The Pillars of Hercules

More than any other place I had seen so far on the Mediterranean, Greece was purely a tourist destination, a theme park of shattered marble and broken statues, and garbled history. But tourists did not really go to Greece for the history; they went for the sunshine, and these cautioning signs were in many cases meant to restrain north Europeans who in the Greek warmth became militant nudists—Germans, especially. The Greeks struck me as being more xenophobic than the French, and more ill-tempered and irrational, in a country more backward than Croatia. They sneered at the Albanians and deported them. They loudly cursed the Turks. They boasted of their glorious past, but were selective, for it was only yesterday in the 1960s that these passionate democrats had welcomed a military coup, and supported them for creating one of the most right-wing governments in the hemisphere, the seven-year dictatorship of the Greek Colonels.

Greece manufactured nothing except tourist souvenirs. It did not even clean its beaches of litter. It was famous for its pollution and its foul drinking water. Even its politics had become ridiculous, as its aging prime minister, famous for his moralistic rants, chucked his wife and ran off with an air hostess. But Greece had been redeemed. By being accepted as a member of the European Community, Greece had become respectable, even viable as a sort of welfare case. Membership meant free money, handouts, every commercial boondoggle imaginable; and the sort of pork that Italians had made into prosciutto the Greeks simply gobbled up, all the while keeping their Mediterranean enemies out of the European Community.

As I walked over the hills above Nafplion the sky lowered and it began to rain, and the complaints of the grazing sheep grew louder. In sunshine, at a little distance, Greece could look delightful, because the arid glaring rock was so bright and backlit, the trash and garbage camouflaged, and even the most polluted parts of the Aegean had sparkle. The rain made it truly gloomy. In bad weather Greece was an awful place, of glum gray tenements and wrecked cars and rough treeless hills of solemn stone. Cloudy skies seemed also to throw the Greek dereliction into sharper relief—and so, to make matters worse, the sensational litter of Greece became visible in the rain.

Given these tetchy people and this insubstantial landscape and the theme park culture, it was odd that Greece was thought of as a country of romance and robust passion and diaphanous rain. In a land of preposterous myths, the myth of Greece as a paradise of joy and abundance was surely the most preposterous. How had that come about?

“The sea,” wrote Kazantzakis, rhapsodizing in Zorba the Greek, “autumn mildness, islands bathed in light, fine rain spreading a diaphanous veil over the immortal nakedness of Greece.” Happy is the man, I thought, who, before dying, has the good fortune to sail the Aegean Sea.

“Many are the joys of this world—women, fruit, ideas. But to cleave that sea in the gentle autumnal season, murmuring the name of each islet, is to my mind the joy most apt to transport the heart of man into paradise. Nowhere else can one pass so easily and serenely from reality into dream. The frontiers dwindle, and from the masts of the most ancient ships spring branches and fruits. It is as if here in Greece necessity is the mother of miracles.”

Dreamy, sentimental, passionate Kazantzakis, of the purple prose and the purple nose! His Greece, especially his native Crete, is mostly gone now and the paradox is that (if I may borrow an empurpled leaf from one of the master’s own books) it seems that Kazantzakis’s Oedipal feeling for his motherland produced the inevitable Greek tragedy. Tourists came in droves to verify Kazantzakis’s sensuous praise of the Greek sluttishness, and rumbunctiousness, and goodheartedness, the cheap food and the sunshine.

The early visitors were not disappointed, but in the end Greece—so fragile, so infertile, so ill-prepared for another invasion—became blighted with, among nightmares of tourism, thousands of Zorba Discos, Zorba Tavernas, Zorba Cafes and the Zorba the Greek bouzouki music from the movie soundtrack played much too loudly in so many souvenir shops. All the curious, the fake icons, the glass beads, the t-shirts and carvings and plates (Souvenir of Mycenae); and regiments of marching Germans, resolutely looking for fun. Greece had needed a few metaphors. Kazantzakis provided the highbrow, or at least literary, metaphors; movies and television provided the rest.

The Seabourn lay at anchor at the Greek port of Ágios Nikólaos (“Ag Nik” to its habitués). There were many Zorba businesses here, and the sign As seen on the BBC was displayed at various parts of town, for this place, specifically the nearby leper island of Spinalonga, was the setting for a popular and long-running series entitled “Who Pays the Ferryman.”