Coronavirus Diary: life in Athens in times of (another) crisis, Day 38

As of 6pm, local time, Athens:

# of confirmed cases: 2,192 (22 new cases since yesterday)

# of deaths: 102 (1 more since yesterday)

# of people in hospital ICU: 72

# of people tested: 50,771

***

Day 38 of staying home

Hello? Is anybody there? God? Can you hear me? Well, I don’t know how to begin but I guess I’m wondering how we got here. It all happened so fast and yet now time moves like honey spilled from a jar. And I sit here and wonder about things.

Oh God. In limbo, stuck between uncertainty and expectations, I wait. When will it end? Will I swim in the sea this summer? Will a vaccine be found? Will my hair ever look good again? This year will I be able to get on a plane to visit my family abroad? Will the neighbors in the apartment above ever stop squabbling? Am I washing the fruit properly? Will I ever see my 85-yr old mother again?

The sun is shining, there’s a gentle breeze blowing through my balcony door, I can hear the birds chirping. It sounds so harmlessly peaceful out there. I want to run outside like a lunatic in my pajamas, greying hair in a raggedy ponytail, skip along the sidewalk in my ugly crocs, grab an ice cream at the periptero, greet old-man Manolis who’s always around, smiling beneath his Cretan mustache, tap-tapping his cane on the pavement, directing drivers into tight parking spots: ela, ela. Opa…. God, I want everything to be normal again.

I step outside onto the balcony and look around the neighborhood. No one is out and I haven’t seen old-man Manolis in months.

Oh God. It’s Holy Week. I’m not religious. Sorry. I don’t care much about Easter, either. In fact, I hardly ever go to church and I look at most priests with suspicion or an odd curiosity. I’ve always liked the chanting though. Does that count for something? I don’t watch much TV but sometimes I catch a service, live from the Phanari. Men dressed in black robes, solemnly gathered around, (wow, they’re standing close to each other) booming voices rising and falling, chanting words that I mostly don’t understand but somehow sound familiar and comforting. I leave the TV on and listen to the voices while I chop mushrooms, peppers and onions. The chanting echoes off the marble floor of my kitchen, like a mantra it’s hypnotic and somehow consoling.

Suddenly, outside there is noise. A construction crew has arrived and is bulldozing parts of the sidewalk to install fiber optic cables. I watch from the balcony. Others watch too. I wonder if old-man Manolis is watching. If he could, he’d be down there, helping - directing traffic with his cane, telling workers what to do.

I look at the time, it’s morning in the US. I text the link for the Phanari to my sister, so she can put it on for my mother to watch. In normal circumstances, going to church is her week’s main event. Dressed in her Sunday best, she (still) drives herself to the same church she’s been attending since she arrived in the US, over 60 years ago. It’s the church where she was married, the church where they christened me, the church where my father’s funeral was held. On the phone last Sunday, my mother laughed “I just came back from church – in the living room, in my pajamas!!”

I don’t tell her that each Sunday, I too have been tuning in to a live zoom gathering of hundreds, to participate in Buddhist chanting, meditation and discussion.

Om shanti, I focus on resiliency, strength, and staying grounded.

A pragmatic of Spartan descent, my mother seems almost unfazed by the way we are living now. She has survived much worse in her childhood, growing up during WWII and the Greek civil war – when she and her extended family escaped into the hills during the night, to hide in caves to avoid being captured and killed. I think about that every time I hear someone complaining or hear about people breaking the strict measures which are in place to literally keep us all alive.

Oh God. How did we luck out? How did Greece pull this off? So far a total of 102 dead, while other countries mourn tens of thousands. Is this all some kind of sick joke? Do we really think we’re smarter than everyone else? Will things suddenly flip and will we too, have hundreds dying every day, thousands? The world is scratching its head, praising the clever Greeks, but are we just waiting for the other shoe to drop? What’s next? An uncontrollable surge in cases come autumn? An earthquake? A financial crisis worse than the one we’re still recovering from?

