Renewing My Greek Passport: The Unsung Extra-Credit Labor of Hercules

Ruminant With A View

by Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

MYKONOS Greece—(Weekly Hubris)—9/26/11—Today, I learned why Greek passports are good for five years: it actually takes five years to renew one.

Anyone who has lived almost anywhere in The (so-called) Levant, from Greece, circling around through Turkey, detouring over to Cyprus, and then moving on south into the nations experiencing the Arab Spring (a misnomer of the very first water) knows that acquiring any legal document whatsoever requires the patience of a certain biblical character stranded atop a dung-heap, and covered with boils: Job.

I can’t speak for Israel: I suspect bureaucratic encounters may be a bit less harrowing there, unless you’re a “guest worker” (yet another extravagant misnomer).

I, on the other hand, am (in Greece—or, anywhere, for that matter) a “dual national”: I possess a US passport and a Greek one. Both must be renewed at regular intervals, but when my (nice, maroon-red) Greek document expired in 1993, I found it would take me some 18 years to work up the nerve to renew it. I knew my adopted homeland. I knew its bureaucrats.

My longtime Greek lawyer—a real card—said, on the phone from Athens, “Bean (his nickname for me—long, dumb story), just go into any police station anywhere in the country, and they’ll renew it. Easy-peasey-lemon-squeezey.”

“Bear (my nickname for him), any police station?”

“Yeah. You have a couple of mug shots with you?”

“Had ‘em taken at Triple-A in the States . . .”

“. . . so . . . piece of cake. Oh, there is a small fee, but it’s a really easy process now. I had to renew mine just last month.”

Now, remember: this is a 100 percent Greek, male lawyer from whom I’m getting this information. I, on the other hand, am a 5’7”, green-eyed, Anglo-Saxon woman, speaking fractured “Bureaucratic Greek” (and it is its own dialect, believe me), in shorts and a Yoga T-shirt, with an armload of Buddhist malas and Annie Lenox hair.

The three young Greek policemen, all packing, looked up at me last Friday afternoon, took my passport, photos, ID card, etc., passed them around, and said, “Oh, yes, Madam. This is where you get your passport renewed—Sheesh, this one’s ancient; look at this, Costa; ever seen one this old?—but first, you need a stamped, certified document from the Tax Office [the Greek IRS], but they’re not open today. You need to get there no later than 8 a.m. Monday morning. The photos and everything else is fine—you’ll see Mr. Glykos, down the hall here, when the IRS clears you.”

Right. Back to the hotel. Back to the beach. Back to Square One.

Monday, at 8, Dean (aka The Devil Bat) and I fronted up at the IRS and, miraculously, we’d beat any Greek-born Greeks to the office. They showed up very shortly after us, in droves, however.

The very nice young exophthalmic woman at the desk took one look at my assorted documents and said, “Where’s your tax number?”

“Tax number?”

“Yeah, your tax number. Can’t renew your passport without your tax number.”

“But I don’t work here. It’s been some 18 years since I worked here and filed taxes. I don’t tote along my tax booklet when on vacation.”

“Well,” she said—and I could see in her eyes the decision being made: “Do I bother actually to help this woman or just tell her to go back to the New York consulate and let them handle this?” Thank heaven, the scales tipped in my favor (a first, and last, for the day).

“OK,” she said, then. “Let’s see if I can find you on my computer. I have to warn you, though, this thing’s a relic.” She began searching for my name, first in Greek; then in “Latin characters,” as she phrased it. Nada. Zip. No me at all. Anywhere. Let alone a tax number.

Helpfully, The Devil Bat interjected: “Why can’t she just get a new tax number?”

Ms. Exophthalmic admitted that might indeed be possible . . . but, first, she wanted us to go down the hall to Alexandros’s office, as he was the IRS’s I.T. maven, and he might be able “to find me” somehow.

The Devil Bat expressed skepticism.

Alexandros concurred. But he appeared game to give it a shot, at least.

