...And Dreams Are Dreams

Meanwhile, Greece was changing courtier

governments as if they were shirts: Tzavellas, Koundouriotis, Kanaris, Kriezis. Otto had been forced to grant a Constitution in 1944, after a bloodless revolution, but he kept violating it. He was still the

“tyrant,” the “traitor,” the “hyena,” the “foreign locust,” and his wife Amalia the “Greek Messalina.”

Lyons found her “very beautiful, but also very proud of her relations with the royal family of Russia. ” So where did this leave the English? How would they impose their politics on this small state that was so critical to the control of the Mediterranean? The captain of the past wrote: “England was determined to have total influence over Greece at any cost. Any other solution would be contrary to her interests. Just as Russia exercised its uncontested influence over the Serbo-Vlach countries, England wanted to control Greece. That was what the interests of England dictated. ”

One hundred years later, after the betrayal of the second insurrection, the problem would recur: instead of the czar there would be Stalin, instead of Palmerston, Churchill; the French would once again constitute a European guarantee.

But what should you do when others are fighting over your own interests? “A wise Greek government could benefit from these pernicious politics by flattering this colossus who, thanks to his floating fortresses, held in his hands the fate of our coasts, our navy, and our commerce. But where to find such a government? For five whole years British politics had been scorned in Greece. And yet one cannonball would be enough to end it all.”

And so the new ambassador, Wise, who was to replace Lyons (whom Otto and Amalia had not wanted and finally succeeded in getting rid of), arrived freshly pressed from the Foreign Office. A sour, querulous, disagreeable man, but a lover of ancient Greece, he found the opportunity, amidst the governmental instability, to dig up the old question of the islets of Sapiéntza and Elafónisos, north of Kythira, and to claim that they came under the jurisdiction of the Ionian State, which at the time was British. But since such an untimely claim could provoke the intervention of the protection powers, France and Russia, Wise first brought up British national Don Pacifico’s damage claim for the pillaging of his house by “Christian natives indignant at the ban of the burning of Judas.”

This claim consisted of 9,700 drachmas for money stolen; 12,000 drachmas for distress caused; 665,000

drachmas for the destruction of Portuguese letters of credit (how could one possibly verify that?), etc., etc., which came to a total of over 800,000 drachmas.

(“One hundred years later,” thought the narrator to himself, “in Athens, when the Italians handed over the city to the Germans, and they wanted to round up the Jews like they had done in Salonika, Archbishop Damaskinos started christening them; the chief of police issued certificates of christening that very day.

The ones who did not have time to get baptized were saved by E.A.M., which issued a proclamation to the people telling them to help the Jews escape to the mountains or to the Near East. Not a single one, not even half a one, was caught by the Nazis. Only the English played their dirty game again in 1948, by not letting them disembark when Israel became a state.”) The captain of the past knew nothing of all this.

All he knew was that he wanted to load up at Piraeus and set sail for Smyrna where a cargo of silk was waiting for him, and he couldn’t leave. Parker, the commander of the fleet, had sent an ultimatum with a time limit of twenty-four hours. As soon as the twenty-four hours were up, he declared the blockade.