At you the choice

(Mytilini, the capital of Lesvos)

The advantage of living on an island is that you feel far away from the hectic world where the important things are decided. Especially these last days when the weather has been incredible beautiful: high temperatures with the sun trying to dry out the humidity which makes mysterious foggy shapes out of the mountains.

However, thanks to the letter bombs addressed to heads of states and foreign embassies, the Greek capital has been in uproar. The international post was shut down for 48 hours but here at the Molyvos post office mail going to foreign countries has been taken in as usual. Let’s see how far the post will come these days.

Some of the packets were sent by courier services and normally would be delivered within a day. However, when the Speedex company had to bring my new computer from Athens to Lesvos, they took their time. First it went to Patras (how could you confuse Patras with Mytilini?!) When that mistake was discovered the computer stayed a day in Patras before going back to Athens where it stayed another day. Only then was it shipped to Lesvos. The boat arrived at seven in the morning, and you might think that somebody at the courier service would jump into a car to deliver the package to me - it was already three days late. But that was too much to be expected. When I phoned Speedex in Mytilini the employee I spoke to took no interest in my problem and told me there was no way they would deliver it the same day: maybe tomorrow or the day after!

Unfortunately, this lack of service is still common in too many Greek companies (especially those still state owned). Sometimes you think you live in a communistic country where the workers are not interested at all in their work but do everything that make the hours pass as pleasantly and quickly as possible.

Yesterday, this kind of apathy was confirmed by the results of Sunday’s local elections: only 54 % of the Greeks voted. There was even a village in the northwest – Velvendos - that broke a new record. Protesting against the new Kallikrates project 95.77 % of the villagers stayed at home! Greeks are tired of change and don’t believe in the government’s solution to the crisis. They also don’t think it’s possible to prevent politicians and other people with power from putting money into their own pockets, or that the workers will forever continue doing jobs for slave’s wages, or that anybody can get Greece out of this crisis.

However, these elections have shown that small parties - left wing or green parties – are gaining more and more votes which means more Greeks believe that by not voting for the two main parties (Pasok and Neo Dimokratia), they can change the country.

On Sunday there was indeed a lot to decide. Not only was there the choice between parties, but elections according to the new Kallikrates system took place. This means that Lesvos is no longer part of a regional island group including Limnos and Ai Stratis, but is now also with Samos, Chios and Ikaria. So people had to choose a new governor for this expanded group. Kallikrates also meant that our island’s local municipalities were also disbanded, so that now there is only one authority and again, for this a mayor had to be elected - plus a deputy and the entire council from very long lists of candidates. Each of the old municipal districts had to vote for a representative on the central council. It was the same everywhere in Greece because the national government wants this Kallikrates system to save billions of euros.

On the topic of economics, here on the street these days there are more and more people riding horses or donkeys. Will the crisis bring back the old ways of getting around? People also fear that the price of heating fuel has risen so far they won’t be able to afford it for the coming winter, so I think in a lot of houses we’ll see a return to the old wood stoves. Another sign: although the ban on public smoking is opposed by Greeks many have stopped because it’s also become far too expensive.

So, we are facing a hard winter. Although some people are cheered up by the prospect of a good olive harvest - the trees are heavy with fat and juicy fruit ready for the olive press - this year rather than paying people to do the work, many will be doing their own harvesting. This is how people are forced to face the crisis: spending less and working more. And now we have to wait and see how it will work with only one mayor for the whole island. I am wondering if such a mayor, living far away in Mytilini, will take notice that the road here in Eftalou has not been repaired since the storm damage of last winter. Do we have to wait until the road disappears completely into the sea so that people living here can only get to Molyvos via the coastal road to Sykaminia?

(With thanks to Tony Barrell)

@ Smitaki 2010

Some small changes

(picture: Green is for Pasok, blue for Neo Demokratia)

On the 4th of October there are national elections in Greece. The question is apart from possibly a new Prime Minister will they will bring real change?

The government has decreed that during the last two weeks before the vote the media must not publish any prognosis as to the result. Not that they are needed. It is clear that one of the two main parties will win: Neo Demokratia or Pasok. Even if they always keep on promising change, the fact is these two parties have been governing modern Greece for ages, and so any promise of real change is a hollow one.

The other three serious parties, Siriza (a green left party), KKE (the communist party) and Laos (an extreme right party) have no chance of winning, so it seems Greeks are afraid of any real change in their country.

Yesterday, when I arrived in Athens after a week in Holland, three political party stands stood together in fraternal solidarity at the exit of the airport: Neo Demokratia, Pasok and Siriza. Only at the stand of Siriza were people discussing things. Why would you ask anything of the Pasok or Neo Demokratia people? After all these years it is obvious how they govern the country: by corruption and scandal.

