The Full Catastrophe (6 page)

“That is to say, he was reading the gospel?” commented one guest on the program.

The show’s moderator fumed with anger over the scandal.

“The Troika had to come for us to do such investigations?” he said to the television audience. “It’s an embarrassment. It makes you want to go crazy. It makes you want to say, ‘Good what’s happening to us, good what they’re doing to us,’ those who’ve come from the outside.”

Television pundits and the mayor called for a criminal investigation, with the doctor receiving the most vitriolic criticism. A few months after my visit, the doctor resigned from the hospital. Over the phone, he told me his decision had nothing to do with the “noise” about the blindness scandal. “I was ready to retire,” he said.

One afternoon in Zakynthos Town, I went for a walk in the city center, passing jewelry and designer clothing stores and cafés. At the time, there were no boarded up-stores or other signs of economic misery that were increasingly prevalent in Athens. Rather, the town appeared to be pretty well off. The city government may have long been broke, but the people living there seemed to be doing okay. I passed the offices of the island’s religious authorities, located near the mayor’s office, and decided to stop in and see if I could speak with someone about the spiritual state of the island. At the door, a man in a black robe asked me the purpose of my visit. I told him I was writing a story about “the blindness.”

I was introduced to the general vicar, Panagiotis Kapodistrias, who also wore a long black robe and had a graying beard. On his office wall hung a framed image of Jesus lying dead at the foot of the cross, pierced by two spears. I sat down across from the vicar at his desk, and he offered me a piece of baklava from “Constantinople,” as Greeks refer to Istanbul, where he’d recently visited the Ecumenical Patriarch, the spiritual head of Orthodox Christianity. As we spoke about the quality of the baklava, a Polish woman entered the office and asked for money. She had three children, she said, and couldn’t find work. She had made twenty-three euros a day over the summer unloading trucks, a job, she said, “only a man should have done.”

“I don’t ever see you in church,” the vicar said.

“I do go,” she replied.

“I’m not going to give you a lot,” the vicar told her. He filled out a little slip of paper for her, noting the size of the donation—fifty euros—which she could exchange for cash in another office.

“That’s a lot,” said the Polish woman. “I can live on that for two or three days.” She left the office, bowing toward the vicar. “Go with Jesus,” she said.

I turned on my recorder and he, like the others I interviewed, began unprompted.

“Greece, as we all know, is undergoing a crisis. The crisis appears to be economic and political, but deep down, it’s ethical.” Then he proceeded to blame the ethical problems on foreigners, in particular tourists. Zakynthos had an increasingly uneasy relationship with package tourism. In 2008, a group of drunken British tourists conducted an oral sex contest on a Zakynthos beach, outraging locals. Also that year, according to press reports, a Greek woman tried to set a drunken British tourist’s scrotum on fire after he exposed it to several local women at a nightclub. Tourism was a form of neocolonialism that corrupted local souls, according to the vicar. Zakynthos citizens, in the process of catering to the visitors by building inexpensive hotels, had become “the slave of the tourists,” he said. “This is how the crisis has arisen.” To exit it, he added, locals must avoid becoming one with the foreigner and return to what they truly are.

By this point, the cause of the country’s fiscal problems had become a hotly debated subject in Greece. There were many theories for why Greece was in trouble and who was responsible. For the rapidly rising far left, the Greek people were generally blameless victims of inevitably doomed neoliberal policies that were benefiting the big capitalists at the expense of everyone else. For the rising extreme right, Jewish bankers and job-stealing immigrants were to blame. The two mainstream parties blamed each other until, due to a rapid decline in their popularity, they were forced to band together in a coalition in order to maintain power. For many, the Troika was most culpable. So was German chancellor
Angela Merkel. Greece was the target of an international plan for economic plunder, many believed. This, however, was the first time I’d heard tourism (albeit quite raunchy tourism), an economic lifeblood for Greece, referred to as the source of the nation’s problems. All these explanations shared one commonality: they laid the blame elsewhere, often on outsiders. The tendency is partly understandable. Greece is a small country that has long been subject to foreign sway, and at the time, it was under the dominion of its foreign creditors. The vicar’s argument and others like it, however, proved alluring to the many Greeks who wished to avoid considering the extent to which they were responsible for their own decline. The vicar’s comments made me wonder what chances Greece had of improving its fate if this was the widespread nature of the self-examination taking place. Before I left his office, the vicar signed a book he had written on the theology of environmental protection and gave it to me. I briefly opened it to the introduction, which began: “Whether we want it or not, we are obliged before a common danger to coexist and to cooperate.” I thanked him for the present.

