Pericles the great Athenian general and statesman was right when he praised the virtues of city life and said everything great comes from the city. He gave free reign to some of the most inspired writers, artists & thinkers of his time because he believed that a city achieved its greatness through the freedom of thought and expression of its citizens. He was a patron of the arts & promoted philosophy and literature & the political, artistic and cultural revival of his city. Athens flourished during this Golden Age which led his contemporary Thucydides, the historian of the Peloponnesian wars to call him “the first citizen of Athens.” Athens now more than ever needs a new Pericles.
My last Saturday in Athens arrives too soon. My good friend Lefteris aka Freedom takes me on a whirlwind tour of the old historic neighbourhoods of central Athens. There is no better “cicerone” – as tour guides are called in Italian, after the famous Roman consul and orator Cicero who had the gift of the gab.
Freedom’s love for his city is self-evident. He never tires exploring it, constantly seeking out the best it has to offer, new places and old favourite haunts. His enthusiasm & zest for life is infectious. He discovers wine bars, rooftop bars and cinemas, basement bars and tavernas, classic patisseries like Asimakopoulos for marron glacè – chestnuts in syrup that have been around for a century or more, cafés and traditional deli’s & meze tavernas like Fani’s Karamanlithika in Sokratous Street in Psyri which proudly continues a family tradition and stocks every type of cheese, cured meat pastourma, sausage & charcuterie produced in Greece and beyond. He goes to organic fresh produce markets, street food fairs and food festivals. In every street and neighbourhood, on every corner and alleyway, the sociable Athenians are spoilt for choice. Sensory overload is guaranteed.
The enterprising Greeks love courtyards and have a thing for utlising basements, usually entered from a small flight of stairs below a pavement, to create warm intimate spaces from cosy eateries to live music bars and even a charming family run hat shop called Savapile on two floors below the street in Psiri that has been making straw hats for various boutiques since 1960 & is now run by the beguiling daughter, Lisa.
With space in the crowded city at a premium, every square metre is used creatively for commercial & leisure pursuits.Yet the Greeks don’t have a bunker mentality. On the contrary, they are warm, friendly, open & engaging once they overcome their initial scepticism or in some cases thinly veiled suspicion.
Loumides Coffee
Our first stop is Loumides Coffee in Aiolou Street in central Athens for traditional aromatic Greek coffee freshly ground while you wait and packed into brown paper bags. Loumidis Coffee is an old-world, wood-panelled shop dating back to 1920 with black & white floor tiles. An emporium dedicated to Greek coffee & everything that goes with it. We buy rolls of loukoum – Greek Delight, the perfect companion for unsweetened Greek coffee, some flavoured with masticha (resin from the mastic tree) others studded with whole almonds.
Ktistakis Loukoumathes
Our next stop is just around the corner. A tiny shop with only four tables inside, established in 1912 by the Ktistakis family originally from Chania in Crete. The shop makes one item only: ‘loukoumathes’ – the best in Athens. Small balls of dough, deep fried until golden brown & crisp on the outside, soft, moist & slightly chewy on the inside, dunked while still hot in a honey syrup & sprinkled with sesame and cinnamon. We sit at a small round white marble table and order two portions from the elderly proprietor who runs the place all by himself. He’s clearly a stoic. A man of few words caught in a time warp in a fast changing Athens. He looks slightly melancholic with the sad, longing eyes of the immigrant, yearning to be somewhere else and perhaps with good reason for someone nostalgic for a different era.
The loukoumathes arrive served on two small tin saucers, eight puffy balls per portion. We devour them in quick succession. I allow each ball to pop in my mouth, releasing its sweet nectar, coating my mouth with honey syrup in an instant sugar hit. We wash them down with a jug of cold water before we hit the road again.
Omonia Square
We cross Omonia Square which in years gone by was the busiest traffic circle in Athens. It’s now a public square providing acess to the Metro – the Athens underground rail network which at every station cleverly showcases replicas of so many ancient treasures including, pottery, sculptures, amphora & ancient toys, discovered in the excavations & now on display, transporting commuters & visitors back in time to the 5th century BC. Dig anywhere in & around central Athens & you will find ancient artefacts of immense archaelogical value.
