‘I waited with nervous immigrants at the Ministry of Justice, where a browbeaten apparatchik was single-handedly fielding all requests. I rode wheezing elevators up and down the tax office, trying to figure out who needed to stamp what. I was bullied by a tax inspector while he baldly negotiated a job for his son-in-law with a stooge, and consoled by a Romanian accountant, whose experience of communism had taught her to handle beadledom with cheerful stoicism. I watched scuffles break out between shiny-suited plaintiffs at the law courts, a compound of cryptically numbered buildings where giant bundles of tattered files teetered on every available surface. There was no sign of the government’s digitisation drive here….’
Since the debt crisis, Greece has become a media plaything, the broken child on the naughty step. Yet few reports manage to capture the essence of the country or the realities of daily life. Letters from Greece, a series of essays published by The Pigeonhole, offer a compelling insight into what it’s really like to be living and working in Greece now.
In my essay, Paperchase, I describe my crushing, and ultimately futile, attempts to negotiate Greek bureaucracy.
My essay is accompanied by haunting photographs of Greek government buildings by Eirini Vourloumis. Her images distil the peculiar mix of neglect and nostalgia that permeate these spaces – the physical manifestation of an anachronistic administration desperately in need of modernisation.