August is supposed to be the black month of Athens, bright and clotted with pustules of heat. But that’s a fiction those island folk make up, lounging on some hot spot of rock and thinking of this melting city.
Most of the Athens has fled itself this month, not looking back as they steam out of Piraeus, the harbor rocking with froth. Around the big holiday of the 15th the city was at its emptiest and for the first time since I arrived it felt like there was a bit of spare space, some pockets in spots that weren’t stacked with fumes and sweaty shirts. It was as if I had been walking all this time with every person pushing on my chest and now the hands were gone. And it started to feel so different even if the city seemed just a little toned down, just a few gaps between its teeth of traffic—a sheepish smile that shone only to those who stayed.
In the center, the city still felt busy. Though all the little shops just off the main ways had been closing their shutters since the week before still I waited for the big shut, some resounding sound like a lock turning over in a empty house that would mark for certain the closing of Athens.
I waited, and still it did not sound. I had been savoring the rumors I had heard that even Syntagma Square would be empty but for its itinerant dogs. Even in crowds they move like kings, chasing the street sweeper like it was some blustering big cat and drinking from the marble fountain like it was their own little dish, so what would they make of the city’s center all to themselves? But on the day before the long weekend the dogs waited to cross the street with the other commuters, still as much on business as the rest of us.
Crossing that same street today, the dogs beside me as the city once more fills, I can see how easy I had it. The traffic two weeks ago turned all yellow, private cars gone and taxis all left alone on the black streets. South of Athens it was even better, and the only car was a red dot on the black. In the little neighborhoods, it was all a long nap, the shade made from sleeping cats. I could stroll anywhere. I could have slept on the streets. I could have strung dominos across the faded crosswalks. Where was the city my friendly nemesis, who always kept me sharp and guessing?
Moving through the city absent its vehicles and people was like witnessing a body without enough blood, at its heart still knotting with goings but at its limbs all cool with silence, silence that for moments hung like smoke, not an absence so much as something tangible and timid that only now found emptiness enough to peer out asking “how?”.
Reaching the other side of the street I realize what I missed in all the relative quiet was my morning dance. And now with the return of the traffic so too does my partner. Even you’d rather sit it out, even if I sometimes think I’d rather have the city slumber for a few days more, the dance comes as the cars rush in.
If you join me and cross the city with your feet you’ll soon be tapping them along, and stolid in your bones though you’d rather be, the center is in your hips, sliding past bumpers, slipping back inches from the passing taxis sailing unconcerned through red lights, brushing shoulders with strangers and curving around scooters now and then on your toes.
Ya’ll know I can’t dance so maybe this is the closest I’ll get and if you saw my grin though it looks so often grim you’d know I enjoy it and maybe I like it more because the woman tries to step on my toes and she’s my height too and sometimes she tries to kill me but I know that must be because she likes me. I never feel embarrassed because she’s as bad as me and she’ll always be there besides and she never says much either but that’s alright.
Laconic though she is I think she wants to dance because on these streets walking across them is an act of rebellion. Crossing traffic—no fear, no regrets—is my little insurgency and I think she likes the fight in me. There’s no space left to walk, and there’s no regard for those who walk—more like contempt, as if putting my feet to the pavement were a personal insult to everyone straddling an engine. So fuck you right back. My advice to all future guerillas:
Staring down an errant, just-slowing-down-in-time taxi driver won’t do you much good—Greek aren’t capable of showing or admitting shame, just like Rhinos can’t experience ennui and sparrows can’t read Czech, it just wouldn’t make sense—but blister them with your eyes if you can. Then walk slow across the road. Make them stop. Hold them up. Get in their way. Watch the scooters, like wasps, jostle and jitter in agitation. Crossing the street is taking back the street—and it was no choice of us, the pedestrians, it’s just the only way to walk. Only attitude will ferry you across, and sometimes, I feel like jumping on their hoods and treating the metal like a springy mattress.
Fear is part of it—am I going to make it across before becoming a hood ornament?—but it’s what makes you bold and if you put it forward in your mouth and taste it I think it kicks you forward— and damn them all! There’s a current beneath the passing sheets of metal and with a Zen-like buoyancy all you have do is float. And no taxi driver would want to ruin the hood of his car anyway.
If you make it across the street, you still have the Greeks on foot to deal with—all of them slow like they were trying to pull dimes along the street with the bottom of their feet or drifting back and forth like they had just stepped off ship and headed straight for the bar0. They’ll stop and talk. They’ll pause to put their bags down. Or they’ll just stand there, for no reason at all. Jump, twist, curl into a knot or stretch into a swimmer’s stroke, parting the people and propelling yourself through the thick air, whatever it takes not to stop. I’ve even spun to avoid stopping—like she grabbed my hand and this time twirled me.
Such is the dance Athena taught me and I don’t think I can dance it with any other. I missed her, in those empty days of the city now passing away. Maybe she was still there, resting her feet. I know she couldn’t have missed me, because I was there, trying to dance on those nearly empty streets, missing her hand in mine.
8.8.08
The Unwritten Land, Part 2
In the morning I climbed through overgrown trail into browned terraced fields, cherry trees and their red fruits the only company to a host of collapsed houses, their shells tumbling down and mingling with the earth. The massive peak of Delidhimi peered up over the lips of the hills. Below it a little hut stood, its white roof removing it from the gaggle of trees clinging to the hillside. Below, dogs barked.
I walked down and heard beneath the dogs human voices and the bells of sheep. Several haggard dogs charged me at the bottom of the creek, one biting at my heel before the young shepherd loped over and pulled him away. I made a wide berth around the dogs and climbed up to the hut I had seen, passing through lines of laundry while chickens scattered between my feet.
The house had the appearance of something very old held together only by the lives that filled it, their breath and not the beams. Plastic sheeting - the white I had seen - covered the roof, pinned down by a piece of wood like a giant rubber band around the lid of a jar. The wood windows were old and long since bleached of their color, the stones still cool with the memory of the night, hard and compressed through years of waiting and weathering. The trail ended at the house’s wood gate.
I walked in and was immediately greeted by an old woman wrapped in black. She insisted I sit and take off my pack. Her daughter appeared from the doorway, sly smile on her face. They served me coffee with water and a slice of a sweet, dry cake. How far to Asprorema, I asked. They smiled. “This is Asprorema," they said.
A short while later the shepherds - the sons - appeared, milk sloshing hot in the buckets they carried. Their mother went to the back of the house and tended to the chicken baking in a subterranean pot. Beyond the porch the house was covered in the multi-colored occlusions of their lives - buckets, bowels, strings, pots, broken chairs, tools, cans of olive oil, rusted machine parts, spare nails and tufts of errant wool. All of it sprouted chaotic and profuse as mushrooms after rain.
Her daughter swept crumbs and shooed flies from the faded tablecloths and blankets draped over the seats. I was struck by the care in her hands as she brushed and cleared and patted the cloth—as if the small act of taking her hands to the cloth was the only thing that made the meal possible.
Lunch was greasy chicken—so perfect—with strong olives and silence. I asked about the trail over the mountains. Kostas, one of the sons, would drive me. I showed him the trail on the map. He dismissed it. It was no good, he said, he would show me a better trail to the top of the mountain. From there, I could hike the ridge back to Epiniana.
Yet again I threw my pack in the back of a muddy pick-up truck. The family had insisted that I weigh my pack before I leave—it was nearly twenty-five kilos and I braced myself for another rant about how I would die. They laughed. That I was crazy was a given. Maybe they just weren’t that impressed. Kostas and I rumbled away from the house through the hail of barking dogs chained to trees beside the road. Pieces were missing from their ears.
We drove on. In a little while we had crossed the creek and Kostas stopped where the road, little road as it was, turned to grass. "The trail is there," he said, pointing up at the vertical gulch, zigging and zagging his finger as if he were writing quite clearly on the mountain where I should go. All I could see was a towering wall of scrubby brush, loose soil, and broken scree. “It’s there, he said, it’s just very small. When I was young, ” he went on, “I could climb it in an hour.”
An hour later I was nowhere near the top. The trail faded in and out and most of the time I scrambled straight up the hill or over fields of broken rock, battling with thick, tangled masses of bristling pines or rivers of ankle-twisting shale. The innumerable small cuts on my hands, arms, and face stung with sweat.
The view to the other side of the range became more and more astounding, but at an hour and half in I had completely lost the trail and my boots were filled with the broken shoots and seeds of wild grasses, flowers, and fragrant thyme. Everywhere I stepped, the smell of it erupted from the broken stalks. It was the smell of being lost.
Near the top I hopped across boulders in the total, particular silence that marks the borders of the far highlands. My boots made hollow thumps on the enormous, misshapen boulders. Shadows of clouds raced and tussled and bled into each other on the bare heads of the mountains surrounding me.
At the top I was nearly blown off by the wind To my right, a ridge narrowed to nothing. Ahead, mountains of immensity, as if the gods had grabbed the earth and twisted it straight up. To my left, red and yellow-dappled grass swirled in the gusts, no sign of a trail, and nowhere, seemingly, to go.
Was there really a trail out that could stitch itself to these mountains? I had no choice but to go. The shepherds, I hoped, would keep this trail clearer than the Asprorema crossing. No roads could reach me now, and this was my best hope.
Everywhere else, the roads had brought only ruin to the trails. There were no paths preserved for and from joy. There were only paths of necessity. The Asprorema trail will likely soon disappear, and I flew down this highland trail as if it at any moment it would cease to be useful and vanish beneath my feet.
Several times it almost did. The steep drop on my right rarely crept back, and the trail had a bad habit of crossing loose scree and wobbling rocks. Every time I took my eyes from the trail, I slipped, came close to toppling, and barely regained my balance. Once I fell on my side, slid down the mountain for a moment and caught myself as the rocks bounced and cascaded down the gulch where I might have gone, filling the air with chalky dust and dying cacophony and a smell close to that of gunpowder as the rocks struck one another spilling sparks.
