(This was the first of a series of blogs I published on Kiltr in the lead up to and aftermath of the UK's Brexit vote; like most blogs they are just opinions, this one was first posted three months ago)
Greece has had a special place in my heart for over twenty five years, probably always will. That's not the type of sentence I'd usually find myself writing or even saying, as some of you may know from other writings I've published here, so needless to say, I have good reason for feeling that way. You would also be reasonable in extending any assumptions from it to thinking I may have been moved by the Hellenic people's plight in recent times, for a whole myriad of reasons. Some of those reasons I feel, in light of further recent developments, compelled to share in the hopes that perhaps it may prompt a little deeper understanding of where the people currently inhabiting the lands we are want to call 'the cradle of Western civilisation' find themselves. If you can bear with me, let me tell you some of my story of connection to them, to their wonderful civic and civil nation and why it feels relevant to tell it.
I almost didn't though, tell it; I've had a draft, with most of this piece written for around four days, prompted by specifics, but I don't want you to think this is cultural appropriation, I wring my hands a little too much sometimes over things like that. I also don't have any infographics or videos and just the one picture; I didn't have a (questionably) snappy title until this morning, I only have these words. So, if your attention span is used to Facebook posts or the restricted characters of Twitter, apologies if this bores you but for me, it concerns humanity.
So, back in the late 1980s/ early 90s, I lived and worked in Greece for the best part of three years. I'd dropped out of art college (returning a few years later to finish some design qualifications) and joined a hotel management training programme with that ultimate goal in mind. The course lasted two years and in the second year I even sold part of my soul working a sales job alongside it to raise the finance, just so I could afford to go. It hadn't all proved strictly necessary since the well known hotelier family of Greek origin, whose company I'd trained with (at the then Scottish flagship hotel where I had passing acquaintance with the founding don and his heir presumptive) virtually handed me a job running a small hotel/club for a family friend.
The job was seasonal so still facilitated the travelling/'research' I had intended to do ( I had a loose theory that some of the 'lost' knowledge from the Great Library and Musaeum of Alexandria may have made its way up through Greece, accumulating artefacts from significant sites which later showed up in unexpected/inexplicable places in Europe, along the way, then some dispersing to Al Andaluz and some up through Doggerland and across the open stretch of sea from what would then have been the Northern shores of Europe to Skara Brae. I reckoned some of it may even be encoded in the ancient sites of the Orkneys. I fully admit to having a wishful horse in that race, my paternal grandmother's family having been Orkney folk for generations, her wondrous tales, deftly illustrated with nothing more than a single wax crayon, were the ambrosia of the Nothern island gods to me and Essypattle would have the measure of Odysseus every time; still, the recent archeological findings at Brodgar Ness, which seem to indicate the pattern of ancient worship site building, and all of the cultural implications that has, may have spread southwards from there through the islands of Britain, even to Stonehenge et al, don't contradict my 'theory' or make it the wildest of poetic imaginings.
I had also just wanted to journey into the cradle of Western civilisation for as long as I was aware of culture, it was a large part of the impetus for me to, much later, go on to study Cultural Anthropology.).
Misty eyed reminiscence and pontification aside, towards my point; I'd gone to Greece on one of the old six month passports, I was young, caught up in finally getting to where I wanted to go, I'd overlooked a crucial detail, I didn't know the consequences which would later ensue. On arrival in Kos, where the hotel was, my new boss, playboy son of an Athens lawyer, sorted out the details of my work permit, which I simply renewed at the local police station each year before the summer season started. It wasn't until I came to leave the country, as the Third Balkan War was gathering pace and refugees from the early conflicts began to seek asylum and refuge over the borders, I realised the fullness of my situation.
I'd first encountered some of those fleeing conflict and persecution in what was to become the former Yugoslavia whilst 'wintering' my first year in Crete. When my summer earnings saved had begun to run low, I'd taken to supplementing my finances by joining the ranks of casual agricultural labourers who gathered at the local Cafeneions of a morning for the farmers to offer day work to. It was often tough work, no tougher than the 'tattle pickin' I'd done every year as a youth though, but usually relatively well paid; a day's wage could mean a week without having to look for more work. Over the course of that winter things changed, by the next winter much more so.
The casual nature of the Cafeneion labour market intensified, almost week on week, day by day, particularly in that second winter. When offers were being made to potential workers by farmers and the usual barter of day wage negotiations ensued, growing more heated, as they always had, the commonplace situation became palpably more intense than the largely British and Northern European travellers, who came every year for the fairly lucrative (in the sense that it paid enough to facilitate a decent life work balance which incorporated varying degrees of travel, sight-seeing and general cultural exploration) seasonal work were accustomed to. Groups of what had come to be pejoratively known among many/most of the supposedly liberal minded travelling fraternity simply as 'the Yugos' would intervene and undercut any pay offers. They were leaner, hungrier and much more forlorn and generally shabby looking, many of them visibly distressed, bearing what I now know to be the hallmarks of persistent PTSD sufferers.
