The man who once crossed the Greek border with fear of his soul is photographed today on the wall of shame in Evros as an MEP candidate with the ND
When Pyrros Dimas traveled to Athens for the first time in 1988, unknown among strangers, with fear for his soul, he was of course not an Olympic medalist nor did he imagine that he was destined to become a member of the European Parliament with the party whose flag is xenophobia and the anti-immigration agenda. The two neighbors, Albania and Greece, were once separated by a border fence and even a power line.
Pyrrhus and his brother Odysseus came from a relatively wealthy family by the standards of Heimarra, but nevertheless poor. The food that was rationed to them was often stale kangaroo meat, a remnant of an old alice war between France and Australia. Almost all of it ended up in the empty stomachs of the Albanians and Northern Europeans.
“The regime constantly made us fear propaganda about what was happening across the border. He talked to us about poverty, about miserable living conditions, about shocking crimes that happened on the streets every day” writes Pyrros in his autobiography that was released last year. “But on this trip I saw with my own eyes free people, living in prosperity, with goods that we had never caught in our hands. And above all, people who walked with their heads held high, without being surrounded by fear.” Greece in 1988 had a PASOK government. The same party with which Pyrrhus made his political debut much later (an era of memoranda).
“We have to do it…”
During the days of the 1989 World Weightlifting Championships in Athens, the Dima brothers – still Albanians – exchanged 200 dollars on the Tirana black market: “To buy two or three blue jeans, some blankets, maybe no Glykeria tapes”. They hid the cord under a seat of the bus that would take them to Kakavia. Having learned the tricks of the “thief”, the border guards found the money.
“They took us one by one for questioning. They undress me, they strip me, they start searching me everywhere. Until our coach, Zef, intervened with a phone call to Albania’s Minister of Sports. To everyone’s surprise, they let us go and we ran away, terrified. As long as we stayed in Athens, half of the athletes were racking their brains to find a way to leave and escape. “We have to do it, otherwise in Albania they will put us in” they whispered. I was shaking like a fish. I was getting wet at the thought of going back.”
Pyrros Dimas did not have to jump fences. His meeting with – later PASOK politician and regional governor – Yannis Sgouros in 1990 in Aalborg, Denmark, opened a rift for him towards the Greek border. “Son. Barcelona. Winner” the legendary Vasily Alekseev had said succinctly to him on the sidelines of the European Championship. And indeed, two years later in Barcelona, Pyrrhos was crowned Olympic gold medalist. “For Greece” he shouted on the mat.
The seizure of the German embassy in Tirana on July 3, 1990 opened the first crack in the steel curtain of terror. The regime painted the uprising with blood, but hundreds of civilians managed to break into the embassies of the Western superpowers. Terrified, the government of Ramiz Alia proceeded with a series of reforms. For the first time, Albanian citizens had the right to obtain a passport. Pyrrhus began to think about emigration. Sgouros, a powerful member of the Hellenic Weightlifting Federation, approached him again on the sidelines of some matches in Kortsa.
“In Albania, however, the walls also had ears,” recalls the later Olympic champion. “We waited with bated breath to see what would happen to the families of the first athletes who took up the hoe and left. We had to ensure that everything would be done without endangering anyone.” The country was slowly becoming deserted, since the youth were crowding the embassies with their passports in their hands. Pyrros was almost last in the gym of his club together with Leonidas Kokkas. Giorgos Gereudakis, attaché of the Greek embassy in Tirana, was hesitant to issue him a visa. “I want you here to deal with politics” he told him…
Hate and xenophobia
Pyrros Dimas would leave by air from Tirana to Ioannina on February 7, 1991 with a single-use visa, in order to undergo knee surgery by a Greek doctor. The flight was canceled due to bad weather, but Pyrrhus woke up a neighbor in the middle of the night and asked him to drive him to Kakavia. “We will send you a taxi to the border to bring you to Athens” Sgouros promised. Now free from his fear, Pyrrhus first set foot in his new homeland at 6 in the morning with only one piece of luggage, a rucksack. Hanging inside the bag was his most faithful friend: a stray kitten named Zeph.
In the winter that followed, the massive influx of Albanian emigrants brought Greece to the brink of a humanitarian crisis. The Dima brothers experienced the hatred and xenophobia first hand: “In the bus I held the handles with both hands so that the other passengers wouldn’t think I was going to steal from them.”
Anti-immigrant crescendo
Three decades after the day he crossed the Greek-Albanian border, Pyrros Dimas is photographed at the Evros fence and is asking for the vote of the same people who then called him a “butt-Albanian” and demanded the shooting of illegal immigrants at the border. “We realized with sadness early on that in Greece we would live more or less like foreigners. We left Albania “Greek masquerades” and arrived in Greece Albanians…”.
Read also: Pyrros Dimas: Rage on Twitter for the xenophobic post and the fence on Evros
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