The next day was the feast day of St. Nicholas, and that morning I waited for the ferry departing for the Peloponnese. A stiff wind blew, churning the Ionian waters and sweeping cottony cumulus clouds across the crisp blue sky. In the town center, the modal sound of an Orthodox church service piping through speakers on the domed roof of St. Nicholas Church fluttered in the wind gusts. “Both now and ever and unto the ages of ages,” sang the vicar and other clerics. A recitation of the Lord’s Prayer washed over the city, mingling with the techno beats emanating from the outdoor cafés, where patrons huddled near heat lamps, smoking and sipping coffee. The sermon was about St. Nicholas, and his capacity for “unadulterated” love. On the main square, city workers hung white string lights in the form of a Christmas tree.

After I departed Zakynthos, I visited a public hospital in Athens where the health ministry had summoned some four hundred blindness benefit recipients from the island to take an eye exam in order to determine whether they were really blind. Athens was a long way from Zakynthos, but the government did not trust nearby doctors to make accurate diagnoses, forcing island residents to make the long trip. In the hospital waiting room, I met Panagiotis Vozaitis, a skinny, bowlegged, retired currant farmer from Zakynthos. Vozaitis had not received the blindness benefit, but had decided to make the trip with his daughter anyway when he heard the exams were taking place. He had eye problems, he said, and had twice tried to get the blindness benefit, but had been unsuccessful. With his small farmer’s pension, he could not afford even the bargain rate of eight hundred euros, paid in two installments, he alleged the island ophthalmologist had requested of him for a blindness diagnosis. “If I had it, I would’ve paid it,” Vozaitis told me. Now he was in Athens to see if he could get the benefit in the proper manner—due to blindness. Vozaitis said he could not see out of his right eye, and had some problems with the left. A doctor later told me the old farmer wasn’t impaired enough to qualify for the benefit, for which one has to be almost completely blind in both eyes. I had suspected as much. As Vozaitis and I spoke in the hospital, his pale blue left eye focused alertly on me as he talked about the crisis and derided the politicians who “stole it all.” Though he did not technically qualify for the benefit, Vozaitis’s story showed how Greece’s social safety net, while having been abused as if it were a slush fund by many of the country’s politicians, was deficient at fulfilling the purpose for which it was intended. Vozaitis, after all, had traveled several hours because he could not trust he would receive a benefit he might have been entitled to without having to pay a fee. When I mentioned Gasparos, the man who had been prefect when many suspect blindness benefits were handed out, Vozaitis laughed.

“Those who eat a lot also give to those who vote for them,”
he told me. “That prefect is going to become bishop one day.” This expression, to “eat,” is the ubiquitous Greek shorthand for illicit feasting on public money. Those politicians who ate also bequeathed some of the spoils to the voters, Vozaitis was saying. This way of seeing things, while accurate, was also somewhat controversial in Greece. To the extent there was any consensus on the domestic cause of Greece’s fiscal problems, it was that “the politicians ate it all,” a phrase I very frequently heard when discussing the crisis with Greeks. There was less often acknowledgment of citizens’ eating. When one prominent Greek politician offered a more inclusive theory of how Greece’s money had been consumed, it was not well received. The politician, Theodoros Pangalos, was deputy prime minister in 2010 when, speaking in parliament, he offered an answer to the question Greeks were asking the politicians: “How did you eat the money?” Pangalos, a hefty man who barely fit into his parliamentary seat, then answered: “We ate it all together in the framework of a relationship of political clientelism, corruption, payouts, and the debasement of the meaning of the politics itself.” This statement—reduced to “We ate it together”—quickly became famous and served as a kind of mantra of the debt crisis, though it was usually uttered in irony and outrage, as Greeks felt that politicians and their powerful associates ate it, or at least a lot more of it than everyone else. Yet that anger did not take into account the fact that politicians did not exist in a vacuum, and had found ways to involve their voters in the feasting, thereby securing their electoral place at the head of the table. The manner in which this allegedly transpired on Zakynthos was flagrant, but the vast majority of the time it was much more mundane, and legal: rapid wage and benefit increases for public workers, for example; generous pensions for people working in certain professions; the protection of monopolistic cartels through arbitrary regulations. Since politicians orchestrated this system and greatly benefited from it, it seemed indecent of
them—particularly one like Pangalos, long in the PASOK ruling elite—to implicate the electorate, which, broadly speaking, did not believe that it shared in the responsibility.

