See last month’s entry, The Virgin Palin, for a precursor to this posting

IF ONE ACCEPTS the argument from The Virgin Palin that Sarah Palin is to the Republican Party what the Virgin Mary is to Christianity, and if one accepts that in earlier centuries iconography and paintings were a primary vehicle through which a largely illiterate public formed its views on the Virgin Mary, then it follows that one can explore what Sarah Palin means to the Republican Party by looking at images of the Virgin Mary from past centuries. If the transitive logic of such reasoning seems as dubious as its assumptions, it should be remembered that when dealing with matters of religion, or presidential elections for that matter, faith always trumps reason.

The Virgin and Child, Ambrogio Bergognone, about 1488-90

In the 1250-1500 wing of the museum, where the oldest of the museum’s paintings are on display, one encounters numerous images of a regal, saint-like Virgin Mary. As with Bergognone’s The Virgin and Child, Mary is often haloed and garbed in ecumenical robes. Admittedly, it is difficult to see the small town mom connections in these early paintings, which emphasize Mary’s saintly and queenly aspects. But if one considers the critic Marina Warner’s claim that the “regal role of Mary as the mother of the God-Emperor became a central and forceful symbol of power, which could be used to reinforce the authority of the Church on earth” then the unexpected coronation of Sarah Palin at the Republican Convention begins to make sense. A Hail Palin prayer is inscribed in the halo. While the designer ecclesiastical outfit worn by the Virgin runs into the thousands of dollars, he rosary held by infant America was purchased from the Minneapolis children’s boutique Pacifier for a mere $98, less than a quarter of the price of a haircut.

The Virgin and Child Before a Firescreen, Robert Campin,about 1440

Alongside the regal bejeweled themes, paintings from this era are also replete with images of the Virgin breastfeeding. While the Virgin Mary is exempt from the messy business of intercourse, labor, and childbirth, she does give suck, an act that reflects and emphasizes her humility. Here we see a true hockey mom before the days of hockey, a woman engaged in the most human and motherly of activities, breast squeezing. Campin’s painting fuses the earthly and the divine, the fire screen serving not only as backdrop to this humble motherly scene but also as a halo for the PTA mom cum saint. Note how infant GOP luxuriates in her embrace.

The Virgin and Child, Dirk Bouts, about 1465

Here again the Virgin squeezes her breast, this time aiming it directly at baby GOP’s face in a possible allusion to the future advent of the breast pump. Puffy-eyed from too much election coverage, infant GOP smiles with anticipation and waves to the camera as Joseph, aka Joe the Carpenter, says “Cheese.”

The Virgin and Child, Lorenzo di Credi, 1480-1500

In di Credi’s painting we encounter a plumper Jesus and womanlier Mary, reflecting the Roman emphasis upon the human rather than the divine. Considering the devotion Palin inspires among devout Christians and plunger-happy males, she may well be the culmination of this humanizing process by emanating at once the chaste, maternal qualities of the Virgin Mary as well as the this-worldly forbidden allure of a Mary Magdalene, thereby reconciling the two Christian archetypes of womanhood, virgin and whore. The bright colors of the Virgin’s clothing in the painting imbue a festive, energizing atmosphere to what might otherwise have been a subdued lactation experience. Not surprisingly, the color that predominates is blue, Mary’s color. While this may seem anathema to a Republican candidate, it should be remembered that in an effort to reach out with non-partisan brotherly love the GOP has adopted blue for its Country Music First banners. Besides, in an election where there are so many crypto socialists and pinkos lurking about in capitalist disguise, red is best left only for coloring in states on maps and painting lips on pit bulls. Note the glutted infant GOP, whose expression and stance suggests that, while he has had his share of milk, he is not quite ready to part with the breast. In the distance, across the Bering Straits, is Kremlin Palace.

The Virgin and Child, Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, about 1500-1525

According to the National Gallery audio tour for this painting: “The healthy chubby Christ Child, wearing only a large band around his waist, turns towards us with large, sad eyes. He lies across her lap in a pose that anticipates the Pietà, when he will rest in her arms after the crucifixion. And here, the joy of the mother cradling her child is permeated with the haunting sorrow of one who will lose her son.” Weep not, Mater Dolorosa: the rabble may be lashing your son towards Mount Cavalry, but His sacrifice shall not be in vain. The resurrection of the crucified Republican Party is nigh.

Altarpiece: The Madonna and Child with Saints John the Baptist and Jerome, Parmigianino, 1526-7

Art critics once believed this to be a depiction of John the Maverick introducing Mother Palin as his vice presidential candidate at the 2008 Republican Convention. But the consensus is now that it is John the Mac-Is-Back, freshly emerged from his years of post-election soul-searching in the wilderness, proclaiming Queen Palin at her 2012 Republican Convention Assumption.

-Constantine Markides

Image Credits: makismakis. Makismakis is available for freelance work. Anyone interested should email him at: makismakismakismakis@gmail.com.

The Virgin Palin

WHEN JOHN MCCAIN announced Sarah Palin as his running mate, a number of Doubting Thomases within the ranks questioned his judgment. But the ensuing surge of blood into the Republican Party’s worryingly flaccid and impotent apparatus (a process referred to in politer circles as “energizing the base”), quickly brought these skeptics to their senses. They welcomed the “former” beauty queen (pfff, former!) and aerial wolf hunter with a zeal of outstretched arms that was surpassed only by the engorged manhood of the Pakistan President.

Unfortunately a few Katie Couric interviews, an ethical misconduct investigation, and recent geospatial revelations that neither Russia nor Putin’s head is visible from Wasilla or Anchorage have resurfaced the murmurs of doubt over McCain’s choice, but skeptics should heed the advice of Jesus—In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world—a sanguinity that was reflected in Palin’s Straight Talk Express response when asked if she was ready to be President: “Absolutely. Yup. Yup.”

Critics of McCain from the unpatriotic terrorist-palling left have called his choice of Sarah Palin as disingenuous, cynical, and opportunistic, asserting that the McCain camp has been sheltering her from the media (MILF Hunter and Bang Bros were both allegedly refused interviews) because her public exposure would reveal their naked political motivations. Father, forgive them for they know not what they say. If there were any motivations, they were divine in origin. Sarah Palin is to the Republican Party what the Virgin Mary is to Christianity. If this analogy seems farfetched, one needs only to glance into the latter history of Byzantium to appreciate how neo-Christian the G.O.P. really is. Let us be attentive.

In the first three centuries of its history, Christianity was a persecuted minority religion tolerated by emperors only for providing lion fodder at gladiator shows. Only in the fourth century, after Emperor Constantine’s Edict of Milan, was Christianity given legal equality with the pagan cults and eventually supremacy, thereby acquiring the privilege to wield the whip rather than suffer it.

Over the next century the Virgin Mary controversially made her admission into the theological limelight and into the hearts and, to a lesser extent, minds of the Christian flock. Although Mary is only peripherally mentioned in the Bible, the cult of Mary had entrenched itself by the time of the Council of Ephesus in 431, where a number of monks made it dogmatically official that Mary was indeed Theotokos, God-Bearer, or to put it more simplistically, the Mother of God.

The monks’ decision proved a professional blow to the fourth century patriarch of Constantinople, Nestorius, who vocally objected to calling Mary the Mother of God, as he felt the title carried blasphemous associations with the mother deities of paganism. “That God passed through the Virgin Christostokos, I am taught by the divine Scriptures,” Nestorius declared, “but that God was born from her I have not been taught anywhere.” Alas for Nestorius, education mattered in the intrigues of higher office no more back then as it does today, and the monks of Ephesus sided in the theological debate with his political opponent Pope Cyril of Alexandria. Nestorius was eventually dethroned for his heretical views, exiled to a desert monastery, attacked by raiding bandits, and his writings burned wherever they were found, Amen.

Theological squabbles aside, this status upgrade of the Virgin Mary was mostly a means of absorbing other groups into the Christian throng. It remains unresolved just how widespread the cult of Mary had been before the fourth century: many like the cultural historian Geoffrey Ashe claim there was a widespread Marian church existing separate from the Christian one, while others like the sociologist Michael Carroll, claim the cult of Mary fully emerged only in the fifth century. Regardless, most scholars agree that the new ecclesiastical relish for the Madonna was a bait and hook effort to expand the tribe, whether that involved assimilating the Marian Church into the Christian church, attracting pagan worshippers of mother goddesses to their persecution-free religion, or simply appealing to the urban and rural proletariat who found security and Freudian relief in a mother goddess during a time of upheaval and barbarian invasions.

Now fast forward a millennium-and-a-half or so, to another time of political upheaval and of new barackbarian invasions into the declining Republican Empire. Sarah Palin makes her apparition-like world debut (it’s a miracle!) in the new holy site of Dayton, Ohio beside a visibly uncomfortable hand-wringing John McCain, who was such a maverick that he did not even listen to himself when it came to his preferred VP choice, renegade Joe “Bush-Kissed” Lieberman. Palin at once set to praising the wounded angel Hillary Clinton, who had been felled from her deserving heights by another angel, the Fallen One, Barack Obama, whose middle name, lest they accuse us of not providing all the facts, beloved brethren, is Hussein…

In an admirable love-thy-enemy gesture, Palin praised St. Clinton for leaving 18 million cracks in the “highest, hardest glass ceiling” separating America and that special place where righteous dead Americans await to join us on Judgment Day, and then called upon women across America to join her in hastening the End of Days by “shatter[ing] that glass ceiling once and for all,” presumably with high-powered hunting rifles.

Just as the Virgin Mary brought around worshippers of pagan mother goddesses into the folds of Christianity, so too has it been written that Palin will bring around those spiritually eviscerated Clinton supporters into her loving embrace. As for those naysayers who obsess over how Palin’s opposition to abortion even in cases of rape and incest and her support of guns and drilling are not positions appealing to most women, it should be remembered that pagan devotees flocked to Christianity even though the chaste Virgin Mary was devoid of the sexuality of the mother goddesses (including the virgin ones like Astarte, Inanna and Ishtar who had intact hymens but were still promiscuous, thanks to a biological deus ex machina); therefore, why should Palin not attract the stray orphaned Clinton supporters even if they vote for her, as Jon Stewart has noted, “purely on gynecological reasons?”

Consider the following view on the Virgin Mary by another feminist, though not nearly as famous, Simone de Beauvoir: “For the first time in history, the mother kneels before her son; she freely accepts her inferiority. This is the supreme masculine victory, consummated in the cult of the Virgin—it is the rehabilitation of woman through the accomplishment of her defeat.” Geez. Well guess what folks, if you listen to that gotcha media and think Palin is bad for women, then you obviously think the Virgin Mary was bad for women, and Christians too, which means you think America is bad for the American people too which is what the bad guys want you to believe, and that’s darned scary, but you know what, not Dr. Henry Kissinger and not the great Ronal
d Reagan.

In his 1969 article “Virgin Birth” the anthropologist Edmund Leach suggests that the underlying idea in the Virgin Birth is the vast disparity between an omnipotent male and the mere mortal he chooses to impregnate, thereby symbolically reflecting the concentration of wealth and power that characterized Byzantium. Collins expands upon Leach’s ideas in Origins of the Mary Cult to develop a theory that sheds some interesting light on the inspired devotion that the vice presidential candidate provokes, even if his conclusions rely upon some suspiciously unverifiable Freudianizing.

Collins points out that the cult of the Virgin flourished in places like Spain and Italy, countries that were both heavily reliant upon agriculture—not surprisingly since agrarian regions are traditional strongholds of mother goddess worship—as well as characterized by a vast disparity between rich and poor. Unlike Ashe, Collins finds no evidence of a significant Mary cult during the first four centuries. In his view the cult emerged when the Church, which he claims was primarily constituted of the middle-class, spread outwards to incorporate the rural and urban poor. Such families, he claims, were ‘father-ineffective,’ meaning power was concentrated in the mother due to the economic enfeeblement of the males. In such families, the sons will initially identify strongly with their mothers but then realize as they mature that they must behave like men, which generates insecurity that in turn leads to the machismo complex.

All sons, Collins agrees with Freud, develop oedipal sexual urges for their mother that must later be repressed. In the ‘father-ineffective’ families these urges are even more exaggerated. How to discharge this sexual energy? Enter the Virgin Mother, whose worship allows for the acceptable dissipation of their repressed sexual tension. As for women, the Virgin Mary permits them to vicariously enjoy the fulfillment of their desire to not only have sex with their father, but also—bonus!—to have a child by him (after all, ladies, if you can’t have a penis, you may as well have a baby). The church grew in scope, the men exhaled with relief, the women sighed with satisfaction, and the Virgin Mary gazed out with beatific chastity from statuettes the world over, occasionally weeping tears of joy at the win-win situation.