Did it take a pandemic to unify us? Just eight years ago during Holy Week we were raging in the streets, committing suicide, attacking police, watching and cheering as our corrupt politicians were led away in handcuffs…. Unstable, divided, polarized, fearful, hopeless. We were in limbo then too, living in uncertainty and expectation.

We are again, now living in uncertain times of a different kind, facing an enemy, waiting tentatively… These days the words Patrick Leigh Fermor wrote in 1966 (Roumeli, travels in Northern Greece) keep revolving in my head…

Emotional feeling for Greece is the country’s deepest conviction. Affronts, threats and the danger of invasion are the things that not only fling the Romios and the Hellene into each other’s arms… but reconcile all the internal differences of the country. Courage, self-sacrifice and endurance reach heroic heights. When the emergency passes, cohesion too dissolves, and political rivalries rage as fiercely as ever…parties abound and factions flourish but such is the individuality of the Greeks that the country is really made up of eight million one-man splinter groups reluctantly forced into a series of temporary coalitions.

What will happen when the invisible enemy is gone and we are left with what some experts are saying will be a 22% unemployment rate and an economy that will contract by 10%, the highest rate in the EU (in the worst year of the bailouts during the financial crisis, in 2011, the economy shrank by 9.1%) ?

How will the Greek public react when eventually more is revealed about the €11 million of public funding that the government paid to private TV and media groups to air the COVID-19 “we stay home” campaign – which critics argue, is evading rules of transparency?

How will the Greeks and the government react – heroically or with malice – towards the boatloads of refugees which will inevitably flow once again, sooner or later, towards our shores?

Oh God. The last time we were in such a state of crisis, it brought out both the best and the worst in us. Fear fostered xenophobia and led to the neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn being elected to parliament. But hope and solidarity brought light and compassion too, as new initiatives emerged and people selflessly joined together to help one another…

This time, will we face new challenges united or will we splinter into millions of pieces of one-man selfishness?

Fermor observed what he called “The Hellenic-Romaic Dilemma” or in simplified terms, the clash between the more modern, forward-thinking, worldly Hellene vs the deep-rooted traditional Romios.

They [the Greeks] have the keener sense, which poor and barren countries instil,

of the existence of disaster and tragedy. But though they see many things in tragic and melodramatic terms, stoicism and humour are at hand to deflate them…. Similarly, the self-imposed code of philotimo, or private honour – a whole apparatus of ancestral scruples – mitigates anarchic impulses and sets a codifying bridle on Romaic short-cuts and personal solutions. To contravene these laws marks the offender with a more shameful and indelible brand than any sanction that the law can inflict.

He goes on to mention that:

… a stranger feels here that he is surrounded by people of ancient and civilized descent. This feeling grows in force the lower one plunges in the economic scale… primitive surroundings place it in higher relief. The last of these Greek-wide attributes is an orientation towards virtue. This may be rooted in the qualities which the ancients prized or in the Christian ethic. Perhaps natural and physical influences are responsible… the luminosity which surrounds them does much to exorcize the principle of wickedness and confute the dogma of original sin… The bent towards virtue may waver, but it exerts as powerful an influence on the Greek subconscious mind as the north on a compass needle.

Later in the text Fermor, observing a 1960’s Greece, laments the changes he witnesses in Athens, the islands, the once-untouched rural areas. Modernization has taken over, creating a new way of life:

It is now that the materialism of the West shines its brightest and the propaganda of the East falls on the most unquestioning ears. It is the moment when the instinctive Greek virtues are most in need… The monuments of the past evoke their deserved wonder, but it is not these that finally win pride of place in the memory and affection; it is the live Greeks themselves; not the Greeks they were two-and-a-half thousand years ago, nor as they will be or could be or should be one day, but as they are.

