By ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ (GREEK) TÜRKÇE (TURKISH)
A popular saying that my father often reminded me of when I was a child says that first, you have to know where you put your signature and second, what you understood. In our day and age, I could easily add voting to this.
All in all, I think that the Fidias phenomenon has been good for our country. Perhaps never before has a single phenomenon – the word in the positive or negative sense, or both, however you prefer – managed to highlight so many things that concern us, politically or otherwise.
By chance? Of course, by chance. Does it matter?
On the occasion of the most recent incident: Fidias went to Kyrenia and shot a video in a hotel – casino. The branch of high patriotism’s censors, several of whose members made entire careers and fortunes selling unyielding cheap struggles to the desperate of 1974, has again raised a finger ready to stamp out at its root the new emergence of betrayal, with political reward emanating, of course, as always, from the new verbal guerrilla warfare.
On the other hand, the camp of the – certainly more than they should be – solution romantics, unforgivably mildly put maybe because I was one them myself, went one step further in the process of fully adopting Fidias, in order to also capitalise – at least so says the naivety of the approach – on the voice of the young MEP who says they are teaching us half the History.
Folklore – or not folklore, in times of trouble, whatever little you have will have to suffice.
But Fidias is what he is. How seriously one takes him into consideration reveals one’s own seriousness, not the seriousness of Fidias which we should know.
Quite rightly someone will point out that on top of everything else he is also an MEP – now – and that when one of our MEPs makes videos in the hotel-casinos of the occupied areas, whether he knows that they are controlled by the Turkish mafia and built on Greek Cypriot properties or not, with Fidias I would not be so certain, the issue is not simple. I don’t disagree at all.
However, why do we believe that the outside world will see the whole incident as something more than farcical? Most will never know about it and those that do, if they know what the Fidias phenomenon is, will laugh. And if not, I humbly suggest that they probably will realise [what the phenomon is].
And the television colleagues in Athens, the ones in and outside quotation marks who took the opportunity to play the Tsoliades [Editor’s note: colloquial name for Evzones, members of the Greek Presidential Guard] in the television slots and teach the nation’s history, this taking place before the issue about the panties of so-and-so and so-and-so’s fight with the other about the silicone they put in their boobs, sorry, that’s what they do for a living.
And here as well, taking seriously all that happened is uncomfortable as far as one’s own being is concerned.
The responsibility lies with those who (a) voted for him and (b) didn’t go out to vote, allowing the vote of those who voted for him to multiply. A popular saying that my father often reminded me of when I was a child says that first, you have to know where you put your signature and second, what you understood. In our day and age, I could easily add voting to this.
The old shopkeepers used to write that no mistakes could be accepted after walking away from the till.
Beyond that, while Cyprus is preoccupied with how we are in danger of either becoming Turkified because of Fidias or not learning the other half of History when we don’t even know the… other half of the other half, we don’t bother to read beyond Omonoia – APOEL that we use for our part; our region is experiencing the greatest instability of the last decades, an instability that affects directly, not indirectly, the Cyprus problem, but also the emergence of developments that could force us or your children to leave Cyprus in a hurry. If we make it in time.
When one votes for political simpletons it is not the simpletons that are to blame but one’s own judgement and inadequacy. The same applies when one doesn’t go to vote.
In conclusion: Cheers!
*Toubeki, from the Turkish tömbeki. The tobacco of the hookah, finely chopped. Hence the phrase “I make toubeki”, which means I don’t speak, I keep silent.