In light of Mr. Collins’ blasphemy, let us redirect our attention to Sarah Palin, that twinkly-eyed, rouge-cheeked, nose-wrinkling, lipsticked-winking loin-igniter, that ravishing librarian who can just go ahead and permanently remove any books that she feels like removing, preferably one-by-one and slowly, that Drillmate Polar Bear of the Year whose mantra ‘Drill, Baby, Drill’ is sending adolescents from sea to oil-rich sea into nocturnal frenzies of terrestrial penetrations that often end with the G.O.P. promise of an ecstatic spurt of black gold, that protectress of family values and patron saint of hockey MILFs who has at last united and Viagrized the base of the Grand Old Party (newly energized as the Grand Old Prostate), consisting of evangelical Christians who uphold the virtues of chastity and abstinence, most of whom reside in the Southern and Midwestern states, a poorer region and more heavily reliant on agriculture than other parts of the U.S. like Sodom and Gomorrah.

So to those of you establishment types who have “better” ideas on what the McCain ticket should look like: thanks but no thanks. You can keep your pork barrel Candidates to Nowhere. God’s will has to be done in unifying people and companies to get a Palin and McCain administration in place so that this peace-seeking nation can stage a surge in our neighboring country of Afghanistan and lead us to victory there as it has proven to have done in Iraq, and it’s got to be all about job creation, too, so pray for that. It’s business time, guys and gals, so let’s get down to gettin’ business done.

How long has Palin been at this, like six weeks? That’s how doggone mavericky she is. Was the Virgin Mary, who helped to save all of humanity, an elite Washington insider who wanted to raise your taxes and take away your freedoms? Nope, you betcha she wasn’t. So stay thee away, Barack, God Bless Joe Six-Pack and Hail Palin! xo

Constantine Markides

To read about Mother Palin, click here

*makismakis is available for freelance work. Anyone interested should email him at: makismakismakismakis@gmail.com

8. THE LAMP

THE EPICENTER of the training camp was a vast plaza roughly the size of a football pitch where all parades and ceremonies took place.  The paved plaza was empty save for two buildings. On the far end, overlooking the Mediterranean, was the training camp headquarters building.  And in the middle of the plaza, rising up out of the center of this vast concrete plain, was the church.  It was one-fifth the size of the headquarters building and was essentially no more than an altar and sanctum designed for outdoor services, but its focal location sent the clear message that the activities of the training camp were dedicated and beholden to the house of God, who was after all the best general the army had ever known since He was the only superior who commanded the respect of almost all the soldiers.  He was so effective at infusing discipline and elevating morale among army ranks that no other officer had ever raised the tender and controversial matter of His beard, although a few officers did secretly nurse the hope that He might one day be reconceived as a clean-shaven Lord, or at least a mustached one.   

The officers marched us from our barracks down to the plaza, where we all lined up before the church.  A priest soon arrived with briefcase in hand and, after lighting the candles, proceeded with the chants and service.  There were no interruptions, although the presence of a curvy black-haired female officer who was normally hidden away from the conscripts’ view in the headquarters building did disrupt the atmosphere of ecclesiastical solemnity by sending the congregation into a nerve-jangling, tooth-gritting ecstatic torment of a most unspiritual variety.   

After sprinkling us with holy tapwater, the priest then lectured us on our Hellenic roots and on how we were unraveling as a people because we had begun to embrace the dissolute culture and customs of the West.  However, it was not the materialism or consumerism that the church was opposed to but rather the erosion of its cherished millennia-old tradition of sexual repression and patriarchy. These admonitions and diagnoses had already been given to us on our first day in the KEN via a four-page Orthodox pamphlet titled The Lamp.  There had in fact even been a section in the pamphlet dedicated to “The Western Way of Life” warning us about the “phenomena of anarchism, crime, drugs, lewd sex, and homosexuality observed in the communities of the West.” 

The Lamp also urged abstinence until marriage and quoted the “wise professor of psychiatry” at Zurich University A. Forel who according to the pamphlet claimed that “chastity and abstinence until marriage not only does not hurt a youth but actually helps tremendously with his health.”  All ‘prophylactics’ (the word was always in quotes) were “half-measures and a dangerous temptation.”  It then condemned those “unscrupulous doctors and antichrist hawkers of sexuality who recommend the use of ‘prophylactics’ for illegal relationships.”

The pamphlet would highlight in bold certain lines or phrases that it considered particularly valuable, like the following metaphor to describe those who promote the use of condoms: “It is like telling thieves that they can freely commit the injustice of theft and robbery, but should take all the necessary protective measures to avoid arrest from the police. Hey, people, wake up!!!”

There was distinctive advice for the youth of each gender.  Under the subheading “Man or Rascal?” The Lamp informed that a “man can never be that wild long-haired hippie with the varicolored shirts, the tight pants and the earring. With his comic appearance he plays the stud, the man, and he boasts about his sexual conquests. In fact he is not a man but a squirt, not a person but a shrimp.”

“The Future Mothers,” meanwhile, offered concrete dos and don’ts in the hope that all female readers might live long oppressive lives:  “Girls need to prepare appropriately so that they can responsibly and worthily take on the role of the mother.  They must learn to be modest and obedient so that they can be good wives and affectionate mothers… [The young woman] does not go to discos, dances, or to parties and sinful entertainments. She does not drink alcohol. She does not smoke and she does not play cards… and she maintains the principle of chastity as the apple of her eye.”

The priest had no time to delve upon subjects of deeper philosophical and spiritual complexity like Christian love since we still had to go get our assault rifles, and so he concluded his sermon with a tribute to the glories of Hellenism. The blessing was now complete.  The officers lined up before the priest, one by one bowing down to kiss his hand, and then marched us off to the firearms storage room. 

9. THE ZASTAVA

The Yugoslavian-made Zastava semi-automatic assault rifles that were assigned to us had wooden stocks and without the cartridge clipped in place looked more like jacked-up BB guns than army weapons. But the gun was surprisingly capable.  It had a maximum effective range of 600 meters and a maximum range of 3,500.  Nevertheless, the arphades treated it like a water gun.  The procedure began in an orderly manner: seated in rows by platoon, we went up one by one as our names were called to receive our issued rifle and then returned to our seated positions.  But it was not long before everyone was up, milling about, fiddling with the new toys. The harsh metallic sound of sliding bolts and clicking hammers filled the air as conscripts cocked their guns and depressed the triggers with a ceaseless repetitive zest.  No matter where you stood, the end of a barrel was pointed at you. Guns were deliberately turned upon one another. Mock executions were performed.  One grinning arphas put his mouth over the end of the barrel and pulled the trigger.  Another jabbed the muzzle of his Zastava into the stomach of his unperturbed friend, who was aiming his own gun at a truck driving by while puffing on an unsupported cigarette.

Of course, we had not been issued any cartridges yet and the chambers of the guns had assumedly all been checked, but a small oversight would have sufficed to create a big mess. Just one overlooked bullet, one 7.62mm that had jammed in the barrel, one numbskull prank, and we would be attending another sort of service. 

I had handled guns before but had never seen them treated so casually.  I would step aside anytime I found myself in the trajectory of a rifle’s line of fire only to find myself staring down the mouth of another barrel.  It was just something to get used to.  The conscript officers occasionally barked that we should not cock the guns or turn them upon one another, but they never did anything about it.  Later that day our company commander threatened punishment and delivered a stern warning that goofing around with firearms had cost the lives of many soldiers.  The words had no impact.  It was only when the guns had lost their novelty that the sound of sliding bolts and the sight of mock killings came to an end.

The next few days were spent on the Zastava, memorizing its specifications and range, disassembling and reassembling it, maintaining it, and learning to respond to commands like Shoulder Arms, Present Arms, Port Arms and Order Arms.  It would be another two weeks until we fired them, and even then we would only shoot a total of twenty bullets: ten during daytime target practice and ten at night.  The targets were situated 100 meters away against the carved out wall of a mountain and considering the puffs of raised dust and shattered earth that exploded upon the rock face as high as ten or fifteen meters over the targets every time the command to fire was given, the results may well have been comparable if the target practice had also involved blindfolds.  The training, as our daily rest periods were called, consisted of workshops on anything from rocket launchers to compasses to fire and movement.  These sometimes included hands-on schooling, which once even became head-on during the camouflage-cover-and-concealment exercise when three conscripts rushing with their guns for shelter under imaginary enemy fire collided into one another, with the result that one three-monther had to go to the hospital for x-rays.

Now and then we would hike up to the shelters after dark for nighttime seminars, like how to crawl on one one’s belly and ambush sentries.  The highlight was a ten-minute seminar on how to silently kill an enemy guard by sneaking up behind him and cupping a hand over his mouth while sinking a knife to the hilt into his second rib and then driving the blade upwards.  The cadet officer demonstrated on an accommodating friend who pretended to be murdered with little fuss.  We all watched with great interest, confident that after this brief demonstration we would have no problems getting ourselves killed if we ever attempted to silently knife a sentry.

The other memorable moment in the shelters was when one of the National Guard helicopters came flying low overhead one afternoon.  One of the conscripts (known simply as Brains) ran out of his shelter and, aiming his Zastava at the helicopter, followed its path while making the tat-a-tat stuttering sound that boys make when imitating machine-gun fire.  There was no conscript officer there at the time, but Chewbacca suddenly rounded the corner of the shelter and blasted Brains with a bellow that the helicopter pilot may well have heard over the chopping roar of the blades.    

The shelters were in the rolling foothills of the Troodos mountain range and made a fine place to idle away a morning or afternoon.  With a few exceptions like Chewbacca, the conscript officers who led the training were highly unmotivated, so often we just loafed and napped in the sunshine until someone spotted one of the permanent officers coming to inspect the training.  Even the most unabashed softies and whiners had to admit that as far as boot camps went, we had it good.

“If you could screw now and then, it wouldn’t be bad,” said one three-monther as we lounged on the grass with our backs against the outer wall of the shelter.   

“Well they screw you, you can’t have everything,” another replied.

“I hear if you get raped in here you’re discharged.”

“Yeah, and the guy who porks you gets all your months on top of whatever he’s got left.”

There was a brief pause.  “Boys, I’m a good-lucking guy.  What’s another three months on top of twenty-five?  What do you say?”

Later that week we were told that if we behaved well, we would get a two-night leave over the weekend.  As Friday approached there was an undeniable improvement of behavior and we went from atrocious to merely awful. On Friday morning Grivas delivered a Don’t Drink and Drive and Just Say No to Drugs lecture (“Don’t accept offerings from strangers, because whoever offers you grass today, will be selling you cocaine or heroine tomorrow”) and then let us go after we satisfactorily chanted for him where we were going to have coffee, where we were going to light a candle, and where we were going for a swim.

We were supposed to leave in what was now referred to as civilian clothing but about a third of the conscripts nonetheless remained in army uniforms.  They crowded around the giant mirrors in the lobby of the barracks to adjust their berets before the buses arrived.  Now that they were leaving the army camp, they had transformed into proud soldiers. 

Even after a paltry ten days in the camp, one felt awash in a wave of liberation upon leaving those barbed wire gates and finally turning out onto the highway, the shimmering sea whizzing by to the right, the Eye of the Tiger playing over the bus speakers.  The sight of females when we rolled down the main avenue of Nicosia sent all the seventeen-year-olds into a whistling, window-knocking frenzy.  One teenager blew a lipsticked kiss back at the bus, prompting a rapturous cheering uproar so deafening that the bus driver threatened to kick us all off the bus.   

“So did you get a girl?” one of the younger conscripts, upon our return to the camp, asked one of the six-monthers who had been especially vocal about his plans for a different woman each night.   

“Two,” he replied, grinning.

“Two!”

He raised both hands. “Maria,” he says, nodding to his left hand, “and Ioanna,” he added, motioning to the right. 

10. THE GORILLA

The weekend furlough was continually dangled over our heads in hopes of bribing or threatening good behavior out of us and it consistently never worked.  Conscripts were denied upcoming leaves as punishment but on the night before the departure day our captain would say that the camp commander had granted a universal amnesty.   There would be no such reprieves again, he assured us on a weekly basis.

There was however one disciplinary measure that was upheld in the training camp—the jail cell.  It was a severe punishment, dramatically out of place in the lax environment of the training camp considering the absence of other disciplinary measures.  To get jail time you generally had to commit some serious infraction like beat someone up or spray paint insults on army property, although even then you might merely get a scolding.  In the jail you were stripped of all your belongings and locked into a three-by-five-meter cell containing a bed frame and a small barred window up by the ceiling. You stayed in there alone for as many days as they saw fit, usually three or four although it could be as many as ten.  Three times a day you were let out to an adjacent room where you had a half hour to eat and smoke a cigarette, again in solitude.   

