Enough Already About Mykonos!

 

Saturday–Jeff

 

Have you been following the hatchet-job of bad news and piling-on raging across the Internet and much of the western media about my adopted home of Mykonos?  I don’t like it, and do not wish to “give legs” to those tales, but nor can I leave such targeted rumor mongering unanswered.

 

Practically everywhere you turn someone is offering a curated agenda of reasons for blasting this legendary Aegean Greek island’s iconic draw for tourist dreams world-wide. If you believe all that’s written, during tourist season my island is a traffic jammed, mafia controlled, violent, robbery prone, drug enhanced, politically corrupt, sexually promiscuous, outrageously expensive, over-developed, wild 24/7 party scene overrun each day by behemoth cruise boats filled with tens of thousands of tourists who rarely contribute more than the price of a bottle of water to the local economy.

 

Hmm, sounds a lot like the fictional setting for my tenth Chief Inspector Andreas Kaldis novel, The Mykonos Mob (aka Island of Secrets in trade paperback).

 

That’s quite an impressive checklist for a modest island of 11,000 full time residents to achieve.  If true, it puts Mykonos right up there with some of the free world’s most appealing tourist attractions, such as Manhattan, LA, Chicago, Miami, Paris, the South of France, Brazil, London, Rome, Naples, various locales in Mexico…you get the idea.

 

Rightly or wrongly, any number of other tourism-driven locales appear anxious to achieve what they perceive as the “Mykonos Vibe” and the imagined financial benefits to be gained from such a bargain. 

 

I’m not suggesting that all claimed in the media about Mykonos is true or false or somewhere in-between, and I freely admit that I’m not fully happy at the direction Mykonos has taken over the 40 years that I’ve called it home, but finger-pointing, name calling, and exuberant schadenfreude is not the answer. Those sorts of responses only harden positions, raise defensive hackles on the accused, and change nothing.

 

The Telegraph

Let’s be realistic. The powerful and those seeking power will always search to capitalize on places and opportunities that will profit them.  The key is to separate the bad actors from the benevolent, the corrupt from the caring, and the opportunistic predators from the powerless oppressed. For that you need an alliance of the willing and strong government management.

 

If that can’t be achieved, then perhaps all that’s been written shall indeed come to pass.

 

So, let’s get to work.

 

–Jeff