Some journalistic comment on Greece

I read the following article in a fairly new English language paper in Athens and some of the comments struck me - that was the day before the killing of the teenager that sparked all the rioting and demonstrating that you probably heard about leading up to Christmas. I thought I'd scan it and post it here - I'm sorry but I couldn't find an online version to link you to. Have a read for a journalist's take on contemporary Greek life - and as far as we can see, the complaints outlined here apply well to the events that transpired immediately after this being printed.



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BY NIKOS KONSTANDARAS

Greece's tragedy is that it does not have modern tragedians - playwrights who can encapsulate in a few tight, merciless images the full glory of the madness that reigns in our public life. Without such an omnipotent intelligence to put things in order, we are left to struggle with the disparate images that keep rushing at us haphazardly, without protagonists but only miserable players piling up one on top of the other, without any semblance of order, without any tragic dignity. Each great story, which could be the stuff of parable, flies past like a series of incoherent images on a television screen, being replaced by the next object of mass hysteria before any lessons are drawn, before pity and terror can lead to any kind of catharsis.

The drama of the season has concerned the allegations, investigations and revelations concerning the very worldly real estate dealings of the monks of the Vatopedi Monastery on Mount Athos. This is the stuff of great drama, with initial claims of political influence being brought to bear on the state machinery to the benefit of the monks leading, in fits and starts, to revelations of wheeling-and-dealing that would not be out of place at the Vatican at its most conspiratorial best or in Umberto Eco's "Name of the Rose." (We all remember the case of "God's banker," Roberto Calvi, chairman of the Vatican-controlled Banco Ambrosiano, who was found hanging under Black-friars Bridge in London in 1982. A shroud of mystery still hangs over this story, even though Italy has no shortage of playwrights and filmmakers capable of making dark sense of it all.)

Here we have a handful of monks who set up a network of offshore companies (or, as they say, non-offshore companies, as they were based in EU member Cyprus) to buy and sell land that the monastery took control of after a conspiracy of (alleged) political and judicial favors resulted in the Vatopedi Monastery's ownership of a large tract of useless land around a protected lagoon being exchanged for very valuable properties that could be used for housing development. Supreme Court prosecutor Giorgos Sanidas, who did the work investigative journalists in this country will not, ordered a judicial investigation, saying that the state may have lost 100 million euros in the deal. The nation has been stunned by revelations that include an effort to blackmail a businessman who turned out to be a partner of the monks in at least one of their offshore companies, a former bellydancer's refutation of a lawyer's claims that Thessaloniki Prefect Panayiotis Psomiadis had hinted at the prime minister's interest in supporting the monks, the archbishop of Cyprus's declaration that the Vatopedi abbot and his Cypriot compatriots were "contrabandistas" who had funnelled money to the island republic, and so on and so forth. On November 28, Ecumenical Patriarch Vartholomaios - in God's absence - summoned the abbot, Ephraim, to the Phanar and called on him to resign. The deal, as far as we know, entails Ephraim handing over the finances of the monastery to another monk while remaining Vatopedi's spiritual head as the judicial investigation into the affair rolls on.

On the political front, the parliamentary inquiry into politicians' possible culpability is expected to end in the same way every major scandal in this country ends: in mutual recriminations between the political parties and, in the overall confusion, an impasse in which no one is held accountable for their actions (or inaction). The questioning of witnesses and possible culprits was due to end yesterday, after two former ministers, who lost their jobs because of this scandal, had put forward their views. Current and former ministers passed the blame from one to the other and to PASOK officials, for the initial decisions acknowledging the monks' eons-old right to the Vistonida lagoon property. New Democracy's majority on the panel blocked an effort by PASOK to extend the inquiry. All the parties are now expected to come up with their own, conflicting reports, leading nowhere.

No one, of course, expected anything better. No politicians will be held to account. If anyone at all is punished it will be some anonymous member of the state machinery whose life will be destroyed because he or she got in the way of bigger interests. And so the general feeling of injustice, of citizens' impotence, will continue.

That is why the absence of a great tragedian is so profound. Not only are the protagonists of these wonderful tales (which never seem to end) deprived of their tragic grandeur - what's worse is that, knowing that there will be no dispensation of justice at the political and judicial level, we could only expect justice through a playwright's pillorying of those who poison our public life and undermine our future. Until a new Euripides, Shakespeare or Beckett arises, we will allow the protagonists to write their own script and drag us along with them.