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Panayiotis runs the mini-market he inherited from his father. I have known father and son for 30 years. 'How do you see things at this stage of the krisi?' I ask him, for I'm always asking people what they think of Greece's financial crisis. 'What crisis?' he grins. 'Greece has got a crisis; Greeks haven't.'
Greek leaders condemned the outbreak of violence that has seen innocent people die on the streets of Athens. However many people fear that worse is to come. Most people are angry, particularly the young. Greece has never treated its youth well.
My generation of Australians grew up with bigotry: the cordial loathing between Catholics and Protestants has faded only recently. But only when I married into a Greek family did I learn of the bitter and complicated antipathy of the Greeks for Albanians.
In Australia it would beggar belief to see elderly nuns directing garden hoses against the fires that threaten their convents. But that is what happened last week in Greece. Australia and Greece resemble each other in many ways, but not in the way they cope with fire.
In Australia I had never been taunted because of my migrant father, but after moving to Greece I was ridiculed and bullied because I was half-foreign, and because my mother was entirely so. I began to do my best to deny her existence.
In the Orthodox Church, Lent is a fairly strict period of austerity, which is one reason for Carnival: traditional societies have long understood that sessions of high spirits are needed before and after difficult times. They are also undisturbed by the blurring of the sacred and the secular.
It was all very quiet, and the waterfront was practically deserted. But I suddenly noticed a sole woman right at the water’s edge. She had her back to me, but I saw her lift what was clearly an icon, which she then venerated. I couldn’t hear her precise words, but it seemed obvious she was repeating the forms of the liturgy to herself.
The shepherd wife has one word for her cosmos – isychia: here is isychia, she tells strangers. Without amenities — no water, electricity — her house clings to a small crease in the hills, a tortoise shell; sea forces strips of blue between the planks of outer walls that have no windows to admit the sky, the hills’ harsh beauty.
Here in Greece, people seem to be smoking less and walking more. Gone are the days when long walks were measured in the time it took to smoke x number of cigarettes, the cigarettes being considered compensation for the walking, for the latter was equated with work and certainly not with pleasure. But the practice of walking can, of course, accomplish great things.
Whereas the Vatican II document sought to engage with, and to respect, the autonomy of the modern world and its science, only too many of the Vatican’s official statements over the past fifty years have effectively resiled from that commitment.
If they are to enlist the support of their people in acting responsibly in the face of coronavirus, governments must themselves practice responsibility. They must look to the good of the whole community, and especially to disadvantaged people who are at the greatest risk of contracting the coronavirus.
During times of crisis concepts such as power and liberty are often brought into the light and re-examined, and it is a sad fact that during those same times, people in power often try to chip away at liberty, at democracy’s most basic freedoms: several current world leaders immediately spring to mind.
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