My Greek Drama: Life, Love, and One Woman's Olympic Effort to Bring Glory to Her Country

by Gianna Angelopoulos

  And I did enjoy my courses. My favorite subject—no surprise—was history. My least favorite was math, though many years later, with my husband as mentor, I would prove more adept at it than I had ever demonstrated in school.

  But if I had a singular talent during my early school years, it was for questioning things I did not understand. Questions such as why we used textbooks that had nothing to do with the lives we led on Crete. The books we studied had all been copied from French or English and were filled with pictures of things—snow, factories, trains—that couldn’t be found on our island. My constant lament was, “Where on earth have I been born?” For me, cold and snow became a symbol of real civilization. Yet they seemed so distant from my life that they might as well have existed in another solar system.

  Although I disliked our textbooks, I loved books more than almost anything else. Yes, like all little girls, I played with toys and dolls. I particularly liked the dolls my father brought home from Germany. But, just like my father, I devoured books of all kinds. Our house was filled with books, not only in Greek but also in English, French, and German. Remarque, Dostoyevsky, Mark Twain, and Victor Hugo. When I went to kiss my father good night, he was most often already in bed with a book in hand. I remember trying to imagine all the books he had read over the course of his life—as a schoolboy, as a prisoner of war, at college and, later, for work—and asking him, “Dad, are you never bored reading them?” “No,” he told me. “Knowledge is very good for the spirit.”

  Despite our shared love of books, we would eventually bump heads over some of my choices in reading material. In school, I became friends with a girl whose father owned a bookshop. He was also a member of the Communist Party, and he gave me access to a whole range of books—from Marx to Jung—that would not normally have crossed the threshold of our home. My father disapproved, but I wanted to read books of every stripe so that I could voice an opinion on everything. And like so many young people of my generation, I saw knowledge as far more than just spiritual nourishment; I embraced it as an instrument for change in the world. When it came to my education, I refused to be constrained by convention, tradition, or middle-class values. For the first time in my life, I was openly challenging my father and his view of the world.

  I would wind up defying him over more than books. As a young girl, I enjoyed the delicious foods my family lovingly served, perhaps a bit too much. I was a bit chunky, which caused my parents some concern. They didn’t send me to ballet lessons like other girls in Heraklion, apparently anxious to spare me embarrassment. When I became a teenager, I slimmed down and morphed into an attractive young woman, and I was not the least bit concerned with sparing my parents any discomfort. The teenage years were marked by some titanic battles with my father and mother, battles that are likely familiar to teens and parents everywhere. We fought over clothes, makeup, music, magazines, indeed over all the critical trappings of the youth revolution that was sweeping the world (or at least the civilized world) and that I was desperate to join.

  I took fashion tips from the Greek magazines. I hid a transistor radio in my bedroom and listened to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones played on the radio station at the local US Army base. I kept up with the popular hits of the day. I still remember the song “Parole, parole” by the French torch singer Dalida. My father refused to buy a television until I graduated from high school, so I had to go to the neighbors’ to watch Hawaii Five-O, my favorite American program. And it was not even in color!

  If the rest of the world was living in the age of mod dress and marijuana, little of the counterculture was evident in Heraklion. About all the city could boast by way of popular culture were a few movie theaters, where films were shown long after everyone else around the globe had seen them. I was thrilled to see Love Story and Doctor Zhivago and Fiddler on the Roof, and to imagine what life and love were like in the hip world of LA where movies were filmed—so distant from Crete. Just as it had been for my grandfather, America became my paradise, a dreamland of hope, opportunity, and success.

  With legs that were finally worth showing off, I began wearing miniskirts—very mini—to noticeable effect. I was making men dizzy. Unfortunately, those dizzy men included our neighbors at the local coffee shop, where my father happened to be sitting one day when I strolled by. He stormed into the house in a rage, telling my mother, “I almost had a stroke looking at our daughter with her legs out and all the men staring at her with their greedy eyes.” So my mother had a girl who helped out at home lower the hem of my skirt until it was below my knees. We warred over that hemline. Despite my reluctance during mom’s sewing sessions, I had learned enough. When I was preparing to go out, I would slip into the bathroom and, with needle and thread and a little glue, turn my mother’s maxi back into my mini.

  All my parents’ efforts weren’t going to halt or hide what was, after all, a natural progression for any young woman.

  My mother was as concerned about my soul as she was about my appearance. She was committed to her faith in the Greek Orthodox Church. My father never really spoke to us about religion. Though he was always respectful of my mother’s deep faith and her attachment to the church, he seldom attended Sunday services with us, always maintaining that he needed to catch up on his work. “Go with the children,” he would usually say to my mother.

  My sentiments about religion lie more with my father’s. When I was not much more than six years old—during the excruciating boredom of the daily siesta my mother inflicted upon us—I remember getting all riled up on the subject of religion. I didn’t like how my mother used God as her enforcer, warning us that God would punish us if we misbehaved. That made no sense to me, so I decided then and there to test God’s punitive powers. I began to challenge the icon, the Virgin Mary with the baby Christ, on my bedroom wall. Nothing happened—no punishment manifested itself, not even a bolt of lightning descending from the heavens. My sister started crying, though, and I told her: “Shut up. If Mom comes, I will not let you play with me tomorrow.”