The columnist Niki Kitsantonis, who writes for English language weekly paper Athens Plus (not entirely online), is dead right when she says Greece has no money left for anything. And yet when the elections come around, there’s plenty of money to grease the electors’ palms, to pay the people counting the votes, for enormous billboards and advertisements and for stands scattered all over Athens.

This would never happen in Amsterdam. In the Dutch capital there was a possibility that even stands selling flowers and herring might disappear from the streets. This is because the Amsterdam city council is very busy devising new laws to make life in the city more and more dull. Because it is not allowed to smoke any more in public buildings, bar life has moved to the streets but people are banned from drinking while standing. In some quarters of Amsterdam it is even forbidden to drink in front of your own house and last week a city alderman came up with the idea that people who have been drinking should not allowed on the streets at all!

So I was very happy to be able to leave that carping country and return to the chaos of Greece. In earlier times when you flew into the old Athens airport you landed right in the chaos when you had to change flights going to the islands. After the new airport of Eleftherios Venizelos was opened in 2001, that chaos was blown away on the wind leaving only sweet memories. Even Greek passengers left chaos behind. You used to have to fight to get to the check-in desk, but now Greeks at the new airport are incredibly disciplined.

Olympic Airways, Greece biggest flight company, has now two new competitors: Aegean Airlines and Athens Airways. However they do not fly to Amsterdam, so when you want to fly to Lesvos, you better go with Olympic and your luggage is transferred and you have time for the connection between the two flights.

It was Aristoteles Onassis who bought the old Greek air company and founded Olympic Airways in 1957. He made it a company to be proud of and it always felt good to fly Olympic. Until recently you ate with a metal knife and fork and the stewardesses kept on wearing the same blue uniforms with coloured shawls.

When I flew to Holland a week ago, we boarded a Hellas Air plane at Athens. I heard that Olympic Airlines (so called since 2003 when they had a financial crisis) was to be taken over, so we flew into a black hole. The service on board was terrible, the food was pretty basic and the plane, yes, it just about flew…

Yesterday, coming back to Greece, was quite another story. Although Olympic Air officially will open on the 1st of October - after a take-over by the Marfin Investment Group – already it had new planes, stewardesses and services. I have not flown in such comfort for years, and in such a sparkling new plane with lots of space between the seats, tasty food and remarkably good service. The six Olympic rings are still on the tail of the plane, but the seats are now made of leather and, as a tribute to the decade when Olympic Airways was founded, the stewardesses wear new kinky retro dresses. We even got an Olympic badge and some super chocolate as a gift.

To spare the pride of the Greeks, the name of their oldest airline has changed only very slightly: Olympic Air. Maybe next week only the name of the Prime Minister will change from Kostas Karamanlis to George Papandreaou, but unfortunately, any other changes...

(With thanks to Tony Barrell)

@ Smitaki 2009

Den xero

Three and a half years ago in Greece you could hear animated discussions everywhere. The socialist PASOK party had served its time. After being in power for decades, the Greeks thought they might see how somebody else would do.

This somebody else was Kostas Karamanlis and his party Nea Demokratia. He thought he was doing so well that he called an early election for the 16th September.

But on this day you will not hear animated discussions like in the past. The people are tired after the hot summer, they are tired of the wretched television images of the wild fires, they are tired of all the discussions seen on television, they don't believe any more in the leaders of the two biggest political parties who keep on accusing each other. Last week when Karamanlis visited Lesvos for the elections, there were no crowds to receive him. Maybe the few that were there cheered him for being the premier, but not for being the future premier. More than one Greek will have thought that he is a man with many promises which never happened. The Greeks lost their faith in politics.

In Myitilini there were some posters that praised one or other political party. In Molyvos there was no sign that national elections were going on. Mothers were angry because of their children being out of school for a few days, because the school is used for the elections. They could not be too angry because last year was worse. When the schools started then, the children were home for 6 weeks because the teachers were on strike.

Last October the situation was quite different. For the election of a new mayor everybody in Molyvos was busy in order to gather votes for their favourite party. Even our telephone didn't stop ringing with all the invitations we got to attend election meetings. In the whole village there was no talk other than about a new mayor and wherever you looked you would find the eyes of a prospective mayor staring at you from the posters.

Here in the municipality of Molyvos there are no complaints about our new mayor. Even the tourists remark that there is a man cleaning the streets. We do have to push the municipality sometimes to make sure that they remove the boats of the refugees from the beach, but that problem is like a flowing river you cannot stop.

