Its tragic aspect is that people remember different and conflicting things, and the shadows of the 1944-49 Civil War as it becomes more distant in time, do not fade but only lengthen.
This year these celebrations were held under a socialist government, after sixteen years of conservative rule during which left-wing observances of resistance to Nazi occupation were not recognized, and leftist groups were prohibited from parading on Ohi Day.
A few days after taking oath as Prime Minister, Andreas Papandreou stated, “The National Resistance does not belong to political parties. It belongs to the people of Greece.” Conservative leaders reacted sharply, fearing that official recognition of leftist resistance would “revive old passions”.
The major contribution of the Left to the Resistance during the German occupation would be ridiculous to deny and folly to ignore. On the other hand, to claim that no one else took part in it would be equally absurd. The same is true of the Junta period. Defiance of tyranny is a national characteristic to which no party label can be put, though many try.
On November 6, the present regime, which calls itself a government of all Greeks and has made national unity a paramount aim, suspended all celebrations connected with the civil war pending legislative action to abolish them. This meant the cancellation of the approaching Macriyannis Commemoration which provoked an opposition protest that the government was helping to create “a distortion of history”. This anniversary, celebrated in the past on December 3, observed the first day of the bloody December Revolution in 1944 when the communist National Popular Liberation Army made a nearly successful bid to take over Athens. With British support, Greek National Army formations finally cleared the city a month later.
For all the government’s attempts to lift the demonstrations of National Resistance above the nonpartisan level, the coloring of the Polytechnic march this year was distinctly red, refreshed by some patches of green, but very little in the way of white-and-blue.
As crowds were thickening around the flower-strewn gates in front of the Polytechnion a few days earlier, former Prime Minister and New Democracy Deputy of State, Panayiotis Kanellopoulos, said in a statement, “Someday, at some future anniversary, I hope the Polytechnion will more resemble the holy ground of a temple than a noisy political marketplace.”
The Knights of Vergina and the Third World
On November 5, The Alexander Onassis Foundation in Paris announced the winners of the Athens and the Olympia Prizes for the period 1981-2.
Bernard Kouchner, 41, recipient of the Athens Prize, is the founder of “Doctors Without Frontiers” and “Doctors of the World”. Bringing medical relief to Biafra, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Chad, Vietnam, Cambodia and many Central and South American countries, Kouchner has been dubbed “The Knight of the Third World”.
Son of a liberal French doctor and a Jewish nurse with progressive ideas, Kouchner joined a communist youth organization with their blessing. Still a teenager, he became involved with student unrest in Paris in the late 1950s when the revelations of the Stalin purges were publicized and the Algerian war was at its peak. As a result, he became an advocate of Tito and Algerian independence at the time when he began studies in gastroenterology.
Disappointed in the results of the May, 1968 student uprising in Paris, Kouchner decided to devote his life to bringing medical relief to the world’s distressed areas.
Whether working with the emaciated children of Biafra or at the front lines of war in Cambodia. Kouchner with his Hollywood good looks, his perfect manners, his impeccable dress and grooming has also been dubbed “Monsieur Vetiver” after the cologne he uses. His detractors may regret the vanished era of Dr. Albert Schweitzer and the coming of the age of mass media publicity, but Kouchner gets things done. Taking his relief ship Light of the World to Vietnam or chartering a Boeing 707 to bring 42 tons of medicine to San Salvador, his grand manner attracts attention and the donations pour in. Criticized in Biafra once for neglecting more pressing matters to work in front of a camera, Kouchner retorted, “This way, another 20,000 lives will be saved.”
Manos Andronikos, recipient of the Olympia Prize, was born in Proussa in 1919 and the scars of his childhood uprooting at the time of the Asia Minor catastrophe are so deep that he never talks of this period of his life even to his closest friends.
Ever since, he has lived in Thessaloniki and has excavated only in Macedonia. Torn between a love of art and of antiquity, Andronikos fell under the spell of Constantine Romaios, the excavator of Tegea and Thermon, at the University of Thessaloniki. Taking his examinations for the Archaeological Service, Andronikos completed his studies at Oxford under the Greek pottery expert, Sir John Beazley. He first dug at Vergina in 1961 and three years later made major discoveries at Pella. In 1974 he returned to Vergina where his excavations have received worldwide attention. Professor Andronikos has published extensively on his excavations, on the culture of Macedonia and on art. At present he is concentrating, as a scholar, on the wall paintings and funerary objects from the royal tombs at Vergina, and, as an excavator, he is making a systematic study of the city as a whole. It is a curiosity of archaeology -often repeated ~ that the scientific excavator finds in the earth what lies closest to the special interests of his mind.
The Onassis awards will be presented at a special ceremony in Athens on April 22.
Arms and the Man
The bimillenary of the death of Virgil was observed by the Athens Academy on October 19. In 19 B.C., having nearly completed TheAeneid, Virgil decided to freak out on the Greek islands for the summer. Stricken by sunstroke near Athens, he hurried home to consult Roman doctors, but expired disembarking from the ferry at Brindisi – an experience which can still be traumatic.
In the immediate post-election heat little note was made of the Academy’s memorial. The old epic commencing “Of arms and the man I sing” was drowned out that night by another epic beginning on television in which the man was the new prime minister and the arms nuclear.