For the farmers, beyond the initial surprise of the arrival of this much more willing and less expensive workforce, they adapted, offered bed and board to many with the work, being able to whilst making a saving on day wages but for most clearly and simply moved by the plight of fellow human beings. Almost inevitably, excruciatingly, among the Northern Europeans, with little knowledge of the political situation in the splintering former Yugoslavia, in an age starved of the constant barrage of information smart phones and other mobile devices can bring to even the weariest and most threatened refugees now (this is fascinating on that subject and on how it may actually be a game changer http://www.dw.com/en/how-technology-can-change-the-refugee-crisis/a-19295937 ) and in what I saw as a cripplingly ironic sense of 'liberal' entitlement, talk turned to 'these Yugos, coming in here, taking our jobs!'. No matter how big the world is, or how interconnected it becomes, small, insular minds are small, insular minds. I stopped going to the Cafeneions for work, went a few times simply to talk to the 'Yugos', to stop thinking of them as that and to understand their situation. With no easy solutions in sight, I resolved to make sure what I earned in the summer lasted through the next winter. I felt more empathy with the refugees from the troubled Balkans than my fellow Northern Europeans.
My affinity would be further confirmed just a few months later. A fracas had occurred towards the end of the season at the club and I was required to appear as a witness in the Greek courts. I needed my passport and work permit as ID when I went to the court building to register. I had to come clean; I had been living and working in Greece for two and a half years as an illegal immigrant!
The Greek authorities were surprisingly circumspect about it all. They gave me the address of the British Embassy in Athens, withheld my work permit, told me I couldn't work anymore and that my status as a tourist would depend on the British Embassy. The Embassy, once I got there, on the other hand, couldn't have been less helpful, barely listened to what I had to say, told me that without a valid or recently expired British passport I was officially Persona Non Grata (the guy's actual words, and it felt like they were capitalised that way too, just for emphasis, so I got the point) to them and to the British state.
It took six weeks and almost all of the money I'd saved so far that summer, as well as a few well placed interventions from my, by then, former employer's lawyer father, to reach any kind of resolution. I had family in the Netherlands, who vouched for me, said I was going to work for them (which I did briefly) and sent paperwork to the British Embassy, the Dutch Embassy and the Greek authorities. This resulted in me being issued with a time sensitive sheet of paper, which would get me through borders but only as far as the British Embassy in Amsterdam, what happened there was up to them.
During that six weeks or so, every couch I slept on, every meal I ate which wasn't paid for from my fast dwindling savings, every formal accompaniment to a Greek speaking authority (although I spoke fairly fluent Greek by this point my reading standard was minimal, I couldn't have read much and could easily have signed my life away if asked!) was freely proffered by Greek friends (who know me affectionately, I hope, as 'the crazy Scottish') I keep to this day. Every seemingly unnecessarily protracted bureaucracy came from the British Embassy or other Northern European countries I would need to journey through or to, whilst the Greek, and to some extent Italian, authorities showed a willingness to accommodate and help. I realise the world has changed drastically since then and borders/international securities are viewed entirely differently but my window on things was then not now.
I say all of this because as first the Greek financial crisis, with the attendant rise and 'smackdown' of Syriza by the neoliberal forces of the 'troika', then the magnitude of the refugee crisis across the Mediterranean unfolded, I have followed as many reports from Greece, on the ground so to speak, unfiltered through the UK media lens, as I can. I have rooted for the folkways of a people and a country I came to love, in a much more personal and intimate way than the culturally guided impetus which led me to their shores, to their communities, to their families. I found a people, as far as these things can be determined, living in the birthplaces of Western civilisation, having given the world so much, with little to no conceit or arrogance, always able and ready to give a little more.
This all came startlingly to mind as the latest shocking pictures of the current refugee crisis and the woeful reactions of most European leaders tore viscerally at my consciousness. And as the politics justifies the inhumanity a seeming growing indifference among ordinary people seems to become more and more prevalent with more and more convoluted contortions of justification attendant upon it. It shouldn't be necessary for the former First Minister of Scotland to appeal to his peers across Europe and remind them that "These are desperate families, fleeing war, hardship and oppression and it is incumbent upon European leaders to produce a scale of response which combines both European solidarity and simple humanity"; it should be clear to leaders and peoples alike that a humanitarian crisis is solved not by politicking or more and more draconian, insular, right wing measures, but by humanity.
