Essay from The Literary Review
Census Day in Greece
NICK PAPANDREOU
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Today is the decennial census. At my living room table, below the picture of Melina Mercouri, sits the census-taker. He is a young man, tired, sleepy, perhaps uncertain why he and thousands of others took on the task. “Didn't want to start too early,” he told me when I asked if he would finish his allotment before the sun went down. “Otherwise everybody would throw lemon rinds at us.” I informed him of the facts: born in America, moved to Greece in 1994 to write, and (check two reasons) to re-join my family. No, I am no longer a Greek abroad, a homogene, as they are called. Size of my apartment---140 square meters, five rooms in all, including WC. Level of educational attainment, job, et cetera. |
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Today, the Greek government is inaugurating the supermodern Attica Highway. It's nearly complete. What's missing are the “off” and “on” ramps. Once you're on the highway, you can't get off except when you reach the airport. When it's complete, our bit of property in Corinth will be less than an hour away.
Corinth is a place never claimed by Turkey. It does not belong to any of the so-called “disputed” areas.
Sometimes I think that Greece actually needs Turkey. It's a Cavafy sort of thing. Waiting for the Barbarian and all. Greece also needs the Single Currency. The Attica Highway. The census. Greece is populated by Greeks, so the Greeks will tell you. Who today is a Greek?
A Greek is someone who is born in Greece.
A Greek is someone who speaks Greek, even if he is Albanian, Serbian, or Georgian.
A Greek is someone who is Greek Orthodox and was born in Alexandria, Egypt, or Alexandria, Virginia.
Maybe even in Schenectady, New York, or Kensington, London.
Or in Yemen, Kenya, the Congo, Mozambique.
To get to Corinth you have to drive by the shipyard town of Elefsina. Smokestacks, cement factories, and hundreds and hundreds of ships make up this town. A homeless old man with a grizzled face named Pharmakis lived there. For a hat he wore his coat. You could find him in the parks, hanging around sites under construction, or along the shore, searching for ancient stones. When he found them, he would dust them with a small brush. The smaller pieces he carted to the museum yard. He is the keeper of the stones. When archeological sites were covered up by cement, he wore a black armband for weeks.
When he died, the few locals who attended his funeral called him “a true Greek.”
*
A friend of mine was buried this very morning, on census day. He almost made it. His epitaph says: “Here lies Andonis Tzoanakis, a man who believed in the Dream, a socialist, a true Greek.”
A little while ago, I received the following news-flash from the Greek-American lobby, over the Internet:
Come celebrate Greek Independence Day with all of your friends at DC's largest nightclub venue “The Spot.” Straight from New York, The MYLOS ALL-STAR BAND will provide you with the best live Greek music all night long. Also featuring the sounds of NY legendary Greek D.J. SAVAS (Radio Seismos, World-NY) for a night of the best music from Greece! BALTIMORE GREEKS, busses will be leaving from Michael's Steak and Lobster House, to The Spot, 932 F Street, NW Washington, DC.I was once an honorary Baltimore Greek, since I used to live next door, in Washington, DC, where I worked at the World Bank. Lambis Platsis, a round-faced, happy computer scientist ran Towson Pizza. I was best man at his marriage. He decided to use his “American training” for the socialist cause. He is now head of informatics for the municipality of the island of Rhodes, serving the digital needs of the island citizenry.
His brother never claimed he was a socialist. He opened up a store in the heart of Rhodes called AMERICAN DONUTS. When NATO bombed Serbia, someone tore down the sign and broke the windows. “I'm a Greek-American,” he told me over donuts and coffee, when I visited Rhodes to take part in a Greek-Turkish women's meeting my mother had organized. “I don't believe in politics. But here you are.” He pointed to the broken sign.
*
My brother's political star is rising. He is Greek Minister of Foreign Affairs. His detractors accuse him of being an American, unable to understand history. He was born in the States. One good thing, they admit, is that he speaks their language.
During the war in the Balkans, his advisor, who was born in Tanzania (now married to a girl from Oxford, Mississippi), coordinated the Greek war relief effort.
