PLACING DEMOCRACY

There is something decidedly Cavafyesque about the spectacle of Victorian politicians assembling behind Parliament House to unveil a place intended to honour the contribution of the Greek community to this State, when the contribution selected took place in Athens some two and a half millennia before Victoria, Australia or, in any historically meaningful sense, Greek-Australia existed. Past and present are collapsed into each other until cultural descent begins to resemble historical participation and something inherited from antiquity becomes, almost imperceptibly, something we apparently accomplished here.

The distinction between inheritance and contribution is a significant one. Greek Australians can reasonably regard classical civilisation as part of the immense and often contradictory inheritance from which modern Greek identity has been fashioned. A contribution to Victoria is something else. It must arise from the encounter between Greeks and Victoria, from lives lived, institutions created, conflicts endured and changes wrought here. Democracy Place was expressly presented as recognition of such a contribution, yet its name commemorates an achievement for which no Greek-Victorian can plausibly claim responsibility.

The irony is compounded by the fact that the democracy bestowed upon us as an honour is already claimed by virtually the entire Western political tradition as part of its own inheritance. Parliament House itself belongs to a political culture that traces part of its democratic genealogy to ancient Greece. We are therefore being honoured with something the society “honouring” us already considers its own. Democracy belongs to everybody because it came from the Greeks and is then, for the purposes of multicultural commemoration, handed back to the Greeks as though it were peculiarly theirs.

Even the Premier’s generous proposition that democracy constitutes Greece’s greatest gift to the world warrants some qualification. The democracy invoked is principally Athenian, the product of a particular society whose political arrangements differed profoundly from modern representative democracy. Subsequent Greek history encompasses monarchy, empire, oligarchy, foreign rule, constitutional experimentation and dictatorship. To make democracy an essential attribute of Hellenism therefore requires one extraordinary moment to be extracted from a long and contradictory historical experience and allowed to speak for the whole.

The Premier’s further amusing suggestion that an ancient Greek god might eventually be placed upon the site is revealing for much the same reason. A space ostensibly dedicated to Greek Victorians immediately sends the commemorative imagination several millennia backwards in search of an unspecified deity capable of making it sufficiently “Greek.” If I were a classical scholar I would suggest a statue to the titular god of the cult of the eternal Epitimos Proedros, for that truly is a local, home-grown deity.

A counter-suggestion involving the erection of a likeness of St Paul addressing the Greeks recalls another formative strand of Greek historical experience and complicates the easy identification of Greekness with classical antiquity. Yet the exchange itself is wonderfully revealing. Pagan antiquity is answered with Christian antiquity, while Greek-Victoria remains conspicuous by its absence. One begins to wonder how far through the historical archive we must travel before a monument dedicated to Greek-Victorians finally encounters said Greek-Victorians themselves.

There is a reason classical democracy presents itself so readily. Western Europe progressively incorporated an idealised ancient Greece into its own civilisational ancestry, particularly with the emergence of bourgeois capitalist modernity. The paradox was that the West could claim the ancient Greeks as its forebears while treating living Greeks as uncertain heirs to a past it had already appropriated. Modern Greek nationalism embraced this classical genealogy in turn, and the diaspora inherited both its prestige and its contradictions.

Recognition, however, is also an exercise of power. Institutions inevitably influence which aspects of a culture become publicly visible and worthy of commemoration. Democracy Place thus illustrates how a complex community can become publicly understood through categories selected largely by those possessing the authority to recognise it.

Greek Australians have hardly been passive in this process. For migrants confronting prejudice and condescension, classical ancestry provided valuable cultural capital. The wog, factory hand or uncultivated foreigner could claim descent from the very civilisation the society patronising him had been taught to revere. There was dignity in that assertion and, under the circumstances, considerable strategic value as well.

Danger arises however, when this strategy hardens into a habit. A community repeatedly recognised through the greatness of its ancient past can become accustomed to approaching power through the forms of Greekness that power finds flattering: we are welcomed as the descendants of philosophers, democrats and the founders of Western civilisation, and learn to value recognition accordingly. Praise then begins to take the place of equality, while honours and affirmations make accommodation with prevailing structures easier to accept. There is something profoundly undemocratic in such a relationship. A democratic community engages power as an equal, capable of criticism, disagreement and demands upon it; it does not require power continually to assure it that it is ancient, exceptional and worthy before it feels recognised.

All of which makes the recourse to antiquity now unnecessary. Victoria has no shortage of Greek contributions of its own, although they possess considerably less marble about them. Greek migrants entered the labour movement and participated in struggles for workers whose language, migration status and economic vulnerability could leave them poorly represented. They entered politics, established welfare and charitable structures, created schools and cultural institutions and formed organisations through which newcomers negotiated an unfamiliar society. Slowly, unevenly and amid the arguments and schisms without which Greek communal life would scarcely be recognisable, survival acquired a civic dimension.

There is little purpose in replacing one consoling mythology with another and turning Greek migration into an uncomplicated progress from poverty to prosperity. Postwar Australian industry benefited enormously from migrant labour, while many of those providing it occupied positions of limited status and bargaining power, including people whose overseas qualifications counted for remarkably little. Exploitation was hardly confined to the Anglo-Australian employer either. Later prosperity can cast a flattering retrospective light over circumstances in which Greek migrants often occupied a distinctly subordinate position.

That subordination was sometimes reinforced from within the community itself. Greek communal institutions could be rigidly hierarchical, while established figures counselled migrants to remain deferential towards Australian authority, grateful for their acceptance and reluctant to challenge the social and political order around them. Those who rejected such expectations and sought to engage politically, challenge exclusion and demand equality could encounter considerable pressure and even repression. The struggle was therefore also over the place Greeks were entitled to claim in Australian society: whether they should remain compliant outsiders or participate as equals in shaping the society in which they lived.

