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Carnival time brought no carnival to Athens last week. The people did not, in the fashion of happier years, cavort through the streets behind the gaitanaki (mock donkey formed by two clowns). The season brought only reminders of the fact that Greece was one of Europe's unhappiest nations.
At Athens' Acropole Palace Hotel, a U.N. commission was hearing witnesses on Greece's imbroglio with her northern neighbors. From Washington came an Olympian statement from Secretary of State Marshall, welcoming Greece's new coalition Government but warning that it must put Greece's chaotic house in order before it could expect more U.S. help.
In his sand-colored marble palace in Athens, a short (5 ft. 2 in.), stiff-backed gentleman was having a lonely lunch of a simple entree and fruit. George of Schles-wig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glucksburg, King of the Hellenes, was suffering from a stomach ulcer, and a heavier meal, combined with all his worries about his realm, would have been inadvisable.
Cradle & Key. Greece, though it was tiny and poor and quarrelsome, was worth the world's worry. Under its deep blue skies people had first achieved the reasoned rule they called democracy. The Greece of 1947 was a strategic spot in democracy's worldwide, defensive struggle.
Greece is a key to the eastern Mediterranean and to the Dardanelles (which Russia wants). It is the only Balkan country still outside the Iron Curtain, and its frontier with Slav lands to the north (Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Albania) is in fact a frontier between two worlds. The U.N. commission was in Athens last week because Greece charged that Russia's allies were trying to push that frontier south.
Well-trained guerrillas from Russia's satellite states infiltrated into Greece's northern provinces, fanning Greece's chronic civil war. By diverting the energies of the Greek Government from the desperate domestic situation to the fighting in the north, the Communists were constantly worsening that domestic situation and gaining supporters among Greece's disgruntled, hungry people. The exasperatingly slow and petty testimonies before the U.N. commission did not tell the real story of Greece's tragedy. Outside the Acropole Palace's heavy brown curtains the streets of Athens told far more.
The Feast of Peace. On the walls of the working-class district beneath the Parthenon, scrawled slogans gave a chronology of Greece's sorrow.
One said: "Hurrah for the Allies, Death to Hitler!"
A second said: "EAM" (National Liberation Front, the leftist anti-Hitler organization which became an instrument of Communist terror).
A third said: "Erkhete"—He [the King] is coming.
The streets were crowded with refugees driven to Athens from the countryside, where the bitter forces behind political slogans whipped up a violence that made reconstruction impossible.
Two samples from refugees' stories: