Bloody Greeks . .
. . living beyond their means; sponging off everyone else. Lazy bastards got everything they deserve coming to them!
So runs the mainstream media around much of Europe but particularly in Germany where the hard working and fiscally frugal natives see Iron Chancellor Merkel’s handing over of ‘their’ hard-earned savings to the dissolute Greeks as nothing short of insanity – she is unlikely to win re-election as a result.
Has the mainstream media shaped your view of the pampered and spoilt Greeks as it had mine? If you are feeling less than sympathetic to that nation’s plight can I respectfully ask you to read on – you might be as shocked and appalled as I was when I learned the truth.
To those of you who ask what all this has to do with ‘Archers – living, loving and travelling Turkey’ I answer ‘They are our neighbours, they are in desperate straits and, if nothing else, they deserve our understanding.’
In October 1940, His Arrogance Il Duce Benito Mussolini dragged Greece into WW2 by invasion of its territory. After six months of humiliation and certain defeat at the hands of the tiny Greek army supported by a rag-tag resistance movement Hitler bailed his Axis partner by invading the country in April 1941.
Greece was looted and devastated like no other under German occupation. The International Committee of the Red Cross estimated that between 1941 and 1943 at least 300,000 Greeks died of starvation as a direct result of German plundering. Even Il Duce was appalled when he complained to his foreign minister ‘The Germans have taken from the Greeks even their shoelaces’.
Germany and Italy, in addition to charging Greece outlandish ‘occupation expenses’, obtained by force an ‘occupation loan’ of $3.5 billion. Hitler himself recognised the legal nature of this loan and had given orders to start the process of repayment. After the war ended, at the Paris Conference of 1946, Greece was awarded $7.1 billion by way of war reparations in addition to the repayment of the ‘occupation loans’.
Italy repaid its share of the occupation loan; Italy and Bulgaria paid war reparations to Greece. Germany paid war reparations to Poland in 1956 and to former Yugoslavia in 1971. Greece demanded repayment of the occupation loan in 1945, 1946, 1947, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1974, 1987 and in 1995. Germany has consistently refused to pay its obligations to Greece arising from the occupation loan and war reparations. In 1964, German Chancellor Erhard promised repayment of the loan after reunification, which happened in 1990 – Greece is still waiting.
To give some idea of the scale of German obligations to Greece consider the following: using an interest rate linked to an average for US Treasury Bonds since 1944 of 6% it is estimated that the current value of the occupation loan is $163.8 billion and that for war reparations is $332 billion – that’s a combined total as of July 2011 of 575 billion euros that Germany owes to Greece!
It wasn’t just ‘even their shoelaces’ that was taken from the Greeks. During WW2 Greece lost 13% of its population, some from fighting but most from famine and war crimes. The Germans murdered the populations of 89 Greek villages and towns, burned to the ground 1,700 villages with many of their inhabitants executed; the country was reduced to rubble and its antiquities and treasures looted.
Location: Distomo, Kingdom of Greece (under German-occupation)
Date: 10 June 1944 Deaths: 214
Perpetrators: 4th SS Polizei Panzergrenadier Division
Next time you see or read of Merkel’s demands for more Greek belt tightening, more austerity, remember that if her government coughed up and met its obligations as it is legally required to do there wouldn’t be any sponging Greek wasters out on the streets. There wouldn’t be any more Greek suicide deaths to add to the war time total either.
Alan Fenn, Okçular Köyü
ps if you were surprised to learn these facts, put yourself in the shoes of all those decent people in Germany who have also been kept in the dark. Politics is a dirty game. There is a petition by Greek academics to call on Germany to make good on its obligations.
Anyway, what got me started on this line of thought was this – I was rummaging through some of my bits and bobs when I came across the story of a certain Nusret Berişa. Mr Berişa used to run a radio repair business from his workshop in the back streets of the Balat district in İstanbul. Mr Berişa was also a survivor from the long vanished age of steam radio. I say was because my notes are more than ten years old and this usta (craftsman) was of mature years even then. He would have nothing whatever to do with transistor radios – they were beneath contempt and, when broken, worthy of nothing more than the dustbin. The shelves of his workshop were stacked with old radios, some for sale, some awaiting repair. Alongside them were neatly stacked boxes of single and double-ganged tuning capacitors and dusty, fly-blown boxes of thermionic valves – you know, those things that look like strangely shaped light bulbs with equally strange names like ‘double diode triode’.
J and I found Antakya, the principal city of Hatay, SE Turkey, to be an astonishingly cosmopolitan place. Laid back, Istanbul fashions everywhere, and barely a headscarf to be seen. The old parts of the town are not extensive but are a delight to explore – the people, as everywhere in Turkey, are open and warm-hearted. If that is not enough for you then there is always the local speciality dessert, Künefe.