I got up and walked on. I passed a small stone shelter on a saddle and I felt the light begin to change—evening was coming, and I had only a guess of how far I had to go. Gold light started to condense like vapor on the peak of Plaka behind me, and the few pines I could see in the distance were rivaled in size by their shadows that tattooed the mountains with abstract blooms. But there were trees, which meant I was losing altitude and getting closer. The sun melted upon the gargantuan peak of Fteri to the my right, and I off I went.
A hour later the evening was longer still. If noon stands straight upon the earth touching only with its feet then evening reclines and wrinkles the earth with shadows like earth were wool. I paused in the ring of an old house, the trace of its stone foundation like an immense, empty fingerprint. The mountains cut up into the sky.
I came across three old men. In their hands they held combs and scissors at right angles forming a shape like an archaic sextant. They told me they were going to their sheep. I looked up to where they pointed. There was only the mountain and what moved upon it. But no movement seemed like much; everywhere was far. I could see no sheep but I heard them. They had become only their bells.
I descended to a small stone hut on a pinnacle around it wet earth pressed and distorted by many small prints. The hut, its roof bolted with metal, was scarcely larger than an American SUV. The doorway was dark. Hello? I called into it. There was no response. I walked a little closer to the dark door. A pair of eyes appeared, one atop the other, glinting a dull silver in the murk.
The old woman, dressed all in the black, sat up from her bed and whispered to me. “Come, ” she called, “come, ” as she teetered forward into the deep of the house, shifting from one foot to the other in a strange shuffling walk.
I entered and was swarmed with flies. My eyes took in the dark and I saw another old woman, shrunken into her black clothes, staring up at me from a simple bed—a wood platform with a grey blanket, its rough wool long since abraded into softness. The earth floor was uneven. A pot squatted over charcoals in the hearth. Garlic hung in long streams from the sagging wood beams. The white bulbs dipped into the swirls of flies beside bags with contents unknown and objects of strange utility, blades and hooks and scoops with empty hollows. Barrels clustered in the corner like frightened animals. Cats, silent as light, played in the slab of white evening cast slanting from the open door. The smell of earth. Whispers.
The sitting woman watched me from her bed, waving her wrinkle-warped hands like a maestro. My host pulled a square of cheese from a tub in the corner. It was soft and mild. She offered bread. It was stale, and she threw most of it to the cats who pawed at the pieces. Their hair was like fire in the cool light. Their tails and their bodies wrapped into each other and passed light between them. We sat. The flies swam in the languid air.
Sometime later one of her sons appeared carrying a bag of peaches. I ate one and he said he would drive me back to Epiniana. “There’s a road now, ” he said.
A little while later the son and I bounced and rocked down the road. His name was Stereo, and his English was about as good as my Greek, so we had a good time barely understanding each other. We discussed bears (they steal his honey; I had a good impression with lots of snarls), the NBA championships, the footpath that had been bulldozed into this awful road. “Blame Karamanlis! ” He said. “Tell him to come here and build more roads, better roads!”
All the roads I had seen, all the roads I had gotten sick of, and again I met someone who only wanted more of them. To me they were only destruction. To the people of the Agrafa, they were a sign of prosperity and connection—when they were good, anyway—and a sign of lingering poverty and isolation when they were poor. To connect with the world no longer meant destruction; it meant survival. It meant escape.
I came to the village of Agrafa in the morning. It looked little more than another village, newer, though, rebuilt from some nameless calamity that might only have been time. After all the distance, it felt hollow.
I left on the old footpath to Niala, one of the famed grazing grounds of the Sarakatsani herdsmen. The trail, though good in spots, was showing its neglect even worse than the trail to Asprorema: trees blocked the path every few dozen metres, and the embankments, once laid with stone, had collapsed in many spots and dribbled down the cliffs. How quickly the footpath had been forgotten, how quickly the mountain had taken it back. Below, the new forest road wound through the mountain, lost, embarrassed, and empty.
After an hour I reached another road. The bare crest that formed Niala’s western edge loomed naked and treeless above me. As I begun to walk up toward what I hoped was the trail, two men, probably middle-aged but eroded into men much older, appeared from the edge of the forest. I asked if they were going to Niala and they said yes. They easily picked out the worn trail and I followed them as we went up onto the cliff, immense and breaching from the earth as a whale breaks the surface of the sea, the sky running down the rock like water.
The men pulled reeds and grasses from between the rocks and stuffed them in their pockets or clutched them tightly in their sun-cracked hands, the soft melon-green heads of the grass shimmering silver in the sun and wind. They were harvesting tea.
The leading man’s partner stepped off the trail and evaporated into the slopes. It was just the two of us and the clouds going light and dark and painting their shadows upon us.
After a while we sat down and he lit a cigarette. He rubbed his pale knee with his boney, burned-dark hands. Nearly every bit of him seemed to have been desiccated away. He cursed his failing knee and he drank coffee from a Coke bottle while we watched the mountains far away over Asprorema soak up the blue haze and thick sun.
We climbed on through the hot, shattered rock. He kicked stones from the path and cleared the trail before us. He mumbled to himself with every miniature rockslide he sent barreling down the slopes. “No trail, no work, ” he said. “Without the trail, we cannot get tea. No tea, nothing. ” For tea, this trail existed. Nothing else kept it passable. I knew that we were climbing, ultimately, to only another road and if he could he would have taken a truck. He would have filled its bed with bags of tea, and stones would smother the trail.
Close to the top he stopped and pointed at a flat stone. Much of its face had flaked off and shattered on the ground but a few etchings remained—a Byzantine double-headed eagle, names, a few dates from deep in WWII or the Civil War. A few steps further and Niala unfurled beneath us, a great, slow-sloping basin that descended from an encompassing lip of sharp mountains into a narrow canyon. It rolled with grass. Below us, sheep swam tiny in the green, like fish deep in the sea at the edge of the touch of the sun.
The dun-colored road went on ahead, it stretched on behind, and I went on while he went the other way. I passed by goats, I passed through more green pastures high in the cupped hands of the mountains. I was saluted by a man waiting in a chair by his truck. “For tea! ” he said, pointing at the hills, his partners, I presumed, somewhere in the dark light of the evening. We compared walking sticks. His had an eagle carved in wood. I kept to the road until it vanished.
I followed ribbons tied to trees and a few cairns low to the ground as turtles. In a little over half an hour I came to the Portal of Agrafa, a narrow clef in the ridge dark and ragged. Someone had blocked the trail with a clot of shrubs and broken trees. I clambered over and walked through the narrow, gold-grass filled passage that wound down the ridge. Like two hands touching at the wrists, their fingers curved in toward one another, the rock walls of the portal curled over me as if they made to reach me but I passed swiftly as if I had never been. Looking back, the walls of the portal were black, the mountains through them viridian, and the air the color of a dust-covered lion.
I left the Agrafa. I walked down and crossed through a forest to a mountain refugee warm and smelling of cut wood. The bunks were bare but people had been there not so long ago. Candles half-melted into empty wine bottles. An axe cupped by red wood. Cups and bowls unwashed and clustered together for company. Names carved into the wood walls with a knife. We were here.
I stopped. I sat in the last light. I lit candles. Around their flames there was another light that was the evening like white moths. The cats that were the flames flicked their tails. Somewhere close there was the sound of animals of eating grass. Somewhere, their bells.
I walked down and heard beneath the dogs human voices and the bells of sheep. Several haggard dogs charged me at the bottom of the creek, one biting at my heel before the young shepherd loped over and pulled him away. I made a wide berth around the dogs and climbed up to the hut I had seen, passing through lines of laundry while chickens scattered between my feet.
The house had the appearance of something very old held together only by the lives that filled it, their breath and not the beams. Plastic sheeting - the white I had seen - covered the roof, pinned down by a piece of wood like a giant rubber band around the lid of a jar. The wood windows were old and long since bleached of their color, the stones still cool with the memory of the night, hard and compressed through years of waiting and weathering. The trail ended at the house’s wood gate.
I walked in and was immediately greeted by an old woman wrapped in black. She insisted I sit and take off my pack. Her daughter appeared from the doorway, sly smile on her face. They served me coffee with water and a slice of a sweet, dry cake. How far to Asprorema, I asked. They smiled. “This is Asprorema," they said.
A short while later the shepherds - the sons - appeared, milk sloshing hot in the buckets they carried. Their mother went to the back of the house and tended to the chicken baking in a subterranean pot. Beyond the porch the house was covered in the multi-colored occlusions of their lives - buckets, bowels, strings, pots, broken chairs, tools, cans of olive oil, rusted machine parts, spare nails and tufts of errant wool. All of it sprouted chaotic and profuse as mushrooms after rain.
Her daughter swept crumbs and shooed flies from the faded tablecloths and blankets draped over the seats. I was struck by the care in her hands as she brushed and cleared and patted the cloth—as if the small act of taking her hands to the cloth was the only thing that made the meal possible.
Lunch was greasy chicken—so perfect—with strong olives and silence. I asked about the trail over the mountains. Kostas, one of the sons, would drive me. I showed him the trail on the map. He dismissed it. It was no good, he said, he would show me a better trail to the top of the mountain. From there, I could hike the ridge back to Epiniana.
Yet again I threw my pack in the back of a muddy pick-up truck. The family had insisted that I weigh my pack before I leave—it was nearly twenty-five kilos and I braced myself for another rant about how I would die. They laughed. That I was crazy was a given. Maybe they just weren’t that impressed. Kostas and I rumbled away from the house through the hail of barking dogs chained to trees beside the road. Pieces were missing from their ears.
We drove on. In a little while we had crossed the creek and Kostas stopped where the road, little road as it was, turned to grass. "The trail is there," he said, pointing up at the vertical gulch, zigging and zagging his finger as if he were writing quite clearly on the mountain where I should go. All I could see was a towering wall of scrubby brush, loose soil, and broken scree. “It’s there, he said, it’s just very small. When I was young, ” he went on, “I could climb it in an hour.”
An hour later I was nowhere near the top. The trail faded in and out and most of the time I scrambled straight up the hill or over fields of broken rock, battling with thick, tangled masses of bristling pines or rivers of ankle-twisting shale. The innumerable small cuts on my hands, arms, and face stung with sweat.
