Run

I swear that she kissed me awake.

The news must have sounded unreal to my wife. Even exciting. A snap referendum, with only a week's time for campaigning - wow!

I had gone to bed early, with a planned road trip ahead of me. Despite the worrying latest news - of people queuing in front of ATMs - Friday fatigue had helped me sleep fast.

And there I was, seated bleary-eyed in front of the TV and wondering. Not whether it was real -it sure was- but what it really meant. Some idea we did have, from earlier Cyprus or Argentina footage, from warnings spelt out after the abandoned 2011 referendum idea, from the very term bank run. You just run.

I still needed to sleep but only managed part of what I hoped for. Show had to go on. I hit the road with my son, not too late in the morning. We made all the right stops for coffee and lunch along the 600-kilometer route, trying to enjoy the ride. Our destination was an attractive one, after all - the seaside Thessaloniki, where the young lad would spend three weeks in an English-speaking summer boarding school.

I hardly enjoyed the first break and the cold coffee I ordered. A text message had come from a worried colleague seeking my advice. I don't quite remember what I answered but most likely it was a tip for caution and vigilance - what else could it be?

Run.

It was extremely nice along the north Aegean waterfront. Following a stroll along part of the revamped promenade we watched a Swedish street performer and then had dinner with an old MSc classmate and her daughter. We chatted a bit about what was to come, but only a bit - there was so much to talk about, spanning some fifteen years (and thankfully the youngsters developed their own interesting conversation, largely ignoring us).

The next morning I drove my son to the school, situated in an uphill suburb. All along the drive we saw people queued in front of ATMs. At the school I met the mother of another student who told me she regretted having paid the fees in advance. For a moment I wondered whether we should have cancelled this luxury. Then I thought, perhaps cynically, that at least the school would make sure the kids would be sheltered and fed for three weeks, no matter what.

Sensing my conflict, the nice lady gave me her number, offering to help in case of any emergency. My friend had suggested the same the night before. But nothing will happen, I kept telling myself, even as I walked down to the parking lot to pick up the car for the drive back home.

It was a long drive and only started a few hours later, after several futile stops for cash withdrawal (the only ATMs without queues were the empty ones, and the non-empty ones would soon dry out), a gyros lunch and a downtown coffee. And then I hit the road.

Run. But not exactly in the right direction. Somehow I felt I could afford to fool around a bit more, so I took the Edessa road instead of the tollway and decided to drive for the first time ever along what some people believe was "Greece's first motorway".

As I wrote in my Greek blog entry of those days, this 60-km stretch belonged to my personal terra incognita. For the most part it isn't really a motorway. Only a small part, including the 16 kilometers between Polykastro junction and the border have a divided cross-section. Traffic-wise this is more than enough and it is really puzzling to see as many as three (!) lanes per direction at the Edessa road interchange.

Apparently the road was meant as a facade for those arriving from onetime Yugoslavia and the rest of Europe. Even today, with the facilities otherwise looking relatively shabby, an international driver would be impressed by certain unusual signs leading to the Karasouli allied cemetery or to the only roadside Greek mosque at a huge rest area. It was the main gateway from Europe - and to Europe, of course.

Run.

It was a leased car, meant for travel within Greece. This must have stopped me, together with realizing that it would be irrational and ridiculous. Even if I'd had the documentation to cross the border (a passport and a green card, as a minimum), where exactly would I go? The nearest I could find any friends was probably Vienna. My family, obligations and job were all south of the border and even if payments should get delayed (which in the end didn't really happen) there was no way they could reach me on the other side.

I filled up the Nissan using a credit card - it worked - and drove back towards Athens and Corinth. At my last stop I heard the announcements on capital controls and called once again my family. Everything seemed under control. On arrival in Corinth the streets were busy. No ATM queues, nor protests of the slightest sort. People were actually partying to celebrate the local festival in honor of Saints Peter and Paul.

They don't give a f*ck - they breed their chicken and plant their tomatoes so they're not afraid of starving, was a communication expert's explanation for rural Greece's apparent indifference to banking restrictions. He knew better - and actually surprised me by foreseeing the key resignations (of the finance minister and the opposition leader) in the wake of the referendum. His cool head helped me exercise the caution and vigilance that I advised to others.

No partying on either of those Sundays. A lot of TV, internet and talk until late in the night. Then I needed sleep. We would all run, but not immediately. In the meantime, she kept kissing me goodnight.

