Greece and the Barbarians
The Greeks seem hurt and bewildered at the reluctance of fellow EU members to rush to their rescue. For reasons they cannot comprehend, being the heirs of Pericles and the victors of Marathon is not enough to bring the barbarians flocking with purses of gold. It might help their understanding if they could take a step back, brush Themistocles and Aristotle out of their eyes, and look at themselves.
Take, for example, my experiences on a recent trip to Greece, which I recorded in a letter home.
The flight from Amman to Athens went well but it took 41 minutes to get through passport control. There were only two booths open, though six Greeks occupied them, four in one, two in the other. The non-EU queue had the four Greeks.
As each person presented his passport the chap behind the desk seemed mildly surprised at the intrusion but at the same time curious about this strange object. He picked it up and opened it, commenting on the photograph and arguing with the other three over whether it was or was not the person standing in front of him. Next he leafed through the passport, commenting on the various visas it contained. He then handed it to one of the others who did the same and argued with him over some of the details. The third man then took the passport and the discussion grew more lively, to reach a climax when the fourth man leafed leisurely through it.
There then followed a heated argument over what should be done with the passport. The idea of stamping it was advanced, rejected, resurrected, declared to be absurd and finally done. After about twenty minutes, when only six or seven people had been processed, a Greek whom I could feel getting restive behind me blew up and started shouting at the chaps in the cubicle. The man with the passport hurled it to the desk, leaped to his feet and let loose a barrage of purple-faced vituperation. This stirred up another Greek in the queue and soon three Greeks in the queue were bellowing obscenitites at the four Greeks in the cubicle who responded vigorously in kind.
They had just got to the point where slighting references were being made to their opponents' mothers when an official wheeled someone in a wheelchair up to the window. Hostilities were immediately suspended and the handicapped person's passport was dealt with rapidly. As soon as she had been wheeled away, the argument broke out again, more violent than before, but I was pleased to note that, in order to emphasise some point or other, the official stamped the passport in front of him with such force it is a wonder he didn't put the stamp through the page. The passenger grabbed his passport and scuttled away, thankful to be out of the firing line.
An American somewhere in the queue behind me remarked loudly, "I'd forgotten what the Greeks were like."
Her husband, in a weary voice, replied, "And to think they have let them have the Olympic Games!"
How long this charade would have gone on I do not know, but a bell rang or a clock chimed or something and the extraneous persons abandoned the cubicles in order to have afternoon tea or their siesta. Left on his own, the official morosely stamped passports mechanically and before long it was my turn. By the time I got down to the baggage carousel my bags were already circling; based on later experience I suspect that they had only just arrived.
I doubt that any of us in the queue that day would be willing to lend the Greeks a single euro; at least, not until they learn to put work ahead of tea and customer service before their desire to argue with each other.
One thing that would help for be for the Greeks to discover that they are no better than anyone else in the world and in many respects a good deal worse. Chronic Greek disunity nearly caused their struggle for freedom from Turkish rule to fail - in fact, it would have failed had it not suited other European powers to diminish the Ottoman Empire. An individual Greek may be - like any other human being - as brave as a lion, but his ability to work in tandem with another Greek is about as noted as the ability of oil and water to mix.
Yet, despite 3,000 years of disastrous history brought about by this national failing, Greeks continue to take themselves far too seriously. On the same trip I noted a sign outside the door of the Mycenae museum.
I was amused to notice a sign by the doorway, demanding that visitors be "properly dressed". I enquired the reason from the girl checking tickets; "A church I can understand, but why a museum?" I asked.
She looked at me seriously. "But a museum is like a church," she informed me. "Some people come in shorts and without shirts and they must show respect for the museum."
Comparing a museum of broken Greek antiquities to a church is not as ridiculous to the Greeks as it might seem to you and me. Despite a fierce pride in their Greek Orthodox Church, a surprising number of Greeks are pagans at heart and venerate Zeus and Hera as much as Jesus and Mary. This leads to an almost schizophrenic internal conflict when confronted with mass tourism. On the one hand there is the entirely Greek desire to lay their hands on as much of the tourists' money as possible, but on the other is the desire to have their monuments treated with adoring reverence.
On the whole, the Greeks would much prefer pilgrims to tourists, but as tourists are all that they are going to get, they adopt the practical expedient of charging them as much as possible while making life for them as difficult and unpleasant as possible. Nowhere is this better seen than on the Acropolis in Athens.
As the sign at the Mycenae Museum showed, the Greeks are precious to a degree about their wretched monuments and there are signs up everywhere forbidding visitors to pose in front of the monuments. Every so often there is a shrilling of whistles and an outburst of shouting and you look round to find a phalanx of irate guards descending on some poor innocent who was trying to take a picture of his girlfriend in front of the Parthenon. You can't take a picture of the place without hordes of sun-burned tourists in the picture, but woe betide you if you have someone stand and smile at the camera while you take your photograph.
Meanwhile hordes of angry trade unionists swarm up onto the very same Acropolis and drape it in red banners calling on the workers of the world to unite and dip into their pockets to keep the Greeks in the manner to which they have become accustomed. So far, at least, the workers of the world, having been to Greece for their holidays and experienced at first hand Greek rudeness, greed, inefficiency and laziness, have united in a strong determination to keep their hands firmly in their pockets.
© Kendall K. Down 2010
