The spirit of Davos, conceived last January by the prime ministers of Greece and Turkey in an anteroom of a deluxe hotel at the Swiss resort made famous by Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain got its first eyeball-to-eyeball test in hardcore Greek reality when Bedreddin Dalan, mayor of Istanbul, paid a five-day visit to Athens early last month.
As in many other Western countries the national holiday here, celebrated on March 25, has been reduced mostly to a pageant for children during which boys and girls, dressed up as tsoliades and Amalias, recite in poetry the bold feats of Markos Botsaris in monotone squeaks to the delight of their parents.
After every one of its crimes, the ability of members of the November 17 terrorist organization to vanish blithely into thin air, has aroused the awe, and even the suspicion, of the public.
The 200th anniversary of the birth of Lord Byron was celebrated in Athens on January 22 with the opening of the “Lord Byron in Greece” exhibition and a dinner party at the British Embassy where much Samian wine was dashed down the throats of eminent philhellenes.
Imagine a spare figure in a cape of wool homespun, a nose that a Roman emperor would have envied, jet-black hair often jammed into a turban, flashing wide-apart eyes, a long and loping gait, a contralto voice that got a bit scratchy with age, like an old much-loved phonograph record.
In wishing one another the best for the New Year, Athenians, like most people, have a lot of good things in mind: peace, prosperity, more basketball and football victories, cheaper cars, the return of the Parthenon (alias Elgin) marbles, fewer forest fires, more housing for university students, lots of well-heeled tourists, free radio stations and early elections. Above all, they wish each other good health.
There is an interesting new amendment to a law on crime prevention being discussed in parliament these days. It states that insulting certain ‘persons of authority’ in this country should be liable to more stringent punishment.
Returning recently from a conference in Berlin, opposition leader Constantine Mitsotakis warned that Greece’s international position has weakened and that it no longer inspires trust abroad.
The idea that Greeks are a simple, fun-loving, cicada-like folk singing “Never on a Sunday” and dancing on Aegean sands at all hours amid a welter of smashed plates, Doric columns and gyro-joints may have been an attractive image once but it is superficial and obsolete.
It is ironic when the government is trying so hard to get its independent, multi-dimensional foreign policy heard in the international press that Athens only made the front pages this summer because of the temperature.
