Athens is buzzing with energy and it's easy to mistake the chaos, tension and messiness for negativity. Rather, Athens has it all. This sprawled, yet super dense, city epitomizes the state of the world today; a state caught up in the struggle between the contradictions of human nature, between the needs and wants, the fear and love, the ease and panic within us all.
To the best of my understanding, the culture of Athens, through rapid modernization, has become a very selfish and suspicious culture. Yet, because this modernization took over so quickly, it did not shed it's traditional values and beliefs; a tradition that holds family and hospitality as top priorities. Instead, these traditions have been twisted to fit into the picture of "modernity", which was an imported concept. "Copy, paste, and hope it works" has been the unstated motto of Greek modernization. So, Athens culture is a spectacular swirl of traditional and modern, countryside and cosmopolitan, Greek and a bad imitation of Elle magazine. Like so many other places in the world today, a great many Athenians appear to have tried to cover up their roots with the outward appearance of Hollywood.
I couldn't understand why, at first. Why would so many of the women here, who are endowed with such a unique Mediterranean beauty, bleach their hair blonde? Why would the men and women, alike, all wear the same clothes, from the same shops, based on the same imported fashions? It all seemed to me to be a very superficial and unsuccessful imitation and I couldn't understand why. This place has so much history, the roots of philosophy and democracy, home to Plato, Aristotle and Socrates. Why has it become this?
I had to learn about the rest of Greece's history. I learned about the 400 year long Turkish occupation. I learned about the dictatorship, from which it emerged just a few decades ago. Some things started to come to light. Then, it struck me. Greece is the epitome of the world. In addition to its outward struggle with human nature, Greece is deeply caught up in the victim cycle that is responsible for so much of the pain and fear in the world.
When Greeks talk about their country's history, it is told in a very black-and-white way. Greece has always either been a hero or a victim. No grey areas are even up for discussion, because obviously Greece has never done anything wrong. It was a victim of the brutish Ottoman Empire for 400 years. But Alexander the Great was a gentle hero who always treated his vanquished people with the utmost respect. This story is always told with an odd, hard-to-place mixture of pride and insecurity. I suspect that people don't fully believe what they've been taught, but most of them are too afraid to begin to question it. With such a skewed sense of history, it is no wonder that the Greek people have such an identity struggle.
Then, came along the 20th century. Greece was literally caught between the modern, industrialized West and the traditional, "backwards" East. (These are not my personal sentiments, but the way that modern history seems to divide the West and East.) Most Greeks wanted to be identified as Europeans, but the 400 years of being in the Ottoman Empire had, as one might easily conclude, a significant impact on their culture and path of development. This is when the imitation method started. During and after the dictatorship, there was a huge push to become Western without having much of an understanding of what "Western" meant or where it came from. French, German, English, American, and all of the other industrialized cultures had developed over time, on their own courses to modernity. Greek culture had not. Nevertheless, Greece joined the European Union in 1981 and ditched the Drachma for the Euro in 2002, as we all now know, giving an inaccurate account of its economy. So, Greece moved along on its quest to become European at all costs and, perhaps more importantly, to become not Eastern, especially not Turkish.
Population trends have had a massive impact on the culture and identity crisis of Athens, as well. Suddenly,within just a few decades, Athens grew from a population of around 2 million in the 1960s to 3 million in 1981 and now it is estimated to have about 5 million people (including illegal immigrants). Up until the 1990s, people flooded into Athens from the Greek countryside, until about 40% of the entire Greek population was living in this one city. All of the people that composed this population flood were from different areas of Greece, areas that had been fairly self-sufficient and isolated for a long time. So, they all brought with them, their local village's culture, mentality and dialect. Imagine millions of farmers from different villages, all shoving themselves into the same, packed city. Nobody's really happy with the outcome.
Then, as if there wasn't enough chaos already, in more recent years, Athens has been receiving a rush of illegal immigrants from all corners of the globe, because Greece is seen as a sort of entry point into the EU. Most of the immigrants here do not want to stay in Athens, or even Greece. They want to move on to the "good life" (more or less a mirage) in countries like Germany, France and the Netherlands, which they can't get to. Many feel trapped here. So, again, nobody's really happy with the outcome.
On top of all this, now with the economic crisis, which is just in its beginning stages, I must say that Athens is one of the most fascinating places in which I could find myself. All of the tensions that have been kept under a facade, that they've tried to pave over with the imitation of "modern Europeanism", are bubbling up to the surface... and are even boiling over. This is a painful experience and so far, from what I've seen, the reaction here has been mostly blaming, taking shelter in victimhood. Workers blaming the government, people blaming corporations, the blame just keeps getting passed around without anybody really taking responsibility. When, in fact, everybody has played their part.
Blame is probably a more-or-less universal human reaction. Who wants to take responsibility when you can blame? It's just so much easier and more comfortable. But, then, where does the buck stop? Where does positive change start? Or will we just get stuck in another self-defeating feedback loop?
I can't help but see that this breakdown is a wonderful opportunity for Athenians, and Greeks all over, to have a deeper look into the Greek identity, as well as their personal identities, to see what's really there, to face their shadows, and to build something new; a strong, innovative, unique Greek culture. But this involves shedding the part of the Greek identity that claims to be a victim (and, thus, not responsible), the part that just wants to imitate anything considered "modern" (without understanding what modern means), the part that simply wants to be non-Eastern (denying the 400 years of Ottoman history), and the part that calls selfishness freedom (as is clearly illustrated by people parking their cars on pedestrian sidewalks and smoking inside public places).
If Greece was to embrace its full, unadulterated history, with all of its flaws and conundrums; if Greeks would embrace their mixture of Easternness and Westernness and find the beauty of the uniqueness in that mixture; if they would, head-on, face the parts of themselves that they have always covered up and avoided for fear of what others might think; then, I believe that Greece would become a leader in the world. Greece has the opportunity right now to choose a new direction, to be a visionary country. It is precisely because everything is falling apart that Greece is graced with this chance. A chance to ask fundamental questions that could kick-start an entirely new path of development. What does Greece want to be? Where does it want to go with its development? Why? What goals, as a nation, should Greece have?
Beautiful things can come from these hard times, but that can only happen if Greeks can let go of their bad habit of shallowly imitating the West and if they can start embracing the uniqueness of what it means to be Greek. Only then can this nation move on to fulfill its full potential.
(photo by: Theodoros Kolonas)
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