The military police administered the prison.  The man in charge of the military police at the training camp was a big man close to two meters tall with long thick arms that on a man of average Cypriot height would have trailed along the ground behind him as he walked.  He came to be known simply as Gorilla.  Whenever there were troubles he would arrive in his Gorillamobile, the light flashing on the roof, and make the rounds of each company, roaring threats.

“No, and I mean NO favors to any recruits,” he bawled the day before they brought in the sniffer dogs for a random drug search. “I know there will be some who’ll say, ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it…’ Well, my nutsac he didn’t!  The devil can take him!  I’ll step on his neck!  No, and I mean NO, favors to any recruits!” 

He was in fact a friendly hardworking man who under different conditions could have easily been a cheerful restaurant owner or a compassionate family doctor but he was the head of the military police at the training camp and so he had to act up to his size and play the chest-pounding gorilla. 

11. THE PARADE

Every day over the two weeks preceding the swearing-in ceremony we practiced marching for the parade.  It could have been learnt in a half hour but we spent hours on it each day.  We marched after breakfast; we marched at sunset; we marched in rain; we marched in icy winds; we marched until our shoulders throbbed and the heel of our left boot soles had worn away.

“I want to hear that left heel clip the ground!” Chewbacca would roar.  “I don’t hear anything!  That’s better!  One-two, hep-two, hep-two, One!  The elbows should be locked. The wrist locked down and the thumb pointed upwards! Your hand should swing up to eye level! One-two, hep-two, hep-two, One!”

After several days they positioned us in our parade formations, which were arranged by platoon and by height.  I was in the first platoon and, being the tallest conscript in my platoon, I was therefore in the first line.  I had hoped to be tucked away somewhere within the company formation as I was not keen on having thousands of people watch me march by like the Nutcracker.  But there was no escaping it.  It in fact turned out to be even worse than I expected because I also happened to be located in the row facing the audience during the swearing-in ceremony.  By a stroke of misfortune I happened to be the only conscript with the privilege of being perpetually in full view of the audience.   

Grivas would occasionally emerge from the headquarters building to examine our progress.  He always stood in the same place, a mere arm’s length away from our marching line, with the look of beetle-browed engrossment common to professional coaches.  One of the enduring images from boot camp that has retained all of its vividness is the sight of my right arm swinging up and down like a windmill blade over a growing and nearing Grivas, who would be standing statue-like on the other side of the painted white line that I was marching along, his hands folded at his back, his sunglasses perched over his conspiratorial mustache, his impenetrable elevated face gazing motionlessly down upon us as the sun slid down behind him into the Mediterranean under a magnolia sky.  Grivas reveled in the marching.  The sight of all those young uniformed men in a regimented parade elevated his spirit with manly passion and sent coursing through his shuddering flesh all those Hellenic aspirations and yearnings that gave meaning to his life as a training camp commander.         

There was no slacking when it came to marching. Neither hail, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of Grivas’ sight stayed us from the dreary completion of our appointed rounds.  The crucial thing in this boot camp seemed to be that we learned to march well.  That was how you defended your country: you marched gloriously. We never did.  Either the arphades were trying to sabotage Grivas’ dreams or they simply didn’t give a damn.   

“You should be looking up when you march!” Grivas would lecture us.  “Only women look down! Your eyes should be looking up, where the eagles fly.”  The wind would often come whipping across the plaza and we would stand there shivering as he tried to inspire us.  “In hard times, you should raise your head and say ‘I will struggle.’  To win the medal.  Tomorrow it may be a small race.  The day after tomorrow a marathon.”

“Up yours,” the kid next to me said.

“Who said that?” he screamed. “Tramp!  Scumbag!  Who told you to talk?”  Grivas became increasingly unstable with the approach of the swearing-in ceremony.  “Lift your left knee high when I say attention or I’ll cut your legs off!” he bawled.  “And don’t scratch yourselves!”  His curses also grew increasingly obscene as boot camp progressed, filled with bizarre, often incomprehensible, references to genitalia.

On our last weekend furlough before the swearing-in ceremony Grivas made a round of the barracks rooms for an inspection.  As usual we had been threatened that if he was dissatisfied we would spend the weekend inside the camp. We spent most of Friday morning sweeping, mopping, scrubbing walls, washing windows, wiping the dust from the top of the ceiling fan blades, shining our boots, and stretching our blankets so tight that you could bounce a coin off the beds.

“He’s coming! He’s coming!” our barracks room captain cried, running into the room. We all stood at attention by our beds.  We could hear him ranting in the room next to us.  I later found out that he had opened a locker and found the words “Fuck the commander” scribbled all over the inside of the door.  He did not even glance at our room when he walked in.  He went straight to the lockers and opened the first one.  No one had expected he would check the lockers.  The conscript responsible for the locked stomped to attention and reported his name. 

“Magazines… food…” Grivas murmured with disgust, tossing the magazine and the packet of chips onto the bed next to him.

He went to the next locker. “Dirty socks,” he said, tossing them behind him.  He opened another locker and a soda tumbled out and spilled at his feet.  He then opened my locker and began rummaging through my folded underpants, under which lay a plastic water bottle filled with the clear Cypriot spirit zivania. “Look at this, a bottle of water amidst the underwear.  Couldn’t these be in a bag?”

“They’re clean,” I said.

He paused and then his eyes darted over at me as if I had no right to speak.  “If you come to my room in headquarters you’ll see I keep all of my underwear and socks in bags.”  He shut the locker door and moved on to the next one.

12. THE SWEARING-IN CEREMONY

 “Tomorrow will be your day,” Grivas told us the day before the swearing-in ceremony.  “Tomorrow is a day for your parents and siblings and girlfriends to admire you.  There is no other KEN training camp in operation right now so all the stations will be showing you.  You have a chance to be seen by the whole world.”

And so it was that the whole world--or at least friends and family--witnessed the making of these 350 or so recruits into hardened soldiers trained to defend the homeland and withstand the rigors of war.  During the ceremony a conscript fainted and had to be carried away on a stretcher.  As usual we were told that the National Guard Chief of Staff would grant us an additional day of honorary furlough if we marched well and as usual it was given to us despite our resemblance to circus performers specializing in military satire. 

And it may as well have been a circus.  It was a lucrative act, with ticket sales on a national scale.  The essential thing was to keep the applause going by giving the appearance of a disciplined, trained army.  Like circus showmen, we spent weeks practicing for several minutes of performance.  It was no different from the island’s political arena: all hot air and humbug.  We were too busy puffing our chests out and raising our chins for anything else.   

The day after returning from our furlough—one of the last days in boot camp—we went on a “mountain trek,” which amounted to a mild three-hour hike, rest stops included, through the surrounding hills. On the way back, we passed through a neighboring village. Before we entered it we were taught one last chant, with the opening line “we are tough and disciplined.”  We practiced it a few times and then set off stomping into the village, bellowing out the self-promotional chant.  Two octogenarians applauded us from their porches as we stomped through; a few squawking chickens raced in fright across the road in front of us; and a dozen schoolchildren rushed in our direction upon sighting us and threw themselves against the chain link fence of their playground, pointing at us and laughing. 

Constantine Markides

*The entry Manning the Dead Zone, about guard duty on the UN-monitored Green Line, picks up where this piece ends.*

3 GRIVAS

AFTER ROLL CALL at morning lineup, a corporal announced that those who wished to see a doctor should go line up by the wall. Twenty-three of the seventy-three conscripts with apparently obscure ailments that manifested no external symptoms at once buoyantly made their way to the wall where they waited, their grinning faces radiating health and well-being.

An officer from headquarters then took the place of the corporal. He glared down silently upon us through his red-tinted sunglasses.

“Somebody discharged in the showers,” he finally said. “Obviously whoever did it learned it at home. His old man taught him. That’s the only excuse for that.”

The toilets consisted of holes in the porcelain floor over which you squatted and some of the conscripts tried avoiding them entirely. But one could only stave off biology for so long and eventually the deed had to be done, although thankfully it never again occurred in the shower. It was astonishing just how long some of them waited. Occasionally one would find a monstrous blasphemy perched on the edge of the hole of such girth that a human origin seemed impossible. These would become the subject of countless photos and lewd jokes and would remain etched in the collective memory of the conscripts long after it had been hosed down the hole with a high-powered blast of water.

After the officer had finished his scolding and walked off, one of the sergeants began to pace up and down the lineup. “So you shit in the showers?” he jeered, scowling with narrowed eyes at each of us in passing as if we had all offered individual scatological contributions to the mislaid heap that was still curled up in one of the shower stalls. “Aren’t you ashamed?”

But it was not until later that day when we were being congratulated by one of the corporals that we were ashamed. It was the third and final day of conscription and, as we had finished early in the equipment room, we were sent off to a black beret corporal to learn how to stomp to attention and execute a left- and right-turn and an about-turn. The first lesson involved how to react to the command “Men!” We were to inhale deeply and puff out our chests so that we looked proud. He gave the command and our chests at once swelled out and our chins and gazes went up. We were a model group and we looked so proud that we were ashamed.

But it was not so with the thirty or so conscripts from the neighboring company who were approaching our barracks in what was supposed to be a group march. They came huffing and misstepping along in the setting sunlight like a piece of weird performance art, their heads swiveling about in every direction, their boots ringing upon the concrete in a dissonant clatter, their bent arms flailing in perfect untimed disorganization, some of them even simultaneously swinging in zombie-style the same arm and leg instead of the opposing ones. They were an officer’s nightmare, an inerasable military failure, an insult to martial order and discipline, and the pride was visible on their faces as they lurched by.

That evening in the dining hall the training camp commander spoke to all 350 or so of us from the three companies. He had a bushy mustache and glasses with orange-tinted lenses. He was always pacing about with his arms folded behind at his lower back, taking long slow strides as if he were in profound contemplation, although between the tinted lenses and the dark complex growth on his upper lip it looked more as if he were perpetually in the grip of some intricate conspiratorial scheme. When he spoke before groups of soldiers he always accented the last syllable of every sentence to ensure we grasped its triviality. He was a diligent suspicious man who kept his socks and underwear neatly organized in bags and was never relaxed unless he was restlessly prowling the grounds of his training camp, guarding against instances of insubordination and slovenliness. He had a habit of running the edge of his finger up along your cheek to see when you had last shaven and he would change the station on the cafeteria television whenever Euronews came on as he felt conscripts would be better off exposed to mushy Greek soap operas than Anglo-American propaganda. The soldiers all addressed him as Mr. Commander but amongst themselves they called him Grivas because of his striking visual resemblance to the EOKA general, with whom he also shared ideological ground.

“We are all Greeks,” he would later tell all of us three-and six-monthers, most of who had grown up abroad. “Some of us are Greeks of Cyprus. Others are Greeks of Greece. Some are Greeks of England. Or Greeks of America. Or Greeks of Australia. But we are all Greeks.” On the other side of the Green Line, Turkish Cypriot commanders were telling Turkish Cypriot conscripts much of the same, except they pronounced them Turks instead of Greeks. It was unfortunate that Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot officers were doing such a good job at keeping the island divided on ethnic lines because they would have surely enjoyed celebrating together over raki and ouzo their nationalist love of another country and their mutual aversion for Cypriot identity.

But the topic of our Hellenic Spirit was not broached during that first welcome speech. A lower-ranking officer saluted Grivas and then snapped out the force numbers with that cheerless inhuman martial formality that is referred to as a “brisk and lively manner.” One of the conscripts made a farting noise but it was ignored. Grivas then saluted the officer off and turned to us.

“Men!” he called out. But he did not continue with the command for attention. He glared at us. “Haven’t you learned that the head should be thrown back and your cap should fly back fifteen meters?” He paused. “Invalid.”

“Men!” he called again. We puffed out our chests and threw our heads back, although our caps did not go flying into the back wall. “Attention!” We raised our left leg and stomped so that it landed by our right foot while simultaneously extending our arms—which had been folded at our back—to our side. “At ease!” We stomped back to the ‘at ease’ position.

“That was your first attention to me,” he said. “When in a week I give a command I want you to be excellent.” One of the conscripts was murmuring. Grivas looked in his direction. “I ask that you shut your mouth. Your head is swiveling. Look in front of you.” He paused. “Today the 2007 conscription of the January series ended. I welcome you to the KEN Paphos and the ranks of the National Guard. I hope that your service, whether it is twenty-five months or a reduced three months, is pleasant and will be a sweet good memory.” A number of conscripts were whispering and sniggering. “I asked that you do not murmur. And when you are at ease, you do not move.” He paused. “You are far from your family here. Your family will be calmer and more pleasant when you tell them over the phone that you are doing well.”

