The Full Catastrophe by James Angelos Read Free Book Online Page A

easily.” Bolaris was making an argument I heard commonly around this time. Greeks, through centuries of foreign domination, had antigovernment feeling imbued in their blood. The government was a foe, and if you could defraud it, you were not only enriching yourself; in a way, you were a patriot. I wasn’t sure I bought this argument, though there was something to the notion that, in Greece, disloyalty to the state did not equate to disloyalty to the nation. Greeks don’t necessarily synthesize their
ethnos
—a word that means “nation” but has a racial, tribal connotation—with the republic. The
ethnos
is far vaster. The
ethnos
is thousands of years old, and unparalleled in its magnificence and import to humanity. What contemporary state could embody such grandeur? This has long been particularly true of the Greek state, which Greeks know to be dysfunctional anyway. Scamming the state, therefore, was not the same as scamming the nation.
    Bolaris then went on to talk about Ioannis Kapodistrias, the first president of Greece, who was born on the Ionian island of Corfu but had long served as the foreign minister of Russia under Tsar Alexander I. Kapodistrias was living in Geneva, Switzerland, when the revolutionary Greek national assembly, judging his international connections and prestige advantageous, elected himto govern the country. When he arrived in 1828, the condition of the budding Hellenic state and the immensity of the task ahead must have come as a shock. He found a largely agrarian, underdeveloped country, tattered by years of fighting and beset by disease and poverty. A government and an infrastructure had to be built from scratch, a task made harder by the fact that the revolutionary factions fighting for independence were often warring with one another. Kapodistrias had plans to modernize the place, but did not have much of a chance to implement them. A few years after he arrived, members of a powerful Peloponnesian clan he had upset shot him dead.
“Bam bam,”
as Bolaris put it. I wasn’t sure what moral the deputy minister was trying to impart by mentioning this, other than to point out how ungovernable the nation was, and perhaps remained. “After that, the barbarians came. From Germany. Otto. Otto came.” The Otto he was referring to was Greece’s first king, a prince from Bavaria who came to rule at age seventeen, a decision of Britain, France, and Russia, who secured Greece’s independence by defeating the Ottomans in a decisive naval clash—the Battle of Navarino, off the southwestern tip of the Peloponnese. Otto arrived in Greece with a considerable Bavarian entourage, including his personal confectioner, in order to establish the new nation and capital in Athens, which was then a small, rustic town, and he brought a Bavarian architect to build a palace, the austere, neoclassical building that today serves as the Greek parliament. I was astounded at how casually the minister referred to Germans as barbarians, but I would later find out that this was commonplace. “He brought German soldiers, German judges, and a government started to form,” Bolaris added. “But the Greek on the bottom said, ‘Good, it’s Greece, but the Germans are in control.’ It didn’t bother us if we didn’t pay taxes to the Germans. Do you understand?” he added. “It was resistance to the foreigner.”
    —
    On Zakynthos, as I was leaving one of the local government offices one morning, an elfin woman who had heard about the reason for my visit approached me. “My grandmother is one of those who took the benefit,” she said. “Now she lost it and she is angry about it. Maybe she will talk to you.” This was a terrific stroke of fortune, as I had tried to find someone on the island who had taken the benefit and could see, but no one had been willing to single out an offender. It seemed a worse transgression to squeal than to commit fraud. The woman, who was affluent and had a good job, told me her