Most of the time Athens does not feel like an ancient city. I live about 20 minutes walk from the base of the Acropolis, but it does not feel very present when I’m walking around the streets of Pagrati. Occasionally whilst walking along Ardittou I look back and see the columns of the Parthenon and I am slightly surprised – what is that doing there? My life is mostly the roar of traffic up Vasileos Konstantinou on the way to work, the pitted and broken pavements, overflowing dumpsters, iced coffee and cigarettes in the morning on Alexandras.
In this way Athens has more in common with the ancient cities of the Middle East than those of Europe, I think. I have never been to Baghdad or Damascus (perhaps the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world), but these look like cities that wear their great age lightly, or clad with reinforced concrete. In Athens, if you take a bus through the miles and miles of apartment blocks that extend across the Attic plain, the Acropolis seems as far away as it does in Bristol.
Despite this, it is a city that feels like it has been here forever because it embodies the archetype of a city. When I first visited everything about the place screamed “city” to me, in a way that no English town does. London is a grand and elegant city partially because it is 40% green space – Athens gives you little respite from its unrelenting urbanity. Philopappou is one of the few sanctuaries from the heat and the concrete in summer, elsewhere you will see stone, concrete, brick, metal, cars, buses, trams, broken up only by the bitter orange trees lining the pavement. Look below at the satellite images of the two cities for comparison:
Obviously England is a much greener country than Greece throughout at the year, but look closely at the difference in housing density – Athens is a sea of grey, London liberally speckled with gaps in the housing. (These images are not to scale, London is much bigger.)
Bristol, where I was born and spent my formative years, hardly warrants the term “city” when seen from the view of London and Athens. At the most generous of definitions it has a population of about one million. And this is very generous as it includes places such as Frampton Cotterell, which is the countryside, and firmly within south Gloucestershire. Growing up there were very few places that it was not possible to walk to in a reasonable time – which is lucky because the public transport was expensive and often non-existent. The smallness of the city was exacerbated by the fact that we basically refused to go to South Bristol, which for all I know is a lovely place. We went to the same pubs and clubs week in week out: the Duke of York, the Miner’s Arms, occasionally the Farm, the Cadbury, the Golden Lion, the Plough, Lakota, the Black Swan, Cosies, the Black Swan, the Black Swan… the Black Swan. (Apologies if I’m boring any non-Bristolians).
Despite its limits, Bristol is undoubtedly the best city in England and if I had to go back to live in the UK I can’t imagine living anywhere but there. It has a huge variation of things for such a small place, the people are possible the friendliest in southern England (I know that doesn’t sound like it’s saying much). But moving to Athens (after a colourful sojourn in Colchester) was a shock. For the first time I was living in a city. Huge, dirty, monstrous and with more than one area to go out of an evening.
St. John’s on the Wall, Old City, Bristol
Bristol, conversely, does feel like an old city. Its history is very visible. Much of the housing stock around the centre is Victorian, the unused shipping cranes stand idle by the Floating Harbour and the nails outside the Corn Exchange still stand – where tradesmen used to shake hands to cement a deal. (The origin of the phrase “on the nail”). The street pattern around Broad Street and Corn Street displays the route of the Saxon city walls. Also pleasing is how the Church of St. John on the Wall at the end of Broad Street, with its old city gate, has been built into the fabric of the modern buildings and stands still. It is not a museum site but a part of the living city. Despite all of the modernisations of the city centre the rivers Avon and Frome are still very much part of the city and is a reminder of the past.
Athens on the other hand has covered up its rivers. My mission to find a possible scene for Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus led me to the intersection outside the Athens Hilton. In fact the river would once have flowed a couple of blocks from my house, along what is now Vasileos Konstantinou and in front of Kalimarmaro (the Panathenaic Stadium).
The River Illisos 1900 – my house would be out of frame to the right, although it wouldn’t have existed at the time
Athens has grown so enormously over the last century that the ancient centre has almost been swallowed up. Much remains, but it is behind glass and fences, preserved as museum relics, separated from the life of the city. Few people know that there were once people living on the Acropolis and the Parthenon itself had been at various times a church and a mosque. Old photos show a café nestled between the columns of the Temple of Olympian Zeus. This was all cleared away in favour of a pure vision of 5th century BC Athens around which the modern city must pick its way, careful not to disturb the past. An constant reminder of this is the excruciatingly slow progress of the new metro line, which must stop every two metres because a new archaeological site as been uncovered. This is perhaps symbolic of the uneasy and complicated relationship Greeks have with their illustrious history.
Clearly it is great that the Greeks take such great pains to preserve their past, my complaint is that the time period is arbitrary and was determined by foreign philhellenes. Millions of people every year visit the Acropolis and its museum, but when I went to visit the wonderful Christian and Byzantine Museum, my companions and I were the only visitors. The Byzantine and Ottoman history of the city is far more enmeshed within the fabric of the city but, for various reasons, they are not promoted with the same energy as the ancient stuff. The presentation of Athens to the rest of the world is as if nothing happened for 2,500 years. Likewise, little thought is given to preserving the beautiful 1930s architecture of the city – the crumbling state of our house is testament to this.
Lucy and I outside the beautiful but crumbling house that we share with Anastasia
So I find myself myself, like the Greeks, living in the shadow of history and also within history itself, for, like I have said, it is not always so distant. Once you start to appreciate the full span of Greek history its presence is not so distant – it is in the churches and street names, the grand buildings around Omonoia. You just have to scratch the surface in Bristol and Athens to find hidden stuff in the roots of the city. Bristol is perhaps blessed by not having Athens longevity and great history, but when I push my everyday life to one side and think about it, it is thrilling to think that the river that Socrates and Phaedrus sat by runs next to my house. And there are few things that equal sitting on the Areopagus, where Saint Paul preached to the Athenians.
*Final note as this has gone on long enough – I’m planning on getting hold of a basic camera at some point so I can start taking pictures of my favourite buildings around Athens. I may do that on this blog or somewhere else. I’ll keep you posted.
Update: I found this quote on the blog Anatomy of Melancholy from “The Names” by Don DeLillo, it seemed apt:
“There were Cypriots here, Lebanese, Armenians, Alexandrians, the island Greeks, the northern Greeks, the old men and women of the epic separation, their children, grandchildren, the Greeks of Smyrna and Constantinople. Their true home was to the spacious east, the dream, the great idea. Everywhere the pressure of remembrance. The black memory of civil war, children starving. Through the mountains we see it in the lean faces of men in flyspeck villages, stubble on their jaws. They sit beneath the meter on the cafe wall. There’s a bleakness in their gazing, an unrest. How many dead in your village? Sisters, brothers. The women walk past with donkeys carrying bricks. There were times when I thought Athens was a denial of Greece, literally a paving over of this blood memory, the faces gazing out of stony landscapes. As the city grew it would consume the bitter history around it until nothing was left but gray streets, the six-storey buildings with laundry flying from the rooftops. Then I realised the city itself was an invention of people from lost places, people forcibly resettled, fleeing war and massacre and each other, hungry, needing jobs. They were exiled home, to Athens, which spread toward the sea and over the lesser hills out into the Attic plain, direction-seeking. A compass rose of memory.”
Morgan Sabnis 