Recycling anniversaries

The worst thing about rebooting a country after it has suffered a crisis with tectonic consequences is the feeling that things are being recycled, the feeling that the country is trying to stand on the precarious remnants of yesteryear. This process involves a ritual that is known to be ineffective: the reuse of symbols - preferably national symbols. 

This is not necessarily a desire to revive the memory of historical events, and it is not a fear that we will feel poorer unless we pay tribute to the nation's outstanding cultural figures. Rather, it is a sign of confusion as well as of the unwillingness to deviate from the beaten path - to come up, as it were, with a different interpretation of our present and, by extension, our future. 

On Wednesday, Zappeion Hall in central Athens hosted an event to mark the upcoming 2,500th anniversary of the Battle of Thermopylae...