Although leaders of the opposition at once claimed that this compromise was another example of PASOK backsliding from its self-proclaimed radical reforms, much of the public may have been relieved to learn that an exclusively ecclesiastical tyranny would not be replaced by an equally exclusive civic one. That there was alleged opposition to the bill from the left wing of PASOK as well, may have accounted for the unorthodox way in which the draft law was made public. Instead of being handed out at the Ministry of Justice where reporters had foregathered, the text was deposited directly at the General Press Office when most journalists were absent.
In giving citizens the choice of what sort of marriage they want, the bill states that the conditions, content, and annulments of a marriage contract will follow, respectively, either civil law or the law of the Eastern Orthodox Church. Hence, by example, the termination of a marriage contracted in church will require submission to ecclesiastical rule. In principle, the Church has been liberal in matters of divorce, and has recently increased its allowance of marriages to individuals from three to four.
The new legislation provides that two people may be married before a mayor or a president of a community, or before a legal representative of these officials, in the presence of two witnesses. It also recognizes the validity of civil marriages that have been contracted by citizens abroad, whether one or both are members of the Orthodox Church. Heretofore, a second, ecclesiastical marriage in Greece has been deemed necessary to prove that the union is legal. In such cases, the legality of the second contract will be upheld.
The ease and speed with which civil marriages can now be contracted and consummated, places the ball, as it were, in the Church’s court. Its adamant refusal to countenance civil marriage in any form has recently been the cause of widespread criticism. Now, the heaps of red-tape, documents, permits and the endless visits and long queues at parish registry offices may have to be considerably shortened and simplified if brides are going to continue walking down church aisles. It may even inspire, in the case of mixed marriages, the elimination of such demanding requirements as an authenticated paper in triplicate from the village priest of, say, Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, stating that the betrothed in question is not a bigamist.
Otherwise, it is not only church coffers that are in danger of being depleted, but those that belong to v/hat may be called dependent business concerns. Bridal shops in Greek towns are almost as numerous as kiosks, and it is not just the dress industry that may be affected if the Church does not streamline its methods. There are those masters of contemporary folk art who create bonbonnieres and the confectioners who fill them. The presentation, for instance, of a purple, plastic, plug-in gondola filled with sugar-coated almonds to a witness at a civil marriage is not going to be a custom easily established, even though the new law specifically suggests that the ceremony be carried through in a festive
(panigyriki) manner. Then there are the chandlers who make the lampades and those innumerable
hands that poke out from behind church draperies expecting pourboires. Above all, there are the florists. The vast interior of an Athenian neo-Byzantine parish church requires at least two nylon-covered-hothouse loads of duBarry pink gladiolas to make it look in any way more cheerful than an abandoned railway terminal.
It is open to question whether the government in following up its program of social liberalization has seriously considered the possible financial repercussions of its acts. The garment industry was still reeling under the Ministry of Education’s recent pronunciamento abolishing the regulation schoolgirl pinafore, when it was threatened with losing its taffeta-and-tulle trade as well. Supposing the government should go whole hog in its pursuit of the Socialist Ideal and now institute, by by example, civil burial? Given the loss of all that fanfare upon which so many cottage industries depend, the result might leave the country’s fragile economic infrastructure permanently weakened. Worse yet, consider the legalizing of cremation which even would rob a man (and his tailor) of a last custom-made suit.
The only journalistic consolation for the Church on February 17, as banner headlines announced the institution of civil marriage, lay on the social page which printed photographs of a much-publicized church wedding. Yet, it may have been a prophetic warning that this was to be one of the last Greek weddings to take place in front of an altar, in which case the bride’s name, Sibyl, was quite appropriate to the occasion.
Tax Evasion
Strict legislation that would wipe out tax evasion has long been a hefty plank in the PASOK platform. Some of the party’s pre-Keynesian economists have seemed to suggest that the country’s endemic imbalance-of-payments problems could be cured at once and an unprecedented wave of prosperity follow if only taxpayers declared their true earnings. Although these claims may be exaggerated — other, unorthodox, anti-social (or anti-socialist) economists claim that it is only through tax evasion that money circulates as freely as it does in this country’ -getting around the tax collector is considered by most red-blooded Hellenes to be a patriotic duty, perhaps dating back to the time when the collector was an Ottoman Turk.
At the end of every year the Ministry of Finance publishes the names and professions of the people who declare the hundred highest incomes. Last December, a maker of thread led the list which also included a student and two people who declared they had no occupation at all, but did not include many well-known names in the world of big business. When this list is published, the Ministry always points out that the hundred on the list are not necessarily the richest people in the country (many of them derive their wealth from business operations based abroad) but only the most honest. During the early months of its administration, the present government made various attempts to face the problem of tax evasion, although, by first reshuffling the directors of Internal Revenue bureaus and then eliminating many of them through the Civil Service Act which did away with several degrees of directors, it was apparently unable to keep people from stuffing their pockets with undeclared income.
In January, PASOK economic advisors decided in their rural shrewdness to advertise publicly a telephone number whereby officials could be informed by whom, when and how the government was being cheated. Informing on others being almost as popular a national pastime as tax evasion, the telephone operators handling this number were nearly as overworked as those serving the number which gives out football lottery results. Fanners spying on their neighbors reported unauthorized contracts for selling a sheep or a goat; resentful young men informed on their mothers-in-law who were collecting under-the-counter rents; wives revenged themselves on their husband’s mistresses by revealing hidden and illegal profits gained from gambling at Koum-Kan. Eventually, the harassed tax people had to admit that they were after bigger game.
In January, a number of doctors were bagged who had declared only a fraction of their muiti-million-drachma incomes. This was not surprising, as it is generally known that fashionable physicians whose waiting rooms are stocked with elite magazines (like The Athenian) have 18-karat gold pens which often have an odd way of running out of ink when patients’ receipts are being issued.
Late in the month, the Ministry of Finance announced that it was after the rarest rara avis of them all, Christina Onassis, contending that she still owed nearly fifty million dollars in inheritance taxes. The claim partly involves the assets of Olympic Airways which was bought by-the state soon after the death of Aristotle Onassis in 1975. Disputing the claim, she said that the properties involved did not come under Greek jurisdiction because they involved the assets of companies set up abroad. By mid-February, the matter, far from being in hand, was still in the bush, and by no means in the Internal Revenue’s still rather empty bag.
