Stasinou 13, Pangrati
by Vivien Wong
It’s the perfect setup for a bad joke: “Three American college students and fifteen-odd expats walk into a bar…” Except the bartender is a Greek bookseller, and the bar—a full liquor shelf in a room half-closet, half-cavern—is concealed behind a set of sliding bookcases.
This was the last meeting of the English-language book club at Lexikopoleio, the locally owned international bookstore in Pangrati, Athens. Diamantis Diamantidis, the events coordinator and bartender for the evening, told me that members have been petitioning him to extend meetings one more month, into July.
Aside from the three of us, I count an American sociology professor, an Argentine actor, a digital nomad—Dutch—among the faces at the table. They’ve got a level of dedication that Diamantidis hasn’t seen in the bookstore’s Greek- and French-language book clubs. It has something to do with the transience of their time together, he believes. “These people came five years ago, or three years ago,” Diamantidis explained. “They’re going to go in two years. It’s not very fixed. But they’ve been loyal because they know that this is an anchor for them.”
There’s a general divide between book club attendees who prefer to analyze the themes and content of a book, and those for whom the reading primarily serves as a jumping-off point for divulgences about their own lives. But what if the attendees’ lives really are the subject of the book?
Wednesday’s discussion centered around Italian author Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection, translated into English by Sophie Hughes. The novel chronicles a relationship between two expats—digital “creatives”—living in Berlin in the 2010s.
A certain self-consciousness about the impact of expat professionals on the physical and economic landscape of Athens intermittently resurfaced at the table. “What’s the difference between an expat and a refugee?” a dark-haired woman, herself a digital nomad from Amsterdam, asked. Then she answered: “Someone who comes here voluntarily with money and someone who doesn’t.”
An American professor described herself as one of the “vampires” who profited from coming to Athens when rent and real estate were relatively cheap. “I can have a really nice life that’s very difficult to have for the same amount of money in New York City,” she continued. “It makes me wonder what happens when Athens, all of a sudden, starts to become expensive and inaccessible?”
“Ask the Athenians!” the Greek man across the table from her interjected, laughing. Attempts to describe the problem of gentrification carried a different tense for different readers at the table: future tense for the American professor, past tense for Greeks priced out of gentrified neighborhoods like Pangrati.
The physical architecture of the city makes these tense concrete. The part of Pangrati which surrounds Lexikopoleio was once called Vatrachonisi—meaning “frog island”—a nod to amphibians native to the bed of the Ilissos River. Urban expansion of Athens, dating back to the 1950s, has all but covered the ancient river. On the corner of Proskopon Square, the Athens café chain Petite Fleur, which features vinyls hanging from the ceiling and stools upholstered with black-and-white prints of Roy Haynes and Billie Holiday, rounds off one travel blog’s description of the Vatrachonisi area as “more like Paris than Athens.”
Meanwhile, two blocks from Lexikopoleio, the side of an apartment has been spray-painted, in large green letters, “REFUGEES WELCOME / TOURISTS GO HOME.” Someone’s tried to white out the graffiti by scratching lines into the beige coat of the building.
The attendees discussed the helplessness of the expat couple in Perfection at length. Why didn’t they ever learn German? A debate ensued: perhaps technology was to blame, perhaps the characters’ parochialism.
“They didn’t seem to be able to do things differently, did they?” one woman said. A joke about their own inability to speak Greek drew laughter from around the table. ♦
