Greek Island Under The Colonels

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31730, 13 July 1968, Page 5

Greek Island Under The Colonels

The Metropolitan of Kassos and Karpathos, in tall hat and long black veil, smiled with tender anticipation on the first course of his dinner, a whole octopus which crouched on the plate before him, its tentacles folded under it in an attitude suggestive of prayer.

“I have a cousin in Sydney,” the Metropolitan said. Beads of sweat stood out on his round, ruddy, healthy face, and he took off his patriarchial hat and handed it to a young monk with an air of a man settling down to serious business.

We—a raggle-taggle party of journalists and travel agents were dining on the island of Rhodes with a whole constellation of clerics. The Greek Orthodox Church was represented by an archbishop, several metropolitans, and their retinues, all bearded, gowned, hatted, veiled, and encrusted with rings and medallions swinging on long gold chains. They quite outshone the sole representative of Islam, the Mufti leader of the Turkish community on Rhodes. A small man in a white hat and dark glasses, he sat gloomily teetotal, chainsmoking cigarettes through a holder. Waiters’ Carnations The waiters wore red carnations in their caps as they removed the octopus (which had made some members of our party turn pale), and brought in a course of stewed goat On the side plates were piles of fat purple olives, rosy local tomatoes, stuffed vine leaves, and shairp white goat’s cheese. Glasses brimmed with the sweetish Rhodian wine or with retsina, which, to those without a passion for it tastes remarkably like furniture polish. The hot night was delicately scented with flowers and herbs, and throbbed faintly with the music—atonal and Turkish-influenced being played to accompany a group of Dodecanese dancers on the terrace outside. All very seductive: it was hard to remember that when the invitation to visit Rhodes and Athens on an inaugural flight had c<.me from our hosts, Olympic Airways, one had had some moral scruples: hard to remember, looking from the windows of the candle-lit dining-room across the glittering sea to the mysterious outline of Asia Minor, that this was Greece under a military regime, with the King fled and the Government in the hands of the colonels. Only the sight across the table of a public-relations man belonging to the London firm that the colonels have hired to polish up their image was a nudging reminder Tourist Trade Even as we drank our retsina, the exiled actress Melina Mercouri was touring Europe fierily imploring tourists to stay out of Greece this summer. One small comforting thought: if Greece is blacklisted, should one not also stay away from Spain, Portugal, Jugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and possibly France? The political situation in Greece has undoubtedly hit the tourist trade hard, though it is starting to pick up again, as echoes of the colonels’ coup and the King’s counter-coup fade away. Rhodes, the Gold Coast of the Aegean, is still badly affected by a semi-boycott by the Scandinavian nations. The Swedes and Danes who used to come in at the rate of 80 charter flights a weeks have largely decided to stay away until Queen Anne Marie (a Dane) again sits on the throne. Only a few tall blonde girls now tantalise the local boys on the beaches of Rhodes, where once there were thousands. Recovering This situation is slowly beginning to right itself, however, as the military regime continues to demonstrate its apparent stability. To hurry things along a bit, the colonels have engaged the services of a major London public relations organisation, which has already installed its own man in Athens to act as mentor to visiting pressmen. The P.R. firm got off to a bad start. When Melina Mercouri was in London, stirring up anti-junta feeling in Trafalgar Square, it put out a Press handout about the actress, using the tactics of guilt-by-association. The handout queried the political affinities of Mercouri’s grandfather, father and uncle and of her husband, Jules Dassin, one of the casualties of the McCarthy era in the United States. The handout even suggested that Mercouri is five or six years older than her admitted age, which seems a bit unsporting. Visit By M.P.s This opening gambit was seen here as something of a gaffe. The P.R. firm seems to be working on more profitable lines now, however, by quietly trying to demolish the damaging charges of torture of political prisoners brought against the junta. The firm claims that the letters from “tortured” prisoners were actually written by Italian Communists working out of Athens. It recently arranged a visit to Greece by five British M.P.S, who cautiously said later they at least saw nothing to substantiate the charges. The regime is taking other steps on its own to restore the tourist trade to normal health. Prices in the medium-to-luxury range iff Greek

