Author: Noah LaBelle

Yasaman Heidarpour hadn’t spoken to her parents in two years. When Israel struck Tehran, she feared she never would again.

By Noah LaBelle

The night of Thursday, June 13th, Yasaman Heidarpour was fast asleep in her Athens apartment when her husband shook her awake. Israeli bombs had struck Tehran, the city they fled nearly a decade ago. She immediately grabbed her phone. Her father’s number, which she knew by heart, wasn’t working. On Instagram, she sent messages to her parents, cousins, high school friends. None delivered; Iran was already experiencing an internet blackout that, days later, the government extended nationwide. “It’s only me and my husband here in Greece,” Heidarpour told me recently. “Everyone is back in Iran, and I couldn’t find anybody.”

After twelve days of conflict—which killed 610 Iranians and injured 4,746 more—Israel and Iran agreed to a ceasefire on June 24th. The next day, while working at the Melissa Network, an Athens-based organization supporting migrant women, Heidarpour noticed her messages had gone through. Her father replied at once: all was well, the internet was back, and if she had time, they could talk. 

Heidarpour, who is thirty-one, hadn’t spoken with her parents in two years. Still, she called straight after work. Once on the line, her parents downplayed everything, saying the airstrikes were nothing serious. Their faces, visibly frightened, told another story—“like they were ten years older,” Heidarpour said. When she asked more questions, her father insisted there was no need, steering the conversation to daily life.

The call brought back complex emotions of what she’d left behind. “I felt really relieved that they are well,” Heidarpour told me, “but still, everything is the same.” As her parents spoke, past memories of never having the right to complain or talk resurfaced. 

***

When she was ten, Heidarpour tried to tell her mother about a man who had harassed her on the streets of Tehran. Before she finished, her mother slapped her: “You don’t say it to anybody—not even to me.” After that, she stopped talking about her feelings. “I was not even saying that I was hungry,” she told me. 

Nine years later, her life changed rapidly. At a wedding, while studying accounting at university, she met her future husband, a second-cousin whose family had been estranged with hers for eight years. She quickly learned why. His father, brothers, and one of his sisters were members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or Sepah, a force tied to militant groups fighting Western and Israeli influence. Her husband had refused to join for years, but the pressure escalated.

“When we got married, they had another option to threaten,” Heidarpour said, referring to herself. “They were threatening us with death.” In December of 2015, it took Heidarpour and her husband just a day to stuff necessities into a backpack and leave. They had no plan beyond Turkey, but found a smuggler who could get them to Greece. 

The sea was frigid in Çeşme, at Turkey’s westernmost end. Four plastic fishing rafts rocked in the surf. Women and children, babies among them, were told to get in first. If there wasn’t space, the men would sit on the edges. Looking back for her husband, Heidarpour saw the smugglers holding guns and knives. Over all the crying and shouting, they growled that there was no choice: “You sit inside the boat, or you die.” When seventy people had been crammed into each, the boats set off, and were soon separated. Water rushed through a hole in hers. As the boat began to sink, she blacked out.

She came to under a large tent. Her husband told her they’d reached Chios, a Greek island seventeen kilometers from the Turkish coast. Only their boat had made it.

They reached Athens on a humanitarian boat the next night, where they landed in Eleonas, a camp already packed with over a thousand refugees. “The first thing I did,” Heidarpour said, “I just removed the scarf, and then said, ‘Okay, here I am, and I’m safe.’” They lived there, calamitously, for more than a year, until a chance encounter with an Afghan woman led Heidarpour to the Melissa Network in November of 2017. Heidarpour, who studied English for fifteen years in Turkey, had arrived just as Melissa’s lone Farsi translator went on maternity leave. She landed the gig that January.

***

What saved Heidarpour during the phone call with her parents was her two daughters, three and five, grabbing the phone. Besides calling to update her parents about their grandchildren two years ago, she kept her distance before the strikes, and hasn’t contacted her parents since. “I have more peace with myself when I’m not in communication with them,” she told me. “Otherwise, I don’t know if I will be such a good mother.” 

On a recent morning, her youngest was trailing her oldest around the house, per usual. The five-year-old had had enough. She turned around and begged for just five minutes of privacy. 