The National Guard desperately wanted its soldiers’ families to be calm and pleasant, especially the soldiers’ mothers. The National Guard had softened significantly in the last decade, and it was not long after the arrival of cell phones in Cyprus that soldiers were permitted to bring their mobiles into boot camp, which only eroded away the remnants of army discipline. Conscripts in boot camp were no longer isolated from the outside world and so there were far fewer opportunities for officers to break them down and rewire them in their martial image. Anytime a conscript was punished he could immediately place a call and protest about his abused human rights to his mother, who would then call National Guard headquarters or the media and protest that those men who had seized her son from her and declared absolute custody over him for the next two years were violating his human rights because they were not imposing their militaristic existence upon him in a courteous and respectful manner. The conscripts gallantly upheld human rights standards on army camps and outposts and made sure to be as discourteous and disrespectful as possible to the officers, since officers were far less likely to complain to their mothers.

In short, the National Guard had turned into damage control for spoiled delinquent teenagers. “We don’t use our knives to carve our name and series into the dining tables,” Grivas said, in case any conscript had mistaken notions on why the National Guard had issued each of them a pocketknife. “The tables hurt.” He paused, impressed with this poetic turn of phrase that had unexpectedly risen from him. “And we hurt too.”

But despite a decline in disciplinary standards, the National Guard had not relented in its efforts to infuse a patriotic spirit when it came to the issue of the island’s division and occupation. It had been so unrelenting that it had become ineffective. “When I say, where will we light a candle, you will say Apostolos Andreas,” Grivas told us. “When I say where will we go for coffee, you say Kyrenia. And when I say where will we go for a swim, Famagusta.”

“Where are we going to light a candle?” Grivas demanded.

“Apostolos Andreas!” the room boomed.

“Where will we go for coffee?”

“Kyrenia!”

“And where will we go for a swim?”

“Famagusta!”

The enthusiastic Q&A may have made sense before the crossings had opened three years ago, but it now either seemed like a blasphemous proposal by a military commander for a daytrip to the north or an anachronism in serious need of updating since it only emphasized with self-defeating irony the reality that that every day Greek Cypriots were making such trips.

It was not so different with the chants, probably written in late 1974, that our corporals and sergeants and cadet officers had us yell out that same night before prayer while marching in place in front of our barracks. Our company hollered into the offended night about how blood had been spilled in villages in the north, about eagles and freedom, about how Cyprus is Greek and so is Macedonia, and then we were told to turn to face the second company and then, as if in competition with them, holler out a final chant with the unforgettable one-liner “unfaithful Turkish dog, you killed a Greek.”

“You should feel this when you say it!” one corporal screamed. “How many of you don’t feel it?” I was neither feeling it nor saying it, and in fact the only thing I felt was an urge to club the silly corporal upside the head. It is one thing to go through the motions of the idiotic things you are ordered to do and another to take them to heart. The younger conscripts in my company, however, did not seem to object, not because they found the lyrics stirring, but because it was an opportunity to taunt and roar at the other conscripts in the second company who may as well have been the unfaithful dogs for all they cared.

4. THE ARPHADES

Every year there are two conscription dates for the National Guard: one in January, the other in July. As a rule, those attending college after the army enter in July. The rest go in January and are nicknamed the ‘arphades’ (pronounced ärf’äes) because they are in the ‘A’ or ‘alpha’ series. The arphades are far fewer in number and have over the years acquired a tarnished reputation. Just as the word ‘idiot’ can no longer be used to refer to people with mental impairments without an accompanying insult, so too is it impossible to refer to someone as an ‘arphas’ (the singular of arphades) without slamming his intelligence. Even arphades use the word ‘arphas’ to put down one another (“You’re a total arphas”) and actually pride themselves on the title, which to the July conscripts further demonstrates their collective stupidity. But in fact the only reason arphades are so astoundingly stupid is because they are clever.

Arphades live up to their reputation as jackasses because if they did not they wouldn’t be able to get away with nearly as much as they do. They are in a misfit category that brings with it special treatment and privileges. With more or less impunity they raise hell after lights-out, ignore wakeup calls, evade chores, jabber through roll call and sleep through sentry duty. The officers threaten them incessantly but do nothing, instead writing off their baboon antics as the inevitable result of irreversible malignant genetic and environmental influences.

It was often hard to tell whether they were acting or serious. One of the arphades once saluted a cadet officer with his left hand instead of the right. “No, the other side,” the cadet officer scolded him. Without cracking a grin, the arphas promptly crossed his hand across his face, so that his left hand was aimed at his right temple.

The arphades took pleasure in defying every aspect of the training program. Every night four conscripts from each platoon were assigned to stand as sentries for two-hour shifts on a rotating basis in the hallway outside their barracks rooms to watch over the sleepers and the locked gun rack. An additional four conscripts per night from the entire company were scheduled to stand guard over the toilets and showers (we referred to this position as Shit Guardian since it was the only explanation for standing guard over a bathroom). This pseudo-sentry duty was presumably to acclimatize us to the idea of waking up in the middle of the night for a guard shift. It might have worked had the repercussions for missing one’s shift involved anything more than hot air; on average, between the hours of twelve am and six am, only one in four sentries got out of bed.

The only time arphades excelled at guard duty was whenever they smuggled in kebabs and beer. They then took turns of their own initiative, standing by the barracks room door while the others ate their food in bed. Anytime an officer approached, the Kebab Guardian would warn those who were dining to hide the food under the covers and spray cologne about to mask the smell of charbroiled meat.

Morning exercise never lasted more than a half hour and consisted of light jogging to bawdy chants, stretches, and exercises like crunches, back extensions and pushups; it was undemanding, enjoyable and beneficial and most of the arphades did everything to avoid it. Every morning three in four weaseled their way out of it and of those twenty-five per cent who did participate, about half of them would drop out partway through. The arphades would instead work on depleting their energy reserves during the night by thrashing about and howling for hours until they had exhausted themselves to sleep. A corporal or a sergeant would make a round of the barracks rooms at ten, shutting the lights off with a stern warning that anyone who made a noise would be punished. As soon as he departed, the arphades would switch the lights back on and begin shrieking, opening and slamming locker doors, swinging from the fan, doing pushups with the bunk beds, wrestling, and even dragging bunk beds out into the hallways, with or without sleepers.

My barracks room was an exception because seven out of the twenty of us happened to be older conscripts like myself and we secured a tolerable degree of quiet during the night by putting up a united bristling front against any violations of the peace. But other older conscripts were not so lucky and sometimes there were only one or two of them in a roomful of rioting fiends. “I can’t take it anymore,” said one frazzled 26-year-old from a neighboring room. “I can’t get more than twenty minutes of sleep at a time. I want to kill them.”

There were times I wished he did kill them. Roll call would often take a half hour instead of five minutes because many of the arphades simply could not be bothered to get out of bed. In the mornings, those of us who went out on time would have to wait shivering in the 6:15 am cold for fifteen minutes while the corporal bellowed at the others until they finally emerged, bootlaces untied, unshaven, their mucus-encrusted eyes looking out amusedly at the exasperated hypothermic lot of us. If they were especially long in materializing the conscript officers would make the rest of us do about-turns while shouting “we are waiting for you!” And then when they finally did all line up, they would yap, smoke, and play music or porn videos on their cell phones so that a five-minute roll call instead took another fifteen minutes and like misbehaving nursery children we would again be ordered to do continuous about-turns until it was quiet. The worst of the arphades tossed their cigarette butts and trash on the floor, smeared shit on the walls of the toilet stalls, sprayed shaving cream graffiti all over the bathroom mirror, and expected everyone else to clean up the mess.

It was astonishing how much some of them got away with. One of them, when ordered by the company commander to clean the toilets for the day as punishment for a slew of misdeeds, promptly replied, “You clean them.” He never did clean them and he never was punished.

Other arphades found subtler ways of disrespecting the high-ranking officers, like the time when Grivas was reproaching us after the first inspection of the barracks: “The barracks are filthy,” he said. “Non-smokers don’t want to have to pick up the cigarette butts of every asshole smoker.” A murmur went up through the company. “I have to speak openly to you because you don’t understan— Who farted?” Grivas paused. “Who farted?” he demanded.

“I did. It slipped out.”

“It slipped out? What’s your name?”

“Syradiotis, Kostas.”

“Who?” he demanded.

“Syradiotis, Kostas.”

“Aren’t you a soldier?”

“Yes.”

“Then say it.”

“Soldier Syradiotis, Kostas.”

Grivas paused. “Say ‘I’m sorry’.”

“I’m sorry.”

Unlike Grivas, our company commander was a coolheaded capable orator in his early thirties who would lecture us in an authoritative tone about team spirit and group unity, about respecting and depending upon the soldier at your side. “Adjust your course,” he would tell us. “You came to the KEN and you think you’re on vacation. Forget it. I repeat, recruits, adjust your course.” He was one of those rare officers who had managed to climb the military hierarchy without the usual corrosion of character that comes with authority. Everyone liked him and no one ever adjusted his course.

He was the kind of decent reasonable army man that any recruit would be lucky to have as his commanding officer and I desperately wanted him to hulk out into the kind of unreasonable blockheaded brute that I would despise. I yearned for a bully of violent unreasoning action to crush some spirits and bones. A few arphades in particular would send my nerves squirming and my teeth into a clench-up, and graphic visions would possess me of a fist going through their heads, splintering out the backside in a blissful eruption of skull and brain. I prayed with an inward feverishness for the officers to drop the paternal talk and threats and instead take up the bludgeon, to flog them with rusty chain, pull out toenails, electrocute testicles, shatter kneecaps, or just execute them against a wall, why not, the world will go on spinning, where are the fascists when you need them?

The arphades were so maddeningly aggravating that I soon grew incredibly fond of them. You could not help but respect their boundless disrespect and lawlessness. They had managed to turn boot camp into a bizarre state-funded kinderarmy for the delinquent. But that said, the bulk of the finest and most generous Cypriots also come from their ranks. In these so-called uneducated peasants one can still find that mellow earthy warmth and fierce devotion that are becoming endangered traits due to the materialist rave that over the last two decades has been sweeping the island with the frenzy and destructive power of a locust plague.

As I too was an arphas, I soon learned to adapt myself to the arpha way. In the afternoons, when ‘free time’ ended, I would remain in bed when the first call for lineup was bellowed out. On the twelfth or thirteenth call I might consider putting my boots on. I once counted them yell “Lineup!” thirty-five times. But I was never quite able to cultivate their knack for insubordination and disregard of duties, which was their way of rebelling against the conscription system. The arphades understood perfectly well the magnitude of the gulf dividing conscript officers, who were merely completing their two-year service (in increasing order of rank: corporal, sergeant, and cadet officer) and ‘permanents,’ who were career army men (warrant officer, company commander, camp commander, colonel, brigadier, etc). It was not until I left the KEN and was sent for sentry duty on the Green Line that I came to fully recognize this distinction (one of ‘us’ versus ‘them’). That is why they paid little to no attention to the 19- and 20-year-old corporals, sergeants, and cadet officers, who had absolutely no power to do anything to them but refer them to the commanding officer, who for all practical purposes had been stripped of disciplinary power thanks to the advent of mobile phones, human rights rhetoric, and pro-active mothers.

There was only one conscript officer who commanded their respect and could silence and still an entire lineup of rioting arphades with a few deep barks. And he happened to be my platoon leader.

5. CHEWBACCA

Chewbacca was a muscular, fit, disciplined, capable, and dutiful young man despite having spent almost two years in the army. He was a 19-year-old green beret and a cadet officer but appeared a decade older due to his commanding presence and the deep booming timbre of his voice, which seemed to emerge from the primordial bowels of the earth. One could not ignore a Chewbaccan bellow any more than trespassers could ignore the bark of Cerberus or philistines the apocalyptic denunciations of an Old Testament prophet.

The arphades had so much fearful respect of Chewbacca that they would ambush him at any opportunity. He formed an insurmountable physical challenge and brawny arphades tested their manhood by pouncing upon him in gangs of three or four at a time. I remember watching during one of my two am sentry shifts as four conscripts tackled Chewbacca in the main hall of the barracks and tried unsuccessfully to wrestle him to the ground. Chewbacca never objected to such attacks and instead humored them by putting them in headlocks and squashing their faces against the floor.

