First time in Greece, landed in Athens the day before yesterday. I haven’t even seen the famously beautiful bits yet, but I already love this country. Athens seems very underrated to me: I’ve heard various opinions that it is a dirty, uninteresting city - and I disagree totally. It is sprawling, dirty, anarchic, and for me, immediately endearing.
Warm spring weather: all day yesterday was pure mediterranean sun, then today a diffuse milky light, occasional heavy raindrops falling then stopping, no-one paying them much attention. People are very relaxed and informal here. A lot of men have beards and long hair, and no jobs. On my first day, I walked into a ceramics shop and I was trying to talk Greek with the old lady who owned it and then suddeny she pinched my cheek as if I were grandson, and I thought, I like this place.
I wandered into an Orthodox church while they were giving a service. It was very dark in there, and rather strange, because people kept walking in, saying a few prayers, kissing icons on the lips, then walking out again. And there wasn’t just one priest, but two, taking it in turns. “Taking turns” consisted in reading very very quickly from some big old books (in Greek of course); this reading seemed expressionless, indifferent and informational - like a horse-race commentator describing a very uneventful race. One of the priests sat in the same dark area as the worshippers, but up on a high chair with his lecturn and old books. The other priest was inside some kind of inner chamber, in robes and with candles burning, a narrow doorway allowing us to catches glances of his holiness.
There’s more graffiti in Athens than any other city I’ve seen. Shops are diverse and unpredictable, market stalls and street-sellers haggling, taverna spruikers beseeching you come in, stray dogs bickering or running down the street in packs. I see here many of the things that enchanted me when I first went to Spain in the year 2000 - a Mediterranean Europe where the hyper-capitalist coralling of public space and commerce is not in such an advanced state. It makes me nostalgic, because on more recent visits to Spain, after ten years of “economic boom” in that country, its beginning to look more like the rest of Europe.
The central parts of Athens have another aspect, that being the weight of history hanging over things. This is quite literally true: the Acropolis is up there overlooking things, and it keeps reappearing as a view, near or distant, when you turn into a new street. Of slightly more recent vintage, Byzantine churches pop up incongruously in various squares, as well as miscellaneous ruins littered around the place. Even the modern art centre is in an old gasworks (”Gazi”) dating from the much smaller Athens that existed before it expanded rapidly like a tumorous growth after conflicts and upheavals in the early twentieth century.
We went to Gazi, and there I found a cavernous, huge public toilet, all built from pure white marble. Strange that with all this space it only had two urinals, and these were somewhat awkward to access, since a stray dog had laid down to sleep right underneath them. I urinated, holding my breath, hoping that the dog would wake up and snarl at my pendulous encroachment.
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