It's Still Greek to Me!
August 2023
Another dramatic month. Last month it was trial by sea, while this month it is ordeal on land. Fire seems to be Greece’s fate every summer, and this summer is no exception, as fires have been burning out of control, most notably on Rhodes, one of several popular islands, popular especially with British tourists. Fires on Rhodes were very recently fought for at least five days, but to not much avail: three hotels reportedly burned down, and 19000 people were evacuated in the largest such exercise in Greece’s history. Rhodes is the largest island in the Dodecanese group, and only about ten percent of its area was affected, but even so 50,000 olive trees have been destroyed and 2500 animals have been killed. As far as I know, however, there have been no human fatalities.
July 2023
What a month it has been! Full of drama and disaster. Disaster was very localised with the sinking of the overloaded ship that had set off from Tobruk in Libya and then later sank off the coast of Kalamata on June the 14th. Over a hundred people were rescued, but it is thought that at least 500 people perished. According to the Greek coastguard, the captain and crew refused offers of help because they wanted to stay on course for Italy. The captain deserted the ship, and the coastguard’s version of events has been regularly challenged since the crisis, while nine men were charged in Kalamata with the crime of people trafficking. The foreign press has been extremely critical of Greek actions or lack of them, and very few media outlets have mentioned the generous reaction of the citizens of Kalamata, who rallied immediately with offers of help: food, clothes and accommodation. The people saved were speedily removed to a refugee camp in Athens, which is the last place they want to be.
June 2023
Of course I watched the Coronation. I knew I would, because I still have such vivid memories of That Other Coronation, which took place in June, 1953. We didn’t have television in Australia then, but were able to see a film of the proceedings itself at the local picture theatre some time later. And our school put on a display that had taken months of rehearsal, and was presented on the day at the local football ground.
May 2023
Another month. Time seems to be passing very quickly (I keep saying that) but the world gets no better. Every month a new crisis seems to erupt. Sudan is of course the latest one, while the Ukrainian conflict rumbles on, reaching a dreadful peak now and then: yesterday the peak consisted of missile strikes on Kyiv and other places.
April 2023
It is now a month since the horrifying train crash that took place near the Vale of Tempe. The death toll eventually rose to 57, and poor parents had to go through various ordeals, such as the one of going to hospitals in order to give DNA samples, hoping against hope that no matches would be found. Members of the government toured the nightmarish scene: the Minister for Transport was in tears, and later resigned. He said he had tried to do his best with his portfolio, but found there was little he could do to correct past errors, not to mention effect a change to the general atmosphere of apathy. This, unfortunately, is a common story here, where governments inherit the messes the previous ones have made. Of course this is not exclusively a Greek pattern. Various heads have rolled, so to speak, and it has been discovered that several people were negligent, and thus made errors that brought about the catastrophe.
March 23
One does not like to start writing with bad news, but it is impossible to ignore the horror of the train crash that took place in northern Greece just before midnight last night. (February 28). The accident happened near the picturesque Vale of Tempe, when a goods train and a passenger train carrying 350 people collided head-on, leaving 36 people dead and at least 85 injured. The cause of the accident is as yet unknown, but the most upsetting part of the episode concerns the fact that many of the passengers were students travelling at the end of a long weekend that included Clean Monday, a public holiday for the start of Orthodox Lent. Rescuers were very much hampered by difficult conditions and darkness. Now the emergency services are at least working in daylight while all Greece, I imagine, waits with bated breath for further news.
February 2023
The new year doesn’t seem to be very new any more. It also seems quite sameish, in that there is familiar hardship, poverty, hunger,persecution and war anywhere one cares to look, really. Very depressing. Human nature does not seem to learn much, or to want to change. Witness Holocaust Memorial Day, for example. Despite the historical record and constant focus on the horrors, synagogues are still being attacked. One wonders whether God regrets all the effort He put into the project of Creation.
January 2023
Here we are again at the start of another year. I know it’s a feature of age, but time seems to be flowing past very rapidly. Galloping, really. But just recently the passage of time brought a change for the better, in that my youngest grandson, after two weeks in hospital in Athens with pneumonia and flu, was home in time for Christmas, which he thoroughly enjoyed, along with the rest of us. I pulled rank (age has its compensations) and announced that nobody was going to slave away over a hot stove: we were all quite tired. So we booked a table at a very nice restaurant on the waterfront. The weather was perfect, with cloudless skies and a reading of nineteen degrees. You can’t do much better than that for a winter’s day. The three children are always very well behaved when out, so a good time was had by all. I gave my elder granddaughter a book called Father Christmas’s Secret Mission, and it was obviously a great success, because she read it at the dinner table, something I was never permitted to do at her age.
December 2022
I’m running late with this month’s effort, but there are reasons for this tardiness. I’ve written before about my third grandson’s health problems: last month saw him in Athens twice, with the second trip involving an overnight stay. He bears these mini-ordeals very well, always with a book handy: his reading seems to get him through many a sticky moment in doctors’ waiting rooms and surgeries. But now the sticky moments are coming far too fast for anybody’s liking.
November 2022
Kalo mina, as the Greeks say: Have a good month.
Well, I think most people try to do that, but it seems increasingly hard to remain optimistic these days, bombarded as we are by all kinds of reports that are conducive only to gloom and doom. We can’t help but think that civilisation as we know it seems to be becoming a very frail structure. My eldest son once told me that he had not read a newspaper or watched the TV news for a whole year, and that he felt much better as a result, and I can well believe it. But most of us are addicted to being informed, and long ago I read about a paper that was dedicated to reporting only good news. It went broke, a fact that seems to indicate something negative about human nature, to say the least. In these present grim times, the latest fear in the northern hemisphere is that of a bleak and expensive winter.
October 2022
I’m writing the diary column rather early this month. For various reasons, one being the death of the Queen. I’m striking while the iron is hot, so to speak, as Britain is coming to the end of a prolonged period of mourning. I must admit to having a lifelong weakness for pomp and circumstance, and so have watched the various parades, and have, as usual, admired the military precision involved. Not to mention the pageantry and the colour and sense of history invoked. I’ve also watched the church services, and have appreciated the music, while being annoyed because St Anne’s in Belfast used a new-fangled translation of the Bible for its readings.
September 2022
Officially, summer is at an end, although hot weather persists, with the mercury registering at least 30 every day, so there is still plenty of beach weather ahead for the crowds of eager visitors: Greece has had its best tourist season for many years. I don’t think this was expected by those in the industry, but it seems that many people have thrown caution to the winds, and are pretending that the pandemic is a thing of the past. In fact, it is still very much with us. And there is always something extra to worry about: monkey pox, for example, and now Attica and parts of northern Greece are experiencing cases of West Nile virus, a mosquito-borne illness. Authorities in Attica at least spray the province every spring, but mosquitoes are persistent creatures, as we know.
Gillian occasionally writes for
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