CLUB ΦΤΥΑΡΙ

A quiet and insidious malaise has begun to permeate the Greek community of Melbourne. It does not roar in the open. It moves through whispers, nods, messages sent in private, and names murmured in half-lit corners. Its preferred theatre is not the agora but the comment thread, the messenger chat, the casual phone call that begins with “I tell you this as a friend.” Bullying has assumed a refined and destructive form, woven into the fabric of our social exchanges until it feels like an accepted way of life.

The days of open confrontation have passed. In their place has emerged a subtler order of aggression, whose weapons are exclusion and rumour. Modern ostracism, known in years past as thapsimo, thrives on social media, where posts are dissected and private lives debated with relish. Some are denounced directly, others through artful insinuation, their identities half-concealed so that gossip can do its work. This is punishment by erasure. Instead of public censure, there is the slow death of reputation, the quiet exile from one’s peers. In our community, those who wield the φτυάρι often determine the discourse.

Behind the scenes, the machinery of exclusion turns efficiently. Invitations once extended are withdrawn. Collaborations dissolve without explanation. Events that once symbolised unity are abruptly curtailed when a particular name appears. Those associated with the “undesirable” receive warnings disguised as friendly advice. “Perhaps you should keep your distance.” “It is better not to be seen together.” “Why did you involve them?” The message is clear. Friendship has a price. Association becomes a liability. Fear becomes etiquette. All of a sudden, that invitation for a function you were waiting for, so as to be photographed among your peers, never arrives.

Such behaviour belongs to the schoolyard. Among adults, and particularly among a community that prides itself on intellect, it is tantamount to moral impoverishment. Cliques form and re-form, loyalties shift, gossip replaces reasoned conversation. Important decisions are made privately, in camera, with whispered votes and invisible vetoes. Dissenters, often capable people with much to contribute and with an immense love and proven commitment to the community, are frozen out rather than confronted. Ideas and initiatives are discredited by association rather than argument. Power passes through rumour, and reputations rise and fall according to proximity to influence.

This culture we have crafted craves compliance, rewarding silence and punishing honesty. Those who speak plainly are branded divisive. Those who question are seen as subversive. Rhetorical tropes such as cynical appeals for unity are artfully employed to suffocate dialogue. Debate, once the essence of Hellenic engagement, is re-cast as disloyalty. Behind the smiling photographs of harmony lies a community that has forgotten how to disagree with dignity.

There is ample historical precedent for this. In the time of Homer, one man dared to speak freely, Thersites, the common soldier. Of low birth and coarse manner, he did not fear to stand before kings and condemn their vanity and greed. For that offence he was struck and mocked while the army laughed. Homer’s message has never faded: truth is punished when it wounds authority and we ought to know our place. We may like to think ourselves heirs to that heroic age, yet our treatment of those who question us remains unchanged. Even Homer, who sang of courage, immortalised Thersites as a fool. In this, we remain faithful to our origins.

Centuries later, Athens itself would destroy the man who turned inquiry into an art. Socrates refused to flatter the powerful or to bend to opinion. His weapon was the question, a mirror held to the face of pretence. He taught that an unexamined life is unworthy of a human being, and for that teaching he was condemned, his real crime being to encourage thought. When the city forced him to drink the hemlock, it silenced the one voice that gave its democracy meaning. The world has been mourning him ever since, while Greeks repeat the act over and over again.

The Byzantines later elevated the ideal of παρρησία, the courage to speak truth to power. The Fathers of the Church called it a gift of the Spirit, yet few dared to live it. Saint John Chrysostom, Archbishop of Constantinople, spoke against the vanity of Empress Eudoxia and the corruption of her court. His eloquence exposed hypocrisy, his conscience unsettled power. For his candour he was exiled twice and died on the road to Pontus. The saint’s fate still speaks to us, even now we prefer harmony to truth, abjuring conscience for compliance.

It is a curious paradox that each year we mark the anniversary of 28 October 1940 with ceremony, flags, and songs. We seek to remind our children that our people stood against fascism, suppression, and fear, fighting for freedom, for truth, for the right to speak without permission. Yet, in the decades that followed, that same spirit of defiance curdled into suspicion and self-censorship. Once liberated, our forebears silenced one another with remarkable efficiency, nearly dismantling their civilisation in the name of ideological purity. It seems we have inherited their anxiety but not their courage. Our modern battles take place in the shadowy corridors of largely defunct community organisations, where the enemy is rarely an invader and almost always a compatriot.

Our ancestors declared “OXI” to tyranny. We, in turn, whisper it into our coffee cups when someone is maligned, then nod politely at the next slanderer. Each October we celebrate our ‘bravery’ and patriotism, and by November we are back to practising cowardice in prose.

All the while, we are shrinking. Our institutions are decaying, our volunteers fewer, our audiences smaller. The less influence we have, the more violently we guard it. Every chair becomes a throne, every role a fiefdom, every minor honour a matter of dynastic succession. We fight over titles no one outside our circles understands, as though defending the final province of Byzantium. The tragedy is that our rivalries consume the very energy we claim to devote to cultural survival.

It is trite to mention that free speech fades when its exercise invites punishment. The censorship we practice arises from fear: fear of exclusion, fear of the phone call that ends an invitation or a collaboration. When discussion becomes unsafe, ideas ossify. A people who once built their civilisation upon dialectic now prize quiet compliance over thoughtful dissent. What was once the most articulate diaspora in Australia risks becoming the most mute, a parody of its former self.

For the community to move forward, every school of thought must have room to breathe. Ideas need sunlight in order to thrive. Conversation must be restored to its rightful place as the lifeblood of our institutions. True unity grows from engagement, from argument, from the understanding that strength is forged through difference. Those entrusted with leadership carry the responsibility to encourage speech, to cultivate disagreement as a source of wisdom rather than threat.

The ancient Athenians, who after trial and error arrived at democracy, understood the necessity of transparency even in punishment. When they exiled a citizen, they did so openly. Each man scratched a name onto a shard of pottery and cast it into the urn for all to see. The condemned knew both his fate and his accusers. The process was harsh but honest. Today’s ostracism is far crueller. It revels in secrecy. It leaves no trace except silence. The victims often discover their fate only when doors close, when communication ceases, when old friends avert their eyes in public. In this community, in the twenty-first century, we have a phenomenon of “former people” that even the Bolsheviks would envy.

We remain a dwindling circle of participants who rely on one another more than we admit. We are, in essence, a family. Families endure through patience, openness, and the willingness to face truth. The health of our community depends on its ability to look itself in the eye. Reputations destroyed in the dark can never build a future in the light.

It is high time we lose our fear of conversation, and resist our natural tendency to exclude, to malign or to libel difference. The time has come for candour, for courage, and for the restoration of our public soul. If we must dig, let it be for new foundations, not for the graves of reputations, or for monuments to our own futility.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 22 November 2025