I had several years without being in Greece. A place I enjoy and love through art and a lot of people. A place with great meaningful history for the world and human life. A neighbor, that my country and me as his son, God has assigned us to have.
A few years later, on Monday this week, I returned to the Greek police in Kakavija in a random taxi. I was not told anything. I handed over my passport. The police conducted the routine process on the computer. After getting acquainted with my name and generalities, he browsed my passport on all pages. Close the glass window of the passport control office. Without saying a word, he moved from his chair and got lost in the neighboring offices. He returned after five minutes. Just asked two questions:
Where are you going? Why did you come? When will you return?
Received short answers:
-We are coming for fun. A visit and a modest lunch at Lake Ioannina and we will be back.
Everything went normal. We adhered to the assertion in the dry routine interview of the policeman.
We ate a lunch at the lake with the family and dear family of a colleague of mine from the city where I grew up. And we came back.
When we returned to Kakavija, again in front of the window with a small window of the police officer checking the passports (but in the other direction), the entry episode was repeated at the exit. But in return, the delay was even greater. The policeman just encountered my last name in my passport, made a startling move. They rolled around in chairs. He glanced out of the car where we were family and started asking the random taxi driver:
Where were you? How do you know him? Where did you eat lunch? Who did you meet?
It was all questions that woke me up to a dead time of my country.
Same as in the case of my penultimate visit to Greece. The policeman even after these questions went up to another office. Missed more than five minutes consultation in that or those offices. He did not ask me any questions. But in my psychological reading I noticed how on his face was simply respect for something found as a note on his computer or system and any Greek institution. This is simply a recurring and officially unaffirmed annoyance to me. What a note, I will learn this through a request to the highest official Greek institutions and with the help of organizations and my journalist friends in Greece.
In the 30 years of my career as a journalist, I have known and know Greece by maintaining civic correctness in its content and behavior, especially legal ones. While in my professional law and my national identity I have seen it as a neighboring country, as a country that is as Balkan as my country (although it is an early member of the community of EU countries).
I always love Greece by saying first that providence has equally assigned us as neighbors and not as hypocrites, on each other's side.
But through this reaction, I would like to bring to the attention of all my colleagues and precious Greek intelligence, my direct question: Is it possible to help me learn, even through you, which institutional note makes it more and more extended the time of checking my passport at the border crossings of Greece?
Controls never bother me, but the curtailment of freedom and rights always makes me more active and more faithful to my identification as an Albanian.