No (to Stiglitz)

"It is hard to advise Greeks how to vote on 5 July. Neither alternative – approval or rejection of the troika’s terms – will be easy, and both carry huge risks. A yes vote would mean depression almost without end. Perhaps a depleted country – one that has sold off all of its assets, and whose bright young people have emigrated – might finally get debt forgiveness; perhaps, having shrivelled into a middle-income economy, Greece might finally be able to get assistance from the World Bank. All of this might happen in the next decade, or perhaps in the decade after that".

That's how economist Stiglitz had explained his preference to a No vote in the Greek referendum, 3 years ago these days. Given that the Tsipras government ignored the referendum and adopted harsher terms (with cross-party support to counter defections of his own radicals, under an "emergency" setting), it is quite possible that such detached intellectuals still feel at ease with their lighthearted 2015 advice.

After all, the No became a virtual Yes and some of Stiglitz's warnings are partly confirmed (also because they were vague enough and/or have a 10-20 year horizon, by which time he will probably be dead or senile).

It is tricky to challenge specialists outside one's field but one can still legitimately wonder, whether this cry-wolf game (on Greece then and on Italy etc. today) does any good to the very people these savants are supposed to care about.

Like the expert himself, I have made up my mind on this last point, and it is a confident No.

South Balkan dialogue

There are so many occasions of stalemate or deterioration that it automatically looks encouraging whenever solutions are sought. It is therefore tempting to rejoice in advance of the Macedonia-naming dispute resolution, as it was in the early '00s to look forward to the plan for the far-trickier Cyprus issue. However, experience from that latter UN-mediated endeavor shows that good intentions and high hopes won't suffice.

As a European citizen frustrated with unfriendly borders I would be glad to see the neighboring country (by whichever name is agreed) to prosper, be safe, join prestigious and demanding institutions and become a place welcoming people and not encouraging out-migration. It is exactly the thing I have been hoping for my own country, which was fortunate and able to join the E(E)C and has stayed in the fold even in hard times. Unfortunately, prosperity, safety and demography are areas where we have been deteriorating. And this is largely due to our bad selves and very little or not at all due to others.

Surely not due to the landlocked country to our north. It is a pity that the naming issue has prevented a warm-up with the people I consider the Greeks' closest relative, culturally speaking. We are, of course, a nation without siblings, a bit like Hungarians - which explains some collective similarities in attitudes (see e.g. the Economist's recent graph on elements of national identities). Our main ethnic group is neither Slavic nor Turkic. But the populations descend from subjects of the East Roman empire with an Eastern Orthodox church tradition. Physical barriers in the area were not impenetrable, at least not in the north-south direction. Food, music and some intermarriages (or mostly the legacy of the latter) still echo some of the community shared among South Balkan Christian folk before the advent of modern nation-states.

Events of the last century and a half cannot be narrated in the same way by current nationals of the countries denoted as GR, MK and others in the region; we cannot even agree on terminologies. There will be no suggestion on the dispute resolution on this webpage - it's not my job to mess in diplomacy or politics and this is not a place or time for brainstorming. I am hoping more and more people on both sides of the divide will reach out and realize there are good reasons for both realities: that most people in Greece will not accept a plain "Macedonia" and that most people in the "former Yugoslav Republic" will not accept the total absence of "Macedonia". I'm also quite sure that neither side will prove desperate in the dialogue: there is more than enough stock of national prides. Is there a way to channel these patriotisms into energy that will make the country (each country) stronger and more confident? It would be good if, from now on, there could be more discussion in the region -the whole Balkans and especially the triangle between its highest peaks, mountains Musala, Olympus and Korab- about shaping a future of development than about reasserting known facts of centuries-old world history. 

"I'd make wine from your tears"

I loved Prague before I ever got there and maybe this is to blame on the narratives of the 1968 crushing of its Spring, on the bit of Kafka, Kundera and Ivan Klima I read, or the true Bud beer, or the smoothness of the velvet separation of Czechs and Slovaks - perhaps even on the personality of Havel or the class demonstrated by the football team that crushed us Greeks in 1980's Euro when even the Germans couldn't.

The main damage was done by the visuals, though. Not sure what came first but there were two bits. In ascending order of influence: a magazine feature (Time, I think, but not sure anymore) and a music video. With the latter I wasn't sure at first. After all it was late '88 or early '89. This part of the world was kind of closed, wasn't it? Off-limits. Forbidden, I thought.

Enter my dad with his early '80s adversity to communism - so strong at times that when I once mentioned the term East Bloc to him, he curtly advised me not to talk so much about it. Not that I really ever did - people who inspired me in my teens were often socialist-leaning but rarely of the pro-Moscow variety. I was convinced (and remain to this day) that no sane person - other than the power-holders - would really ever like to live in these societies.