The view to the other side of the range became more and more astounding, but at an hour and half in I had completely lost the trail and my boots were filled with the broken shoots and seeds of wild grasses, flowers, and fragrant thyme. Everywhere I stepped, the smell of it erupted from the broken stalks. It was the smell of being lost.
Near the top I hopped across boulders in the total, particular silence that marks the borders of the far highlands. My boots made hollow thumps on the enormous, misshapen boulders. Shadows of clouds raced and tussled and bled into each other on the bare heads of the mountains surrounding me.
At the top I was nearly blown off by the wind To my right, a ridge narrowed to nothing. Ahead, mountains of immensity, as if the gods had grabbed the earth and twisted it straight up. To my left, red and yellow-dappled grass swirled in the gusts, no sign of a trail, and nowhere, seemingly, to go.
Was there really a trail out that could stitch itself to these mountains? I had no choice but to go. The shepherds, I hoped, would keep this trail clearer than the Asprorema crossing. No roads could reach me now, and this was my best hope.
Everywhere else, the roads had brought only ruin to the trails. There were no paths preserved for and from joy. There were only paths of necessity. The Asprorema trail will likely soon disappear, and I flew down this highland trail as if it at any moment it would cease to be useful and vanish beneath my feet.
Several times it almost did. The steep drop on my right rarely crept back, and the trail had a bad habit of crossing loose scree and wobbling rocks. Every time I took my eyes from the trail, I slipped, came close to toppling, and barely regained my balance. Once I fell on my side, slid down the mountain for a moment and caught myself as the rocks bounced and cascaded down the gulch where I might have gone, filling the air with chalky dust and dying cacophony and a smell close to that of gunpowder as the rocks struck one another spilling sparks.
I got up and walked on. I passed a small stone shelter on a saddle and I felt the light begin to change—evening was coming, and I had only a guess of how far I had to go. Gold light started to condense like vapor on the peak of Plaka behind me, and the few pines I could see in the distance were rivaled in size by their shadows that tattooed the mountains with abstract blooms. But there were trees, which meant I was losing altitude and getting closer. The sun melted upon the gargantuan peak of Fteri to the my right, and I off I went.
A hour later the evening was longer still. If noon stands straight upon the earth touching only with its feet then evening reclines and wrinkles the earth with shadows like earth were wool. I paused in the ring of an old house, the trace of its stone foundation like an immense, empty fingerprint. The mountains cut up into the sky.
I came across three old men. In their hands they held combs and scissors at right angles forming a shape like an archaic sextant. They told me they were going to their sheep. I looked up to where they pointed. There was only the mountain and what moved upon it. But no movement seemed like much; everywhere was far. I could see no sheep but I heard them. They had become only their bells.
I descended to a small stone hut on a pinnacle around it wet earth pressed and distorted by many small prints. The hut, its roof bolted with metal, was scarcely larger than an American SUV. The doorway was dark. Hello? I called into it. There was no response. I walked a little closer to the dark door. A pair of eyes appeared, one atop the other, glinting a dull silver in the murk.
The old woman, dressed all in the black, sat up from her bed and whispered to me. “Come, ” she called, “come, ” as she teetered forward into the deep of the house, shifting from one foot to the other in a strange shuffling walk.
I entered and was swarmed with flies. My eyes took in the dark and I saw another old woman, shrunken into her black clothes, staring up at me from a simple bed—a wood platform with a grey blanket, its rough wool long since abraded into softness. The earth floor was uneven. A pot squatted over charcoals in the hearth. Garlic hung in long streams from the sagging wood beams. The white bulbs dipped into the swirls of flies beside bags with contents unknown and objects of strange utility, blades and hooks and scoops with empty hollows. Barrels clustered in the corner like frightened animals. Cats, silent as light, played in the slab of white evening cast slanting from the open door. The smell of earth. Whispers.
The sitting woman watched me from her bed, waving her wrinkle-warped hands like a maestro. My host pulled a square of cheese from a tub in the corner. It was soft and mild. She offered bread. It was stale, and she threw most of it to the cats who pawed at the pieces. Their hair was like fire in the cool light. Their tails and their bodies wrapped into each other and passed light between them. We sat. The flies swam in the languid air.
Sometime later one of her sons appeared carrying a bag of peaches. I ate one and he said he would drive me back to Epiniana. “There’s a road now, ” he said.
A little while later the son and I bounced and rocked down the road. His name was Stereo, and his English was about as good as my Greek, so we had a good time barely understanding each other. We discussed bears (they steal his honey; I had a good impression with lots of snarls), the NBA championships, the footpath that had been bulldozed into this awful road. “Blame Karamanlis! ” He said. “Tell him to come here and build more roads, better roads!”
All the roads I had seen, all the roads I had gotten sick of, and again I met someone who only wanted more of them. To me they were only destruction. To the people of the Agrafa, they were a sign of prosperity and connection—when they were good, anyway—and a sign of lingering poverty and isolation when they were poor. To connect with the world no longer meant destruction; it meant survival. It meant escape.
I came to the village of Agrafa in the morning. It looked little more than another village, newer, though, rebuilt from some nameless calamity that might only have been time. After all the distance, it felt hollow.
I left on the old footpath to Niala, one of the famed grazing grounds of the Sarakatsani herdsmen. The trail, though good in spots, was showing its neglect even worse than the trail to Asprorema: trees blocked the path every few dozen metres, and the embankments, once laid with stone, had collapsed in many spots and dribbled down the cliffs. How quickly the footpath had been forgotten, how quickly the mountain had taken it back. Below, the new forest road wound through the mountain, lost, embarrassed, and empty.
After an hour I reached another road. The bare crest that formed Niala’s western edge loomed naked and treeless above me. As I begun to walk up toward what I hoped was the trail, two men, probably middle-aged but eroded into men much older, appeared from the edge of the forest. I asked if they were going to Niala and they said yes. They easily picked out the worn trail and I followed them as we went up onto the cliff, immense and breaching from the earth as a whale breaks the surface of the sea, the sky running down the rock like water.
The men pulled reeds and grasses from between the rocks and stuffed them in their pockets or clutched them tightly in their sun-cracked hands, the soft melon-green heads of the grass shimmering silver in the sun and wind. They were harvesting tea.
The leading man’s partner stepped off the trail and evaporated into the slopes. It was just the two of us and the clouds going light and dark and painting their shadows upon us.
After a while we sat down and he lit a cigarette. He rubbed his pale knee with his boney, burned-dark hands. Nearly every bit of him seemed to have been desiccated away. He cursed his failing knee and he drank coffee from a Coke bottle while we watched the mountains far away over Asprorema soak up the blue haze and thick sun.
We climbed on through the hot, shattered rock. He kicked stones from the path and cleared the trail before us. He mumbled to himself with every miniature rockslide he sent barreling down the slopes. “No trail, no work, ” he said. “Without the trail, we cannot get tea. No tea, nothing. ” For tea, this trail existed. Nothing else kept it passable. I knew that we were climbing, ultimately, to only another road and if he could he would have taken a truck. He would have filled its bed with bags of tea, and stones would smother the trail.
Close to the top he stopped and pointed at a flat stone. Much of its face had flaked off and shattered on the ground but a few etchings remained—a Byzantine double-headed eagle, names, a few dates from deep in WWII or the Civil War. A few steps further and Niala unfurled beneath us, a great, slow-sloping basin that descended from an encompassing lip of sharp mountains into a narrow canyon. It rolled with grass. Below us, sheep swam tiny in the green, like fish deep in the sea at the edge of the touch of the sun.
The dun-colored road went on ahead, it stretched on behind, and I went on while he went the other way. I passed by goats, I passed through more green pastures high in the cupped hands of the mountains. I was saluted by a man waiting in a chair by his truck. “For tea! ” he said, pointing at the hills, his partners, I presumed, somewhere in the dark light of the evening. We compared walking sticks. His had an eagle carved in wood. I kept to the road until it vanished.
I followed ribbons tied to trees and a few cairns low to the ground as turtles. In a little over half an hour I came to the Portal of Agrafa, a narrow clef in the ridge dark and ragged. Someone had blocked the trail with a clot of shrubs and broken trees. I clambered over and walked through the narrow, gold-grass filled passage that wound down the ridge. Like two hands touching at the wrists, their fingers curved in toward one another, the rock walls of the portal curled over me as if they made to reach me but I passed swiftly as if I had never been. Looking back, the walls of the portal were black, the mountains through them viridian, and the air the color of a dust-covered lion.
I left the Agrafa. I walked down and crossed through a forest to a mountain refugee warm and smelling of cut wood. The bunks were bare but people had been there not so long ago. Candles half-melted into empty wine bottles. An axe cupped by red wood. Cups and bowls unwashed and clustered together for company. Names carved into the wood walls with a knife. We were here.
I stopped. I sat in the last light. I lit candles. Around their flames there was another light that was the evening like white moths. The cats that were the flames flicked their tails. Somewhere close there was the sound of animals of eating grass. Somewhere, their bells.
1.8.08
The Unwritten Land: Part I
When I told them where I was going, I was met with one of three responses: I would die, I was crazy, I would die crazy and though I had died alone, having tumbled down some precipice, everyone would know that I was crazy and it would be much discussed at my funeral. Sometimes they just laughed. Even if I could speak passable Greek, what would I say?
I went because the name of the place means unwritten. Since I had first heard of Agrafa, I knew I had to see it. The only question was when. In late June of this year, when I finally had my chance, the question then became how - that is, how I would die.
The Agrafa is a tight knot of mountains in central Greece stretching south from Karpenisi all the way north past Karditsa, bound on the west by the basin of Arta and on the east by the vast agricultural plains of Thessaly. It preserves its history in its name. During the 400-year Ottoman occupation of Greece, the mountains - and the fiercely independent people they sheltered - refused the empire’s soldiers, cartographers and, most importantly, its tax collectors. To the Ottomans, the land was neither accessible nor profitable. It became a blank spot on the map. It wrote its history in absence.
