In midsummer the Aegean is normally crowded enough, dotted as it is with cruise ships and yachts, freighters and tankers, ferryboats and caiques and the omnipresent gri-gri. This year, however, the traffic has been swollen with refugee ships from Beirut, a French helicopter carrier., Greek and Turkish destroyers and missile ships on maneuvres, oil drilling rigs off Thasos and the Nestor Delta, a Soviet aircraft carrier, and Sixth Fleet tenders plying between their mother ships and Cretan ports, and trying unsuccessfully to put their personnel on shore-leave. Like a solitary and harassed policeman in the midst of this international nautical traffic jam, one ship, Jacques Cousteau’s Calypso, is painstakingly attempting to explore the Aegean’s past and to safeguard its future.
In an imperfect world with a very uncertain present, one can only look to the future of the Aegean with anxiety. What if, for instance, in this crowded and uneasy seascape, the sacred island of Delos should suddenly decide to drop its moorings and start drifting around the Aegean as it did in mythological times? Present laws governing the sea are inconclusive and complicated enough as it is. For a start, would Delos be classified as a vessel under power or sail? And how would the authorities decide who the Officer in charge’ was in the event of an accident? Nor is Delos the only Mediterranean isle with a peripatetic past. Consider Malta. The brief, if well-documented voyages of the Sismik so hampered by Hellenic craft that it might as well have been attempting to search for oil while weaving its way through the yacht marina in Passalimani—recalls the altogether more glamorous Turkish adventure into the unexplored reaches of the Mediterranean during the First World War when the Sultan’s Imperial Fleet sailed out against British Malta. They never found it and cabled back: ‘Malta Does Not Exist’ which still sends every red-blooded Greek over the age of four into fits of merriment. But of course this may be mere prejudice, and it is only fair to presume that Malta was off on a cruise of its own at the time. Politicians be forewarned: if we should wake up one fine morning in the near future with Malta anchored in the Straits of Gibraltar (with Admiral Mintoff on the bridge) and Delos nosing up the Dardenelles and berthing under the Bosporus bridge — and both rightfully claiming six-mile limits — then the Security Council really would have something to talk about.
In this grasping world it seems that we are obliged to carve up our seas, although a growing oil-slick in the Aegean cannot be indifferently contemplated by any civilized person. It is the sea which above all others has been associated with civilization. Three thousand years divide the Aegean sea-songs of Elytis from those of Homer, but the Aegean still belongs to its poets by right, and to all those who continue to believe in them,
Olympic Ode
PRIME Minister Karamanlis’s proposal to hold future Olympic Games (after the 1980 Games in Moscow) permanently in Greece has been warmly received by the local and the foreign press. There is no doubt that a great deal of the commercialism and chauvinism that has marred recent encounters could be largely circumvented by giving the Games a settled site.
That the Games be put once more under the godly aegis of Olympian Zeus has been warmly commended by The Times of London. Our Prime Minister has naturally suggested the ancient site of Olympia in the Peloponnisos as the logical setting for the Games. An enthusiastic item appeared in The New York Times, however, which inadvertently proposed Mount Olympus, in northern Greece, as a site, when the writer confused Olympia with Mount Olympus. While the archaeologists in Olympia would certainly second this proposal in order to protect their preserves down on the banks of the Alpheus, constructing an entire Olympic Village at an altitude of three thousand metres on Mount Olympus — in an area usually cloud-bound — is certainly adventurous if not reckless. Besides, athletes, it will be recalled, had a difficult enough time adjusting to the altitude of Mexico City eight years ago, which is a thousand metres lower. A far more sensible location, in our opinion, is the Diktean Cave in Crete where Olympian Zeus was born. The cave is spacious and could easily be converted into a covered stadium, and just in case war did break out during the duration of the Games (which of course would be in blatant violation of ancient practice), athletes could still compete in safety.
Two prickly questions still arise, however, if the true spirit of the Games is to be revived. Women in the old days were forbidden from attending the Games, let alone participating in them, and violators were pushed off a cliff. Clearly these strictures are not in the spirit of modern sexual equality. The second problem is that contestants performed naked. Now, the idea of Princess Anne riding in this fashion around the Stadium at Olympia can only spread anxiety among the television officials at the BBC, and nude pole-vaulting and ski-jumping for both sexes can only be seen as unnecessarily hazardous.
There is, all the same, a perfectly reasonable compromise to all these questions. In ancient times there were four sets of games: the Nemean Games at Nemea, the Isthmian Games at Corinth, the Pythian Games at Delphi, and, of course, the Olympic Games. In this case, there could be (by example) the Olympics (nude, male), the Pythian (nude, female), the Nemean (clothed, female), and the Isthmian (clothed, male), with the first two sets of events broadcast on closed-circuit TV. The Winter Olympics could take place on the top of Mount Olympus, and the International Olympic Committee could have its headquarters in the Diktean Cave. Delphi is recommended for the nude-female events as these are bound to be the most popular and the town already has many hotels of all categories.
The idea of holding five sets of international games in Greece, each attended by fifty to a hundred thousand spectators and given world-wide televison coverage, can only warm the cockles of the heart of every athlete and every classicist — not to mention all those hearts now beating over at the Ministries of Tourism and of Finance.
One final problem — which involves Turkey — is easily solved. Olympian Zeus is also connected with Mount Ida near Troy. The Turks can compete alone among themselves there (in which case they are bound to win), clothed or unclothed, male or female, or mixed as they like. And may the Lord of Thunder have mercy on us all!
