Ancient and Modern

Your lucky Minor Heretic just returned from two weeks in Greece, mostly on the island of Kefalonia. There’s nothing like travel for perspective on your home, and Greece has contrasts aplenty. Some thoughts, in no particular order:

Our country is an infant. I visited an archaeological excavation near the town of Poros on Kefalonia that had uncovered layer upon layer of burials going back at least 3,000 years. I held in my hand a coin that had been placed in the mouth of a deceased Greek 2,600 years ago. The ancient Greeks believed that a dead person’s soul had to pay Charon, the ferryman, in order to get across the river Styx to the realm of the dead. One of the problems of construction in Greece is that excavating for a foundation anywhere near an inhabited area will generally expose some structure that is at least 1,500 years old. Buildings from the era of Venetian dominance (1400’s to the 1700’s) are characterized as “modern.” The Athenian city-state was holding town meetings 2,400 years ago, and attendance was mandatory.

On that final point: My beach reading for Greece was I.F. Stone’s “The Trial of Socrates.” My opinion of Socrates has fallen as I read it – he wanted an oligarchy and sandbagged people in debate without proposing much himself. One of the asides that interested me was the origin of the word “idiot.” The ancient Greeks used the word “idiotes” to describe a private person, that is, someone who shunned public political life. They considered it a serious character flaw to avoid political participation.

Mobile phones are ubiquitous in Greece. Most people I met didn’t have a land line phone, including a number of small businesses. At the archaeological excavation I visited, halfway up a mountain near a village of a few hundred people on an isolated island, cellular reception was fine. If a mountainous, rural island off the coast of Greece can have universal cellular coverage, why can’t Vermont?

The Greeks don’t seem to expect flawless produce in their grocery stores. A few dings are no big deal as long as the stuff is fresh. Food is expensive, though. Greece experienced some brutal inflation when it switched to the Euro.

The Greeks aren’t as particular as we are about guardrails. When driving, sometimes the only thing between you and a 500-foot drop is a tuft of grass. The same goes for walkways and various kinds of drop-offs. Passers by are expected to watch where they are going and not fall off. I would prefer a little more attention to railings, but their attitude towards liability is refreshing.

In Greece gasoline costs about 1.2 Euros a liter, or $6.72 a gallon. They still drive, but most of their cars are tiny by our standards. You just won’t see SUVs or large pickup trucks over there. Traffic in Athens is brutal, but a lot of it is taxis and maniacs on small motorbikes. Out on Kefalonia I saw a local grocer deliver two 50-pound sacks of potatoes by slinging them in front of him on his motorcycle.

As far as I can tell from casual observation, about one out of every four houses in Greece has a solar hot water collector on the roof. Some houses just have a black water tank on the roof, which is sufficient most of the time in that climate. On the downside, in many places they haven’t figured out the efficacy of attaching the showerhead to the wall.

Up until very recently Greece had nothing like our system of credit. If a family wanted to build a house they saved up money and then started one. If they ran out they stopped construction and saved more. The result is that Greece is dotted with unfinished buildings of all kinds. It is also covered with abandoned and collapsed buildings. I walked up streets where brand-new buildings alternated with weathered, half-completed shells and collapsed 18th century mansions. Sometimes one building would be half-occupied and half-abandoned. Now that the Greeks have access to credit there is a saying: “A Greek family has two houses, two big screen TVs, two cars, and two Euros in its pockets.”

There is a locally distilled liquor called tsipouro, made from the residue left over from crushing grapes for wine. Avoid it. Really.