Left alone, the Greeks of the Agrafa were free to speak their language and record the lineage of their families. They tended to their flocks and the few crops that could survive the winters and the thin soil. They lived as if there was no outside world. It was a rumour whispered from the haze of the distance. It had very little to do with them; they had even less to do with it.
In more recent history, the mountains became known for their bandits and rebels and, later, as the modern age seeped into the Agrafa on dirt roads, for poverty and depopulation. Many have left and the ruins scattered throughout the region attest to the changes that have soaked up through the roots of the mountains, even to the smallest hut and its goats with their music of bells.
The modern world now has a little more to do with the Agrafa - plenty of timber, a bit of tourism - and many Agrafiotes have more and more to do with it. The distinction between these mountains and everything else - the line between the inked and the bare - has by now all but disappeared. The roads bleed their black, and the absence itself continues to be erased.
Ignoring the predictions of doom, I set out from Karpenisi and for six days walked north. There was too much road. Four hours out from Karpenisi I came to a dirt road that dwindled into a footpath paved with the golden leaves fallen from the oaks on its flanks. Ducking through the underbrush, constantly scraping spider webs from my face, I eventually made my way to the bottom of the Tavropos river canyon. On all sides the canyon shot nearly straight up and dressed itself in impenetrable forest.
I camped on the banks of the Tavropos and marvelled at the sudden profusion of life. That morning I had stumbled through a predawn Athens overcome with rigor mortis and now the trout sparked in the stream. As dusk ran out of breath, the air stilled and fireflies swarmed above the trout, each a mirror to the other.
In the morning I got lost. I walked several hours up, up, up a forest road above the village of Kerasohori, all the while gazing south into the far northern spurs of the southern Evritania range. I passed blue, pink and yellow boxes of beehives, the bees’ wings the loudest voices in the evening forest, their bodies like pollen alive in the gold light.
I finally crossed over the ridge and the mountains rocketed up all around me. I felt that I was finally getting somewhere, though I had little idea where I was. I scrambled onto some rocks overlooking the plunge into the valley and unfolded my map. I did this less to figure out where I was and more to show some distant mountain, if it happened to care, that I intended to go on.
A battered pickup truck wheezed towards me up the hill. A shepherd - must have traded his dogs for the truck - hopped out, hands behind his back, shoulders and chest slightly stooped in that Greek male all-so-knowing-and-in-charge posture. We bantered back and forth in pidgin Greek for a while. It wasn't until later the next day that I realised he was telling me that I was well off the path I needed - by at least five or six kilometres - and he must have been maddened by the stubborn, just-not getting it American. "Difficult mountains," he said, easing into his truck. “I go," he said, putting into the spaces around the words a multitude of things he’d rather not say: "You're dead."
That night I forgot his words as I watched the full moon, first orange as the setting sun, then white like an egg as it birthed itself slow from behind a peak, delicate as a new flower atop the dark spire of the mountain. Silence.
The next day I could see what the shepherd meant. The road abruptly stopped as it rounded the mountain's curve, affording superb views but nowhere to go but up. From the crest I could see the road I needed - far, far away, winding off into the distance, interlaced with ragged peaks. I was inspired, but I had to turn around.
An hour later I found myself at yet another crossroad holding my map open but not really looking at it. I held it as one might a sail, hoping to catch in a subtle breeze some ineffable suggestion made clear. It was the cardboard sign of a forlorn hitchhiker with no passing motorists to read it. Again, as if it were perfectly natural that these things should happen only as and when they do, another truck bounded down the dirt road and skidded to a halt beside me.
My pack lurched around in the bed of the truck as the three shepherds discussed business and smoked with the windows closed. At a few points, we crossed through herds of scrawny-looking sheep and the men commented on the poor quality of the filthy and sorry-looking animals, bright red dots spray-painted on their woollen bellies.
Unable to confirm the presence of water (they shrugged one after the other) or just how long it would take to walk to Marathos via the highland road (they shrugged in unison, the Greek shrug, where everything - eyes, chin, hands - drifts up), I opted for the paved road, yet again. It would get me there, nothing more.
It was a boring walk; I regretted turning back from the highlands. Eventually, the mouth of the river came into view, the canyon, narrow and radiantly green, winding off behind it. What my map had recorded as a little dirt road descending gently to the river had turned into an EU construction project. It had been widened, flattened, discoloured like a bruise. Workers tacked fencing to the earth to hold it back from falling apart. Construction trucks rumbled up the road behind them, the grey dust an ersatz stampede.
After 40 minutes of walking, I reached the valley floor where yet more construction workers, their browned skin white while they strained in sweat, toppled old electric poles into the river. After doing away with the old ones, they pulled taught the new lines pinned to the new steel poles, grunting and digging their feet in the earth, pulling at the cords that whipped in the hot air as if some great mammoth beast pulled back from the other end mute but fierce.
One of the workers asked where I was from. I said America and he gave me a thumbs-up. Another worker insisted I ride with him up the road, and I was happy to join him. We bounced along as the road narrowed then widened again, dumptrucks and trailers pulling in and out of the road and around each other in a crude, halting dance. "Obama?" he said to me, somewhere between a question and a statement. "Obama!" I replied. "No McCain, no Bush!" he said laughing, bouncing on his seat, his hands jumping over each other spinning the wheel.
He dropped me where the road split and shrunk. The river, once chrome-blue with tailings from the gravel pits that fed the new road, cleared and sparkled. The verdant canyon narrowed and the road climbed upon it, further peaks becoming visible all around me. Terraced fields sloughed down the mountain. Goats chewed absently at the abundant grass.
After two hours' walking, a strange sound emerged from the canyon behind me. A small van, goods, supplies and water barrels sticking out the windows and roped to the roof, wobbled up the raw-hewn road, its wild Gypsy music careening off the canyon walls. Its absurdity seemed to make it shrink. I waved at the driver, he waved back and the music dwindled as it wound up into the pass. A couple in a Kia pulling a trailer rattled past and I smiled. Some wild this was. Everywhere I looked, I could see the faint tracings of ancient footpaths. Like the cruelty of a museum, I could touch none of them. As if in mourning, the mountain sprouted flowers from their bones.
Another worker offered me a ride and I climbed into his oversized truck. He dropped me at the trailhead to Asprorema canyon - swallowed by the construction debris of the new paved road - and I made fast progress on a surprisingly clear path. The vista up-canyon erased all my frustrations. Here, as the sun coupled with the haze and soaked the canyon in gold, the glimmering unknown, the wild green, was what I had wanted all along. I almost jumped down the trail, eating it with my feet that dug like hands.
I spied a fox, rust and grey and silence, slip between the green-hued sheets of fading light. Evening rested in the boughs of the trees and bent them low over the path. Birds offered occasional songs that ended quickly. Sporadic breaks in the forest revealed sheer drops into the river below and emerald spires stretching up above into an ageing blue sky.
As I went on, it became clear the trail was used though not maintained. Huge trees fell across the trail and only across the trail as if they had meant to die sealing off the forest. Footprints cut into the hill above them. I followed them around the immense upturned roots.
After two hours of teasing, the trail swooped down to the riverbed and the abandoned settlement of Eklisia. Among the thick-waisted trees and round, river-rolled boulders, there was little to mark what was once the biggest town in the Asprorema valley. A few log beams leaned against a rock. Some stones gathered in a circle, but it might have been an accident of the river that had already collapsed a large portion of the soft bank, leaving roots to reach like beggars' hands. As I cleared debris to set my tent, I found a porcelain handle from a tea cup. It was the most that was left of the people of Eklisia.
I went because the name of the place means unwritten. Since I had first heard of Agrafa, I knew I had to see it. The only question was when. In late June of this year, when I finally had my chance, the question then became how - that is, how I would die.
The Agrafa is a tight knot of mountains in central Greece stretching south from Karpenisi all the way north past Karditsa, bound on the west by the basin of Arta and on the east by the vast agricultural plains of Thessaly. It preserves its history in its name. During the 400-year Ottoman occupation of Greece, the mountains - and the fiercely independent people they sheltered - refused the empire’s soldiers, cartographers and, most importantly, its tax collectors. To the Ottomans, the land was neither accessible nor profitable. It became a blank spot on the map. It wrote its history in absence.
Left alone, the Greeks of the Agrafa were free to speak their language and record the lineage of their families. They tended to their flocks and the few crops that could survive the winters and the thin soil. They lived as if there was no outside world. It was a rumour whispered from the haze of the distance. It had very little to do with them; they had even less to do with it.
In more recent history, the mountains became known for their bandits and rebels and, later, as the modern age seeped into the Agrafa on dirt roads, for poverty and depopulation. Many have left and the ruins scattered throughout the region attest to the changes that have soaked up through the roots of the mountains, even to the smallest hut and its goats with their music of bells.
The modern world now has a little more to do with the Agrafa - plenty of timber, a bit of tourism - and many Agrafiotes have more and more to do with it. The distinction between these mountains and everything else - the line between the inked and the bare - has by now all but disappeared. The roads bleed their black, and the absence itself continues to be erased.
Ignoring the predictions of doom, I set out from Karpenisi and for six days walked north. There was too much road. Four hours out from Karpenisi I came to a dirt road that dwindled into a footpath paved with the golden leaves fallen from the oaks on its flanks. Ducking through the underbrush, constantly scraping spider webs from my face, I eventually made my way to the bottom of the Tavropos river canyon. On all sides the canyon shot nearly straight up and dressed itself in impenetrable forest.
I camped on the banks of the Tavropos and marvelled at the sudden profusion of life. That morning I had stumbled through a predawn Athens overcome with rigor mortis and now the trout sparked in the stream. As dusk ran out of breath, the air stilled and fireflies swarmed above the trout, each a mirror to the other.
In the morning I got lost. I walked several hours up, up, up a forest road above the village of Kerasohori, all the while gazing south into the far northern spurs of the southern Evritania range. I passed blue, pink and yellow boxes of beehives, the bees’ wings the loudest voices in the evening forest, their bodies like pollen alive in the gold light.
