I Like the Greeks

by OSBERT LANCASTER

1

IT is hardly surprising that, in view of the many strains and stocks from which the modern Greeks derive, one of the first of the differences which separate them from other nations of which the foreign visitor becomes aware is their striking nonconformity to type. Elsewhere, particularly in Anglo-Saxon countries, a fearful and increasing uniformity is the rule, which is discernible not only in the great mass of the population, where one might perhaps look for it, but also in those walks of life where one would be justified in expecting to find some outstanding signs of character and individuality. In England, the Labor Government has held power for three years, yet few save the experts can tell the Under Secretaries apart, while in the United States none save those who have devoted a lifetime to the subject can possibly memorize the features of any individual politician for more than five minutes.

How different are things in Greece! Here, where politicians are in proportion to the population so much more numerous, no possibility of mistaken identity exists; their faces, figures, and deportment are as individual and readily distinguishable to the naked eye of the man in the street as their thumbprints would be under the microscope of Monsieur Bertillon. Consider his Beatitude the Archbishop, six feet six in height, weighing 238 pounds, with cheekbones as rugged and prominent as the Pindus; M. Mavromichaelis, rosy and monocled, as fine a specimen of the brachycephalic White’s Club type as you could find in Pall Mall; Comrade Siantos, a cross between King Zog and Emlyn Williams in a Welsh character part; General Plastiras, thin as string, fiercely mustachioed, with eyes like Kalamata olives; M. Papandreou, so nobly Thespian in the old Lyceum manner that one automatically expects to be addressed as “laddie.” These and half a hundred others lend infinite color and variety to the Greek political scene and render enviably easy the lot of the Athenian caricaturists.

It is not without design that the above examples have all been chosen from the political world, although the rule holds good in all strata of Greek society, for nothing is likely to strike the foreigner so forcibly as the magnitude of the role which politics plays in the life of every Greek.

In Greece, as with us, hard though it may be for some Western democrats to credit it, governments are dependent on popular support; and the principal difference lies in the manner in which that support is expressed or withdrawn. There, when a government has exhausted the patience of the country, it is as often as not removed from office not by the ballot box but the coup d’état, and for many years the technique has remained unchanged. One morning a band of colonels and major generals, judging the state of public opinion to warrant such an enterprise, marches across Constitution Square, firing a ritual volley down University Street en route, takes possession of the Ministries of War and the Interior, and arrests the Cabinet. Next morning a new government is installed; the leaders of the old one have been condemned to death, and the colonels and major generals are gazetted lieutenant generals and full generals. A few days later the sentences on the defeated politicians are commuted to life imprisonment, subsequently to be reduced to banishment to the islands where most of them have already provided themselves with comfortable villas against just such an emergency. A few months pass, an amnesty is proclaimed, and life goes on as before.

In these circumstances the coup d’état becomes an accepted constitutional device and is usually attended with far less bloodshed than a general election, but its success depends on the strict observance of the rules by both sides. On the two occasions in recent years when the rules were infringed, wounds were inflicted to which the present state of the country can in no small measure be attributed.

After the Asia Minor disaster in 1922, Colonels Plastiras and Gonatas went so far as to carry out the death sentence on six of the Royalist leaders, a gross infringement of the accepted code, which, whether or not there existed legal justification, left a legacy of bitterness which even Venizelos himself was never effectually able to surmount and which was active for harm up to the outbreak of the last war. In 1935 General Metaxas, having seized power in the accepted fashion, so far forgot himself as to keep his political opponents in the exile to which they had been traditionally banished for an indefinite period, and by so doing prevented the normal functioning of the politikos kosmos from then onwards. It was for this, far more than for those totalitarian gestures which so excited the wrath of foreign anti-fascists, that he earned the cordial dislike of his countrymen; while supplying an unaccustomed quantity of bread in the form of improved social services, he was forced, in order to maintain himself in power, to close down the principal circus.

More typical is the story of General Pangalos, a resourceful and highly praxicopomatic¹ general who first came into political prominence when, in the early twenties, he delivered his country by the usual methods from whatever form of tyranny it was groaning under at the time. Having sworn to establish the rule of justice and democracy with no thought of private advantage, he soon found himself in the unenviable position, owing to the obstructive activities of various suspicious and far from disinterested rival saviors, of being forced to assume the supreme power. In due course he was elected to the Presidency by the voice of the people expressed in a vote the size and unanimity of which more than compensated for any disadvantage his cause might have suffered in the popular esteem from the grave necessity to which he had been put of having to arrest all rival candidates before the polling day.

