Amidst the Greek economic crisis, a newly- published book comes as another yet account of what led the country to this mess, penned by freelance journalist James Angelos.
Its title, The Full Catastrophe: Travels Among the New Greek Ruins, is taken from a line uttered by the protagonist of the 1964 film Zorba the Greek based on the famous Nikos Kazantzakis novel.
Angelos, as a former correspondent for The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, visited Greece to report on the rumours of Zakynthos being ‘the island of the blind’ back in 2009. Almost upon arrival he discovered that 498 of 680 of the ‘blind’ residents were not even only partially-sighted. Angelos uncovered a disability benefits fraud, involving one ophthalmologist and one official, estimated to have cost the country €9 million.
Feeling that this scam was only scratching the surface of the problem, Angelos began travelling across the country, from Athens to Thessaloniki, visiting mountain villages and remote islands in order to document the dysfunction of the Greek society and state.
He draws the modern portrait of a country overburdened by the patronage system, tax evasion and widespread corruption, often with the complicity of officials, leading to bribery scandals.
The final chapter of the book focuses on Golden Dawn, the neo-Nazi party which spurred anti-immigrant hysteria, yet still won 18 seats in the parliament in the 2012 elections.
Being a fluent Greek speaker, Angelos was able to interact with the people he met along his journey and record their testimonies.
On asking why people who have cheated the Greek state still go unpunished, he appears to have received the following answer from an official: “If you start putting people in jail, maybe you’ll have to put half of Greece in jail.”