“Από την Ελλάδα έφυγα πικραμένη. Οι υπεύθυνοι δεν θέλησαν να αναγνωρίσουν το ταλέντο μου, όσο πραγματικά άξιζε . . .” I left Greece bitterly. Those in charge didn’t want to recognize my talent, no matter how much I deserved it. 

— Maria Callas 

Greece’s motionlessness, its stillness, makes many believe that it is a place without change; that is what attracts people here—if not the slew of historical sights and tourist traps which people have decided, are best viewed when Athens effectively becomes an oven. People love the peace they find sprawled out on their cotton beach towels, wearing their linens, watching foreign yachts pass on the horizon over the distinctly beautiful blue of the Mediterranean. This is a fantasy: a fantasy of Greece as the quintessential locus of the “slow life”; Greeks do not live slowly, inefficient might be more accurate, and Greece as a functioning, living place is not always stagnant and scenic like the postcards courteously passed out by uncles at family reunions as a memento for their recent trip to Santorini. No, indeed Greece has changed a lot in the past few years: new roads, new resorts, mass movement: movement into the cities, movement into other countries’ cities, movement into other continents’ cities, movement of other countries into our cities, movement of foreign companies onto our coastline. Over the past two decades, hotels and resorts have piled up in every corner of the nation: Santorini, for example, has practically become a singular massive resort while previous residencies of even the most touristically insignificant locations are, too, open for business. Massive tourism has morphed our coastlines, towns, and cities from what our nostalgia tells us was a haven to centers crawling with lobster-red irreverent tourists. Resorts serve as a tentative enclave encompassing the nearest beach while surrounding communities fill with nothing but ghosts; all the young people move out for new opportunities. Now, the towns are like time capsules, many buildings eerily untouched: the only residents left work in small cafes, gas stations, or some peripheral restaurants. To foreigners, the apoptosis of these places certainly would seem like motionlessness, like a slow life; it is easy to think so when you, yourself, are the motion. 

Outside of this fantasy, there are two real versions of Greece; The past and the present. My mother was born in the vibrant past; her childhood was “magical”: our family was a family, our home was bustling, culture and tradition held people together, and there were young people everywhere in the villages. When asked directly about her childhood—what Greece was like when she was young—she would dodge the question. Nonetheless, stories and bits of information spill out sometimes. Through laughs, she’d recount funny sayings certain family members had and their mannerisms. These were the ones she revisits the most; she most notably and consistently mentioned comedy between the Allagianis twins—one now a Professor in America, one a Greek engineer—as they’d comedically (and ironically) call each other villagers and the poor English of her maternal grandmother, as she’d mispronounce the only English word she knew, potato chips, as “paterros ndzeeps”. She’d list her friends from way back when: their quirks, where they ended up, how it fell apart, how it held together. 

The newer version of Greece is a shadow of that. Unlike the emigrants from abandoned, atrophied villages among islands and countryside, my mother and her family spanned (and still span) a small municipality just south of Athens; the difference between the past and present was visible, but the area was not nearly as abandoned as Cycladic and Peloponnesian villages. Still, the way my mother described her childhood town makes its current state seem dreary in comparison. Lagonisi, where her mother’s house lies, has become one of those places where children who’ve ventured abroad for more opportunities return to take care of what their dead parents and grandparents left behind. Old ladies sit on their porches like watchtowers, monitoring the dirt roads they live on. Families segregate at the slightest fracture, like pepper to dish soap. The area’s urban status prevented its apoptosis, keeping it genuine to an extent innocent American tourists wouldn’t tolerate; a busy highway with drivers harboring little to no self-preservation, and slightly menacing hordes of men dressed as Russian gopnik copycats breaks the illusion a bit. 

The most mourned factor of this apoptosis is how it has broken apart the communities within the villages: the communities Greeks hold so dear. Constant economic collapse, political unrest, dictatorship, and Western influences have come to define Greece anew; they built a more individualistic future, of children self-concerned with survival. My mother’s generation, the new generation, was born into the dictatorship, out of a civil war. Many of the more educated Greeks, like my mother and her immediate family, left Greece young; what was to come was foreshadowed. The junta was oppressive: transportation and industry were improved at the cost of our seas, and our voices. During the Junta the rural countryside, via new highways, connected to Athens and by proxy the world. Eventually the Junta was not sustainable, so, the economy dug deep into tourism. The country was now interconnected, and globally connected, and people joined an emerging hyper-capitalistic workforce from the West. People were (and are) paid poorly and education was arduous and, in ways, bureaucratic. My mother, after the dictatorship, then visited Greece every summer to meet with her cousins and friends who would almost all seek new horizons in Athens or New York. No matter where they stayed they largely abandoned the family as they knew it. That is, they abandoned the parts they didn’t like (and good on them for it). The new Greece is too preoccupied with its own needs, work, and individualism to hold together, centralized. 