I finally crossed over the ridge and the mountains rocketed up all around me. I felt that I was finally getting somewhere, though I had little idea where I was. I scrambled onto some rocks overlooking the plunge into the valley and unfolded my map. I did this less to figure out where I was and more to show some distant mountain, if it happened to care, that I intended to go on.
A battered pickup truck wheezed towards me up the hill. A shepherd - must have traded his dogs for the truck - hopped out, hands behind his back, shoulders and chest slightly stooped in that Greek male all-so-knowing-and-in-charge posture. We bantered back and forth in pidgin Greek for a while. It wasn't until later the next day that I realised he was telling me that I was well off the path I needed - by at least five or six kilometres - and he must have been maddened by the stubborn, just-not getting it American. "Difficult mountains," he said, easing into his truck. “I go," he said, putting into the spaces around the words a multitude of things he’d rather not say: "You're dead."
That night I forgot his words as I watched the full moon, first orange as the setting sun, then white like an egg as it birthed itself slow from behind a peak, delicate as a new flower atop the dark spire of the mountain. Silence.
The next day I could see what the shepherd meant. The road abruptly stopped as it rounded the mountain's curve, affording superb views but nowhere to go but up. From the crest I could see the road I needed - far, far away, winding off into the distance, interlaced with ragged peaks. I was inspired, but I had to turn around.
An hour later I found myself at yet another crossroad holding my map open but not really looking at it. I held it as one might a sail, hoping to catch in a subtle breeze some ineffable suggestion made clear. It was the cardboard sign of a forlorn hitchhiker with no passing motorists to read it. Again, as if it were perfectly natural that these things should happen only as and when they do, another truck bounded down the dirt road and skidded to a halt beside me.
My pack lurched around in the bed of the truck as the three shepherds discussed business and smoked with the windows closed. At a few points, we crossed through herds of scrawny-looking sheep and the men commented on the poor quality of the filthy and sorry-looking animals, bright red dots spray-painted on their woollen bellies.
Unable to confirm the presence of water (they shrugged one after the other) or just how long it would take to walk to Marathos via the highland road (they shrugged in unison, the Greek shrug, where everything - eyes, chin, hands - drifts up), I opted for the paved road, yet again. It would get me there, nothing more.
It was a boring walk; I regretted turning back from the highlands. Eventually, the mouth of the river came into view, the canyon, narrow and radiantly green, winding off behind it. What my map had recorded as a little dirt road descending gently to the river had turned into an EU construction project. It had been widened, flattened, discoloured like a bruise. Workers tacked fencing to the earth to hold it back from falling apart. Construction trucks rumbled up the road behind them, the grey dust an ersatz stampede.
After 40 minutes of walking, I reached the valley floor where yet more construction workers, their browned skin white while they strained in sweat, toppled old electric poles into the river. After doing away with the old ones, they pulled taught the new lines pinned to the new steel poles, grunting and digging their feet in the earth, pulling at the cords that whipped in the hot air as if some great mammoth beast pulled back from the other end mute but fierce.
One of the workers asked where I was from. I said America and he gave me a thumbs-up. Another worker insisted I ride with him up the road, and I was happy to join him. We bounced along as the road narrowed then widened again, dumptrucks and trailers pulling in and out of the road and around each other in a crude, halting dance. "Obama?" he said to me, somewhere between a question and a statement. "Obama!" I replied. "No McCain, no Bush!" he said laughing, bouncing on his seat, his hands jumping over each other spinning the wheel.
He dropped me where the road split and shrunk. The river, once chrome-blue with tailings from the gravel pits that fed the new road, cleared and sparkled. The verdant canyon narrowed and the road climbed upon it, further peaks becoming visible all around me. Terraced fields sloughed down the mountain. Goats chewed absently at the abundant grass.
After two hours' walking, a strange sound emerged from the canyon behind me. A small van, goods, supplies and water barrels sticking out the windows and roped to the roof, wobbled up the raw-hewn road, its wild Gypsy music careening off the canyon walls. Its absurdity seemed to make it shrink. I waved at the driver, he waved back and the music dwindled as it wound up into the pass. A couple in a Kia pulling a trailer rattled past and I smiled. Some wild this was. Everywhere I looked, I could see the faint tracings of ancient footpaths. Like the cruelty of a museum, I could touch none of them. As if in mourning, the mountain sprouted flowers from their bones.
Another worker offered me a ride and I climbed into his oversized truck. He dropped me at the trailhead to Asprorema canyon - swallowed by the construction debris of the new paved road - and I made fast progress on a surprisingly clear path. The vista up-canyon erased all my frustrations. Here, as the sun coupled with the haze and soaked the canyon in gold, the glimmering unknown, the wild green, was what I had wanted all along. I almost jumped down the trail, eating it with my feet that dug like hands.
I spied a fox, rust and grey and silence, slip between the green-hued sheets of fading light. Evening rested in the boughs of the trees and bent them low over the path. Birds offered occasional songs that ended quickly. Sporadic breaks in the forest revealed sheer drops into the river below and emerald spires stretching up above into an ageing blue sky.
As I went on, it became clear the trail was used though not maintained. Huge trees fell across the trail and only across the trail as if they had meant to die sealing off the forest. Footprints cut into the hill above them. I followed them around the immense upturned roots.
After two hours of teasing, the trail swooped down to the riverbed and the abandoned settlement of Eklisia. Among the thick-waisted trees and round, river-rolled boulders, there was little to mark what was once the biggest town in the Asprorema valley. A few log beams leaned against a rock. Some stones gathered in a circle, but it might have been an accident of the river that had already collapsed a large portion of the soft bank, leaving roots to reach like beggars' hands. As I cleared debris to set my tent, I found a porcelain handle from a tea cup. It was the most that was left of the people of Eklisia.
25.7.08
The thirst of concrete
Three weeks ago right around when I started work a heat wave rolled through Athens boiling away the city’s last reservoir of sanity. From the windows of the air-conditioned office of the Athens News the city looked depleted, its colors dehydrated into sepia tones, the mess of water heaters and satellite dishes atop the buildings like glinting globs of mercury at any moment ready to slosh down into the streets.
Down below on those streets, it felt like everyone had lost patience with everyone else—we all wanted out, and wanted out now. The heat clawed at everything that’s raw about downtown—the swarms of taxis irritable like agitated ants, the swirls of strange characters around Omonia (Harmony) square jittery and stenched, their bizarre, mirage-like appearances lended reality and weight—everything screaming, bus wheels smacking the pavement and trolley lines cracking like dry lightning the trolleys themselves like bugs their antennae bent back from heat while they scuttled to the curbs for shade. The air thicker carrying sound like water. Masses of crossing faces bewildered by the heat, their voices like cats fighting on the street.
Even the air conditioners were sweating, their perspiration dripping on the streets or condensing on the ceilings. Going from inside to outside gave me a headache, like my brain and body were pulling inside themselves trying to find a wisp of cool still preserved within. Going back in felt like a lie—you could almost see the fumes of the evaporating, smoggy city rising among the buildings like pillars of mud from a civilization long destroyed.
Greek flags hung limp on their poles like they’d been beaten, runny like eggs bruised blue like flesh. People sat on the steps of department stores catching the escaping cold that rolled along the floor and out into the street, the light of their cigarettes meek, the color appearing cool. The mountains around the city seemed to recede leaving but outlines like cardboard cutouts, the real mountains snuck away leaving their doubles to fool the city. The few scrappy trees on their slopes sucked back into the rocks like frightened eels into coral, parched, the city whole city parched.
Electricity demand in Athens roughly doubles during the summer months. Greece is also one of the least efficient and most thirsty users of water in Europe. Most of the forests around Athens have been burned or logged into non-existence, and Mt. Parnitha, the last major greenery in sight of the city, was burned last year and with it the forest that helped cool the city. It was a big story when many meteorologists predicted that the mountain’s destruction would suffocate Athens. It may not need to; everyone is already holding their breath.
All this combined with the Greeks’ notoriously poor environmental sense (though it’s become better and the media more alarmist) makes me wonder about the future of the city. Sometimes Athens does become only the biggest village in Greece, not just because of its character, but for how precarious it feels in times like these. It never seems so more likely that it will melt or die of thirst and sheer exhaustion, frantic and seizing as it heats with no way to throw off come night the fire of day. It drinks and drinks, and never is it sated.
It cooled for a few days, then burned again but there are days of clear light not so heavy like a hammer pounding nails of light in our eyes. There are days I don’t wake sweating. They are few; the sky turns silver with heat-maddened dust. I wake expecting fires. They burn and circle the city, the smoke awake before us still wreathing the city, the concrete morning, like a snake around its prey. The black clouds flee high into the sky by day, slowly unfurling from flames somewhere lost but finding their way to our gates.
Down below on those streets, it felt like everyone had lost patience with everyone else—we all wanted out, and wanted out now. The heat clawed at everything that’s raw about downtown—the swarms of taxis irritable like agitated ants, the swirls of strange characters around Omonia (Harmony) square jittery and stenched, their bizarre, mirage-like appearances lended reality and weight—everything screaming, bus wheels smacking the pavement and trolley lines cracking like dry lightning the trolleys themselves like bugs their antennae bent back from heat while they scuttled to the curbs for shade. The air thicker carrying sound like water. Masses of crossing faces bewildered by the heat, their voices like cats fighting on the street.
Even the air conditioners were sweating, their perspiration dripping on the streets or condensing on the ceilings. Going from inside to outside gave me a headache, like my brain and body were pulling inside themselves trying to find a wisp of cool still preserved within. Going back in felt like a lie—you could almost see the fumes of the evaporating, smoggy city rising among the buildings like pillars of mud from a civilization long destroyed.
Greek flags hung limp on their poles like they’d been beaten, runny like eggs bruised blue like flesh. People sat on the steps of department stores catching the escaping cold that rolled along the floor and out into the street, the light of their cigarettes meek, the color appearing cool. The mountains around the city seemed to recede leaving but outlines like cardboard cutouts, the real mountains snuck away leaving their doubles to fool the city. The few scrappy trees on their slopes sucked back into the rocks like frightened eels into coral, parched, the city whole city parched.