Andonis wanted me to be a full-time citizen, meaning fully active in “the cause.” Instead, I drifted away. I took up observing and writing. I had failed him. I wasn't going out to do battle any more. No more posters, no more clashes with the “organs of the state,” no more gatherings with villagers on mountainsides to discuss the transformation of society under the protection of thick-smelling pine. Then again, those meetings had ended a decade ago. Maybe it was the right time to be a writer, now the dream had expired.
*
My brother George went to Thrace for his census, in a show of solidarity with the Greeks living close to the war-torn Balkans. His advisor from Tanzania was unable to register. He had to be in Skopje, because of the attacks of the American-backed Albanian “freedom-fighters” along the borders of Kosovo.
A hundred thousand Muslims live in Thrace, next to Turkey. Some of them call Turkey their home. None of them want to live there, however. They will be asked the relevant questions when the census takers knock on their doors.
In Greece, we're not supposed to call the small state around the city of Skopje by the name Macedonia. That's unpatriotic. Macedonia is Greek, the bumper-stickers say. So we call it Skopje or FYROM----as in Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. If the country implodes under the weight of the Albanian population and the terrorist Albanian “freedom-fighters,” how will we refer to it? The Former Former Republic of Macedonia?
Nearly a million Albanians come and go across the border each year. At least five hundred thousand have taken up permanent residence in Athens, Corinth, Thessaloniki, in mountain villages abandoned by Greeks during the last thirty years, in islands like Crete, Rhodes, and Amorgos.
The census will tell us how many Greeks we are. It will be unable to measure the intensity of our Greekness.
*
Strands of Greek culture seem to be getting stronger even as globalization pushes deeper. Every day, on Piraeus Street, a few kilometers south of the Andreas Papandreou Foundation (I am responsible for the audio-visual department which means I listen to speeches by my father, when the dream was being articulated), the large building named Kortsopon, which means maiden in the Pontian dialect, becomes a danceteria, hosting folk bands from around Greece, usually from the North. A man named Zlatanis sometimes shows up to play brass instruments. He looks sad. He has a droopy mustache. The average age of those dancing is less than thirty. Those ages used to dance only to American music. Black continues to be the favorite color. Black, tight jeans, tight T-shirts. They dance in large sweeping circles, shaking their shoulders, kicking out their legs like they were from Ireland. Like they were auditioning for a spot with the Lord of the Dance.
In the cultural battle against globalization, a Greek dance is far more effective than the most fiery speech, than the most impassioned argument.
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The census will record the movement away from the countryside and into the cities. Like the recent move by my friend Thanasis, who came to Athens from a village in Pyrgos. “What this country needs,” he tells me when I ride on his motorcycle, “is a revolution. Burn the Mercedes, BMWs, and all those new villas.”
* Bulgarians entering Greece no longer require visas. Their socialism is nothing like what Andonis dreamt about.
* Two Greek friends of mine have started a land-mine removal company. They're de-mining Bosnia-Herzegovina using unemployed, former Serbian military men. They have been asked to de-mine the mountains of Grammos, where the last great battle of the Greek Civil War occurred in 1949. They have been invited to Lebanon, and have asked me to come along. I love Lebanon. It's almost Greek. It looks Greek.
*
Andonis carried a certain sadness about his person, though he seemed like the happiest person in the world. Being so close to the end, he said, really makes everything shine---the streets, this very tavern, the smell of grilled lamb. He reminded me of Dean Martin, with that twinkle in his eyes, a drink in his hand and an easy way about him. The taverna, in a working class district that had benefited greatly from the socialist government, was in the open. The air smelled of jasmine. The wine flowed---he drank most of it. He was fifteen years older than me, had spent most of his life on ships. He had just read my first book. I had come close to capturing the Dream, he said, the dream of Greece, the dream he'd been searching for since he could remember. “Well, at least we built part of the dream,” he said.
*
The census takers are ordered to stop at any building structure or site where people dwell. This includes the gypsy tent camps.
Serb, Croat, and Muslim kids, mainly orphans, attend camps in Greece each summer, all costs paid for by the local municipalities. This is a socialist kind of thing to do.
The Kurdish refugees living in the port city of Lavrion have little choice. Their census will not be taken. They are considered transitory migrants, something like Monarch butterflies. “They are refugees, like my parents were,” Andonis said.