Vozaitis had a point about the former prefect and the island’s voters. In May 2012, Zakynthos elected Gasparos to the Greek parliament as a member of New Democracy. The result seemed to call into question voters’ willingness to upend the political status quo they often decried. On the night of his win, Gasparos walked through the streets of Zakynthos Town wearing a suit and tie striped with the blue and white of the Greek flag. His supporters gathered on the streets and applauded, many of them kissing him on both cheeks. The outcome, Gasparos told the crowd, was a victory for ethical and honorable citizens trying to improve life on the island. “Tonight is not my night,” he said. “Tonight belongs to the people of Zakynthos. To the youth. It belongs to hope. It belongs to a better tomorrow.”

Unfortunately for Gasparos, his success was short-lived. Nationally, the election was inconclusive, resulting in no clear majority and a hung parliament. A new vote took place one month later, and though Gasparos received more votes the second time around, he nevertheless came in second to a candidate from the surging leftist Syriza. The new victor, a middle-aged lawyer, Stavros Kontonis, said his election represented a condemnation of the corruption that had brought infamy to the island. It proved Zakynthos was not inhabited by corrupt people, said Kontonis, but rather had long fallen into bad political hands.

The outcome also meant Gasparos would not benefit from the parliamentary immunity enshrined in the Greek constitution. He was later charged with fraud, as was the ophthalmologist accused of making false diagnoses, Greek newspapers reported at the end of 2014; both maintained their innocence. Locals accused of wrongly taking blindness benefits would also face criminal charges. This degree of accountability was highly unusual in
Greece, and it indicated a growing appetite for transformation. The outcome of the 2012 elections, however, meant that the two main parties that had for decades fostered the system of political patronage remained in parliamentary power for a few more years by forming a coalition. On the night of his defeat, Gasparos, appearing on television, said there was still cause to celebrate. Despite his loss, his party would be leading the national government. And he offered words of assurance for his supporters. “I’ll remain in politics,” he said.

2
Off the Books

The just is always a loser in comparison with the unjust.

—Thrasymachus, in
The Republic
by Plato

H
ydra is a tall, barren rock that juts from the Aegean Sea just off the eastern edge of the Peloponnese. A few thousand people live on the island, mostly in a settlement of white stone homes in “Hydra Town,” which rises like a theater on slopes that form a horseshoe over the main harbor. Hydra derives its name not from the eponymous nine-headed serpent of Greek mythology, slain by Hercules, but from the Ancient Greek word for water—at least according to locals, who say the island once contained an abundance of springs. Today, there is virtually no fresh water on Hydra, and the noxious-tasting auxiliary that flows from Hydriot pipes is shipped in on tankers. Given the paucity of fresh water and arable land, locals have traditionally sailed for a living and once thrived off a vibrant merchant marine business. The island now benefits from a lot of tourism, and the boats entering and leaving the harbor in the summer are often ferries and yachts from Athens, which is a short ride to the north. There are no cars on Hydra, a circumstance that also tends to lure foreign tourists. When they
get off the ferry, the tourists usually encounter a row of men offering donkey rides, the traditional transportation method for the island’s steep stone alleys. Hydra is an altogether calm place. Riot police are not usually needed to keep order.

One night in the summer of 2012, however, a bit of disarray erupted on the island following a visit from undercover financial-crime police officers. The officers had visited a century-old fish
taverna
on the harbor called Psaropoula—or “fishing boat”—and reported to have observed several violations take place. Greek restaurant owners are required by law to leave receipts on their customers’ tables with the delivery of each order, not at the end of a meal as one would be accustomed to in other parts of the world. The rule is supposed to compel restaurant owners to keep official records of their sales, and make it easier to spot when they don’t. The government, badly in need of cash, had freshly elevated the consumption tax on restaurant meals and other purchases to a steep 23 percent, though Aegean islands benefited from a discounted rate. Businesses often skirted the tax with the justification that this allowed them to offer lower prices at a time when their customers, due to the economic situation, were getting increasingly thrifty. At Psaropoula, the officers said several tables had not been given proper receipts. They introduced themselves to the restaurateur, Sevasti Mavrommatis, a stocky woman in her mid-fifties with a liking for floral-patterned blouses, and told her that because her violation was flagrant, she was under arrest. Mavrommatis said her blood pressure surged and she began to tremble and feel faint. “I didn’t kill anyone,” she told me as she recalled the events a few weeks later. “Why put me in jail with the criminals?” The police grudgingly allowed Mavrommatis to go to the local hospital, and instead arrested her son Ilias, who worked at the restaurant as a waiter. The police planned to transfer him by ferry to a jail on the mainland to get his fingerprints taken, but some locals had other ideas.

