Athens in spring and the tangerine trees are laden with vivid orange fruit. On the top floor of a quiet bookshop near the parliament a press conference is in progress: six people facing a room of journalists, arguing for the need to preserve the home of one of Greece's best-known poets. At their centre sits a woman striking both for her total stillness and her huge dark glasses. She speaks evenly into a microphone, certain of her audience. When she finishes the meeting breaks up, into knots of people jockeying and gossiping, as in any literary gathering the world over.
But when Nana Mouskouri makes her way to the back of the room it is to say, "Welcome. Welcome to troubled Athens." Because while here there may be blue skies and blossom, just round the corner stand armed police, riot shields at the ready. The traffic is just beginning to flow again, after yet another demonstration against the austerity measures just announced — the third round in as many months and the harshest: 4.8 billion (4.3 billion) in wage cuts, tax increases, a 30 per cent cut in traditional holiday bonuses, a freeze on state pensions.
Mouskouri announced that she is doing her bit by forgoing her pension altogether. "They say that one bird doesn't bring the springtime," she says now, laughing slightly, "but it's something." Unlike the socialist government, which has strongly suggested that Greece's often very wealthy diaspora stump up some cash in its time of trouble, Mouskouri refuses to insist that other people should follow her example. But she rather hopes they will. "I believe in the pride and the good will of everybody." Later she mentions that she has heard "that a deputy from the parliament has given her salary for a certain time. In Greece we call that philotimo. Philotimo is to have a certain pride — not arrogance, pride — and to place it well. To say I want to do something for my country. I believe there is some of it. I hope. At least nowadays everybody's informed about [the crisis]."
Though that, as she concedes, is a distinct part of the problem and an entirely understandable reason for popular anger — how long it took for everyone to know and how much of a surprise it all was. This applies, of course, across the eurozone: As Timothy Garton-Ash pointed out recently, Greece, early in the last decade, used the dark skills of Goldman Sachs to arrange a currency swap deal that concealed the scale of their debt. In 2003 they claimed their deficit was 2.6 billion, or 1.7 per cent of GDP, well under the 3 per cent required of model European Union members. Within 18 months they had been forced to admit that the deficit was, in fact, 8.8 billion. Last October the newly elected socialist government had the unenviable task of announcing that the deficit was far larger than the previous, centre-right New Democracy government had let on — nearly 13 per cent of GDP. "People in Greece feel that they are cheated by the government," she says.
Mouskouri does, in fact, vote New Democrat and served, for five years from 1994, as a Member of European Parliament in Brussels. There was some surprise when she proved to be a conscientious politician, sitting on various committees and launching Operation Ariane, to support the translation and publication in the EU of the lesser European languages — Catalan, Basque, Gaelic, Greek. She also campaigned for the return of the Elgin marbles but politics proved, eventually, to be an affront to her idea of integrity: "I came with high ideals," she once said, "but I soon realised that in politics you have to accept the system or get out quickly. You have to play the game and become like the others, which is sad." She was also, it turned out, unable to toe the party line: If she happened to agree with the socialists, for example, she would simply vote with them — something of a handicap in a politician. But for the civilian she now is, it is perfectly fine.
"There is a sense of revolt. I feel it too. But at this point, we cannot sit and say whose fault it was. We have to save the reputation of the country. And the country itself, of course, and save it in front of Europe because we belong to Europe and there is a responsibility when you are a member. So we all have to help and I hope it will be possible. And just keep our word and be very honest from now on."
But there, as the Germans in particular are vociferously pointing out, is the rub. Only just wobbling out of their own recession, they are not best pleased by the prospect of their taxpayer-funded banks having to bail out a country that, as Vassilis Monastiriotis of the London School of Economics commented drily last week, completely "failed to internalise the logic of the euro zone, which is fiscal discipline".
There is a mood of punishment abroad: Two Right-wing German MPs suggested, seriously, that the Acropolis, the Parthenon and a few Aegean islands should be sold off to raise the necessary cash. Mouskouri obviously takes the Greece-bashing to heart. "In every single news report, it's Greece, Greece, Greece. Everywhere I see stories about my country going bankrupt. And people are aggressive about it. It's frightening. And it's painful for me. Nobody wants their country to be treated badly. It's frustrating and very sad."