Once in power, it must be admitted that those stern republican ideals which had hitherto always influenced his policy suffered some slight modification; his installation of his wife in the Queen’s apartments in the Royal Palace caused unfavorable comment among Republicans and Royalists alike, while his appearance in the royal box at an Opera ball clothed in a silk toga with his brow wreathed in roses shook the confidence of the more solid section of the electorate. Before rather abruptly leaving office, however, he initiated several sound and praiseworthy pieces of legislation, one of which, a sumptuary law establishing the exact number of inches from the ground the women of Greece would be permitted to wear their skirts — an edict that was rigidly enforced by a corps of inspectors equipped with tape measures — at the time attracted considerable attention in the world press.

After his enemies had brought about his removal from power the general retired into an exile, enlivened by occasional abortive attempts at coups d’état (the competition in this line of business was, in the twenties and thirties, unfortunately considerable), from which he once more emerged into the light of history on being discovered among the collaborationists in the Averoff jail shortly after the liberation. This unfortunate predicament was due, so he informed a correspondent (Richard Capell, to whose admirable volume Simiomata I am indebted for this brief account of the later phase of the General’s career), to the fact that some days previously, certain Communists had lost their lives in a savage attack on his flat in Aristotle Street — an attack which would certainly have succeeded had he not, as one well versed in the uncertainties of Greek political life, kept beneath the upholstery of his sofa thirty hand grenades, two pistols, a rifle, and a tommy gun. When some weeks later the Averoff was stormed by ELAS it was thought that the old campaigner had lost his life in the ensuing massacre, but I am glad to say that he was able, under cover of the disturbance, to make good his escape and is now once more living in a retirement which I have not the least doubt he is still prepared instantly to abandon at the first call of duty.

While the actual maneuvering and strategy are confined to a comparatively small team, it should not be supposed that the spectators are doomed to a passive role or that their opportunities for political self-expression are few or unsatisfying. Quite apart from the organized rallies and demonstrations which provide the regular Sunday amusement of every self-respecting citizen, political enthusiasm manifests itself in every department of everyday life in a manner which to us is apt to appear almost excessive. Thus, seldom has a man been more distressed than a young English musician invited to conduct a concert of modern Greek music when, at the first rehearsal, the composer of the work in progress having informed the orchestra that the next twenty-five bars of his tone poem represented the triumph of democracy over fascism, all the strings got up and cheered and the brass and percussion walked out in a rage.

Similarly, few of the English present are likely to forget a memorable first night of The Merchant of Venice when his political opponents in the stalls opened up on Shylock with a tommy gun, inflicting a nasty flesh wound on Bassanio and killing Lancelot Gobbo.

2

OVERWHELMING as is the prevailing enthusiasm for politics, it is likely that the visitor to Athens will be struck more immediately by the Greek passion for noise. There are some who hold that this extraordinary trait in the national character springs rather from insensitiveness or indifference than from any positive liking; but this is a theory which has been rendered untenable by my chance discovery, in a car park in the Piraeus, of a motor bicycle fitted with two exhausts, each provided not with a silencer but with an amplifier.

The means whereby this passion is given expression are manifold and ingenious and there is no department of life in which it is not fully satisfied. Political demonstrations, in addition to the highpowered stream of oratory and the rhythmical chanting of slogans, are invariably enlivened by the presence of a brass band, if not two, while sessions of Parliament, thanks to the high pitch of development to which the slamming of desk lids and banging of dispatch boxes have here attained, frequently astound even French observers brought up in the hard school of the Chambre des Députés.

In everyday life the polite commonplaces of social intercourse are normally exchanged in the ringing tones of Demosthenes sharing his candid opinion of Philip of Macedon with a crowd of several thousands in the open air, and in summer the traveler approaching the coast of Attica across the waters of the Saronic Gulf is frequently puzzled by the continuous buzzing that first becomes audible soon after he passes the point of Aegina, and increases in intensity as he draws nearer the shore. It proceeds, he is startled finally to discover, from the casual conversation being sustained on the bathing beaches of Phaleron.

