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Which Greece ?

ugur akinci writes @ Living on the Planet - Which Greece?

I love to watch the Olympics. I love the competition, the effort, the drive for excellence, and the whole youthful atmosphere... 16, 17, 18 year olds teaching us old geezers how to persevere and rise to the occasion under pressure-cooker conditions.

This year, while watching the Olympics, two meditations insist to take the front seat to my other thoughts and emotions:

1) Empty seats. Am I the only one noticing that most of the seats in those expensive stadiums and swimming halls are empty? Especially the gymnastics is a pain to watch. Basketball, the same story. An Athenian interviewed by (U.S.) National Public Radio said the tickets are so expensive that most Greeks cannot afford to attend their own Olympics.

What an irony. At the home of Olympic games, the owner of the house cannot afford to sit together with the guests.

Perhaps the whole terror scare played a part in the low attendance record. But whatever it is, there seems to be some truth to speculations by some olympiad observers that Greece will not be able to pay the $10 billion that she dished out for the games, and that the financial consequences for Greece would be felt for some time to come.

2) Ancient Greece of Multi Gods vs. Orthodox Christian Greece of the 21st Century. OK, this may not be the most elegant way of putting it but I really believe that Ancient Greece probably has as much in common with Modern Greece as Hittites have with Modern Turkey -- that is, very little, except the geography.

I cannot imagine a starker contrast than that between the rough and tumble athletes of the old, cussing, cursing, wine drinking, racing naked, scheming and competing with Gods (plural, a plethora of them), the ancient Greece where MAN was the measure of all things possible and precious, where RATIONALITY got its first kickstart, REASON, the frail vulnerable lonely HUMAN REASON, took its first trembling steps towards circles, triangles, the math, the moon, the planets and beyond, and where the HUMAN CONDITION, with its tragedy, comedy, beauty and temporal brevity of it all, stood in the heart of the mystery of existence... The Odyssey of MAN leaving his comfortable confines and through the terror of the unknown trying to go back home again...

... versus the Orthodox Christian Greece of our day, with a NATIONAL religion, a deep seated mysticism going back to the "Desert Fathers" ... are these the same Greece's?

Or is it just a geographical illusion played on our senses by a mind that telescopes time?

Every time I speak to a contemporary Greek it is obvious that that mischievous, iconoclast zest for life, that ZORBA wine coursing in the veins for human blood, is of course still there.

But I do not know enough about the Greek character or culture to discern whether the political zealotry and the collective unease that prompted Greece to take a few disasterous political adventures too many in the 20th century should be attributed to:

1) PLATO's Greece where the conceited philosopher-king, who has read more books than anybody else, drunk with hubris, took the country by the throat in unexamined directions (see, Karl Popper, "The Open Society and Its Enemies"), or

2) the relatively new Greece shaped in the crucible of British and French nationalism, a new nation which for too long found its sharpest self-definition in anti-Turkism, with its militaristic-nationalistic-Orthodox pulse trying to redeem a re-discovered history, a Greece that tests an ancient hypothesis through a new masculine reflex, at times bordering a Hellenistic crusade?

Which Greece am I watching, I ask myself, as I sit before my TV set, drinking in the gorgeous Greek countryside, the blue endless sea and the white-washed houses, the olive groves and the overloaded donkeys, the winding village trails, the bees and flies buzzing under the hot August sun darting in and out of the purple thistle and wild oregano bushes, and patient smiling folks, aging gentlemen with curled moustaches and village ladies with kerchiefs carrying freshly picked tomatoes and eggs in their baskets, people that look so much like their Anatolian counterparts on the other side of the Aegean...

Which Greece am I watching, I keep wondering as Michael Phelps racks up one medal after another... as the diminuitive Turkish Hercules, like super ants, lift twice and thrice their body weights and shatter world records...

The Greece of Thales, Plato, Aristotle and Socrates... or Metaxas, Venizelos, Grivas and Sampson?

And Jesus, who constantly stressed that this world was nothing and that the "real kingdom" was that "of my Father" on the other side... would he have approved all this jumping and running and jostling in Christian Greece for the highest, fastest, strongest, just to beat the other guy to the punch, for two cents worth of fleeting fame and fortune?

As Baltimore's hometown boy-wonder Michael Phelps steps out of the chrome blue pool dripping gold, I close my eyes for a commercial break and silently send a pair of doves from my heart, pure shimmering white doves, fluttering from the shores of the good country where I was born and raised, to the other shore of the Aegean where the oldest experiment of the human mind is still unfolding in all its beauty and with all its questions.