Table Of ContentHISTORY,
TIME, and
ECONOMIC
CRISIS in
CENTRAL
GREECE
Daniel M. Knight
History, Time, and Economic Crisis
in Central Greece
History, Time, and Economic Crisis
in Central Greece
Daniel M. Knight
Foreword by Robert Layton
history, time, and economic crisis in central greece
Copyright © Daniel M. Knight 2015.
All rights reserved.
First published in 2015 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United
States— a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York,
NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world,
this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke,
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ISBN: 978-1-137-50148-6
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Knight, Daniel M.
History, time, and economic crisis in Central Greece / Daniel M. Knight.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-137-50148-6 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Trikala
(Greece)—Economic conditions—1974- 2. Working class—Greece—
Trikala—Economic conditions—21st century. 3. Poverty—Greece—Trikala—
History—21st century. 4. Recessions—Greece—Trikala—History—21st
century. 5. Financial crises—Greece—Trikala—History—21st century.
6. Trikala (Greece)—History. I. Title.
HC298.T75K55 2015
330.9495'4—dc23
2014045410
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Amnet.
First edition: May 2015
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
In memory of Bill, Oliver, Thomas, Eugenia, Giorgos, and Mary.
Those we lost along the way.
Contents
List of Figures ix
Foreword xi
Acknowledgments xv
1 Introduction: Prosperity and Crisis 1
2 Ethnography on the Plain of Thessaly 21
3 Return of the Tsiflikades: Crisis and Land Tenure 1881–1923 41
4 Hungry with the Same Famine 65
5 Things to Forget, Things to Remember: The Greek Civil War 85
6 Public Faces: Food and Protest in the Current Crisis 101
7 Transforming the Public Sphere 121
8 Status in Crisis 141
9 Conclusions: Past, Future, and Beyond 165
Notes 173
Bibliography 187
Index 205
List of Figures
Figure 1 The location of Thessaly periphery (shaded) and
the town of Trikala. 22
Figure 2 The four prefectures of Thessaly and their
principal urban centers (as of 2010). 23
Figure 3 Trikala prefecture. The research for this book
was conducted within the “golden triangle”
between Trikala, Kalampaka, and Pyli. 23
Figure 4 Greek Orthodox Church of Agios Konstantinos
with the Ottoman Kursum Tzami in the background. 24
Figure 5 Setting up for another day’s trade: early morning
on Asklipiou. 29
Figure 6 Monday market in central Trikala. 29
Figure 7 Examples of midsummer sales on Asklipiou.
The banner on the shop reads “For two more weeks
even lower prices.” 139
Figure 8 The sign on the bottom basket reads
“Everything 5 euros.” These were symptomatic
of the sales in all establishments in central Trikala
during summer 2010. 140
Foreword
Dr. Knight’s study of contemporary life in a small Greek town is an out-
standing example of anthropology in the Malinowskian tradition, with the
bonus that it is also a study of dramatic social change. Daniel Knight had the
good fortune (from an anthropological perspective) to have already started
his fieldwork in 2007, before the 2010 collapse of Greek financial institu-
tions threatened the entire economy of the Eurozone and the rest of Western
Europe. In his account of what followed, vivid case studies of the sufferings
of individuals and families are juxtaposed to theoretical insights that emerge,
not from armchair speculation but from his overview of the field data: Does
hardship strengthen the community or cause division and argument? Can
individuals be blamed for the collapse of a system? Why has public life
become more animated as people have less money to spend?
The collapse of 2010 was not the first period of hardship in modern
Greece, and Daniel’s study is exemplary in documenting previous disasters:
the oppression by Ottoman landlords, the Nazi Occupation of World War
Two and the Great Famine that it brought about, the 1973 Athens Polytech-
nic uprising, that now, in his words, press up against the present as if time
had been folded and shortened, not so much cyclical as repetitive. Daniel also
examines why the Greek Civil War, despite the suffering it caused, has not
generally joined these iconic events, except in a mountain village where the
anarchy of the civil war seems about to return. While many recent anthro-
pological studies have shown how landscape can become a source of shared
memories and values, in the Greek case recurrent disasters have left people
with the sense of alienation from what should be their own landscape.