It is the rejection of that marginality that belongs to the democratic history of Victoria. Greek Australians petitioned and challenged institutions, entered political and civic life and asserted a right to participate on equal terms. They now sit in parliaments, serve as ministers and councillors and participate throughout public life with a visibility that can appear unremarkable only because the struggles enabling it are receding from memory. Victoria’s institutions did not simply discover diversity. Rather, their transformation also reflects the efforts of those once kept at their margins to enter them and demand an equal voice.

This democratic engagement also extended to events in Greece itself. Greek Australians opposed the Metaxas dictatorship during the 1930s and, a generation later, organised against the military junta of 1967 to 1974, supporting resistance and campaigning for the restoration of democracy, while other sections of the diaspora supported or accommodated authoritarian rule. Both regimes invoked their own versions of Greek national authenticity, so those opposing them were choosing between competing visions of Greece and of the political values Hellenism was supposed to represent. Democracy was something argued over, defended and fought for, including against other Greeks. Had it simply passed through the bloodstream of Hellenism since the fifth century BC, these struggles would scarcely have been necessary.

Here lies the hollowness at the centre of Democracy Place, notwithstanding the evident goodwill with which the honour has been conceived. There is little reason to question the sincerity of the desire to acknowledge the Greek community. Indeed, that sincerity makes the assumptions behind the gesture more revealing. Commemoration acquires meaning through specificity. It tells us why particular people, in a particular place, matter. Ancient democracy asks little of the society doing the commemorating because everybody can admire it without being implicated by it. Migrant labour, assimilation, prejudice, industrial struggle, political mobilisation and welfare are less comfortable subjects, because Victoria must then enter the story as a participant rather than a benevolent spectator. Before we are honoured, we must all engage in a collective amnesia.

Premier Ben Carroll’s injunction that those assembled “should be proud” captures this economy of recognition particularly well. The State selects the symbol, provides its interpretation and even proposes the emotion with which it should be received. Greek-Victorian politicians can then be marshalled to authenticate the connection. After more than a century of organised Greek life in this State, we should possess sufficient confidence to appreciate the goodwill while still examining the terms upon which it is offered.

If antiquity must nevertheless be invoked, perhaps the wrong antiquity has been chosen. They should have called the place the Pnyx, after the hill upon which the Athenian popular assembly met and democracy was actually practised. For a Labor Premier, the democratic hill carries an additional resonance. Ben Chifley bequeathed to the Australian labour movement the enduring metaphor of the “light on the hill,” the distant objective towards which politics should strive in the service of a better life for ordinary people. There would be a pleasing symmetry in allowing Greek democracy a hill of its own behind Parliament, even if present circumstances might occasionally render the light difficult to discern.

The name Pnyx possesses further advantages. The word carries the sense of something closely packed or constricted, an etymological felicity of some relevance both to the Victorian economy and to anybody attempting to traverse Melbourne by road. To the modern Greek ear it also offers the irresistible phonetic association with πνίγω, to choke or strangle. Democracy Place could thereby unite two venerable political traditions: the Athenian assembly upon the hill and Chifley’s light shining from it. And whenever the economy constricts, the traffic congeals and another hidden tax materialises, the demos below might make its own modest contribution to democratic practice by gazing towards the hill and exercising that most direct form of popular sovereignty: «άει πνίξου».

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 3 October 2026

 

EV-ZONED OUT

 

It seems that the Evzones are coming to Australia again and this time, in an egregious affront to the natural order of things, they will be visiting Sydney and Canberra while bypassing Melbourne, a city which, depending upon the enthusiasm of the master of ceremonies, is either the third largest Greek city in the world, the largest Greek city outside Greece, the most Greek city outside Greece, or the only place outside Greece where one has reasonable prospects of obtaining a something that resembles a souvlaki after 2am, although I suspect Thessaloniki retains a considerable advantage in all four categories.

The news has caused consternation, with questions being asked, letters being written and feelings apparently hurt as members of our community attempt to comprehend how the motherland can dispatch its exquisitely accoutred Presidential Guard all the way to Australia and then permit them to pass Melbourne by. Sydney apparently merits a visitation, as does Canberra, whose principal contribution to Hellenism as far as I am aware consists of providing a convenient location in which Greek ambassadors may reside while contemplating how long it will take before they can return to Athens, yet Melbourne, home to generations of Greeks, countless organisations, churches, schools, brotherhoods, federations, festivals, factions and self-appointed fuhrers, must somehow struggle on without the consoling sight of tall young men goose-stepping in short skirts. I too am attempting to summon the requisite sense of outrage, although so far it has proved elusive.

This is largely because I adore the Evzones, having written about them, dressed like them, pursued them around community events and generally comported myself in their presence with all the dignity expected of a middle-aged solicitor and man of letters confronted by exceptionally tall men wearing four hundred pleats. During one of their previous Melbourne sojourns I found myself helping some of them change before an appearance, at which point one, weary of being photographed, admired and generally treated as though temporarily removed from a vitrine in the National Historical Museum, complained that people treated them like dolls or male models. “We have degrees, you know. If only you people loved us for our intellect,” he told me, leaving me chastened, for here was a highly educated young man seeking recognition for his mind while I was helping him adjust his foustanella, an inversion of the Platonic ascent in which, rather than proceeding from the contemplation of bodily beauty towards Beauty itself, we Greek-Australians appeared perfectly content to stop somewhere around the pleats.

His complaint exposes a magnificent contradiction, for we become indignant when Australians reduce Greek culture to Zorba, souvlaki, islands and men in skirts, yet whenever said men in skirts arrive, we descend upon them in our thousands and disseminate photographs of ourselves beside them with such intensity that an anthropologist could reasonably conclude that the principal purpose of the diaspora is the conservation of the ceremonial male thigh. The ideological versatility involved is even more impressive, for people who oppose militarism, nationalism, standing armies, NATO, American bases and most varieties of imperialism become positively Alcibiadean when an Evzone enters the room, whereupon rifles acquire the innocence of folk accessories and hardened anti-imperialists capable of detecting fascism in the seating arrangements of a community dinner blush, swoon and request selfies. If Circe transformed the companions of Odysseus into swine, the foustanella performs a gentler metamorphosis upon the Greek-Australian Left, transforming committed dialectical materialists into breathless maidens of Brauron at approximately the speed required to unlock an iPhone camera.

