Agiotfest 2015

For a seventh year my friend Paul McGovern runs his music festival at Agios Ioannis in the centre of Corfu...

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This is a quote from page 12 of the first chapter - The Ploys of Cunning - from the the 1978 book by the French scholars Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant called Les ruses de l’intelligence: la mètis des Grecs, translated later into English...

Antilochus won by skill, or trickery or cheating; cunning or...?

With this the horses, responding to his threat, speeded up for a while, and soon the steadfast Antilochus saw a narrow place in the sunken road ahead, where a stream swollen by winter rain had eroded the track and hollowed out the course. Menelaus drove on assuming no one could overtake, but Antilochus veered alongside, almost off the track. Then Menelaus called to him, in alarm: ‘Rein in Antilochus, that’s recklessness! The track’s wider further on. Pass there if you can, mind my chariot, don’t wreck us both!’ He shouted loud enough, but Antilochus, pretending not to hear, plied his whip and drove the more wildly. They ran side by side a discus length, as far as a young athlete testing his strength can hurl it from the shoulder, then Menelaus held back, and his pair gave way, fearing the teams might collide and overturn the light chariots, hurling their masters in the dust, for all their eagerness to win. Red-haired Menelaus stormed at Antilochus: ‘You’re a pest Antilochus, we Achaeans credited you with more sense. All the same, you’ll not win a prize, when I force you to answer on oath to this.’ The Iliad Bk XXIII:362-447 The chariot race

I was at Euston Station at 9.15pm on Thursday when I saw - for seconds - on a big Sky screen above the concourse, the news that Tsipras had resigned...

So for the third time in eight months, Greece will hold a national vote. In late January after SYRIZA won a famous victory their new leader proclaimed 'the future has begun' telling the electorate...

"You are an example of history which is changing... Your mandate is undoubtedly cancelling the bailouts of austerity and destruction...The troika for Greece is the thing of the past"

Then this June Tsipras won a 'No' referendum testing the population's  opinion of the terms of the third bail-out demanded by EU finance ministers - the third Memorandum of Understanding. Accounts suggest the result astonished him, and many others. Now Tsipras calls a third election -Sunday Sept 20th I've read - gambling on a good chance of winning again, despite the inevitable break-away from SYRIZA of MPs who see his acceptance of the third memorandum as a betrayal...and, the unlikely possibility, that, as the Greek constitution requires, other political parties are able to command sufficient majority in the Hellenic parliament to form a government without an election...Yannis Varoufakis, Finance minister of Greece, still an MP, resigned from the government over his former colleague's acceptance of the third Memo...

'Tsipras made a decision on that night of the referendum not only to surrender to the troika but also to implement the terms of surrender on the basis that it is better that a progressive government implement terms of surrender that it despises than leave it to the local stooges of the troika, who would implement the same terms of surrender with enthusiasm...This mutation I have already witnessed. Those in our party/government who underwent it, then turned against those who refused to mutate, the result being a split in the party that our people, the courageous voters who voted No, did not deserve'

Long ago I learned why 'many-travelled' Odysseus 'turning one way, then the next' has a special place in the pantheon of Greek heroes - renowned for his brilliance, guile, and versatility - polytropos πολυτρόπως - known by the epithet Odysseus the Cunning (mētis μῆτις - cunning intelligence). Richard Pine wrote in March:

Cunning is integral to Greek integrity, hence the disfavour it incurs from Anglo- and Teutonic mindsets...Greece is playing the game of her life, and how she plays the game despite holding a folding hand, will determine the history of the coming future. Being geographically small, Greece and Greeks value the classical merit of cunning - the talent of metis, referring in Greek to wisdom or craft or nous, and to the goddess of wisdom and prudence - η Μήτις. Cunning in Hellenic culture stands higher than it does in ours (tho' Greeks have seen perfidious Albion as a mirror). We are more wary of cunning. It can be ruefully respected, but also detested - no part of our understanding of integrity. Of necessity it's different in Greece.

Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant published a book in 1978 called Les ruses de l’intelligence: la mètis des Grecs, translated in 1991 as Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society.