Nor is it only the human figures in the landscape who are subject to this weakness, for in Athens — and nowhere else so far as I know — the cocks are accustomed to greet the dawn at all hours of the day and night; and as almost all Athenians, even flatdwellers, are enthusiastic keepers of poultry, this contribution to the general din is not to be despised. Needless to say, while there is every reason for supposing that this passion is deep-seated and of long standing, the modern Greeks with their great powers of rapid assimilation have availed themselves of all the discoveries of modern science to such good purpose that they have far surpassed the best which their great ancestors could achieve. The radio, the gramophone, and the internal-combustion engine are all employed to the fullest advantage, but it is noticeable that in so far as modern research has tended towards the elimination of sound its results have been firmly rejected; thus the majority of the Athenian streetcars are of the oldest and noisiest vintage, and such few comparatively new models as appear on the streets have all, by skillful handling and a few minor adjustments, been rendered in this respect almost as good as old.

Nowhere is this carefully cultivated talent for noise more vigorously or, to the Anglican ear, more surprisingly employed than in the service of religion. Here the very church bells call with an insistent, imperative clang which to those accustomed to the gentle summons from the steeple of St. Fridiswede’s sounding softly across the sunset fields of Birckett Forster, would seem more suited to the tocsin than to evensong. (Owing to the rugged nature of Greek political life it must be admitted that they are, in fact, almost as frequently employed for the former task as for the latter.) In many of the monasteries, however, the monies still cling to the older fashion, traditional in the Orthodox Church, of beating on a suspended wooden beam with a hammer, holding that this instrument, while possibly inferior to the bell in carrying power, is even more insistent at close quarters. In some cases a long iron bar has been substituted for the beam, and the results thus attained are said to be even more satisfactory. But these are merely the everyday routine practices and it is only on the great festivals that one is able to appreciate the real pre-eminence of the Church in this field.

3

EASTER, in the Orthodox Church, far surpasses in importance all other feasts, and in Greece it is celebrated by the whole nation — including even those who for the rest of the year are notoriously indifferent in such matters — with a fervor and intensity considerably greater than that which we are accustomed to display at Christmas. The fast of Lent has been observed in progressive stages, culminating, in Holy Week, for the devout in almost total abstinence, and in an absence of meat even on the mundane dinner tables of Kolonaki. All Good Friday the bells have tolled ceaselessly from every belfry in Athens, and after dark the Bier has been carried in procession round the confines of every parish.

Holy Saturday is a dies non; for the only time in the whole year the cafés are empty, and even the terrace at Yennaki’s is deserted except for a handful of foreigners, while in the church all is dark save for one solitary candle on the altar. Towards midnight the space opposite the great west doors of the Metropolis, and of every church throughout the land, is gradually filled by an immense crowd in whom the fasting of the previous week and the unaccustomed gloom of the day, so foreign to the nature of a people not markedly austere, have induced a nervous condition bordering on hysteria. The wooden platform erected on a line with the high altar is occupied by members of the government and representatives of the diplomatic corps, the latter holding their candles in the slightly embarrassed manner of grownups participating in a nursery game, while from the open doors the sound of the chanting which has been going on within the darkened cathedral for many hours takes on a more urgent note. A few minutes before midnight the Archbishop emerges attended by two deacons, one carrying a lighted candle from the altar, and mounting the platform begins the reading of the Gospel.

By now a deathly hush, or what passes in Greece for a deathly hush — that is to say, an absence of sound that compares not unfavorably with the noise of the small mammal house on a quiet afternoon — has fallen on the vast crowd, which is maintained unbroken until, on the stroke of midnight, the Bishop pronounces the words “Xristos anesth — Christ is risen.”At this the night is rent by a wave of sound in comparison with which all the noises to which one has grown accustomed on other days of the year are as tinkling cymbals. A massed choir and two brass bands burst into powerful, though different, songs of praise; the guard of honor presents arms with a crash unrivaled even in the Wellington Barracks; every bell in the city, ably assisted by air-raid sirens and factory whistles, clangs out the good news, while the cheering crowds greet their Risen Lord with a barrage of rockets, squibs, Roman candles, Chinese crackers, and volley after volley of small-arms fire discharged by such of the devout — a not inconsiderable proportion — as have come to the ceremony armed.