Maybe if there hadn't been those big wild fires in the Peloponissos and Evia, the Greeks would have been discussing a new parliament. Now the people have had it. They no longer believe the fine words of Karamanlis, nor those of Georgios Papandreou, the leader of PASOK. The third biggest party in the country, the KKE (communist party) and the smaller parties: Syreza, a party that is a mixture of commnunist and ecological groups and the right wing LAOS, a party that is anti immigrants and Jews, take their chances: they hope for more seats in the parliament thanks to the mistrust of PASOK and ND.

The Greeks themselves do not believe in small parties. The KKE is too strict and Syreza and LAOS are too small to change things. If you give your vote to a small party, a big party can take this as an advantage. Conclusion: most of the Greeks do not know what to vote. Den xero! There are even people who say: let Europe rule us.

The inhabitants of the small island of Lipsi (south of Samos and Leros) have another reason for not voting today. They feel abandoned by the state, because three years ago the ferry from Athens to their island was stopped. It resumed half a year ago, but that was not enough for the inhabitants, since another ferry to Rhodes was also stopped. So why should they vote for a state that doesn't care that their island is difficult to reach?

In the history of Greek elections there is another such incident. There was another small island with the same problems. The inhabitants went to vote, but then refused to send their votes to Athens. The government could come and get the votes themselves, with the promise of a ferry line.

Then there's another group of people who don't want to vote today. The victims of he wild fires have other things to think of instead of wondering which party is to blame for this disaster. They are sure that whoever wins, they will be forgotten in a few weeks.

And so today it is a Sunday as usual. A fierce wind makes sure that the temperature doesn't rise too high, tourists are walking along the beaches, the Greeks are gathered in their village of birth where they have to vote. They enjoy big Sunday lunches and stay unsure if they'll go and vote. Some have got the money, or part of the money for their fares to their home villages from a political party. But nobody controls if in fact they give this party their vote.

At the lunch and coffee tables in Molyvos and Petra the discussions aren't about the elections but about the bankruptcy of Olympia, a Dutch travel company. To which hotels or apartments do they still owe money? Who is likely to go bankrupt because they're still owed tens of thousands of euros from Olympia? The conclusion is that the tourist business is getting more and more risky. Each year now travel companies go bankrupt and take owners of small apartment complexes with them.

And so life goes on in a country where you have to pay not only the doctor's fees but also thank him with an envelop, where the salaries are too low, where the pension funds are paying too late or not at all. A country that has to return millions of euros to Europe because they where incapable of getting all of their land registered.

The Greeks are finished with their political leaders. The Greeks are tired of all their unfulfilled promises, they are tired of their country that is still between a third world country and a modern state. The Greeks are not proud anymore: the images and the criticism of the fights against the wild fires were too devastating.

So who is going to win today? No Greek seems to be interested. Because PASOK is bad news, as well as Nea Demokratia. There is no more choice today. Neither was there in the past, nor will there be in the future. I never saw the Greeks so sad.

17th September. Nea Demokratia has won a majority with 43% of the votes, which means that Karamanlis can continue ruling Greece. As predicted the big parties lost a lot of votes to the small parties like KKE, Syreza and LAOS. It's even the first time since the ending of military dictatorship in 1974 that an extreme right party won seats in the parliament: LAOS won ten seats.

And Lesvos? It was a close race between PASOK and Nea Demokratia. But maybe Karamanlis' visit made a difference: he won with a small majority. Lesvos is no green island anymore... (green is the colour of PASOK). But it keeps on being an exception for Greece. The island used to be communist and the KKE is still strong here. This election the KKE got 14% of the votes, which is more than the double the amount they got in most other voting districts.

Copyright © Smitaki 2007

Election Fever

Just like everywhere in Greece the village of Molyvos is full of election fever. Every night there are gatherings where people try to raise votes for a new Mayor. Next Sunday will be the first round. Then all the Greeks have to vote. And they all have to be sober. Officially, selling alcohol after midnight on Saturday is forbidden. So that will be a really cozy Saturday Night.

You have to vote where you are born or registered, which means this coming weekend a large migration will take place in Greece. A lot of people have to travel back or forth from Athens and so on, wherever they come from. Let's hope the weather will be better than last weekend. Lesvos was lucky with all the rain, having just a few showers. But in the North of Greece and around Thessaloniki there was a state of emergency because of all the flooded houses and floods destroying roads.

On Sunday 15 October you can vote for 2 members of one 'mayors list' for the municipal council (you vote for the people, not for a political party). The two parties with the most votes then compete the next Sunday for who will become the new Mayor.

In Molyvos there are five candidates: Nicos Molvalis, Dionisis Karatsalis, Kralli Raloe (short: Raloe) Konstantellis, Stelios Karadonis and the actual Mayor Lefteris Vogiatzis. If you asked a candidate from a Mayors party a week ago what the programme was of the candidate Mayor, they would not know. So finally last week all the manifestos came out, and I assure you, they are all pretty promising. Molyvos is going to be paradise on earth, if you really believe all the future Mayors.