“My daughter already started saying her needs and thoughts and feelings,” Heidarpour said. “You cannot imagine how happy I was.” She had just finished describing her own childhood—robotic, she called it, lived exactly as programmed by her father. 

“I was like, Okay, I think you’re doing well, Yasaman.” ♦

efood has landed on Paros. Its couriers have traversed far more than restaurant doors and seaside roads.

By Noah LaBelle

Zahid Mehmood couldn’t remember the last time he’d done anything but walk and sleep. Nineteen days earlier, he’d set out from Karachi, Pakistan, on foot, before crossing into Turkey. It was December 2015, just before European borders began to tighten. Soon, his feet could take him no further. On the Greek island of Kos—just 4 kilometers off the Turkish coast—he boarded a three-meter boat, crammed with thirteen others, bound for the port of Piraeus.

Once Mehmood made it safely to Athens, he heard that another nineteen people had died attempting the same passage after him. He could only thank God—and the UN, which clothed, fed, and put him up in a hotel for a week. It took him another two months to land a construction gig, the same work he’d done since age fifteen in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital. 

This May, Mehmood’s boat ride was much less treacherous: a high-speed ferry to Paros, where he now delivers takeout by motorcycle.

“Athens has too much heat,” he told me on a recent Thursday afternoon. “Here, I have the sea. There’s not too much traffic, not too much pollution. It’s a very peaceful place.” He was lounging on a semi-circular stone bench outside the Paros Byzantine Museum with three other couriers in red efood vests, refreshing their food delivery apps. “It’s like a shared office!” Mehmood, thirty, said, a fanny pack slung over his shoulder. They’d clocked in at noon and would stay until ten. In the distance, another ferry pulled in, spilling visitors and their suitcases.

efood launched on Paros this summer. Mehmood stepped away from the scaffolding in 2020, when pandemic lockdowns impelled a food delivery boom. Now, he and eleven other Pakistanis working for efood in Athens have relocated to the island, where they share two villas. They’ve arrived just in time for high season—July through August—when Paros overflows with Greeks and foreigners alike. By September, they’ll return to the mainland.

Tourists come with their culinary tastes, and leave Paros with less of its own. “There are not that many tavernas—it’s my main problem, seriously,” Sophia Katsipi, the president of the Realtors Association of Paros and Antiparos, said. “To go to these little tavernas with the beautiful, local produce…I don’t want to see another sushi place. I’ve had enough.”

While locals may think the island is oversaturated, investors often argue new restaurants or hotels will create jobs for Parians. “But this island doesn’t suffer from unemployment,” Costas Bizas, the mayor of Paros, told me. “So who will you create new jobs for, and how are you going to find those people to work for you?”

The answer, often, is men like Mehmood. (There are enough Pakistanis, Afghans, and Bengalis on the island to field a cricket match on Sundays from six to eight or nine, depending on the number of overs.) What sold Mehmood on moving to Paros was what drew him to efood in Athens, and what pushed him to leave Pakistan: the pay. “After one day of work, it’s finished if you have two people [to provide for],” he said of his hometown.

That didn’t include the heat. In Islamabad, he worked outside, always, on two-story shells that trapped the humidity. In Athens’ high-rises, less sweltering but sweltering still, he sometimes worked indoors. The salary was fixed at seventy euros for eight hours. efood paid a tad better, with looser hours, and no dust. On Paros, his pay doubled to meet the island’s costs. “Now I care for all of my family,” he said: seven siblings, and his parents, his father retired from electrical work.

“If I have papers, I’ll go back and get married,” Mehmood said. That’s proven challenging. He’s been waiting since April 2024 for his third country national application to be approved. “I have nine years of proof, tax proof, doctors notes,” he said. “Maybe it will happen. I don’t know. God only knows.”

The next day, I returned to the pine-shaded area where Mehmood and his crew spend the majority of their waking hours, but he was nowhere to be found. A smattering of cigarette butts lay inside the stone semicircle. Some of his colleagues had draped cardboard sheets over it, more comfortable for long stints.

