The last time I was in the Athens-Kalamata bus I happened to sit next to an older woman, a widow, who was very excited to be returning to her patritha. Having married a German, she had been away from the scenes of her youth for a long time, so that she gasped and sighed over familiar sights, and at the changes time had wrought.
As the bus neared its terminus, she clutched my arm, pointed, and said, 'There it is: that's my work; that's why I'm here.' I saw nothing but a large white plinth. But a few days later, I observed a Statue of Liberty in place, and the name inscribed on the plinth made it obvious the statue had been donated by my travelling companion.
The bronze edifice follows convention: Liberty/Eleftheria is a female usually swathed in flowing robes: she holds aloft either a sword or a flame. Beneath this particular statue is a relief that shows the events of 23 March 1821, when the Greek War of Independence started, two days ahead of schedule, right here in Kalamata. The scene of priests and warriors bears the legend: With one voice, we have decided to live or die for our freedom.
The problem is that the town already has two similar statues. Did it need another? Statues are, of course, a very Greek thing. Busts of military heroes and departed civic dignitaries are all over Kalamata, while rows of long-gone bishops grace the forecourt of the Cathedral. Predictably, my foreign friends and I rumbled and grumbled. All that money. What about the hospital? What about the poor and unemployed? What about children going hungry?
I was in a state of doubt. As usual. Perhaps people will feel encouraged and uplifted, I ventured, but subsided when my ex-Sydney friend came forth with a scathing Oh, come on!
In Jessica Anderson's fine novel Tirra Lirra by the River, narrator Nora Porteous, reflecting in a series of seamless flashbacks on her difficult life, tells the reader that she is in love with beauty. She becomes a dressmaker who also does exquisite embroidery. Much of her life, during which she moves from Brisbane to Sydney to London and back again, is spent in an often unconscious search for sensibilities that match her own.
During the search she consoles herself with her work, and with reading what a like-minded friend calls 'the great big beautiful classics'. At the end of the novel, Nora recalls her father's funeral, and a voice that makes the comment: A fine ceremony, madam! A verry fine ceremony! Nora's last words and those of the novel are: I think it consoled me, a little. I think ceremony always has, a little.
Although the tourist season in Greece was better than expected, there is otherwise not much cause for cheer. PM Antonis Samaras says that recovery will take six years: other people are more pessimistic.
Suicide rates have risen alarmingly in a country where formerly they were very low, and the young continue to seek opportunities elsewhere. Strikes and demonstrations occur regularly, and until recently the political scene has been marred by the rise of the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party. But in a shocking episode, a left wing musician was last month stabbed to death by a Golden Dawn member. Pavlos Fyssas was 34, and his death led, in a move itself fraught with hazard, to a long-overdue governmental crackdown on the party.
Nora was in love with beauty; Greeks have always been in love with freedom. And they know that ordinary people have fought for it, and are keeping on fighting. Fortuitously, I have come across some lines written by another novelist, the mighty George Eliot, who maintained that the 'growing good of the world' (a concept with which I struggle) 'is partly dependent on unhistoric acts.' Such good, she went on to say, was 'half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs'.
Perhaps that's it. The newest Statue of Liberty, donated by an exile, certainly acknowledges that age-old love that countless hidden and unknown Greeks have lived and died for. And perhaps the statue also consoles. A little.
Gillian Bouras is an Australian writer who has been based in Greece for 30 years. She has had nine books published. Her most recent is No Time For Dances. Her latest, Seeing and Believing, is appearing in instalments on her website.