...There is no doubt that mêtis is a type of intelligence and of thought, a way of knowing; it implies a complex but very coherent body of mental attitudes and intellectual behaviour which combine flair, wisdom, forethought, subtlety of mind, deception, resourcefulness, vigilance, opportunism, various skills, and experience acquired over the years. It is applied to situations which are transient, shifting, disconcerting and ambiguous, situations which do not lend themselves to precise measurement, exact calculation or rigorous logic...

One critic of the original book wrote on Amazon.fr:

La métis, c'est le flair, la connaissance oblique et tordue qui permet de comprendre une situation. Une forme d'intelligence pratique, non analytique. C'est le contraire du savoir théorique, la sophia. C'est l'esprit de finesse opposé à l'esprit de géométrie.
Detienne et Vernant nous présentent cette forme d'intelligence pratique au travers de l'histoire des dieux dans la mythologie grecque. C'est une lecture utile à une époque où nous sommes dirigés par des crânes d'oeufs qui prétendent appliquer leurs théories partout et en tout lieu sans se soucier du contexte et de la réalité.

...from p.16 of Detienne's and Vernant's book...

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Like the serpent that wrapped itself around Laocoön...well not really. Our wisteria, ever ready to turn feral, had tangled itself up with our balcony and wind vane - the one designed by my stepfather showing two dogs, Genie the whippet and Sukie the Jack Russell - we owned long ago, brought to Greece from mum's home in the Highlands, but Mark saw the problem and sorted it and phoned us from Ano Korakiana an exquisite image of the sky as blue as her flag over the sky of beloved Greece...

208 Democracy Street (photo: Mark Jacks)

Professor Eleni Briasouli-Kapetanaki

I DON”T KNOW WHY I WAS SENT AN EMAIL ABOUT THIS POST BEING TAKEN DOWN DUE TO BREACH OF COMMUNITY GUIDELINES. THIS WAS POSTED BY MY HUSBAND, NOT BY ME. I HAVE NEVER POSTED ANYTHING ON BLOGGER. I AM ONLY SUBSCRIBED SO THAT I CAN READ MY HUSBAND’S BLOG!

I am describing this distinguished Greek academic because her expertise and interests relate so directly to the current problems of land use faced by Greece, and other countries blighted by the activities of the Lopachkins. Her interests, from her public CV are:

Environmental/Energy/Economic Planning and Policy Analysis Integrated Economic/Environmental/Energy Modeling Environmental Conflict Resolution, Mediation, and Negotiation Tourism and the Environment, Sustainable Tourism Development Planning Theory and Decision Making Planning Methods (Demographic, Economic, Evaluation, Integrated Models) Multicriteria Analysis and Evaluation

Look at just a sample of the things she writes about, in academic journals, in policy reports and in practitioner journals:

Land use policy and planning, theorizing, and modeling: Lost in translation, found in complexity?' Environment and Planning B (forthcoming). 'The institutional complexity of environmental policy and planning problems: The example of Mediterranean Desertification', Journal of Environmental Planning and Management (2003) 'The "commons" – Resources of collective ownership and collective responsibility: Concepts, problems and the question of their management'. Aeichoros (2003). 'Golf and tourism: The invisible sides of the moon'. Geografies (2003, forthcoming). (in Greek) 'Crete: Endowed by nature, privileged by geography, threatened by tourism?'. Journal of Sustainable Tourism, Vol. 11, No. 2&3 (2003, forthcoming). 'Sustainable tourism and the question of the commons'. Annals of Tourism Research Vol. 29, No. 4 (2002). 'Sustainable development and its indicators: Through a (planner’s) glass darkly'. Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, Vol. 44, No.3, 2001 'Policy-oriented integrated analysis of land use change: An analysis of data needs'. Environmental Management, Vol. 26, No. 2 (2001). (with J. Papazoglou and G. Bonanos) 'Risk Informed Decision Making in Land Use Planning' Journal of Risk Research 3(1): 69-92 (2000). 'Tourism and biodiversity: Impacts and issues', European Nature, No.3: 3, November 1999. 'Who plans whose sustainability? Alternative roles for planners'. Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, Vol. 42, No.6, 1999. 'Sustainable development and the informal sector: An uneasy relationship?', Journal of Environment and Development