  Her crying stirred me up even more. So while she wept silently, I took my experiment with the deity a nasty step further. I began to direct certain hand gestures—ones I had seen irate drivers utilize to considerable effect—at the icon. Aware of the threat that “God will cut off your hand,” I hedged my bet by using my left hand. But when nothing bad happened, I went at the icon with both hands. I remember saying to myself, “So that’s the way it is: Whatever they tell you is most likely untrue.” At a very tender age, I had decided that I would never fear the unknown nor substitute faith for proof.

  My mother was very active in our church and involved in a lot of charity work. When I began butting heads with my parents, she decided it would be helpful if I talked to a priest. And she knew just the one, a younger priest with whom, she believed, I would identify because of his work with the poor. Unlike priests in the Roman Catholic tradition, priests in the Greek Orthodox Church are allowed to marry, although Bishops in the church cannot.

  When I went to meet the priest, he wasn’t interested in discussing my problems with my parents or even his good works with the poor. Instead, he began to lament his marital difficulties and how he could no longer approach his wife. He suggested that, as I was a very smart young woman, it would be good if we could develop a closer relationship. But because I was a very smart young woman, I knew exactly what he had in mind. I literally fled the church—running all the way home to my mother. When I told her what had happened, she was furious at my blasphemy. “I’m sure you misunderstood,” she said. But I was sure that I hadn’t, and I refused to attend that church ever again. So did Eleni, one of the first times I can recall that we forged an alliance rather than fought. In later years, my opinion of the clergy would change somewhat, as two of my most trusted associates turned out to be sons of Greek Orthodox priests.

  Despite all the teen drama, I continued to do very well academically. Even though I was unwilling to become what we then called “a grind,”
I was always in the top of my class. But I was also eager for the fun to begin in my life. I wanted to model myself after my cousin Lena, who was seven years older than me and had gone off to study law in Athens. Lena was smart, but she was also beautiful and stylish, always wearing the latest fashion in clothes and makeup. She even knew the words to all the Beatles songs. Boys were streaming by her house to take her to parties or dance clubs. I understood her popularity, but what was truly amazing to me was her parents’ permissiveness. They never seemed to say no to her.

  My parents always said no. They didn’t approve mixing young women and young men in social environments. I tried every argument I could think of to convince them that these parties were harmless. I chided them for listening to silly gossip from people who had nothing better to do and who knew nothing about us. In desperation, I resorted to classical quotes to buttress my case: “Pay attention to the right people when they say something about you.” But my father could always trump me when it came to a battle of wit and knowledge. Without hesitation, he responded: “Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion.”

  The fights continued to escalate, and my challenges to parental authority, particularly my mother’s, became more brazen and outrageous. On one occasion, when I was sixteen, the family took a vacation in Athens. We were supposed to go shopping the first morning, and my parents and sister were already waiting when I emerged from my room looking like an extra out of the musical Hair. My hair was huge, teased way out, and I was wearing a maxiskirt with a slit that ran a long way up my leg. Worst of all, at least in my parents’ eyes, I wasn’t wearing shoes, intent on frolicking barefoot through the streets of Athens. Visibly stunned and completely at a loss for words, my mother stepped up to me and slapped my face. I didn’t cry and I didn’t make any smart remarks. Indeed, I didn’t say anything at all. I knew I had crossed a line. But I sure do remember exactly what I was thinking: “Very soon I will be out on my own and then there will be no way for anybody to control me.”

  MY LONG-ANTICIPATED ESCAPE FROM CRETE, my first major step on the path to independence, would be university studies.

  In the early 1970s, the government ran all of the universities in Greece. A university degree was a near necessity for anyone who wanted to work in the civil service or pursue a professional career. The college application process differed from the process in the United States. In the Greek system, students had to choose a course of study and to list colleges in their order of preference before taking an exam that would determine where, and if, they would attend.

  First I had to choose a course of study. Unfortunately no degree programs were directed toward my becoming an ambassador. And while I loved history, I wasn’t interested in a staid academic career. I considered myself more of an activist, less interested in explaining past events than in solving future problems. I decided to study law, convinced that it offered the most career options.

  The other critical decision was where to study law. All students take national exams, after which they are assigned a spot at a university—hopefully one of their top choices. I was an excellent candidate and was confident I would fare well in the competition for placement. So I limited myself to two choices: the University of Athens and Aristotle University in Thessaloniki in northern Greece, the country’s second largest city.

  The announcement of university placements was such a big deal in Crete that it was broadcast on local radio. Everybody could hear how you fared at exactly the same moment you learned your fate. I was playing tennis the afternoon the placements were announced. (Even today, I can’t explain why I went to such lengths to appear indifferent when I was anything but. Perhaps I wanted to see myself as above it all. Or maybe I was simply too nervous to endure the long wait at home, to hear my name in the company of my mother.) Though I wasn’t much of a player or even, truthfully, much of an enthusiast, the tennis club provided me with a good excuse to get out of the house. And it was one place I was allowed to go where I could meet my peers, particularly young men. (Remember, that wasn’t easy for me while attending an all-girls school.) My tennis game ran late and I missed the radio announcements.