He keyed in my name in any number of iterations, and my name, to the Greeks, is about as alien a moniker as you can get: full of sounds not vocalized in Greek, and downright weird, even in English. My mother and I, just for example, have exactly the same name, something that would never occur in Greece. Bureaucrats examining my papers here always look at me askance.

Alexandros typed and typed. Finally, he said, “Eureka!” Really, he did. It’s a Greek interjection of triumph. “You know what some idiot did in Athens,” he asked, rhetorically. “He typed in your name with two ‘r’s’ in Greek—a major mistake. On your ID and in your passport, your father’s last name is entered in Greek, correctly, with one ‘r.’”

“Have you ever seen Terry Gilliam’s film, ‘Brazil’?” I interjected.

“So, she does have a tax number?” interrupted The Devil Bat.

“Of course she has a tax number. But . . . ‘Brazil’?” asked Alexandros.

“Just see it,” I said. “The subject is how a mistroke of one computer key affects, well, everything in the known universe . . .”

“OK,” said Alexandros, “I’ll see it. And, when you pay the cashier the 83 euros required, I will give you the document you need to take to the police.”

“Eighty-three euros?!” I sputtered. “To renew a passport? Every five years? Do poor people ever leave this country?”

Alexandros shrugged.

Then, of course, the cashier claimed The Devil Bat’s platinum Visa card was “unacceptable” to his machine (though we’d just charged groceries on it about a mile down the road), so I handed over the equivalent of $116. in cash, we collected our very legal-looking tax number document and receipt, and returned to the police station . . .

. . . and a Mr. Glykos, whose only chore it is to renew passports.

And he’s a very nice man, but he took one look at my (two) Triple-A-generated passport photos and said, “These, of course won’t do.”

“Oh. And why not?”

“Well, you see, they’re the wrong size, your mouth is open, your chin’s tilted up, you’re wearing jewelry . . . and you need four photos. Clean of any fingerprints, as well.”

“Don’t tell me,” I said, “but we’re going to have to go somewhere else to get these particular photos shot, aren’t we?”

“Yes,” he said, and gave us detailed directions to a galaxy far, far away.

Eventually, we managed to find the photo shop; then return to it when it was actually open; get the photos shot (mouth closed, chin down, earrings off); and return (again), an hour later, to pay for and collect them. Oh, we also had the photo-shop-guy Xerox the IRS documents and my ID card (both sides), as the photocopying machine at the police station was broken. Nice of Mr. Glykos to warn us about that in advance.

Back, then, to Mr. Glykos, where a line-of-misery had formed outside his closed door. Since I’d been there first, I knew, according to the unwritten code of Greek social mores, I could jump the queue and go to the front of the line, which I did. Still, it was a long wait (and The Devil Bat had not brought along his iPod).

When Mr. Glykos’s door finally opened, an old Mykonian friend of mine emerged. Seems he has no fingerprints, for some reason, and this always poses a problem for him in the matter of legal documents: thus, our long wait. We greeted one another in passing, and The Devil Bat and I lunged ahead of the other poor souls waiting their turn to see Mr. Glykos.

“So,” he said, “this all looks in order now.” And he at once began the laborious process of keying in all my barbaric foreign names, in two scripts, on his computer, stamping each and every piece of paper to be sent off to Athens for analysis with strips of bar code, and, finally, fingerprinting me (which would give US Civil Libertarians the willies, but which all Greeks accept as the price of doing business: in this country, everyone has an ID card, bearing a photo, a family history, fingerprints, etc., etc.).

“And that’s it?” I asked, at last—after about an hour of typing, stamping, signing and certifying. “I can get my new passport now?”

“Oh, no,” said Mr. Glykos. That takes another week to ten days. It has to come from Athens. And,” he added, “you’d better phone me before coming, as sometimes it takes a little longer.”

A. Little. Longer.

Why do I have the sinking feeling that, though we’ll be here on the island another two weeks, my new passport is not going to make it back here before we leave for Santorini?

In Greece, a country so long dominated by the bureaucracy-heavy Ottoman Empire, one really needs to have absorbed all the lessons of that great, Pythonesque film, “Brazil.” Whatever can go wrong, will, here . . . but slowly; very slowly.