I realise there may be dog whistle, tub thumpers who'd react to my, admittedly anecdotal, stories seeming to allude to an inherent open humanity among Greek communities, who'd point to the resurgence of the 'Golden Dawn' and intimate a similar reaction to current situations as are occurring across Europe. To them, I'd suggest looking at the history of the organisation, at its roots in Britain's, Churchill's, response to the Greek resistance in WWII being composed largely of left leaning organisations. I'd ask them to look at Britain's shame in provoking the civil war which ensued and creates divisions among Greeks to this day, with the core of the 'Golden Dawn' simmering away ready to respond to any resurgence from the left ever since. Manolis Glezos, as the greatest living authority on the Greek resistance, one of two men who scaled the Acropolis and tore down the Nazi flag, gives some fascinating insights into how things occurred and developed from the events of Athens 1944, some of them drawn upon by Andre Gerolymatos in his compelling histories of the times. They're a good place to stop off to quieten down those whistles. I was acutely aware of the relevance of these histories to the Hellenic peoples, and to all of Europe, during my own fated six weeks or so every time I crossed Syntagma Square en route to the British embassy from my temporary residences.
Recounting all of this around the story of my own plight has been an attempt to create just a sideways look into the current chapter of the Greek peoples' story and its relevance to the ongoing refugee crisis; an attempt to subvert a little of the refugee story 'newsfeed fatigue' because I know there are some people, good people, who feel now, as yet more horrific tales, brought about complicitly by the failed foreign policies and interventionism, to say nothing of the illegal wars, perpetrated in all our names by both UK and other Europen governments, as well as Team America World Police, roll across screens, that they simply cannot look at another picture of a dead baby, hear another tale of horror from inside a camp; yet we all remain responsible and should never, ever shy away from that responsibility, should never excuse it or devalue the simple priority of human life in holding our political representatives to account.
I've told my story (and frightening and alienating as my circumstances were for me, they were as nothing compared to the plight of those attempting to cross the Med or trapped within the borders of a Greece doubly shackled by its commitments to the European Commission's coup of forcibly imposed austerity/'rescue' and the barely sticky sticking plaster represented by the EU/Turkey deal) because in those days and weeks waiting, as an illegal immigrant, for a simple piece of paper, as alone and afraid as I've ever been, whilst war raged across the border, I realised Scotland had taught me family, community but Greece, the Greek people taught me humanity. And it was a humanity I was never likely to see, then or now, from agents of the British state.
So whilst the old Etonian, it would be laughable if the consequences didn't matter so much, production of 'Westside Story' rolls on with Davie Hamheed's Jets and Boris 'Look, all future leaders will bumble and have farcical hair' Johnson's Sharks, I also break with a self imposed ban on online political partisanry and ask you to consider, beyond the sideshow, where do you think we can most exercise our humanity? I confess to briefly having joined the People's Front of Judea, or was it The Judean People's Front, but no longer belong to a political party, whilst I still consider myself an active and willing member of two movements, that for an independent Scotland, and the DiEM25 movement, which I joined as soon as I knew it existed. I see no contradiction in a sovereign nation being part of a federal block of other sovereign nations (despite the simplistic arguments I've heard to the contrary) albeit one in which democracy needs to be reasserted at every level. If Mr Varoufakis can stare down the barrel of the European Commissioners', and pretty much every European leader and chancellor's, neoliberal impulses and still find validity in the EU project, the plight of his country should never be used as a stick with which to beat the Remain camp (just saying like, it's just my opinion!).
As the Greek people struggle to cope in the face of the refugee crisis, when they have been stretched beyond breaking and can still show more humanity on one tiny island in a single day, every single day the crisis ensues, than many European governments, the U.K. among them, have shown throughout its duration, the least we can do is try to understand what's causing them when cracks start to show, and realise it should always be more than reactions of right or left. Simple basic humanity is never reactionary, the Greek people have shown so much, they deserve some from us too.
(I felt moved to write this after, yet again, finding myself with tears rolling down my cheeks reading this account of life among the Greek people and refugees on the island of Chios. I didn't want to simply link to the article, knowing some of you good people of Kiltr would have read many reports and articles on the crisis and on the current Greek situation and may suffer a little crisis fatigue too, perhaps just passing on by; if I've held your attention, if you've made it this far, please, go a little further still, for the people of Greece, for every refugee, for those fleeing war, this is every minute of every day, for us it's just a little time, a little more empathy, a little more understanding, a little more humanity
http://www.thenation.com/article/the-eu-has-turned-greece-into-a-prison-for-refugees/
Thanks for reading.)
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