It was with sadness that I read of the passing of Dr Michael Tsounis in Neos Kosmos last week. Dr Tsounis was a brilliant historian, a community organiser and above all a humanist.
I had the honour of having Dr Tsounis as a mentor between 1984 and 1985 as I completed my Honours Thesis on the schism between the Greek Orthodox Community of South Australia and the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese.
Dr Tsounis, my late father, Anastasios Kapetopoulos and others, like Petro Savas were founding members of the Plato club in Adelaide. They all played a roles in the Greek Orthodox Community of South Australia and were committed to secular democratic control of community assets and services, in opposition to the attempts by the Archdiocese to control of Greek communities.
In 1985 – as a 23-year old – I would meet Dr Tsounis at his house on a weekly basis where we would talk for hours about the Greek community’s development, Hellenism, the Diaspora and the complex, yet fraught relationship between culture and religion for Hellenes.
Dr Tsounis rolled his own cigarettes, infused his tobacco with fresh basil and used cotton wool as filters. As a smoker then and a poor student I always had his cigarettes followed by large cups of viscous Greek coffee. I gave up smoking in my mid-40s, but still at times I long for one of Dr Tsounis’ cigarettes.
I recorded Dr Tsounis on a cassette tape, his baritone voice detailing the history of Greek migration, the establishment of Greek community organisations, and the role of clerical verses secular authority.
Dr Tsounis’ analysis of the Hellenic Diaspora in the post-1821 development of modern Greece had the most impact on me. He understood the birth of the Greek nation, nationalism and the complex and at times destructive relationship between Hellenic universality and Greek ethnocentrism; between democratic secularism and patriarchal clericalism.
Many of the issues confronting Greece now were foreseen by Michael Tsounis in the 1980s as the Greek community’s first historian. He understood the dysfunctional relationship between the middle classes, the elites and the poor of Greece; the urban and rural areas of Greece; and the secular and clerical ascendancies. All these historical tensions and patterns played out in the Greek communities of Australia.
Dr Tsounis recognised how Greek political elites, left and the right, abstracted arguments making them atmospheric debates of “evil verses good, or life verses death”. In doing so the political elites would defocus citizens from the issues of building civic society, collecting taxes, running hospitals and laying down roads. In many ways the poor civic engagement Greeks reveal in Greece has much to do with the abstraction of debates.
Dr Tsounis’ work has been a template for my understanding what it is to be a Hellene. He’d say, “while there are many migrants, millions of Italian, Irish, British and others, there are only four Diasporas, the Jewish, the Greek, the Indian and the Chinese”. For Dr Tsounis these Diasporas’ notion of state was based on their collective understanding of their cultural, linguistic and (to a degree), religious affiliation.
“We carry the state on our backs,” he’d say while highlighting the impact of the Jewish and Greek Diasporas had in the development of modern Israel and Greece, especially as conduits to European based notions of national development. These notions, he would argue, were not congruent with the reality of Greece. They were imposed Eurocentric views of what a Hellene should be, they were German, English, French or Russian views imported by Diaspora living in those areas.
Dr Michael Tsounis saw Hellenes, Jews, Indians and Chinese as conduits to other people’s empires, people whose notion of state was to be sourced internally. He knew that Indians, Chinese, Jews and Greeks understood migration, settlement and aspiration as natural states of being.
It was Dr Tsounis who made me understand the real asset of our Orientalism as Hellenes. He foresaw the negative impact of the Greeks’ affectation to being European. Greeks fixated with “cleansing themselves” of the Orient in the post 1821 period was aided by their tragic attempts to becoming European, like their Diaspora peers, instead of being conduits between East and West.
For Dr Tsounis, a Hellene could be Jewish, Muslim or Catholic. A Hellene could be African, Asian, Turkish or Slavic, any of the minorities which constituted a culturally diverse pre-nationalist Greece. Michael Tsounis as a Hellene and as a humanist would be appalled by the rise of the racist and violent Golden Dawn in Greece.
In closing, I want to remind readers of the immense work Dr Michael Tsounis did in documenting the history of the Greek community of South Australia and as one of the greatest authorities on Greek community development, migration and settlement, globally.
My sympathies to his family and the Tsounis legacy inspire us, motivate us, and teach us to be Hellenes, not merely Greeks.
* Fotis Kapetopoulos was the former editor of the English Edition of Neos Kosmos.