4

ONE reason for the vast crowds which throng the churches at Easter has little enough to do with religion. The Greeks are, of all nations, the most gregarious, and any occasion which provides an opportunity for them to congregate in masses, be it religious, political, or sporting, is sincerely welcomed.

To the quality of the entertainment offered they appear quite indifferent, holding the pleasure of standing for two or three hours wedged among some thirty thousand or so of their fellow human beings in itself sufficient recompense. Nor are they dependent for the satisfaction of this particular whim on fixed celebrations previously announced, but will spontaneously gather in droves on the most trivial pretexts; a squabble between two cigarette boys, a broken-down motorbus, a performing bear, will in any Greek town draw crowds which in England only popular film stars arriving at a Command Performance can attract. This powerful instinct, of course, renders them unrivaled blockers-up-of-gangways, and when it is allied to an unfailing ability to select at a glance the narrowest strip of pavement, the sharpest corner of the stairs, slows up the tempo of everyday life to a pace which those not similarly gifted occasionally find distressingly slow.

This passion for crowds is accompanied, logically enough, by a dislike of solitude correspondingly intense. Thus in the height of the summer one never finds a beach, no matter how convenient or delightful, in the possession of half a dozen bathers; it is other completely empty or occupied by upwards of fifteen hundred people. Similarly a wealthy Greek, building himself a country villa, will reject any secluded spot, even if not inconveniently remote, in favor of a site in a suburb already overcrowded by his friends and relations. Nor, even if he is as rich as Croesus, will he buy sufficient land or plant trees in order to ensure what we should regard as a minimum degree of privacy, arguing that it is practically impossible to escape being overlooked by the neighbors without at the same time depriving oneself of the pleasure of overlooking them.

Allied to this formidable passion for company is a trait which in me, as a small boy, was invariably dubbed vulgar curiosity but which a maiden aunt used convincingly to justify in herself as “taking a healthy interest in one’s fellow beings.” Needless to say, in this matter the Greeks are entirely of the aunt ‘s way of thinking. One’s health, one’s income, one’s children, one’s sex life, are all matters in which they are prepared to take a burning and perfectly genuine interest and on which deliberately to withhold information would be considered churlish. Fortunately any suggestion of offensiveness in this string of personal questions—posed, as often as not, within a few moments of first meeting — is banished by that most endearing of all their national virtues — their unfailing and exquisite courtesy.

This virtue is all the more delightful for being unexpected; for the Greeks are a formidably intelligent people and among us, in the days when we could still as a nation lay some claim to it, politeness was seldom found allied to intellectual eminence and today can hardly be described as conspicuous among the logical and quick-witted French. In Greece, where both stupidity and rudeness are exceptional, they are usually discovered in firm alliance, and when a Greek is stupid he is very, very stupid indeed. In this connection it should perhaps be pointed out that the majority of rude Greeks seem always to gravitate towards the service of foreigners, a phenomenon which, while it undoubtedly testifies to the judgment and shrewdness of the average employer, has an unfortunate effect on the national prestige.

In order to avoid subsequent disappointment it would be as well perhaps, at this point, to attempt some analysis of the nature of Greek intelligence and to define its limitations. Its principal characteristic is the speed with which it works, which renders the Greek peculiarly formidable in all matters requiring rapid decision while leaving him more vulnerable when long-term issues are at stake. Thus time and again an apparently insoluble political crisis which seemed destined to plunge the whole country into chaos has by some brilliant feat of legerdemain been solved at the eleventh hour; but the deep underlying causes, political or economic, which have really occasioned the deadlock invariably remain unheeded and unresolved.

In a humbler sphere it renders the Greek the best mechanic in the world when it comes to doing roadside repairs, and the worst when it involves maintaining a car in good running order over a period of time. This being so, it is not surprising that he should have most profitably exploited this remarkable gift in the field of international commerce operating under the principles of laissez-faire economics.

