MAYDAY, MAYDAY

My father was a shipowner of commercial vessels. One of them, NikosNasos II—named after a mix of my brother’s and my first names—was loaded with palletized cement bags in Turkey and headed for Lagos, Nigeria.

The seas in the Aegean were brutal that night, winds at force 10 on the Beaufort scale. Close to midnight on April 11, 1973, the phone rang. My father picked up. On the line was a fellow shipowner:

“One of our Captains just picked up a distress signal from NikosNasos II.”

My father immediately called his friend Tsavliris, one of Greece’s most prominent tug operators. “Yes, the distress signal is real,” he confirmed. “But none of my tugs are nearby. I can send one from Piraeus, but it won’t reach east of Lesvos until after daybreak.”

The vessel was listing, taking on water, sinking. The only mission left was to save the 23 crew members—Greeks and Filipinos.

Thank God, the Hellenic Coast Guard arrived in time. Everyone was rescued, though one crewman was badly injured by the helicopter hoisting cable. He was rushed to a public hospital in Athens.

That’s where the real nightmare began.

The next morning, I went with my father to visit him as I was able to communicate in English. It was my first time in a Greek public hospital—and it felt like walking onto the set of a disaster film. Beds crammed into corridors. Patients lined up like wreckage after a bombardment. Our crewman was one of them, his arm shattered, waiting endlessly for an X-ray. No nurses, no doctors in sight.

My father did what people did back then: slipped a drachma note to a “runner,” whose job was to wheel patients wherever they needed to go. That bribe bought us an X-ray, but it still took four and a half hours.

When he was finally placed in a ward, he lay naked under a blanket—there were no hospital gowns, and his bloodstained clothes had been stripped away.

Then came lunch: a bowl of soup, a glass of water… and a fork. Try eating soup with a fork sometime. With enough practice, you might make it onto America’s Got Talent.

My father had seen enough. He decided to move him to a private clinic. Easy, right? Sign a release, walk out. Not in Greece. The hospital demanded the patient himself sign for the release of his clothes.

So unless they wanted him to walk down two floors, buck naked, to scribble a signature, we had a problem. In the end, I handed over my Greek ID card as collateral just to retrieve his clothes. Only then could he dress, sign the form, and leave.

The ship had gone down the night before. But in that hospital, sinking felt like an everyday condition.

In 1995, I left for the States—my dream ever since finishing college in Los Angeles.

Thirty years later, I find myself back in Greece. Not in Athens, not in Piraeus—of all places, in Kalamata, with my wife.

Greece is fabulous, right? Whitewashed houses with blue doors, the endless azure sea, the food, the music. Who cares about bureaucracy? Who cares about delays? Who cares about…

But here’s the truth: Greece to me is not the postcard version filling Instagram feeds. It’s my homeland. I love it in full—its beauty and its flaws, its light and its shadows. That’s normal, I think, to love your homeland in all its dimensions.

What surprises me most, though, is my wife. A devout New Yorker, sharp-eyed and tough-skinned, she is steadily falling for Greece. For its rhythms. For its people. For the small daily kindnesses that don’t make it into travel brochures but stay with you longer than any beach sunset.

Two days ago in the news:

“Billionaire and CEO of Volt and Velocity, Tom Greenwood, was airlifted from Mykonos to a public hospital in Athens after a serious quad bike accident.He suffered multiple fractures and a heart attack. His private insurance dispatched a medical helicopter, but the crew refused to transport him due to the severity of his condition and low chance of survival.In the end, the Greek National Ambulance Service (EKAV) arranged the transfer. Doctors had to repeatedly resuscitate him mid-flight before he underwent hours of surgery at Nikaia General Hospital. Greenwood remains in stable but critical condition, fighting for his life.”

My prayers go to him and his family for a full recovery.

But think about that: billionaire, top-class private insurance, private helicopter on call—and yet it was Greece’s free national public health system that intervened and gave him a fighting chance.

SPOILED & PAMPERED

Thirty years ago, I had surgery to fix a tendon. A month ago, I slipped on a rock while hunting for “sea creatures” and severed the same tendon again. This time, instead of chaos and soup with a fork, I used “doctoranytime,” a service connecting patients to doctors, to find an orthopedic surgeon in Kalamata.

Enter Dr. Theofanis—Fanis for short. Offices in Kolonaki (high end suburb in Athens), Sparta, Kalamata. Trained at McGill in Canada and the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York. English perfect, equipment first-class.

I walked into his office, he strolled in with coffee in hand, calm as ever. After examining me, reviewing my X rays and using state of the art ultrasound, he explained two options—surgery or a custom splint. He recommended the splint first, but didn’t have the right one in the office. He picked up his phone, called Niko, a colleague. No luck. Called two medical supply stores in town. Bingo.

“They don’t have the exact one, but something close. You can pick it up yourself or wait here 45 minutes. Either way, come back so I can fit it.”

I walked, picked up five options, brought them back—without even paying. He checked them, chose one, fitted my hand, and sent me home with a spare “just in case.”

“If it slips,” he said, “call me immediately and come back.” Then he added, almost casually:“On Tuesdays I see patients in Sparta. Wednesdays and Thursdays I operate in Athens. But I always drive back to Kalamata at night. If it happens on a day I’m not in the office, call me anytime. I’ll take care of it.”

I was stunned. Here was a man performing complex surgeries in Athens, driving two and a half hours back to Kalamata, eager to spend family time, have a hot meal, or just relax and he is offering to fix my little pinky finger splint in the middle of the night—as if it were life or death.

In Greece, both I and my wife have become Spoiled. Pampered. Not by luxury, but by kindness. By doctors who still treat you like a human being. By strangers who step in without hesitation. By a system that—flawed as it is—still carries a beating heart.

So, should we consider going back to the USA? It is getting more doubtful day by day.

I’m not sure we want to give up this kind of humanity.