Soon, Mehmood returned, fresh off a delivery. “It’s a tourist speaking English,” he told me. “His order is eleven euro, but in his mind, it’s ten euro fifty.” Mehmood informed him, and got an apology with the missing coins. As he showed me the receipt on his iPhone, a ping sounded, twice, arpeggiated.

“Oh my God,” he exhaled. He’d been seated for ninety seconds, tops. (The day prior, I hadn’t seen him get a single order during a multi-hour conversation.) Now, onto Orange Cafe, for two coffees and a sandwich. Seventeen euros. He’d earn two forty-seven.

He crossed the street, quick but unhurried. On a side road, motorcycles clustered among parked cars, their red efood boxes ratcheted on tight. One was his, bought last year for €4,200, with an Apple sticker on the front fender.

“I must be careful,” he said, unzipping the box to reveal his helmet. “In Athens, I left helmets on my bike, twice, then I came back: no helmet.”

“I’ll come back, I’ll come back,” he reassured me. “Only just four, five minutes.” The engine revved. He didn’t flip down his visor. Then he was gone—a right at the roundabout, before the coffee could cool. ♦

Hosios Loukas, a tenth-century Orthodox monastery, is just down the road from Delphi. Are they linked by more than proximity?

By Noah LaBelle

Father Anthimos left home at the age of twenty and spent fifteen years without seeing his mother. If that’s what devotion to the Almighty demanded, it was fine by him.

“Mount Athos is a peninsula, and it is not allowed for women,” he said, describing the Eastern Orthodox monastic community where he’d spent nearly all of his adult life. Twenty monasteries. Some two-thousand monks. “I liked it very much there, because I did not have my mother,” he quipped.

Now, he’s at Hosios Loukas, a tenth-century monastery tucked into the olive-covered foothills of Mount Helicon. It’s just over a half-hour’s drive from Delphi, another site of ancient sanctity.

At first glance, the two—Delphi and Hosios Loukas—seem at odds. One, in ruins, is stone-strewn. Its temple, treasuries, stadium, and amphitheatre are now divided among reconstructed fragments, displays in the adjacent museum, and still-buried remains. The other, intact in an elegant mélange of brick, stone, and marble, beams with golden mosaics, as revered today as they were in Byzantium.

Then there’s the tension between God and the gods. “Phoibos [Apollo] no longer has his house, nor his mantic bay, nor his prophetic spring; the water has dried up,” the Pythia lamented in 362 A.D., in one of the final Delphic auguries. Gone were the days when Chaerephon, a friend of Socrates, and Alexander the Great schlepped up to the vapor-dazed oracle. Predictions ceased. 

That is, until Luke of Steiris, a Hellenic hermit, came along half a millennium later. With his mother’s blessing, a fourteen-year-old Luke left to live as an ascetic on a mountain called Ioannitza. A life of Christ-centered divinity—over Apollonian divination—ensued, and with it, prophecy. In his teens, Luke foretold the Bulgarian invasion of Ioannitza. He also predicted Emperor Romanos’ conquest of Crete: fulfilled in the 960s, a decade after Luke’s death in 953. By then, he’d already settled down, founded Hosios Loukas, and, as tradition holds, got caught levitating during prayer.

The gods had gone silent on Mount Parnassus. Luke’s monastery still prays. God, it appears, never left central Greece.

***

I met Anthimos in the courtyard, apron pale against his black habit and kalimavkion. Together, they mirrored the charred conifer abutting the entry walkway. In August 2023, a wildfire swept the valley, and a pine cone-turned-grenade torched one of the oldest buildings to a crisp. Anthimos arrived this March.

Inside the octagonal katholikon—christened the finest surviving church interior from the first centuries after Iconoclasm—his phone rang. He let it. First, he scrubbed the icons a visitor had just kissed, post-signum crucis. Mary. Loukas. I watched, pondering the contents of the spray bottle. Windex? Certainly not. (Later, I consulted The Byzantine Forum, an online hub for all things Eastern Christian, which suggested a mix of waters: rose and holy. But, as one commenter warned, “Rosewater doesn’t remove lipstick.”)

“I never imagined that one day someone would call me to go outside of Mount Athos,” Anthimos told me. 

