The cover of Golden Opportunity, a magazine featuring classifieds, summed up the Greek zeitgeist perfectly: Alongside an advertisement for discounted €1 pizza was another one for handguns, rifles, and machine-guns.

The waves of the financial meltdown have battered Greece for months, but locals expect its real effects to only start showing in the Fall, when the first of two additional salaries paid to public sector employees as annual bonuses gets withheld. The government has already cut public sector wages by up to 20 percent, and a wage freeze has been imposed on the private sector.

Central Athens throbs with daily marches. In the port of Piraeus, Communist Party-led workers picket luxury ferries, seeking to hinder hundreds of travelers from descending to shop in tourist districts enduring a cash-strapped summer. Knife and club-yielding gangs of anarchists and far right-wingers duke it out in immigrant ghettos over their respective interpretations of social justice, and whether immigrants should have the right to live in a country under collapse. Meanwhile, Somali and Kurdish mafia gangs fight over their dominance of the streets and the lucrative heroin and prostitution trades. Car-jackings are increasingly common and daylight robberies are also up.

The next step, many Greeks fear, is weaponization. Urban guerilla groups have multiplied and bomb explosions are now a common occurrence – one attack nearly killed the minister of the Orwellianly-named Ministry for the Protection of the Citizen in June. With Greece’s social cohesion at its frailest in decades, this is not just an economic crisis; it is one of values too. TRENDS asks seven very different Greeks their views over where the country is headed.

Nicolas Vernicos, shipping magnate and president of the Greek chapter of the International Chamber of Commerce:

I’m the fourth generation of a seafaring family from the island of Sifnos. My great-grandfather moved to Constantinople in 1850 and started transporting goods and passengers across Istanbul’s Bosporus Channel, from Europe to Asia.

We’re the only bourgeois family whose men have been jailed consistently over four generations for fighting for democracy. Our family tradition is to stay in this country and fight, especially during hard times. I was in jail during the dictatorship of the Colonels in the early 1970s for being an anti-Junta activist. My father was a minister in the post-dictatorship national unity government. After the dictatorship, I visited a Palestinian training camp in Lebanon along with my brother, who was a deputy in the Greek Socialist Youth group.

   Email This Post      Print This Post       | Next