Packing up for Athens!

I did none, relying on my fluency in shouting the famous slogan from the anti-junta riots 35 years earlier: "Anathema tin periergia sou re Kolombe!" (Damn your curiosity Colombus!) That failing to help, I could always fake like a foreign comrade who had come to help. "Den mpirazi re pedia!" (The revolutionaries in my country always put on a suit and a necktie!) Which would be trueÉ Most men who have been trying to "counter-revolutionize" Turkey do wear suits and neckties.

After giving orders to my bank to buy generous quantities of stocks in Greek glass makers and getting the last updates on the Athens riots, I thought how lucky the Turks and Greeks were. The Greek rioters would have had to face the Turkish police if they lived on this side of the Aegean, and the Turkish police would have had to face the Greek rioters if they lived on the other side, with strict orders not to harm a single rioter, a probability close to nil.

The criticism that Costas Karamanlis, the Greek prime minister, has mismanaged the riots is probably accurate. Instead of turning to Israel and Germany to replenish depleted reserves of gas to contain demonstrators, Mr Karamanlis could simply have borrowed divisions of the Turkish riot police. I am confident that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan would have given a helping hand to "his good friend Costas," and with the Turkish police in charge, the Greek rioters would probably have repented never to riot again for another half a century. Alternatively, Mr Karamanlis, copying Mr Erdogan’s recent rhetoric, could always advise Athenian shop-owners to defend themselves by shooting at the rioters.

Unsurprisingly, according to a public opinion poll in the Greek daily Kathimerini, 60 percent of Greeks think the riots constitute social uprising. But why? A friend from across the Atlantic rang me to ask the same question, "Why do they not just sip their ouzos and enjoy the finer moments of life?"

The simple answer could have been, "Why, but this is an ouzo revolution for more democracy," had Mr Karamanlis been on unfriendly terms with the capital where my friend resides. If they have their "oranges" and "cloves" around the Black Sea, we have our "ouzo" around the Aegean. But no, Mr Karamanlis is not a pro-Russian former Soviet leader.

Could it be hopelessness, as many analyses suggest? Well, it cannot be measured, but empirical evidence tells us that per capita happiness in Greece must be one of the highest in the world. Joblessness? At 7.4 percent as opposed to 10 percent in Turkey? Why then do the Turkish youths not riot?

Rioting for economic mismanagement with a per capita income three times more than Turkey’s officially "upgraded" income? And the minimum wage twice as much? With no young man recently dying under torture like Engin Ceber, yet not a single official resigning? What, really, would the rioting Greek youth do if they learned the number of voters suddenly rose by 15 percent within a year, or by 6 million people as in the Turkish case, just ahead of an election?

Corruption and nepotism? Well, Greece can only play in the third division compared to the Superleague team Turkey. What, really, would the Greek rioters have done if a company run by Mr Karamanlis’s son-in-law appeared as the sole bidder in a government tender, purchased Greece’s second biggest media group, and if that deal was financed by loans from two state banks?

All that reminded me of an opinion poll in September which revealed that 80 percent of Turks said they were indifferent to corruption when voting. Ironically, the findings of that poll had fallen into the public domain when Giorgos Voulgarakis, then Greek Minister for merchant marine had to resign over a matter that was not "illegal," but was "unethical." Poor Mr Voulgarakis, he was just a victim of being a politician on the wrong side of the Aegean!

But why are the Turks and Greeks, who have many things in common, just too different in respecting/standing up against the state authority?

The answer is perhaps hidden in the personality of one man, Greek poet and politician, and later an MP, Alexandros Panagoulis, who in his torture cell during the junta wrote some of his poems on the walls literally with his blood because he had been deprived of a pen and a piece of paper. When Panagoulis died in a suspicious car accident which many people believed was a murder, nearly 2 million Greeks attended his funeral, shouting "Zi, zi, zi!" (He lives, he lives, he lives!) The year was 1976, and Greece’s population was less than 10 million.