The Shoe on the Other Foot
A PECULIAR migration sweeps across the European continent each summer as Europeans, on a European holiday, flock to the faraway corners of their spiritual and geographic opposites. Perhaps the most conspicuous tourists in Greece are the tall, blonde Scandinavians. Even now when tourists have become so much a part of the nation’s tapestry that they are virtually overlooked, these Nordic types send shivers through our ever-hopeful young men. What allures these intrepid Grecophiles, we asked a Swedish acquaintance. ‘The climate, the ] v;ht life, the plentiful wine, the kefi, and, dismissing our Don Juans with a death-blow to their filotimo, added, ‘the prices’. Captivated by the Northern mystique one of our correspondents decided to investigate a newly-inaugurated direct air connection between Athens and Oslo offered by Scandinavian Airlines. This is her report:
Equipped with guide books, camera and assorted preconceptions, I joined the ranks of summer tourists, exhilarated by exotic promises—blue-eyed Vikings, Arctic breezes, and midnight sun. Ellinikon Airport was not the usual hum of travellers coming and going but a frantic throng of steaming faces and ragged assemblages of bodies and baggages, the living statistics on tourism in Greece. Rounding the corner to passport control, I was stopped short by an impenetrable wedge of bodies straining toward the officials rhythmically executing their duties, oblivious to the panic of travellers convinced they would miss their flights.
On board the plane, I helped myself to the brochures in the pocket in front of me and began to bone up on Norway. It is so far north that the Arctic Circle divides it in half; in fact, Norway means ‘the northern way’. It boasts the most northerly town in the world, the deepest lake in Europe, fifty thousand islands, seventeen hundred glaciers, two thousand ski jumps, the lowest population density in Europe after Iceland, zero-percent illiteracy, and seventy-two daily newspapers. The plane was advancing over a flat plain of green velvet as my Arctic reverie was interrupted by a Danish traveller nearby sighing that already she missed the pastel landscape of the Aegean.
‘What is the purpose of your visit?’ asked a disconcertingly cultivated official once we had landed on Norway’s terra firma. ‘Tourism?’ I asked, foolishly adjusting to the new role, and thinking of the lost-looking souls in Athens asking for directions to Sintagma. Dismissed with a flick of his stamp, I followed fellow travellers into the baggage retrieval areas, rivetted my eyes on the silent parade of bags, boxes, and fishing poles moving along the conveyor belt, and spotted my luggage toppling onto a heap of unclaimed baggage in the ‘Lost Baggage’ area, rehearsing all the while exchange rates between Norwegian kroner and drachmas.
Arriving at my ‘C category hotel anticipating the worst, I found myself in a surprisingly cheerful lobby where I was greeted by a wholesome young desk clerk who led me to a tidy, no-nonsense room. It was midnight, bouzouki-going time in Athens, but I retired to bed, awaking eagerly as the first rays of sun filtered through the curtains. The dining room was deserted when I arrived there. Consulting a clock, I discovered it was 3 a.m. and made my way back to bed: the literature on Norwegian midnight sunsets failed to mention midnight sunrises! Breakfast several hours later included fresh orange juice, boiled eggs, cheeses, smoked salmon—and fragrant, rich coffee. No paximathia or pound cake.
Well fortified I set off for the various adventures and misadventures of a tourist in a foreign city. One is never quite prepared for the simultaneously charming and frustrating idiosyncrasies unique to each city, unmentioned in travel literature. One moves in Oslo by bus, boat, subway, and foot, in and out of the city and harbour. It is a well-ordered, sparkling clean city with wide boulevards and narrow streets, seasoned department stores and modern boutiques, genteel indoor restaurants and the occasional, informal outdoor cafe. From the harbour areas one catches small boats that shuttle passengers on ‘cruises’ of the fjords. I ‘sailed’ to the three major museums situated at the other side of the harbour: the Viking Museum, the Kon-Tiki Museum (which houses the raft on which Thor Heyerdahl and five companions drifted five thousand miles across the Pacific Ocean), and the Folk Museum. At the latter complex, examples of folk architecture from all over Norway, including entire houses, churches, and streets are scattered throughout a forest-like park. In addition to a National Gallery, there are museums dedicated to artist Edvard Munch and playwright Henrik Ibsen, as well as an immense park-museum devoted to oversized bronze figures by sculptor Gustav Vigeland.
All Norwegians, it would seem, speak English and to my Mediterranean eye all looked strikingly tall and handsome. Shop hours are uneventful nine to five which left me in total confusion, as did the orderly traffic and unintimidated pedestrians calmly traversing the streets. Conductors on public transportation were cheerful, well-scrubbed boys and girls in blue jumpsuits.
If every city is unique, its tourists are all alike. I overheard one ask if he was in Stockholm or in Oslo. Touring is not necessarily vacationing, and particularly in Oslo where the summer days are so long one may walk farther in one day than one does in a month at home. I also learned from the athletic natives that ‘just a fifteen-minute walk’ may be a long, brisk walk up the side of a mountain.
Two days later, a pleasantly exhausted, tattered tourist, I was back at the Fornebu Airport which, like Ellinikon, was overrun with Norway’s living tourist statistics. Behind me a Norwegian diplomat (in line along with the other proletarians) was muttering the traditional, ‘It was never like this before.’
