It sometimes feels like only a day has passed. At other times, it seems like a century has gone by. But it's been a year. One year ago, exactly, Arianna arrived in Athens --with a nice banner in the colors of the Greek sea or the sky above the Parthenon-- and The Huffington Post started speaking Greek.
It was the first time that a large international media organization, one with great credibility and a powerful international presence, came to settle in Greece and adopted a Greek voice. And that made the debut of HuffPost Greece an important moment in the history of Greek media. But it also coincided with an important moment in Greek history; Greece seemed to have entered a kind of great accelerator. It seemed to be living out an experiment in some sort of political CERN. Everything was happening at the speed of light. And yet, concurrently, it was like political time was expanding -- changes that would usually take decades unfold over weeks or days.
In a year, Greece lived through two elections and a referendum, a phantasmagoria of a negotiations and the harrowing experience of bankruptcy. One night, the shadows of rupture were looming, and then Greece awoke to an emergency landing onto the reality of a difficult compromise. It saw long nights of thunderous voting in parliament, and even longer nights of negotiations in Brussels. Greece was shaken by great agonies and small intra-party drama. At times, one got that feeling that you'd get at the Theatre of Dionysus, at the base of the Acropolis- politics and history dressed up in tragedy, as the whole city, the whole world, watched with bated breath.
It was an incredibly political year. And in this piping hot environment, a clear-eyed observer was necessary -- one that was calm but not indifferent or uninvolved. Free of prejudice and bias but not lacking in interest, passionate interest. An observer that combined the immediacy of the eyewitness, the distance of the chronologist and the agony of someone trying to understand, to find a thread of light within the storm of events. The start of meaningful dialogue, not just noise. The Greek edition of the Huffington Post attempted to do just that. It was not easy. I don't know if it succeeded. I do know however that it tried to achieve this with hard work-- the team, the soul of the publication, has made personal sacrifices on endless nights of news.
For someone who makes a living as a professional journalist in Greece, some days offer wings, and other days drive you to crawl and scrape yourself on thorns. But if we had these 365 days flash before our eyes, those that would remain in our memories would not be the days that burned up in political fever, but those that gave a platform to everyday heroes. For a chronicler of crisis alone, these everyday heroes would slip under the radar.
Today's Greece has the most educated generation in its history, and is probably the country with the highest density of youth with post-graduate degrees in Europe. These young people --who wonder whether they should stay or leave-- have launched hundreds of startups, and gave new life to distressed businesses that have been forgotten in corners of the city or on faraway islands. These young people are the country's strength. HuffPost Greece, I think, owes it to them to become their voice.
The image of Greece in global media these last few years was tied mostly to flaming protests, dark and disastrous city landscapes, queues of the unemployed at soup kitchens, or marches of black-clad Neo-Nazis. But for Greece of 2015, if I had to choose one photograph for the splash page of the year, it would be the image of a port worker saving a boy who nearly drowned at sea. It is not melodramatic. In 2015, approximately 800,000 refugees and immigrants have arrived in Europe. 650,000 crossed the sea to Greece in boats. A Greek island accepted, in one month, refugees amounting to three times its population, without ever exhibiting racist behavior.
Let's cherish this-- it's a positive step for a country that, this year, has had to look at its naked self in the mirror of crisis, and was bitterly disappointed by its reflection.
This post first appeared on HuffPost Greece and was translated into English.
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