Greece’s debt mirrors crisis in cultural assets
Plato doesn?t live here anymore.
A pack of feral cats chases the rodents that run past the Gypsy squatters who inhabit the bleak 32-acre Athens park that masks the birthplace of Western civilization. Alexandros Stanas says what?s interred beneath the debris illustrates both a solution to Greece?s 345 billion euro ($473 billion) sovereign debt crisis and why his country roils in catastrophe.
?Economics, politics, philosophy, everything that empowers our reasoning and ability to solve today?s problems was born here at Plato?s Academy,? says Stanas, a former management consultant at the Greek Ministry of Culture and Tourism who is now general director of the Art-Athina International Contemporary Art Fair.
?This is the original holy ground,? Stanas says, walking across the garbage that covers the buried foundation of the 387 B.C. intellectual incubator. ?This is what we Greeks have allowed to happen to our ultimate metaphor for excellence.?
Stanas, 40, says that Plato?s Academy, discovered by a private archaeologist in the late 1920s, is one of hundreds of forlorn historic sites and destitute museums that generations of Greek politicians of all persuasions have failed to turn into attractions with the marketing clout of Versailles, the academic distinction of Harvard University or the influential draw of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
?WEF sells itself as Plato?s Academy in a Swiss village,? Stanas says. ?You are standing on the original WEF, the original Harvard, but I can?t envision global leaders coming here for enlightenment and inspiration.?
Under Siege
Stanas is not alone in using strong and what for many among the 11 million Greeks is politically incorrect imagery to describe the cultural dysfunction in a fiscally handcuffed country under psychological siege and battling to show its creditors that the corruption of the past is over.
?Athens is a tourism black hole,? says Minister of Culture and Tourism Pavlos Yeroulanos, 45. ?The days of the minister of culture handing out money to his friends are over.?
Yet time is running out for the vigorous fishing-industry executive tapped by Prime Minister George Papandreou in 2008 to buff up the city?s decrepit government-owned museums.
Yeroulanos is brooding in the Hilton Hotel coffee shop. His ministry has been taken over by some of the 2,500 contract employees he was forced to dismiss to meet a budget target of 400 million euros that likely will be slashed even further.
Addicts and Tourists
?Let me tell you what we face,? Yeroulanos says. ?The minister of health and I are trying to create a methadone program that will stop addicts from gathering around the National Archaeology Museum. My job is to promote culture but the changes I?m trying to make happen, that need to happen, are taking place within an escalating crisis.?
Pamphlets on how to deal with drug addicts scaring tourists at what should be one of the world?s leading cultural attractions are not on the table in the office of Guggenheim Foundation international-board member Dakis Joannou. The chairman of the Greek construction company J
