The Full Catastrophe (19 page)

Giorgos, at my request, called his brother’s wife, and she agreed to come to the
kafenio.
He left before she arrived, saying they didn’t get along, though he didn’t want to explain why. Soon, a thickset blond woman in flip-flops and a purple “Angry Birds” T-shirt walked up to me and politely shook my hand. She took a seat across from me, put her keys on the table, and asked for a glass of water. I asked her how she and her children were doing, and she began to cry. She said she still had trouble believing her husband was in prison. “I feel like he’s just gone for a visit,” she said. Their eight-year-old was dealing with it very badly. He needed therapy, she said, but she didn’t have the money to pay for it. Things would get much worse without her husband’s halved salary. “With the economic crisis in Greece, I understand they want to cut it,” she said. “But how should I live? What support do I have?” She said she had lost her job as a cleaning lady at a language school after the employer was forced to make cutbacks. Now, she was helping to take care of an elderly pensioner a few days a week, and couldn’t find anything better. Making matters worse, there was a
possibility the municipality could seize and auction off the family house, which, she said, her husband had built long ago with profits he made, not with the
lyra,
but in the stock market. “How can they cut his salary just like that after so many years of service?” she added. He had worked for twenty years as a public servant, she said, and he had a good record until this incident. More tears dribbled down her cheeks. “If they cut that money, I can’t imagine what I’ll do,” she said. “There are no jobs.”

5
The Apostate

Our Lady was seized with trembling, and the icons wept tears.

“Be silent, Lady and Mistress; and you, icons, weep not. Again in years and times to come it will be ours once more.”

—Song of Hagia Sophia

O
ne night in the year 982, the archangel Gabriel descended from heaven for an earthly visit, according to Orthodox Christian tradition. Disguised as a monk, the angel arrived on Mount Athos, a secluded mountain peninsula dotted with Byzantium’s most revered monasteries, to partake in a pre-dawn vigil before an icon of Mary and Jesus. “It is truly meet to bless thee, O Theotokos, thou the ever-blessed and most pure, and the Mother of our God,” the archangel chanted with such celestial melody that a monk beside him understood he was in the presence of a heavenly being. The archangel then vanished, and for a time, according to some tellings, the icon emitted a divine light.

On a sunny, hot October Saturday in 2012, the same icon was delivered from Mount Athos to the shore of the northern city of Thessaloniki, Greece’s second-largest metropolis, aboard a Greek navy gunboat. The occasion was the coming 100th anniversary of
the city’s liberation from the Ottoman Empire, and the monks of Mount Athos, a few hours’ boat ride away, had it seen fit to enhance the festivities by contributing one of their most venerated icons for a few weeks’ residence in the city. There on the paved harborside to receive the icon were a military marching band, scores of Greek soldiers in navy whites and army fatigues standing in formation, and various politicians. I stood sweating among a crowd of a few thousand Greek citizens who had gathered around the city’s most prominent landmark, the cylindrical, turreted
Lefkos Pyrgos,
or White Tower, built to fortify Thessaloniki during Ottoman rule. After an Ottoman surrender during the First Balkan War, the city came under Greek control in the fall of 1912, on a day that seemed fated, as it fell on the feast day of the city’s patron saint, Demetrios, a Roman military commander martyred there for his Christian faith in the early fourth century.

On an elevated stage sat the nation’s highest-ranking clergy, all clad in black hats and robes. Flanking the clerics were two scruffy men adorned in the customary revolutionary bandit garb—the pleated kilts and pom-pom shoes. They wore tired expressions, as if having been rented out for such festivities one too many times. Offshore, a few clerics emerged from the cabin of the gunboat, their frocks fluttering violently in the wind, followed by a pack of sailors carrying the icon. The revered object was enclosed in a wooden and glass case and framed with white flowers. The sailors strained from the weight of the contraption as they boarded a smaller coast guard boat that bobbed alongside the navy vessel. The priests, the sailors, and their holy cargo then puttered toward the harborside. The crowd waited in silent anticipation as the faint, windswept din of techno music echoed from the cafés lining the harbor, where young people carried on with their Saturday, apathetic to the sacred undertaking.

The boat pulled up to shore, and the onlookers applauded its arrival. Many held their cameras high with one hand while making
the sign of the cross with the other. People seemed to believe that the Virgin Mary herself, or the
Panagia,
as she is referred to in Greece—the “All Holy”—was about to step off the boat. It took a few more hushed minutes of anticipation for the sailors to unload the icon. The priests disembarked first, and then the sailors with the
Panagia.
“Present arms!” yelled a voice through a loudspeaker. The soldiers on land snapped to attention and brought their rifles to their chests. The marching band began to play a tune called “The March of the Flag.” Cymbals crashed, trumpets blared. Two priests waving smoking thuribles led the sailors with the icon along a red carpet, passing the soldiers in formation. Those soldiers not holding rifles saluted.