There were however two scraggly arphades in my platoon—Satan and Wig—that knew how to get a rise out of Chewbacca. Satan was a ruffian with enthusiastic acne and eyes that for no apparent reason would often goggle from his sockets as if he had just experienced a flashback of some infernal past torment. Satan was always finding new and creative ways of irritating cadet officers. When his phone would ring in the middle of lineup and the cadet officer would sternly warn him to shut it off, he would promptly reply that he didn’t know how.

Satan’s partner-in-delinquency, Wig, was a restless windbag who slouched about like a slinking alley cat with skinny arms that hung limp at his sides and a head that was always craning forward and to the side like a turtle taking stock of its surroundings after a long hibernation inside its shell. Wig was always raising his arm during training seminars with the word “Permission?” Dozens of times a day he would ask for permission to ask a question. His questions were consistently ridiculous and four out of five times the answer was no. He would then merely lower his hand and raise it again a few moments later, requesting permission to ask a question. None of us knew who had first called him Wig or why, but the name had stuck.

Both Satan and Wig took boundless pleasure in repeating the same jokes, or what they saw as jokes, countless times per day. Wig would often count “one, two, three” and then he, Satan, and some of their groupies would yell out “Patrida! [Country]” at the top of their lungs. No one knew why Wig and Satan yelled this and they probably didn’t either.

In lineup they would do anything to disrupt roll call and make a scene. “Permission?” Wig once said, raising his arm. “I’ve gotta piss. Can I go? No? Then I’m gonna pull it out right here.” He started to unbutton himself, which sparked yelling from the conscript officers. “Well what do you want me to do? Piss all over myself? I can’t hold it.” They let him go and he slunk indoors, grinning back at the rest of us.

During one of the training seminars that were held in the hills on the army camp’s perimeter, Chewbacca was explaining to us how to orient oneself without a compass. “If it’s a cloudy day, you can look for physical landmarks. In Cyprus trees usually bend towards the south because the winds generally blow—”

“Permission?” Wig asked, thrusting up his hand.

“No,” Chewbacca said. “Because the winds generally blow from the north. You can also look for anthills. Ants build the north side of their anthills slightly higher to block—“

“Permission?” Wig asked, again raising his hand.

“Don’t interrupt! Ants build the northern side higher to block the wind. You can also orient yourself if a graveyard is nearby. Tombstones all look to the east so that when the dead rise they face east.”

After a moment of silence, Wig raised his hand. “Permission?”

“Yes.”

“How can they rise if they’re dead?”

6. THE BRIGADIER

The highest-ranking officer who came to the army camp on a regular basis was the brigadier. He was a towering man with a great curling mustache that was all the rage in the 1950s. He was often in buoyant spirits but could storm over as instantly and ferociously as a Greco-Turkish dogfight over the Aegean. The army camp was a fine place for him to indulge his mood swings, which in any other work environment would have been compassionately treated with pills. When he yelled at someone he would thrust his open paw out in front of him as if demanding alms for the disgraceful state of the camp. Without retracting his extended arm and before an answer was given, he would launch into another question with an emphatic twirl of his hand that would have also been effective for spinning basketballs.

But it was not the recruits whom he yelled at. In fact he was full of advice for them. “When you walk, you keep your head tall. You are slaves of no one,” he told us one afternoon after a corporal had bossed us out of out of our barrack rooms during rest period and ordered us to hastily line up outside.

Rather it was the conscript officers who suffered his foul moods. The brigadier would come stomping through the camp bellowing out questions and twirling his interrogative hand at every corporal, sergeant and cadet officer he encountered. Grivas would always be at his side, docile as a lamb, relinquishing all authority in his superior’s presence. The army hierarchy and the dictatorial privileges conferred upon every officer in relation to those under him ensured that ever officer, although a slave driver to many, was also a slave to some. It was like a family tree of abuse—the father mistreating his sons who in turn mistreated their sons, on down through the generations—although unlike the family tree, the relatives never died. It was a very democratic totalitarian structure and an educational one, as it cultivated an existential awareness of the variable and absurd nature of the human condition.

News of the brigadier’s approach would always send the officers into a state of panic, like on the first Saturday afternoon when a corporal came rushing into our barracks room.

“The brigadier is coming for an inspection!” he hissed. “Stand by your beds!” We all hastily took our positions. “If he looks at you directly, say your name!” The corporal rushed out of the room.

Moments later a sergeant rushed in. “Why are you all standing by your beds? You’re not supposed to know the brigadier is coming. Look like you’re talking!” We all fell back onto our beds and started pretending to talk.

The brigadier soon walked in and we all stood up. “What are you all doing here?” he demanded. “Why are you inside? Well? It’s not prohibited to be outside, you know. Do you know that?”

“We know,” a three-monther replied. “We’re relaxing. Discussing.”

“Discussing what? How to solve the Cyprus problem?” The brigadier grinned, evidently pleased with his joke, and walked out into the other barracks room across the hall.

A sergeant came into our room moments after the brigadier had left the company barracks. “Go outside,” he urged. “It’s still free time. The brigadier should see you relaxing out there.” We went outside. The brigadier’s car was gone. “Oh, I guess he’s gone,” the sergeant said. “You can go back inside if you want.”

7. THE CAFETERIA PRAYER

The next day during dinner Grivas lectured us on how we must respond to his call for attention when sitting at the cafeteria tables:

“When I say ‘Camp’ you stomp your fists once upon the table at shoulder width distance apart and leave them there.”  Grivas paused. “CAMP!”

We slammed our fists down onto the table, knocking the cups over. “You stay in this position with your heads straight forward and without moving until I tell you otherwise,” he said while pacing across the cafeteria floor.  “I said don’t move!” he snapped.

After a pause, he resumed in a slow, measured tone.  “I hear some of you have complained about the food. I eat the same food as you. If you spit in it, then I will eat it.”

“That’s how much of a shithead you are,” a conscript at my table murmured.

“Keep quiet! Don’t murmur!” Grivas barked. “It’s easy to be a critic, but it’s not easy to dance to the orchestra in front of everyone.” He paused so that the incomprehensible force of his metaphor could sink in. Someone raised his hand. “Don’t raise your hand!”  He continued to rant for some time as we sat there with our fists on the table, as if each of us were clutching the invisible bars of a cage. When he finished, he silently paced about for some time with his hands folded at his back.

“Everyone say the Lord’s Prayer together,” he finally ordered. The air at once filled with the bowed murmurings of the Lord’s Prayer and the synchronized motion of hundreds of right hands with bundled fingertips grazing over the four points on one’s body—forehead, belly, right nipple, left nipple—whose traced weave represents the Orthodox cross. The prayer ended. “You are free,” Grivas said.

There was no pretence in the Cypriot army about separation of church and state. As far as most of the permanent officers were concerned, the Lord’s staff was an assault rifle. The army apparently wanted to ensure that the warrior spirit was built upon the Christian foundations of the love-thy-enemy, turn-thy-other-cheek teachings of Jesus so that, in the case of war, an atmosphere of brotherly love and compassion would prevail after the smoke and screams had subsided and the charred dismembered bodies had been tossed into their unmarked graves.

There was prayer before and after every meal and prayer before bed. But there were also occasions of greater consequence that demanded more than a brief prayer. For such events a blessing was in order.

“You are now going to go to the church for a blessing,” an officer told us during lineup on Monday morning after breakfast. “And then you are going to get your guns.”

The final entry of The Way of the Arpha will be on July 4.

arphas (ärf’äs) 1. a Cypriot male who conscripts in the January “alpha” series of National Guard basic training   2. (derogatory) a jackass (pl. arphades)

1 THE CONSCRIPTION OFFICER

THE CONSCRIPTION OFFICER did not look up from his desk when I entered his office. Nor did he look up when I handed him the copy of my birth certificate proving I was over the age of twenty-six or the consul’s letter from a Cyprus embassy in the U.S. confirming I had spent most of my life outside of Cyprus.

He glanced at the consul’s document. “Why isn’t this in Greek!” he muttered in a voice without a trace of Cypriot dialect. “They want to make us all Amerikanakia!” He slowly and disgustedly shook his head at this diplomatic betrayal of the ethnic struggle. It was deplorable because the National Guard had been trying for close to a half century to make us Cypriots all Greeks.

He then looked at my birth certificate, frowned, and handed back both documents, telling me to return on Monday after I had them translated at the Press and Information Office. It was clear the conscription officer was a man infused with the spirit of non-discrimination. Why should a Cypriot born in, say, Lithuania have to get his birth certificate translated into Greek just because the relevant officials can’t read Lithuanian while one born in the U.S. does not have to translate it just because the officials are able to read English? It was far more democratic when the bureaucratic proceeding was equally laborious for all barbarians of foreign tongues.

He maintained a severe expression throughout the encounter and did not once look up at me from his papers. But I took no offense: I had observed earlier from the waiting room that he was considerate enough to be equally dismissive and unsmiling towards everyone. He was a tall gangly man with glasses and carefully combed hair parted down the middle of his head, and he carried himself with equal measures of detachment and disdain. His egalitarian indifference to those under him was not only admirable but also forgivable because had he not been a stern army officer he would have risked being a geek.

It was however irritating that no one had told me my documents needed to be in Greek when I had called the office several months ago. But then I tried to put myself in their boots and my resentment subsided as I recognized how challenging it must be to unnecessarily complicate life for others. So with the translated, officially stamped documents in hand I returned on Monday morning to the office and was given my conscription papers; on Tuesday night I buzzed my hair off; and on Wednesday at noon I walked through the main gate of the Paphos KEN, the Recruit Training Camp, for my first day at boot camp.

Any expectations I had of thick-necked red-faced sergeants bellowing at trembling conscripts soon vanished. It was often the reverse. Two teenagers with ponytails halfway down their back were jeering rebelliously at two sergeants, claiming they were going to get deferment. Another group of conscripts jabbered and hooted through a ten-minute National Guard video (“Ah, come on, put a porno on!”) that was meant to inspire recruits for the forthcoming army training by depicting tanks and helicopters firing missiles to a soundtrack of military drumming

Army men and politicians in Cyprus cite lack of manpower as the reason why conscription must be twenty-five months. It is estimated close to a third of the recruits defer their twenty-five-month conscription term by claiming mental instability. Were conscription shortened to twelve or fourteen months, most of the recruits would not likely try to evade it since exemption often carries repercussions (exclusion from government jobs, denial of driver’s license, etc). The army would then have the extra forces that it claims to need.

But reducing the military term would be a seditious betrayal of the high-ranking patriots whose redundant jobs depend on a bloated military budget. It would potentially also lead to a loss of that martial spirit for which Cypriots are so unrenowned. By instead making it easy to allege mental instability, the National Guard remains safely hard-pressed for those essential force numbers that are no longer necessary under present day political conditions.

Some of the more accommodating doctors even oblige the recruit or soldier by asking him to choose his desired mental illness from a list. Nonetheless, deferment is not always granted right away. A conscript who looked like he was fourteen threw a tantrum when he was not given immediate deferment.

“Wait till you see what I’ll do when I’m in tonight!” he yelped at the cadet officers. “No one is going to sleep!” He was a yapping Chihuahua with dangling knobby limbs and seemed to have no concern that everyone there could have smeared his face across the pavement. No one touched him. He stayed a few days and then was released. The idea was to put on a show that you were unhinged and a danger to others. One of the conscripts threw a rock through the window of the psychologist’s office and another pulled a pocketknife on her. They were both awarded deferment for their striving efforts while the others who behaved well were punished with two-year terms.

After handing over our conscription forms in a building strung with innumerable small Greek and Cypriot flags, we each had to strip to our underwear and stand before a panel of moribund health professionals with dark sagging pouches under their eyes who rated us on our physical well being. Anything we did involved hours of waiting so it was twilight by the time we finally arrived at the equipment distribution room where we were issued our army gear.

After dropping off our new possessions at the barracks we went straight to the mess hall. We were served trays of fried squid rings, boiled potatoes, and salad, along with baskets of bread, bowls of oranges and bottles of olive oil and vinegar. Due to unfounded rumors, I had prepared myself for meals more along the lines of diced lizard or stewed goat hooves. But in fact, except for breakfast, which was usually just tea and bread, all the meals were consistently very good, and over the following weeks everyone consistently complained about them, many instead smuggling in inferior take-away or curbing their appetite with packaged chocolate-crème-filled pastries from the canteen. It was very considerate of them to be so ungrateful for the quality meals and I nodded in agreement with them that the food was unacceptable as I helped myself to their untouched trays.