What we called East Europe - as if my country were more western geographically than Czechoslovakia - was a terra incognita hidden behind the veil of my indifference and ignorance. I knew of a few iconic monuments and landscapes but nothing of the greying former Habsburg or Czarist cities, the trams and cobblestone streets never too far from a river.

The opening scenes (or rather, each and every second) of the INXS clip revealed a footbridge with sculptures across a stretch of water that could only be described by the German word prachtvoll, in the same language used by the famous Jewish author of dark situations and by the people that fled the region a few years after being used in the prelude of World War II.

The sax and violins of Never Tear Us Apart helped strengthen my desire to visit the Czechoslovak and later Czech capital, but this only happened almost a decade after the song's release. My first walk in the former East Bloc, however, was not in sunlit Prague but in dark Brno, on my arrival prior to a business trip. I was dead tired following successive travels but needed to eat, so I took a walk along a street leading up to the only square with a promise of a restaurant. Old trams and even older buildings and barely another walker encountered in over a quarter of an hour: could it still be as bleak these days?

Living in such a town for over two years now -the former Austrohungarian and then Yugoslav Zagreb- I now know better how they look and especially feel. Their facades may need major investment to look as fresh as the otherwise similar ones in Graz or Salzburg, but everything else is pretty much similar. Never the same - although to buffs of exotic travel they may look as uniform as East Asian faces seem to us Europeans (when we are our narrower selves). Human geography and history - in particular, the cultural diversity we have learned to notice on this continent - can truly make the difference in our perception.

The second visit to Prague, on a working Friday and a bonus weekend in '98, remains the prettiest of my eastern experiences in the past twenty years. I walked down Petrin hill and up the cemetery, spent time at a bookstore in Josefov (leaving with an amazing Jan Lukas photo album of Greece as it looked before my birth) and at various cafes reading books, chatted (occasionally drinking beer) with people I will probably never see again. Last but not least, I visited the old residence hosting my country's embassy, to get a signed and stamped paper proving* forever that I wasn't among the voters who got a "Mr Nobody" elected to some office (I only need to remember where I've stored it).

While I'm still living just 8 hours' driving time away, I hope to share this urban beauty with people who couldn't (have) join(ed) me. Maybe we will get lucky this summer, in which case we'll be able to call today's desire "my one and only new year's resolution".

[This post's title is taken from the song's lyrics, written by the late Michael Hutchence]

*Back then, voting was compulsory; when not voting, it was useful to have official proof you were at a distance above 200 kilometers

Anyone

There are only so many times you can chant the Kyrie Eleison or its Ukrainian equivalent Hospody Pomiluy. The exact number eludes me. All I knew on that sunny day was that I had heard the latter quite a few times in the Kyiv-Orthodox* St. Michael's monastery, where I attended my first-ever "Service of the Bridegroom"** in a language other than Greek. However much I was valuing this experience, the absence of seating places -a normal feature of Orthodox churches in several Slavic countries but very rare in my country- soon got the better of me. I could no longer stay standing, or even leaning on the balustrade protecting a preserved restoration of the early part of this historic church, founded around 1100 and destroyed in the crude Soviet 1930s. I needed to walk.

I must confess (for getting out of church early is not exactly proper religious behavior) that I even enjoyed the fresh air and the unusually bright Kyiv sky. The colorful exterior and surroundings were further adorned by a soundtrack that surprised me. An upright piano was placed at the edge of the walkway, for passers-by to hear and hopefully leave a few hryvnias*** for the artist performing in the cool dusk. I'm not sure if I did; sometimes I bypass even those quality petty fundraisers, unfairly mixing them with instances of outright beggary - which I flatly reject.

That was pre-Easter Monday, a full eight months before my next encounter with an upright piano of that sort. Perhaps it was the same instrument and the same player but I wasn't looking at him and it didn't really matter. The day had surely been different, much different. Fog was obscuring even the tops of multi-storey buildings encountered in the afternoon walk. The gloom got more intense at the site of a huge massacre by Nazis, at what would otherwise be an innocuous and lovely suburban park. Babi(n) Yar**** features a modest set of monuments to the tens of thousands of Jews, Roma and other people executed after the German army occupied "Kiew" on its eastward campaign of 1941.