Freedom points out two majestic old buildings. Neo-classical beauties that will be restored to their former glory, both designed by the Philhellene Saxon architect Ernst Ziller. The Alexander the Great Hotel built in 1894 & the “Bageion” building dating to 1889 which housed the HQ of the German Wehrmacht during WW2. The Bageion was first the private residence of a wealthy Athenian family & then became a hotel. With it’s opulent pillared archways and grand reception rooms clad in marble now serving as gallery and exhibition spaces while it’s under restoration.
A block away we walk past the National Theatre of Greece in Agiou Konstantinou Street also designed by Ernst Ziller who more than any other architect single-handedly contributed to the classical revival of Athens after it was reduced to a ruinous, rubble-strewn state when the Ottomon Turks left. The theatre is another splendid example of the aesthetic sensitivity, the symmetry, scale and sense of proportion found in classical architecture. We turn down a side street & suddenly the scene that unfolds before us is distinctly different.
In narrow streets below distressed buildings, long past their prime, crowds of young men mill around aimlessly. Economic refugees and migrants from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Some of them escaping war. All of them fleeing poverty. There are hardly any women in sight. The shops their countrymen now run, sell cheap clothes and plastic goods: assorted toys, buckets, caps & backpacks. A group of men gather around a mountain of cheap, fake sneakers emptied onto the pavement. There’s a mad scramble as thrusting hands dig into the pile, looking for the right size and colour, scavenging through the detritus of global consumerism.
We walk down another street. Freedom points to a car that has reversed onto the pavement parked at 90 degrees to a shopfront housing a travel agency. The owner of the travel agency is one of his clients. Two nervous looking characters lean against the bonnet of the car. They give us suspicious glares. They’re not Greek and never will be even if they speak the basic street Greek of the hustler. Freedom tells me they are cigarette smugglers. Beneath the metal drain cover in the pavement lies their hidden stash of contraband cigarettes. During our walking tour, the police are noticeable by their absence. Another casualty of savage budget cuts caused by austerity.
Around another corner and we stand in front of a famous landmark building in Anaxagora Street. For more than 60 years starting in 1934 the building housed the printing plant and offices that published popular pulp fiction magazines that my grandmother read, titles such as Pantheon, Vendeta & Romantso – meaning novel, that once had a circulation of 300 000 copies per week. Amidst the urban blight the building stands as a beacon of hope, now renovated and transformed into a live music cafè and bar on the ground floor, a cultural hub, photographic studio and incubator for young start up businesses in shared work spaces.
Taverna Avli
A while later we walk past Avli – the courtyard. One of our favourite hidden tavernas in the historic triangle of Athens in Evristheos Street in Psiri. Few people walking past realise that behind a roughly plastered wall marked by graffiti and a metal door lies a secret hideout for locals and those with a more care-free Bohemian disposition.
You open the door & walk down a narrow passage which in turn leads into a wider passage in which wooden tables & traditional taverna chairs have been arranged on either side. Behind this space two rows of wooden doors & shuttered windows painted Greek blue. The rooms now used as storerooms, face a broken, grey flagstone courtyard. The space gives you a glimpse of how working class Athenians once worked and lived. One room per family with a shared bathroom for all the rooms. Some rooms were used as shops or small workshops. Chairs and tables would no doubt have been placed outside the rooms to create a sense of community and neighbourliness. At the end of the courtyard a narrow whitewashed concrete staircase without handrails leads to a second floor covered wooden gangway & more rooms.
A slender middle-aged man stands outside Avli’s front door. He gives us a big smile as he rubs his stomach and cheerfully informs us that he’s eaten well today. He has rosy cheeks and looks mildly inebriated. I think he must be a very happy, satisfied customer. It turns out he is none other than Takis the proprietor. You can tell from his mirthful eyes that this man is always smiling and it’s not just the alcohol he has consumed that makes him look intoxicated. The man is drunk with life.
