March 25th again!
Iphigenie Moraitini – Patriarchea
I know about the 14th of July and the 3rd of October and the 26th of October and the 4th of July. But you probably don’t know about the 25th of March, so I thought I’d pull you into my own country’s narrative for a minute.
The 25th of March is one of our 3 large national holidays. On the 28th of October we celebrate rejecting the annexation demands of fascist Italy, on the 17th of November revolution against the dictatorship.
But March 25th is Independence Day.
That is to say that the Greek warleaders of the south took a solemn oath to rebell against the Ottoman Empire, while the priest of Old Patras raised the banner of what would become the Greek state. The timeline is a bit complicated, because the Greek Revolutionaries from the Diaspora had been at work for years– but this is the date on which we celebrate the birth of the modern Greek state.
Whose first coin was not the Drachma, but the Phoenix, a symbol I probably do not need to introduce.
…Oh what the hell… here you go:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/…/a/a1/Phoenix_coin.jpg
Whatever one might think about the successes and failures of modern Greece, there is something beautiful in the notion of this millenial continuity being reborn and honored again. When abroad as a Greek everyone wants to talk to you about ancient Greece. But most of us are Greeks today because of that uprising then. Millenia reaching over with ruthless reinvention.
Few cultures indeed have this, and if the internet is to be believed, quite a few are lately trying to hijack what it means to belong to a millenial culture. I’m telling you already that way lies madness. History is the common patrimony of all mankind, and one need not hijack it to love it. Because when one successfully feels that connection, and I do in the way few other people do, it lies like a heavy cloak upon one’s shoulders. A burden of self-definition, in which we can only be petty children of lesser parents, seeking our path to honor the paths they found.
But anyway.
Happy birthday Greece. And may we all live to see 204, right?
Join me in listening, once, to the Greek national anthem, The Hymn to Liberty. Because, Rigas Feraios once wrote, “Better to have lived an hour a free life, than to be enslaved and imprisoned for 40 years”.
Not everyone likes music, so if you don’t, the lyrics are in fact a poem titled”The Free Besieged”, by national Poem Dionsysios Solomos.
Good day.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VkPRU6C-JQ
https://www.ellopos.net/…/modern/solomos_free-besieged.asp