Music was needed to our ears after this emotional charge. Not any music but the film classic that translates as "anyone", Morricone's Chi Mai. The piano was now placed at a passage under the famous Maidan square, on the eve of yet another planned demonstration. Joining the dozen or maybe more people around the music surely helped add another precious Celsius degree or two, well above the outdoor zero that prevailed between two fits of typical Ukrainian snowfall. At this transition point, just before taking the deep metro for a quick glimpse of the non-touristy east Dnieper bank, I felt I knew what was the right thing to do. The afternoon tears had dried away and an evening smile shone on my face, as I let a yellow banknote drop into the piano man's hat, before moving on to downward escalators, high-capacity tunnels and two short walks on the wild side. Simple things that anyone can do, I guess.


*Kyiv-Orthodox means of the Kyiv patriarchate (as opposed to the Moscow patriarchate; the Orthodox church in Ukraine is fragmented)
**Service of the Bridegroom (based on the metaphor of Jesus as the Nymphios mentioned in Matthew's gospel) is heard on Palm Sunday and the two first evenings of the Orthodox Holy Week (pre-Easter)
***Hryvnia is the Ukrainian currency
****Widely known by its Russian name of Babi Yar

Thalwegs and jardinieres

Eighteen out of the twenty counties of Croatia are bordering neighboring countries. The country's V-shape, borne out of historical processes (most notably the Ottoman presence in today's Bosnia), makes it extremely easy to abandon by land - wherever you are, you can meet a border at a maximum distance of 50 kilometres. The most extensive frontier is with Bosnia: 931 km, of which at least half along river thalwegs. When "soon" Croatia joins Schengen -this "soon" being a mobile time target, given the refugee issue- control of entries from the partly Muslim country will be the primary headache of border guards. 

For the time being, pressure is on the opposite side. Traffic jams before the Croatia-Slovenia border, along today's Schengen line, is the only constant content of traffic bulletins, at all seasons -and especially in summers. The millions of tourists flocking by road towards the east Adriatic coasts are allowing this year for even more consumed time and fuel at Bregana and other "hot spots". This is caused by stricter controls on European citizens' passports on entry or exit from the single European space.

The situation is made more complex by the variability of Croatia-Slovenia relationships. Contrary to what one would expect of the two countries that almost simultaneously abandoned the old federation, their relationship is not trouble-free. Croatia's entry into the EU came only after an agreement for arbitration on their territorial-water conflict: Slovenes are claiming a corridor that will give them direct access to the Adriatic's international waters, which is denied by the Croats evoking the principle of equidistance. The verdict of the arbitration is expected on June 29th but may not provide a sure, conclusive solution. This pending matter leads to prolonged mistrust, which is expressed in various ways as regards border traffic management. The two sides' disagreement over the cause and manner of managing delays resulted in an extraordinary meeting on the matter, involving Juncker and the two prime ministers at the end of last April. Despite the deal reached, recent reports tend to flare up tensions again, mentioning a possible abolition of common controls at the large border stations - a measure introduced in 2013 as a showcase of friendly cooperation, which is however judged by some to be non-effective.

Those of us living in Zagreb, however, have our own way of bypassing queues. Together with the massive facilities on motorway E-70, Bregana also has another checkpoint, a few hundred meters to the west. The namesake village was once connected to nearby Slovenska Vas. Even after independence, Bregana's Croats could go for a quick beer to the Kalin guesthouse, showing their documents to the guard and passing from an opening between the jardinieres delimiting entry to Slovenia. Although nowadays this picturesque passage has been fenced properly, passage by car from the village's main two-lane street has considerably less traffic, giving us the possibility of grabbing a coffee "abroad" in less than a half hour from home.

Maybe I shouldn't have used the inverted commas. Slovenia's peculiarity is soon perceived. Belgrade's and Zagreb's Sava is a different river along its upper course: the winding flow on Croatia's plain is replaced by a narrow, wooded valley. Castles with German names such as "Reichenburg" (spelt "Rajhenburg") dominate the area around Sevnica, birthplace of the US's first lady -where, together with the indifferent ice cream called “Melanija” one can also buy a special series of food and other consumable products, branded “First Lady”, at the beautiful castle of the town. Perhaps the most characteristic feature in this corner of Slovenia is the coexistence of Gothic-style churches with factory chimneys, even a nuclear power station. One is tempted to think it is no accident that this former federal state -having a GDP per capita close to Greece's or even above it, already from Yugoslav times- was the first of its kind to enter not just Schengen, but also the Eurozone, even the OECD. 

Where exactly the Balkans end is a long discussion. It is sometimes said that Slovenia -due to its primarily economic peculiarities described earlier- does not belong to them, whereas Croatia only partly. Others may examine geographical factors (e.g. "The Balkans stop at the Sava river") or historical ones, such as "how far north the Ottoman raids extended" - according to one view, the limit was the Slovene small town of Kostanjevica.