The irony becomes richer when one remembers that Greek political vocabulary still contains the term Germanotsolias, for the collaborationist Security Battalions of the Occupation appropriated elements of the Evzone tradition, leaving behind a word capable of evoking one of the darkest fractures of modern Greek history. The costume can therefore summon revolutionary heroism, the Balkan Wars and the mountains of Epirus while carrying, through its appropriation, the shadow of collaboration, for Clio has always been an inconvenient Muse, more interested in recording contradiction than assisting communities with their commemorative programmes. Yet place six feet three inches of immaculately groomed Presidential Guard before a Greek-Australian audience and even Clio appears prepared to close her tablets and admire the spectacle.

The distress caused by their absence consequently tells us rather more about ourselves than about them, for somewhere within our diasporic consciousness persists the suspicion that authentic Greekness has a metropolitan issuing authority and that our certificates require periodic renewal. The Evzones arrive as bearers of that authentication, reassuring us that Greece remembers us and that despite generations spent speaking English, marrying people from Folegandros when our grandparents expressly forbade it and developing the conviction that Oakleigh constitutes an extraterritorial possession of the Hellenic Republic, we remain members in good standing of the greater Greek world. Their diversion to Sydney consequently assumes the dimensions of yiayia gifting the better χωράφι to a cousin.

Perhaps, however, their absence is a compliment, for after more than a century and a half of Greek settlement in Victoria, Athens may finally have concluded that we can be trusted to remain Greek without supervision. Someone may have examined Melbourne and observed churches, schools, newspapers, radio programmes, festivals, archives, libraries, writers, musicians, academics, poets, artists, choirs and enough committees to administer the late Byzantine Empire, before deciding that another shipment of foustanellades can safely be sent elsewhere. After all, Seferis never came to Melbourne, Elytis somehow neglected us, went to the trouble of travelling halfway around the world while inexplicably failing to drop into Oakleigh. We have survived these successive acts of metropolitan indifference with Hellenism more or less intact, so there is at least a reasonable prospect that we can endure the Evzones spending a week in another polis.

A more serious issue arises from the habit of seeking metropolitan authentication, because it teaches the next generation that cultural legitimacy resides elsewhere. Children smell weakness, and if we tell them that Greek-Australian identity is rich, self-sustaining and worthy of inheritance while behaving as though Athens can diminish it merely by sending the Evzones to Sydney, they will identify the contradiction immediately. We become rather like the inhabitants of Plato's cave, awaiting the next procession of metropolitan shadows across the wall and arguing furiously over which constitutes the most authentic representation of Greece, while overlooking the culture already being produced around us.

Rebetika is being played at Triakosia by musicians treating the tradition as something living, books are being written here by people articulating experiences that could have arisen nowhere else, while increasingly sophisticated discussions concerning Greek-Australian history, language, literature and identity are taking place. We even possess hordes of people monitoring one another on social media, identifying subversive remarks and conveying them to their respective superiors for immediate ghosting, proving that Athenian ostracism has survived transplantation remarkably well, save that the ostrakon has been replaced by the screenshot and ten years of exile by removal from the friends list. With such fidelity to ancestral political practice, exactly how many additional Evzones does our civilisation require?

Years ago I suggested that rather than repeatedly spending considerable sums importing Evzones, we should establish our own guard composed of Greek-Australian young people, allowing them to learn the history, wear the costumes and become stakeholders in their community rather than spectators applauding authenticity flown in from Athens. Demosthenis Manasis actually did something about it, creating the ‘Froura’ and thereby demonstrating the dangers inherent in taking one of my suggestions seriously. His initiative matters because the young people wearing the costumes are ours and inhabit the same hybrid cultural world as those watching them; in this respect Manasis has performed something resembling the theft of fire by Prometheus, save that the sacred technology wrested from the metropolitan gods consists principally of pleats, tsarouchia and the capacity to stand motionless for considerable periods.

Indeed, if Evzones are indispensable, the only ones I particularly want to see are those who have reconciled the foustanella with denim, as their counterparts in Albania have done in the accompanying photograph, where traditional dress is magnificently interrupted by blue jeans protruding beneath the pleats. Here, finally, is a Hellenism I can embrace, sufficiently secure to survive contact with denim, a sartorial synthesis worthy of Heraclitus, in which foustanella and jeans, permanence and change, coexist while the river flows on and the clarinet keeps playing. If our identity cannot withstand such innovation, the absence of the Presidential Guard constitutes the least of our problems.

There is also the question of frequency, for nobody is suggesting that the Evzones should be banished permanently from our shores and the sight of them once in a while is splendid. The problem begins when a ceremonial visit acquires the regularity of a touring franchise and the Presidential Guard starts to resemble the Hellenic answer to Cirque du Soleil or Disney on Ice, returning annually with the same costumes, the same choreography and an audience eagerly awaiting the moment when somebody performs the difficult manoeuvre involving the pom-pommed ice-skate. At some point we are entitled to discuss production values. If the Evzones are to become a fixture of the Greek-Australian entertainment calendar, surely each season requires fresh material, a revised programme or at least the occasional guest performer, because even Cirque du Soleil understands that one cannot tour the same spectacle indefinitely merely by changing the dignitaries in the front row. The Panathenaic procession itself occurred only once every four years, which suggests that even the ancient Athenians, hardly a people deficient in ceremonial self-regard, understood the dramatic importance of leaving the audience wanting more.

Such repetition also inadvertently vindicates the young Evzone who complained to me that they were being treated as dolls and male models, because somewhere along the way soldiers invited here as symbols have become performers whose absence from the next season causes patrons to demand explanations. Affection for a symbol, however, can become dependence upon it, allowing such visits to perform cultural labour that properly belongs to us.