*
Tonight I am going to a restaurant called Left-Right with Nikos Sifounakis, Minister of the Aegean, next to the Multi-Culti. The Minister is a tall, dark-faced man with sensuous lips and thick black hair. He was born in Rethymno, Crete. He studied architecture in Venice.
He has recently legislated power away from the traditional centers and passed it into the hands of “true architects,” the ones who still have the vision of a better Greece, the ones who wish to preserve the “architectural integrity” of the Aegean villages.
In his company I notice things. The paint beneath an old customs building in Nisiros. The design of the aviaries in Sifnos; the thickness of a wooden door.
*
People left Andonis's funeral rather quickly. They want to be at home when the census taker knocks, to provide solid proof of their existence.
* The day after the beginning of the Millennium, I drove out past Sounion and gave a whole bunch of my clothes to the Kurds living in the port city of Lavrion. From the apartments they flew flags with the communist party emblem. There were also many pictures of Ocalan, the Kurdish PKK leader now in the jail in Turkey, the same jails that Trotsky once sat in decades ago. The Turks want to execute Ocalan. They also want to be part of the EC. They aren't sure whether to go East or West.
The recently arrived Russian mafia drive mainly Mercedes. They live primarily in Glyfada. That's where the Americans used to live when the Sixth Fleet was docked here.
*
Only small boats dock on the island of Tilos, which I visited with Nikos Sifounakis, the Minister of the Aegean. As an economist by training, and as an author unable to live off writing alone, I have been “tasked” to follow the deregulation of the Aegean seas. Come full-blown deregulation, small islands like Tilos and Nisiros, islands with little traffic, will not be profitable enough to merit stops en-route to larger islands. As if the Aegean winds weren't enough to isolate them.
On Tilos the Minister and I are rushed around the island by the mayor-doctor, a loose, thin man in his late forties with unkempt hair. He tests the hearts of all islanders once a year. He sends sonograms to heart specialists in Athens through the Internet. Nobody has died of a heart attack since he came to the island seventeen years ago. Inspired by the socialist call for decentralization, he abandoned Athens in 1982 to “serve the forgotten and ignored.”
On a lush hill, next to an overgrown chestnut tree, the mayor pulls out handfuls of sage, rosemary, thyme, and something that smelled like cilantro. “This island is a living pharmacy. I have become something of a believer in alternative medicine.”
Sifounakis takes pictures of illegally built structures, and will call out the dogs when he returns to Athens. Walking through the old part of town, he draws in his breath. He stares at the stone arch of an old entrance. “Beautiful,” he whispers, and passes his hand along the stone. “Look how they carved it.” I think he wants to kneel.
*
As ship captain, Andonis traveled the world. In Shanghai, he had dropped a pack of cigarettes from his tanker onto a small wooden boat parked next to him. An old wizened fisherman came out, picked up the pack, examined it, yelped, then burned the whole pack disdainfully in front of Andonis's very eyes. To top it off, he wiped the spot where the box had landed---over and over--- to rid his deck of all foreign impurities.
*
In Ethiopia my brother's advisor from Tanzania, Alex, once saw a shipment of food, dropped from the air, squash about ten kids who wanted to get to it first. Hunger got the better of their judgment. Land-mines do the rest. Alex wants to send my de-mining friends to Ethiopia. “You wouldn't believe how many kids are killed each day,” he tells me.
*
My nephew, still a kid, attended a camp for Palestinian and Israeli children called Seeds of Peace, in Maine. His father, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, wanted him to understand the world before he got into it. He is now learning Norwegian, because Norway, he says, is the closest thing to Socialism in the living world. When my nephew says that, his eyes have that certain gleam, the same one that lit up Andonis's when he spoke about the future.
*
Picking olives with me on our small plot of land in Corinth last November were five Greeks and three Albanians. When I saw one Albanian cross himself I asked him if he was Christian. “Yes,” he said, “and I am your brother. We are Greeks.” A Greek woman working the tree kept muttering under breath, “I hate Albanians. I hate Muslims. They should go back to Albania. They are pretending to be Greek. They don't speak Greek, not really.”
