Greece is a ‘complicated neighbourhood’ where three worlds collide

In 2015, Emilia Kamvysi and her two cousins, Efstratia and Maritsa – all in their late 80s – gave shelter to a Syrian refugee who had landed, with her infant child, on the shore of their island, Lesvos.

Against strong opposition from their fellow islanders, these women took care of the baby. Their justification? “Our mothers and grandmothers were welcomed here as refugees from Turkey. It is our responsibility to show the same spirit of care.”

This was not only a profound humanitarian action (which earned them a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize) but also a throwback to the Asia Minor Catastrophe of 1922, in which 1.5 million ethnic Greeks were expelled from Anatolia, now western Turkey. Its centenary has reminded Greeks of how deeply and permanently it divided public opinion.

Greece is poised dangerously between the West’s institutional perception of asylum seekers and the humanitarian compassion of the grandmothers of Lesvos.

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In another facet of the refugee crisis, academic Chloe Howe Haralambous, describes the reception of boatloads of refugees, also in Lesvos, where the outsiders threatening Greece were not the refugees clamouring ashore, but the German NGOs that saw them not as people but as potential cheap labour for northern Europe.

Howe Haralambous is one of the expert witnesses – Greek, American, British and Irish – who contribute to a new book, Greece Between East and West – Culture and Geopolitics. Their sociological and cultural consensus is that the political imperative ignores many aspects of the “Greek spirit”, which continue to sustain the country’s ambivalent position between east and west.

As Roderick Beaton, emeritus professor of Greek and an honorary citizen of Greece, says in his foreword to the book, “This duality is not reducible to a single proposition. It is not ‘either/or’ but ‘both/and’.”

In the upcoming Greek elections, most political leaders are stressing Greece’s need to modernise using ever more westernised thinking about the economy, political alliances and social development.

The “Venntrality” of Greece, as I call it, underlines “complicated” as the mot juste

The modern Greek state was founded in the 19th century on the principles of the European Enlightenment, despite the fact that as a unified, centralised state, it in many instances defied the inherent characteristics of its people. Within a few years, the “Megali Idea” or “Great Concept” was articulated: a project not only to repossess lands beyond the original borders of the state, but, more significantly, to embrace all ethnic Greeks – such as those in Anatolia, Bulgaria and the Pontic region around the Black Sea.

[ Greece shows how sovereignty is an illusion for most modern nations ]

But the current “eastern question” in Greece is not only a matter of its relations with Asia Minor or modern Turkey. The growing significance of China in Europe, and the reinvention of the historic Silk Road trading route, means that a new “eastern” question is at the heart of Greece, where a Chinese company owns the port of Piraeus, the busiest in the Mediterranean.

Memory is central to history, but also to understanding the future. In Ireland the experience of traumatic memory, for example in the Magdalene laundries, has been alarmingly instructive. In Greece such experience has been transmuted into national memory. Its recurrence in today’s elections resonates compellingly within the debate “Where is Greece going?”

A poignant example is Tassos Boulmetis’s deeply autobiographical film A Touch of Spice (2003), which celebrates Greek cuisine in Constantinople through the memories of ethnic Greeks who, forced to relocate in Greece, were regarded as “Turks”.

“Our cuisine is tinged with politics,” says Boulmetis. “It’s made by people who left their dinner unfinished somewhere else.” Boulmetis told me that he had rediscovered Constantinople aged 37: “This comeback was apocalyptic. It was the journey of my life. I discovered so many missing elements from my childhood, and it was on this journey that I conceived the film.”

That same memory of Anatolia visited the composer Mikis Theodorakis in later life. He had spent decades trying to create a hybrid of Greek traditional music and the western idiom. But when he rediscovered the musical heritage of his mother – another emigrant from Anatolia – this utterly “Greek” musician celebrated it in East of the Aegean (2008), one of his last compositions for that most poignant of instruments, the cello. Its title, he tells us, “refers to the roots of my origin, to Asia Minor, to the islands of Chios, Lesvos and Ikaria”.

The former US ambassador to Greece, Geoffrey Pyatt, remarked: “If you draw a Venn diagram of this region, there are three circles which come together right here with Greece. So, we recognise that you are living in a very complicated neighbourhood”.

The “Venntrality” of Greece, as I call it, underlines “complicated” as the mot juste. It is, in the words of novelist Christy Lefteri, “an intermediary between three worlds”.

And why is “Anatolia” so vital to the Greek spirit? Because it means, literally, “the rising of the sun” – the source of light, perhaps a better source than the West’s “enlightenment”.