I tried hard to repress what must have looked like an impious grin, inspired by this vision of soldiers saluting the mother of Jesus. My neighbors in the crowd were already looking at me with suspicion, apparently wondering why I was jotting down notes on a small notepad instead of crossing myself. What might seem bizarre to someone who grew up in the United States, where the separation of church and state is more stringently upheld, is for many religious Greeks unremarkable. Greece does not in practice abide by Western concepts of secularism. The nation’s Orthodox Church sees itself as the torchbearer of Hellenism through the ages, and the guardian of Greek identity. Since Greece’s founding, religion has defined what it means to be Greek. When Greek revolutionaries declared independence from the Ottoman Empire and wrote the first constitution in 1822, Greeks were defined as Christians living within the liberated territory. That is because most citizens of the budding state identified themselves primarily by their religion, having lived for centuries under an Ottoman Empire in which religious belief rather than ethnicity was the nomenclature by which the population had been grouped and governed. Nor was “Hellene” a ubiquitous term of self-identification for the unschooled, pastoral citizens of the new state. The term in
previous centuries had carried an unpleasant, pagan connotation, and so people still often referred to themselves as
Romaioi,
or Romans, which had a Christian one.

The continuing intertwinement of the Greek Church in political and civil affairs is partly a vestige of Ottoman rule. Under the Ottomans, the Orthodox Church was charged with administering the Christian population and collecting taxes. Bishop and government official were essentially the same thing, and this cultivated the synthesis of religion and
ethnos.
Today, Greek Orthodox clerics are paid by the state, and Greek politicians, from the prime minister on down, are usually sworn in to office not by a judge, but by prelates, as if the church bequeaths the ultimate authority to govern. In 2015, Alexis Tspiras, the atheist leader of Syriza, became the first Greek prime minister to opt for a secular inauguration, drawing an angry response from some church hierarchs. Until then, prime ministers were sworn in by the Archbishop of Athens and all Greece, and took the oath in the name of the “Holy and Consubstantial and Indivisible Trinity.”

On the October day of the icon’s arrival in Thessaloniki, the archbishop stood among the other clerics on stage as the icon was taken ashore. A Greek public television station broadcast the ceremony live, giving the kind of commentary one would not hear on PBS.

“The
Panagia
is inspecting the military corps, which is giving her military honors at this time,” the program’s host explained to viewers.

“She, also known as the New Eve, who rectified original sin with her obedience to the will of the Lord,” said the reporter on the ground.

“On top of everything else, she’s a general, the
Panagia,
both a defender and a general,” the host said. Indeed, Mary is a high-ranking military figure of sorts. A Byzantine chant refers to Mary as the “Champion General,” praising her for protecting
Constantinople in 626 from invading nomadic warriors on horseback. In Greece, the
Panagia
is still called upon to ward off all kinds of misfortune, not only to protect the nation from attack, but to remedy droughts and, in more recent times, to save the nation from economic calamity.

“The
Panagia
helps Greece with great vigor,” the reporter on the ground said, paraphrasing the words of a venerated monk. Mary, the reporter added, was a “broker” for the nation in discussions with her son. “With great vigor, the saints of the church will help us in the hard times that will come,” he went on. “The
Panagia
and all the saints will make a huge circle above Greece in order to protect her. We’ve seen that time and again with the wars, with the difficulties endured by this small nation, which, if you’d like, other stronger nations have attempted to literally swallow. However, Greece remained standing. She lived on. That is not at all out of luck. We have someone who is protecting us. And that is our Christ and our broker, the
Panagia
.”

The icon was taken before the stage where the high clergy had gathered. The marching band ceased and the sailors hoisted the icon higher into the air so that it was level with the clergy. Clerics then began to chant, uttering the same modal song of praise to Mary that the archangel Gabriel had sung one millennium and some decades earlier. The prayers and chants, however, were interrupted by a commotion.

“Accursed in front of us! Traitor!” Two monks, also bearded and wearing black robes, lunged toward the mayor of Thessaloniki, Yiannis Boutaris, a chain-smoking, tattooed, silver-haired man of scant size and seventy years. “Boutaris, you bum!” one of the monks cried as they tried to set upon the mayor. A group of army officers intervened, grabbing the monks. Then police officers arrived and began dragging them away. One monk’s robe was torn in the struggle. “You lust after Turks!” one of them cried.

