With all due respect for this eminently sensible statement, there may be an explanation for this. Furthermore, it must be remembered that UNICEF is not run by children (yet) but by grown-ups who, among other bad habits, have a way of always missing the obvious point and getting things backward.
For all the fanfare and hullabaloo, the concrete accomplishments of the International Year of the Child in Greece weren’t many. Perhaps they were hidden. An Athenian child put it thus:
“As I see it, there were a lot of lectures, exhibitions and contests this year, but the main thing didn’t happen. That is, no one tried to improve the ugly environment that we live in.”
That is, there were seminars, but no new libraries; Karaghiozi shows, but no improved television programs; pedagogic theory, but no working plan for improving education.
Many of these shortcomings could have only been expected. The International Year of the Child was not meant to complete things but to begin them, and certainly a sense-of awareness was aroused throughout the country. More importantly, by having attention focused on them, many Greek children became more aware, more understanding, and more critical of the grown-up world.
One encouraging project which will be continuing for a long time to come was itself begun by a group of children. Irinoupolis, the City of Peace, is rising on a five-acre lot outside of Thessaloniki. While the children are planning and landscaping the area themselves, the buildings, though small in scale, will be permanent and are being constructed with the help of professional masons and carpenters. To the initial astonishment of grown-ups, however, the first section of Irinoupolis to be laid out by the children was a cemetery. And when it was ready, they buried their pistols and other toy weapons there.
“We must learn to understand and love one another,” writes another Turkish child. “If children from two countries which are enemies have the good fortune to spend a little time together and get to know each other, then they will not fight when they grow up. They will say, ‘but I know the people of that country. They think as we do. Why should we fight?’ “
Wordsworth said that the child is the father of the man, so there may after all be some logic in suggesting that a Year of the Grown-up follow, rather than precede, the Year of the Child. The question remains, is he ready for it? Is he mature enough — or better, is he enough of a child — to start laying out a cemetery for his weapons and begin building at last an Irinoupolis of his own?
The Fabulous Eighties
THE beginning of a new decade is always a good time to start playing the tha game. The word tha is the auxiliary of the future tense in Greek, and appropriately of the conditional tense as well. In current usage, however, tha has come to mean all those wonderful future plans announced by government agencies which have a way of remaining in the future, whether being accomplished late or not accomplished at all. The game is simple enough. It just means jotting down a list of government projects that are announced publicly and making a note of the proposed completion date. Every year which passes after that date in regard to a certain project counts one point. It is a game popular with members of the opposition parties, but like most simple-minded games, it encourages gambling.
The 1970s was a rich decade in tha, particularly during the Colonels’ regime. There was the Church of the Tama which was to be erected high on Tourkovounia behind Psychiko in national thanksgiving for the Junta. The empty area is now called Attica park (a latter- day tha) as it remains today largely a dump for rubbish. Then there was the great Phaleron Delta project, a stunning complex of twenty-storey luxury hotels at the foot of Syngrou Avenue, itself a semi- tha, as those wide bicycle paths dappled by the shade of spreading trees have not yet appeared. There were Pattakos’ seven towers of Athens, the Passa Museum, the floating Ellenikon airport, the metro, the reconstruction of the Theatre of Dionysus, the Plaka throughway, the Delphic Spiritual Centre, theSikelianos Museum, the new Halls of Justice and the new DEI building in Maroussi (both scheduled for completion years ago and still skeletons), the new State Theatre, the new National Library, new parks, new restorations, and so forth.
The 1980s may be a fruitful decade for tha as well. The bridges at either end of Salamis and the one crossing the Gulf of Corinth are only among the more dramatic contenders. Athens alone has been recently slated for an enormous number of promised improvements. But rather than make a list of all possible projects that may not be accomplished, which would be tiresome, it might be more heartening right now to imagine what a 1990 tourist pamphlet for visitors arriving in Athens might read like, if all government projects, past and present, are accomplished within the next decade:
“Pick up your rented car at the International Airport at Spata and drive right through the uncongested Mount Hymettus Tunnel, emerging into the crystalline atmosphere of the Athens valley at the other end. As you descend into the city, note the charming Kotopouli Theatre Museum on your right and the Isadora Memorial Museum of Dance in the restored Duncan house on your left. Note as well (if you haven’t been in Athens since 1980) that Mount Lycabettus straight ahead has not lost one tree or gained one highrise in the last ten years.”
