Less thrilled are the drivers who are on their way home from work across Syntagma Square. “Walk with us! Gas is too expensive!” shout the protestors, but the only answers they get from behind the steering wheels are insults.
“But Maria, Greece should be tightening its belt!” I try to shout over the car horns.
“Typical propaganda,” snaps Maria, puffing out her lower lip again. “Have a talk with Melina. She tightened her belt ten years ago.”
Melina is a little over thirty. She teaches biology. Not at one, but at three schools. “I work half time at one high school, a quarter of the time at a second, and an eighth of the time at a third. Why don’t I teach anywhere full time? Because although I’ve been in the profession for ten years, nobody has ever offered me a permanent job!”
“Why not?”
“Getting a permanent job within the Greek state sector is like winning the lottery. You get an annual bonus and they can’t fire you. But there are always more job seekers than jobs. So either you have to know someone well or, even better, pay up. As it is, although I’ve been working in the profession for ten years, I’ve put almost nothing aside for my retirement. But for the European Union it looks very nice because employment isn’t rising.”
Not enough nurses
Giorgos, a nurse at a large hospital on the outskirts of Athens, only started putting money aside for his retirement two years ago.
“After twelve years in the job,” he stresses. “Because although there’s a lack of almost three thousand medical staff in Greece, nobody’s bothered about it. And now the government is cutting even more posts and refusing to employ anyone. When our delegation went to see the minister of health, she refused to talk to us—because she was busy receiving a delegation of hospital gardeners.”
“But the experts are saying that too many people are employed in your state sector.”
“Get your experts to come and see me on night duty. The emergency room is staffed by two doctors and me. And during the night we might have an accident involving two people whose lives need to be saved instantly; a drug addict who’s having visions and thinks he’s Satan, and whom I have to calm down; a heart-attack victim; and several people with broken bones, whom I dose up with painkillers because I know they’re going to have to wait several hours. Meanwhile half the beds in the ward are empty, and we can’t make use of all the equipment. Why not? Because of the cuts. Quite often the hospital commissions tests from private hospitals, because then they can be accounted for in a way that looks better in the statistics prepared for the European Union. So what if it costs twice as much? Who’s going to worry about that? The Germans are satisfied that we’re saving money. And these days that’s what matters most.”
Wednesday, or shipyard workers versus Germans
“We need to bring the Germans down a peg. That’s what we’re here for!” says Yannis, who is blocking Omonoia Square.
Omonoia is at the heart of Athens. This is where the main streets and metro lines cross. From here, it’s no distance to the Acropolis or to Syntagma Square.
But ever since the district was overrun by illegal immigrants, fewer and fewer indigenous Greeks dare to come here. By day, black men hang around the area, selling fake purses and watches or standing in long lines for soup. By night, prostitutes from Nigeria noisily tout their wares. Here the demonstration by shipyard workers from Piraeus looks a bit like something from another world.
Yannis is fifty-five, and he works at the shipyard as an electrician. Yes, he has heard of Lech Wałęsa—you bet he has. “He’s a role model for us, for all Greeks fighting against dictatorship. Except that he fought against a Communist dictatorship, while we’re fighting a capitalist one.”
I wanted to say that these analogies aren’t so obvious at all. But it was hard to interrupt Yannis, who was off on an anti-German diatribe. “They’ve made Greece into a colony, like in Africa. The whole European Union is a form of colonization. A year ago there was a big scandal, because it turned out Siemens was corrupting Greek officials, and that was how it was winning tenders. The Germans are teaching us how to change our economy, but they’re the ones gaining the most from all the loopholes. We bought submarines from them for a vast amount of money.”
“And then what?”
“They’ve broken down! They spin to the left. We call them the ‘drunken boats.’ The shipyard where I work has been bought by a German too. They were supposed to develop production, so they bought it at a discount. But what do you think? They haven’t developed production, and now they’re selling us to the Arabs. At a profit. I can’t bear to think what the Arabs will do to us. And our prime minister goes off to see Merkel, and never says a word to her about the shipyards.”
“So the Germans are to blame for your problems?”
“And how! They brought the euro here so they could come on cheap holidays.”
“You’ve received a lot of help from the European Union.”
“Because once a German does come on holiday, he has to have everything like in Germany. They’ve built highways, they’ve restored the old sites. They’ve been trying to make it into a second Germany. But it won’t succeed. Do you know what a German really is?”
I think I know, but I decide not to answer.
“The German is a robot. He gets up at six, goes to work, and gets drunk on schedule, once a week. And do you know what a Greek is? A Greek is good fun, friends, family. After work I always meet up with my friends. We sit and chat. We visit each other. But the German—I’ve read about it in the papers—never enters his neighbors’ house. If I wanted to be a German, I’d dye my hair blond and start getting up at six. But I don’t want to. So why don’t they finally get lost and leave our economy alone?!”