Inside Avli a tiny makeshift kitchen in another narrow passage serves poikilia -meaning variety. Platters of meze, meatball-keftethes, fried chips, small squares of fried cheese saganaki, olives, grilled sausages, an omelette and pieces of succulent chicken breast cooked in an unctuous creamy sauce that mysteriously has a hint of curry in it. There are old faded prints and photos on the walls. Greek music plays in the background from a popular FM radio station tuned to old favourites. An old domestic fridge dispenses bottles of cold beer, tsipouro – a clear, grape distilled spirit, ouzo, raki – another much stronger anise flavoured spirit and jugs of water. The waiter takes our order and suggests a shredded cabbage salad doused in lemon and olive oil. To help everything go down, he explains with a wry smile.
Sitting at one of Avli’s tables feels less like being in a restaurant and more like you are sitting in somebody’s backyard, like co-conspirators playing hooky, escaping from the world outside the walls. The close proximity to other patrons makes banter between the tables natural and effortless as cigarettes and lighters get shared.
I’m not a beer drinker but at Avli it’s almost obligatory. We drink beer from small tumblers which somehow makes the beer taste better and go further. Chased by small shots of tsipouro poured into thimble size glasses. Tsipouro is a sociable drink that lends itself to such occasions to be shared in the company of friends and strangers who become friends.
Avli is honest, authentic and unpretentious. The space has evolved over time to serve the changing needs of it’s inhabitants. Athens has many such gems if you know where to look – medallions of time and space.
Varvakion Market
For a start you could walk through the Varvakion meat & fish market in downtown Athens in the heart of the old commercial centre of the city. The municipal market has been in operation since 1886. Named after Ioannis Varvakis, a successful Greek Russian privateer who fought against the Ottomans for the Imperial Russian fleet. Catherine the Great rewarded him with concessions in the Caspian Sea to harvest caviar. The enterprising Varvakis found a way to preserve and export caviar to Europe which made him a millionaire. He used his enormous to help build the new independent Greek state.
Greeks thrive on orderly chaos and the bustling market is no exception. Even a die-hard carnivore will be stunned by the sight of hundreds of lamb carcasses hanging from hooks especially over the busy Easter weekend. In a passage linking the fish and meat market halls we stop at a tiny kitchen with high ceilings, a hole in the wall clad in white tiles.
We order a few shots of ouzo in narrow glasses to wash down a shared plate of grilled bifteki patties, fried cheese and sausages skewered with toothpicks onto pieces of bread to go with fried green chillies & olives. Prepared and presented within minutes without fuss on a shared stainless steel counter. The open line kitchen consists of some frying pans on burners, a fridge & stacked white plates behind a glass display cabinet. Pared down utility at its best with only room for the essentials. It could be a metaphor for a simple but full life. It’s standing room only as we mingle with off duty fishmongers and butchers still in their blood-stained white overcoats.
We exit into the street through the fish hall. Only a few flaccid octopus & squid are left unsold resting on beds of ice. We walk past street vendors from every nationality shouting at passersby, promoting their wares with good-natured banter, selling everything from mangos and papayas from Brazil to local walnuts, pistachios, pine scented honey, spices, cheeses, kitchen equipment, hardware, bric-a-brac & on Vissis a street dedicated solely to brass doorknobs.
Taverna Diporto
Freedom points to the crumbling facade of a building straddling the corner of Sokratous and Theatrou streets. A two-storey neo-classical villa in its day with wrought iron balconies & small pediments above the tall shuttered windows. In the basement of this building a tiny taverna called Diporto -Two Doors has defied time. The distressed villa now defaced with grafitti is 150 years old & the underground taverna – which the Greeks call a ‘koutouki’ has been in business for 131 of those years since 1887. There’s no sign outside and no menu once you’re inside. In Athens it’s best not to be scared off by uninviting external appearances. If you did you’d miss out on the real Athens. Diporto is a good example. It looks like a slum on the outside but once you step inside, it may be old but it’s clean, organised and fully functional.