The ancient Greeks, whom we invoke whenever convenient and return respectfully to storage whenever they become troublesome, understood this rather well, for their apoikiai remained recognisably Greek while developing institutions, cults, dialects and identities particular to their own circumstances. Syracuse required no annual delegation from Corinth to reassure its inhabitants of their Hellenicity, nor did Massalia suspend its Greekness pending the arrival of appropriately credentialled Phocaeans. The Greek world expanded precisely because Greekness proved capable of adaptation, and after generations in Australia we might finally concede ourselves the same privilege rather than measuring our cultural vitality according to the frequency with which representatives of the metropolitan centre come to inspect us. Faced with such abundance of natic cultural capital, I remain uncertain how much more Hellenism one city can safely withstand.

Besides, Cavafy understood better than most the melancholy truth that male beauty is transient, however fervently one attempts to preserve it through memory, poetry and art, and thus the Evzones will grow older, the immaculate symmetry of their youthful forms will pass and even those magnificent legs must eventually submit to Chronos, while the culture we create here, provided we possess sufficient confidence to make it our own and sufficient wisdom to entrust it to our children, has at least the possibility of enduring. Until then, Sydney is welcome to contemplate the foustanelles on our behalf, while we shall console ourselves, in appropriately Cavafian fashion, with his immortal words, θυμήσου σώμα.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 26 September 2026

OLYMPIA AND GOLD COAST: ON DIVINE SISTERHOOD

Upon learning the glorious news that hallowed Olympia and the Gold Coast have become sister cities, one experiences the same satisfaction that attends the discovery that two hitherto unrelated members of one’s extended family are in fact distant cousins, explaining in retrospect a host of otherwise inexplicable physiognomic and behavioural similarities. Certain affinities, hitherto dismissed as coincidence, reveal themselves as manifestations of a cultural relationship almost three millennia in the making. That it has taken so long to formalise the relationship can only be attributed to deficiencies in ancient municipal diplomacy and the failure of the Eleans to establish a properly funded Sister Cities Subcommittee.

The greater mystery is why Pausanias never noticed. In the fifth and sixth books of his Description of Greece, that indefatigable second-century traveller records Olympia with the forensic enthusiasm of a man constitutionally incapable of walking past a statue without finding out who paid for it. He tells of temples, treasuries, altars, athletes, cheats, obscure customs and forgotten wars, while a statue reminds him of a king, the king of an oracle and the oracle of something that happened in Arcadia. Somewhere between the Temple of Hera and the stadium, however, the geographical trail goes cold. Had he continued south-east for another fourteen thousand kilometres, his account might have been considerably enriched.

“Beyond the lands of the Antipodeans,” he could have written, “there lies a land called Queensland, in which lies a sacred coast which the inhabitants call Golden. There are many temples and many images of beings larger than mortal men, among whom are Batman and Superman. The women called Meter Maids appear to be priestesses of Aphrodite, although others say they regulate wheeled conveyances, and concerning this I cannot speak with certainty.” Such confusion would have been characteristic, for Pausanias records competing explanations even when he considers one ridiculous, a scholarly generosity particularly useful in determining why anybody decided meter regulation was best accomplished in gold bikinis.

The sporting connection would reassure him that he had reached the correct place. Olympia gave humanity the Olympic Games, while the Gold Coast hosted the 2018 Commonwealth Games and now resides within the wider sacred geography of Brisbane 2032, meaning that both places understand the peculiar civic alchemy by which running, jumping and swimming become infrastructure, urban mythology and arguments about who paid for everything. Ancient Olympia operated a cheaper awards programme. The victor received a wreath of wild olive, sparing organisers the expense of precious-metal medallions and suggesting that Queensland could address future Olympic budgetary pressures with a pair of secateurs.

Competition on the Gold Coast hardly requires an official festival. Anyone attempting to secure a parking space at Pacific Fair on the Saturday before Christmas has entered an agon worthy of Pindar, involving endurance, feints, tactical positioning and appeals to gods who have otherwise received little devotional attention since childhood. A pedestrian carrying shopping bags becomes an oracle whose every gesture demands interpretation as two vehicles follow at walking pace with the concentrated solemnity of rival charioteers approaching the turning post. The ancient victor received the sacred olive wreath. The modern victor receives P2 near David Jones, an achievement for which nobody has yet commissioned an epinician ode.

Pausanias would probably proceed from there to the beach, where the deeper kinship becomes impossible to ignore. Greek athletes famously competed naked, the disciplined body becoming an expression of beauty and arete, while the Gold Coast has preserved the underlying philosophical proposition subject to sunscreen and Queensland law. Few places since classical Greece have invested comparable cultural meaning in the bronzed torso. If the sculptors of Olympia pursued ideal proportion in marble and bronze, Surfers Paradise has expanded the available media to spray tan, protein powder and tattoos of clocks surrounded by roses. Classical traditions survive most securely when nobody consciously realises they are preserving them, and in this context Schoolies becomes less an aberration than an extraordinary instance of cultural continuity.

At regular intervals large numbers of young people travel considerable distances to a famous destination, gather in an atmosphere of heightened excitement, celebrate physical vitality, participate in contests of endurance and progressively remove their clothing. Whereas Ancient Olympia boasted the stadion, wrestling and pankration, Surfers Paradise has disciplines for which records are less systematically maintained. The absence of the discus is probably fortunate, since bronze projectiles and Cavill Avenue after midnight would require amendments to Queensland occupational health and safety legislation. The Olympic ideal, suitably adapted to local conditions, is apparently alive and well.

All this leads inevitably to the Olympic ἐκεχειρία, the sacred truce permitting competitors and spectators to travel safely to the Games despite the Greek states spending much of their remaining time devising ways of injuring one another. Its genius lay in modest expectations: Athenians and Spartans merely had to stop killing each other long enough to watch the wrestling. The Gold Coast performs an analogous Pan-Australian function during school holidays, when Victorians, New South Welshmen and Queenslanders temporarily overlook disagreements concerning football codes, daylight saving and whether a thin disc of fried potato is a potato cake or a potato scallop. The truce generally survives until somebody attempts to merge onto the M1, whereupon Thucydidean realism rapidly reasserts itself.

