From Tsirkas’ Drifting Cities
to Tsipras’ Drifting City

Many analyses about Greece conclude with a refrain that there is no precedent for what is taking place. However, we Alexandrians remember vividly the last days of our own Alexandria: Capital controls, travel restrictions, pervasive uncertainty. And after those, the threatening thunderclouds, the emergency measures and finally the diaspora of Alexandrians the world over. As the Greek crisis deepens, each day reminds some of us  of things we lived through in the early ‘60s.

Yesterday I visited my parents’ two dearest friends from Alexandria. Their two children, my brother and I grew up together, at a time when the grown ups were counting through the last days of their previous lives, and our city was daily emptying of Greeks. Today, well into their 90s, with active minds and vivid memories, they talked to us of our own Alexandria of 1963. 

What stuck most to mind was everyday life. The way our parents and their friends confronted the daily blows with humour, kefi, and courage –making sure we children were not frightened. The image of my father confidently invading the kitchen determined to make herring paté, generously sprinkled with some brandy discovered at the back of a cupboard. Those days a Soviet relief ship had arrived and for two weeks we had to eat herrings daily- as there was nothing else in the shops. Dad’s honest attempt at Cucina povera was an unmitigated disaster: All his culinary élan and enthusiasm was not sufficient to overcome the aversion of two seven-year olds and two eleven-year olds for smelly salted fish. Even if the herrings were theoretical a welcome change from Polish butter or Ukrainian flour (which, once sifted to remove the worms, was fine). The food was awful, but what remains decades later is the joie de vivre of four 40-year old parents; the laughs we had, had completely erased the rancid smell of fish. 

Also, other memories of these times: Khrushchev’s visit to Alex (parading in Rue Fouad, standing in an American convertible next to Nasser). A little later, Soviet sailors in the city (shouting ‘Kharshouf’ to them as an Arabic version of ‘khorosho’). Passports with multicoloured stamps and the thirty (?) dollars even us kids were entitled to carry with us when summering in Greece with our grandparents. Also, the classes at school constantly depleted of students. Grown-up’s discussion about how and where they would restart their lives and with what money. How fortunes built over generations were liquidated into worthless Egyptian pounds trapped in accounts to which no one ever had access. An end of an era. 

Those childhood memories were confirmed by Philip Mansel’s parallel history of the three Mediterranean ‘world cities’ of the 19th century, Smyrna, Alexandria and Beirut. (Philip Mansel, Levant: Splendour and Catastrophe on the Mediterranean). Chapter 14 deals with Egyptianization and covers exactly the period I remember as a 7-year old. The book supplied the context – the big picture – which was missing from  my own lived experience.  

Mansel traces how Nasser was forced to change camps after the refusal of the World Bank to finance the Aswan Dam.  That decision, together with the foolish way the British and French handled the Suez crisis, led to the end of cosmopolitan Alexandria – of the city we were born in. The shift was forced on Nasser by circumstances. It was made easier by plentiful anti-colonial rhetoric (an innovation discovered largely after the fact). The result of all these disjointed acts was that the city turned its back to the outside world of the Mediterranean and turned inland – towards the introspection of an Arab mono-ethnic hinterland. 

Exactly how  this reorientation tainted the future course of Alexandria and Egypt is beyond the scope of this reflection. It is certain, though, that our city was robbed of its special place.  This made our type of Alexandrine redundant; together with the bustle of the  city. The divorce began with capital controls, stricter by the day. It moved on to target foreigners, first Jews and Cypriots with British passports, then the rest of us. The assurance Greek governments received time and again that we Greeks were a special case counted for nothing. The withering of Alexandria, in sharp contrast with Smyrna and Beirut, was not abrupt or violent. It was a drawn-out process which began in hope in 1952 (overthrow of King Farouk) and was not completed until 15 years later, with the 1967 war. It is to the credit of the Egyptian people that this process was shielded from personal acrimony and violence (Mansel mentions that some policemen seeing foreigners off in the port had tear in their eyes). Mighty proof of that are the warm memories we all cherish – both us children and our parents - of the city in which we were born.

Fifty  years have passed.  The story of Egyptian Greeks (though sadly not of Egypt itself) has much to show. We now live in Athens, the city chosen by our parents, in which a similar kind of reorientation is now threatened. A (possibly justified) anger about the Europeans’ stance since 2010 is once again threatening crucial parameters of our lives. 

It is thus no surprise how, in Athens in 2015, an aged Alexandrian couple was suddenly reminded of a herring paté served in 1963. That memory left a bitter taste, which remained well after our laughter stopped. 

We feel the premonition of a society awaiting collapse in the great Alexandrian trilogy, the Drifting cities of Stratis Tsirkas. Though the novels’ action are  set in wartime, the reader cannot help but remember that the change of orientation of the city will ultimately lead to the end of our native city. A similar bitter foretaste, rises as Alexis Tsipras Drifting City allows uncertainty to take over.  

To say that History does not repeat itself is a banality. However, it is also true that if we, the subjects of History, do not do our best, it might well repeat itself. 

This article is also published on Athens Voice