Electricity demand in Athens roughly doubles during the summer months. Greece is also one of the least efficient and most thirsty users of water in Europe. Most of the forests around Athens have been burned or logged into non-existence, and Mt. Parnitha, the last major greenery in sight of the city, was burned last year and with it the forest that helped cool the city. It was a big story when many meteorologists predicted that the mountain’s destruction would suffocate Athens. It may not need to; everyone is already holding their breath.
All this combined with the Greeks’ notoriously poor environmental sense (though it’s become better and the media more alarmist) makes me wonder about the future of the city. Sometimes Athens does become only the biggest village in Greece, not just because of its character, but for how precarious it feels in times like these. It never seems so more likely that it will melt or die of thirst and sheer exhaustion, frantic and seizing as it heats with no way to throw off come night the fire of day. It drinks and drinks, and never is it sated.
It cooled for a few days, then burned again but there are days of clear light not so heavy like a hammer pounding nails of light in our eyes. There are days I don’t wake sweating. They are few; the sky turns silver with heat-maddened dust. I wake expecting fires. They burn and circle the city, the smoke awake before us still wreathing the city, the concrete morning, like a snake around its prey. The black clouds flee high into the sky by day, slowly unfurling from flames somewhere lost but finding their way to our gates.
18.7.08
A Game and a Match
I had never seen a Greek cop run. Even walking seemed too energetic for them. Mostly they smoke and drink coffee sitting or slouched in their cars. That takes it out of them; they fall asleep with the seat leaned back.
But this cop was sprinting, his stomach like a ship’s keel parting the confused tourists from his path. What could ever convince a Greek cop to run, I wondered, following the crowd’s gaze. An ambiguously dark-skinned man dwindled to a dot down the street, trailing a twirling pink parasol behind him. The cop stomped to a halt and smoothed back his hair. Coffee break.
Only an immigrant could have made him run. Even more than the States, Europe is fixated by the issue of immigration. The Mediterranean countries especially, but Greece by yet another degree because it receives huddled masses from both Northern Africa and Asia: Africans cross from Egypt and Libya while tens of thousands from everywhere east of the Aegean flow from Turkey across narrow straits to islands like Samos, Lesvos, and Hios.
With a population of no more than twelve million, Greece cannot absorb these people discreetly or easily and it seems forced against its inclination to do something—but only the government, slow, stupid, and corrupt—is large enough to do anything. Of course it doesn’t, and the cop blurred in speed is only another symbol of doing nothing.
From the north, Albanians have entered Greece in larger numbers than any immigrant group, possibly over one million strong (the official government count is 550,000). Like the Mexicans in the United States, they form a core of legal and illegal labor that does the dirty and necessary jobs the Greeks don’t want to do. No people in Greece are despised and mistrusted more than the Albanians, who the Greeks blame for a surge in the crime rate and any other number of social ills. Still, the Greeks manage to reserve ire for the hundreds of thousands (112,000 in 2007, nearly double that of five years ago) of others from at least a hundred different nations.
Maybe most of all Greece resents that the majority of these immigrants are only looking to pass through Greece on to more liberal and prosperous parts of Europe—Germany, England, and Norway with its generous support for immigrants. Most end up stuck here, unable to leave and never legally arrived, as resentful of the Greeks as the Greeks are of them. For the Greeks, it’s as if the immigrants have snubbed them and their whole fragile pride already laced with fractures of insecurity: “Greece is not good enough for the Africans, the Indians, the Pakistanis.” Dark faces become yet another reminder to the Greeks that their country is still in most aspects a second-class citizen of Europe, in constant need of scolding and rescuing. When it isn’t rescued, as in the case of its immigration burden, it lets out as mighty a wail as it can muster, like a child abandoned in familiar space suddenly wrong and filled with strangers.
For the immigrants who choose to stay in Greece, the prejudices against them have only piled up and their chances of naturalization proportionally dwindled. Greek bureaucracy is one of those things both huge and empty, terrifying but impotent to cause anything but obstruction or negation. For those who sincerely desire to become Greek citizens—or for their children to become citizens—there is little to do but languish and wait, receiving rejection after rejection for years without explanation and without much hope. A new bill being pushed through the government would allow children of immigrants to obtain long-term resident status, a step up if it passes but still a few steps short of the immigrant families’ ideal.
Most who pass through Athens see its immigrants as nothing more than the street vendors who appear in the morning burdened with sacks of cheap and stolen goods and who by night fade away into the sprawling city as if absorbed like water into a plant, this city’s streets like its naked grey roots that leech from those who live upon them. They sell sunglasses, purses, pirated CDs, junk and trifles that anyone at some whim might want; and at the same whim of those who see, they vanish.
That’s how I knew them for a while too, until I journeyed down Sofokleos street, where at its far end the immigrant community coalesces and pulses, parcels of the world torn from the ground and stuck back in out of order and stuffed into a few blocks, faces collections of maps their lines outdated, the street lettered with the languages of home, home again over and over and different all the time, in a bag of dates from Egypt or a handful of chickpeas from Iran. Home, home all over again and again, while the police cruise the street, pushing the bodies bargaining and squatting with their bumpers, never leaving their cars, never opening their windows, never to smell the wet grime and garlic or hear the common language of noise.
But Sofokleos ends too and I know there are immigrants in this city who have become at home here. The full picture of immigration is not just its desperation or tragedy—Europe sustaining its self-image as the promised land with the scores of dead Africans thrown bloated from a boat lost at sea—however magnified it may become on the front page of any paper or upon the banner of any protest inked in red. Immigration is the success too, the finding, the arriving that is more than setting foot upon the land. The journey is not the destination this time; home is left for home.
For that reason I wandered into Athens’ northern suburbs for the championship soccer game between the Nigerian and Cameroonian immigrant teams. The game was boring but the crowd made it, whooping, cheering and pounding drums when their team came within fifty yards of the opponent’s goal. A rare score caused an eruption that shot across the suburbs and the leafy field of grape vines beyond the stadium.
The Africans danced and sang in the evening smacking their feet on the plastic stadium chairs and a man in wood mask with a mane of braided rope ran laps around the field bare chested, bare footed clapping his hands and taunting the other team. The crowd was resolutely middle-class; the play calling was in English, French, and Greek; the refs were Greek; and the mayor of the municipality sat between the presidents of the Nigerian and Cameroonian communities.
Few Greeks were in the stands, about five pale faces total including mine, but to see people not just hanging on but hanging out felt good. Beside me, a man swept the dust from his seat with a napkin before he sat down and smoothed the wrinkles in his tight black jeans. Somehow, even vanity was a comfort. It could be afforded, there was room for being ridiculous because life wasn’t crushed by the enormous weight of the necessary. These people, it seemed, it felt, had made it: Their children, limp and soft and loose in their chubby skin, slept upon their parents’ laps.
It seems strange that Greeks wouldn’t get it. When the millions of Anatolian Greeks fled Turkey after Greece’s failed invasion and the destruction of Smyrna, they were treated like strangers by the mainland Greeks. They both spoke Greek, but it sounded different as it hit their ears and that was enough.
How long have Greeks lived in two lands at once, Greek to their core, whatever that means, but speaking not just English but American, Canadian, and Australian, tasting upon their lips the consonants of a new home? How many Greeks have been immigrants themselves? Greece’s biggest export has always been its own people. Many made their way as the Africans do today and faced the same scorn that they now pour back upon their own immigrants.
It seems the way of people. The other day when I was locked outside of our apartment building I met Minda, a Filipino woman who has lived in Greece the past eighteen years, learning the language from the Greek children who she cared for while their parents were away. She was a little leery of me at first, she explained, because a man stole her purse the other day, taking with him her residence permit and ID. She’ll have to pay a 100 Euros for a new one, whenever they get around to issuing it. “It’s not like it was before here in Greece,” she told me. “It was so safe here before, but now there are criminals here, Bulgarians, Albanians. All these new immigrants.”
But this cop was sprinting, his stomach like a ship’s keel parting the confused tourists from his path. What could ever convince a Greek cop to run, I wondered, following the crowd’s gaze. An ambiguously dark-skinned man dwindled to a dot down the street, trailing a twirling pink parasol behind him. The cop stomped to a halt and smoothed back his hair. Coffee break.
Only an immigrant could have made him run. Even more than the States, Europe is fixated by the issue of immigration. The Mediterranean countries especially, but Greece by yet another degree because it receives huddled masses from both Northern Africa and Asia: Africans cross from Egypt and Libya while tens of thousands from everywhere east of the Aegean flow from Turkey across narrow straits to islands like Samos, Lesvos, and Hios.
With a population of no more than twelve million, Greece cannot absorb these people discreetly or easily and it seems forced against its inclination to do something—but only the government, slow, stupid, and corrupt—is large enough to do anything. Of course it doesn’t, and the cop blurred in speed is only another symbol of doing nothing.
From the north, Albanians have entered Greece in larger numbers than any immigrant group, possibly over one million strong (the official government count is 550,000). Like the Mexicans in the United States, they form a core of legal and illegal labor that does the dirty and necessary jobs the Greeks don’t want to do. No people in Greece are despised and mistrusted more than the Albanians, who the Greeks blame for a surge in the crime rate and any other number of social ills. Still, the Greeks manage to reserve ire for the hundreds of thousands (112,000 in 2007, nearly double that of five years ago) of others from at least a hundred different nations.
Maybe most of all Greece resents that the majority of these immigrants are only looking to pass through Greece on to more liberal and prosperous parts of Europe—Germany, England, and Norway with its generous support for immigrants. Most end up stuck here, unable to leave and never legally arrived, as resentful of the Greeks as the Greeks are of them. For the Greeks, it’s as if the immigrants have snubbed them and their whole fragile pride already laced with fractures of insecurity: “Greece is not good enough for the Africans, the Indians, the Pakistanis.” Dark faces become yet another reminder to the Greeks that their country is still in most aspects a second-class citizen of Europe, in constant need of scolding and rescuing. When it isn’t rescued, as in the case of its immigration burden, it lets out as mighty a wail as it can muster, like a child abandoned in familiar space suddenly wrong and filled with strangers.
