Equally cursed and blessed - in Greece, August 2011

Written from the beach on the island of Astypalaea, the Dodecanese, Greece

We visited an iron age re-creation camp in Hampshire, England once. There was a beardy chap in what might have been Anglo saxon dress or might have been a set of velour curtains sitting in front of a clay oven in which he was trying to bake primitive bread. The primitive bread looked really unappetising - burnt on one side and still gooey and uncooked on the other. 'The trouble is we don't really know how these ovens were used.' Said Eric Velour Curtain rather defensively.

"My Grandma had one just like that!" said my wife. "She baked bread and cheese pies in it for forty years!" My wife is Greek. Her grandmother, who lived to be over a hundred started out her life as an itinerant shepherdess. Her family aren't sure exactly how old she was because she was born in an area of Greece still under Turkish occupation where the last thing you wanted to do was register your children with the authorities. She gave birth to some of her children at the side of the road as her family herded sheep from one area of grazing to another. This article made me think about this:

http://m.guardian.co.uk/ms/p/gnm/op/swBRGoXJuZH4uf6_4FisFgw/view.m?id=15&gid=.../2011/aug/27/attenberg-dogtooth-greece-cinema&cat=film

One of things that great art does is makes you think 'ah yes, of course!' It gives you permission to think consciously things that had previously been milling around in your subconscious. I haven't yet seen any of the films talked about in this article (although 'Attack of the Giant Mousaka' is top of my list) but already, just having read about them I'm getting that feeling. Of course Greece is a weird place! Permission to think this in itself feels like a great relief.

I've been coming here and witnessing the weirdness as first the boyfriend and then the husband of a Greek woman for seventeen years. And this article feels like it's given me permission to talk about why I think Greece might be a bit weird. The iron age oven thing is one of those reasons. Perhaps it is the reason for Greek weirdness #1: although it shares it with a large number of European countries that sat out the Industrial revolution. It is a country that has come from, if not the stone age, certainly the iron age in the years since the second world war. Greece is essentially an agrarian, peasant society, where the family, home and hearth are everything. But what to do when family, home and hearth (and as part of this bundle inevitably in Greece comes the church) cannot provide the answers? Well now, welcome to the modern world. Maybe it is time Greece took a closer look at the kind of problems that many northern European cultures were forced to deal with at the beginning of the previous century. At least in their art if not in their reactionary politics. The death of God, the dread understanding that we all have to make it up as we go along without a clear steer about right and wrong.

Reason for weirdness #2: This place is like the Marilyn Monroe of Europe. Greece is a crazy beautiful country. Quite possibly one of the most beautiful in the world. Nothing short of a massive nuclear explosion will stop it trading on its looks. And even after that, the sun, the sea and the sky would still be here, you'd just maybe need a higher factor sun cream. No matter how much the Greeks try to fuck things up with dodgy development, disastrous administration and average food (in their restaurants, the home-cooked stuff is another matter) and accommodation, pale northerners will still pay to come here in their droves.

This is both a blessing and curse. It's a blessing in that, as long as there are planes, even trains, there will be paying punters on the beach in Greece. And there will be a living for Greeks. It's a curse because, like in many other countries rich in natural resources, there's little pressure for governmental and organisational reform. Greeks can make a living, but it's a precarious living, with no social security and no health care system to really speak of (the health care system is that you have to pay a private surgeon a fee plus a cash bribe if hope to survive an operation). Levels of corruption in Greece are now so high that independent outside observers who follow such matters think that investments in some African countries such as Tanzania are a better bet.

Reason for weirdness #3: "When you were all swinging from the trees eating acorns we were building the Parthenon." I've heard this attempt to knock upstart northern Europeans down to size from children as young as six in Greece. For a huge number of people who know about, care about and truly love Greece, the real Greece isn't the one that I'm sitting in now, but the one that produced the Parthenon, the dialogues of Plato and the plays of Sophocles. Greece, more than any other country is a country of the mind. Then again, that puts Greece in the select and scary company of other countires tha 'Have to exist' such as Tibet and Isreal. Every scientist, philosopher, educator, mathematician and most surely any democratic politician owes ancient Greece a nod and a tribute. The philhellenic urge is strong in western civilisation. Some say Modern Greece has traded on this sentimental love of Ancient Greece at various crucial points in its history, including its war of independence from Turkey and its membership of the European community. But this love of Ancient Greece also has its downsides, it has resulted in a great deal of Greece's art and culture simply being looted. You're never going to get the British Museum in court for receiving stolen goods, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't call it what it is - theft. It also, during the dictatorship of the late sixties and early seventies in Greece resulted on the teaching of a 'cleaned-up' (re-Ancient-Greekified) version of Greek in schools that no one had ever spoken or written. It has also perhaps resulted in a degree of contempt for Modern Greek culture.

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