I had first heard of Boutaris several months earlier during a visit to my parents’ house on Long Island for Christmas. A front-page article in the
National Herald,
a Greek-American newspaper that happened to be sitting in front of me on the kitchen table one morning, caught my attention with the headline “A Nod to Ataturk, Boutaris’ New Epoch Begins.” Boutaris had just been sworn in as mayor of Thessaloniki and, according to the story, “was backpedaling from a report” that he wanted to build a memorial for Atatürk, the father of the Turkish Republic, in his city. That report “fired up righteous anger in Greeks and those in the Diaspora,” said the article. Atatürk is considered villainous by many Greeks, or as the newspaper put it: “Under his reign Greeks were driven out of Asia Minor and thousands were killed and the Greek city of Smyrna was burned and civilians were massacred.”

In an interview for the story, Boutaris said he did not, in fact, intend to build a monument for Atatürk—an action that would for a Greek politician amount to electoral hara-kiri—but that he did intend to lure more Turkish tourists to the home in Thessaloniki where Atatürk is said to have been born in or around 1881. “Let the Turks come to Greece and visit like we go to Constantinople as tourists and give Turkish people money by visiting their country,” Boutaris told the newspaper, using the Greek name for Istanbul, which lures Greek tourists interested in seeing the landmarks of the Byzantine Empire. The mayor also said he would work to attract other foreign tourists who could trace their roots to Thessaloniki, including Sephardic Jews living in Israel. “This city needs to find its identity,” Boutaris went on. Instead of trying to take advantage of the city’s pluralistic past, he added, “we try to cover it up as if we are afraid of something.”

I was very intrigued by this mayor. Greek society is born from a wonderfully rich amalgamation of cultures and traditions. This reality should be embraced and appreciated, but instead it has long been suppressed out of fear that it could undermine that nation’s founding narrative: that it is the progeny of pure,
uninterrupted Hellenic civilization. Since the nation won its independence, academics, politicians, schoolteachers, and clerics have often promoted a stilted, hackneyed version of its history, omitting or altering facts that might adulterate this narrative. It’s understandable why they made the effort. Greek independence in the early nineteenth century was not the ambition only of bands of Greek mountain fighters, but of Western Europeans who yearned to free the Hellenes, the Enlightenment’s forebearers, from the dark ages of Muslim rule. Among the most famed of the so-called philhellenes—foreign admirers of Greece—was the aristocratic English romantic poet Lord Byron, who so much believed in the cause of a liberated, regenerated heir to Ancient Greece that he traveled south in order to participate in the revolutionary fight. He died of a fever before seeing any battle, but not before writing a few poems about the place, such as “The Isles of Greece,” “Where burning Sappho loved and sung,” and “Where Delos rose, and Phoebus sprung!”

The mountains look on Marathon—

And Marathon looks on the sea;

And musing there an hour alone,

I dream’d that Greece might still be free;

The Greek revolution was in great part inspired by this romantic ideal. Educated, mercantile Greeks who lived in Europe and were influenced by its thinkers embraced the romantics’ vision and coordinated the rebellion in the motherland. When the revolt broke out, European volunteers traveled to Greece to help the Hellenes in their epic struggle. When they arrived, however, they were often dismayed by what they found. The fighting did not resemble the regular warfare they imagined as noble and gentlemanly. Rather, the volunteers found Greek guerrilla bands led by warlord figures who, in addition to their national fervor,
saw the revolution as an opportunity to increase their wealth and power. The Greek rebels began massacring unarmed Turkish civilians, and within a short time, virtually all the Turks living in the Peloponnese either had fled for their lives or were dead. The Ottomans, in order the punish the rebellion, unleashed a similar orgy of terror and violence on Greek civilians living in Turkish-controlled areas. Tens of thousands of civilians on both sides were expeditiously slaughtered. At the same time, rebel-controlled areas of Greece descended into utter lawlessness, and bands of fighters looted and plundered at will. Greek warlords began to fight among themselves over the spoils. In short, it wasn’t a very romantic scene.

Seeing all this, a lot of the European volunteers left in disillusionment. Still, the disenchanting reality on the ground did not temper the philhellenic spirit in European capitals. Greek rebel fighters smartly used the idealized image Europeans had of them to their advantage, employing it to enlist material support. “With every right does Hellas, our mother, whence ye also, O Nations, have become enlightened, anxiously request your friendly assistance with money, arms, and counsel, and we entertain the highest hope that our appeal will be listened to,” wrote one rebel leader in an appeal for European assistance. That assistance eventually arrived, and in 1832, the Kingdom of Greece officially came into existence—a truncated version of what the country is today, encompassing the southern part of the mainland, including the Peloponnese, and many of the islands. More Greeks, at the time, still lived in the Ottoman Empire than in Greece itself.