THE GUARDIAN: Nana Mouskouri is one of the biggest-selling singers of all time. Already adored in Greece, she promised this week to forgo her pension – the least she could do, she says, to help her financially ruined country
Athens in spring, and the tangerine trees are laden with vivid orange fruit. On the top floor of a quiet bookshop near the parliament a press conference is in progress: six people facing a room of journalists, arguing for the need to preserve the home of one of Greece's best-known poets. At their centre sits a woman striking both for her total stillness, and her huge dark glasses. She speaks evenly into a microphone, certain of her audience. When she finishes the meeting breaks up, into knots of people sipping wine and lighting cigarettes, jockeying and gossiping, as in any literary gathering the world over.
But when Nana Mouskouri makes her way to the back of the room it's to say, "Welcome. Welcome to troubled Athens." Because while here there may be blue skies and blossom, just round the corner stand armed police, riot shields at the ready. The traffic is just beginning to flow again, after yet another demonstration against the austerity measures just announced – the third round in as many months, and the harshest: €4.8bn (£4.3bn) in wage cuts, tax increases, a 30% cut in traditional holiday bonuses, a freeze on state pensions. The papers carry pictures of the demonstration yesterday – of pensioners, grey-haired and lined, being pressed back into line by young officers in full riot gear.
This week Mouskouri – who, even though she doesn't live in Greece, must be, by some measure, the country's most famous pensioner – announced that she is doing her bit by forgoing her pension altogether. "They say that one bird doesn't bring the springtime," she says now, laughing slightly, "but it's something." Her voice is quiet, only very lightly inflected – 50 years of fame, of equable, kindly interviews in one or another of her six languages, have produced an odd mixture of openness and distance, a generosity both rote and sincere – an effect exacerbated by the glasses she has hidden behind ever since she was a child. Speaking to her, you often find you are addressing her mouth, because although you can see her eyes through the tinted lenses, they seem to be doing their own thing, like a consciousness in a fish tank, swimming close, then arching away again.
Unlike the socialist government, which has strongly suggested that Greece's often very wealthy diaspora stump up some cash in its time of trouble, Mouskouri refuses to insist that other people should follow her example. But she rather hopes they will. "I believe in the pride, and the good will of everybody." Later she mentions that she's heard "that a deputy from the parliament has given her salary for a certain time. In Greece we call that philotimo. Philotimo is to have a certain pride – not arrogance, pride – and to place it well. To say I want to do something for my country. I believe there is some of it. I hope. At least nowadays everybody's informed about [the crisis]." >>> Aida Edemariam | Saturday, March 06, 2010