I was in the first company barracks, a two-story cream peach building with rooms of ten bunk beds and twenty lockers. On the vast concrete lot there were two other buildings—the second and third companies. All three equidistant barracks were on the same parallel. Hewn into unnatural cliffs, the mountain loomed to our sides and behind us in a semicircle; the entire concrete expanse had been carved out of the mountain slope and then paved over. The three buildings were identical in rectangular shape and differed only in their pastel coloring. Leading up to the main entrance of each building was a series of steps that were perpetually littered with cigarette butts and stained with vending machine hot chocolate despite diligent daily efforts of the assigned soldiers to sweep and mop them as infrequently as possible.

That night we all lined up outside our respective buildings. To my right was the second company barracks and, beyond that, the third. At the top of the steps of each building stood an officer, illuminated in ghastly white fluorescence by a single exterior light over the main entrance. The conscripts were all lined up before him. A row of tall streetlamps flanked the lot and each cast a pale pinkish fluorescent cone-shaped glow upon the concrete. Conscripts would still be arriving for two more days but to even just look through one’s billowing plumes of breath at the 200 or so recruits who were already there, lined up in three clusters, each cluster made up of eight ordered rows of conscripts standing in front of a giant oppressive edifice where a single illuminated officer addressed them from his perch, all this taking place in a vast concrete lot, empty but for some sinister streetlamps, the carved walls of a mountain rising along the perimeter and ringed above by barbed wire… to look through one’s breath at all this one could not help but think of prison or concentration camp. It would prove to have more in common with a nursery school, but it did make a forbidding impression during that first chilly January night.

At one point a vehicle drove up and an officer emerged to inform us that this was a “different environment” and that we best therefore do our utmost to acclimatize to it. “There’s no Filipinos or blacks here so you’ll have to do the cleaning up,” he said and then returned to his vehicle and drove off to his home, which probably could have served for us as an exemplar of spotless sanitation and domestic devotion thanks to the conscientious efforts of his wife or Sri Lankan maid. Moments later we were ordered to turn to the east and remove our caps. The Lord’s Prayer was recited. Then we were ordered to go to bed.

2 THE EQUIPMENT OFFICER

The next morning after a breakfast of frosted flakes, warm milk and group prayer, which came standard with every meal, a corporal pulled aside from our company all the three-monthers and six-monthers, as those of us with reduced conscription terms were referred to, and led us in a line of pairs to the equipment distribution room.

Our job would be to issue the army gear to the arriving conscripts. We were each assigned a position next to an article of clothing. I was on underwear duty and was to deliver to every conscript three olive tank tops and three tighty-greenies. The first group did not show up for several hours so we passed the morning lounging in the sun and playing foosball in the neighboring canteen.

The equipment officer was a man of medium height who looked taller because of his long neck, which looked even longer because he buzzed the hair most of the way up the back of his narrow head, which looked even narrower because of the shape and position of the flat-billed army cap that sat high over his prominent forehead, which looked even more prominent when the veins stood out upon it. He ranted, hollered, and cursed at his temporary staff to keep himself in good spirits. The more he shouted, the more his blood-engorged vessels bulged out on his forehead, and the more he was at peace. After an especially cantankerous spew of invective he bore about him an aura of serene equanimity. But it was not solely for calmness of mind that he screamed like a madman. He also saw himself as the most recent manifestation of a long vibrant military tradition of officers berating and hollering at subordinates, a noble line of great screaming men that has throughout history ensured that the vitality of army life remains untainted by the energy-sapping soft-spoken niceties of the civilian world. It was hard work to yell all day long, especially as he was already burdened by the countless headaches of inventory counts, backorders, storage procedures, and requests for exchanges, but he selflessly took it upon himself to bitch at everyone without a murmur of complaint. He shrieked, fulminated and bellowed as if he despised all of us and we all took an instant liking to him.

Before the first group came in, he told us to stay calm and not to lose our tempers. “What the hell are you waiting for, the Holy Spirit?” he later hollered at one of the six-monthers who was lost in a reverie, causing a back-up in the delivery line. Another six-monther was shuffling through a box to find the right jacket size for the conscript. “Hurry up,” the equipment officer yelled at him. “We’re not choosing grooms here!”

“Didn’t I tell you not to smoke in here?” he roared at the far end of the room, chopping his hand in the air. “Hell, what do I have to do in here to keep some order?”

But he kept his fondest cursing for his long-term staff. When he wanted the attention of one of his helpers in the neighboring storage room, he would yell until the escalating decibels penetrated the building walls. “Christo! CHRISTO! CHRISTOOO! Fuck my race! Where in hell is he?”

“The socks!” he ranted when one of his assistants told him one of the boxes was missing. “Can you please tell me where in hell they went? I told you where the socks were and they went to anathema again. I’m gonna tear you apart! What kind of bullshit in this you’re telling me now? We’ll see when the devil comes to take you!” His helpers delighted in his abuse, often mimicking his words and tone to his face, and he would merely glower back at them wordlessly.

Several dozen conscripts returned in mass to the equipment room to exchange some of the gear, which had proven either too large or too small. The equipment officer seemed to relish such group returns because it gave him a chance to tower colossally above them with clipboard in hand and storm at them like a clean-shaven Ahab. He would have them all sit cross legged on the concrete in rows and then would rip through them one by one.

“You, what size? No, not the size you’re holding! Bring it up for the size you want! Over there, you keep quiet! Hurry up! What do you want? Fuck my history!”

There was often a great deal of confusion and the equipment officer would sometimes reassess how he might remedy this lack of communication between himself and the conscript, who was only growing more bewildered with every curse and question. As the equipment officer was an enthusiastic practitioner of the verbal arts, he always found imaginative ways around the problem.

“I have one simple question for you and I want one clear and lucid answer,” he once said in a strong rising voice that yearned to break loose into a passionate harangue. He paused to give the conscript time to prepare himself for the question. “What size are you?”

In between yelling bouts he either languidly chatted with whomever was around, freely dispensing the fruits of his reflection on the subject at hand, or he repeatedly sang the refrain “Se Birovolo” (“I shoot you”) with impassioned musicality.

Like the conscription officer, he too was a democratic man, and he swore with equal non-discriminatory vehemence at everyone of a lower rank than him. But he did not want to give the impression that superiors were untouchables. That’s why he gave us all a brief pep talk before the head of the National Guard visited the equipment room on his tour of the training camp.

“He’s a man, just like us, with feelings,” he noted philosophically. “But he deserves some respect of course.”

The National Guard Chief of Staff came in just long enough to say a few words of encouragement to us in front of the cameraman trailing him. He was in a buoyant mood and stopped to talk with one of the younger conscripts whom he congratulated and then expressed his approval of by delivering to the back of his neck a warm-hearted slap that rang throughout the equipment room.

At the end of the day the equipment officer had us all line up outside. The veins had all settled invisibly back into his forehead and his face, aglow with the warm light of the setting sun, emanated tranquility and self-possession. “Is there anyone who doesn’t want to do this tomorrow?” No one wanted to miss out on another day of rollicking verbal abuse and diatribe. “Okay good, then all of you return at the same time tomorrow. Nice job. The conscription couldn’t have taken place without you.”

He paused and then, as if he felt the compliment needed qualification to be strictly correct, added, “Though they would have found others to do the job, of course.”

*The Way of the Arpha is continued on June 4

The two most gifted comedians by far – each claiming a unique and inimitable style – are Bishop Nikiforos of Kykkos and the new Archbishop Chrysostomos II, formerly Bishop Chrysostomos of Paphos (hence the chummy nickname ‘O Paphitis’). Their fans so revere their comic routines that they stoop to kiss their hands and refer to them as “Your Arch-Holiness”. Their black robes and beards, which merge hippy mellowness, big city sophistication, and Arthurian wizardry, have taken the comedy fashion world by Orthodox storm.

But they are not without individual flair. The Kykkos Bishop plays on his short stature and facial malleability by going for the cartoon look. With a beard dyed white to enhance the effect, Kykkos Nikiforos will occasionally burst into spectacular tantrums of melodramatic hell-and-brimstone rants, a sidesplitting show of gaudy fury that reminds one of a cross between Elmer Fudd and the Tasmanian Devil. The taller Paphos Bishop, on the other hand, aims for the Casa Nostra look. Wearing sunglasses with semi-dark lenses and a closely cropped beard, the church father diplomatically delivers his comedy with the measured manner of the smooth mafia man assuring the jury he has committed no foul play, although his varicose cheeks and coy smiles warms him to the audience in a way no underworld man has ever managed to do.

To appreciate the humor of these men, or even to recognize it as humor, one must have a bleak undercurrent running through one’s soul, a sardonic ingrained sense of life’s perpetual hypocrisy, a capacity to chortle over corruption, lies, and double-dealings – especially when they are painted with a transparent veneer of Christian brotherly love and piety – and a rejection of, or at least resignation over, the belief that God can be found in the gold-coated altar of the Church. In short, you need to be able to chuckle over the following phrase (recently uttered by Kykkos Nikiforos about the Paphos Bishop and Limassol Bishop): “Now it’s my turn to fry the fish on the lips of my two holy brothers.” This direct translation from Cypriot into English does not convey the essence of the sentence, which can be better summed up as: ‘Now it’s my turn to give those two sons of bitches hell’.

Several years ago it became apparent that elections for a new Cyprus Archbishop would have to be held because the resident Archbishop was becoming increasingly incapacitated due to advanced stages of Alzheimer’s. That was when the comedy began. It is very amusing – assuming you have a dark sense of humor – to observe men, who are supposed to reflect brotherly love and humility and who are accustomed to having the backs of their right hand kissed dozens of times each day, practice treachery, character assassinations, slander, lying and cheating on a daily basis, all motivated out of naked ambition.

For centuries politicians have looked to Machiavelli’s The Prince to for practical ethics-free advice on how to win and maintain political power. After the latest electoral victory that landed the Bishop of Paphos in the Archbishop’s throne, clergymen seeking ecclesiastical glory would benefit from diligently studying his methods and tactics. Unfortunately, the Paphos Bishop has not yet summed up all that he “over so many years and with so much affliction and peril, ha[s] learned and understood” as Machiavelli noted in his letter to Lorenzo de Medici. But one need only review his unabashed rise to the throne to glean the tactical insights gained from a life tirelessly and unswervingly dedicated to the immoral pursuit of ecclesiastical power.

The turn of the millennium is a good place to start. In 2000, the Paphos Bishop was reported to have spearheaded a campaign to mar the growing reputation of Bishop Athanassios of Limassol – who had recently returned to Cyprus after years of monastic living in Greece’s Mt. Athos – by accusing him of homosexuality. The charges were dropped when court evidence demonstrated that two archimandrites had promised a car and cash to a key witness if he would testify that Bishop Athanassios was gay.

With his soft-spoken manner and commitment to the teachings of Orthodox Christianity, the Limassol Bishop stood in stark contrast to most of the other bishops, especially the man he had replaced – Limassol Bishop Chrysanthos – who had been forced to step down in 1998 after reports emerged that he had been involved in stealing more than £6 million from at least four groups of investors, including an Ecuadorian charity for underprivileged girls. In May 2004 Chrysanthos’ car was destroyed by a bomb blast, a common form of communication between underworld acquaintances.

To counter the rising popularity of the Limassol Bishop, the Paphos Bishop helped to promote Nikiforos – the Abbot of the Kykkos monastery – to the more powerful position of Bishop in early 2002, without forcing him to surrender his leadership at the wealthy and powerful monastery. But the divide and rule plan seemed to backfire on him when the Kykkos Bishop began using the vast sums of monastery money available to him to start garnering popular and political support. From then on until the Archbishopric elections, the Paphos Bishop and the Kykkos Bishop would become arch-nemeses, providing endless colorful material for the island’s church correspondents.

In 2005 the Paphos Bishop said that the Kykkos Bishop was on a power trip and regretted backing him for the bishopric. He then said Nikiforos’ family had “bad DNA.” In response, the Kykkos Bishop said it was with “pain of heart” that he heard the “negative and offensive remarks by my beloved brother.”

“I am proud of my DNA and my Greek, Christian origin,” he said, and then, as if to prove just how Christian his DNA was, he added, “to the raised fist I extend a brotherly hand.”

The Paphos Bishop later insinuated that the Kykkos Bishop was schmoozing journalists and others to ensure their electoral support: “Every weekend 10 or 15 buses go to Kykkos monastery and they eat and drink for free.”

The Kykkos Bishop responded to the allegation in an October 27, 2005 statement from the “Press Office of the Honorable Kykkos Bishop,” stating that the Paphos Bishop was “continuing his favorite tactic of abusing and slinging mud at all of his brothers in Christ who do not agree with his arbitrariness and illegalities… [and of] abusing, undermining, defaming, and slinging mud at the Kykkos Bishop to lower his honor and esteem.”