hotels have been dropped by 20 per cent this year by Government order. Virility As Bait The virility iff Greek men is being used as a tourist bait, a ploy that has for years proved its worth in Italy. The right-wing magazine, “PariMusic, good food, the perfume of flowers and herbs. It was hard to remember that this was life under a military regime, reports Margaret Jones, from Rhodes. kaiki,” published in London, recently announced that Greece is “one of the most love-conscious countries in the world. The young Greeks are notorious lovers, and it is a public secret that some beauties from the North come down to Venus’s land just to make sure about it Another public secret is that the Greeks do have a special inclination towards foreign women.” (Women who go to Rhodes found this out some time ago. Local report says some 1000 young Rhodians are now living in Sweden, as the guests of ladies somewhat older than themselves.) Few Signs Of Junta In all fairness, it must be recorded that the average tourist visiting Greece at this time will see almost no sign that a military junta is running the country- The colonels are keeping tight reins on the communications media, but on the surface an idyllic calm appears to prevail. (Contrast any peaceful Greek street scene with recent news pictures out of Paris and the situation seems almost ironic.) The tourist will nowhere see any parade of might, and inability to read Greek signs will protect him from disquiet The large neon sign which blazes over the Rhodes airport terminal means, he will assume, Welcome To Rhodes. In fact I was curious enough to ask for a translation—it says Long Live The Army. A similar sign has been installed on the cliff’s edge at Rhodes, winking its lonely message over the sea, and the same message is being spelt out on hillsides in white stones. Solid Support On the whole, the quality of the propaganda is disarmingly naive. After Long Live The Amy the most übiquitous is Up The 21st April, the anniversary of the colonels' coup. This is always coupled with a picture of a soldier with bayonet silhouetted against a phoenix. In Athens, someone had ripped a poster showing a soldier, sailor and airman being led towards a new dawn by a

white-robed virgin. This was the only sign of protest we noticed. The average tourist is not going to have much communication with the locals, especially in the islands where the English-speaking men seem more interested in sex than politics. Generally speaking, the people we talked to seemed in favour of the regime, on the grounds that it was “getting things done.” The colonels have quite solid support in rural areas, where road-making and other schemes are being pushed through, and where the farmers’ debts are being forgiven them. One thing is clear: the Greek economy is so heavily dependent on tourism that the regime cannot afford to let fears of internal violence drive the tourists away. I have heard the figure for national income derived from tourism put as high as 80 per cent. On Rhodes, the islanders depend almost entirely on tourism for survival. Even then, many of the young men have to emigrate, to Australia, Canada or America. Giant Hotels Despite present little legal difficulties, millions of dollars are being poured into Rhodes, to put up super-king-size, Surfers - Paradise - type hotels on the tongue of land outside the medieval city built 700 years ago by the Hospitaller Knights of the Order of St John of Jerusalem. Sixty hotels have already been run up, and more are being built at the rate of 10 a year. Fortunately the architecture of Rhodes is eclectic, enough to digest even modern functional. Zeus originally pulled Rhodes up out of the sea as a gift for his son Apollo. Since then it has survived invasion by Dorians, Arabs, Turks, Romans, Crusaders, Turks again, and latter-day Italians, all of whom left their architectural mark. (Mussolini is immortalised by an ersatz “medieval” castle.) The earliest remains are Minoan, but the island’s pride is its two stunning Classical cities, Indos and Camirus, built 500 years before Christ was born. To ride on donkeyback up the sacred mountains at Lindos, to the peak where the temple of Athena Lindia hangs like a hallucination over the peacock sea, remains one of life’s most shattering experiences. Colossus Gone Alas, no trace remains of the Colossus of Rhodes, the 100-foot high statue of Helios the sun god, which bestrode the harbour entrance. The statue, one of the seven wonders of the world, fell down in the earthquake of 225 B.C. The remains lay about until A.D. 678, when the Arabs—then overlords of the island—sold them to a Syrian Jew for scrap metal. The fragments of the god are believed to have been converted into weaponry for some Middle East war. There seems to be a moral in that story somewhere. — Copywright, 1968, Associated Newspapers Feature Service.