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

by Gianna Angelopoulos

  When the votes were tallied, I had pulled off the biggest upset in Athens. I had needed about 2,500 votes to capture a seat on the council; I received almost twice that many, with 4,645 votes! Three months later, in January 1987, the young woman who was given no chance to win put on her makeup, donned her loveliest clothes, and went to be sworn in as a member of the Athens city council.

  ANY CITY COUNCILOR WHO TRULY WANTED TO MAKE AN IMPACT was facing a herculean challenge. Athens, a city of 4.5 million, was broken into some forty discrete municipalities, each with a Mayor and a city council. The number of city council members was proportional to the individual municipality’s population compared to the population of greater Athens. Central Athens had the largest population, with about one million people and forty-one city council members.

  Politics in Athens was a microcosm of federal Greek politics. The city was a maze of jurisdictions. While the Ministry of Agriculture controlled one park, a different ministry controlled the park a few blocks away. Most of the forty municipalities refused to cooperate with one another, creating even more bizarre bureaucratic nightmares. For example, a particular highway forms the boundary between two municipalities. One municipality is responsible for one-half of the highway and one municipality is responsible for the other half. Yet the federal Ministry of Public Works is responsible for the upkeep of the median. Who paves the street? Who maintains the street-lights? This patchwork of responsibility allows Greek politicians to participate in their favorite exercise, finger-pointing. Nothing is ever anyone’s fault because there are so many other people and political organizations to blame. Little did I know, then, that this arena was preparing me for becoming the head of the Athens 2004 Summer Olympic Games organizing committee, when I had to deal with more than fifty Mayors to prepare the necessary conditions in Athens and throughout Greece.

  It didn’t take me long to discover that change and the public interest were not foremost in the minds of my colleagues. They appeared to cast every vote based on one thing only: how that issue affected their future political prospects.

  While New Democracy had won the election and Evert had been installed as Mayor, none of the power trickled down to me. I had no real influence in the party and wasn’t in any position to effect the changes that had motivated my candidacy in the first place. The party still wanted to showcase its women—and me because of my strong campaign performance—but the emphasis remained on “show.” Thus, even though I was assigned a highly visible position as Secretary of the Board of the central Athens city council, organizing meetings and keeping official notes, I viewed my role as little more than window dressing.

  Still, I have always believed that to do something right, you have to devote yourself entirely to that undertaking, so I threw myself wholeheartedly into my position and its responsibilities. I essentially gave up my daytime law practice and, with it, the potential for significant earnings, but I managed to get by. While “secretary” may not have been a power position, the job demanded—given the ceaseless array of committee meetings—long and tedious hours. That was hardest on my daughter because I was often at work from morning until night. Carolina, who was not yet four years old and in preschool, was so precocious that we called her “the wild child.” Sometimes when she got home from school, she’d climb on a chair to reach the phone and dial my office number, which she had memorized. “I want to speak to my mom,” she’d demand. And when I got on the phone, she’d berate me with a litany of complaints and then start crying. “I’m the only one whose mommy doesn’t pick her up at the bus to take her home,” I can recall her saying. “I always get grandma or the girl from the house.”

  After a succession of these unhappy calls, I decided I needed to sit down face-to-face with Carolina to discuss our mutual problems and somehow work out a truce. It isn’t easy to explain life’s complexities to a small child. I started off by telling her that while we could always talk things over, I wouldn’t put up with her grumpy faces and grumpy noises because my life wasn’t that easy either. Someday, I said, she would understand that we make choices that may be hard on us but are good for other people. I told her that we are sometimes called upon to make personal sacrifices for the greater good of the community. “Do you remember,” I asked her, “that day when we went to the playground and everything was a mess? Do you remember how the equipment was broken and the park looked like it had been abandoned? And it was dangerous for children? Well, somebody has to fix problems like that. That’s why I ran for city council, and that’s why the people voted for me.”

  I told her that I couldn’t be there at the bus every day to pick her up. But I promised her that twice a week I would come home and have lunch with her. What makes a child happy is when its mother is happy. Stressed, unhappy, no-smiles mothers will end up with stressed, unhappy, no-smiles children.

  And I promised Carolina that I would occasionally bring her along when I worked late at the office or had meetings out in the community. She thought about this for a few seconds and asked: “You will do a new park? You will do a new playground?” “I’ll try,” I said. We had our compromise. I would eventually discover that it was far easier to strike a compromise deal with a three-and-a-half-year-old “wild child” than with most of my colleagues.

  I remember bringing Carolina to work one evening when I had to supervise a meeting. She couldn’t have been four feet tall yet, and she looked adorable lugging this white teddy bear—not surprisingly named Teddy—that was almost as big as she was. Some of the people in the office enjoyed her being there, offering Carolina drawing materials and even joining her in silly songs. The Mayor, however, heard singing and came out of his office looking very unhappy. “What is this, kindergarten?” he demanded. His longtime assistant Phoni said, “Mrs. Daskalaki has to bring her daughter because she has to work late.”

