacious, morally rigid, despotically patriarchal, but almost atrophied, rural society into the urban, pluralistic, liberal, lax, materialistic, hedonistic and self-motivated one that most westerners live in today. From under the nefos and within the cement city it is safe to be nostalgic for the cobbled streets, rubble walls and tiled roofs of the past, but one doesn’t see people dashing back there without refurbishing the old kitchen in the latest appliances and the outhouse in gleaming white porcelain – and the money for that can only come from the concrete jungle.
If the wholesale exodus from the poorer rural areas into the big cities was at its peak 15 years ago, the demographic movement into the dozens of now affluent towns has happened since then. And today, the new trend of townspeople beginning to fix up their birthplaces if only as vacation homes, is encouraging. Ironically, it seems to be a social law that one has to break with tradition in order to discover its true values.
Nevertheless, this new awareness of tradition is a growing and salutary phenomenon in Greece today, reviving a self-respect which this country sorely needs and helping to renew a sense of moral integrity which, at least recently, has been so spectacularly missing from public life. It need hardly be said that the sorry state of local affairs, arousing astonishment and derision abroad, has caused outrage and sorrow here.
The wrenching effect of this massive social change from one culture to another, with ways of life so different, and standards so contrary, has transformed the physical aspect of the whole Mediterranean heartland beyond recognition: one generation later the strain of its psychological effects is still being strongly felt.
In the face of these extraordinary changes carried on in the unrestrained, querulous, passionate, careless and life-loving manner which is the Greek way of going about things, it is almost impossible for a modest-sized publication to fulfill its obligations to its readers by providing a truthful, responsible and vivid picture of this non-stop three-ring epic which confronts it on all sides. A staff that has numbered eight in moments of plenty and been reduced to five during periods of austerity (which is the more usual state), attempting to describe Greek reality in all its splendor is certainly challenged when it is not hopelessly baffled.
Due consideration, too, must be paid to those dozens of half-starved contributors who over the years have been so patient with their distracted editors, just out of stubborness and certainly out of the love and care they feel for their native, or their adopted, country.
In one way the recent notoriety which Greece has received in the international press has given pleasure, as it has afforded an opportunity to see far mightier publications than this one stub their toes on the mind-boggling facts of Greek life, arousing a question asked by astonished readers all over the world: Can this be so? And now with 15 years’ experience, The Athenian can reply to this with confidence: Yes, indeed, and much more!
So today, The Athenian rededicates itself to muddling along, trying to give an adequate picture of this magnificent and maddening country, and salutes all its friends – its writers, photographers and technicians, its readers and certainly its advertisers – Hellenes and philhellenes everywhere.
