Do you not already know all about Greece? About its condition, its degradation, its agony?
The cradle of Western civilization, the cradle of democracy, the cradle of antiquity—how long have you been watching it suffocating?
The media have heaped on you so much: testimonials, figures of extremist threats, images of riots and protests. All those expert analyses told to us through a prism of information that we could comprehend. And all this was necessary, of course, to try to understand what was going on.
But does it all really convey the magnitude of the crisis? A crisis that criss-crosses the country from end to end, like a sword slashing at a body? Can this crisis be read through images?
Who, from the outside, can understand the pain of loss and abandonment? The feeling of leaving and abandoning everything we had built—all of us, each of us.
These abandoned places, the gutted houses, these unfinished hopes for a life. They litter Greece. They testify to a flourishing past, to a life once full of abundance, to expectations mown down in mid-flight.
I meant, by these images, to show that which we do not normally get to see. Misery like an implacable sentence. And here, the misery is so especially grim because it has become general. No one escaped its cleaver.