Dionisis Karatsalis is the candidate for the communist party, short: KKE (spoken: koukou-aa). As a real red rascal he is against the capitalist state of America, Europe and NATO. According to the KKE the money from Europe only goes to the big industries, the wages are too low in Greece, the taxes too high and there is too much unemployment. In local matters they think the 5 euro entrance for the Hot Springs is too much, the 2% tax each restaurant and shop has to pay in Molyvos is too high and the power of the tourist operators needs to be smaller. Dionisis wants a museum, a better library and a better exploitation of the Hot Springs.

But to be honest, everybody wants the same. And Dionisis did not read the manifesto of the actual Mayor Lefteris, because in there he explains what he did in the last 4 years. Besides the improvement of sewage, drainage and roads, he got money from Europe to improve walking paths and their signs (44,000 euros) and he got a 1,625,000 euro European subsidy to renew the main street of Molyvos going to the harbour. I understand now why everybody in Molyvos was so annoyed the whole winter long by this big project. You do not spend that amount of money in just one month. Another creation of Lefteris is the Molyvos kafenion (there was no kafenion anymore in Molyvos). I call that one the Living Room of the Mayor because each night you can find him there. Lefteris' impressive program has full colour pictures of other things that Mayors should usually do. But I have no idea what his plans for the future are. They cannot be much different from what the others want. Everybody wants the best for this municipality.

The list of plans from Nikos Molvalis is extremely long and I think that even if he were Mayor for a hundreds years, he would never be able to realise all those projects. Every idea you ever heard seem to be on his list. Most remarkable projects are: bringing hot spring water to the hotels, a foot path from the harbour to the beach of Molyvos, the organization of the Tourist Office (I thought there already was one), taking part in tourist exhibitions (I am wondering what he means by this...), opening a school for tourism, getting a movie theatre, the re- opening of one of the two old tunnels going from the castle to the beach (at the disco Congas). Wow, that sounds exciting!

However, Nikos Molvalis wants the best. He wants more excitement for the local people, more culture and more education. He wants to protect nature, he wants more money from Europe for agriculture, he wants more sports for the locals. And he wants a day care centre for the children, a thing Molyvos really needs because in the summer the mothers work their socks off while the tourists and their children are enjoying themselves.

The only female candidate wants about the same as Nikos, but she knows better how to bring it, also she is the only candidate who has vision. She is a lady who used to be a member of the KKE light (light version of the communistic party), but has now joined PASOK. She first wants to have a good look at the future for the municipality, before planning projects. Just like the others she wants more culture in all the villages, to protect the environment, a better exploitation of the Hot Springs and other tourist attractions in the municipality. She wants a review of the planning laws for building, she thinks about what tourism could be best in the North of the island (she is against all inclusive hotels), she want young people to take an interest in agriculture and she want to create more educational and cultural events for the local youth.

The biggest point on all lists however is the rubbish dump. They say that finally there will be a central place for waste treatment near Agia Paraskevi. Stelios Karadonis is the man for the middle class and he is full of personal promises for his direct voters. He had the brilliant idea to relocate the actual refuse dump 3 kilometres further in a deserted valley (where a river runs...) where nobody would be disturbed by it. In Holland we say: from the sight, out of the heart. I am wondering how many right thinking people will vote for this great idea...

So you see, it is happy hours in Molyvos. It bristles with new ideas and especially all the old ones which are to be aired once again. The electors are summoned to participate in gatherings maybe not every night but certainly every other night and the candidates on the lists travel through all the villages in order to get votes. Petra does it better than the municipality of Molyvos: in the central market place they created a kind of speakers corner where every night everybody can say what he wants.

It is going to be a tight race, because there are clearly two opponents: the more traditional Greeks who consider the problems the way their ancestors did and like to work with favouritism (Stelios and Lefteris) and the group who is open to new ideas, like those of the European foreigners living here (Raloe and Nikos). Maybe the choice seems to be easy in a tourist city like Molyvos, but one should not forget that the villages of Vafios, Argenos, Lepetimnos, Sykaminia and Skala Sykaminia, where most people work in the agricultural sector, also belong to this municipality and they would probably not be happy with a woman as Mayor or foreigners in their municipal council.

The elections are alive and well in the villages, for young and old, for local or foreigner. Even without the villages plastered everywhere with election bills where you can admire the future Mayor (it is said that, in the Greek way, this will happen at the last moment) election fever is high in the streets. Even though most tourists are gone, Molyvos is still very much alive. And if everyone keeps their word, it will be the best place on earth with only happy and bright people...

Copyright © Smitaki 2006