*
My favorite subway stop in all of the world is the one at Thisio. It is an open-air stop. When you emerge from the old train and look up, there it is: the Acropolis. Nothing but monument.
It was at that very subway stop a few months ago that a man standing across the train rails called to me: “Niko! Niko!” I pretended not to hear him. For all I knew he could have been calling another person with my name. “No, you, yes you, you Niko! Niko Papandreou!” He was slightly older than me, dressed in work clothes, with dirty-blonde hair and the distinctive small face and narrow eyes of someone from the area of Northern Peloponnesus.
“I'm from Patras,” he shouted, confirming my prejudice. “How old are you Niko? Forty-three right? You're exactly forty-three, no?” I nodded, still not saying a word. “It's time you enter politics. You're father was forty-three when he entered politics too!” An old woman in black came up to me and brought a finger to her gray forehead. “You see,” she said, “you have no choice.”
*
Greece is a country of fractals. Look at its jagged coast, its endless turns and curves. The closer you look, the more cragged it appears. Can the coast line be represented mathematically? What would be the mathematical equation expressing Greekness? An integral with an imaginary solution?
*
Christie's New York auctioned off a book by Archimedes for approximately $2 million. Rumor had it that Bill Gates bought it, besting the Greek government's offer by $250,000, plus tax and commission.
*
Greece's national poet, Dionysios Solomos, spoke Italian better than Greek. He paid someone to teach him a new Greek word each day.
Maria Callas, Aristotle Onassis, Vangelis.
Souvlaki, gyro, moussaka.
Holland took Greece to the European court. Feta cheese is a generic term, it claimed, hence not patentable. They don't want Greece to be able to label its feta as “Greek” feta. Greece blew the legal arguments and lost. Thanks to the Dutch, you don't know where your feta is from.
*
When the Germans asked a Greek to lower the Greek flag over the Acropolis and raise the Swastika, he lowered the Greek flag as ordered, then wrapped himself in it and jumped off the Parthenon. He died in the stones below. So goes the national myth.
The restoration of the Acropolis is run by an architectural genius named Kores. He has made miniature models of the cranes, pulleys, and other construction machinery used by the ancients to build the Acropolis. His home looks like a Lego factory. Even today's most sophisticated laser technology can't slice marble as closely--- to the thousandth---as did the ancients. When Kores took apart the ancient columns, the workers found graffiti carved into the faces of the marble drums. “Theocles was here.”
My grandfather raised the flag over the Acropolis when the Germans left Greece. The son of a priest, he had a flair for aphorisms: “The people have deposed many a king, but never has a king deposed the people,” he used to say in the sixties, when he was doing battle against Constantine, the twenty-one-year-old monarch.
*
When a Greek says “I am Greek,” and he is speaking to a foreigner, he means it with pride. If he's speaking to one of his own, he uses it as an excuse.
In Greek, the word Greek is Hellene.
*
Gabriel is the heart of a high school movement that momentarily threatened to take down the socialist government. His hair is long, his face is smooth, he has thick eyebrows and a certain nonchalance that makes him attractive. He keeps his hands folded in front of him and he speaks without too much excess motion, unlike so many others. He is protesting the introduction of multiple-choice testing in final exams. “Multiple-choice is a sign of the penetration of capitalist education. We are not automatons, built for the global workplace.”
Many Greeks consider themselves poets. This might have to do with how easy it is to make words rhyme. Beginning poets send me their stuff with titles like “Lonely.” “Loneliness.” “Alone.”
*
When Ceauºescu visited my father in 1982, accepting an invitation on the part of the previous administration, he was confronted with a rare dilemma. Lying on the steps leading to my father's home was Leon, a fifteen-year-old mutt known mainly for his active laziness. He also had a skin rash and would bark loudly if touched. My father loved the dog to no end. His security people knew they were not to disturb the dog, under any circumstance.
One of Ceauºescu's bodyguards tried to kick the beast off the stairs. He was pinned back by four Greeks almost before he lifted his foot. An altercation ensued. The Greeks refused to move the dog. Ceauºescu, who had brought with him two ambulances, three doctors and two food-tasters, and who had booked two floors of the Grande Bretagne to make sure nobody else was nearby, was now forced to step over the dog. The dog was accorded more respect than he'd ever shown to his own countrymen. At lunch his son, Nicolai, rolled bread into little balls and flicked them at the Rumanian ambassador.
