One of the few successful solutions to this dilemma so far has been Solon’s, who said that he would only set down laws for the Athenians if they abided by them for ten years, and when they agreed, he abruptly left the country before they could change their minds.
The present-day relatively minor matter of the government’s forcing people to wear seatbelts in their automobiles only goes to show that the outcome of this historical debate remains far from closed. While everyone agreed that the official decision was well-intentioned, many felt that the method of enforcement was at fault. Legal purists claimed that while it was admissible for the government to insist that cars be equipped with seatbelts, compelling people to wear them was an infringement of personal rights. Others at once questioned whether the wearing of seatbelts necessarily meant the fastening of them. Others, again, were suspiciously reminded of Colonel Pattakos and the enforcement of a law requiring that cars be equipped with a first – aid kit — a matter which turned out to be a rip-off. Now ladies of a certain stratum of society are asking their husbands if, in lieu of seatbelts, fashion-conscious shoulder straps cannot be tastefully appliqued onto their new 1980s wardrobes instead. The result of all this has been a tangle of straps, buckles, clasps.
Yet the end-of-the-year law regarding seatbelts was only symbolic of a far greater corpus of legislation which had to do with belt-tightening in general, and whether it would have any public support. While the greater issues of rising energy costs and world inflation were invoked by government spokesmen, many believed that the measures were unduly panicky and would impede rather than stimulate the local economy. Even so, when it comes to the simplest practical economies, we are woefully inefficient. When state services feel the need to advertise in costly plugs on television that it is more sensible to turn down thermostats than open windows when rooms are overheated, that it is desirable to turn off lights in unoccupied rooms, that it is unnecessary to boil a whole kettle of water when brewing a single cup of chamomile, it only shows how far and how fast we have moved from what were common and not so ancient economies. Even those tireless Kolonaki exponents of the simple life and back-to-the-roots romiosyne in their calculated homespuns tend today to serve their tsipouro in Bohemian crystal, their trahana in Meissen bowls and their Greek coffee in Limoges cups.
In less realistic countries than Greece, thrift can be thought of as virtuous and even as fun. But the likelihood of getting the local bourgeois populace more enthusiastic about saving odd bits of string, retying broken shoelaces, darning socks, turning collars, patching elbows on jackets and hooking up laddered nylons than throwing a whole wardrobe out and buying a new one is most unlikely.
If there seem to be no effective ways of creating incentives to cut down on imported luxuries (indeed, it was noted that luxury shops did particularly well during the Christmas season just after the new import taxes were put on), there may be a way of appealing to the public’s health. Whisky, champagne, vodka, imported cigarettes and cigars, foreign cheeses with 80 percent matiere grasse, pate, chocolates and caviar (all of which are on the blacklist) could be said to endanger health. And this could be said of petrol, also, particularly as it issues out of exhausts of cars. Yet health awareness is still in its infancy here and not much can be expected from such a campaign, as the Ministry of Public Welfare knows well, having had great difficulties recently in merely prohibiting smoking in hospitals.
As Themistocles of old well understood (who seduced Athenians into giving up imported Persian delicacies and building a fleet), if you want people to obey unpopular laws, the only way is to make an ethnic cause of it. In this case, emphasis should be placed on doctors rather than on health. As is generally believed, doctors —especially those who accept under-the-counter fees, of which there a goodly humber — are the people with the most cash lying around. Now, due to the heavy local property transfer tax, it is suspected that they are not investing in real estate here any more but in Switzerland, America and other choice areas, causing a further cash-flow abroad. Thus, by awakening in people a sense of outrage, resentment, envy, patriotism and national purpose, they will avoid doctors,
embark on preventative medicine, and put a self-imposed embargo on foreign products. The new draconian laws will be cheerfully abided by and belts will be more easily tightened. Thus the country, by going back to a native diet of olives, tomatoes and water (and travelling donkey-back) will blossom with its former health restored.
Saving Attica
IT was the opinion of most early nineteenth-century travellers that of all the regions of Greece, the fairest was Attica. And there are still people about who remember the unique quality of its light, the.beauty of its mountains and the harmoniousness of its fore-ground, background and middle distance which only the term ‘classical’ seemed to describe accurately. The despoiling of Attica began many decades ago when a railroad was built up to the foothills of Mount Pendeli to bring marble down from the quarries there for the construction of a growing Athens. Before the Second World War, Elefsis was already being developed as an industrial area and the olive groves, once considered among the most beautiful in Greece, were being chopped down between Piraeus and Athens. But it is the expansion of the city in the last quarter of a century that has accelerated the disfigurement of the region to a point where much of it has lost its special character and parts of it have become downright hideous. It is not only those wastelands around Aigaleo and behind Aspropyrgos but the tens of thousands of small lots often little more than a hundred square metres in extent and enclosed by wire-mesh fences, which are scattered all over Attica, that have made so much of it an eyesore.
