Attic Nights
By: Jason Price Everett

The landscape of Attica reminded me uncomfortably of Southern California: arid, dusty, acres of new concrete gleaming whitely in the tepid sunlight. We acquired maps and exchanged currency; Greece was a primary benefactor of the 2002 currency union. As we swiftly came to realize, everything in Greece is more expensive than it used to or needs to be, given the ambience of second-tier national decay only just being reversed in places.

We took a bus from the airport to the center of Athens proper. On the way I received a panorama of the surrounding countryside. At first it was highway ramps and arrogant concrete construction efflorescing in a maritime desert, and then the snarl of traffic wound us in. The "miracle mile” stretched forever, an accusatory finger admonishing the face of Athens. Aside from the fact that two-thirds of the signs were in Greek, it could have been my own flavorless home. Car dealerships, even a diner, cars that varied, fewer Japanese vehicles, many European makes that don't really exist in the New World: Opels from Germany, various Italian and Greek models I'd never seen before, a puny cube-shaped half-car created to deal with the endemic problem of parking space, all sweetly asphyxiating in a blanket of carbon.

Greece is much like a Latin American country, albeit one with a ridiculously effective currency: the 2004 Olympics are slated to return to Athens, the place of their original rebirth in 1896, so naturally everything is getting an architectural facelift. Much as with other nations of this level, the culture and historic record of the past is being systematically prostituted to uncaring tourists.

The bus entered downtown Athens by way of the Vassilissis Sofias avenue towards the Syntagma outside the Parliament building. During the long ride, I had time to absorb the lesson that I had half-feared would be true all along: Greece is not its past, and has nothing to do with its history. The Greece of the ancients does not exist. The Greece of Byzantium, of the Ottomans, does not exist. I cannot stress this point clearly enough. I think that they may have learned their lesson from us all too well, even before the European Union came to leech away all the last vestiges of a cultural identity. I saw nothing older than the Brooklyn Bridge until we reached the National Gardens in the heart of downtown Athens, and I saw nothing of classical architecture until we walked up the Acropolis.

The area immediately adjacent to the Town Hall of Athens is a curious conglomerate of frowzy budget hotels, very beat, interspersed with sex shops, pocket theaters and the odd Arab-run "supermarket" the size of a telephone kiosk. We took a room in an economy hotel in the narrow street directly behind the Town Hall -- very cheap, private shower in a private bathroom and a balcony with a view of the street itself, and the row of fruit-bearing orange trees directly behind that august civic institution.

We watched television in our hotel room, soft-core pornography on several channels plus the usual endemic live coverage of the war next door, and we were hard put to distinguish between the two. This entire nation is against the war, with anti-American graffiti scrawled everywhere; spray paint on aged marble becomes a peculiar aesthetic crime never before encountered. On the bus inward we rode past the U.S. Embassy; it was protected by busloads of police. Nearby, an extensive stretch of concrete obstacles was thickly covered from top to bottom with anti-American slogans, curses and threats, some of remarkable fluency and inventiveness. All of the writing on that wall protesting against the war was in the Roman alphabet and in our classic American idiom. This is significant. Welcome to the truncated Hellas of the new century.

USEFUL LINKS: Wikipedia Attica