Craziness Street

The signpost reads: "Craziness Street: You can walk this street fearlessly. We own it." Indeed we do.

As seen on Apollonia, Sifnos island, Greece. Summer 2011.
Picture author's own, copyrighted by Elena Vosnaki

Two Statues: "It was for them we fought"

George Seferis, the Nobel prize poet (and Greece's ambassador to London in the 1960s) wrote of a beloved leader of the revolution, General Makriyannis; Makriyannis had no formal education and in his old age taught himself to read. In his battling days he had been able to preserve two ancient statues until the liberation. At that time he found that some soldiers were thinking of selling them.

Seferis quotes Makriyannis: "I took these soldiers aside and told them this: You must not give away these things, not even for ten thousand talers; you must not let them leave the country; it was for them we fought".

And Seferis wrote: "You see it is not a great scholar, nor an archaeologist speaking. It is a shepherd's son from Roumelia, his body covered with wounds: 'It was for them we fought'.

~from the memorandum submitted by Jules Dassin to the British Parliament (on occasion of a plea to return the Elgin marbles)

On this fateful day, may we remember "it was for them we fought" and not be swayed by false dilemmas and hyenas: where one head gets cut off, two spring up again. You must burn the cancerous in order to get rid of it once and for all.

Further reading:  
Makriyannis: The Memoirs of General Makriyannis 1797-1864 (ed. & trans. H.A. Lidderdale), Oxford: OUP, 1966 (in English).

Fancypants countries with fancypants currency? Not necessarily so fancypants

Vogue France: the June issue is dedicated to Greece

And right when we were called "the burden, the vermin of Europe" (we, the ones who gave Europe its very name!), there goes Vogue France and dedicates their June issue to Greece. Greece seen through the classical but also the modern, contemporary eye: the one of growth, of young people, of healthy businesses, of innovative ideas and creativity and of eternal natural beauty. That latter part isn't going anyplace...
At last, a breath of fresh, optimistic air in the border of a sleazy campaign to blacken the name of an entire people, just for the powers-that-be to make fortunes on their (literally) poor backs...

The photos are scanned by It's all beauty to me, borrowed with many patriotic thanks. Click to enlarge.

The (Greek) World is Based on Chaos and Cheap Smokes

"Every morning will see me give myself 10 secs to realise where I am and why. There goes another 5 secs to accept my total incapability for any work. The realisation of my tragic financial situation is visceral, a fact that helps me gain time and devote it to my fish. There are times when I long to tell them everything about my life...But even if they weren't deaf, their memory retention ability doesn't last longer than 3 secs, as long as it takes them to swim around the bowl. Maybe that's why I can see my whole life reflected in their eyes, a continuous swirl, a happy nil. These are the first moments of the day, when inspiration comes to rescue me.
 The world is based on Chaos and I'm going to cross it without searching for logical order...This is my life, capiche?"

          ~Renos Haralambidis, Cheap Smokes(2000)

It's not hard to see how the pseudophilosophizing nihilistic types who construct poetic mock-noir films such as Cheap Smokes on a zero budget are in reality nothing of the sort. But this diarrhea of the spirit which takes place in front of an existential mirror is reflecting the plight of the modern Greek to a T: The world is based on chaos and I'm going to cross it without searching for logical order. I wonder though whether this isn't some trait encrypted into the Greek DNA. The classical adherence to Law as the ultimate order of any society of free men addresses probably people who were deeply chaotic to begin with. Otherwise why the marked insistence?

Elsewhere the anti-hero inwardly wonders in a voice-over: "I should be subsidised by the Ministry of Culture. Why should they pay someone to make a statue and not me to wander around town like a moving statue? Damn country! It doesn't appreciate artists!"

Another trait of the modern (and perhaps eternal) Greek: "Why them and not ME?" (Sarcastic) self-loathing is taking a very sideways patriotic course: The country would only be rescued if I were given half a chance!
In a place where you have to be "poniros" (i.e. cunning without being evil) to make things go by, there isn't too much shortage of chaos in the first place. This eternal self-loathing is best spent at a "cafeneion", a coffee shop, "a  place with a huge industry of lost time. It is the art of allowing time to pass by without leaving its mark". Which probably explains why the modern Greek revolutionary spirit is mollified into (intricate) words rather than swift action: Contrast with the Heroic Outlook.

The Wick

Crazied, mad, left over, bankrupt,
tied to dreams, selling out rhymes.

I cling on to the wick, amidst the storm;
my right, my own, I am not bequesting it to anyone.



The Wick (Θρυαλλίδα) is sung by Suzanna and Helen Vougioukli. 

Fata Morgana

I'll take communion with sea water,
distilled from your body drop by drop,
in an ancient copper cup from Algiers,
as done by pirates of old before the fight.

Where are you coming from? From Babylon.
Where are you going? To the eye of the cyclone.
Whom do you love? A Gypsy maid.
What is her name? Fata Morgana*.

A leather sail, all smeared with wax,
smelling of cedar-wood, of incense and of varnish,
like the smell of the hold in an aging ship
built in olden times on Euphrates in Phoenicia.

Where are you coming from? From Babylon.
Where are you going? To the eye of the cyclone.
Whom do you love? A Gypsy maid.
What is her name? Fata Morgana.

Fire-hued rust in the mines of Sina,
the capes of Gerakini and Stratoni.
That ship-coating, that old blessed rust ages us,
It feeds us, feeds on us, and then it kill us!

Where are you coming from? From Babylon.
Where are you going? To the eye of the cyclone.
Whom do you love? A Gypsy maid.
What is her name? Fata Morgana.

The poem Fata Morgana by sea-faring Greek poet Nikos Kavvadias is set to music and sung by Mariza Koch.

*A "fata morgana" is a mirage, an optical phenomenon caused by abrupt variances in air temperature. Objects on the horizon, such as islands, cliffs, ships or icebergs, appear elongated and elevated