There has to be a receipt
“German-style capitalism is already over for us. But the whole crisis started with it,” says Loukas, an agency journalist. “In the past, I’d get a call five times a day from some bank or other offering me a nice little loan or a nice line of credit. That’s not normal. But now? They never ring at all. They know that people have been hit in the wallet. I work for a state news agency, so they’ve cut my salary by 25 percent. My wife works for a private newspaper, and they’ve cut hers too. Many employers are taking advantage of the situation to fire people or to lower their salaries. There’s no question of taking a vacation this year. It’s a pity, because the kids have just gone off on their own, and we wanted to see Thailand.
“The government is trying to persuade us to get receipts or invoices for everything. It’s estimated that the gray economy in our country may account for as much as 50 percent of the budget. Greece is known as a poor country of rich people.
“Receipts are all right, though at first the taxi drivers and doctors kicked up a bit of a fuss. I support all the changes—I see no alternative. But last week the full-blooded Greek in me came out. Our front door lock broke, so my wife and I decided to invest in a good, burglarproof replacement. The locksmith came and said, ‘The lock will cost one hundred euros, and if you want a guarantee for it, you’ll have to accept a receipt. My labor will cost another hundred—if you don’t want a receipt. With a receipt it’ll be one hundred twenty.’
“Of course I asked for him to do the work without a receipt, just like at the repair shop, the dentist’s, and even the gas station. Lately, the government came up with the idea of giving tax inspectors the power to look in people’s bags and ask them to show a receipt for any items they’ve bought. If they don’t have one, they’ll get a fine, and so will the storekeeper.
“I think that’s going a bit too far. Like with the salary cuts. I can understand that for a few years we frittered our money away, and now we have to tighten our belts, but the cuts are too big. But we won’t find out what the government is really up to until July. By then there’ll be a hundred-degree heat wave, and whatever they do nobody will have the strength to
protest.”
Thursday, or storekeepers versus the euro
How do things look from the storekeepers’ point of view? I ask Giorgos Burbulis, also known as Jurek, the Polish version of his name. Burbulis was the assistant to Kazimierz Górski, Poland’s former national soccer team coach, in the days when he successfully coached several of the Greek clubs. Now Jurek is the owner of three Polish stores. A can of Łomża beer costs €1.00 at Jurek’s stores. Raspberry syrup is €2.35. A can of “army” goulash is €3.40, and half a pound of smoked ham is €7.20. “But when you Poles enter the euro zone, I’ll wind up the business. Because Poland is only competitive now. Even the Greeks buy Polish cooked meats from me, because they’re good, and they cost less than the Greek ones. Of course everyone gets a receipt, without exception.”
“All right, but how did a Greek come to run Polish stores?”
“During the war, in Greece, just as in Poland, the Home Army (with allegiance to the old, prewar government) and the People’s Army (with allegiance to the future, postwar Communist government) fought against fascism. In Poland the People’s Army won. But in Greece it was the Home Army. The ones who were on the Communist side, like my father for instance, were persecuted. My dad fled from Greece and ended up in Poland. That’s where he met my mom. And that’s where my brother and I were born.”
Jurek’s family came back to Greece in 1974, as soon as the dictatorship of the colonels ended. “We were one of the first families to return. My dad had never wanted to live anywhere else. He loved this country. I understood that many years later, when I myself came home from emigration—I spent twenty years living in the United States. Here the air is good, the food is good, and the people are good. Paradise! Anyway, take a look at my customers. They arrived here fifteen years ago and they don’t want to go home at all.”
His customers are Robert, Grzesiek, and Zdzich—all from Poland. They’re drinking Łomża beer and praising Greece to the skies.
“Here if you have a beer and then drive a car, the cops just smile. They have a human approach,” says Robert. “But in Poland I’ve heard you can go to jail. So why go back there?”
“Just don’t write that we do nothing here but drink beer. If that were true, nobody would keep their job for long. We’ve been here for more than ten years, and we’re still getting work. What’s it like? Now that Poland is in the European Union, it’s really good. We can work legally and nobody bothers us. Because before we joined, the police used to make raids on the building sites. If they caught you working illegally, you had to slip them some cash straightaway. Otherwise you were deported.”
“And to get work legally you had to slip them some cash too.”
“And to get their social security number.”
“And to go see the doctor.”
“So do you know why there’s this crisis in Greece?” asks Jurek. “Everyone wants too much for himself. I’m not feeling it personally yet. But I can already see that the customers have stopped buying ham in three-ounce amounts. They’ve started buying it by the slice.”
Friday, or lefties versus the state
Exarcheia is a district full of anarchists, Communists, Trotskyites, alter-globalists, and environmentalists. It’s hard to find a patch of wall here that’s free of graffiti. At the local cafés, the politicized youth spend all day and night debating how to change the world.
The police don’t venture in here. At the very sight of them, stones start to fly. On weekends, officers with plastic shields are posted as a precaution at the main points in and out of Exarcheia. Occasionally, everyone at the café tables suddenly starts to sneeze. “Tear gas. Our guys must be chasing around with the pigs somewhere,” the waiter then explains, and fetches some moistened handkerchiefs.