  I was certainly a genuine example of a working mother trying very hard to balance parental responsibilities with a demanding job. After my negotiations with Carolina, I did my best to honor our deal. And though I didn’t always make it home for lunch and she wound up having to sit through more meetings than she ever imagined, Carolina never again complained about my work. One evening as I was going out I heard her voice from her bedroom. I cracked opened the door and peeked inside. Carolina, who would never play with dolls, had lined up all her stuffed animals—there must have been at least thirty—and she was lecturing them. “I don’t want any grumpy faces,” she said. “If you want something just tell me. If you want to go for a swim or a walk in the forest you tell me. But no grumpy faces!”

  ________

  I am not, by nature, a patient person. But I performed all my assigned tasks on the council dutifully, worked long hours, and, I believed, demonstrated my commitment to the council as well as to my political party. After some months, I went to the Mayor and asked him to consider giving me some major responsibility that would allow me to make good on my commitment to the city. You know the old saying “Be careful what you wish for. You just may get it.” That is exactly what happened. I was assigned responsibility for the city schools, a thankless task and, many believed, a hopeless problem that nobody else wanted to tackle. After all, who in his right mind wanted to listen to the never-ending complaints of parents, however warranted? Who in his right mind wanted to spend countless hours, days, and weeks fighting with the various ministries that held the purse strings over money the state insisted it didn’t have?

  But I have always been willing to take on the hardest jobs and the biggest challenges—the jobs that should have been labeled “mission impossible.” At the time, the city’s schools were in total chaos. My electoral district alone had 224 school facilities, and many of those buildings were in dangerous disrepair, and vital equipment and supplies were missing. There was no money for such basic utilities as electricity, telephones, heating oil, or, sometimes, even water. There was no food service or medical support. Some schools had become havens for drug users: Schoolyards were littered with
syringes so there was no safe place for the children to play outside. Sometimes you would even find syringes in classroom desks. One school had even been constructed on top of a gas station. The schools were so overcrowded that the kids attended in shifts, alternating between morning and afternoon classes. I had been required to do the same in high school in Heraklion, so I knew how adversely it affected a child’s ability to focus on learning. And the irregular hours drove parents crazy. The bottom line—and sad truth—was that our schools were no longer places where boys and girls could go to learn.

  I don’t pretend to be a miracle worker, but what I did might have seemed like a miracle to some parents. I simply started by showing up. I visited every single school, and I talked to parents at every school, church, and neighborhood meeting. I was out each night until ten or eleven o’clock. I wanted to show people that somebody cared and that the council felt a responsibility for the plight of our Athenian schoolchildren.

  Amid this mess, two thousand Athenian boys and girls were offered an excellent summer program on a lovely campus near Agios Andreas on the Attic peninsula. It was a small town with nothing more than a cinema and a few supermarkets—and, of course, the shining Aegean Sea. So many parents wanted to send their children to this free summer program that participants were chosen by lottery. I wanted to show people that I was a new kind of politician, that I didn’t just make pronouncements. I was willing to get out there on the front line. I volunteered to go to the camp and help supervise the kids. Sometimes that meant helping the nurses clean lice out of the children’s hair. The nurses preferred to send these children home to their parents, but I insisted: “The families do not have the money to send their children on vacations. We can take care of this ourselves.”

  I took Carolina along that summer because I didn’t have a nanny at the time. I was the only city councilor to volunteer.

  I knew there were limits to what I could achieve in the schools. Consequently, I never made promises I couldn’t keep. I told people the truth, even when it was the bitter truth. “Sorry,” I would say, “I think we can get this much money, but no more.” But I also knew that if we were to accomplish anything substantial, the parents had to believe in me and embrace my efforts. At first, they just wanted to thank me for being there. But I needed more than thanks. I needed them to join me. We began to organize a coalition of parents, teachers, and others who recognized that the situation in our schools was tragic—tragic for our children and, ultimately, for Athens. Then we had to convince the Mayor and other city councilors what was at stake for them. If the future of our children wasn’t enough to move them, then we had to demonstrate that we represented a significant number of votes. To the chagrin of my party colleagues, I also began to court all the city councilors, including those in other parties that usually opposed any New Democracy initiative. I called it a moral imperative to act. And I promised that if we did act in concert, I would not try to claim the laurels for saving our schools.

  Slowly, just as a stone thrown into a pond creates concentric circles that ripple outward, we began to make some headway. It had been easy for the government to ignore the schools when nobody was challenging them publicly. But it is never good politics to be against schoolchildren. The Socialist government’s Ministry of Education promised us more money for the schools and, surprisingly, delivered rather quickly. In the past, all schools had been given identical funding regardless of their size or needs or how many classes they housed. We developed new formulas to distribute the money fairly. We could now pre-pay the heat so there was no shortfall in winter. We began to maintain the schools year-round so they wouldn’t deteriorate from neglect during the summer. We built pedestrian walks around schools, added some greenery, and bought new playground equipment so that we were actually beginning to serve education’s mind–body ideal.

