Casual
REES, MATTHEW
Casual MODERN GREEK My wife and I are in Athens, and all we want to eat is the Greek equivalent of a hamburger, a luscious lamb gyro. Without realizing it, we've selected a hopelessly...
...When I lived in Brussels five years ago, I ate lunch occasionally with a Greek diplomat...
...on Tuesday, May 29, 1453...
...Without realizing it, we've selected a hopelessly American-themed restaurant, called "Jackson," and when I ask our waitress whether they serve gyros—carefully pronouncing it the Greek way, yero— she looks at me puzzled and says no...
...We order two Coronas instead—no Greek beer to be had here, thank you...
...But unless you're a journalist or happen to be in Greece at a time of massive protests (like those last year over NATO's bombing of Belgrade), it's easy to miss this living history...
...What I missed on that trip but discovered on this one is Greece's split personality: part Balkan, part Western European...
...The Greek mind, I learned, is restless with ancient grievances and modern ambitions...
...Absent more Balkan wars— admittedly an iffy proposition—this lust for all things modern is bound to grow...
...It turns out the U.S...
...One result is that Greeks are considerably chattier when talking about long-ago events than events of our own time...
...Yet the potential for reviving the old obsessions is ever-present, and there will always be internal struggles over how fiercely to cling to tradition...
...During our stay, a fight was brewing over whether the identity cards that all Greeks carry should continue to state their religion...
...But it doesn't take long to discover the limits of this goodwill...
...And how could it be otherwise...
...A while later a Greek-American waitress from Oregon comes over and asks us what it was we'd wanted...
...The Turks controlled Greece for centuries...
...Some Greeks, at least, can laugh about it all...
...Our meetings usually began with an offer of fresh orange juice...
...Then our hosts, representatives of the forward-looking Greece, would make soothing noises about their country's traditional enemy...
...It was a rare disappointment of our recent stay in Greece...
...There's even a word for this syndrome, pro-gonoplexia, which can be translated roughly as "ancestoritis...
...Only in 1830 did the country gain its independence from the Ottoman Empire...
...MATTHEW REES...
...torn over whether to obsess about the past or shed it...
...Greece and Turkey, they assured us, engage in joint military exercises and help each other out after natural disasters...
...During a white-knuckle ferry ride to Santorini, I was convinced our boat would capsize in the turbulent seas...
...Our conversations were dull when the subject was contemporary Greece...
...A stroll through the Kolonaki neighborhood of Athens, with its whiff of Paris, or up the winding stone streets of Oia, on sun-drenched Santorini, is more likely to show the visitor the other, 21st-century Greece: cell phones and Internet cafes, the sound of English ubiquitous (Frenchmen beware), and everywhere women dressed in Erin Brock-ovich-style miniskirts and halter tops...
...A yero I tell her...
...When I'd visited ten years ago, the place had a Third World feel: sweaty crowds everywhere and poor to non-existent budget lodging—my friends and I had to sleep on the beach in Mykonos...
...Oh, you mean a gyro," she says, pronouncing it the American way (jy-row, rhymes with Cairo...
...Now, for every announcement of a new dawn in Greek-Turkish relations, you hear the fall of Constantinople to the Turks invoked at least once: Every Greek knows the fateful moment—11:25 a.m...
...On TV, there's even a Greek Who Wants to Be a Mil-^ lionaire...
...The modernizers notwithstanding, the Greek perspective on the world remains shaped by the past...
...This time, I was traveling with journalists, and we met with bureaucrats, think-tank types, and politicians lined up by the American Journalism Foundation...
...To be sure, my expectations were low...
...Turkey is never far from our minds," noted the centrist Athens daily Kathimerini during our visit...
...You can't ask for everything...
...This was the European Greece, enlightened and resentment-free...
...But that changed as soon as I asked him to explain, say, why Greece vehemently insists that its northern neighbor be referred to by any name but "Macedonia" (leading to that country's hideous new appellation, "FYROM," for Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia...
...pronunciation has caught on here, and our first waitress was baffled when she thought we'd asked for euros, the currency of the European Union...
...To this day, Greeks consider Tuesdays unlucky and disdain to use the modern name for Constantinople, Istanbul...
...Out would pour an impassioned tutorial starting with Philip of Macedon, father of Alexander the Great, and culminating in a detailed comparison of the Byzantine and Ottoman empires, lubricated by generously flowing wine and illustrated with maps of the Balkans sketched on placemats...
...One political cartoonist, asked a few years back whether his country had a future, replied, "We have a past...
Vol. 5 • September 2000 • No. 48