The M1 would eventually lead Pausanias towards Q1, where the religious character of the relationship becomes apparent. His benchmark for enormity was Pheidias’ colossal Zeus, fashioned from gold and ivory and so immense that Strabo remarked that, were the god to stand, he would unroof his temple. The Gold Coast solved this architectural difficulty by giving the gigantic object the roof in advance. Where Pheidias employed chryselephantine technique, Queensland employs glass, concrete, strata title and investment capital. Both cultures understand that if something is made sufficiently large, visitors will travel considerable distances, stand beneath it with their mouths slightly open and pay to ascend it.

Olympia’s Temple of Zeus, Heraion, Metroon and innumerable sacred precincts also prepare Pausanias admirably for Dreamworld, Movie World, Sea World and Wet’n’Wild, although the gods inhabiting the latter possess more complicated intellectual-property arrangements. The ritual structure would nevertheless be reassuringly familiar. Pilgrims enter through monumental gates, join processions and encounter beings larger than ordinary mortals while children demand refreshments. Ancient visitors left votive objects; modern pilgrims return with refrigerator magnets and Batman drinking vessels. Given two thousand years underground, a Surfers Paradise bottle opener bearing the inscription “Mick’s Bucks 2026” will inevitably be described by archaeologists as a ceremonial object associated with male initiation rites, which will be substantially correct.

Sacrifice, on the other hand, has migrated into the economic sphere. Anyone purchasing lunch for a family inside a theme park understands the ancient sensation of watching valuable property consumed before one’s eyes pursuant to ritual obligation, while the timeshare presentation offers an even purer survival: the victim is separated from the herd, conducted into a designated precinct and attended by specially trained officiants until an offering is extracted. Ancient sacrificial animals at least enjoyed the consolation of never being asked whether they wished to extend their holiday accommodation entitlement for another forty years.

At this juncture the Eleans may derive considerable comfort from the Gold Coast’s attitude towards prophecy. The ancient Greeks had oracles, seers and diviners who inspected birds, entrails and sundry natural phenomena in order to determine whether an enterprise would prosper. Not to be outdone, the Gold Coast has real estate agents. The methods employed by both are remarkably similar. Both examine signs unintelligible to the ordinary person before confidently predicting future abundance, although the ancient μάντις at least occasionally conceded that Apollo’s meaning was ambiguous. An Elean contemplating the purchase of an off-the-plan two-bedroom apartment in Broadbeach would consequently feel entirely at home upon being informed that the signs reveal strong capital growth, excellent rental yield and an unprecedented opportunity to secure a premium lifestyle precinct before settlement.

The practice of ornithomancy does, however, present a uniquely Australian difficulty. It is challenging to imagine Tiresias deriving anything useful from observing an ibis methodically disembowel a McDonald’s bag beside Cavill Avenue, although Aristophanes would undoubtedly have found employment for it. Since the Australian white ibis has acquired the appellation “bin chicken,” an ancient Greek visitor might reasonably assume that this constitutes some hitherto unknown hybrid creature, rather like the Chimera. If demi-god Heracles required twelve labours, retrieving a kebab from an ibis at three in the morning could comfortably have constituted the thirteenth.

All that remains is to determine which deity should preside over the new sisterhood. Zeus has the obvious historical claim, although appointing a serial philanderer who habitually assumed animal form in order to pursue women may send an unfortunate message about the values underpinning the relationship. Poseidon would seem more appropriate to the Gold Coast, save that his recorded dealings with coastal communities generally involve storms, earthquakes and the occasional sea monster, none of which Tourism Queensland is likely to include in its promotional material. Hermes, patron of travellers, merchants and thieves, offers a more comprehensive portfolio, especially once accommodation prices during school holidays are taken into account.

Aphrodite has much to recommend her, given the amount of exposed flesh, although her appointment might lead the Meter Maids to demand recognition as an established priesthood. Dionysus presents a perhaps even stronger claim. As god of wine, intoxication, ecstatic dancing, altered states of consciousness and people behaving in ways which seem entirely reasonable at the time and inexplicable the following morning, he already exercises something approaching de facto sovereignty over Surfers Paradise after 10 pm. The principal difficulty is that acknowledging him formally would require Schoolies to be reclassified as a religious festival, with consequences for public funding that neither sister city may yet have considered.

Perhaps, then, the most appropriate patron is Hermes. Pausanias tells us that his statues stood in gymnasia, while travellers invoked his protection upon journeys and merchants prospered beneath his gaze. He was also the god of boundaries and their transgression, which seems particularly apt for a relationship that has managed to extend the sacred precinct of Olympia fourteen thousand kilometres into Queensland. Most compellingly, Hermes was the divine trickster, capable of stealing Apollo’s cattle on the day of his birth and then talking his way out of the consequences. There can surely be no better supernatural qualification for navigating a Gold Coast body corporate.

The formalities can then commence. A sacred embassy should leave Olympia bearing an olive branch, cross the Antipodes and proceed directly to Surfers Paradise, where the envoys can deposit it before the statue of the Meter Maid and await an omen. Should an ibis immediately seize the branch and drag it into a bin, the augurs will have their answer. Should it survive, the sisterhood has divine approval and the ancient Olympic ideal may safely enter its Queensland phase.

Pausanias would record the result with his customary caution. “The inhabitants say that Olympia and the Golden Coast are sisters, and in support of this they relate many things which I have already described. I myself saw the sacred ibis take the olive branch, though whether it did so by command of the gods or because there was half a souvlaki attached to it, I cannot say.”

For once, there would be no reason to doubt him.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 19 September 2026

 

HOMER IN SPACE

In 1994, in England, a Czech psychologist and writer sat down and crafted a science fiction epic of some 6,500 lines in Homeric Greek, setting his hero wandering among planets, aliens, robots, computers and strange civilisations. The work was Jan Křesadlo’s Astronautilia, whose full Greek title, Ποιητοῦ ἀδήλου Ἀστροναυτιλία ἢ ἡ Μικροοδύσσεια ἡ κοσμική, describes it as a “Cosmic Micro Odyssey”. It was published shortly after his death.