Meanwhile the Athens News Agency has a report in my regular digest of stories from Greece [No.2975, 6 Oct 2007]:

[33] Agriculture ministry promises tough action against crooked forestry official Deputy Agriculture Minister Costas Kiltidis on Thursday pledged that the ministry will closely monitor the case of senior forestry service official Panagiotis Kanellopoulos - who currently faces a charge of bribery - and stressed that the ministry would not allow 'even a whisper' of suspicion regarding the existence of corrupt transactions in the forestry department. 'What must at last prevail is the morality of responsibility' Kiltidis said, adding that the response of the authorities would be 'ruthless in every direction'. He was answering a question raised by main opposition PASOK MP Theodoros Pangalos in Parliament, who pointed out that Kanellopoulos had already been granted two postponements in the hearing of the case against him. According to Pangalos, the whole Markopoulos area where Kanellopoulos served as head of the local forestry service was 'abuzz' with his activities. 'He operated in two ways: either by removing the designation of land as forested or public land and acknowledging it as private land, in return for bribes, or by blackmailing and raising issues that land was forested that he finally gave freely to be converted into building lots in order to earn money,' Pangalos claimed. The MP further noted that the accused and a team that quite likely assisted him were rumoured to have earned huge sums in this manner, while pointing out that Kanellopoulos had a highly luxurious residence and lived in a 'scandalous' manner. Pangalos also commented on the fact that the same forestry official had let it be known that he was extremely highly connected and could expect support, and that his brother was a trade unionist that was very well known at the agriculture ministry. 'I am not suggesting that this constitutes some sort of responsibility but it is undoubtedly an interesting dimension that must be treated carefully. It would be better if postponements of his trial did not continue,' the MP added. Kiltidis noted that the forestry official was being prosecuted by justice and through internal disciplinary proceedings and that the Public Administration Inspectors and Comptrollers Corps had been called in to investigate any cases that Kanellopoulos had handled. Thanking Pangalos for his question, he said that the entire government and leadership of the ministry were determined to uphold the law, according to the prime minister's orders. Kanellopoulos was arrested on September 24 after he accepted a bribe of 5,000 euros in pre-marked notes from a woman to give a favourable opinion in a property case concerning her husband.

This is not a Greek problem. This is a far wider problem which in the way i am framing it involves two very different types of Greek with highly contrasting values and attitudes. The market for Greek land is global. We with our blind love for Greece, and our property ownership in Corfu are among the millions of those consuming the dream and stoking passions for 'a place in the sun' (I am referencing an exhibition held at our National Exhibition Centre near Birmingham only days ago at which two friends of ours from Corfu had a stand - people who are doing property development 'the right way' but without getting on any moral high horse - see a revised version of 'The Frogs' earlier in this blog). It seemed to me, being only partially frivolous, that this juxtaposition of an academic expert clearly committed to implementing rational and progressive land use policies in Greece with a corrupt forestry official accused of taking bribes from those who want to build on land intended for trees, echoes the familiar tension that has run through modern Greek history since the War of Independence, between klephts and constitutionalists. My apologies if this is an offensive analogy but it was the one that occurred to me. How i would like to see a conversation between forestry official Panagiotis Kanellopoulos (not to be mistaken for the Greek statesman of the same name) and academic Professor Eleni Briasouli. What could they say to one another? It is an impossible conversation - and has been for a long time. E-mail to Professor Briassouli

Dear Dr Briassouli. In apprehension I may have caused offence or even been impolite in taking your name in vain I thought I would check for your permission and, hopefully approval, for posting your public details on my blog (URL below) and on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sibadd/1495025540/ http://democracystreet.blogspot.com/ I am a lecturer at Birmingham University (UK) and very interested in evidence-based policy making (among other local government subjects) and curious about the degree to which your distinguished work enters political discourse in Greece. My comment on Flickr related to the contrast between your erudition and commitment and the corrupt practices of a forestry official selling off land ‘informally’. It seemed to me an ancient tension maintained by the global market for Greek land – to which I contribute as a consumer, owning a property in Corfu, since earlier this year. Yours sincerely, Simon Baddeley Inlogov, School of Public Policy University of Birmingham http://www.inlogov.bham.ac.uk/staff/baddeleys.htm