So I’m off to Exarcheia with a knot in my stomach. I start at a cozy square outside the polytechnic.
“Exarcheia? There are changes being initiated here that will reshape the whole of Greece, and if it all goes to plan, the whole world too,” enthuses Maria, an architecture student. “One government has already fallen here—the colonels’ junta. On November 17, 1973, the students at my polytechnic declared a strike. The citizens of Athens soon joined in with them, because they’d had enough of the dictatorship. The colonels got scared. They sent a tank to the college. Twenty-four people were killed. But that was how the changes began, thanks to which a year later we had a democratically elected government instead of the colonels.”
The second time Exarcheia rebelled was in 2009. “The smartest minds couldn’t see it coming,” says Maria. “It began when the police shot a young guy called Alexandros, who’d mouthed off at them. The whole of Exarcheia erupted. Soon after, the whole of Greece erupted too. People fought with the police, and every day there were riots, tear gas, and demonstrations. Several police stations all over the country went up in flames.”
They were the biggest riots since 1973.
Christos is a teacher at the nearby high school. “I’ve been working with the young people here for fifteen years. I was sure something like this would happen. The kids spend hours studying hard. They finish school. Then they go to college. But if I ask my former students what their ambitions are, they say they want a job in the state sector. Is it normal for a twenty-year-old to aspire to a job as a civil servant? Earning one thousand euros a month? But that’s how it is in Greece. Because we don’t manufacture anything. You can either work for the state or in tourism.”
“But what does that have to do with the riots?” I ask.
“There’s only work for the chosen few. You have to have contacts, and pay a bribe too. Then you have heaven on earth: bonus pay, and they can’t throw you out. But for most students there’s no future in Greece.”
I ask Maria what it’s like for young architects. “There are two state-owned firms that take on the most talented or better placed people—the ones who have a father or mother in the sector. Apart from that, there are a few private companies. But they rarely employ anyone. The choice? You graduate, and either you go abroad or you find work that’s below your abilities. At a gas station or an office. If you’re lucky, you get a job in tourism. I’m in my third year, and today I’m off to do an internship at one of the agencies that brings in tourists from Israel.”
Maria takes me to the center of Exarcheia. The once attractive little square stinks of urine. “Hash? Coke? Something harder?” asks an immigrant from Africa as we enter the square. Those who didn’t say no are trailing about the place. Someone’s smoking a joint. Someone else is helping a pal to shoot up.
“Unfortunately, this place is getting more and more horrible,” says Maria. “The city quite knowingly lets people do drugs here. When the foreign journalists come along, what do they see? Smackheads, grass that’s been pissed on, graffiti. But Exarcheia is really about something totally different. It’s about a refusal to accept capitalism. A rejection of the rat race. Here we’re going to fight our way to victory.”
“But what exactly are you fighting against? The crisis?” I ask. Maria waves a hand. “The crisis is chicken feed. There’s been more than one of them before. We’re going to fight against capitalism. To show people that they don’t have to have a villa with a swimming pool and a helicopter to be happy.”
“So what do you want to change?”
“We want to do away with capitalism. And after that we’ll see. You’ll realize we’re starting a landslide here that will engulf the entire world.”
Bear keepers on the way to work . . .
. . . and at home before leaving.
Stefan Marinov wrestling with a bear . . .
. . . and after winning the fight.
Stefan bought his bear from a zoo in Sofia when she was only a few months old. The bear’s mother was euthanized when she killed a drunken soldier who broke into her enclosure.
Gyorgy Marinov with his beloved Vela.
A be
ar working at one of the Bulgarian resorts.
Pencho Stanev with the female bear that he apparently took straight from the forest when the zoo wanted too much money for a cub.
A moment of relaxation in the lap of nature.
Pencho with tourists on the Black Sea.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book could not have been written or published in English translation without the help of several dozen, perhaps more than a hundred people. Here I shall mention only the most important of them by name. Some have helped me with this work in particular; others have believed in me and supported me with their advice and friendship since I first began to write; yet others taught me to write.
Agora Publishing, Mariusz Burchart, the Four Paws Foundation, Jadwiga Dąbrowska, Magdalena Dębowska, the editors of Duży Format, Anna Dziewit-Meller, Grzegorz Gauden, Paweł Goźliński, Dorota Górniak-Krumova, Zbigniew Jankowski, Izabella Kaluta, Krasimir Krumov, Antonia Lloyd-Jones, Marcin Meller, Izabela Meyza, Włodzimierz Nowak, Agnieszka Rasińska-Bóbr, Paulina Reiter, John Siciliano, Małgorzata Skowrońska, Mariusz Szczygieł, Mariusz Tkaczyk, Ewa Wieczorek, Ewa Wojciechowska, Albert Zawada, and Joanna Zgadzaj.
Thank you all, from the bottom of my heart.
My thanks are also due to the heroes of this book—from the Bulgarian bear keepers, via the custodians of the Stalin museum, to the car smugglers on the old Soviet border. For the time afforded me, for your trust, and for sharing your life stories with me—thank you.
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