One particularly acid moment was “among diplomats the snarling is getting louder about the black sheep in their midst.”
With characteristic Hellenic humor, cartoonist Ilias Makris reacted by showing Greece looking into a mirror and mumbling, “I don’t mind being black; it’s being a sheep that I don’t like.”
This, of course, is true, and independence of mind is the most Greek of characteristics, sometime for good, sometime for ill. This, too, seemed to be very much on the minds of Messrs Genscher, Carter, Karagheorgis arid McTaggart who came to Athens last month to collect their Onassis prizes and say a few words which gave no impression that they had entered a sheep pen.
Ever since Harold MacMillan shuffled to the podium in 1980 after receiving the first Athinai Prize (he helped save the Acropolis in one of its many crises), the Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation has put on a good show, and it is no slight to the ten intervening ceremonies that the 1991 presentation was the best. If no one was as wise as President Senghor or as handsome as Dr Kouchner or as sweet as Ailton Krenek of Amazonia, the four laureates this year were impassioned and, thankfully, brief.
The new venue had something to do with the ceremony’s success. The Old Parliament is a dear survivor of Othonian Athens but it was a bit of a squash particularly during Melina Mercouri’s entrances who always acted as if she were Onassis Prize winner in perpetuity.
This year the ceremony took place at the newly-completed Athens Concert Hall. Local chauvinists are right for once, it is the most beautiful concert hall in the EC (shoo, you other 11 sheep!) and let us cry, Bravo! to those true believers in the ultimate quality of Greek life who made this monument possible: the late Alexandra Triandi, Lambros Eftaxias and Christos Lambrakis – for starters.
But just to make sure that amid all this glamor one was still in the homely homeland, landscaping was still going on around the hall as the first limos drew up. Sapling cypresses and olive trees and little rows of purple posies were being planted by eager native workers like Albanian refugees, gypsies and recently-arrived Pontians who are the only ones who keep the black sheep on its four feet.
A brief choral prelude showed off the hall’s wonderful acoustics and the solemn music was given a dash of color by Mimi’s late arrival in a pretty dress with her spouse unobtrusively taking seats first row, centre.
“The freedom which unites Europe today is based on the freedom of man, as we first encounter it in all its worthiness in the wisdom of Greek philosophy, the proportion of Greek sculpture and the profundity of fate as expressed in Greek tragedy.”
So spoke Vice Chancellor of Ger-many, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, on receiving the Athinai Prize for Man and Mankind in his dedication to the unification of Europe and his own country.
Mr Genscher drew a parallel be-tween Germany and Greece for being the only two EC countries which bordered on the communist states of Eastern Europe and, due to this fatal geography, were split by a fissure which abetted the Civil War and the dictatorship 20 years later in Greece, and produced the two Germanys, only now reunited.
“This anguish has, however, strengthened our desire for European union. Here, men and women know that freedom does not come by itself, but is gained only through pain and even at the risk of life.”
If Mr Genscher stressed overall political unity based on individual freedom as first conceived and manifested in ancient Greece, Professor Vassos Karagheorgis lamented the loss of cultural unity by violence.
Dean of Cypriot archaeology and minister of antiquities, Professor Karagheorgis was awarded the Olympia Prize for Man and Culture in his dedication to the preservation of the Cypriot cultural heritage.
“It was my good fortune to study, to preserve and to bring to light the ancient culture of my country… For 22 years, from 1952 to 1974, the earth at Salamis gave me joy each season by yielding up the secrets of the past. A whole world was opened for the first time, widening the history and the archaeology of Cyprus. The myths and traditions which I had learned as a child growing up in a village a few kilometers from Salamis became a reality.”
“Then one summer morning in 1974,1 saw that whole world vanish…”
Ever since, Dr Karagheorgis’ sole aim has. been trying to keep the Cypriot heritage intact. Through publications, researches, lectures, protests and pleas, he has sought to stop or reduce the stream of treasures taken from churches, monasteries, museums, archaeological sites and by clandestine excavations, and identify those that have appeared on western markets.
On receiving the Aristotelis Prize for Man and Society, former US President Jimmy Carter made an impassioned plea for the victims of famine, disease and civil war in the Third World and outlined the admirably practical and attainable aims of the Carter Centre at Emory University, Atlanta, in research, agricultural technology and getting vaccines to the places where they are most urgently needed.
The Delphi Prize for Man and his Environment went to the founder and president of Greenpeace, David McTaggart. Of the four speeches it was the tartest but the most challenging, for it seems, the only way the world is going to stay in one piece is by forcing man to make best use of his mind, widen his awareness and act on it. In their own way, the sages of ancient Athens faced with equal courage the mysteries and dangers of existence and would understand what was meant.
The prizes were presented by President Karamanlis who was praised by Mr Genscher as a great democrat, a great Hellene and a great European. So if Greece, after all, is a sheep whatever the color, at least it is watched over by a Good Shepherd.