Anyway, enough of that! This post is about feeding the mind, not the belly; and just across the river from where J and I were stuffing ourselves lies the rather sad looking Museum of Archaeology. Had we not had an inkling of what lay inside we might well have given it a miss and that would have been a mistake. There are the usual marble tombs, busts and statues of long departed emperors, governors and their ladies – gods and goddesses, nymphs and shepherds (coming away), etc. There is also one of the most remarkable collections of Roman wall and floor mosaics to be found outside Ankara or Rome.
Here we go on another of those ‘Tardis’ time trips; this time back to the year 2003 of the Modern Era (as we have to say now). J and I were touring around the east of Turkey with our kaymakam ‘son’ and his very new and very delightful wife.
The kindly kaymakam had enquired about our plans and our mode of transport (my trusty Doblo) and had hurrumphed at its short-comings in such terrain. ‘This is an important town with much diplomatic comings and goings’ he informed us. ‘I have several 4x4s why don’t you use one of those? In fact, you might as well have my driver as well, he knows the way around.’
J and I were on our way up here to the cabin when we, along with others, were pulled over by the traffic police for a routine document check. It’s so routine here in Turkey that we expect it and are delighted when we are waved through and not over. In our more than 20 years of driving here we have been meticulous about all or documents and paperwork being in order because we really don’t want to fall foul of the bureaucracy here.
Join me as we slip back to a time before (I had) a digital camera – it is Spring; the year is 2003 and we are aboard a small boat heading for the island of Akhtamar, or Akdamar that lies 3 kms out into Lake Van in Eastern Turkey.
The Church of the Holy Cross was the seat of Armenian patriarchs from 1116 until 1895 when it was abandoned due to ‘difficulties’ between Armenians and the Ottoman Empire. The church fell into disrepair – in 1951 there was a concerted effort to demolish the complex – fortunately the total destruction was prevented by an observant military officer and an enlightened minister in Ankara. Today, all that remains is the church.
In 2005-6 the Turkish government carried out a programme of restoration and the church was opened as a museum in 2007. In 2010 the first mass in 95 years was celebrated and in the same year the cross was replaced on the dome.
. . an appropriate title for a trip back in time to 2004. J and I were on one of our periodic wanderings around the east of the country; Erzurum in general and the ‘almost’ town of Çat in particular. ‘Almost’, because the place is only about the size of a village and had to be twinned with another village a few kilometres away to qualify as a town. The photos left give you a good idea of how ‘basic’ the place is.
here’s some background. We were there visiting our ‘son’ who was the resident kaymakam with responsibility for an area covering some 30 villages. One of the splendid bonuses on these trips is getting to ‘shadow’ him as he goes about his daily tasks and visits to outlying parts of his ‘empire’.
earning ability of many of the young women by teaching them skills to do with machine embroidery. There was to be an exhibition and a presentation of certificates and, of course, the inevitable speeches.
Sometimes, living as we do in a country stuffed full of biological, historical and geographical gems, a land so overflowing with wonderful, wondrous superlatives, we forget to look around our own ‘backyards’. If you live by the junction of the A303 and A360 trunk roads in Wiltshire (UK), I bet that it wouldn’t take long before you wouldn’t even notice that Stonehenge was there!!
Çandır was one of the first places J and I considered when we were searching for a place to call home here in Turkey. It was Christmas Day 1996 when we arrived, shaken and bruised from a grinding drive along broken tracks (it would be several years before anything remotely resembling a road broke through to the village), and we were ready for something to eat and a glass of tea. This photo is of the original road in to the village.
Göle is a rather grubby, nondescript little town in Turkey’s Ardahan Province. It was also the scene of a minor revolution that, with a little luck and a fair wind, will have a profound effect on the lives of hundreds of kids.
Kaymakams wield considerable power and control substantial budgets; some use their position to bring real benefits to the areas under their control, whilst a few do little more than collect their monthly pay packets! We have, on numerous occasions, watched ‘our’ man make good on his promise to us that he would always seek to work for the people. We have witnessed countless individuals benefit from acts of relief, and numerous larger projects bring benefits to the wider community. From helping the destitute to setting up an organic food/milk/cheese cooperative; from pioneering environmentally friendly road surfacing (with a South African-Turkish company) to breaking the strangle-hold of monopoly produce buyers; we have seen so much good done.
On their special day, we joined the children, the media and the many members of the inevitable ‘protokol’ for the presentation of the prizes. As happens every day in Ardahan, it rained, which had no effect whatsoever on the proceedings and on the spontaneous street party that erupted.
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