...And Dreams Are Dreams

“Because, my boy, it seems nobody else was available on the market. Or rather there was one, Leopold, who wanted to come, but Capodistrias was quick to discourage him. You see, Capodistrias, who could not foresee his untimely end, did not want to have anyone else over his head. So he made sure, in his own way, by writing Leopold letters in which he spoke of Greece as a banana republic (which it was in a way, but we usually keep information like that to ourselves) so as to dissuade him from coming. And so, Leopold, who later became king of Belgium and proved himself to be a fine man, longed for Greece into his deepest old age, because he had loved it as he had loved Lord Byron. ‘Belgium is only prose writing,’ he wrote in a letter. ‘Greece satisfied the poetic needs of my soul.’ So, our good old mediators sent us Otto.”

But why did we need mediators, Grandfather?”

Because, my boy, we were good Christians. We believed in the Holy Trinity. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. In those days this meant England, Russia, and France. But before sending us Otto, who was still a kid, they sent us a professor, Friedrich Thiersch, who hellenized his name to Friderikos Thirsios, as was the fashion back then. They sent him on the pretext of an archaeological expedition. Up until World War II the Germans always sent us their agents disguised as archaeologists. Nowadays, the English send them as journalists and the Russians as commercial representatives.

“In any case, Otto learned that he was to be king of Greece even before he had turned seventeen. He asked whereabouts that country was, and presumably he was told that it did not yet exist, but that by the time he came of age, which would be in three years, it would have appeared on the map. ‘And what am I supposed to go and do there?’ ‘You will reign,’ said his father. ‘It’s by the sea, and the scenery is beautiful.’ (The young boy loved riding and swimming.) Besides, his father, who was such a debauchee, had given him a complex. Like Kafka. Otto kept writing letters to his father that he never sent. He only sent the ones his tutor dictated to him. And, like Kafka, he died before his father.

“So, Otto arrived, not transformed into a

cockroach like Kafka’s hero Gregor Samsa, but like a bridegroom, with his whole trousseau (he played the piano, he spoke French and a little Greek). One hot number, we would say nowadays. Or a stud. After all, he disembarked in the stud capital, Nafplion. He rode into town on a white horse (and ever since, young girls are said to be waiting for a prince on a white horse).

But at the moment when he was about to speak in his broken Greek, he forgot everything and spoke to the provisional government and the people, who were in a way handing over power, in his native tongue.

Needless to say, nobody understood a word. And that was the way modern Greek history began, in incomprehension. ‘ Hellenen, berufen durch das vertrauender erlauchten grossherzigen Vermittler…’

(Greeks, invited here by the confident, illustrious, and magnanimous mediator…).

“Along with him came Bavarian soldiers who used the national loan for subsistence. At the time, my boy, the Greek tribunals were not able to try a foreign army man. This policy of providing immunity to the foreign military is still in force today. Bavarian jurists came, Bavarian architects, and ladies of the Bavarian court, and all that’s left of them today is a dessert, the famous Bavarian cream.

“This is how a foreign traveler, the Russian painter Vladimir Davidoff (no relation to the cigars of the same name), describes life in Athens in 1834: ‘We are on Ermou Street, near the entrance of the Bavarian cafe Grunen Baum (The Green Tree). We are surprised not only by the poverty of the city, but also by the absolute predominance of foreigners of every nationality over the natives, even in their own capital.

In the street, the only well-dressed people one comes across are Italian shop owners, Bavarian soldiers, government employees, and the members of the diplomatic corps. The only natives we see are manual workers and beggars dressed in their national costume.’

“It was at that time that the old man of the Morea, Theodoros Kolokotronis, decided to retire.