The ability to amass wealth is of course no more equitably diffused among the Greeks themselves than among other nations; on the contrary, to him that hath shall be given in Greece even more abundantly than elsewhere. Nevertheless, despite a fantastic disparity in incomes there is little or no resentment of great riches on the part of the havenots, and all the desperate efforts of the Communists to wage the class war have as yet met with little or no success. This is to be explained both on psychological and economic grounds; the moneymaking gift is generally held in such high esteem among the Greeks that its successful exploitation on the grandest scale is a matter for respect and emulation but not for envy.

Economically, the fact that the majority of rich Greeks have from time immemorial amassed their fortunes by grinding the faces of other people’s poor, exploiting the workers of Alexandria, Bombay, Manchester, or Cardiff, but seldom their own, has successfully prevented the formation within Greece of an industrial proletariat. Thus the poorest peasant in the land, unless he happens to be in the employ of one of the big tobacco magnates, is unable in his extremely logical mind to trace any connection between his own miserable condition and the usually far from discreet display of riches in the millionaires’ quarter of Kolonaki.

Furthermore, this state of affairs is rendered difficult to upset by the almost total absence of class distinctions. Save for the existence of a few old Phanariot families, Greece is a country almost completely without an hereditary aristocracy; few of the most prominent citizens are more than a couple of generations from the soil, and many of the richest started life in the gutters of Smyrna or Constantinople. Moreover, where education is free and compulsory, it is no simple matter to establish the social rule of privilege.

Fortunately for the national character the Greek’s ability to make money is equaled only by his genius for spending it, and on inquiry it will usually be discovered that the millionaire whose name is a household word for opulence is halfway through his third fortune. This lighthearted expenditure particularly excites the contempt of the Jews, who tend to despise the Greeks as being far too talkative and woefully irresponsible. The Greeks for their part entertain no envy or hard feelings for the Jews (in no country did the Germans have less success with their anti-Semitic campaign, which aroused the openly expressed horror of the whole nation), knowing full well that they have in Greece to work a twenty-four-hour day simply in order to keep their heads above water. Indeed, the Greeks are singularly free from that distressing and today almost universal complaint, xenophobia. It is of course true that few can be found who are willing freely to admit that Bulgarians are human beings, a large proportion holding the view that they cannot, strictly speaking, even be classed as mammals; but in general they regard foreigners with an amused and kindly tolerance, and in certain cases with a degree of admiration as considerable as they could reasonably be expected to manifest for any beings laboring under the appalling disadvantage of not being Greek.

5

THE position which England occupies in the affections of the Greeks is exalted but rather less secure than we are apt lightheartedly to imagine. On the credit side there remains Byron and “all that,” for so historically-minded are even the most ignorant Greeks that today the English traveler can still cash checks on the good will accumulated by our countrymen in the War of Independence. Against this must be set the fact that for a large and influential section of the population, the Asia Minor refugees, our national genius is typified not by the figure of the Pilgrim of Eternity dying for liberty in 1824, but by that of Lloyd George selling Greece up the river in 1922.

Similarly in recent times our record in the late conflict enormously increased our prestige, which was further strengthened in the eyes of the vast majority by our intervention in 1944. But on the other hand, a small but excessively vocal minority will not soon forgive us the latter action, while our popularity with all parties has undoubtedly decreased as a result of our failure to support sufficiently vehemently Greek national claims at the Paris Peace Conference.

Nevertheless, it seems probable, unless we are more than usually maladroit in our foreign policy, that we shall continue to enjoy the benefits of an emotional most-favored-nation clause for some time to come. This optimistic assertion is based not so much on the memory of past sufferings shared as on the undoubted existence of certain traits in the Greek national character which find their parallels in our own and which are not markedly conspicuous among the other nations of Europe. For instance, the average Greek is naturally lazy, without any belief in all that nonsense about the dignity of labor or work for work’s sake, and in Greece the English traveler is seldom afflicted by those vague feelings of guilt to which in France and Italy the depressing spectacle of the toiling peasantry too frequently gives rise.

Then both nations are afflicted by an extraordinary inability to comprehend the ways of other peoples, which in our case finds expression in a pained incredulity that foreigners can be so stupid as to doubt the purity of British motives and in the Greeks in a righteous and clamorous indignation at the base ingratitude of those who refuse to honor the enormous debts which all nations, at some time or other, either individually or collectively, are held to have contracted to the founders of Western civilization. Both of us in fact like to be liked and neither has yet lost, despite innumerable bitter disappointments, the ability to register pain and surprise when it is unmistakably demonstrated that we are not.