Since it became the capital of Greece and inspired Bavarian and other German architects with dreams of neoclassical grandeur, Athens has pupped so many city-plans that even a list of them runs to a small volume. It has also resolutely resisted abiding by almost any of them, and it has been wryly observed that the Doxiades School of Ekistics which has created or transformed urban areas around the world has had little or no effect on its own home town.
The lack of any effective long-range program for city planning has of course had its baneful effect on all of Attica, for it is not so much the expansion of the city as the way it has expanded which has greatly increased the extent of present-day ugliness. The lack of planning in the suburban sprawl around the city is at once apparent to the visitor, for it is not only the unfinished state of so many constructions that catches the eye, but the basic and immediate visual realization that the buildings don’t seem to have any relation to the site on which they stand. And, in fact, much construction in Attica does not belong where it is, having risen quite illegally in the dead of night. The overall provisional look, the feeling that most of the population is either moving in or moving out, is what gives Attica the unnerving appearance of being not so much settled as unsettled.
The recent, final decision by the government to build the new international airport at Spata in the Messogia east of Athens, has threatened now to lay waste one of the least spoiled areas of Attica. The Messogia, the inland plain lying between Hymettus and the Lavrion hills on the east coast, is the chief agricultural area remaining in Attica, much of it covered by olive groves and vineyards.
To mitigate this threat, the government in December announced measures that will affect all of Attica outside of the city plan. Dividing the area into four zones, the measures will restrict construction according to whether the zone is rated for light industry, residences, or agriculture. The restrictions will be even stricter regarding lands purchased since the law has gone into effect. The size of the property will also affect the number of square metres permissible for construction. By example, in rural zones where prior to now houses could be built on four stremmata (one acre), hence-forth property purchased after the enacting of the law will need twenty stremmata in order to permit building. On property of this size, only four hundred square metres of construction will be allowed, all on one floor or two hundred on each of two storeys. New buildings going up on unimproved properties already owned will also be restricted according to the size of the lots. Such legislation, of course, has its antagonists. It is said to favour the rich (twenty stremmata costing anywhere from five to twelve million drachmas in much of the Messogia) and to depress the value of presently held small holdings. Yet if any of Attica is to be preserved, and remain attractive to live in, such laws are the only solution. It would be certainly ironic if the area in which over one-third of the nation’s population already resides, with an even greater proportion expected in the future, should become the one and only unsightly region in the country.
The Tribulations of Procopios
WHEN Procopios, Bishop of Kephallonia,decided to return to his flock late last year, he was surprised to find himself in the midst of wolves. Perhaps he should not have been surprised. A scandal had broken out during the spring when nuns disclosed that certain mortal parts of the body of Saint Gerassimos, patron saint of Kephallonia, had been surreptitiously removed and pointed accusing fingers at Bishop Procopios and several accomplices ranking high in the Church.
Commerce in relics may seem an esoteric occupation today but given the lethargy of stock markets, the shyly modest performance of the drachma against other currencies (even the dollar), and the feverish activity of inflation, investment in many material things — even material things that are holy — are what used to be called blue chip, sound investments. In a country where the miraculous has not been banished from the physical world and gratitude is still payable in cash, relics have their own little niche in this big, bad world.
Procopios was hauled on the carpet before the Holy Synod without any final decision’s being made. Although laymen were unable (due to the splendour of his array) to find anything amiss during the saint’s two feast days in the summer when he is paraded about his church, specialists suspect that delicate surgery may be difficult to prove on a cadavre of ‘a certain age’.
Procopios had always proclaimed his innocence, and as a proof of it decided to return to his bishopric at Argostoli, claiming that any demonstration against him was simply the anti-clerical expression of Leftists.
Demonstrations indeed took place — and persisted — until MAT, police forces specializing in what is euphemistically called urban unrest (most recently used in Athens to disperse feminists protesting against a Beauty Contest), had to be called in, lest a second ecclesiastical dismemberment take place.
Unrest reached a peak in December when the Metropolitan’s residence seemed about to be stormed. The ingenious bishop, however, was not so easily foiled. Disguising himself in the other-worldly guise of those who keep urban law-and-order, he miraculously escaped through the crowds intact.
