A character in Stealing Dad, the new novel by Athens-based Sofka Zinovieff, remarks that Greece is “a country of catastrophes and corruption. Only good to visit.”
The speaker (who happens to be dead) is a Greek sculptor from the island of Ikaria, who by choice or perhaps necessity lives in London. The same character “never believed a process would be straightforward, so it was easier to go around the back or under the table”, which typifies the chicane of getting things done in a country with a top-heavy bureaucracy and an inbuilt antinomian citizenship.
Zinovieff, who has an Anglo-Russian background, has written persuasively in the past about living in Greece. Her first book Eurydice Street (2004) describes her difficulty, as an outsider (and an anthropologist) in being married to a Greek and raising their two daughters. She has written of “the Greeks’ long history of doubting power and mistrusting the state”.
Another authority on Greek history and character is New York-based academic Yanni Kotsonis, whose recent book on the Greek revolution suggests that the problems of the early Greek state, which was founded in the late 1820s, are “still with us” and that Greece’s viability is even today “up for grabs”.
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As both Zinovieff and Kotsonis point out, the fault lines in the Greek system go back to the foundation of the state, for a variety of reasons, of which citizens’ mistrust of that state is only one. With the first World War and the collapse of both the Habsburg and Ottoman empires, the kaleidoscope of Balkan cultures and identities became pawns in an elaborate chess game.
The Greek state was the first modern democratic state to be established in the Balkan region, but it came on the say-so of the “great” powers – at that time, Britain, France and Russia. It prevails because the “great” powers – today, the United States, Russia, Germany – continue to dominate the fortunes of the smaller states, in terms of economics, migration, and of course warfare, which is omnipresent in this region.
In terms of catastrophes, the most recent was the Tempe train crash in February 2023, in which at least 57 people, mostly young, died, and 25 were seriously injured. The tragedy consists in both the loss of life and the reasons for the crash, which has occupied tribunals of inquiry and vivid public demonstrations ever since.
Whether or not personal negligence was the principal reason, the entire rail system has been judged at fault, due to lack of planning, upgrading and maintenance. The debate represents a pervasive way of judging whether the Greek state is inherently unstable.
Corruption is another matter, since it involves almost everyone at every level of society and decision-making.
I was once asked whether Ireland had an equivalent to the “fakelaki”, meaning “little envelope” in which bribes are passed to officials. I explained that it’s more often called “a little brown envelope” which provoked the linguistic puzzle: how could Greeks insert the idea of “brown” into the single-word “fakelaki”?
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But as I argued in this column in 2012, it is not bribery itself that has to be eradicated, but the need for bribery necessitated by red tape. Nothing has changed, for the very basic reason that work style and lifestyle in the Balkans are qualitatively different from those in northern Europe and particularly in the way Eurocrats in Brussels see the world.
It’s the same difference between a “cafe culture” and a “pub culture”, between a rational, narrative way of thinking your way towards a solution and a circular, periodic intuitive way of what Zinovieff’s character calls “easier to go around the back”.
One reason is family: “economics” is a Greek word meaning, literally, the laws of the house, and how a family keeps together determines how it conducts itself in the political and financial marketplace. To forget this is to misunderstand Greece. People’s loyalty is first to family, then to the local community, and then to the state if that does not complicate the other fealties.
“Only good to visit”? Well, if Greece didn’t have 36 million visitors each year, its economy would shrink by 25 per cent. So the indifference of at least 35.99 million of these visitors to the “catastrophes and corruption” of ordinary Greek life is understandable and forgivable. Who can blame those who want to park their bum somewhere in the sun for two weeks?
Personally, I can’t think of anything worse. I came here for the winters. All-inclusive resorts and cruise ships are becoming so popular because they don’t require any cultural adjustment to your expectations.
And by the way, Zinovieff’s Stealing Dad, set in Athens, London and Scotland, and exploring the need for those cultural adjustments, is a thrilling and very rewarding read.