Daniel’s vivid and truly Malinowskian case studies not only convey per-
sonal hardship but also humor: the insults exchanged between members of
the line at the gas station awaiting a rumored delivery of fuel, political graffiti
and the symbolism of the cucumber—“the next cucumber is always around
the corner”—the trip to the beach frustrated by the fact that the roads pro-
grammed into the cars’ satellite navigation systems had never been built.
xii ● Foreword
Cooperation sometimes breaks down during moments of universal scarcity,
but solidarity among young friends leads them to share their pocket money,
and the intervention of a nongovernment organization to short-circuit entre-
preneurial dealings in potatoes restores profit to farmers, and reduces cost to
consumers.
As Daniel’s analysis proceeds there are unexpected twists in the plot. While
Germany, and Angela Merkel in particular, are identified as the causes of
Greek suffering, perhaps, in truth, the Greeks were responsible for their own
fall from prosperity. The unregulated nature of Greek bank loans from 1981
to 2007 encouraged unrepayable indebtedness. During the Greek stock mar-
ket boom of the 1990s ordinary Greeks speculated in the shares of largely fic-
titious businesses such as a “fish farm” that only consisted of a pond and two
sheds, creating what seems to be money out of nothing, their gaze focused
only on the daily rise and fall in share prices and advised by local amateurs.
Officials and professionals demanding bribes, tax evasion, overemployment
in government posts, all added to the unsustainable character of the Greek
economy. But deregulation of the economy and privatization were imposed
on Greece by neoliberal foreigners. Trikalinoi know that in northern Europe
the Greek people are publicly portrayed as being responsible for the cur-
rent financial situation due to their participation in “corrupt” practices and
a “lazy” work ethic, yet they argue their own misdeeds were trivial compared
to those of their political leaders who are now asking everyone to bear the
consequences. This resonates in Britain, where it was the greed of bankers
free to speculate in an unregulated market that caused the financial collapse,
yet it is the poor who are bearing the cost of austerity in order to ensure the
rich remain wealthy.
In a further twist, Daniel discovers that history is not just a source of
imagery for representing the present; the present culture has itself developed
historically through the very social upheavals that provide the imagery. The
present social system is built of components that arose at different periods of
history, “like a late model car” whose present components were added at dif-
ferent times. The redistribution of the Ottoman landlords’ holdings created
land as private property, which could be divided between children or sold to
release the capital. Even if this was not an immediate consequence of the land
redistribution program, as social ideals began to change during the postwar
period, away from wealth based on agricultural land ownership and toward
urbanization and education, sellable private property became a valuable asset
that could support a child through postgymnasium (secondary school) edu-
cation in search of skilled employment off the land. A sense of stable social
hierarchy based on land-ownership broke down, but patronage (originally
based on the relationship between landlord and tenant) continues to exist
Foreword ● xiii
alongside neoliberal economic policies. For members of long-established
families it is social capital slowly built up over decades that gives status, but
for others, descended from tenants who have experienced the increasingly
ready supply of cash, consumerism is the new source of status, “coupled with
highly influential mass media imports from western Europe and the United
States.” The former have survived the economic disaster more successfully
than the latter.
How, finally, is the rise Daniel notes in public socializing in the bars and
streets of the local town to be explained? Foreigners, and even Greeks liv-
ing abroad, are puzzled that despite their complaining, Greeks seem still to
be spending money on leisure. Daniel’s careful inquiries discover how the
constant flow of bad news on television and the lack of food at home drive
people into public spaces. He discovers how important the public sphere is
for sharing suffering and support, and how determined his Greek friends are
to show they are not beaten, but resisting northern European neoliberalism.
Dr. Knight’s vivid and thoughtful study takes readers into the heart of
the current turbulent conditions affecting Western Europe, on the one hand
portraying their effects on ordinary lives, on the other uncovering some of
their causes and consequences in an anthropologically enlightening manner.
Robert Layton