Although she was born in Crete, Mouskouri was 2 when the family moved to Athens and 6 when Germany attacked on April 6, 1941. Greece fell in 24 days. Not long after that she and her elder sister Eugenia were looking out the window when resistance fighters threw a grenade at a group of Germans. Soldiers rampaged through the neighbourhood, including the Mouskouri house, searching for the perpetrators, dragging every male, some not much older than the girls themselves, out into the square.
They were already poor but the occupation made them destitute. For two years there was no school and, more importantly, no food — the first winter 2,000 Greeks died of starvation. Much later, when her career was taking off, it took a certain deliberate setting aside of these memories to perform in Germany for the first time; they rewarded her with her first international hit, The White Rose of Athens. And it is, of course, an extra ingredient in the war of words between Greece and Germany over the past few weeks. Mouskouri diplomatically doesn't mention it.
After the war there was still no money because her father wasted it all away but there was more food and as if to make up for the deprivation, she ate and ate. By the time she was 10 she was fat; by the time she was a teenager she weighed 100 kilograms. Much is made, particularly in her rather condescending British press (her utter sincerity, her deeply felt ballads, falling foul of the national requirement for irony) of the fact that she has made no attempt to go blonde or change her appearance in any way whatsoever (though, with the help of Maria Callas's dietician, she did lose weight). But for her it is a deliberate stand, of accepting herself as she is and making everybody else do so too: "What's important is what comes from my heart and from my mouth."
And of course, it worked. She has recorded about 1,500 songs in 15 languages and has more than 230 gold and platinum albums worldwide and is one of the bestselling female artists of all time.
She and her sister loved to sing and both were sent to the Conservatoire. But after a year it became clear that the family could afford only one place. "The professor said to my parents, ‘The problem is — the big daughter is really great, she has a beautiful voice. The little one has less voice,'" — she also, it turned out, had only one functioning vocal cord — "but I think it's a need for her to sing and if you stop it will be very sad.'" Their mother could not choose; it was too unfair, "and then my sister said, ‘No, it doesn't matter, I don't want to go on.' I think she sacrificed herself. I did not realise it at the time because I was too young to think that way — anyway, she does not regret." Doesn't she? "That's what she said." Do you believe her? "I want to believe her. She said, ‘I wouldn't be able to do what you did' — I mean, to be a singer is a simple and very difficult thing.
"But I felt guilty, yes, for many years — you know, I think in Greece people grow up with guilt. So I have guilt when people are not as successful as I am, or if my family has a problem. The same with my children. I tried to give them a wonderful life and I was with them a lot. But still I feel that I failed, as a woman, to keep my family together." At 25, she married a guitarist in her backing band and they had two children. But they grew apart, personally and musically and, increasingly, he was unable to take being the less famous partner in a marriage that so diverged from the macho Greek norm. They divorced when she was 39.
She met Andre Chapelle, then her sound technician, not very long afterwards but they did not marry until 2003 because, she once said, in a phrase unmistakably imprinted with the unhappiness her own mother endured, "I didn't want to bring another father into the family. I wanted them to grow up in the quiet, safe way of the mother." (She had a nanny who worked for her for 25 years.) She probably would not claim to be revolutionary in any way but she is aware that, just because she wanted so much to sing, she became, for Greece at least, an involuntary pathbreaker. There was the divorce, in which she went against everything in her upbringing. There was her career. There was parliament — she obviously still feels rather bruised by the judgments she came in for "because I was a woman and a singer. I think in my life I have had to prove my way as a woman and a singer and a mother but I had to prove with each step, that I am worth it.
"But it was one of the most wonderful things in my life to have children. It gave me stability, a lot of stability, in my life but also in my work." She compares it to her feeling about being Greek. "I feel responsible because if I do something wrong then they will say, ‘Oh, she's Greek.' Or with my children ‘Oh, she's their mother.' It's a great responsibility. So I had to be very disciplined." It is a feeling her country is going to come to know all too well in the coming weeks.
