I remember vividly in 1974 being in the mass of people, descending the streets in my native Lisbon, in Portugal, celebrating the democratic revolution and freedom. This same feeling of joy was experienced by the same generation in Spain and Greece. It was felt later in Central and Eastern Europe and in the Baltic States when they regained their independence. Several generations of Europeans have shown again and again that their choice for Europe was also a choice for freedom. I will never forget Rostropovich playing Bach at the fallen Wall in Berlin. This image reminds the world that it was the quest for freedom and democracy that tore down the old divisions and made possible the reunification of the continent. Joining the European Union was essential for the consolidation of democracy in our countries. Because it places the person and respect of human dignity at its heart. Because it gives a voice to differences while creating unity. And so, after reunification, Europe was able to breathe with both its lungs, as said by Karol Wojtiła. The European Union has become our common house. The “homeland of our homelands” as described by Vaclav Havel.
There will yet be three kings standing up for Persia, and the fourth one will amass greater riches than all [others]. And as soon as he has become strong in his riches, he will rouse up everything against the kingdom of Greece.
Repugnance to the presence and influence of foreigners is an ancient feeling among men. It is peculiar to no particular race or nation. It is met with, not only in the conduct of one nation towards another, but in the conduct of the inhabitants of the different parts of the same country, some times of the same city, and even of the same village. 'Lands intersected by a narrow frith abhor each other. Mountains interposed, make enemies of nations'. To the Greek, every man not speaking Greek is a barbarian. To the Jew, everyone not circumcised is a gentile. To the Mohametan, everyone not believing in the Prophet is a kaffer.
Sport is linked with the technical world because sport itself is a technique. The enormous contrast between the athletes of Greece and those of Rome is well known. For the Greeks, physical exercise was an ethic for developing freely and harmoniously the form and strength of the human body. For the Romans, it was a technique for increasing the legionnaire's efficiency. The Roman conception prevails today.
Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (1964), pp. 382-383.
The kingdom of Greece was a terror to the world, but Mattathias the priest, with faith and not with weapons, boldly met the terror and defeated it.
'Who is she that looketh forth as the morning, fair as the woman?' (Song, 6. 10). She is no other than Esther, who like the morning star was the light brought to Israel in the dark days of Media. 'Clear as the sun and terrible as an army with banners' (Song, 6. 10): these were no other than Mattathias the High Priest and his sons, who like an army with their banners stood up against the evil power of Greece, from which every power fled as one flees from the strength of the mid-day sun. Their army and their banners were faith in their God; they were stimulated by the words of the prophet (Joel 4. 6-10), 'The children of Judah and the children of Jerusalem have ye sold unto the Grecians . . . Beat your ploughshares into swords and your pruning-hooks into spears; let the weak say, I am strong.'
One after another, countries such as Spain and Greece, states such as Wisconsin, Michigan, and Kansas, and American colonies such as Puerto Rico-are becoming laboratories for how much pain can be inflicted on a population for the purpose of satisfying creditors and ideologues.
Amy Goodman Democracy Now!: Twenty Years Covering the Movements Changing America (2016)
[There was] a head-on collision between two trains: a freight train and train IC 62 which had departed from Athens to Thessaloniki.
Relations between Turkey and Greece are the most fractious of any pair of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) 29 member countries. Disputes range from contested offshore hydrocarbon exploration to Athens granting political refugee status to two of eight Turkish officers who fled to Greece after the failed July 2016 coup attempt (Hürriyet Daily News, May 24, 2018). Now, Turkey is protesting Greece’s activities off its Aegean coast. On May 12, Turkish Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hami Aksoy stated that Turkey claims Greece does not respect the demilitarized status of its islands in the eastern Aegean, adding that NATO warships operating in the Aegean should not use Greek ports there for visits and refueling (Mfa.gov.tr, May 12, 2019). Aksoy’s concerns mask a broader anxiety in Ankara that NATO and the United States may be planning to deepen their military presence in the eastern Mediterranean to include more bases in Greece and its Aegean islands.
Greek nationalists in the early nineteenth century, and their supporters in Europe, took it for granted that they were freeing the heirs of classical Greek civilization from the Ottoman Empire. Surely history would grant them a second chance. Greek scholars wrote books showing that there was a direct line from the classical world to the modern. (The four centuries of Ottoman rule were largely overlooked.) Foreign scholars who suggested that such a view was too simplistic were pilloried or ignored. Written Greek was modelled on the classical and so generations of schoolchildren struggled with a language that was very different from the one they spoke. It was only in 1976 that the government finally conceded and made modern Greek the official language.
More dangerously, the past held the promise of a reborn Greek empire. Eleutherios Venizelos, the leading Greek statesman at the time of World War I, once gathered his friends around a map and drew the outlines of the ancient Greece, at the height of its influence, across the modern borders. His outline included most of modern Turkey, a good part of Albania, and most of the islands of the eastern Mediterranean. (He could have but did not also include parts of Italy.) Under the influence of that great (megali) idea, he sent Greek soldiers to Asia Minor in 1919 to stake out Greece’s claims. The result was a catastrophe for the Greek armies and for all those innocent Greeks who had lived for generations in what became modern Turkey. As the resurgent Turkish armies under Kemal Atatürk pressed the Greek forces back, hundreds of thousands of bewildered refugees, many ofwhom barely knew Greek, followed them. In turn, huge numbers of Turks, many distinguished from their Greek neighbours only by their religion, abandoned their homes and villages for Turkey. The events of those years have in turn become part of history and have poisoned relations between Greece and Turkey up to the present.
Greece is one of the rare countries of the EU that does not recognize the phrase "minority rights." They still have a concept of a pure nation—one state, one nation, one religion, one culture, everything Greek. And they do not want to recognize that in Greece there is a big Turkish minority, a big Albanian minority and one small Macedonian minority.