The perception of unjust tax treatment has throughout history spawned insurrections, and on Hydra, a minor one was about to occur. As word of what happened made its way around the island, anger brewed. When a rumor spread that police had managed to successfully transport Ilias onto a ferry, an angry crowd of some sixty to eighty locals rushed to the port to liberate him. A number of the insurgents boarded the boat and got into an altercation with the crew. Ilias, however, was not on board. The police officers, having heard of the presence of a growing mob, had abandoned their plan to transport the captive and remained in the small island precinct. Port authority officials said they managed to remove the angry locals from the boat, and it departed, but the ferry company canceled service from the island due to security reasons until the situation was deemed pacified.

As night fell, the insurgents amassed around the local precinct, a quaint stone building in a narrow alley surrounded by buildings that resembled it. The officers inside locked the doors and windows, barricading themselves in for a long night. Outside, the locals cut electricity to the station and began to hurl firecrackers and flares at it from surrounding buildings. “Free Ilias,” they yelled. In the early morning hours, riot police arrived from the mainland by boat—Ilias described it as a “warship”—to escort the captive to the port. The rebels responded, coming into physical and verbal conflict with the riot police, wrote a local blogger. This resulted “in the throwing of tear gas, jeering and generally a very unpleasant tension on the harbor side, events that our island has never experienced before.”

Ilias had his fingerprints taken on the mainland and was quickly released and returned home. Riot police also returned to the island to escort the financial-crime investigators, who were checking additional establishments. One has to wonder what they were thinking, given that stealth is a requirement for such controls to bear fruit. Locals, it seemed, were amused the second
time around. Teenagers snapped selfies with the riot police, and some Hydriots described a carnival-like atmosphere. The returning investigators found no other violations, locals told me, as if this proved local compliance with tax laws. The following day, the Greek press eagerly reported on the episode, and the news was covered in northern Europe too, where it was taken as further proof of Greece’s unruliness. A lot of locals found the unfavorable attention embarrassing. “It’s not nice for our little island to have police here,” the mayor at the time told me in his office, which was covered with Victorian-like portraits of prominent Hydriots. “You’re a Greek,” he added. “What you write has to be correct for our country so an ugly picture of Greece doesn’t come out abroad.”

The controls were part of a broader government campaign to fulfill the central demand of its creditors: that the Greek government collect more taxes. Tax evasion in Greece was a national preoccupation. The pervasiveness of the habit, and the government’s enduring unwillingness to do anything about it, was more than any other factor the cause of Greece’s financial troubles. Had more Greeks paid their taxes, the country’s debt crisis may have been altogether avoided (assuming, perhaps unrealistically, some degree of responsible use of the hypothetical funds on the part of the government). But because the government had long allowed, even enabled, widespread tax evasion, it now faced the challenge of determining where to begin cracking down. One significant area of tax evasion involved the consumption tax on everyday purchases such as restaurant meals. While people deal in cash and off the books in order to avoid sales tax most everywhere, it was a particularly common phenomenon in Greece, where finding an offense of this type was like shooting fish in a barrel. The summer of the Hydra episode, the finance ministry, which, in addition to the police, conducted its own checks of restaurants and businesses in tourist areas, said it found violations at more than half of the some 4,000 establishments it visited, totaling 31,237 offenses. The
annual revenue loss from uncollected consumption tax in Greece amounted to 10 billion euros a year, according to a 2014 report by the European Commission, over 5 percent of its gross domestic product.

Despite stepped-up enforcement efforts like the one on Hydra, however, people actually avoided the tax more as Greece’s economic collapse deepened. That is because consumers had less money to spend, which meant not only that they did not consume as much, but that when they did, they also made a greater effort to avoid paying taxes. The growing disinclination to pay also had a lot to do with the fact that a slew of other new taxes were being implemented around that time, such as a hefty property tax automatically tacked onto electricity bills as a way of trying to ensure payment; not paying the tax potentially meant getting your electricity cut. Greeks scornfully called the new property tax the
haratsi,
after a hated levy imposed by the Ottomans. The new and hiked taxes meant that many people’s overall tax burden was rising just as their incomes were plunging. Compounded with stepped-up enforcement measures, it all seemed unfair and heavy-handed to a lot of Greeks, particularly because many believed that, while the obligation to pay for the crisis was being loaded on them, enforcement measures did not apply to the worst tax evaders—the rich, the powerful, and the politically connected.