  After that first infusion of money, we had to fight tooth and nail for every drachma. When we determined that 500 million drachmas were required for adequate school maintenance, the ministry offered us 40 million. “Take it,” the Minister of Education advised me, reminding me of the value of a bird in hand. Instead, I recommended that we refuse that amount and ratchet up the pressure. The government upped its offer to 60 million. We again refused. It was easy to refuse 100 million because it was clear we were winning this battle. Ultimately, we received 330 million drachmas—not all we had asked for, but more than eight times the initial offer. That brought a lot of change, and parents and teachers were once again able to take pride in their schools.

  I wound up learning as much as any of the schoolchildren did. The city of Athens was a big university for me, and I was getting a graduate degree in political realities. I learned that solutions don’t come from faith or visions or big slogans or even big mouths, though those can sometimes help the cause. Political problems are best solved by pursuing three steps: first, by gathering knowledge so that you know what you need to do; second, by forging alliances, if not with other politicians then with the voters; and third, by taking decisive action. That approach would serve me well in the future.

  But I learned another lesson too. A far more painful one. The Mayor had underestimated me. He never thought such a refined and sophisticated young woman was going to get her hands dirty fighting for and working on behalf of the schools—sometimes literally scrubbing them myself. And he certainly never imagined that I would have any kind of major success, let alone help to reverse the education system’s decline. Instead of celebrating the success as a New Democracy triumph, therefore, the Mayor worried that I was too independent and becoming way too visible in my work to reform the school system. So Evert created a new position, the Chancellor for the City’s Schools, which left me as the council liaison to those schools but effectively stripped me of executive power over them.

  The work for the schools was certainly my proudest accomplishment during my three years on the Athens city council. But there was another smaller success that, as a Cretan, gave me special satisfaction. It involved the island of Gavdos, situated in the Mediterranean just below Crete and thus the country’s southernmost island. It is small, only about thirteen square miles, and back then the number of its year-round residents didn’t reach much higher than sixty. Despite its isolation and tiny population, the island was an ecological gem, with a unique ecosystem—flora and fauna not seen on Crete just a few miles away—and a species of cedar not found anywhere else in Greece.

  The island lacked any communications infrastructure. The federal government had abandoned the meager farming economy, and no authority had taken responsibility for the few residents there. I made up my mind that I had to do something to support this island and its people. I flew to the island in a helicopter provided by a TV network and met with the local priest. By virtue of the higher profile I had developed on the city council, I was able to get a newspaper article—complete with pictures—published, detailing the shameful neglect of the residents of Gavdos.

  This article galvanized a whole lot of people into action. The Greek navy began making regular stops there. The city of Athens, the Greek Tourism Ministry, and even the European Commission offered help. Today Gavdos has a thriving tourism industry. Each year, approximately three thousand campers visit the island to enjoy its unspoiled natural beauty.

  Some people wondered why I got involved with Gavdos in the first place, given that it didn’t fall under the jurisdiction of the city. Truthfully, I was using a small problem to attack a far bigger problem. There has long been a malaise that affects my country. It is a bad case of laissez-faire. People are ready with the excuse “It’s always been done this way” as grounds for not making the necessary changes. If you want to know the magic words that really set me off—to change me into some kind of cross between a tiger and a tornado—try telling me “We can’t do that” or “We can’t change that.”

  For me, Gavdos was a laboratory experiment in leadership and public policy, and, ultimately, it proved a very successful one. I had demon
strated that we could solve a small problem. We could move the bureaucracy and inspire people to take responsibility for their future. With that same commitment, we could succeed when we addressed the huge challenges confronting our country. Regardless of how things had always been done in the past, we Greeks were capable of orchestrating positive change for the future. I hoped to inspire others who wanted to give back to their community, to act. Change comes only when people seize responsibility and take action. Ultimately, the Gavdos initiative demonstrated that I wasn’t your typical Greek politician committed to preserving the status quo. I was—and I remain—an innovator and a problem solver.

  DURING MY THREE YEARS ON THE CITY COUNCIL, my constituents—so many of whom had lost hope—were inspired to discover that change was indeed possible, even in a system that appears to be immutable, if you only join forces and take a stand. To them I may have been a hard-charging, hardheaded woman, but I was their hard-charging, hardheaded woman! I felt proud of what we accomplished together in the schools and that I had earned both their respect and their affection.

  I would never claim to have evoked the same sentiments among my colleagues, however. It sometimes seemed as if they regarded me as a political virus that had invaded their tidy and comfortable body politic. I didn’t play by the same rules they did. I didn’t feel constrained by hidebound notions. I consorted with folks they considered the enemy. And I eschewed backroom deals, preferring public candor instead. The jealousy and resentment that the Mayor once foresaw as a potential problem for me with voters emerged instead as a problem with my fellow politicians. They resented my popularity and tried to bring me down with malicious gossip.