“As you approach the middle of town, you may wish to park your car in the Cultural Centre garage, one of the spacious sixteen underground car parks located in convenient areas around the city. A visit to the Athens Cultural Centre opposite the Hilton is a real eye-opener. Take in a ballet or an opera, see Minotis in Oedipus at Colonos, ramble through the Museum of Contemporary Arts or j ust go boating on the lake. If you hanker now for priceless Oriental art, why not drop by the Passa Museum? Just drive through the two and a half kilometre long Mount Lycabettus tunnel (noting the handsome Halls of Justice as you cross Alexandras Boulevard) and in a twinkling of an eye you will be there. The Museum is set in the handsomely landscaped Pedion Areos Park where you can enjoy a dip in the Olympic-sized public pool. Speaking of the Olympics, you might just now zip up to the Stadium complex in Paradissos where the Olympic Games are now permanently established. It’s just minutes away if you take the eight-lane Kifissia highway.”
“A visit to the restored Caryatids in the new museum at the foot of the Acropolis is of course a must. Descend into the spotless underground station at Hilton-Boulevard Reine Sophie and change at Place de la Constitution. It might be wise to pause here and ascend to see the beautifully restored neo-classical buildings that line Stadiou Street. Here, in the heart of the metropolis, one best appreciates the streets of Athens which, painted in bright shades of blue, yellow, red and green (as well as the heart-warming hues of the streetcars), vividly make it a city ‘qui n’est pas comme les autres’. Change to the Patissia-Phaleron line and get off at the Makriyanni Station near the Acropolis. This excursion is especially recommended late in the day as the view of the Bubble Dome over the Acropolis is best at sunset…”
Ideally, all of this is possible, and it has all been on official record at one time or another. But to safeguard against future disappointment, it is perhaps best to be realistic. Rome, as they say, was not rebuilt in a day and as for Athens, the example of the Temple of Olympian Zeus should give pause for it received the highest number of points in the tha game, ever recorded. Begun by Peisistratus and finished by Hadrian, it was a government project that took over seven hundred years to fulfill.
Psathas and Maris
Two well-known writers Dimitris Psathas and Yiannis Maris-Tsirimokos, who both died on November 13, were familiar names to quite a number of foreign residents, too. Those who have tried to learn Greek by reading newspapers were first introduced to the social complexities of Athens life by “Chronografima” (Chronicle), the satirical column which Psathas wrote on the front page of Ta Nea for decades. And just as Greeks have begun their reading of English with the mysteries of Agatha Christie, so foreigners have started hacking their way into the jungle of Greek grammar with the unputdownable detective stories of Yiannis Maris.
Yiannis Maris-Tsirimokos was born in Lamia sixty-two years ago of an important political family. His uncle John Tsirimokos was president of Parliament in the days of Venizelos·, his father was a Venizelist deputy and his first cousin, Ilias Tsirimokos, was briefly prime minister in 1965. Maris was an important figure in the ELD and EAM resistance movements and after the war he became an editor and journalist. In struggling to have the detention camp for political prisoners on Macronissos closed down, he was given a political court martial and was himself imprisoned. It was then that he began his long series of detective fiction, which like the eating of fistikia, once begun cannot be stopped. Psathas, who was born in Trebizond in 1907, first came to Athens in 1922 with the uprooting of the Pontians from their native land. He began his journalistic career when he was eighteen, but it was a few years later when he started in Athinaika Nea (the parent paper of today’s Ta Nea) a series of humorous sketches taken from courthouse scenes, that he first came into the limelight. The series carried the title “I Themis Ehi Kefia”, “Justice Has — well, Kefi. As the word humour has no Greek equivalent, so kefi has none in English, but this is what Psathas had in abundance and accounted for much of his later fame. High-spirited or biting, Psathas was always the well-meaning commentator on everything that was wrong with modern Greek society, and he exorcized the power of evil with laughter.
In 1940 he began a career in the theatre which was to equal, and even to surpass, his success and popularity in journalism. His second play, Madame Sousou, was a savagely hilarious portrait of a nouveau riche Athenian lady who ornamented her speech with atrocious French. This megalomaniac became a legend, and such words as sousoudizo and sousoudismos entered the language. Given the social changes that have altered Athens in more recent times, these words remain useful and up-to-date.
A succession of about forty plays in forty years easily made Psathas the leading comic writer of modern Greece and there is hardly a well-known versatile actor in the past two generations who has not played in a Psathas comedy. A revival (there have been a number) of Von Dimitrakis is, not surprisingly, one of the hits of the current season. Like most satirists, and for all his kefi, Psathas was a moralist at heart. He was a democrat, a defender of human rights, and an unflinching supporter of the little man, all of which helped make him become the widely beloved chronicler of his times.
