Greece Awaits Seal of Approval

Greeks are watching the modern world’s supreme sports juggernaut -- and attendant corporate sponsors -- descend on their ancient land with a mix of pride, joy and palpable dread.

When the Summer Olympics officially open today amid pomp, crowds of Greeks will join in the biggest show on Earth and vigorously cheer the arrival of the Olympic flame in a state-of-art stadium built for the occasion. But scratch the veneer of enthusiasm just a bit, and Greeks can be seen and heard wrestling with questions about the financial, personal and political costs of playing host to such a momentous event.

The colossal runaway expense, the chaos that characterized the preparations, the invasive security -- all these things and more give pause to ordinary Greeks.

At the same time, a visceral sense of pride is taking hold -- after all, the Games were born here millenniums ago -- and Greeks including the glittery elite on their yachts and the workaday store clerks forgoing their August vacations want the country to look good on this international stage.

“There is a real ambivalence,” said Nikos Dimou, a Greek pundit and author of the bestselling book “The Misery of Being Greek.” “Greeks have a sort of split personality.”

On the one hand, Dimou said, they crave international acceptance and approval. On the other, they resent the criticism and doubts about whether they could pull this off. It hit a sensitive nerve in the Greek psyche: philotimo -- honor with dignity, essentially. Greeks have felt their honor was at stake.

The nation has linked its self-esteem and even its identity as a modern member of the European fold to its ability to stage an Olympics free of major calamity. Many Greeks say it is important to dispel the notion that Greece, the cradle of Western civilization, is today the poor stepchild of the European Union.

Newspapers in Athens this week have been full of reports on foreign doubting Thomases forced to eat crow after seeing Greece succeed in getting ready for the Games, constructing or refurbishing 38 venues and finding room for 10,500 athletes, 21,000 journalists and an endless list of dignitaries.

“I would never say, ‘I told you so,’ ” said Athens Mayor Dora Bakoyannis, one of the most formidable public faces of Greece’s Herculean effort to prepare for the Games. “But I would say, ‘Trust the Greeks.’ We made it.”

Since the end of a right-wing military dictatorship three decades ago and the ascension of popularly elected leaders, Greece has strived to define itself. It is Western and democratic. It’s also Balkan and tradition-bound and reverent of Eastern-rite Orthodoxy.

Greece is a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, yet is a place where visiting Americans this week have been told by their government not to appear “too American.” It is the one country in the EU that most strenuously fought the removal of religion from citizens’ ID cards. Strains of xenophobia and nationalism run alongside the sleek new cars, latest mobile phones and Cartier fashion houses.

“Greeks can be very modern on some things and totally antique on others,” Dimou said.

Greece is also a poor and very small country that has taken on the most elaborate and expensive of sporting events.

By the thousands, Greeks are fleeing Athens to get away from the festivities. And the waves of tourists that the government promised -- and is counting on to recoup some of its costs -- have failed to materialize.

Ticket sales to the events have been sluggish -- with fewer than half sold two days before the opening ceremonies -- and only began to pick up after the prime minister went on television to plead for Greeks to fill the stadiums.

Athens is decidedly spiffed up for this 17-day occasion and can boast an enlarged, ultramodern subway system, new roads and important bridges. The central Constitution Square is free of trash and awash in greenery. Flags of many of the 202 countries participating in the Games, plus the mammoth orange and blue banners representing Athens 2004, the organizing committee, festoon the main streets of the capital.

A few blocks away, in many parts of the city, it would be hard to tell that anything out of the ordinary was happening.

At a travel agency on Queen Amalias Street, a stone’s throw from the royal gardens where the Greek government has set up headquarters for thousands of visiting journalists, two women sat dejectedly, awaiting the flood of customers that Games organizers had promised would come. They had not sold a single ticket to a foreign tourist -- not for the Acropolis, not for the ferries that cross the sparkling Aegean to Greece’s idyllic islands.

“Everything is upside down,” said one of the women, Erato, 65. She didn’t want her last name used -- criticizing the Olympics is frowned upon.

“The tourists who would normally be here haven’t come,” she continued with a sigh. “There is no benefit at all to the people. Nikon and Coca-Cola -- they will earn from the Games, not the people. This whole idea from the first moment was ridiculous.”

Nearby in the trendy Plaka neighborhood, Constantinos Mylonas, 58, a textile importer, said the Olympics were a good thing, especially now that Greece had shown the world what it could do.

“The Games will make Greece known to those who didn’t know it existed -- not the educated people, of course, but those who didn’t look beyond their own towns and countries,” he said over beers and a plate of grilled meat on skewers.

At the Lord Byron Hotel, Venia Mitsiopoulou said business had been slow much of the year but was picking up a bit. “Generally, it hasn’t been good, but I think the Olympics are a good advertisement for the future,” said the 26-year-old employee. “The biggest worry is the huge debt we will have over the next years.”

George Kirigos, working at the Diogenes Tavern down the road, said this had been the worst season he’d seen in 10 years.

“Maybe more people will come” because of Olympics-related publicity, he said. “But I see a very hard winter for the people of Greece.”

By far, the issue that has most troubled the Greeks -- expressed in newspaper editorials, polls and in interviews with numerous residents -- is the price tag on these Games and the extent to which the government has essentially mortgaged the national economy for years to come.

The final tab is still secret, and maybe unknown, but it is estimated to be at least $8.6 billion, more than 50% over the budgeted cost and saddling the state with a deficit well beyond the limits permitted under EU rules.

The government insists it can sustain the expense, but it is loath to talk about how. Important programs will have to be axed to pay for the financial monster that the Games have become, foreign analysts said. At the least, this government, which came to office after elections in March ousted the Socialist party that had ruled Greece for years, will have to delay plans to lower exorbitant taxes.

Only one government official has dared to voice his concerns: George Souflias, the public works minister.

“I have to question whether our country should have undertaken the organization of the Games,” he said before parliament in late May, as the budget ballooned. He was pilloried in the local, largely patriotic press.

Officials are now trying to convince Greeks that the infrastructure that will be left behind benefits them, as well as the huge boost in positive advertising that the Games bring to the country and its tourism-based economy.

“It’s a promising day after,” said Panos Livadas, a senior government spokesman. “Greece is changing across the board. This is a major investment.”

A huge portion of the money went to security in this first Summer Games since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Those measures, too, have played into Greek ambivalence. Greeks who remember the country’s vicious civil war that pitted communists against nationalists in the 1940s, or CIA interventions in the 1960s, are uneasy at the amount of surveillance directed at the country these days, from a high-tech blimp that hovers overhead to scores of cameras installed on public byways.

Greek ambivalence also carries over into things foreign and things Western. Greeks embrace Western values and aspire to Western trappings but fear that becoming Western means abandoning their traditions and culture.

“Belonging to the West has become a reality, but there is still a debate in society: Are we losing our Greek soul? Are we sacrificing Zorba to become Westerners in a three-piece suit?” said Theodore Couloumbis, a political scientist at the University of Athens.

Successful handling of the Olympics, he said, will confirm Greece’s standing in the West.