On the struggle between Hellene and Romios he concludes:

It is an overt symptom of the private wrestling match which I think is taking place in eight million arenas. No foreigner can say which side is right. The conflict involves not only reason and history but atavistic, subconscious and tribal instincts too deep for any stranger’s reach. But… the Hellenic lion beats the unicorn of Romiosyne all around the town… But even though in a few decades its beautiful name may be no longer uttered, I hope Romionsyne won’t vanish forever. The Hellene and the Romios need and complete each other. Long live both of them…

Oh God, are you still there? This modern phone booth turned religious shrine, the very one I’m using to talk to you right now, is the epitome of this struggle. My thoughts are clouded, Θεέ μου.

Do the words of Fermor, written over 50 years ago, describing a Greece he observed and experienced 50, 60 and even 75 years ago, do they still ring true? Are we still a virtuous people? Is this still the characteristic that is deeply-rooted in our confused contemporary psyche? Are we guided by a genuine virtue, or is our inner compass directed by greed, self-importance? Do we consider ourselves “a people of ancient and civilized descent” ? Are we forever condemned to look into our ancient faces at the museum, searching for the tiniest resemblance to our modern selves?

No one can hide from this pandemic. It will expose our weaknesses, our real natures, stripped bare for all to see and judge. When I think of the most vulnerable people during this crisis – refugees, the homeless, Roma communities – how will we, as a people, as a government, deal with them? With philotimo and compassion?

In 2020, what are our instinctive Greek virtues? Are we, as Greeks, still struggling with this two-sided dilemma within us? Are we still guided by the true sense of philotimo? of Romiosyne? -a word which Fermor correctly predicted would, in the future, be misinterpreted, misused and in the end, its notion practically forgotten.

Oh God. It’s time for the daily 6pm briefing now. Every day, the nation hangs on every word uttered by these two, now very familiar faces: Health Ministry spokesman Sotiris Tsiodras and Deputy Minister of Civil Protection Nikos Hardalias. I’ve talked about them before. They couldn’t be more different.

Tsiodras, the soft-spoken, greying-haired, nerdy epidemiologist, almost lost in a sports

jacket that seems too big for his small frame, mostly looks down at his notes as he reads his statement. He uses the miracle of modern medical technology and scientific research to guide the country’s decision-making process. Forward-thinking, with an international, ivy-league education, he is touted as our top scientist.

Today during the briefing, he urges us not to dwell on negativity, but to focus on our “spiritual, esoteric person”…

Hardalias, on the other hand, with dark hair clipped in a short crew cut, has a commanding presence, has often appealed to our sense of philotimo, and lately has been appearing at briefings more and more in flak jacket-type clothing (at first, he always wore plain button-down dress shirts, sometimes a tie). Now he resembles some kind of action man figure. He’s got a stocky build, speaks with a serious, authoritarian tone, and pauses to give emphasis with matching serious, authoritarian glares which he shoots over the top of his reading glasses, through his intense beady eyes. In news clips, he is shown visiting COVID-19 hot spots, arriving on the scene with an elbow-bumping swagger, to take charge.

Today during the briefing, he said «τσακίζουμε τον ιό» which means “we’re crushing this virus” or, more informally, can be interpreted as “we’re kicking this virus’ ass”…

Oh dear God. I just realized something as I sit here watching the two of them deliver their very different but also very similar daily message. They are a sort of yin and yang. Hellene and Romios. I cannot imagine one without the other. As seemingly opposite as they may appear, together they form an interconnected whole, that somehow is a small reflection of us all.

I don’t know what will happen in the coming days, weeks, months. No one does. We live in uncertainty and have to wrap our heads around it. I don’t know, how, as a nation we will respond to the coming challenges.

All I know is that I have faith in us, the two contrary but complementary sides that are (still) contained within. This new crisis will perhaps bring out new qualities in us, only time will tell. But until then, for now, I choose to believe that we’ll look towards, be open to, and be guided by the luminosity that surrounds us.