Proud, but powerless: the Greece that I love

Greece is still the bad boy of Europe, the pantomime villain in everyone’s local theatre. If it clings to the euro, it will eventually drag the rest of the eurozone down with it. If it bails out and dishonours its massive debts – even at the cut prices on offer – the result will be the same. Either way, Europe’s economies will be plunged into chaos and we will all end up worse off than Baron Hardup.

But hang on for a moment before you hurl that rotten fruit at the villain from your seat in the stalls. Here is another performer entering from the wings. He styles himself a master illusionist and he is about to persuade you that you cannot believe the evidence before your eyes. He is about to demonstrate that Greece deserves your sympathy rather than your censure. Ladies and gentlemen, I am that illusionist.

Before I attempt the impossible, I must declare an interest. I have a home in the Peloponnese and my son lives with his lovely Greek wife and children in Athens. So I have an affection for this infuriating country. And it is because I have been a regular visitor for 20 years that I have been able to see the best as well as the worst of it – no more so than last year. The worst can be summed up in two words. Corruption is one. Incompetence is the other.

At the top of the corruption edifice are those senior politicians and powerful businessmen who have become vastly rich at the nation’s expense. To compare dishonest politicians in our own country with those of Greece is to compare a naughty little boy pinching a chocolate when the shopkeeper’s back is turned with a Mafia boss who’ll think nothing of garrotting you with piano wire for failing to show respect. Metaphorically speaking, of course. Forget duck houses. Think mansions and yachts.

At the bottom of the scale are public employees who turned up for work when it suited them and had one or two other jobs on the side. Or they may have been “ghost” workers. Their jobs did not exist at all, but they got paid anyway because their second cousin ran the department. Stir into this toxic mix of nepotism, bribery, tax evasion and greed the grotesque incompetence and stifling bureaucracy that has characterised Greek public life for so long, and there you have it.

Not that the Greeks could have created their disaster alone. They needed help from outside agencies, such as powerful investment bankers who turned a blind eye when the national books were being cooked and foreign governments who knew perfectly well the ship was heading for the rocks but were quite happy to watch it sailing on so long as a little business was thrown their way.

Now that it is holed beneath the waterline and sinking fast, it is not the rich and powerful who will perish, but the ordinary Greeks who have done their best. They feel they have been betrayed by their own politicians and by the leaders of the European Union – especially Germany. I have not spoken to a single Greek citizen who does not reflect that anger.

The younger ones show it by protesting. Almost half the young people of Greece have no job. Those in work express their fury by staging strikes; others by switching their political support from the mainstream to politicians on the extreme Left and Right. And many others – in the country that gave the world democracy – see no point in politics when their elected prime minister can be replaced by a technocrat imposed on them by foreign diktat. Some even whisper: “At least under the junta….” But it is the EU that attracts the most anger. More specifically, what everyone calls “the troika”: the EU, the European Central Bank and the IMF.

This might seem puzzling, given how Greece appeared to prosper from the moment it joined the EU 30 years ago. Now, the day of reckoning has come and it is the ordinary people who must pay the price. Their sense of injustice is personified in a man who has become a national hero: Manolis Glezos.

When the Germans occupied Greece in 1941, they draped the swastika over the Parthenon. Glezos risked his life to climb the Acropolis and tear down the hated flag. He was 19 then and ever since he has never stopped fighting what he sees as oppression. He fought in the civil war that followed Hitler’s defeat. He fought the military dictatorship who ran the country until 1974 and spent years in jail to defend democracy. He fought political battles when he was elected to the European Parliament. And now he is fighting the deal being imposed by the troika.

Last year he was on a demonstration’s front line and was attacked by the police. They fired tear gas at him and grabbed him by the throat. He was 89. He was back on the front line within days. At his home in Athens, I asked him why Greece should not repay the vast amounts it has borrowed. By way of answer, he produced a book he has published of horrifying accounts of the Nazi atrocities, photographs of some of the 200,000 who died from starvation or were executed.

The slaughter in the village of Distomo, when 218 men, women and children were murdered by the SS as their homes burnt around them, was described by a German federal court in 2003 as “one of the most despicable crimes of the Second World War”.

Then he showed me a portrait of his young brother and, hanging next to it, a framed circle of faded cloth. It was hidden inside his brother’s beret and the words painstakingly etched into it form a farewell message. His brother was one of those executed.

Mr Glezos swelled with pride when he talked about how his brother went to his death. Pride and anger. Pride for his brother. Anger against modern Germany which, he says, has never paid Greece the reparations that are his country’s by right. Yet Germany is now insisting Greece pay back money which, says Mr Glezos, the nation was effectively tricked into borrowing so that the Germans could become even richer and stronger.

Let me stress, this is not the view of one magnificent, if deluded, old man: it is shared by millions of ordinary Greeks and many politicians, too. They do not fit the stereotype of tax-dodging, retsina-drinking layabouts. They work hard and are now genuinely suffering because of the austerity programme. Old people are giving their pensions to their children so their grandchildren do not go hungry. They themselves eat in soup kitchens.

This country has changed beyond recognition. It doesn’t mean for someone like me who’s been coming here for so long that you stop loving it. And at the end of this horrendous year I feel no less affection for it than I did at the beginning. But what is “it”? Greece is staggeringly beautiful. Its history and its legacy are unique. And none of that will change. But its people? It’s hard to escape a sense that many of them feel defeated.

I had Sunday lunch recently with the Papadamos family: three generations of them, at first glance, a typical middle-class family. In reality, they are desperate. Their main income came from Stella, the mother, a qualified civil engineer whose salary was more than 40,000 euros a year. Now it is a third of that and she can no longer afford the mortgage. Nor can she pay it off by selling their apartment: it’s worth less than a third of what she paid for it, and there are no buyers.

A few months ago, the family decided the only thing to do is leave Greece and move abroad – ideally, to England. But they can’t afford to. They are trapped.

“I love Greece,” Stella told me, “but my country has been sold. It has been sold for a very cheap price.”

Stella is the real face of Greece. She – like millions of her compatriots – should not be pilloried. They should be pitied.

‘Pain, fear and despair’

MY WIFE is a lawyer, who works 14-hour days, writes Christopher Humphrys. She’s lucky if half of her clients can pay. I play in a small Athens orchestra and the atmosphere at work is grim. Our monthly salary for December was not paid.

Now the weather has turned cold, we usually have Granny at home with us. Her own apartment block has no heating – the tenants can’t pay the bills. In some parts of Athens militant mayors opposed to the austerity measures organise electricians to re-connect people who are cut off. It’s illegal, but popular. Unfortunately, in our district the council is too busy trying to stop the neo-Nazi supporters and communists trying to kill each other. They don’t always succeed. There’s a death every few months.

I love taking my small son Hector to football training. He’s a bit upset because his best friend has stopped coming. His father still has a job, but hasn’t been paid since September. He can’t afford the 60 euros a month for training.

I used to enjoy walking the streets. When I came here, this city was like a series of villages. Now there are many people sleeping rough and streets where drug addicts shoot up quite openly.

Austerity is a clever word. It has a veneer of respectability. But that rings hollow here. What I see is pain, fear and despair – in the face of my wife, who rarely sees our children, and in the faces of friends who try to make ends meet. They cannot see what the future holds.

For the first time in 20 years, I’m thinking of leaving Greece. But it is my home. And surely we’ll get through this. Won’t we?