In the same press release, the Kykkos Bishop accused the Paphos Bishop of denying allegations that he had recently paid £100,000 to a company to defame him and provoke an “ethical assassination,” adding that the man best suited to be Archbishop would “be decided soon by the people, whom you so fear and hold in contempt… Clear skies, Holy Paphos, are not afraid of lightning.”

In another instance, the Kykkos Bishop accused the Paphos Bishop of “hypocritical and pharisaic attitudes.”

The Paphos Bishop who had supported holding elections the previous summer, probably because he thought he had a good chance of winning, now opposed them, as he would likely be outvoted by both the wealthy and multi-party backed Kykkos Bishop as well as the popular Limassol Bishop.

The Kykkos Bishop, along with the Morphou and Trimithounta Bishops, then traveled to Istanbul to complain that the Synod had decided to not hold archbishopric elections so long as the incapacitated Archbishop was still alive. After their departure the Paphos Bishop told reporters that the three rebel bishops had not respected the majority of the Holy Synod – the decision-making body of the Church. The Paphos Bishop then paid a visit to the Patriarch in Istanbul in order to “hear what the other Bishops had told him” and to respond to their positions, “which were mistaken of course.”

In November the Kykkos Bishop again flew to Istanbul, this time with the Morphou Bishop, to deliver an epistle to the Patriarch regarding the elections. Reporters asked the Paphos Bishop, as he was heading into the Archbishopric to convene a Synod meeting, whether he would wait for the two bishops, who were still in transit at the time. “If they are coming, we will wait for them,” he replied, although when asked again while walking into the building, he added, “If they make it in time…”

It was finally decided, after a Greater Synod meeting in Geneva, to hold elections on September 24, 2006. With its cornucopia of funds, the Kykkos Bishopric conducted the most flamboyant campaigning. During one of his rallies, three jumbo screens flanked the stage, while a giant poster of a ridiculous majestic-looking Kykkos Bishop hung from the ceiling. “Ladies and gentlemen, let’s welcome the next Archbishop of Cyprus!” the speaker urged, prompting cries of “Worthy is he!” from the audience.

“O Greek Cypriot nation,” boomed the Kykkos Bishop’s voice as he stepped up to the pedestal. “Tonight, I feel a captive of your immense love.” In another of his speeches he said that those who question the work of the Kykkos monastery and the Kykkos Bishop (he often refers to himself in the third person) are “deeply shrouded in darkness” and “parked in a basement of filthy mud.”

During a television interview someone asked the Kykkos Bishop whether it was true he had dyed his beard white. “Yes, it’s true,” he replied. “I dyed my beard. But what matters is what a person has inside him, not the exterior.”

The archbishopric elections in Cyprus are a complicated messy affair, involving several rounds of voting and two separate ballots, one of representatives elected by the population and the other of 33 ex officio clerics chosen by the Synod (the Paphos Bishop, who was the acting head of the Church, had the final say on who they were). To become Archbishop one must get an absolute majority (over 50 percent) in both ballots.

The Limassol Bishop reportedly won 48 percent of the popular vote, the Kykkos Bishop 42 percent, and the Paphos Bishop less than 6 percent. Despite garnering over 40 percent of the vote, this was a humiliating defeat for the Kykkos Bishop, whose liberal donations had won him the support of the best-supported football clubs, many TV stations, most newspapers and every major political party – including the biggest one in Cyprus, the pseudo-communist AKEL, which absurdly proclaims itself as Marxist-Leninist.

The Kykkos Bishop at once complained about voter irregularities and illegalities, claiming the voting results were invalid. But the Synod tossed all his complaints, prompting him to rage with classic Kykkotic poesy about the “consummation of a crime” and the “slaughter and rape of truth.”

Just before the vote, the Paphos Bishop urged people to cast their ballot “so that we may show, here and abroad, that we are a democratic nation and respect one another.” One might think, if he took his own words seriously, that he would have nobly bowed out of the race after having only secured less than six per cent of the public vote. But not only did he not bow out; he began to proclaim his impending victory. When asked over the radio who he thought would win the election, Bishop Chrysostomos of Paphos – the man who had received less than six percent of the public vote – replied, “the next Archbishop will be called Chrysostomos.”

The Paphos Bishop has always been a master at the art of diplomatic bullshit, capable of the most outrageous and brazen assertions (in the thick of the campaign mudslinging he said that the bishops’ relationship was “one of collaboration, teamwork and mutual respect), but he occasionally speaks with a frankness that reveals just how his astute Machiavellian mind works. Take for example his response when a reporter asked him to clarify what he meant after he asserted that in the end his rivals might back him “for the good of the Church.”

“I live in this country and know how Cypriot society works,” he said. “I wasn’t born yesterday, nor did I drop out of the sky.”

And the way Cypriot society works, as anyone who has lived in Cyprus for some time knows, is that it is often the least popular candidates who, through deals and alliances, catapult to the top. The current president of Cyprus, Tassos Papadopoulos, is a prime example.

Ironically, because no one had an absolute majority in the two ballots, the Paphos Bishop was in a strong position. Both of his rivals needed his votes to knock the other out. So the night before the final day of voting, the Paphos Bishop struck a deal with the Limassol Bishop to “trade votes” in the two ballots to proceed to the final round of voting, knocking the Kykkos Bishop out of the election. And so it was.

The alliance, which a Kykkos spokesman referred to as a “dark conspiracy to oust the Kykkos bishopric,” prompted the outraged Kykkos Bishop to order his representatives to leave the Archbishopric, despite the fact that they were still supposed to remain and vote in the final round for either the Limassol Bishop or the Paphos Bishop.

With the Kykkos voters gone, the Limassol Bishop was guaranteed victory. Outside the Archbishopric hundreds of his supporters were already celebrating. But as acting head of the Church, the Paphos Bishop called an extraordinary session of the Holy Synod, where it was decided to postpone the election until 4pm the next day, despite the fact that the move violated the Church charter.

The news prompted an outcry among the gathered Limassol Bishop supporters outside, who accused the Paphos Bishop of hijacking the election by illegally postponing the vote to give him time to bribe the Kykkos Bishop for his support. The Paphos Bishop defending the postponement by claiming it would have been “unfair” to hold the vote without the participation of the Kykkos Bishop supporters, adding that he saw no harm in waiting another day.

Later that afternoon the eliminated Kykkos Bishop made his famous brotherly declaration that it was now his turn to “fry the fish on the lips of my two holy brothers” and said that they must now come to him and meet his demands if they desired his votes.

The Kykkos Bishop, who had staged a massive electoral campaign and had just hours ago stormed out of the Archbishopric in a fury, then made a statement that should go down as one of his all time memorable quotes: “However I state that I felt a relief that I did not pass to the third stage, because I will remain here at the Kykkos Monastery, which I consider the highest battlement from which I can continue my work towards my community and my country.”

The next morning the Paphos Bishop traveled to Kykkos monastery and signed an agreement with the Kykkos Bishop in which he promised to make certain changes in the Church (“for the good of the church” of course) in exchange for the votes of the Kykkos supporters.

The double-alliance – first with his one rival, then with the other one whom he had ousted – worked. During the vote later that day, all of the Kykkos supporters and clerics dutifully obeyed their command and the Bishop of Paphos, the man who had received less than six percent of the popular vote, became Archbishop Chrysostomos II.

I was at the Archbishopric at the time the news was announced. The bulk of the people outside were supporters of the Limassol Bishop, who has always drawn the most devoted following of any of the bishops. It was not a cheerful scene. The enthronement ceremony was postponed for a week for fear of public unrest.

In the most violent incident, a group encircled a black Mercedes transporting the Morphou Bishop and began pounding upon the hood and roof, furious at what they saw as a clerical betrayal of the Limassol Bishop. On emerging from his car, the shaken Morphou Bishop told reporters: “They may be faithful towards one person, but they are not faithful to the Church or to Christ.” But to the crowd, it was the clerics and the representatives who had been unfaithful to the popular will. As the churchmen nervously shuffled away out of the backdoor entrance, the crowd booed them to cries of “unworthy, unworthy” and “shame on you… you have put the Church up for sale!” Relatives had to hold back one young man who was openly weeping, his fists clenched, yelling at one of the clerics that he would bury him alive.

But most of the Limassol Bishop’s supporters were more subdued. Some even went so far as to consider the Paphos Bishop’s victory as God’s punishment of their beloved elder, who though the most spiritual of all the candidates, proved in the end he too was not beyond forming alliances and horse trading votes, which he had claimed he would not do (but in fairness to him, he did not betray the public that had voted for him, because it was his clerical votes, not his Elector votes (popular votes) that he traded).

In his usual serene manner, the Limassol Bishop accepted the results without protest. Several weeks before the election he told me him during an interview that he personally did not desire to become Archbishop, but if that was what the people wanted, then he would become Archbishop. All church candidates say that, of course, but he is the only one who may have even partially meant it. When you are not so wolfish yourself, and you find yourself in pack of wolves, it is better to remain where you are rather than become the pack leader.

After being elected, the new Archbishop thanked his “Holy brothers, especially the Kykkos Bishop and the Limassol Bishop because… I was elected with their votes.” He later claimed that the document he signed at the Kykkos monastery was non-binding and merely consisted of “suggestions”. And he managed to hold a straight face upon saying “the people have the last word in the church elections.”

I was recently granted a half hour interview with ‘His Beatitude’ (when you are Bishop you are His Arch-Holiness, when Archbishop you are upgraded to the blissful rank of Beatitude) in his office at the Archbishopric. He told me that all the recent strife and confrontations amongst the bishops were an unfortunate result of the pre-election climate. “But now nothing divides us; all unites us.”

I asked him if he would step down in five years, a claim he made after his meeting with the Kykkos Bishop at the monastery. He skirted the issue with what should go down as one of his all time memorable sentences: “I had absolutely no ambition to become Archbishop.”

“I am purely interested in bringing about changes in the Cyprus church, which it’s my responsibility to serve, he continued. “And I believed it would be difficult for any of the other candidates to make those changes.”

It was the perfect response. By that line of logic, all the shrewd maneuverings, the manipulation, the alliances and betrayals… it could all be justified as the regrettable but necessary means through which he could become Archbishop and bring about those important changes that only he was capable of doing*.

Journalists are generally fond of Chrysostomos II because of his availability to the press (when Bishop he always answered his cell phone) and his readiness to answer questions that other more self-important bishops might find insulting or disrespectable.

The Archbishop was unfazed when I asked him about an incident that took place years ago in his Paphos district in which a lorry driver, allegedly acting under his direct orders, was caught stealing sand from a turtle nesting ground to transport to a golf course on former church property.

“Yes, they accused me that I had taken the sand.” He started to laugh. “And I enjoyed [the accusation] and said, ‘Yes, I took it, and anytime I want to I’ll go and take it’. But I had absolutely no involvement, that’s why I enjoyed saying I did.”

Corruption is an ugly thing when it wears a serious face, but when it chuckles and delights over itself, it can be almost charming. “Tell me Your Beatitude,” I asked, “what specific agreement did you make with the Limassol Bishop in the second round of voting when you both eliminated the Kykkos Bishop and advanced to the final round?”

Chrysostomos II paused, and then, with a coy smile said, “We agreed to leave it to God.”

*One of the first actions Archbishop Chrysostomos II took upon assuming his office was to bury the heart of Archbishop Makarios, which had been sitting preserved in a jar of formaldehyde on display in the Archbishopric since 1977. Not a bad start.

Constantine Markides

By appending this piece I am cheating doubly: first, I wrote it three or four years ago, and second, it is not an essay. But since we are in a new year and there may still be some lingering goodwill and laxity left over from the shopping season, I assume there is no better time to play my “get out of jail free” card. And best to start the year on a bad foot so that the rest of the year has a better chance of looking up.

That said, though You Better Not Cry is no essay, it cannot really be considered fiction either. Fiction demands that every person and perspective gets a fair hearing, and it is best approached without preconceptions and polemics. This piece, however, is no more than a political rant in jocular guise, a spray of anti-corporate propaganda composed in an atmosphere of ludicrous invective that takes every cheap shot possible and runs with every easy stereotype at hand. It is crass in its approach, hyperbolic, contemptuous, dismissive, and under close examination full of cheap tricks and dodgy ploys worthy of a second-rate magician. For this reason, it may in the end be more in line with my character than I care to admit and so I include it here without qualms.

