The English word "spartan" - rigorously austere - rides again in the modern Greek incarnation of the ancient city state that defeated Athens in the Peloponnesian War to became the unrivalled power in southern Greece in the sixth century BC. "MONEY DON'T GROW ON TREES" someone has scrawled in crooked English capitals on the crumbling plaster of one of the many derelict houses in the shabby streets that run back from Sparti Square, the still passably smart city centre with the town hall that looks like a rich man's attractive villa. Sparti is Sparta in modern Greek.
A small crowd had gathered on the town hall's far side on Thursday morning. Although I couldn't see the people, there was something distinctly familiar about the sounds. Then the sounds acquired a different rhythm. The crowd streamed round the corner of the town hall, and all was clear. It was May Day, and the procession that wound past my hotel chanting slogans, carrying banners and waving crimson flags might have been the white-collar employees of a Kolkata office going through a time-honoured lunchtime ritual.
Actually, the organiser, the All-Workers Militant Front known as Pame (from the Greek Panergatiko Agonistiko Metopo) is said to command the allegiance of nearly a million workers. I am told Pame organised a mass demonstration and strike in 60 cities (I didn't know Greece had that many!) on April 9. But Thursday's May Day meeting among the cafes of Sparti Square didn't suggest the red revolution was round the corner. Watching the 100 or so demonstrators as they walked past while two policemen in navy uniforms watched, I was struck by the age of many of the marchers, the number of men with long hair and the high number of women.
Nineteen sixty-seven was a long time ago. But I wonder if, even then, the army colonels who staged a coup to oust King Constantine II didn't invent (or, at least, exaggerate) the "communist threat" as an excuse to seize power. The 96-year-old Communist Party of Greece, proud of being the oldest political group on the scene and known by the letters KKE (for Kommounistikó Kómma Elládas) had been banned for decades. It wasn't made legal until 1974, although the deposed king, who returned to live in Greece last year, says he wanted to legitimise communism but wasn't allowed by his prime minister, Constantine Karamanlis.
In some respects, Greece is not unlike West Bengal. The original communist movement has split into many factions, some with frighteningly revolutionary names. But just as Bengali Marxists are Hindus first, most people in this supposedly most radical of European Union member states are too closely linked to the Greek Orthodox Church for communism ever to pose a serious challenge. The KKE is also very much an establishment party and probably more straightforward than the Communist Party of India (Marxist). The letters KKE shine in bright red on its offices.
The combination of Christianity and communism is one of several Greek contradictions. Last year's reportedly ruthless Operation Xenios Zeus to mop up illegal migrants and the government's perceived ineffectiveness in other matters is another. So is the contrast between the murderously neo-fascist Golden Dawn party and the warmth with which Greeks greet foreigners. Food, features, body language and attitudes seem familiar. I have to rub my eyes to remind myself this is not Asia but Europe. And not just Europe but the cradle of European civilisation.
The explanation for Greece's personality probably lies in the waves of history that have swept over this ancient land. Beyond Sparti Square rise the mountains of Taygetos and Parnon, rosy at dawn and streaked with snow later in the sunlight. We climbed those mountains one morning to the stone turrets and battlements of Mystra, where a pale flame of the Byzantine empire flickered for seven years after Constantinople's fall to Mehmed II in 1453. Then, in 1460, Mystra's ruler (he was styled "Despot"), Demetrius Palaeologos, brother of the defeated Emperor Constantine, also surrendered to Mehmed. Trebizond, the last fragment of the Byzantine empire, capitulated a year later. That completed Islam's victory over Christendom and the end of 1,500 years of imperial Rome.
Mystra is a pretty village below the ruins, six kilometres from Sparti. Venice ruled it from 1687 to 1715. The Ottomans got it back and retained control until Greece became independent in 1821 under the Bavarian King Otto, whose blue and white national colours Greece still uses. No wonder today's Kolkata looks like a shabby and overgrown imitation of a Greek town. Otto abandoned Mystra in the 1830s. Sparti then became the headquarters of the Laconia province, which alone voted for King Constantine in the 1974 referendum that abolished his office.
The monarchy seems as remote today as the Peloponnesian War. What matters is the evidence of poverty and the constant whispers of corruption. Modern Sparti survives on cultivating oranges and olives. The price of the best Valencia oranges has plummeted to six cents a kilo, a restaurant owner tells me. If olives fare a little better, it's mainly because Italians buy up the locally made olive oil to mix with their own. "A lot of aid has been poured in," a Spartan businessman says, "but the money leaks away!" Leak is a popular word.
Idle taxi drivers repeat the charge. Pavement cafes are empty. Shops and restaurants have been boarded up. Hotels have lowered their rates. A housewife complains her government pension has been halved. Leonidas, the warrior king who perished at Thermopylae, and Lycurgus, the legendary lawgiver who lived two centuries earlier, whose graven images guard the town at either end, would have been horrified. Sparta or Sparti, life in the little town couldn't be more spartan.
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