George Clooney and the Golden Dawn Hate Me

Greek schoolchildren protesting in front of the Elgin marbles (photo courtesy of the Deutero Gymnasio Corinthou High School)

I discovered [that other, horrible, inbox](http://assets.vice.com/content-images/contentimage/136402/Screen Shot 2014-02-13 at 12.30.02.jpg) for strangers on my Facebook yesterday. At the top of it was a message from a man in his twenties wearing military uniform, kindly asking me to never return to Greece or he'll "fuck my house". (Yeah, I know it's weird. It's a Greek expression that basically means he would do bad stuff to my family.) "I mean, even George Clooney thinks you suck," he concluded.

But let me explain: George Clooney was in London recently, promoting his new film, The Monuments Men. The film, I read, is about a bunch of soldiers trying to retrieve art pieces stolen by Nazi thieves and return them to their rightful owners sometime during WWII. I'm not sure if the story means anything to you, but if you're Greek, like me, there is no combination of the words "stolen" and "art" that won't automatically make you think of the Elgin, or Parthenon, marbles.

In case any of you are wondering why Greeks are losing their marbles, the story is pretty ancient and complicated, but the gist is that some British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, called Lord Elgin, removed about half of the sculptures gracing the Parthenon (as well as a few other nice bits of the Acropolis) back in the 19th century and sent them to England. I think his reasoning was that the art would be looked after better in London, because the Greeks were a bunch of barbarians living under the rule of even more barbaric barbarians (the Turks).

Then again, I might just be saying that because I grew up in Athens in the 90s, a decade that Greece spent fine-tuning a massive inferiority complex. The country had just been blessed with EU membership and the place was finally bursting with money, as well as a desire to give up the Eastern parts of our culture that represented the conservative ideals our parents grew up with. An aspiration to be "more European" pretty much defined the culture of my childhood, as I'm sure is the case with most Greeks of my generation. Being Western meant being cool. Weirdly, this led to everyone really, really loving the band James.

Anyway, the modern lust for the marbles' return began in the 80s, when then Minister of Culture and Greek national treasure Melina Mercouri launched a campaign for their return to Athens. This included plans for the construction of the New Acropolis Museum, a building that could hypothetically house the artworks. The museum finally opened in 2009 but sadly there's still no sign of the marbles. Cue George Clooney very reasonably telling a Greek reporter at the Berlin Film Festival this weekend that, "Maybe it wouldn't be a bad thing if they [the sculptures] were returned." Greece freaked out and England followed. Clooney's tossed-off sentence made headlines, Matt Damon and Bill Murray were forced to weigh in on the issue while in London on Tuesday, and Boris Johnson may or may not have called George Clooney a Nazi. On top of everything, the Greek Culture Minister, Panos Panagiotopoulos, sent George Clooney a thank you letter.

I'm not sure our Culture Minister realises that George Clooney is in the middle of promoting a film. Athens isn't London, with its big film premieres and its Leicester Square. We rarely get any kind of famous person to set foot in Greece, unless they're briefly mooring their private yacht because the supermodels are whining that the Cava's running dry. The last time I tried to go to a pop concert in Athens was to see P!nk back in 2007. She didn't even bother to show up. Can you imagine how needy a nation going through a catastrophic financial collapse gets when on top of everything, it gets snubbed by P!nk? I don't think you can.

So, imagine you are the ugliest girl at school; you've got a gigantic spot on your forehead, permanent camel-toe and your armpits smell like vag. Then fucking George Clooney asks you out. This is roughly what Greece is experiencing right now.

I'm pretty sure no one cares but I feel it's important to say here that I too would very much like to see the Parthenon marbles go back home. I thought it went without saying, cause y' know, I'm Greek, but if you do a quick google search of my name in Greek you'll come to think I am vehemently opposed to the whole idea. You'll also come across a few photoshops of my face on naked models' bodies in sultry poses and many, so many, people calling my mum a slut and my dad an asshole in the comments sections of various blogs.

You see, almost exactly one year ago, a Greek high school visited the British Museum. Instead of taking a walk to learn about the marbles and the rest of the magnificent international art housed in the building, some of those teachers and students decided their time would be much more constructively spent standing in the middle of the room that stores the sculptures holding Greek flags. In protest, obvs.

After it happened, I wrote an article saying this was stupid and that the teachers should have been more responsible than to be endorsing naive patriotic acts that can, in the times we live in, very easily be misconstrued and misused for the purposes of nationalism (see Golden Dawn). Death threats flooded my personal email inbox, a Golden Dawn MP (now imprisoned) also warned me never to set foot in Greece on regional TV and a priest gave me a pep-talk during my grandmother's funeral. I still get hate from all sorts of patriots to this day. To be fair, in the article I called the teachers morons and described the marbles as "a bunch of stones" – I'm not exactly blameless. In hindsight, I should have used less inflammatory language, and for that I would like to belatedly apologise.

I still stand by my main point, though. What with our historically unstable society, Greece has yet to construct a sense of national identity that makes sense. To make this happen we need to steer clear of populist theatricalities like sending letters to movie stars and actually get to work to better our education. It is vital that we educate ourselves about the history of the world, so we can come to appreciate our own history. So we can keep away from extremism and finally build a society that doesn't self-destruct every 30 years.

Still, Boris, please stop raving and give us back our marbles. We care about them so much more than you do. And anyway, haven't you got more important things to worry about?

 @elektrakotsoni