*
On the way back from Tilos, a man in a shiny lamé suit came up to me. “You're Nikos, no? You're the writer, right?” He put out his hand. “Please come see me! I have lots of stories for you!” He was a ship captain being taken to court for the illegal transportation of Kurds from Turkey into the Greek islands.
*
In Porto Heli, a summer resort where my girlfriend's from, the local women have formed an association to win their husbands back from the imported females that dance at the Babylon Club. “Women against Imports,” they had thought of calling it, until one of them pointed out that it sounded too much like an anti-globalization movement, and they weren't against that, were they? Their association remained untitled. Titled or not, they did succeed in getting at least a few husbands back.
*
A slave, recently freed, inspired by the Greek revolution, crossed the Atlantic in the 1820s to fight on the Greek side against the Turks. He ended up being a cook for a platoon of Greek revolutionaries. I can just imagine the Greeks waking to the smell of home-fries, chitlins, and a song from the deep South. The cook and a few other of his compatriots who fought in Greece are honored with a memorial in Athens.
In an old village square on the island of Astipalaia, a local builder built an enormous memorial plaque during the dictatorship, but there are no names and there is no war memorialized because the builder had used the memorial as an excuse to filch government funds. The local administration is keeping it intact. At some point, they say, they will have a reason to add new names.
A memorial waiting for a memory.
The Turks no longer refer to the ancient ruins as Greek ruins, but as belonging to the Ionian Civilization. They do not want to remind tourists of who was there first. There are some Albanians who want a decent chunk of Northern Greece. A few Slavo-Macedonians want a chunk of Thessaloniki.
I fear the empty memorial plaque in Astypalaia will be put to use all too soon.
*
Over five hundred people attended Andonis's funeral in the church of Nea Erithrea. Erithrea is the name of a Greek city in Asia Minor that vanished after the exchange of populations in 1923. The Greeks who left Turkey for Greece and the Turks who left Greece for Turkey are all called “exchangeables.”
The Turks have lots of battle experience---from fighting the Kurds. Lots of Turkish soldiers know what it is like to pull the trigger and kill. No Greek soldiers have that kind of knowledge. The first time in battle the Greeks will hesitate to pull the trigger. Maybe that's a good thing.
*
News-flash from the Greek-American lobby:
Last evening the United States Senate passed, for the 16th year in row, a resolution commemorating March 25 as “Greek Independence Day—A National Celebration of Greek and American Democracy.” As he has in all previous years, Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA) introduced this legislation in the U.S. Senate and spearheaded efforts for its adoption.
American-style self-help programs in Greece barely exist. Therapy is an insult to manhood. But a recent song by the great Parios has introduced a rather shocking idea that sounds rather like a twelve-step program:
I will be good to myself
and send myself a letter
telling myself “I Love You.”
*
The Peloponnesus Beauty Fair was held not far from Corinth; so, after that day of olive-picking, I decided to drop in. Andonis would have approved. He liked to look at beautiful women, and if the occasion arose, he would take advantage of whatever was offered him. He was a working-class socialist. He believed in the future, but he also believed in the present.
In person I saw the slightly anorexic Miss Star. The sixteen- year-old Miss Young looked younger than her age. Miss Former Peloponnesus had long chestnut hair and thick legs. Miss Playmate 2001 didn't show and the crowd booed at her absence. Miss Aegean, from the island of Kos, was the emcee for the afternoon. She looked like she'd just stepped out of the shimmering blue sea. Her hair glistened and her blue-white swim-suit was see-through, exposing large dark nipples. Kos! Kos! shouted the crowd.
*
Kemal Attaturk, Turkey's hero, the father of their nation, was born in Greece. It is not enough to be born in Greece to be a Greek.
Constantine Cavafy was born in Alexandria, Egypt.
My brother George, registered in Sapphes, Thrace.
Lambis Platsis in Rhodes.
Nikos Sifounakis on the island of Lemnos.
Me, in Athens.
The census, the first of the millennium, will tell us how many we are.
It won't tell us who we are.
That's for us to figure out.
