Apostolos Kouroupakis
To be honest, I hadn’t planned to revisit the controversy surrounding the painter Giorgos Gavriil and the outrageous, incoherent, and ultimately dangerous attacks against him over his exhibition in Paphos. I wouldn’t have, not because the events were insignificant, but because I felt I had nothing new to add beyond what I wrote in 2020, prompted by Gavriil’s work, or more recently regarding the Architecture Biennale and the accompanying book, or the online attack on poet Kyriakos Charalambides by Iosif Iosifidis, who called on the Academies of Athens and Cyprus, and even the Archbishop, to intervene. And now… they’re asking the judiciary to step in.
Reading the statements from political parties, especially DISY, DIKO, and EDEK, I thought, "Nothing can save us." If you read them carefully, you’ll probably agree. Statements with no beginning, middle, or end. A storm in an empty skull. And the worst? The political grandstanding of Efthymios Diplaros, DISY’s deputy president, who picked up the baton from ELAM, whose actions, as we say in my village, “confess to the beans they ate.” By activating the instincts of the faithful and ultra-nationalists, Diplaros put Gavriil squarely in the crosshairs and, almost like Pontius Pilate, handed him over to the fury of the crowd. Within a week, online threats became reality, low-level as they were. But now, who will stop this slide? Will it ever end, or will they be satisfied that violence has bound the blasphemer?
Doesn’t this country tremble at the rise of the philosophy “where our words fail, the rod falls”? The idea that art can be confined by the judiciary? And if the judiciary disagrees, will we claim it’s unfair? Doesn’t it scare us that young people are openly neo-Nazis, fervent believers in the notion that “anything unlike me is a monster from hell”?
It’s chilling that we aren’t alarmed by students at Vergina High School giving Nazi salutes and drawing swastikas in their photos. This only proves how effective ELAM’s fascists are in our schools, and, as the saying goes, “Whatever comes, don’t get bored of it.” As long as political discourse is dominated by parties competing over who can exploit the murky waters of fascism, we can’t expect much, except to listen to the poet. And when we hear the pounding of wolves’ feet, we lie flat with our eyes closed, holding our breath… and may God be with us. I mean Kostas Karyotakis and his poem Mortgages.
Personally, the students embracing Nazism scare me far more than Gavriil’s paintings, which many condemned as blasphemous, including colleagues who almost put him on trial, questioning if he was even an atheist. And the social media frenzy? Everyone rushed to condemn it, yet after the firecrackers at his home, they washed their hands in Pontius-Pilate fashion: “We said one thing, we wrote one thing…” as if to say, Well, he asked for it.
So who fuels this violence? What is the responsibility of the democratic parties? To pour oil on the fire, or to speak with modern political terms and try to restrain their instincts? As for the limits of art, they are crossed when attacks become ad hominem, as I have argued before.
As for Gavriil’s anti-system stance, I’m not sure I see it. His art does not move me aesthetically, politically, or spiritually. It pins me to familiar patterns of Christian morality and points to a political universe that doesn’t concern me. We know that world; it has happened. What comes next? Not liking something, not being inspired by it, is one thing. But disliking it and forbidding it from existing? That is dangerous. Because prohibitions can reach anyone, and no one will ask if you accept them.
*Read the Greek version here.
