by George Schira
This time it was the day before my birthday, May 28, which I wanted to avoid by being abroad hoping that time travel would keep me younger, and two days before the infamous May 29, which marked the Fall of Constantinople. Back then we began our trip in Corfu (Kerkyra in Greek) meeting Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou. The plan was to restore confidence in Greek tourism and raise money for the Carter Center and Presidential Library being built in Atlanta. The hidden agenda was to meet Ecumenical Patriarch Dimitrios and leaders of the Turkish government in Istanbul to assist in a decades-old effort to rebuild the Patriarchal headquarters of the world wide Orthodox Church in the old quarter of the Phanar to which the Church had been relegated since that capital of the New Roman Empire fell to the Turks.
Papandreou had been dealing with a rather tense modern-day geographical dispute with Turkey. What also emerged from the trip was the drawing up of a commercial agreement between Greece and Turkey, sponsored by our host, George P. Livanos, who was American-born and then the largest ship owner in Greece, under the theory that successful commerce equaled peace in the region. Papandreou ultimately decided not to sign the agreement despite the willingness of his Turkish counterparts.
My own agenda then was a personal one, to pursue and ratify my remote origins as a Greek. I was born to Southern Italian-American parents, an immigrant father and immigrant maternal grandparents who had fast become New Yorkers but who had moved to Northern New Jersey where I was born and where my ethnic identity was under playful but hurtful attack. After some precocious research into the Greek proper names and surnames that proliferated in the family and into the history of Southern Italy and Sicily, which formed “Magna Graecia” or “Greater Greece”, I decided that I was truly Greek.
Those were heady years with the former President, from 1982 to 1987, meeting heads of state and wealthy business leaders around the world. This trip, however, was largely generated by my relationship with Greek American friends of Carter, Arthur and Anna Cheokas and their son, Mike, who lived in Americus, Georgia, next door to Plains, the former President’s home. They became my adopted family just as Greece was to become my adopted country of sorts, for better and for worse. They also introduced me to the prominent Greek Orthodox priest, Fr. Alex Karloutsos, who was close to the Metropolitan who is now Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew but was then sort of Secretary of State to Patriarch Dimitrios.
All of this is by way of prologue. The trip was highly successful. The Carter Presidential Center, as we called it then, got built as did the Patriarchal headquarters, though the latter required a dozen or so more trips on my part working with the aforementioned Metropolitan and Turkish leaders. My career as an aide to the former President, however, came to a sorry end, but that is another story. Between that time and now, I had learned some Greek, became Greek Orthodox, and came to better understand Ancient and Modern Greek history and the glory that was Byzantium, but my prolonged exposure to Greek Americans was somewhat disappointing as many of them seemed to exhibit the same ambiguity and ambivalence of my own identity crisis.
This time around I had planned a leisurely lunch on my birthday with an old friend, sipowner Nicos A. Vernicos, President of International Chamber of Commerce-Hellas, not revealing my age but only the occasion of the anniversary of my first trip. However, Nicos had other plans and before I could get a moment’s rest, he had arranged a whirlwind of activity, beginning with a speech by a prominent Greek American “Harvard/Oxford scholar” on Greek Foreign Policy in the 21st Century in the glorious mid-19th century old Parliament building and ending with an evening in Kastri, the town north of Athens that is the home of the Greek Prime Minister, George Papandreou, and that was also the home of his father and grandfather, both Prime Ministers of Greece. The occasion was a presentation of the leader of the five-man Greek team that had successfully reached the summit of Mount Everest in 2004, in the spring of the same year of the highly successful Summer Olympics in Athens, to little acclaim and with virtually no support from the Greek government. The leader, Panagiotis Kotronaros, was joined by a panel of businessmen that included my friend Nicos and the idea was to tie the methods and strategy of that feat, under the rubric of “leadership”, to modern management and business.
Both events, as well as the hyperactive lifestyle of my host and friend, left me exhausted and irritated, only to spend the next day, my birthday, sleeping late and trying to figure out what had happened the day before. At first, it was an honor and pleasure to sit in the seat of a Greek Parliamentarian in the beautiful old Parliament building in the birthplace of democracy. What ensued, however, was an exercise in chaos and confusion as prominent politicians were given the microphone in their front row seats or grabbed it on exiting all before the panel or keynote speaker got to speak. The panel consisted of a strange assortment of government leaders, including a representative of the Greek Communist Party. Everything was conducted in Greek, of course, and I could only catch the drift and gist of the speeches, but one thing caught my attention, the main speaker’s proposal that all the European debtor countries go together to the European Central Bank as the crisis was not just Greek, but European, and, indeed, worldwide, and everyone bore responsibility. The comments, an exercise in Athenian democracy, ranged from denial or rationalization to anger and over-analysis, but never to resignation and acceptance, following a variation on the classic stages of death but short of the last two. Clearly, the Greeks were not about to roll over dead.
Prior to the trip, I had followed with interest the American media coverage of the “Greek Debt Crisis” with all the usual clichés from “It’s Greek to me”, “The Greek Tragedy” and “The Trojan Horse” to the pejorative characterization of the debtor countries as “pigs” (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain), with debt-ridden Great Britain being given a pass, as if these countries were places on some vast Monopoly Board and we were playing with fake money to buy and sell properties. In fact, these were cultures and peoples and even great civilizations of the first order without which there would have been no America, no Christianity as we’ve come to know it, no Renaissance, no Enlightenment, no American or French Revolution, no capitalism, and, mostly due to Greece, no democracy.
But I do admit to American impatience at the endless proceedings, exhibited even more dramatically at the evening’s event when the leader of that successful expedition to the summit of Mount Everest would not let go of the microphone and an endless assortment of guests spoke at length more than one time each, sometimes spontaneously beginning a dialogue with the speaker, with the panel interspersing their presentations. There had indeed been no support from the Greek government, even down to the team providing their own Greek flag to be erected at the summit. But the topic was “leadership” and only my friend Nicos seemed to grasp the moment and engage the audience.
That is what it all came down to – “leadership”, whether of the young and promising Greek Prime Minister or of America’s young and promising President, who held great hope and achieved a great deal, but was being weighed down by the leadership demands of a “jobless recovery” and a devastating oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
The trip was a coming of age or coming to terms with age, my life and experience and with civilization and its discontents, 25 years after that first momentous Odyssey. I had seen seven decades of life, with ups and downs, but here in Greece I was confronted by five millennia of history. Civilizations rise and fall, leaders come and go, but the people, like my immigrant father, American-born mother and her immigrant parents, seem always to find hope amid the ruins and start over, living good and full lives.
Tomorrow I shall go to the new Acropolis Museum where I will not feel so old or doubtful and remember to prize individual heroism, the true wonder of human culture, and the importance of leadership in our fee and vital societies. After all, we are all Greeks.
George Schira was the first Executive Director of the Carter Presidential Center. He lived in Greece from 1989 to 1991. Since 2000 he has served as a communications consultant to the Archbishop Iakovos Leadership 100 Endowment Fund.
