ON SWASTIKAS, STARS AND CRESCENTS.

 I remember the first and only time I ever drew a swastika clearly. I was six years old and had recently watched the Greek classic film «Οι Γερμανοί Ξανάρχονται» (The Nazis Return) with my family. Attending the name-day celebration of a family friend and discovering a dearth of children with which to play, I took to illustrating scenes from the film on the back of an envelope. Drawing a set of soldiers in a row, I decorated their upper arms with swastikas, an emblem that appeared to me to resemble a rather demented spider. Suddenly, I felt the envelope recede from my grasp. An elderly gentleman snatched it from the table and waved it in front of my face. 

“Do you know what you have drawn here?” he shouted. 

“The baddies,” I managed to stammer. 

“Do you know what this symbol is?” he asked, his voice straining to an impossible high pitch. 

“The sign of the baddies,” I muttered, petrified. 

“You have drawn the personification of evil,” he screamed. Tearing up the envelope, he strode over to my parents in the other room. With great difficulty I could make out the strange and new additions to my vocabulary for that evening: “psychological problems,” “disturbed,” and the most fascinating of all, “bunch of fascists.” 

 

It was then that my parents took me aside and explained to me exactly what the swastika meant and the crimes the people who wore it and espoused the ideology it symbolised had committed. Even though the swastika is a most ancient symbol that predates the Nazis by millennia, a symbol that in the form of the tetraskelion or tetragammadion  or meander pattern appears on ancient Greek architectural, clothing and coin designs, I cannot view the swastika without feeling physically sick. This is the reason that although I was lucky enough to be gifted a 6^th century BC silver stater from Corinth by a friend in my youth, I could not keep it, for it bore the symbol of the inverted swastika and I felt compelled to give it away. Similarly, discovering a precious first edition of 19^th century English folklorist Lucy Garnett’s “Greek Folk-Songs From the Turkish Provinces of Greece,”  I was incensed and shocked to find its front cover bizarrely inscribed with a gold inverted swastika that had sprouted wings, labelled with the word ΚΟΣΜΟΣ in the shape of a cross and surrounded by blazing suns. Rather than a compendium of Greek poetry collected in raw form, this appeared like the handbook of some occult ritual and it was only after discovering that in the Western world, the anticlockwise swastika was a symbol of auspiciousness and good luck until the 1930s when the Nazis turned it clockwise, and committed unspeakable acts of evil in its name, that I reconciled myself to its existence. 

 

I also remember the first time I drew the star and crescent, for not long after the incident with the swastika, I had taken to watching pre-war Hollywood Arabian nights films and would festoon the pages of my exercise books with exotic, swashbuckling Douglas Fairbanks characters sporting broad yataghans and flowing turbans topped with the star and crescent, liberating genies from their lamps. This time it was one of my Greek school teachers who snatched the book away from me and gazed at my doodles with horror. 

“Do you know what this is?” kyria Georgia asked me, aghast. 

“Sinbad the sailor,” I responded, marvelling that she could not glean this information from the amount of detail in the drawing. 

“No, this symbol you have placed on his turban and of all these other towel wearing individuals.” 

“I don’t know.” 

“This is the symbol of the people who enslaved our people,” she snarled, tearing the page from my book. “By drawing it, you are condoning four hundred years of oppression. Why can’t you draw some heroes of the Revolution instead? What is wrong with you?” 

 

When my parents came to collect me from school that afternoon, they found her brandishing the drawing at them. Vaguely, I could make out the now familiar words “psychological problems,” “disturbed,” and a new one: «γενίτσαρος». 

 

“She is an ignoramus,” my grandfather snorted when informed of the days events. The star and crescent is Greek.” 

“Shut up Kosta. It’s your fault for putting all these ideas in his head in the first place,” my grandmother snapped, as my grandfather shuffled away. 

 

Yet it turns out, for all of my teacher’s indignation, that my grandfather was right. The star and crescent, which is considered to be a symbol of Islam and is emblazoned upon the flags of Turkey, Tunisia, Azerbaijan, Libya, Algeria, Pakistan, Singapore, Malaysia and so many more states, is actually Greek in origin. Indeed, it was developed in the ancient Greek colony of Byzantium around 300 BC and as a symbol of the moon and morning star, it ultimately came to be connected with the goddess Artemis. It received an even greater reception when it was adopted as the royal emblem of king Mithradates VI Eupator of Pontus, after he took control of Byzantium. As such, the star and crescent began to appear upon the coins of Pontus, and the device came to symbolise Pontus itself. By Hellenistic times, the symbol came to be associated with the goddess Hecate, who was said to have saved the city of Byzantium from attack by Philip of Macedon by illuminating the sky with a bright star in 340BC. The connection between Byzantium and the star and crescent was maintained throughout the Byzantine period and was never forgotten. After Constantinople, its Eastern Roman incarnation finally fell in 1453, scholars contend that its symbol, the star and crescent, was adopted by its Ottoman conquerors as a gesture of total and utter appropriation not only of the city itself, but also of its logos, trademarks and intellectual property. 

 

Contrariwise the symbol that we now associate with the Byzantine Empire, the double headed eagle, turns out not to have its origins in Byzantium at all. Instead, it appears to have been a Hittite symbol, used sparingly by the Byzantines as a decorative motif and adopted as a symbol of their people by the Seljuk Turks and the Mamelukes of Egypt. It was only in the final, Palaeologian period, that the double headed eagle came to symbolise an Empire which by that stage, was in its death throes. 

 

The star and crescent is not the only “Greek” symbol to have its use compromised by connotation. If any device symbolised the rebirth of modern Greece, then this surely was the phoenix, the mythical bird associated with Greek mythology that cannot dies for its is born anew, arising from the ashes of its predecessor. So ancient is the Greek people’s association with the phoenix that mention of its is made in Linear B inscriptions dating back to Mycenaean times. The poet Hesiod, in his “precepts of Chiron,” referred to “rich-haired Nymphs, daughters of Zeus the aegis-holder, [who] outlive ten phoenixes.” 

It is no wonder then that the phoenix rising from the ashes was chosen as a symbol of the Sacred Band that declared the Greek Revolution in modern day Romania, as well as of the revolutionaries of Naousa in 1822. Indeed, the first currency of Greece, introduced by Ioannis Kapodistrias was known as the phoenix and sported the mythical bird upon its coins. So synonymous was the phoenix with the concept of freedom that it was also adopted during the German occupation by the Greek Mountain Government.  

However, it was the adoption of the device as the symbol of the Junta that saw an end to any continued official association between the state of Greece and the phoenix. Although an Order of the Phoenix exists as an honour offered to Greek citizens and foreigners alike, any other public use of the phoenix is associated with Junta sympathisers and it appears that the symbol is thus, like the star and crescent, forever tainted and proscribed, regardless of its prehistory. 

 

Ultimately, whatever their origins and historical trajectory, symbols that come to be associated with hatred and injustice tend to become infused with the memory of that evil and thus their continued use cannot but be abjured. It is for this reason that the entire Greek community welcomes the Victorian government’s initiative to ban the Nazi version of the swastika from public display as a necessary and significant step in the direction of minimising the incidence of hate-crime and anti-semitism. As we go forth, determined to forge a better, securer and more equitable world, it is worth speculating which of our symbols, perfectly acceptable to us now, and encapsulating our ethnic, religious or linguistic identities will come to be tainted and deemed offensive by the stupidity and crimes committed in their name, in the future. 

 

DEAN KALIMNIOU 

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 9 July 2022