As any learner of the Greek language will know, the gender of words in Greek is a critical issue. Adjectives agree with the gender and case of the noun they describe, and with three different genders and three different cases there are a multiplicity of endings for the student to remember. In addition there are several different adjectival forms with different endings. The most common are the form: -os (m), -i (f), -o (n), (e.g. “good”: kalos, kali, kalo), and the form: -is (m), -i (f)), -es (n), (e.g. “unstable”: astathis, astathi, astathes); but there are many other less common forms, e.g. for adjectives ending in -ios or -on in the masculine, and irregular forms of the -os and -is adjectives which depart from the general rule in the feminine and neuter cases.
As a result even native Greek speakers sometimes struggle to find the right ending. Adjectives generally come before the noun and it is not uncommon to hear a Greek public speaker suddenly changing gear in mid-sentence as they realise that the noun they are intending to use requires a different ending from that of the adjective which they have just pronounced.
Perhaps for greater simplicity, Greeks tend to use adjectival nouns in the neuter to describe phenomena in general terms. The most obvious example is the term they use to describe a language, which is the neuter plural of the adjectival form. Thus Greek – the Greek language – is ta ellinika, which one might translate as “the Greek things”, English is ta anglika, French ta gallika and so on. Ta kentrika (“the central things”) means headquarters, and ta oikonomika sou (“your financial things”) means your money or your finances.
The immigrant issue
When describing a particular issue, the singular neuter form of the adjective may be used. A commonly heard term on Greek news channels is to metanastiko (from the noun metanastis – “immigrant”), which refers to the general subject of immigration. It is an issue which deeply concerns the Greeks, since for many years they, along with the Italians, have borne the brunt of immigrant flows from Turkey and North Africa respectively and have felt that they received inadequate support from the rest of the EU in handling the problem.
While the EU has recently managed to hammer out some kind of a joint policy which includes declarations of support for the frontline countries and “various rules to manage legal migration flows, process asylum requests and return illegal migrants”, a number of right-leaning governments in member states have voiced their refusal to accommodate their share of immigrants arriving on Europe’s shores. EU immigration policy therefore remains a work in progress.
With the current détente in Greek-Turkish relations, the issue of immigration in the Eastern Mediterranean has fallen down the agenda. The days of Turkish efforts to weaponise migration by releasing large numbers of refugees across the Evros land border and to the Greek islands close to the Turkish coast seem to have passed. Greece and Turkey are making strenuous efforts to establish a friendly relationship, with meetings between officials on confidence-building measures known officially as “the positive agenda”.
At the beginning of December, President Erdogan is due in Athens on an official visit with an army of a reported 300 politicians, officials and businessmen. It is a visit which is possibly being viewed with some trepidation in Athens, since true to form the Turks have been upping the ante before their arrival, with ministers once more questioning Greece’s sovereignty over some Greek islands and making reference to the “Turkish minorities” in Thrace and “our expats in the Dodecanese”. We can expect Mr Erdogan to be forthright in expressing his views – in a visit to Berlin last Friday he suggested at a press conference with Chancellor Olaf Scholz that Germany’s unwavering support for Israel in the war with Hamas was due to its guilt about the Holocaust.
President Erdogan can be expected to ruffle some feathers during his visit to Athens on 8th December as he has not tempered his expressions of nostalgia for the period of Ottoman rule in recent statements. As reported by Skai TV’s Manolis Kostidis from Istanbul, addressing a cabinet meeting earlier in the week he said that Turkey’s sphere of influence should stretch far beyond its geographical borders. “The geography of our heart reaches from the Adriatic to the Great Wall,” he said. “Thessalonica, Mosul, Jerusalem, we see them as our own cities – Turkey’s political and cultural borders are not defined by its official borders.” The Turkish President is due to visit Thessaloniki and Thrace after his meeting with Kyriakos Mitsotakis in Athens. Photo: SkaiTV/YouTube
While it appears that Turkey has ceased to officially promote immigrant flows in the Eastern Mediterranean, traffickers continue their efforts to bring migrants into Greece along the Aegean coast. Better policing of the maritime frontier has made the use of overloaded, slow-moving dinghies impractical, resulting in a transfer of activity to the North African route and the use of converted fishing vessels to shift large numbers of refugees – often, as we have seen, with disastrous results. The traffickers’ activities in the Eastern Mediterranean now involve the use of what the Greeks call “tachyploia” – small, high-speed boats, mostly rigid inflatables (RIBS), which travel between the Turkish coast and the Greek islands, usually under cover of darkness, in an effort to outwit and outrun the Greek Coastguard.
Recent trafficking incidents
A casual internet search reveals regular incidents of this kind, mainly centred on Kos, which is one of the Greek islands closest to the Turkish mainland. The pattern is generally the same: the craft carrying up to a few dozen migrants is challenged by a Hellenic Coastguard patrol boat and tries to escape at high speed, swerving violently and in some cases trying to ram the Coastguard vessel. The chase usually ends with the firing of warning shots, and if that fails, disablement of the boat by firing into a non-critical part such as the inflatable section of the hull or the outboard motor.
Thus, www.naftemporiki.gr reported that in the early hours of 13th July a Coastguard patrol boat challenged a RIB which had just landed some illegal immigrants at Lampi Beach at the north-eastern end of Kos. The boat’s operator, on spotting the Coastguard vessel, set off at high speed towards the Turkish coast, ignoring the patrol boat’s visual and vocal warnings to stop and making repeated attempts to ram it. The chase ended when the RIB was disabled with shots fired into its hull. The Coastguard picked up the operator and took him to Kos harbour, where he was identified by the immigrants as the person who had brought them across from Turkey. He was thereupon arrested and charged with offences under Article 30 of the Immigration Code (transporting illegal immigrants into the country), as well as belonging to a criminal organisation, putting lives in danger, and illegal entry into the country, and the boat was confiscated.
Similar incidents were recorded:
– at Kos on 6th August, this time with 10 migrants on board (www.real.gr),
– at Kos on 25th October with 5 immigrants on board, in which the RIB managed to ram the Coastguard patrol boat, damaging both vessels in the process, but still attempted to evade pursuit until it was immobilised by gunfire (www.mynews.gr),
– at Rhodes on 18th November, which ended in the arrest of 14 people, including the operator who turned out to be only 19 years old (www.rodostoday.gr),
– at Chios on the evening of 20th November, which involved a boat carrying a total of 30 foreigners, of which 29 were identified as migrants and were taken to a reception centre, and the other as the operator, who was arrested (www.protothema.gr).