For the immigrants who choose to stay in Greece, the prejudices against them have only piled up and their chances of naturalization proportionally dwindled. Greek bureaucracy is one of those things both huge and empty, terrifying but impotent to cause anything but obstruction or negation. For those who sincerely desire to become Greek citizens—or for their children to become citizens—there is little to do but languish and wait, receiving rejection after rejection for years without explanation and without much hope. A new bill being pushed through the government would allow children of immigrants to obtain long-term resident status, a step up if it passes but still a few steps short of the immigrant families’ ideal.
Most who pass through Athens see its immigrants as nothing more than the street vendors who appear in the morning burdened with sacks of cheap and stolen goods and who by night fade away into the sprawling city as if absorbed like water into a plant, this city’s streets like its naked grey roots that leech from those who live upon them. They sell sunglasses, purses, pirated CDs, junk and trifles that anyone at some whim might want; and at the same whim of those who see, they vanish.
That’s how I knew them for a while too, until I journeyed down Sofokleos street, where at its far end the immigrant community coalesces and pulses, parcels of the world torn from the ground and stuck back in out of order and stuffed into a few blocks, faces collections of maps their lines outdated, the street lettered with the languages of home, home again over and over and different all the time, in a bag of dates from Egypt or a handful of chickpeas from Iran. Home, home all over again and again, while the police cruise the street, pushing the bodies bargaining and squatting with their bumpers, never leaving their cars, never opening their windows, never to smell the wet grime and garlic or hear the common language of noise.
But Sofokleos ends too and I know there are immigrants in this city who have become at home here. The full picture of immigration is not just its desperation or tragedy—Europe sustaining its self-image as the promised land with the scores of dead Africans thrown bloated from a boat lost at sea—however magnified it may become on the front page of any paper or upon the banner of any protest inked in red. Immigration is the success too, the finding, the arriving that is more than setting foot upon the land. The journey is not the destination this time; home is left for home.
For that reason I wandered into Athens’ northern suburbs for the championship soccer game between the Nigerian and Cameroonian immigrant teams. The game was boring but the crowd made it, whooping, cheering and pounding drums when their team came within fifty yards of the opponent’s goal. A rare score caused an eruption that shot across the suburbs and the leafy field of grape vines beyond the stadium.
The Africans danced and sang in the evening smacking their feet on the plastic stadium chairs and a man in wood mask with a mane of braided rope ran laps around the field bare chested, bare footed clapping his hands and taunting the other team. The crowd was resolutely middle-class; the play calling was in English, French, and Greek; the refs were Greek; and the mayor of the municipality sat between the presidents of the Nigerian and Cameroonian communities.
Few Greeks were in the stands, about five pale faces total including mine, but to see people not just hanging on but hanging out felt good. Beside me, a man swept the dust from his seat with a napkin before he sat down and smoothed the wrinkles in his tight black jeans. Somehow, even vanity was a comfort. It could be afforded, there was room for being ridiculous because life wasn’t crushed by the enormous weight of the necessary. These people, it seemed, it felt, had made it: Their children, limp and soft and loose in their chubby skin, slept upon their parents’ laps.
It seems strange that Greeks wouldn’t get it. When the millions of Anatolian Greeks fled Turkey after Greece’s failed invasion and the destruction of Smyrna, they were treated like strangers by the mainland Greeks. They both spoke Greek, but it sounded different as it hit their ears and that was enough.
How long have Greeks lived in two lands at once, Greek to their core, whatever that means, but speaking not just English but American, Canadian, and Australian, tasting upon their lips the consonants of a new home? How many Greeks have been immigrants themselves? Greece’s biggest export has always been its own people. Many made their way as the Africans do today and faced the same scorn that they now pour back upon their own immigrants.
It seems the way of people. The other day when I was locked outside of our apartment building I met Minda, a Filipino woman who has lived in Greece the past eighteen years, learning the language from the Greek children who she cared for while their parents were away. She was a little leery of me at first, she explained, because a man stole her purse the other day, taking with him her residence permit and ID. She’ll have to pay a 100 Euros for a new one, whenever they get around to issuing it. “It’s not like it was before here in Greece,” she told me. “It was so safe here before, but now there are criminals here, Bulgarians, Albanians. All these new immigrants.”
12.7.08
Life on Cemetery Street
One evening in the neighborhood of Metz I came across a white door that was bare but for a wilting pile of white flowers laid in the nook at its feet. Beside it a white candle at its side burned pale and silent. I never knew why they were there, the door never opened, and the next day they were gone.
There is a ritual to death that requires the services and skills of those who live on or near Anaspiostisis Street, off of which I too now live. There’s nothing cynical to it—people die and when they do it is necessary to close their lives with a ceremony that marks a passage as one marks a ship’s log, though the destination is left blank. Flowers become the stamps, wood felled now wrapped around them the signatures of those who have embarked, as if to say “a border has been crossed, here is proof.”
Anaspiostisis street is flanked by tall black pines whose thin needles gather in the pots of flowers below them. Once you’ve passed the usual peripteros and mini-markets at its far end, separated from the Temple of Olympian Zeus by a wall, a fence, and another wall of traffic, you’ll begin to see the funeral shops.
In typical Greek fashion, there is no one stop-shop for all-inclusive service. No one does everything, or even two things. The first shop, just around the corner from my building, is usually empty but for a pudgy Greek man at his desk. There are no products, there are no shelves to stack them upon. But every now and then a shining new wood casket appears out of the backroom behind the desk. Beside the office, the smell of hot cut wood leaks out visible as sawdust.
Just up the road, the Studio Vonzidis (Fotoceramicas) pile their windows with samples of engraved angels in marble or brass mourning and supine over the portraits of the dead rendered in silver or stone or framed in hard flowers empty, candle-cradles dangling from their stiff fingers. Jesus in three sizes looks down at himself. Epitaphs speak out at passerby and the faces of the unknown dead smile on as if they were selling some product just out of frame. Who were they, I wonder, and did they know what would become of them? What did they think at that moment the photo was snapped? Did they know they would be buried in a storefront? Perhaps at night, their smiles switch off with the lights.
These Studio Vonzidis cluster together around the two shops that carve the headstones in crosses or slabs as well as the occasional busts that gather outside their small quarry yards like children waiting for the morning bus.
Opposite them stand the statues of whole figures carved by a man shirtless and hairy covered in white dust surrounded by half-men, half bodies, half in rock or suspended from chains. An armless, coarse-skinned woman turns her featureless face toward the corner where the old men of the flower shop prune and arrange their goods, the occasional bright burst of a daisy overcome by the long-petaled white orchids. Their feet snap on the broken and discarded stems that cover the floor. Just down a little side street, other men prepare the white wreaths carried in the stead of those could nor attend, carefully pinning the white petals to the round rolls of white linen.
Behind blank doors opposite others print the white banners running their hands through the reams of white cloth around them the dismembered letters they use to stamp the banners with names. In the company of the letters are tiny figures of saints blessing from their small mirrored plates splotched with ink.
It is custom in most of Greece to bury the dead for a certain period of time to give the flesh away and then to exhume the bones and take them for storage in a simple small box to share a slot in the family tomb. In the Peloponnese, it only takes two years for bodies to decay. In Northern Greece, it can take up to six years. The first cemetery includes a mausoleum for the bones of the dead whose families cannot afford a separate crypt. Most the boxes, piled a story high separated by narrow rows, have spots to tack flowers or light small candles.
One day I arrived at the cemetery just prior to a funeral. I passed through the gates like upright hollow coffins into the yard paved white and wide divided in the center by a row of black pines, flanked on both sides by the ostentatious tombs of the cemetery’s wealthy and famous, high neo-classical domes and Dorian columns.
On that day the mourners still had business to do inside the church but the pallbearers and wreath-bearers—young men nearly slinking down through their clothes into puddles on the ground, old men with their bulbous stomachs testing the absolute limits of the buttons on their starched white shirts—were all smoking, all waiting outside and sitting clicking rosary beads or leaning on their scooters.
Eventually the mourners emerged from the small church and the men in their white shirts gathered up the white garlands and their faces were hidden behind the flowers with only their black legs and feet showing below. Other took the coffin upon their shoulders and they shuffled to the grave followed by the walking wreaths and the mourners strolling so casual, motorcycle helmets tucked in their arms and dangling from their fingers, the old women laughing at some joke understood silently by all in procession.
They buried him and said his name. They walked away. And the door was left open and white. Back on the street, a taxi idled by, its passenger an orchid bright red.
There is a ritual to death that requires the services and skills of those who live on or near Anaspiostisis Street, off of which I too now live. There’s nothing cynical to it—people die and when they do it is necessary to close their lives with a ceremony that marks a passage as one marks a ship’s log, though the destination is left blank. Flowers become the stamps, wood felled now wrapped around them the signatures of those who have embarked, as if to say “a border has been crossed, here is proof.”
Anaspiostisis street is flanked by tall black pines whose thin needles gather in the pots of flowers below them. Once you’ve passed the usual peripteros and mini-markets at its far end, separated from the Temple of Olympian Zeus by a wall, a fence, and another wall of traffic, you’ll begin to see the funeral shops.
In typical Greek fashion, there is no one stop-shop for all-inclusive service. No one does everything, or even two things. The first shop, just around the corner from my building, is usually empty but for a pudgy Greek man at his desk. There are no products, there are no shelves to stack them upon. But every now and then a shining new wood casket appears out of the backroom behind the desk. Beside the office, the smell of hot cut wood leaks out visible as sawdust.
Just up the road, the Studio Vonzidis (Fotoceramicas) pile their windows with samples of engraved angels in marble or brass mourning and supine over the portraits of the dead rendered in silver or stone or framed in hard flowers empty, candle-cradles dangling from their stiff fingers. Jesus in three sizes looks down at himself. Epitaphs speak out at passerby and the faces of the unknown dead smile on as if they were selling some product just out of frame. Who were they, I wonder, and did they know what would become of them? What did they think at that moment the photo was snapped? Did they know they would be buried in a storefront? Perhaps at night, their smiles switch off with the lights.