Jan Křesadlo was the pseudonym of Václav Pinkava, born in Prague in 1926, classically educated, a psychologist by profession and an exile in Britain after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Astronautilia, one of his last works, belongs to a long and now almost forgotten tradition of writing new literary works in Ancient Greek. Křesadlo, however, took that tradition in an extraordinary direction, choosing Homeric Greek for a work of science fiction.

The connection with the Odyssey is apparent from the opening lines. Like the ancient epic poet, Křesadlo begins by invoking the Muses and Apollo, except that the subject he asks them to sing has been transferred from the sea to the cosmos:

“As I begin, I pray first to the choir of Muses from Helicon, and fervently to lord Apollo … that they may tell of my journey through the vast universe.”

The Homeric imitation extends even to the architecture of the poem. Its twenty four books follow the letters of the Greek alphabet, reproducing the familiar twenty four book division through which both the Iliad and the Odyssey have come down to us. Křesadlo is therefore imitating Homer at several levels at once: language, metre, narrative and even the external shape of the epic.

He immediately explains the purpose of the mission. The captain and his companions are travelling in search of “Mandys and the sheep that observes the cosmos.” The solemnity of the epic invocation collides delightfully with its subject, yet the epic form remains perfectly intact. Indeed, the absurdity acquires, through Homer, a peculiar grandeur of its own.

Even the hero’s name is a philological joke. The captain is called Οὐδείς, “Nobody”. Odysseus used Οὖτις, another form of “Nobody”, to deceive Polyphemus, while Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo bears precisely the same name in Latin. Οὐδείς himself explains that he chose his name after the mysterious «Νήμω καπιτᾶνον». In a single name, Křesadlo brings together Odysseus, Verne and science fiction.

At the centre of the story is a rescue mission on a cosmic scale. Mandys has stolen the sheep which, according to the poem’s satirical cosmology, observes the universe and thereby ensures its existence. The joke draws upon the observer problem associated with quantum mechanics: Křesadlo takes the idea that observation is implicated in physical reality and gives the universe a single indispensable observer, which turns out, magnificently, to be a sheep. The fate of the cosmos therefore depends upon the continued gaze of an animal that would have been entirely at home in the pastoral world of ancient epic. Οὐδείς and his crew set out to recover it, travelling from planet to planet through strange civilisations, conflicts and digressions, until the search eventually leads even into time itself.

There is an ancient Greek precedent for this journey beyond the earth as well. In Lucian’s True History, written in the second century AD, travellers are swept into the heavens, reach the Moon and encounter extraterrestrial peoples and a war between the inhabitants of the Moon and the Sun. Lucian is frequently claimed as an ancestor of science fiction, although his purpose was satirical rather than scientific prediction. The resemblance makes Astronautilia still more curious: Křesadlo combines the cosmic absurdity of Lucian with the language, metre and wandering structure of Homer.

This gives Křesadlo the means to reproduce the basic narrative structure of the Odyssey on a cosmic scale. The sea becomes interstellar space, the islands become planets and the strange peoples encountered by Odysseus are replaced by extraterrestrial societies. Οὐδείς is captured, fights monsters, faces mutinies, encounters societies with unusual sexual and political customs, attends feasts, escapes from danger and loses companions as he continues his journey. Křesadlo has therefore transferred something more important than Odysseus himself into space: he has transferred the way the Odyssey tells a story.

There is another, rather unexpected, connection with Homer in the technology of Astronautilia. Robots and artificial intelligence initially seem completely foreign to archaic epic, yet Homer had already imagined machines and artificial beings possessing qualities which, with the necessary historical qualification, bear a remarkable resemblance to automation and artificial intelligence.

The first examples occur in the Iliad. In Book 18, the workshop of Hephaestus contains self moving tripods that go by themselves to the assembly of the gods and return, as well as the famous golden attendants, artificial women who possess intelligence, voice and strength and have been taught their skills by the gods. Homer thus imagines manufactured beings capable of moving, knowing and acting. The Odyssey goes further still. The ships of the Phaeacians require neither helmsmen nor steering oars. Alcinous tells Odysseus that the ships themselves understand the thoughts of men and know the cities and countries to which they are required to travel.

In this way, Homer draws no firm boundary of the kind a modern reader might instinctively place between technology and the marvellous. Hephaestus makes objects that move and act for themselves, and their extraordinary powers belong to his τέχνη, his craft. The Phaeacian ships can think their way to a destination, yet they remain ships. Homeric poetry can therefore accommodate intelligent artefacts without having to explain away their wonder. This helps to account for the curious ease with which Křesadlo can introduce robots, computers and autonomous machines into an Homeric universe: the conceptual space for marvellous technology was already there.

Astronautilia goes one step further by bringing its machines within the conventions of heroic poetry itself. The robotic Ivo and Tonda are more than technological assistants to the crew. The exploits of these robots can even assume the form of an aristeia, the epic display of excellence that in Homer belongs to the great warriors. Technology thus becomes capable of Homeric heroic action, while computers and artificial beings occupy places in the story that ancient epic reserved for heroes, companions and the marvellous creations of the gods.

The language itself is subjected to a similar test. How does one write “computer”, “robot”, “spaceship”, or describe a technological process, in a form of Greek that supposedly belongs to the world of Homer? Křesadlo invents words, transfers modern concepts into ancient morphological forms and uses Homeric vocabulary to express things that lay beyond the horizon of its age. The systematic nature of the exercise can also be seen in the scholarly apparatus of the work, which includes a Greek English glossary of unusual words and a Greek index. The comic effect therefore coexists with a serious linguistic experiment: an ancient language is being asked to invent the future.

