The Land: Greece is a mountainous country of about forty thousand square miles. If you flattened it out there would be no Mont Parnes and no casino. So it stays mountainous. The islands cover another ten thousand square miles or so. If you flattened them out there would be no Aegean Sea and one of the disputes with Turkey would be automatically resolved. As a matter of fact, I have it from the highest authority that a bulldozer salesman from Atlas Copco was staying at the same hotel as Prime Minister Karamanlis at Montreux and spent two hours with him before he flew back to Athens.
Athens is the capital of Greece. It is a charming city with sprawling suburbs composed of one- and two-story concrete villas painted in every shade of yellow, green, red and blue.
Their flat roofs are topped by delightful outcrops of reinforcing steel rods and spindly television aerials. The male inhabitants spend most of their time in cars and buses, stalled in traffic jams all along the broad avenues of the downtown area. This is a great relief for the housewives who do not have to start cooking lunch until three or four p.m. and can watch Dr. Kildare, Ben Casey, and Bonanza on noontime television at their leisure. The monotony of the mountains that surround Athens has been ingeniously broken by large gashes on the mountainsides made by quarrymen who have exposed the essential qualities and beauty of the bedrock for all to see. One mountain in particular, Penteli in the north, has been transformed into a fascinating moonscape which stands ready for the first remake of 2001 – Space Odyssey by Marty Feldman or any other producer-director so inclined.
The People: The Greeks have a great love and craving for carbon monoxide. Since this commodity is found in its greatest concentration in Athens, Piraeus, Thessaloniki, Patras, and Volos, half the population of nine million has flocked to these cities, leaving the other half in the countryside or the islands to sit in cafes and amble over to the post office once a month to collect the cheques sent to them by relatives working in Germany or on merchant ships.
A few hardy peasants still insist on growing wheat, cotton, and tobacco, and picking a few olives to go with their ouzo, but they are a dying race. Their extinction is being hastened by the introduction of the tractor into Greek farm life. Often such vehicles overturn, spilling occupants into irrigation canals, down ravines, or on to the asphalt where they are subsequently run over by lorries with no lights and no brakes. There is, however, little concern over this state of affairs since Greece will soon join the Common Market and nobody will have to work anymore.
Imports and Exports: Greece’s main imports are scotch whisky and bananas. Its main exports are university students and sick people who go to London to have their adenoids removed. The trip and other costs amount to less than one visit to a Greek doctor. And if they can smuggle through customs about a half-dozen summer dresses from Marks and Spencer, they can even make a profit.
The Economy: The Greek economy is one of the most remarkable in the world. It enables an office clerk, who earns nine thousand drachmas per month and supports a wife and two children, to buy a car that may cost anywhere from two hundred to four hundred thousand drachmas, and to eat out every night. He will also manage to scrape up another million drachmas or so to buy a small apartment for his daughter’s dowry. Top economists from all over the world visit Greece to study this phenomenon but none have found the answer. Indeed, most of them stay on and make their own pile in this country as advisors to the government or to some multinational company that makes toothpaste in Peristeri.
The History: Greek history has always been glorious. If there are any bits of it that are not so glorious, nobody talks about them. At first sight, you may Wonder how the ancient Greeks got anything done when you see their statues. Most of them had no arms and quite a few had no heads either. Yet they built the most marvelous piece of architecture in the world — the Parthenon which stands proudly on the Acropolis. It seems a bit worse for the wear these days, what with a Venetian admiral blowing up a Turkish powder magazine on the site, Lord Elgin heisting the sculptures and the Athens gasworks polluting the surrounding area, but it still looks good during the Sound and Light show.
The ancient Greeks also produced such outstanding thinkers as Archimedes who discovered that if you fill your bath to the brim, the water you displace when you enter it will make a terrible mess on the floor; Pythagoras who discovered that a squaw sitting on a hippopotamus hide is equal to the sons of the squaws on the other two hides, or something like that, and Diogenes who went around with a lighted lantern in broad daylight “looking for an honest man”. He never found him and you wouldn’t today either, not even with a ten thousand-watt arc lamp.
Alexander the Great was another glorious figure in Greek history bul present-day Greeks will never forgive him for dying so young and allowing his empire to crumble before it could leave an indelible stamp on history as the Romans did with Ben-Hur and Charlton Heston or the British with gin and lime and the Bengal Lancers.
The Byzantine Empire is a consolation of some kind but that has also never been forgiven for allowing Constantinople to fall into the hands of the Turks — the beginning of Greek woes to this day.
The Mythology: Greek mythology has the uncanny habit of turning out to be history after all. Until Heinrich Schliemann dug up the ruins of Mycenae and Troy, everybody thought Homer’s Iliad was a fairy tale. Now we know that the Greeks did indeed launch a thousand ships with the face of Helen of Troy – a technical feat that has not been equaled, or indeed repeated to this day.
And who is to say that some future archaeological find will not prove that the Olympian gods did exist in some distant corridor of time? Their antics, as they have been handed down to us, are indeed human enough to warrant it. But the greatest myth of all, and one that is being assiduously cultivated by the National Tourist Organization abroad, is that you can live or spend a holiday more cheaply in Greece than anywhere else in Europe. No archaeological find will ever, ever substantiate that fairy story.
