Have you ever asked yourselves what happened to Pontius Pilate?
What was the fate of the man whose tolerance and complicity had Jesus Christ crucified?
The events in Pilate’s life after Christ’s crucifixion were revealed to me by a fairy tale, found in a children’s book. When Pilate returned to Rome from Palestine he lost Caesar’ s favor and he was thrown –by his enemies or by his own depression, this fact was not clear in the fairy tale- to the Tiber river. But the river refused to accept the body of the man who had condemned Christ and huge waves sank the ships and covered the banks of the river. So the Romans drew up his body and threw it, this time, to the Rene river, in their Gallic provinces. The same phenomena happened in the Rene, so they finally transferred Pilate to a mountain in the Alps of Switzerland. This mountain had a little lake on its top and a big one on its feet. “Let him flutter the water of the lake for as long as he wants”, they said.
But the cursed soul of Pilate couldn’t find relief. It was fluttering the water, drowning the villagers’ sheep and goats into the lake, it was frightening the highlanders, stealing their flocks and destroying their harvests with rain and hail. The poor Helvetians were suffering all these hardships for centuries until, one day, a famous alchemist from Salamanca Spain came to their mountain. It was said that no one knew the magic art better than him in the entire Europe. The Spanish wizard promised to relieve the villagers from Pilate for a bag full of gold.
He climbed up the mountain, full of courage, and he started chasing Pilate’s soul in the rough steeps and slopes of Alps. After several days of exhausting persecution Pilate was defeated by the wizard’s spells and they, finally, came to terms; Pilate would stay for ever, peacefully, at the bottom of the lake and only for one day every year –at the anniversary of Jesus’ sentence- it would be permitted to him to emerge and admire the view from the mountain.
This mountain really exists; it is called ‘Mountain Pilatus’(le Mont Pilat) and unbelieving readers can look for it in the current maps of Switzerland. They will also find the lake which was fluttered by Pilate’s contemned soul; it is called the lake of Lucerne and in its banks there is built the city were the negotiations for Cyprus reunification took place back in April 2004. In the same slopes where the Spanish wizard was determining the fate of Pontius Pilate’s soul, the modern wizards of diplomacy tried to determine the fate of Cyprus. At the mountain named after the most indecisive person in all human history, leaders and diplomats were asked to decide for a just and viable solution to Cyprus future. Some days later, Greek Cypriots voted “NO” and Turkish Cypriots voted “YES” to the referendum for Anan’s plan.
The diplomatic history is full of lost chances and unfair solutions. It is full of historical incompatibilities and expectations of coexistence, as well. It is full of difficult questions. What lied under the Russian ‘veto’? ‘Gray’ financial activities of Russian businessmen in the Republic of Cyprus or a justified diplomatic reaction of Russia (and France) to the creation of an unstable state morpheme, the crippled institutions of which would have been the perfect sub-layer for the parasitic existence of foreign interests in the island? Was the then Greek Cypriot President Tassos Papadopoulos having illegal economic relationships with Slobodan Milosjevic or he was defamed by foreign press, because he opposed to the transformation of Cyprus into a new Bosnia – Herzegovina?
Βy May the 1st 2004 the Republic of Cyprus became a full and equal member of the E.U. The Greek foreign policy, for decades trapped in the diplomatic machinations of the Cyprus Problem, could therefore, act more freely. The Cyprus Issue passed in the hands of the E.U., consisting a first degree challenge for the Union to prove that its purpose was not limited to superficial enlargements and, on the contrary, it posses the institutional composition and diplomatic capacity to handle such issues. Both Greece and Cyprus followed the fate of the European South, suffering from the severe economic crisis and experiencing “national depression” with their citizens forced to live under Pascal Bruckner’s «democratic melancholia”, with the economic doldrums still echoing the early 2013 banking crisis in the island. In the same time the offshore gas field, discovered two years ago, intensifies, for one more time, the need for a viable solution of the Cyprus Issue.
Ten years ago, the acceptance of the Republic of Cyprus in the EU did not represent a problem for the Union. It represented a challenging dilemma; not the dilemma of voting “YES” or “NO” to Anan’s plan –that dilemma has already been answered by the referendum- but the dilemma of what kind would be the future form of the E.U. That dilemma still exists. Do we want just a mismatched amalgamated corporation of financial interests, or we want a Union acting as a dynamic international power that is able to implement the principles of international justice and the European Law in every part of its territory?
Chris Ch. Liapis Jr, MD, MSc, PhD
Psychiatrist – Associate Research Scientist, Aiginiteion Hospital,University of Athens
Tufts University School of Medicine, Boston, MA
Email: chliapis@yahoo.gr
