Time for some Philhellenism! The Light of Greece (from Binyon to Fowles)

People are getting tired of all the negative journalistic comment. Greece is not a brand, and it doesn't need rebranding as such, but it deserves more balanced international press coverage. Without making allowances or excuses, it is as well to remind ourselves of what the country has offered (and suffered) in the last seventy years or so.

As a first reminder, here's the first verse of a poem by Laurence Binyon (1869-1943), from 1940.

The Lamp of Greece


Truth incorruptible lives on, though sight
Cloud, and the heart flinch, and the mind askance
Reject. Because she sought that radiance,
Unweariable lover of the light!
History's marvel, Hellas in despite
Of time and interposing circumstance
Still stands above the siege of ignorance,
Serene before the armies of the night.

***

In 1940 Binyon was appointed Byron Professor of English Literature at the University of Athens. He worked there until forced to leave, narrowly escaping before the German invasion of Greece in April 1941 (Wikipedia).

***

If Binyon saw Greece, or rather Hellas, as a source of radiant light, John Fowles could write of Byzantine Greece, only 11-12 years later, as a torturer of light.

Fowles had been appointed as a teacher at a boarding school on the island of Spetsai. He was writing after the end of the Greek Civil War, and around the time that the Cyprus problem was becoming intensified. Does this poem mark, symbolically, the end of a brief new flowering of Philhellenism?

Byzantium

Purples on purples, faecal browns,

Neurotic greens and wombing blacks,

Crusted walls and cancerous cells:

And I stand in the narthex hating

Byzantium, inward Byzantium,

These vile Greek churches staling

Their landscapes like poisonous fungi,

Clusters of foul mycotic caps,

Enshriners of the worst of night.

I know Byzantium: Byzantium

Is anything that tortures light.

                                                                         ***

It's time to be more positive, although the last paragraph of the following article gives little cause for rejoicing.