  When I got home, there were no lights on in the house—something unusual—and I found my mother sitting in the dark, crying. I felt a stab of panic. Was it possible that I hadn’t been accepted at either university? Somehow through her sobs, my mother managed to blurt out the distressing news. I had not been accepted to the university in Athens. I would be going to school in Thessaloniki, which, she gasped, was twice the distance—two plane rides—from Crete. Though Athens had been my top choice, the advantages of being in Thessaloniki were suddenly apparent. At “two plane rides” away, the city and campus would not be convenient for spur-of-the-moment parental visits. I would really be out on my own. I comforted my mother, feigning distress over the distance that would soon separate us. But it was all I could do to keep from leaping up, pumping my fists, and shouting joyously: “Yaaaaayyyy! Thessaloniki, here I come!”

  The summer before I left for university seemed one of infinite possibilities—for me as well as for the entire country. I had been chafing under the tight supervision of my parents and frustrated by life on Crete. I felt that the options there for a young person of wide-ranging interests and serious ambitions were severely limited. I was ready, indeed eager, to expand my horizons. I wanted to abide by my own rules and to make my own decisions, and I was prepared to live with the consequences.

  At the same time, Greece was making a great escape. In 1967, military leaders had seized power in a coup, ostensibly to prevent a Communist takeover of the government—“a revolution to save the nation” was what the junta called it. The Prime Minister and other political leaders were arrested. Democracy was suspended, as were critical constitutional rights. Dissenters could be arrested without a warrant and tried before military tribunals rather than in civilian courts. Martial music replaced Western music on the radio.

  In 1974, after nearly seven years of “The Regime of the Colonels,” the military dictatorship was tottering, weakened by internal discord and by nationwide protests (led by a student uprising at the Athens Polytechnic).

  I confess that as a teenage girl preoccupied with her own parental oppression, government oppression hadn’t seemed particularly acute or the most pressing matter on our island or on my mind. Nor was politics a subject my father discoursed on at home, unless it was the politics of ancient times. But my reverence for Greek’s illustrious traditions, reinforced by all my reading, aligned me with classic democratic values. So the summer of 1974, when the military government fell and democracy was restored in Greece, I celebrated in the streets with true enthusiasm. As I left Crete for university, there was a palpable sense of excitement and change in the air. The American press celebrated the fall of the junta with headlines that read on July 25, “Greece: The Old Fire Rekindled,” and on July 28, “A Breath of Freedom Sweeps Through Greece.”

  In November, parliamentary elections were held, the first free elections in a decade, and Constantinos Karamanlis, who had served as Prime Minister in the late ’50s and early ’60s before going into exile, was swept back into office with a huge majority of voters supporting his new conservative party, New Democracy. Democracy had been restored in its birthplace. And a month later, in an extraordinary national plebiscite, Greeks voted against restoring the monarchy.

  To be honest, given my reverence for Greek history, I wasn’t entirely sure of my feelings about the monarchy. But I did believe the country needed wholesale change more than reflexive obeisance to past traditions. For the people of Greece, not its military, to cast off what the monarchy represented was, at the very least, a monumental, historic change. I didn’t hesitate to join the raucous celebration in the streets of Thessaloniki.

  To me, the city of Thessaloniki was charming and very congenial—quite likely a better choice for me than Athens would have been. In Athens, the university is sprawled all over the city and has no real campus center. When Eleni
studied law in Athens, she said she sometimes felt more like a worker than a student because she spent so much time commuting to various parts of the campus. The university in Thessaloniki is smaller—seamless and quite intimate—and when I arrived, it was abuzz with student activity, making it easy for me to plunge into campus life. Moreover, in contrast to Athens, which seemed ancient and pointed back toward history, Thessaloniki seemed modern and decidedly pointed toward the future. There was lots of contemporary music, art, theater, and film. The city even boasted its own movie festival. Perhaps the surest sign to me that I had scaled new heights of modern civilization was that there were seasons, and at last I got to experience the cold and snow that had once seemed so otherworldly.

  Still and all, it would be hard for me to characterize my first year at university as a total success—except for my genuine belief that you often learn a great deal from your mistakes. Employing that standard, I learned a whole lot that year. I was totally engaged in campus intellectual life, but mainly those parts that occurred outside the classroom. I met all kinds of people, from working class to wealthy, and read all kinds of books. I was a regular among large groups of students that would pile into small apartments late at night for intense discussions of politics, education, psychology, and sociology. We broached radical ideas and concocted new ways to address old problems. Like many university students of that era around the globe, we wanted to change the world. In the meantime, we would show up to protest any and every righteous cause. I even marched with the leftists, and I firmly believe even now that if you’re eighteen, nineteen, or twenty and you’re not a leftist, it’s unhealthy. I was almost too busy to attend classes; there was always a rally or protest underway.