[This shocking tale comes from Nikos Rapti’s weblog at Zdnet. It sounds more like the plot of a horror film but alas it’s real life in 2011.]
As mentioned in some of my ZNet Commentaries, during the 1941-1944 Nazi occupation in Greece there was a famine in Athens, in 1941, that claimed the lives from starvation of about 200,000 Greeks. At that time there was a rumor [?] that the Italian occupiers were eating the cats of Athens as a … delicacy. I do not think that Greeks, in general, ate cats or dogs, even while dying of starvation. I did not and I survived.
One of the journalistically most honest papers in Greece is the satirical weekly “To Pontiki” [The Mouse]. It was started in 1979 by Kostas Papaioannou as an almost one-person endeavor and it evolved into the most authoritative paper of Greece. Three of the ZNet people have already met Kostas on the island of Aegina where he now lives in retirement. I had been writing for “To Pontiki” during its first two decades of publication. The paper was taken over by other people after Kostas’ retirement.
Today, January 6, 2011, seventy years after the Nazi instigated famine, I went to the kiosk in my neighborhood and bought ”To Pontiki” of this week. On page 3 the title reads: ”SHOCK: They grab and eat dogs”.
The article describes the unbelievable situation in a neighborhood of Athens where the immigrants who have flooded the area having reached the lowest point of misery and hunger grab and eat the cats and the dogs in the neighborhood; the stray or the pets of the Greek residents. The Greek residents became aware of this gradually, as they noticed that the stray cats and dogs were disappearing.