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You Better Not Cry

CHILDREN around the world wept on December 22 after a North Pole press release confirmed that Santa Claus would not be delivering presents on Christmas Eve. Santa’s much anticipated visits may in fact be postponed for another three to five years due to a recent structural adjustment program that promises to give a needed economic facelift to the remote and isolated regions of the polar north. With the November 4 passage of the FTANP (Free Trade Area of the North Pole) Claus and economic leaders are paving the way for a productive new future integrating the North Pole into the global economy.

As the passage of FTANP preceded elections, there was little media coverage; the terms of the agreement remain unknown to most people and were conducted in private, but C. Chrissy, one of the negotiators and a respected luncheon speaker, assures the public that “these agreements guarantee unrestricted movement of important goods and services, secure certainty and transparency for investors, and ensure that well-meaning but ill-informed social planners or communist flotsam left over from the Soviet era do not interfere with market forces by propping up barriers to trade that hinder the pursuit of private gain, which is such a vital condition to a vibrant economy.”

Transnational corporations have not failed to capitulate on this opportunity. Mikee has already moved its factories from Indonesia to the North Pole, where labor is available at lower costs. It is hoped this will lessen the headaches caused by disruptive anti-sweatshop groups back in the US who protest that Mikee has been “complicit” with a “brutal regime.”

“These elves are fantastic shoe makers,” said a delighted Mikee spokesman, who then praised the workers for their “nimble little hands.” Because the newly formed state of the North Pole has yet to establish a treasury, the elves are presently being compensated with a monthly pair of new sneakers, a privilege previously unheard of in the backward polar north. Every pair is individualized by a fortuitous and unique color-blemish, a symbol of Mikee’s ethos of creative spontaneity and appreciation for diversity among its workers.

“Of course, when a monetary system is introduced we will compensate at pay rates appropriate to the region,” the Mikee spokesman continued. “But the elves may opt to stay with their current compensation plan. After all, few work forces are guaranteed a steady supply of clean, comfortable sneakers. Many children around the world die because of diseases that afflict their bare feet. But not our workers.”

Critics of Mikee argue that the increased military presence in the North Pole since the passage of the FTANP reveals the ground realities of the free trade agreement and is transforming the once peaceful North Pole into a police state. But Chrissy disagrees:

“This is a security force whose sole mission is to ensure regional stability and prevent unruly elements from disrupting the modernization process. These men have been trained on American soil at S.O.P [School of the Poles], newly opened in Fort Lemmings, Georgia. I should note that, aside from professional training in counterinsurgency techniques and stabilization tactics, their training also included a four-hour human rights and religion course on praying for the salvation of victims’ souls before summary executions.”

Pleased local North Pole workers corroborated Chrissy’s optimistic claims. Escorted by two smartly dressed security officers fresh from S.O.P training, one elf left the Mikee factory line to share his feelings. “I love FTANP and Mikee … I love FTANP and Mikee,” he said, trembling and practically speechless in apparent gratification at the new work opportunities.

The new labor force in the North Pole puts pressure on unions worldwide to abate their incessant demands. Unions are unhappy with the new FTANP, claiming that they must now operate under the company threat that production could shift to the North Pole. They are also concerned with changing workplace conditions. According to official sources, one African-American union worker who drives a Cadillac said FTANP “sucks” because he would now “have to work harder.”

But the arrangement pleases thrifty corporate leaders, who are quick to note the advantages offered by the virgin North Pole territory. “After shifting production from Mexico—with its steep minimum wage rates of $3.40/day—to Guatemala and Haiti, it was believed this would be the end of the line for us,” said a corporate spokesman preferring anonymity. “But as my boss says, success comes to the go-getter with one eye on the market and the other on the pocketbook. We are now considering relocating to the North Pole. This is a great victory for free trade and democracy.”

Rich in marine plants unique to the polar caps, the North Pole has also attracted a group of ambitious ‘bio-prospectors.’ Monstrousanto has taken the lead in this modern-day repeat of the gold rush, though this time not for gold but for plants that can expand the limits of food production and medicine. Bio-prospecting benefits the public by globalizing the valuable plants once enjoyed solely by the privileged few of the locale. While most elves agree it is good to share and help the needy, there are some who are angry that bio-prospectors are profiting off their land by “stealing indigenous knowledge.”

Manager of patent rights at Monstrousanto Rob Dairland concedes that bio-prospecting is motivated by profit, but that seems to him poor grounds for criticism: “A local grocery store that provides food for the neighborhood also operates on profit principles. Does this mean they should be shut down? Of course not. The profit-motivator is precisely what begets these utilitarian outcomes.”

As for the critics who claim Monstrousanto is “stealing” resources, Dairland asked what right these elves had in claiming ownership to the North Pole at large, pointing to the Native American tradition in the US that “was founded on an ethic of sharing the land.” Dairland did note, however, that there was “a clear point at which a collective good could be transformed into a private one by applying willful creative design and technological innovation to the good in question.”

Another accusation, namely that Monstrousanto unfairly demands ‘protectionist measures’ for public goods, visibly distressed Dairland. Kneading his forehead, he said it was a constant battle to fend off such slander. “This is absurd. If you write a novel, do I have the right to put my name on your novel? Of course not. The same rules apply to these plant extracts. These plants can help sick people. And as long as there is a way to help the sick, we will do whatever is necessary. We believe there is hope. We believe in hope.”

With temperatures often plummeting to 80 below zero, farming has never been an easy task in the North Pole. A $500 million food aid package headed by FTANP humanitarian coordinator Aikaire Furyoo now guarantees food to the local elf population. Acting like a Santa Claus, the meatpacking giant Urchin Daniels Hindland has taken on the contract and the initiative to cheer the barren land by supplying the neglected and deprived elves with sustenance crops like rice, corn and soybean. The move has led to the nomination of Furyoo for the newly created UDH Ending World Hunger Award.

A few elves, the vocal minority, criticize the new food aid effort, arguing that it undermines the traditional cold-climate farming practices that have successfully fed the elven population for millennia. In their view, the subsidized crop imports are “unfair” and “coercive.” They claim that the elf farmers, no longer able to participate in the barter system, are losing their land to Urchin Daniels Hindland, which then converts the property to reindeer farms and processing plants.

But Furyoo, unlike the disgruntled elves, sees Hindland’s polar land acquisitions as beneficial to the North Pole peoples. “One must bear in mind that not only are we providing the North Pole with a steady and dependable stream of food stuffs but we are also building an infrastructure that enables the elf tribes to exploit their previously unappreciated resources. The succulent reindeer meat has exploded as the premiere gourmet meat on the world market and will bring needed revenue to this long-ignored region. It also serves as crucial advertising to put the North Pole on the traveler’s map. One can imagine the benefits of establishing a vibrant tourism trade here. In this light, objections to our efforts are, frankly, astounding.”

Unwilling to contemplate these benefits, the usual suspects hammer away with their criticism that the free food imports will not last long and will lead to dangerous “food-dependency” for the former farmers who are “forced” to relocate to the urban center for factory labor.

To this Furyoo can only sigh with a grandfatherly chuckle. “What they fail to understand is that these jobs will provide the elves with more opportunities to purchase a wide variety of goods, including previously unimaginable luxury items. It will have a civilizing effect on their tribal lifestyle and their former standards of living will in retrospect seem barbaric. Just look at the effect of comparable policies on other countries: the GDP rose. Don’t be deceived by shortsighted detractors who fuss that wages have dropped. What matters is that GDP is climbing. As for these elves, what can one say to them? Angry elves will not listen to facts or reason. Of course, they are different from us, and we should bear that in mind.”

US taxpayers are already seeing their investment in the FTANP food aid program pay off as North Pole reindeer steaks begin to line supermarket freezer shelves. At $8.99/lb, North Pole reindeer may not be the most affordable meat, but an online study conducted by The Right Questions Inc. sampled 1000 consumers nationwide who had purchased the North Pole reindeer meat, and 92% found it “sweeter than beef,” while a whopping 98% were “glad it is available.” As part of its Waste Nothing – Save the Planet project, Urchin Daniels Hindland offers a free set of mounted reindeer antlers with every non-commercial bulk order of 100 pounds or more.

Environmental activists have voiced concern about a possible decline in the reindeer population, but Urchin Daniels Hindland representatives assure them that several breeding camps have been constructed outside the slaughterhouse to ensure an uninterrupted flow of meat product. A few marginal watchdog activist groups have recently claimed there is a correlation between the genetically modified grain provided by feed supplier Carkill and the sudden outcropping of cancerous growths on the reindeer intestines. But Furyoo dismisses these claims as “desperate attempts by the usual conspiracy theorists to boost their self-image by playing detective and shouting wolf about imaginary dangers.”

A recent Carkill study that draws on scientists and other advanced degree holders finds that there are “no verifiable connections between GM crops and the growths on the North Pole reindeer intestines,” concluding that the growths are most likely “a harmless cellular reaction to shipping stress.” An Urchin Daniels Hindland study confirms these results.

Despite its infancy in the international economy, the North Pole has already been embroiled in controversy. As a result of an ‘investor-to-state’ dispute resolution established by Chapter 11 of FTANP, ChrystBrrr Corporation—the car manufacturer that recently opened a major production outlet in the North Pole—recently sued the nascent polar state for imposing unacceptable emission standards on its factories. The investor-to-state provisions give companies the right to sue states if FTANP conditions are violated.

“These irrational and burdensome constraints parading as environmental regulation are in flagrant violation of the most essential principles of a free and open market,” said ChrystBrrr prosecuting attorney Sue Yurasoff. “Who does the government think it is anyway? I thought we had advanced beyond the antiquarian and oppressive notion of divine right of kings.”

Because of the efficient structure of the North Pole government—a newly formed governing body consisting of the Clauses—an agreement satisfactory to both parties was promptly worked out. The emission standards were immediately lifted and ChrystBrrr dropped its $600 million lawsuit in return for a signed promise that Christmas would from then on be promoted as Chrystmas, with all patent rights belonging exclusively to ChrystBrrr. In a goodwill gesture, ChrystBrrr custom-designed a fuel-injected sled for Claus, replete with airbags, a retractable bulletproof glass rooftop, a 50-disk DVD player, and a reindeer-leather interior. Economists and business leaders hailed the agreement as “another win-win of privatization” and “a bold step forward towards liberalizing services.”

Claus spoke at a press conference shortly after the settlement of ChrystBrrr Corporation vs. North Pole. “The sky here is big enough for both Santa and ChrystBrrr”, he proclaimed, raising his arms up. “We of the North Pole believe that ‘Chrystmas’ better captures the spirit of our times than ‘Christmas.’ If a day of piety is no longer treated with reverence, we should end the desecration by removing all religious connotation. Let us not use the Lord’s name in vain.”

Claus’s comments carried extra weight among his audience thanks to his new mature look. Clean-shaven and donning a sports suit, Santa now exudes a spruce youthfulness mellowed by respectability. Yet Claus nonetheless remains committed to the Chrystmas spirit: a crimson silken napkin hangs from his breast pocket, forming a tasteful complement to his red-and-white ChrystBrrr sled tiepin.

Thanks to his new Gorge-and-be-Gorgeous sponsorship, Santa has even lost inches around the belly. Formerly known as Get-Thee-Away-Fat, Gorge-and-be-Gorgeous is supplying Claus with a free cargo of trial-size weight loss pills that allegedly work regardless of one’s caloric intake. These berry-flavored complimentary gifts will be dispensed to children who, like the former Santa, could stand to lose a few pounds.

“We are very happy with the FTANP and have seen how the unencumbered pursuit of private gain increases prosperity,” Mrs. Claus said at a recent cocktail reception held at the newly constructed FTANP conference dome to celebrate the passage of the free trade agreement. “There is now a great feeling of liberation and well-being in the North Pole,” she added, while sampling some freshly imported Easter Bunny. “Of course, not all of us benefit, but in every system there are winners and losers. As optimists, we focus on the winners.”

Mr. Claus agreed: “As the great philosopher Voltaire would have said, it is the best of all possible systems. And one should keep in mind that these economic arrangements are the inevitable result of human nature and cannot simply be undone—” Never given a moment’s respite, Claus was interrupted to sign several documents regarding work conditions for the elves.

When he returned he had some words to the young children who were saddened to hear Santa would not visit them this year: “Don’t despair boys and girls! I’ll be back out on the skies A.S.A.P. and the presents will be even bigger than before! Merry Chrystmas to all and to all a prosperous night!”

Whether or not the FTANP will continue proving itself an economic miracle remains to be seen. But what is certain is that FTANP and other similar free trade agreements are here to stay forever … or at least, as long as the brotherly Chrystmas spirit is upon us.

Constantine Markides