In a new adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey proposed by the French director Géraldine Bénichou during the summer festival “Les Nuits de Fourvière” in Lyon this year, Ulysse became the symbol for all immigrants travelling all over the contemporary world. Such new Ulysse do exist in modern Greece. As a natural entry in the eastern part of the European Union, Greece has had to deal with the massive arrival of clandestine refugees for a couple of years. They mostly come from Iran, Irak, Palestine and Asia.

In the Greek newspapers last month one could read a lot of scholar and educative metaphors reporting the following fact: NATO has refused Greece the right to apply and therefore participate in the Kyoto’s protocol. According to the newspaper Ta Nea on the 22nd April, this sounds like a “hard slap on the cheek”; “we have been expelled from Kyoto”, claims a journalist in the same newspaper the following day. What has Greece really done to be punished in such an aggressive way?

As a foreigner arriving in Athens and before you can distinguish the Parthenon, or even the edge of Acropolis’s rock, you will first notice that a new god has joined the Greek Pantheon: the Car. Queen of the melted tarmac in Athens’ hot busy streets, princess of the Nikis avenue by the sea in Thessaloniki, mother of all traffic jams on the principal entries in every Greek town, the car is god.