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The story of eGreece is one you’d think would be peculiar and unique. Why wouldn’t it, right? After all, we, Greeks, have quite the temperament and are idiosyncratic to say the least. Surely, I could bedazzle you with tales of grand aspiration and brazen determination. But, I won’t. It’s not they’d be flamboyant or exaggerated per se; it’s rather they’d come out as off-key. Because, frankly, the backbone of the story runs pretty much formulaic and mundane: ‘We used to be great’. And that about sums it up all too well. The whole community narrative is centered on this one premise.

For good measure, a hell of a lot of things used to be great around here but aren’t any more. However, while most of the rest have shrunk in shame, now derelict and forgotten, Greeks have managed to spin a game style on top of it. We wear past greatness as a badge of honor. Among the countless decorations in the profiles of Greek accounts, there should be one commemorating exactly this. Squint and you may catch a glimpse of it. That’s where that sense of confidence, achievement and entitlement comes from, in battlefields and fora alike. We stand tall to emulate our having stood tall.

That air of provenance may help keep morale up even when down and out, but it also makes for one very, very strong-headed community. It has to be the greatest collective of strongly opinionated blokes you’ve ever encountered. We argue anything and everything, multiple times over, with unrelentless fervor and conviction. You’d think getting things done is utterly impossible. In most cases, you’d be right. Except for those magic moments when the stakes are unbelievably high and everybody simply falls in line. Not because they’ve changed their mind -God forbid. Rather because it dawned on them they won’t be afforded the leisure to continue arguing their proposition otherwise.

And the Greeks keep playing. Another day logged; another day with heads held up high. Most of us have been around for far too long. We’ve seen it all and gamed through all. But then again, as long as there is some odd fellow who thinks it possible to drain us of our spirit, we’ll stick around just to prove them wrong. For from within our fractions and over our bloated egos, there comes an almost mystical power of perseverance like nothing you’ve experienced before. Allright, maybe, it is indeed a tale of grand aspiration and brazen determination after all. Never mind. Hurrah the Greeks. Till the servers go down!