The Hydra episode therefore sparked an emotional debate. Why should a humble tavern owner receive stern justice while the rich remained seemingly untouched? Shortly after the Hydra incident, the conservative-led Greek government felt obliged to justify the action. “The huge problem of tax evasion plagues the Greek economy, canceling every effort for recovery and hope,” the government spokesman said. “Wherever this tax evasion comes from, whatever its source, it must be controlled and stamped out immediately and exemplarily,” he said. “The demise of the state will not be tolerated.” In response, the far-left opposition, Syriza,
repeatedly accused the government of an unwillingness to go after the moneyed elite to which it was tied. “The restaurateur in Hydra, you took her in handcuffed,” Alexis Tsipras, the party leader, said in the Greek parliament. Would the government likewise handcuff and lock up the big tax dodgers who had hidden billions of euros in foreign bank accounts? “We are waiting to see. You won’t take them. We will take them, though.”

At the heart of the debate over the Hydra episode was a critical question. The government had run up what amounted to a very large and growing credit card bill of over 300 billion euros. Who ought to pay? In Hydra, the battlefront over this question was roughly partitioned between the wealthy people arriving for vacation on yachts and the island residents who catered to them for a living. That was evident one morning when I walked into a bookstore on the island to buy a reporter’s notebook and found two men in the middle of an argument.

“Was what happened on Hydra a good thing?” said one of the men, a vacationing fifty-nine-year-old who was buying a newspaper.

“If you kick a dog, it will bite you!” yelled the owner of the shop, who had a comparatively pallid complexion opposite the vacationer and was justifying the local rebellion.

The vacationer, who wore a T-shirt that said
ECONOMICS
across the front, contended that a small amount of tax evasion from a lot of small businesses added up to generate “a very big problem.” He said he had a company that imported spare parts for cars, and bigger businesses such as his could not avoid taxes as easily as shopkeepers and tavern owners could. “I who eat and drink here, no one gave me receipts unless I asked!” he yelled at the shop owner before heading off to enjoy the cloudless day on a rented motorboat.

The shop owner then discussed the issue with me for an additional half hour. It was no coincidence, he said, that the police
arrived on the island just before Prime Minister Samaras took a trip to Berlin to see the German chancellor. “He wanted to show, ‘I’m a good boy. I’m going to stop tax evasion,’ ” the store owner said. “They haven’t even begun with the tax evasion of the big capital”—a phrase used by Greek leftists to refer to the rich capitalist elite. “There is no justice.” I paid for my notebook with some change, and the shop owner dutifully gave me a receipt.

That evening, I stopped by Psaropoula, the restaurant at the center of the debate. It was primely located on the seaside promenade not far from where the ferries docked. Most of the establishments along the harbor were empty, as people were still waking up from their late afternoon siestas. A growing shroud of evening shade encroached on the town, though the rocky cliffs above it were still brightly illuminated, creating a contrast that my eyes worked hard to reconcile. Inside, I found Sevasti Mavrommatis in the kitchen grilling sardines. The waiter, her son Ilias, who was nearly thirty and had a slight goatee, sat at the cash register underneath a row of icons, counting change collected in ziplock bags. As I waited at a table by the door for them to finish their tasks, I examined the large black-and-white family photographs hanging on the wall. In one of the pictures, a young Mavrommatis in an embroidered dress and white shoes stood next to the restaurant entrance looking happily at the camera while her handsome, grinning father embraced her. The restaurant had been in the family for four generations, and despite Greece’s economic problems, business still seemed to be going okay. The instability of the previous few months—two parliamentary elections within a month, massive protests, a bank run over fears the country would exit the euro—were developments that tended to discourage foreign visitors, and Greece that year suffered the consequences with regard to tourism. Still, the island received a loyal mix of affluent Athenians and foreign returnees.

When Ilias joined me at the table, he told me he didn’t know
why the police wrote them up for what he said were eleven violations. The restaurant, he said, had only three tables at the time for which there were open orders, and receipts for those were on the way. “The whole situation is strange.” His mother joined us at the table and told me she offered to pay the officers a fine for any accidental offense, but an arrest seemed very excessive. “I ask you for humanity,” she said she told the officers. As I jotted this down in my notebook, a passing customer in a pink dress paused at our table. “The only business that doesn’t steal is this one!” she told me in reference to its tax obligations, and then proceeded to the toilet.

Ilias put the number of locals who rallied to his defense that evening at one to two hundred. “They were angry,” he said. “Three-fourths of homes have had their electricity cut,” he said, very much exaggerating the number of people who suffered the consequences of not being able to afford the
haratsi.
He and his mother, he added, worked from morning until night. “The government catches us and leaves the big ones. They can’t catch the big ones. Or they don’t want to.”