A place called Greece
We think it’s hot here today in Seattle, but my wife’s cousins tell us that it’s a hundred in the shade in Athens. People in Greece are dying from the heat. I remember that heat. We were there it seems just a few years ago.
Everybody with brains has run for cover from this unforgiving heat. The only ones outside are tourists and other fools—like us. The dogs flopped out on shady door stoops should have been warning enough. But no, we buy our tickets and head up the hill, determined to check off another item on our bucket list. The blue sky weighs down on us as we sweat our way through the Parthenon. Dust chases the wind across the parched rocks. The rocks are treacherous underfoot, worn slick by millions of feet; we pay more attention to where we put our feet than to the ancient monuments surrounding us. When we exit, we head straight for the nearest vendor of liquid refreshments and come up with a brilliant idea: It’s time for a cooler climate.
We travel north on the express train, through the mountains where Greek patriots hid from the Nazis and their collaborators during WWII, and where, some millennia earlier, the gods of Olympus sported. It’s marginally cooler up north. At night, jasmine sidles up to us, insinuates itself into our awareness, clutches at us. We walk through the dark in the old industrial area of Thessaloniki, between the Aegean Sea and the city, and there we see the future: An old factory, its business fled to the far east, is gutted and resurrected as—take your pick—a nightclub, a restaurant, a gathering place. It’s midnight on a week day, but the streets are thronging with couples and families. Children dance and sing along to the strains of Macarena, the latest earworm. People gather and talk and eat and drink and mingle, and—since this is in the years before Greece’s economic collapse—everybody has money and everybody has a good time, because they are escaping from the heat of the day. Those who came in cars roll down the avenue. They drive slowly, partly because of all the people in the street, partly because they want to be seen in their BMWs and Mercedes, and partly because they are reluctant to go home to their super-heated bedrooms. But only partly.
The White Tower in Thessaloniki was once known as the Tower of Blood or Red Tower when used for torture and executions during the Ottoman Empire. Notice the lack of windows.... Image © 2015 Michael Fowles.
We move on to a small town in Chalkidiki; it’s quieter there, but the routine is the same—people strolling late into the Sithonian evening. They move slowly by the hawkers’ carts on the water side of the street, the side facing the sea. Each cart has one or more light bulbs going to show off its wares. Some of them have generators to run the lights, others have electric cords snaking right across the street to the nearby tavernas.
The carts are there after hours, when the regular rush of business is over. They are run by thin men and women and children who speak broken Greek and even more broken English. They are from the breakup of Yugoslavia, especially Bosnia and Serbia; from Albania and the Ukraine and other former Soviet republics—human fallout from the ethnic and political strife to the north. The cart people wait for the pedestrians to stop and look. Some of them will try to engage their potential customers with small talk. Others just stand and stare at nothing, letting their meager merchandise speak for itself. Their carts are filled with memorabilia, old Soviet radios and cassette players, silverware, photographs of their grandparents or—who knows?—of their neighbors’ grandparents.
People buy the photographs, we are told, not for the pictures of the departed, but for the sake of the frames and glass. They buy the old Soviet electronics not for its dubious functionality but for its retro decorative value, its profound otherness. Technology spoke a foreign language in the old USSR—consumer electronics, such as there was, inclined toward the bulky and awkward. And the sellers themselves? I imagine some of them are Russian Orthodox, some are good Soviet-era atheists, some are undoubtedly Muslim. They, too, are awkward. They cling to the shores of Greece, because it’s no good back home. They don’t fit in well.
But it’s not like the old days, the Greek cousins tell us. Not like that at all.
We know what that means—the old days. My wife’s ancestors lived in Greece for nearly five hundred years. But that meant nothing during World War II. Her mother and father survived the war by fleeing into the hills and joining up with the Resistance. My mother-in-law was captured and sent to a prison camp. She hid her Greek identification card, which would have revealed her religion, so the Germans running the camp wouldn’t know she was Jewish. But she was betrayed by a Greek Greek woman, meaning a Greek Orthodox Christian. She survived because her Greek Greek brother-in-law bribed her way out with help from the Red Cross.
F with medal awarded for work as Red Cross nurse before her capture by the Nazis. Her brother-in-law was named a Righteous Gentile for helping to save her.
Therein lies a story, too: However efficient the Germans were at extracting Jews and others—Gypsies, for instance—from Germany, the Greeks were far more efficient and enthusiastic in their own land. My father-in-law kept an aging newspaper clipping in his basement workshop here in Seattle detailing the percent of Jews killed in Greece compared to the percent killed in Germany. Thessaloniki went from 58,000 Jews before the war to less than 3,000 afterwards.
Years pass. My wife’s current Greek identification card card no longer requires her to reveal her religious preference, although it lists her father’s first name, Judah, which is something of a giveaway. We note with some unease that the spirit of the Greek Greek woman lingers on, in the guise of Golden Dawn. This political party’s red-and-black flag is a conscious echo of the Nazi swastika, lightly disguised as a classical meander. Their politics are even less veiled. For them, inclusiveness is anathema.
So imagine the reaction of Greece to the desperate souls now arriving in boatloads from Africa and from as far east as Afghanistan, just as earlier refugees poured across the border to the north—
The Greeks aren’t happy. They can’t afford the burden of more refugees. They’re drowning in their own financial mess. And yet—and yet—despite the presence of Golden Dawn, by and large they are trying to be good hosts.
And maybe with luck it won’t take these newcomers from the north, the south, the east, another half a millennium to fit in.