These Studio Vonzidis cluster together around the two shops that carve the headstones in crosses or slabs as well as the occasional busts that gather outside their small quarry yards like children waiting for the morning bus.
Opposite them stand the statues of whole figures carved by a man shirtless and hairy covered in white dust surrounded by half-men, half bodies, half in rock or suspended from chains. An armless, coarse-skinned woman turns her featureless face toward the corner where the old men of the flower shop prune and arrange their goods, the occasional bright burst of a daisy overcome by the long-petaled white orchids. Their feet snap on the broken and discarded stems that cover the floor. Just down a little side street, other men prepare the white wreaths carried in the stead of those could nor attend, carefully pinning the white petals to the round rolls of white linen.
Behind blank doors opposite others print the white banners running their hands through the reams of white cloth around them the dismembered letters they use to stamp the banners with names. In the company of the letters are tiny figures of saints blessing from their small mirrored plates splotched with ink.
It is custom in most of Greece to bury the dead for a certain period of time to give the flesh away and then to exhume the bones and take them for storage in a simple small box to share a slot in the family tomb. In the Peloponnese, it only takes two years for bodies to decay. In Northern Greece, it can take up to six years. The first cemetery includes a mausoleum for the bones of the dead whose families cannot afford a separate crypt. Most the boxes, piled a story high separated by narrow rows, have spots to tack flowers or light small candles.
One day I arrived at the cemetery just prior to a funeral. I passed through the gates like upright hollow coffins into the yard paved white and wide divided in the center by a row of black pines, flanked on both sides by the ostentatious tombs of the cemetery’s wealthy and famous, high neo-classical domes and Dorian columns.
On that day the mourners still had business to do inside the church but the pallbearers and wreath-bearers—young men nearly slinking down through their clothes into puddles on the ground, old men with their bulbous stomachs testing the absolute limits of the buttons on their starched white shirts—were all smoking, all waiting outside and sitting clicking rosary beads or leaning on their scooters.
Eventually the mourners emerged from the small church and the men in their white shirts gathered up the white garlands and their faces were hidden behind the flowers with only their black legs and feet showing below. Other took the coffin upon their shoulders and they shuffled to the grave followed by the walking wreaths and the mourners strolling so casual, motorcycle helmets tucked in their arms and dangling from their fingers, the old women laughing at some joke understood silently by all in procession.
They buried him and said his name. They walked away. And the door was left open and white. Back on the street, a taxi idled by, its passenger an orchid bright red.
1.7.08
Chimes of a Clock
Athens I see as a city forever in the middle of its life between its rise and its decline moving always but always too in suspense and it tells not whether it is falling or soaring. I could say this of any city that could warm itself with the heat it gives off as it cools at dusk, but in Athens, as I have said before, this sense is necessarily more acute and pervasive.
Most people come here to admire Athens for what it was and most—including me at times—at best tolerate it for what it is. It’s a difficult city to explore, and it’s impossible to consider its modern moment sundered from its ancient moment. But this nagging need to the compare the city’s moments to one another has the effect of joining them in a continuity of separations, like daubing the dry lines in a watercolor so the wet colors intertwine themselves.
Even at dawn the city sounds warm as if has already been swinging itself around for hours. The sounds of birds—doves, and others I do not know that click and fluoresce—mingle easily with the horns of taxis and grumble of motorcycles slowing and speeding as they stitch the traffic together, as if the streets were a wound and they the needles their thread their exhaust and the noise I wish would just for once cease. But it never does. It’s a still life of movement, the steadiness of the changing landscape of cars as color of the streets.
The sound of Athens in the noon of its day is to me the squeak, stick and slip of shoes, that soft parting sound of shoes on the heat-made soft asphalt, thousands melting just a little into the street and back to their feet like a deliberately slowed ending to a kiss that is itself a kiss in the lingering way the lips part.
Marble, however, is solid but still sounds wet when it’s hot and the Acropolis sounds like a basketball court in a close game but it looks like the sorriest you’ve ever seen: all the players ill-dressed and heatstricken gazing up and spinning around looking for the hoop on any one of the many immense white pillars or sitting on a bench developing new and fascinating patterns of sweat in their soaked-through shirts. They map Greek islands on their backs and sea monsters on their bellies.
And maybe it is in its sounds that Athens repeats itself the most—the little grocery carts wheeled by the old women on the way to Laiki, their thin aluminum frames bouncing on the grooved sidewalks, or the sliding tap of the laundry racks pulled out on onto the balconies and unfurled, or the smallest waterfall of droplets trickling from some apartment above, from who knows what source, and the guessing that comes from the patter of its sound going in and out. Can I make it under without getting dripped on? By its sound is it falling on the street or the sidewalk? Is it one drop every three seconds or two? I’ve learned now to ignore it and get wet from that sound.
Yet I’m convinced that’s there’s variety in this grey, tan, and off-white sea. Below it on the street around some blind turn or behind some over-plump dumpster there’s streetart worth thousands given for free and intersections of color and line spontaneous and unexpected and vanished so simply as when a cat wakes and slips away. This city changes with the slant of the castings of light, I swear it. So briefly, the color of the sunset through pollution is the same as the Tang-orange glow that alights the Parthenon at night, both of them in equal dimness and a shade that bequeaths them one color, the artificial and natural seen through each other as the present sees the past, and can, at moments, believe it sees itself. Can the past look at us? Does this city imagine what it must look like to the eyes of the one that came before it? Would the past recognize itself in today?
The way Athens was settled, swelled unthoughtfully and unplanned by rural refugees fleeing decimation after WWII and the Greek Civil War, suggests that this modern city had little time to notice its beginning and yet also had little choice but to depend upon the civilization that preceded it. It was born middle-aged and a little weary—and when it looks back for a mythical vanished youth all it can see, lit up every night in its very center, is a very much vanished old age, its bones worshipped.
It cannot call itself young, and it cannot call itself old, and so it searches for the sound of its name. I’ve written about this before but I find myself thinking about it again and again and for whatever reason I try to listen to city and hear what it says even when it speaks in a wordless language that leaves me feeling more foreign than ever. Cities alienate, but Athens, I feel, more than many others faces everyday the alienation of itself. In its sounds, in its voice, its discrete selves are never so parted, but in its voice it is also never so conjoined, as if the birds and horns were calling to each other though they cannot at all hear one another.
Sean
Most people come here to admire Athens for what it was and most—including me at times—at best tolerate it for what it is. It’s a difficult city to explore, and it’s impossible to consider its modern moment sundered from its ancient moment. But this nagging need to the compare the city’s moments to one another has the effect of joining them in a continuity of separations, like daubing the dry lines in a watercolor so the wet colors intertwine themselves.
Even at dawn the city sounds warm as if has already been swinging itself around for hours. The sounds of birds—doves, and others I do not know that click and fluoresce—mingle easily with the horns of taxis and grumble of motorcycles slowing and speeding as they stitch the traffic together, as if the streets were a wound and they the needles their thread their exhaust and the noise I wish would just for once cease. But it never does. It’s a still life of movement, the steadiness of the changing landscape of cars as color of the streets.
The sound of Athens in the noon of its day is to me the squeak, stick and slip of shoes, that soft parting sound of shoes on the heat-made soft asphalt, thousands melting just a little into the street and back to their feet like a deliberately slowed ending to a kiss that is itself a kiss in the lingering way the lips part.
Marble, however, is solid but still sounds wet when it’s hot and the Acropolis sounds like a basketball court in a close game but it looks like the sorriest you’ve ever seen: all the players ill-dressed and heatstricken gazing up and spinning around looking for the hoop on any one of the many immense white pillars or sitting on a bench developing new and fascinating patterns of sweat in their soaked-through shirts. They map Greek islands on their backs and sea monsters on their bellies.
And maybe it is in its sounds that Athens repeats itself the most—the little grocery carts wheeled by the old women on the way to Laiki, their thin aluminum frames bouncing on the grooved sidewalks, or the sliding tap of the laundry racks pulled out on onto the balconies and unfurled, or the smallest waterfall of droplets trickling from some apartment above, from who knows what source, and the guessing that comes from the patter of its sound going in and out. Can I make it under without getting dripped on? By its sound is it falling on the street or the sidewalk? Is it one drop every three seconds or two? I’ve learned now to ignore it and get wet from that sound.
Yet I’m convinced that’s there’s variety in this grey, tan, and off-white sea. Below it on the street around some blind turn or behind some over-plump dumpster there’s streetart worth thousands given for free and intersections of color and line spontaneous and unexpected and vanished so simply as when a cat wakes and slips away. This city changes with the slant of the castings of light, I swear it. So briefly, the color of the sunset through pollution is the same as the Tang-orange glow that alights the Parthenon at night, both of them in equal dimness and a shade that bequeaths them one color, the artificial and natural seen through each other as the present sees the past, and can, at moments, believe it sees itself. Can the past look at us? Does this city imagine what it must look like to the eyes of the one that came before it? Would the past recognize itself in today?
The way Athens was settled, swelled unthoughtfully and unplanned by rural refugees fleeing decimation after WWII and the Greek Civil War, suggests that this modern city had little time to notice its beginning and yet also had little choice but to depend upon the civilization that preceded it. It was born middle-aged and a little weary—and when it looks back for a mythical vanished youth all it can see, lit up every night in its very center, is a very much vanished old age, its bones worshipped.
It cannot call itself young, and it cannot call itself old, and so it searches for the sound of its name. I’ve written about this before but I find myself thinking about it again and again and for whatever reason I try to listen to city and hear what it says even when it speaks in a wordless language that leaves me feeling more foreign than ever. Cities alienate, but Athens, I feel, more than many others faces everyday the alienation of itself. In its sounds, in its voice, its discrete selves are never so parted, but in its voice it is also never so conjoined, as if the birds and horns were calling to each other though they cannot at all hear one another.
Sean
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