This summer, I returned to Greece with my family, which was very exciting for me since
A) I’m Greek
B) It’s been a while
C) I can now legally drink there
Greece sort of got metaphorically kneecapped with a bazooka in the recession, economically speaking, and hasn’t really gotten its act back together yet. This summer has been the best year for tourism in the homeland since the crash, but people are still hurting. It’s most obvious in Athens. Move out far enough, though, and you find people in mountain villages that don’t even know the recession happened. The Greeks are still kicking it old school, grilling fish and meat and making salads without lettuce (because lettuce is hard to grow in Greece; it takes too much water (so next time you order a “Greek salad” and it has lettuce, you know what’s up)) and generally not concerning themselves with much else.
What happened?
We used to make things happen. Our trajectory along the time line of history sounds like a Drake song played backwards. (Started from the top… you get it.) We basically created mathematics (particularly geometry) figured out that the world was round, (and calculated its circumference within ten percent accuracy) pioneered most of modern language (AND manage to still be spoken today (suck it, Latin)) and gave birth to poetry and written stories. We had great art! Enormous churches! An empire that stretched from Rome to India (thanks Alex)!
During World War II, we put up arguably the first real resistance to the march of the Axis forces, and although we, too, eventually fell, we outlasted all of Hitler’s previous conquests combined, and, some point out, delayed the start of Operation Barbarossa such that Hitler was forced to march into Russia in the middle of a fatally cold winter, for which his troops were ill-prepared. Had Russia fallen, Great Britain would have been the only European power left standing against Hitler, which might have allowed for the success of the Nazi movement. Hitler would have been ruler of Europe.
Now, we can’t even pay off our debts to the same country that we once resisted in the mountains and fields of our homeland.
What made the Greeks so great? Many Greeks offer a single word: philotimo. Philotimo is a Greek compound word (much like 25% of the rest of the English language). It comes from philos, for friend, and timi, for honor: a friend, or lover, of honor. It is a nebulous term that Greeks define as a responsibility to the rest of humanity. It’s basically the premise upon which Greek history and the Spiderman comics were written: if you have the power to help someone, you have the responsibility to do so– with great power comes great responsibility. It’s what your grandmother (yiayia, if you’re a Hellene) says to you when you aren’t being nice to your little sister– “Don’t you have any philotimo?” It’s the idea that when you go out into the world, you represent your family and your country, so you had better act with dignity and kindness.
This is what we’ve lost. This is what we need to get back to. Greeks have a responsibility to make their country great. No one else can do it for us. It’s how we can get back to what we were before. It’s in our blood, and our DNA. It’s a grassroots movement waiting to happen, and it needs to start today, from the bottom up.
But it wouldn’t hurt if a couple of politicians actually paid their taxes.