Citizens Advice Bureaux: a rare commodity in Greece

I assume many of you who have spent some time or live in Greece may have suffered mistreatment at the hands of the Greek state and its various agencies. Now, however, Citizens Advice Bureaux are also available in Greece. You can turn to them for any problems faced in your contacts with the Greek state - provided, of course, you ARE NOT in a hurry and you live in or around Athens. Why do I say that? Because yesterday, when in need of a Citizens Advice Bureau I found out that, alas, there is ONLY ONE in Greece located - where else - in Athens. So, how was I to make contact with them from Salonica? Fortunately, one could also send a report of their problem by fax or post, and that is exactly what I did. At the same time, however, I remembered something else. About ten years ago I was living in England. So, memories came to me of how different things were there with Citizens Advice Bureaux. Οur advice helps people resolve their debt, benefits, housing, legal, discrimination, employment, immigration, consumer and other problems and is available to everyone regardless of race, gender, sexuality, age, nationality, disability or religion: this is what they promised and I can now testify that it was exactly like that. Despite the fact that I was not a British citizen I got all the help I needed. How did I discover them? I just took a walk on the one and only central road of the small town in which I then lived. That town was Leamington Spa. Have you heard of it? I guess not. Still, even in this little provincial spa town one could find a Citizens Advice Bureau, to which I turned and, as I already said, was helped a great deal. Today, ten years after that, I made a telephone call to Athens, to the one and only Greek Citizens Advice Bureau to ask if they received the report I faxed to them yesterday. They said that there seemed to be no record of it and that I’d better call again, come Monday or Tuesday.

Can an opinion leader keep a low profile?

The new Archbishop looks, prima facie, like a low-profile person; and less ambitious, compared to his predecessor. (How, really, could one be MORE ambitious than the late Christodoulos?) He is also said to be in favour of well-educated clerics and to be in good terms with the Patriarch. What I would personally like to see is a man who would not try to convince us that he is ‘our Hieronymus’. Because, if populism is obnoxious when exercised by politicians, journalists or other public figures, when it becomes a key characteristic of a cleric it’s something even worse: inappropriate. I therefore wish that the new leader of the Greek Orthodox Church proves worthy of his role as a religious leader in a modern European nation-state; and less ambitious than his predecessor as another kind of leader. I refer of course to the Archbishop as an opinion leader. As a man who has the power to lead to the formation of social tendencies, awaken or quieten passions, prejudices and beliefs and who influences decisively millions of modern Greeks in their attitudes. (By the way, I didn’t see, in the Greek newspapers, any articles on the quite significant, in modern Greece, role of Hieronymus or his predecessor as opinion leaders.) So, let this man prove to be indeed low-profile, modest and humble. In other words, what the ministers of another low-profile but overambitious person were not. I am referring to our prime-minister and his cabinet, who proved that ambition and modesty do not go well together, as they never did. I am not saying that one should not be ambitious. But the quality of our ambitions is, alas, equivalent to the quality of the society in which we live and prosper; and, of course, relentlessly equivalent to the very quality of our personality. Modesty, on the other hand, is in Greece a high speed train. I am not, of course, referring any more to the Archbishop or the government officials, but to the rest of us. For whom modesty is, I think, a very fast train – compared to which the French TGV looks ridiculously slow – with the Terminal Station ‘Margins of Society’ as its destination.