There is an idea that these changes, the trot into a comparably more individualistic Greece, are killing Greek culture, and is something we should lament. That idea is seen in the faces of the older generation, silently and more kindly, but it is heard by patriarchal ethno-nationalist organizations that pop up whenever a boom occurs to spout bullshit. It is a type of bullshit that certain Americans spout, too: “As parts of our world become globalized (at a much slower rate than most countries mind you) we lose our culture and families to (dun dun dun) immigrants” is the essence of the argument. One day, after having returned from Greece the previous weekend, I was being driven home after getting my driver’s license by the proctor and, naturally, he began to speak—to fill the space. Eventually, he started on Middle Eastern immigration to Europe, how the most common baby name in the UK was “Muhammed”. Big whoop. This is not how (most) Greeks think. Greek culture morphs and survives and has survived as a liquid thing, living alongside many nations, and being influenced by many nations. Communities as they were known in Greece, yes, die out, but the fissures that crack them open are made, not by immigrants and emigrants. They are made by the Greeks themselves. 

One evening, right before Greek dinnertime (10:00 PM), I departed from Lagonisi, just an hour south of Athens, to a restaurant on the very edge of Glyfada—a city witch acts to Athens as Beverly Hills acts to LA. I looked out from the car’s window into the sea, not far from the coastal highway we drove on. Getting in touch with relatives was practically like pulling teeth, but that night an uncle finally bit the bullet and invited us out for dinner. My mother took this time in the car to air her grievances towards the family. “I mean, everyone knew we were coming, and no one contacted us at all,” she said, at some points with a bewildered inflection in her voice. “I mean, when Diana and Andi came to New York, I booked a flight to go see them! We live in Pittsburgh and I flew to New York! Now we’re in Athens and they can’t even take the metro, or a taxi, over to meet us for dinner? I’m grateful for Vlassi (the uncle who set up plans that day) for trying to see us but no one else can do anything.” She continued, exclaiming how we are in Greece 1-2 times a year, and yet most of our (nauseatingly large) family was, seemingly, unenthusiastic to see us. 

I agreed with my mother. It was sad that family could be so available yet so lazy. It was worse for my mother. She had been close with these people since childhood, they were the only ones she expected to see; it would be akin to one failing to invite one’s best friend to their birthday party, or some other important social event. Newer Greeks often left their family behind, cutting off those who were too troublesome. People were busy, and interaction between extended family was abolished in the day-to-day, and even the week-to-week. This was something different. We came twice a year maximum to the cities where they lived and over a week there was no time offered up for a coffee unless it was begged for. 

“Your grandmother, and her generation, ate so much shit to keep everyone together. And it’s my generation’s fault for ruining it—I mean, we have been so selfish, we don’t care about each other.” This is how my mother put it; no one eats shit to cohere a big family.

My grandmother is a 91-year-old woman who needs assistance day-to-day. Assistance and company. She has caretakers, but our family is undoubtedly broken; people don’t come around as often as they used to. This is hard for her, I’m sure. 

My mother is adamant not to reach that point: being fully dependent on others for something so basic as walking. She sometimes repeats her Scandinavian euthanasia scheme to me, telling me to not let her become so immobile, so codependent, so still. 

To that effect, the one thing that hasn’t changed is the Greeks’ comfort with death. Many would find this unsettling, but it is not a love of death, no, my mother cannot even handle cypress trees for they remind her too much of funeral grounds, but it is an acceptance and familiarity with it. It comes with our pragmatism. I am comforted by cypresses. Though they, too, remind me of cemeteries, I am brought a sense of comfort when I imagine them in rows and clusters around the cemetery of Athens. It is a motionless place, a still place, a time capsule, and it is one of few such places in Greece. That is why I cherish it. 

“I want to be able to describe the brilliance of the world just before the sun sets, when it falls on the grass, and how green the grass looks, and all the other beautiful things I’ve seen, for it’s a shame for them to last only as long as I am looking at them.” 

— Margarita Liberaki, Three Summers