You walk through an open double wooden door and down a flight of stairs below the pavement & enter a room with a half a dozen rickety tables covered in paper, a glass display counter, marble basin & a small open kitchen, spartan & spotless which prepares four or five traditional dishes a day. Chickpea – revythia soup in winter doused in olive oil, a yellow split pea purée called fava, topped with slices of raw red onion, a Greek salad, fried sardines or Cod, perhaps a stifado meat stew or yiouvetsi orzo pasta with veal & half a loaf of crusty peasant bread brought to the table without a basket because it’s the kind of bread that must be broken & shared, chunks torn apart with your hands and dunked into olive oil, into soups and stews. It’s the kind of honest, healthy food people ate in a working class taverna in the 1930’s. The giant 600 kg barrels lining the wall are not for display. They store retsina – white wine, which continues the ancient practice of infusing it with pine resin to preserve it, served cold in cylindrical aluminium jugs. The locals order wine by the half kilo or kilo. Only the occasional brave tourist makes the mistake of ordering wine by the glass.
You exit through another door & up a flight of stairs onto another street around the corner. It’s the perfect hideaway for secret or even illicit liaisons. If the walls could talk they would tell you many stories. An unfolding map of the human heart – stories of love found and lost, of unrequited love, of hope, betrayal andvredemption.
One of Diporto’s more recent owners had a stroke & died in the taverna in 1991. He excluded his family in his will and left the taverna to his favourite waiter, the elderly Kyr (Mr) Mitsos who cuts a fine figure in his neatly trimmed white moustache and immaculate white overcoat. The two men were that close.
Diporto transcends class differences finding equal favour among ordinary working class people from street vendors and greengrocers to intellectuals and even parliamentarians. Given the limited space, sharing tables with one of the weathered old timers who frequent the place is common practice. They could be characters drawn from a Kazantzakis novel. It’s the kind of place where Alexis Zorba would hang out regaling people with tall tales about his past adventures.
Life is about contrasts. Without contrasts our life would be dull, meaningless and monotonous. What strikes you the most about Athens is the constant juxtaposition of young and old, ancient and modern blending and working together harmoniously against all odds. You get a tantalising glimpse of history as either time suspended or time passing by in most of her older buildings and public structures. And there’s a sense of comfort and continuity in that appreciation of the old mingling with the new.
Anglais
My last stop with Freedom is a new open air, rooftop bar in Monastiraki called Anglais. It’s on top of a building that is 60 years old to get an elevated view of the Parthenon which is 2500 years old.
Below the bar on bustling Mitropoleos Street, astride a narrow cobbled pedestrian walkway, Thanassis occupies pride of place. It’s the famous souvlaki and kofta kebab shop which grills everything on charcoal and now sprawls over several store fronts, half the pavement and a nearby courtyard with packed outside tables.
The lift to get to Anglais is ancient and only takes three people at a time, with a combined weight of 240 kg. I make up almost half that weight & cannot insist on using the lift all by myself. That would be selfish in the extreme as there’s a queue of bright-eyed young people waiting to get to the bar.
We decide to climb the six flights of stairs to get to the top. This old dog has some fight left in his weary legs, risking a heart attack but adding an element of danger to our excursion. It looks like I’m the oldest person on the roof. While I catch my breath we wait a few minutes for a table to clear. A table against the outer railings with the Parthenon, the Acropolis and Plaka below perfectly framed for the selfie generation.
I take a wild guess. The Wifi password is : “iloveanglais”. A clever method used by most bars, bakeries, cafetaria’s and cafès. Simply type “ilove & add the name of the establishment.
The crowd in their mid to late twenties chat, laugh and bask in the exhuberant glow of youth as they sip their Aperol’s & Cafe Frappè. I am pleasantly surprised that few are looking at their phones. The music is chilled, mellow, retro, best of the 60’s mixed with modern Greek and Italian ballads. Nobody minds nor gives the middle-aged greybeard a second glance.
One of my childhood wishes has finally come true. I’m invisible.
It’s a mild April spring afternoon. The tender green shoots of rebirth and revival are evident not just in nature but in a country ravaged by nearly a decade of devastating austerity. It’s early days and the upturn in the country’s fortunes might be slow but it’s inevitable even if the resilient Greeks don’t immediately see or feel it.
The setting sun gently illuminates the sacred rock on which the temple dedicated to the goddess Athena rests and the terracotta tiled domes of several old Byzantine-era churches nestled below, their sturdy stone walls now cast in warm ochre hues.
My Athenian odyssey begins & ends with a line from Thucydides:
“One must wait until the evening to see how splendid the day has been.”