However you may call our region, if you wish to talk borders -be it in the form of a thalweg or a jardiniere- you are at the right place.

A matter of smile

We climbed to the Upper Town from the steepest steps, through a children's playground whose existence I couldn't even imagine, hidden as it was behind the Austro-Hungarian façades. Short of breath, I was trying to reach her; it wasn't easy, even though we were both kids of fathers born at approximately the same time.

At the top level everything became more familiar and predictable. Or nearly so. The usual crowd was enjoying the sweet dusk, some seated at the benches and the diner and others walking as we were. The musical background, however, held a surprise in store. It was difficult for Nina, a third-generation Greek in Zagreb, to know Gadjo Dilo's remake, let alone the original; neither was I able at the time to explain to her the relation between the verbs "sfyrizo" [part of the song's title, "Sou Sfyrizo", I'm whistling to you] and SerboCroat svirati.

On coming home after the short walk, I remembered that Nina-Demetra's father had asked me to tell him about Greek crooners. The unexpected fan of [Greek singer] Costas Hatzis wanted to widen his repertoire. However, he hadn't heard anything about [crooner] Jimmy Makoulis - who had been my first answer - nor about Tonis Maroudas, who (as I found out through Google) had first sung the song, more than a half-century ago.

Music - played either from the rich collection in his mobile phone, or from satellite Greek TV shows with "music for get-togethers"- is what helps writer and veteran journalist Aris Angelis get a little closer to our country, in which his paternal ancestors, from Smyrna, had only lived shortly. The uprooting of the Angelidis family in 1922 [after the Greek-Turkish war and population exchange] was followed by the usual process: a wirefenced camp on the dry [Aegean] islet of St. George's, passage to an installation we would today call a hotspot at Ermioni [in S. Greece] ― and, in the end, a split of the extended family among Thessaloniki and Athens.

"In the end", I said, but I shouldn't have. The family's adventure had only just begun. In the coming years, the patient woman Eleni Angelidis moved to Yugoslavia, where she lost in turn, one by one, all her immediate family. He husband, a merchant with business reaching up to Belgrade, abandoned her; she had to raise her two kids on her own. Her eldest son Aris was killed in the German invasion of 1941; this is why a street in Bitola is called Angjelovski today, from the Slavicized Greek family name. Lastly, the younger Takis went to the mountains to join Tito's partizans near Banja Luka, together with his stepfather, a military man, descendant of a historical family with its own coat-of-arms, who also became a guerilla. Shortly after the war ended, he begot his only child - but didn't live to see him grow: he died one year later due to an unusual disease. 

Mr. Aris, who took his name from his heroic uncle (and not, as I initially thought, from the more famous and more controversial namesake), didn't have to talk to me about these events. He has written about them vividly in his book From Smyrna to Saigon, a series of interviews ― not only with his Smyrniot grandmother but also with several of his guests in radio shows he ran over the years on Radio Zagreb. Nor did he have anything to tell me about the war of 1991; when I asked him he answered, in perfect Greek, "ikha doulia" (I was busy). When he told me so, while we were sipping wine at his small seaside place near Šibenik, it sounded like evasiveness, similar to that of a Greek clergyman who had used his "studying" as an excuse [when asked about the dictatorship times]. Now, having read the incredible family story, I can better understand not only his unwillingness to speak about the war - despite having the name of its ancient Greek god - but especially the typically Balkan melancholy one often sees on him. 

Despite being relatively tacit, Aris Angelis manages to impress in his own way. Before meeting him in person, I had seen him on a Greek TV documentary of the Balkan Express series. The young reporter was asking him about political life in Croatia, which was then a candidate country for the EU. In a few minutes, the "old hand" took charge. A politician sat - supposedly unexpectedly - at the next table. Mr. Aris became a reporter again and interviewed himself Ivo Josipović, for whom he prophesied that he would become president - something that truly happened some time afterwards. Even during our personal chat, some years later, the retired journalist had his notebook nearby and was taking notes. 

Above all he is a teaser, often with a young child's enthusiasm. Just before we were to watch a football game on TV, he asked me to guess his favorite football team. After letting me struggle with Dinamo and Hajduk and Greek refugee clubs with twin-headed eagle emblems - choices that I considered more obvious due to his family background - he took me by surprise once more. "Aris [Thessaloniki], of course!" he laughed, and then played another Hatzis song, his favorite - and one I hadn't known until that moment: "I zoi ine ypothesis hamogelo" (Life is a matter of smile).

Translated from the original published on amagi.gr.

Gadjo Dilo's song is here.

Tonis Maroudas' original is here.

Costas Hatzis' song on smiling is here.