The author’s game extends even to the authorship of the poem. Křesadlo presents himself, fictitiously, as the translator of a Greek original by an «ἄδηλος ποιητής», an “unknown poet”. Οὐδείς is supposed to have dictated his adventures to Franta, his universal translator, who recorded them in Homeric Greek, after which the manuscript eventually reached Křesadlo for translation. This chain of narration, transcription and translation adds another level to the Homeric imitation. A work that plays with the antiquity of its language also plays with the question of who is speaking, who is recording the story and who, ultimately, is entitled to call himself the poet.

There is, however, a deeper reason why the Odyssey lends itself so naturally to science fiction. The Odyssey and science fiction share the same basic curiosity about unfamiliar worlds. Whenever Odysseus arrives somewhere unknown, he must discover who lives there, whether they are just or violent, how they treat strangers, what they eat, which gods they recognise and what rules govern their society. Alcinous himself asks Odysseus to tell him about the peoples among whom he has wandered, distinguishing between those who are «χαλεποί τε καὶ ἄγριοι οὐδὲ δίκαιοι», “harsh and savage and unjust”, and those who are «φιλόξεινοι» and possess a «νόος … θεουδής», a mind that reveres the gods.

This is also one of the fundamental possibilities of science fiction. Landing on an unknown planet allows a writer to imagine different ways of organising power, family, religion, technology or sexuality and, through them, to examine our own society from a distance. This is why Astronautilia can remind us simultaneously of Star Trek and the Odyssey. In both, the journey becomes a means of comparison: every new place raises again the question of what it means to be human among beings who live differently.

Perhaps the deepest Odyssean connection lies in nostos, the return home. The wandering acquires its particular significance because there is a place and a time from which the traveller has become separated and against which he continues to measure his distance. Even when Křesadlo extends the search across the universe and eventually into time itself, the possibility of return remains. The companions begin their journey back to Earth, while Οὐδείς follows Mandys backwards through time, again towards Earth. The wandering may be cosmic, yet at its heart it remains Odyssean.

Possibly, this is why the greatest joke in Astronautilia is ultimately directed at the reader. Křesadlo begins with the apparently absurd proposition that Homer can be made to describe a world of robots, computers, spaceships and time travel, and then spends thousands of lines demonstrating how naturally Homeric poetry can accommodate all of them. What at first appears to be an elaborate philological joke gradually becomes something more interesting. Homer had already imagined autonomous machines and intelligent artificial beings, while the wanderings of Odysseus already contain the structure required for journeys through unknown worlds. The supposed anachronism begins to look less like an anachronism at all. The technology may change, the geography may expand from the Mediterranean to the universe and the monsters assume different forms, yet the traveller always remains, trying to understand what he encounters, survive it and eventually return home. Almost three thousand years after Homer, Křesadlo sends another Οὐδείς into the unknown. His journey reaches the stars, yet it remains recognisably, an Odyssey.

 

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

 

First published in NKEE on Saturday 12 September 2026

 

AT THE DIVINE THRESHOLD

 

What is the divine? What is a threshold? And what is it about the human condition that compels us, across cultures and epochs, to approach such thresholds and attempt a crossing? A threshold is liminal, belonging completely neither to that which lies before it nor to that which lies beyond. In the case of the Orthodox icon, the direction of travel across that space remains ambiguous. Are we ascending towards the divine, training the eye through colour, form and contemplation to perceive a reality beyond the limitations of the material world, or are we engaged in the more audacious enterprise of bringing the divine down to earth, confining it within wood, linen, gesso, egg tempera and gold so that it can be seen, touched, kissed, carried into battle and installed in the corner of a home? The persistence of the icon across almost two millennia may arise from its refusal to settle the direction of that encounter.

These questions lie at the centre of the Hellenic Museum’s new Divine Thresholds: Icons & the Orthodox Christian World, an exquisitely curated exhibition of icons and sacred objects spanning the geographical and cultural territory of Eastern Christianity. During its development, Museum Director Sarah Craig consulted widely on the Orthodox tradition and the devotional meaning of the icon. Conversations ranged from the Incarnation, iconoclasm and veneration to Russia, Ethiopia, migration and the biographies acquired by icons as they move between churches, homes, countries and collections. That range is reflected in an exhibition whose historical breadth is matched by sensitivity to the religious world from which its objects come.

For an icon in a museum is already an icon displaced. Its viewer stands at a curatorial distance from an object that, within its devotional environment, could be kissed, incensed, carried in procession and addressed in prayer. Recreating these conditions within a gallery would risk converting worship into ethnographic theatre; ignoring them would reduce the icon to connoisseurship. Divine Thresholds negotiates this difficulty intelligently, treating its objects as historical and artistic artefacts while directing attention towards the relationships that made them sacred.

In doing so, the exhibition immediately unsettles the apparently simple question of what an icon actually is. It is neither merely the material object before the viewer nor simply the person represented upon it. Collapse image into prototype and the distinction upon which veneration depends disappears; sever the two entirely and the icon becomes merely an image. By presenting these objects within the history of the practices, beliefs and relationships that gave them meaning, Divine Thresholds locates the icon precisely within that interval between matter, representation and presence.

From there, the exhibition asks how Christianity came to represent sacred presence in the first place. Its juxtaposition of Christian images with earlier Mediterranean forms makes clear that the new religion did not invent its visual vocabulary from nothing. Christ as the Good Shepherd is placed within a tradition recalling the Greek kriophoros, the ram-bearer associated with Hermes, while the Christian orant preserves a much older religious gesture. Especially arresting is the juxtaposition of a relief of the Thracian god Sabazios with icons of Saint George. Here the argument is made through the objects themselves: across the rupture between pagan antiquity and Christianity, horse, rider, adversary and the grammar of triumph persist even as their theological meaning is transformed. By making such continuities visible, Divine Thresholds complicates any neat division between pagan and Christian worlds and suggests that while religious systems may displace one another, the forms through which human beings imagine protection, victory and sacred agency can prove considerably more tenacious.

