All these years we have been watching anxiously, and often frustration, the desperate efforts of Governments to provide solutions, to offer a vision, to keep alive the hope of a broken and humiliated people, who is looking to find his stride in the modern demanding and competitive world.
And while we struggle to stay on the surface of becoming international, suddenly we found ourselves "forced" to fight to keep people afloat, who are drowning!
The refugee problem adds to our economic and social impasse and creates an explosive mixture at the foundations of our national identity and social cohesion.
The risk of Greece turning into a vast refugee camp, in a warehouse of souls, it is visible and real, as competent lips confirm it…
And our fears grow, as another certainty is overturned, that of the inviolability of the border!
Seeing thousands of refugees and migrants arrive on the Greek islands of the Aegean we feel weak and unprotected, as we find that borders, that kept outsiders away and "protected" us, they do not exist….And the bitterest realization is that we can't—because we shouldn't!-to save the seas, at least, our border, for the defense of which so many struggles were fought, so many souls of heroes were lost…
We are listening, at the same time, more and more voices and warnings about…Islamization of Greece and for the disappearance of Hellenism!
Voices and warnings, which as a rule are motivated by good will and sincere love for our Motherland, but where, Nevertheless, it looks, they forget that Hellenism has no borders!
They forget that Hellenism acquired borders only recently 186 years….
They forget that Hellenism lived and flourished for more than three thousand years without borders, without a single State, so, as we know it today. It extended from Macedonia to Crete and from Ionia to Sicily and Lower Italy. The city-states, who were part of it were called Hellenic, although many were not in the area, which today we call Greece, and their inhabitants were aware that they were Greeks, not because they lived in Greece, but because they were connected with each other with others, hyperlocal, ties, were associated with the common language, common worship, common culture!
It was valid, in other words, this, which Christos Giannaras so recently found out, that, that is, "Greece has always been a way, not a place of life"!
Elsewhere, Well, are our borders and our Thermopylae!
And for these borders we must worry and fight!
On these imaginary borders a sleepless vigilator stood and for these borders the eternal Greek was sacrificed… And he won!
Conquered Greece conquered the uncivilized conqueror, Rome, and introduced the arts into Latium, as he bitterly admitted, maybe, the Latin poet Horace, and upon the ruins of the Roman Empire he founded another Empire, which for a thousand years was the breakwater and the defender of European civilization.
And in the heat of Turkish sovereignty, of his enslavement to a foreign and non-religious dynasty, Hellenism, without statehood, survived, he kept his tongue, his religion, its historical memory and its national consciousness, wherever he was, in today's Greece, in Europe, in East Asia, in North Africa, with a common place of unity and reference his Church…
The historian Nikos Svoronos, in fact, writes: “that he kept his tongue, his national consciousness, for me this is a resistance phenomenon… I don't consider resistance simply to take up arms and go up into the mountains. This is an easy thing, relatively easy. The problem is staying who you are, and this is of course combined with the cultural continuity of Hellenism. With the fact that when the Greek people were conquered, had national unity and consciousness of this unity, which allowed it to resist absorption by other peoples"!
Living conditions and situations, certainly not unprecedented in our historical path, but unimaginable for the way and data of our thinking, until a few years ago, and addressing real risks to national survival, the only solution is resistance to the measures of national self-consciousness, our supply with the weapons of long history, of our cultural and national tradition and our decision to preserve the moral Thermopylae of our Hellenism!
And for that they don't even need money, nor memoranda, nor weapons!
Only determination and above all Education, Moral and freedom education, Greek education, which is also Universal!
† DOROTHEOS II OF SYRUS and MYKONOS
(Magazine "POLITICAL ISSUES", τ. 88, February 2016)