Documentary extols rebellious saint
Municipality of Filothei screening film on 16th century figure the area was named after
Revoula Benizelos was born in Turkish-occupied Greece in 1522 and, as the daughter of Angelos Benizelos and Sirigi Palaiologina, belonged to one of the wealthiest and most influential families of Byzantium. However, she chose a path much different to that of the coveted bride she was meant to be. Defying the authority of Suleiman the Magnificent, she took the name Philothei and pursued a combination of an ascetic
Maria Hatzimichali Papaliou traveled to Istanbul, Venice and the Greek islands to add color to and shed light on as many facets as possible of Saint Philothei’s good works
life with intense social activity aimed at educating women, liberating slaves and helping anyone in need, regardless of race or religion. Her life was dedicated to these causes until 1589, when, under the reign of Murad III, she was tortured and left to die by the Ottomans (and certain Christians who wanted to stay in their good graces).
Philothei was sainted after a life so fascinating that centuries later it inspired a film. “Philothei the Athenian – The Revolution of a Woman” premiered at the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival in 2019. It is a dramatized documentary written, directed and produced by Maria Hatzimichali-Papaliou. With a filmography that has covered topics such as disability (“The Struggle of the Blind”) and gender politics (“Female Portraits”) and the history of places like Lycia in Asia Minor, Delos and Mykonos, the filmmaker traveled to Istanbul, Venice
and the Greek islands to add color to and shed light on as many facets as possible of Saint Philothei’s good works.
The documentary chronicles how she put her family’s fortune to the cause of buying men and
women from slave auctions and then helping them escape to a better life or allowing them to live off her land. She founded what is likely to have been the first school for women in Greece and Europe that provided its pupils with vocational
training that would allow them to make a living. She took in abused or unmarried pregnant women and helped them escape to the islands through a series of underground tunnels that ran beneath Athens and she also built a hospital that provided free care to Greeks, Turks and Franks. None of these institutions survives today and the only brick-and-mortar edifice we have to remind us of the saint is her family home in Plaka, known as the Benizelos Mansion. However, the area where her family estate was located and where she did so many of her good works is very familiar today: It is the leafy northern Athens suburb of Filothei and also includes part of Psychiko.
On her feast day today, the Municipality of Filothei will be screening “Philothei the Athenian – The Revolution of a Woman” on its YouTube channel, starting at 7 p.m. and available through Sunday.
An extensive plan aimed at containing tax evasion and increasing transparency in Greece is on the Finance Ministry’s drawing board, with the support of the Independent Authority for Public Revenue. This was among the first draft projects proposed for funding from the Next Generation EU instrument.
It concerns the online connection of more than 600,000 tills and card terminals with the tax and inspection authorities. The rollout of the plan will start in the second half of the year, provided the economy has overcome the health crisis.
Ministry officials say that one of the main pillars of the reform plan is the strengthening of transparency and the combating of tax evasion through the replacement of hundreds of thousands of tills with new ones that will transmit data on the receipts that stores and enterprises issue in real time.
There are two targets in this plan: the online interconnection of the enterprises’ accounting departments with the tax authorities, which will pave the way for effective cross-checking against tax evasion, and the optimum service of corporations that will be spared the bureaucracy.
According to ministry sources, had those systems been in place today, the payment of the cheap state loans through the so-called Deposit To Be Returned emergency program, calculated on the monthly turnover of each company, would be a matter of minutes.
The procurement of the new tills to be linked to Taxisnet is one of the first national recovery plan projects to enter the Public Investments Program, and will be immediately funded through state resources, as the EU fund allows for the retroactive coverage of expenditure. Sources say the tender to that effect is set to be announced.
A second instrument in the tax administration’s hands is artificial intelligence, to be used for uncovering tax evasion cases, financed by the recovery fund. A senior ministry official says this concerns the so-called data mining process from large data pools in order to establish the sincerity of tax declarations.