The selection of icons confronts viewers accustomed to Western naturalism with an immediate difficulty: why do these figures look as they do? Seen together, the exhibition’s elongated bodies, hieratic poses, altered perspectives, stylised faces and fields of gold establish their own logic. Their recurrence across works of different dates and origins makes it difficult to regard them as failures of naturalism; instead, Divine Thresholds allows the viewer to recognise a deliberate vocabulary for placing the sacred beyond ordinary time and space. Gold backgrounds refuse the familiar coordinates of landscape and atmosphere, while pose, proportion and perspective consistently direct attention away from the incidental appearance of the individual. Through the cumulative effect of the works, the exhibition shifts the question from why icons do not look “realistic” to what conception of reality requires them to look precisely this way.

Through its treatment of iconoclasm and the Incarnation, Divine Thresholds uses the materiality of the icons to open a deeper theological problem: how can wood, gesso, pigment and gold legitimately bear an image of the divine? The biblical prohibition against graven images is set beside the Christian claim that the invisible God became visible and tangible in Christ. The Second Council of Nicaea’s distinction between veneration and worship supplies the theological key, yet the argument is made tangible rather than merely doctrinal. Every painted Christ before the viewer is itself evidence of the conclusion reached: if God truly assumed visible human flesh, matter could represent him without becoming the object of worship. The icons consequently function simultaneously as exhibits and arguments, their form asserting the capacity of matter to mediate sacred presence.

The movement into ordinary life is traced through the choice of saints and iconographic types, revealing a world in which images organised time, articulated particular needs and accompanied human uncertainty. Saint George remains recognisable across widely separated traditions while acquiring local resonances; Saint Nicholas gathers associations with sailors, travellers and protection; images of the Mother of God multiply into types and titles around which histories of place, danger, deliverance and miraculous intervention accumulate. Read together, these icons disclose a sacred geography in which the universal and intensely local overlap.

That geography contracts to the household. The exhibition’s attention to domestic devotion prevents the icon from being understood solely as an ecclesiastical object. The “beautiful corner”, lamp burning before an image, triptych carried on a journey and miniature iconostasis locate the sacred within dwelling, departure, return, illness and prayer. Paul of Aleppo’s astonishment at the profusion of icons in seventeenth-century Muscovite homes evokes a world in which sacred and ordinary space continually penetrated one another. The domestic icon establishes a divine threshold within the home itself, a boundary between everyday and sacred crossed repeatedly rather than only within the church.

Set beside one another, these local manifestations raise another problem: how does a sacred image remain recognisably itself while passing between places, periods and cultures? Across Divine Thresholds, Christ, the Theotokos and the saints recur according to shared prototypes, yet seldom identically. Differences of palette, line, material, costume and composition disclose the worlds through which those prototypes have passed. Brought into the same field, they demonstrate a paradox: iconography depends upon repetition, yet survives through the capacity of repetition to accommodate difference.

The Cretan icons provide the first answer. Products of workshops operating within the Venetian sphere, they belong to a Mediterranean world in which Orthodox and Catholic patrons, Byzantine forms and Italian painting encountered one another. Western elements enter the images, modelling alters and compositional devices migrate, yet the Byzantine grammar remains legible. Their hybridity becomes evidence of the processes by which an ostensibly fixed iconographic language negotiated the cultures surrounding it.

The Russian works test the proposition differently. Within the exhibition’s wider geographical field, they demonstrate how a common Byzantine inheritance acquired distinctive lives in centres such as Novgorod, Moscow, Palekh, Smolensk and Vladimir. Differences of palette, line, local saints and devotional emphasis register regional identities without rendering the underlying language unintelligible. Canon appears more supple than uniformity, establishing the terms within which identity can persist without requiring sameness.

With Ethiopia, North Africa and the Levant, the proposition becomes more complicated still. The objects resist any simple account in which Byzantine iconography radiates intact from a self-contained centre towards passive peripheries. Ethiopian material reveals inherited Christian forms transformed within an indigenous tradition, while the Levantine works inhabit a region where Byzantine, Syriac, Arabic-speaking Christian, Crusader and local vocabularies encountered one another through pilgrimage, conquest and trade. Divine Thresholds instead presents the Eastern Christian world of images as a network of encounters in which influence moves, changes direction and is continually translated.

One of the exhibition’s most eloquent objects makes this materially visible: a Cretan icon that travelled to Ethiopia and was subsequently retouched there, Ethiopian elements being added to the existing Mediterranean image. Is it Cretan, Ethiopian, Byzantine or African? Each description identifies one layer of its biography without encompassing the whole. Its surface becomes a proposition in pigment: an icon may remain itself while accumulating other places, hands and ways of seeing. How much difference can a tradition absorb before continuity becomes rupture? Divine Thresholds supplies no convenient point at which one ends and the other begins.

Movement across cultures is one kind of transformation. The exhibition gives rise to a further question: what is the afterlife of an icon when the devotional world for which it was created disappears? Revolutionary Russia provides the most dramatic example. The Bolsheviks persecuted religion and destroyed sacred images, yet something of their authority survived in the monumental portraits, processions and exemplary lives of the new order. Lenin occupied spaces from which saints had been expelled. Theology could be repudiated while habits of seeing endured.

Divine Thresholds poses the same question through migration. Icons carried to Australia as objects of prayer may become heirlooms, cultural markers or, as their devotional significance recedes, objects found in antique and opportunity shops, private collections, museums or even the rubbish. Yet the icon endures, passing from altar to suitcase, household shrine to marketplace and museum, acquiring new meanings as it goes. Divine Thresholds itself participates in this afterlife, asking what survives these transformations of belief, ownership and circumstance.

Where, then, does sacredness reside: in the material object, in the prototype to which it refers, in the practices performed before it, or in the relationship between image and beholder? Divine Thresholds is at its most intelligent in permitting these possibilities to coexist. Across the exhibition, icons change context without necessarily losing identity: they absorb foreign artistic languages, cross continents and survive persecution. Their surfaces accumulate histories even as the figures upon them continue to look back at successive generations of beholders. Everything depends upon the encounters that take place before it. Divine Thresholds leaves us at that point of encounter, where matter becomes image, image becomes presence, and the visible world seems, for an instant, insufficient to contain everything we ask it to mean.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 5 September 2026