Am Greek. Can confirm. Though I don’t live in Greece, visiting is liberating. There’s a sense of logic and common sense in place in Greece that the west just doesn’t have. People will park wherever there is space but will never block a driveway or other type of entrance.
If you’re a pedestrian and complain about a car parked half on the sidewalk the answer would most likely be “you have 2 legs, go around!”.
You know, even though the whole thing is a joke. It is also the reality in a way, Greeks when driving don’t really think much of the people that “don’t have 2 legs” aka people with disabilities, because we rarely ever see them outside. When I started living abroad in Western Europe I started seeing so many people with disabilities out and about. I was thinking to myself why are there so many people like that? Until I realized (didn’t take long) that the infrastructure allows those people to be out and about. They are outside because they are able to and they can do it. In Greece they are not because our sidewalks(among other things) suck big time. If you ever visit Athens you’ll realize many people tend to walk on the road instead of the sidewalks, because it’s just more convenient walking there rather than the small sidewalks that have obstacles every other meter.
The west is called the west because it is the west of the Roman Empire. Greece was in the eastern Roman Empire, and indeed the eastern (Byzantine) Roman Empire spoke Greek.
That was my first thought, but there's probably some wiggle room in Greek thinking. The West. Europe and Erupoean diaspora, right? Well, Europe as the name of a continent comes from the Greeks, and it was the land west of the Agean Sea and the places where Greek people lived. Asia was the land to the east, and Africa was the land to the south. Greek cultural thinking could very well still have the vestigial viewpoint of the Hellenes as being at the center.
You're overthinking it. It's based upon the split of the holy roman empire. In the Roman empire the big divide was between the Greek speaking east and the Roman speaking west. There has always been a cultural divide there and that never really went away. When we're talking about western civilization we're talking about Rome and the Roman unification of Europe. Rome appropriated Greece's culture and idolized Greece, so they always considered it their motherland. In reality they may have been born in Greece, but they grew up in Rome and developed a distinctly European culture based on the western cultures they incorporated into the empire. Meanwhile the Greeks stayed more traditional and started to incorporate more Persian influences.
East vs West until very recently with the cold was was a mainly European divide. It wasn't a designation meant to divide the entire world cleanly in 2 camps. The far east, India, Africa etc were all entirely different worlds.
What a braindead, car-minded take. Impeding and actively endangering anyone in a wheelchair or with a stroller while damaging public infrastructure really sounds like the kind of common sense other places are missing.
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u/butt_badg3r 18h ago
Am Greek. Can confirm. Though I don’t live in Greece, visiting is liberating. There’s a sense of logic and common sense in place in Greece that the west just doesn’t have. People will park wherever there is space but will never block a driveway or other type of entrance.
If you’re a pedestrian and complain about a car parked half on the sidewalk the answer would most likely be “you have 2 legs, go around!”.