More important perhaps than all else, we both cling pathetically to the old world idea that the integrity of the individual is something to be respected.

The Englishman should, however, always be on his guard against pushing these comforting analogies too far; even qualities which both nations can with some assurance be said to have in common find, beyond a certain point, different modes of expression. Thus both English and Greeks can justly be considered kindhearted, but with the latter kindness does not inevitably, any more than with the Austrians or the Irish, neutralize a strain of ferocious cruelty.

For the Greeks can on occasion be cruel, and one has only to read the history of either the Peloponnesian or Independence Wars to realize that this deplorable failing is deep-rooted and not, as many sincere and patriotic Greeks, appalled by the atrocities which rendered the Athens rising of 1944 one of the bloodiest and most ghastly chapters in the whole depressing history of civil strife, so desperately maintain, just a bad habit acquired in the subhuman conditions of the German occupation. In mitigation it should, however, be emphasized that it is almost always a hot-blooded, unpremeditated cruelty fulfilling itself in sudden massacres and passionate reprisals, not in Belsens or Buchenwalds. It is, therefore, very different in degree and kind from the savage insensibility of the Slav or the calculated sadism of the Teuton, and while no Greek would think twice about dropping an atomic bomb on Sofia, one would search in vain, I think, even among the most ferocious and vocal Bulgarophiles, for those capable of initiating or carrying out a scientific and remorseless extermination of the whole race.

In the final analysis it is a trait which history and ethnology teach us almost invariably goes hand in hand with exceptional physical courage in a certain stage in a people’s development, and in this case is closely connected with the prevailing attitude to death. In Greece human life is held as cheap as human personality is held dear, a fact for which abundant evidence is provided not only by the high homicide rate but also by the everyday performance of chauffeurs and pilots. The spectacle of death arouses no feelings of pious horror, and sensitive foreigners are frequently distressed by the sight of the dear departed being conveyed to his last resting place insecurely strapped to the luggage grid of the family car, or, if he has been the victim of political enthusiasm, and it is thought that capital can be made of his martyrdom, hoisted aloft on a pole at the head of an indignant procession. Curiously enough, once the corpse is below ground this realistic attitude immediately gives way to one of irrational horror. No Greek will live near a graveyard or even go through one if he can possibly avoid it, and a highly intelligent acquaintance once confessed that the first months of his time at Oxford had been rendered miserable by the Great Western Railway’s practice of halting all trains for a probationary period alongside the local cemetery before allowing them into the station.

However, if among the Greeks kindness of heart does not invariably prove an altogether effective antidote to an indifference to death and suffering, it never, as is so often the case with us, degenerates into a vague ineffective benevolence, nor is its expression characterized by any trace of sentimentality. Of this unamiable and depressing failing which mars so much of our art and literature, wrecks our foreign policy, renders ridiculous our religion, and is responsible in our social life for as much unhappiness as downright cruelty, the Greeks are entirely free.

Of all the qualities which the Greeks possess in a marked degree this almost terrifying realism which successfully renders impossible the harboring of any illusions, sentimental or otherwise, and which characterizes their personal relationships, their art, and their conduct of business, is perhaps their most distinctive attribute — and one which, in a punchdrunk world muzzy with ideologies and doped with false ideals, may well prove of the greatest value both to themselves and the rest of us.

How far the successful cultivation of this virtue is due to the climate must be determined by those who have made a study of the effect of environment on character, but certainly it is difficult even for those born and bred in the damp Celtic twilight of the West or the green Wagnerian gloom of the North to retain their romantic illusions in the fabulous clarity of this extraordinary atmosphere. Here supernatural sanction for political ambitions is not easily assumed, and unaided good will no longer appears as an adequate remedy for the world’s ills; prosperity is not just around these angular and all too well defined corners, and the doctrine of original sin gains a new validity. One soon discovers that the injunction inscribed on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi is less easily disregarded in the land of Apollo’s birth, and that personal motives cannot so casually be concealed beneath a top dressing of disinterest. Fear does not convincingly masquerade as prudence, nor can pride get by beneath the trappings of justifiable self-respect.