Then the Archbishop called. “‘I have this monastery,’” Anthimos recalls him saying. “‘There are three monks. Can you help me?’”

Only the Archbishop himself knows if it was the wildfire that prompted Anthimos’ move, or the lopsided ratio of fathers to foreigners. Perhaps both. 

Still, it beats Mount Athos. There, the monks rose at two o’clock sharp. After devotion: hours toiling on trees. “Here, we start at seven,” Anthimos said, smiling. 

I wasn’t sure whether his chats with visitors, myself included—“from Australia, from Canada, from Hong Kong,” he said—counted toward his eight hours of work or his eight hours of rest. Prayer, I surmised, was separate. Then again, sharing the monastery might be a kind of devotion in itself.

What was clear: this wasn’t the Delphi crowd. The day before, to my chagrin, a woman in a safety vest—just a stone’s throw away—screamed into a whistle when she spotted a pack of kids trying to hop the stadium wall. Delphi sees close to a million visitors a year. For Hosios Loukas, there’s no public figure. Enough to keep Anthimos busy, and make him want to stay.

“But, I’m open in everything in my life,” Anthimos said, once certain he’d die at Mount Athos.

At Delphi, there was a phrase for that: kairòn gnôthi—know the right moment. Stobaeus found it etched near the Temple of Apollo, and recorded it in his fifth-century anthology of Delphic maxims. This was just years after Theodosius, the Roman Emperor, had outlawed the old gods, cementing the empire’s shift to Christianity. 

That alone didn’t shutter the oracle. It took a natural disaster: an earthquake in 381 A.D. sealed the fissures releasing ethylene, a sweet-smelling gas that induces euphoria, and with them, the vapor trances that powered the Pythia and their prophecies. 

One more rogue pine cone, and Hosios Loukas might’ve gone the way of Delphi. ♦

A dispatch by Noah LaBelle

There’s a portrait of the Sacred Heart, only it’s Snoop Dogg bearing the halo. He’s cherubically lit by a ceiling fixture and framed by clouds—puffy cumulus above, puffed cannabis below. A blunt smolders delicately between his two-fingered benediction. On the mantle beneath, a sign reads #MAYTHEBOOZEBEWITHYOU, nestled next to pothos vines that have far outgrown their pots. 

Welcome to Ziggy Cocktail Bar, Pangrati, Athens, just across from Saint Spyridon’s yellow façade. Population: thirty-odd Anglophones of varying nationality, fluency, and sobriety. All here for what’s billed as “Hear No Evil Comedy Show,” a Thursday night staple.

“Personal philosophy, go!” Pam Benjamin, an Athens-based, California-raised D.J., calls out, pointing the mic, identical to the one tattooed down her right arm, toward the open-air bar tables. 

“Never fly Turkish Airlines,” one woman offers. Benjamin repeats it, fortissimo, to claps.

“Turkish Airlines is incredibly racist,” Benjamin adds. “When you choose your language, Greek is not represented! Every other language, but no Greek.” Someone, presumably not Greek, suggests learning Turkish.

“Greek airlines don’t have screens, it’s crazy,” she continues. Much heartier laughter. “We’re lucky the planes can fly, bro!”

Amateurs wait for their slot, glancing at pre-planned bits scrawled in journals. They’re the only ones with pen and paper in sight. Them, and your correspondent.

“Are you stealing jokes, mate?” asks a bar-goer with a pink fanny pack and a cigarette.

“No, I’m a journalist,” I say, too quickly.

He pauses, then snickers. “That’s even worse.”

I can’t parse out from his accent if he’s a local—the fanny pack, I figure, suggests not—but he’d already shuffled to a back table and grabbed a beer before I could ask.

Next up: George Moulos, a trim Australian in a burgundy polo, seven years in Athens behind him. (A search reveals he’s cracked the Guinness World Record for fastest traverse on foot of mainland Greece, from north to south. Comedy’s next.) He thumbs an A7 notebook, whose inane daintiness in his hands almost makes up for his first three jokes, all duds. 

“Ah, ok,” he says, scanning the page. “Greek or gay. You tell me if this is Greek, or this is gay.” Beat. “Greek dudes who have manicured eyebrows, like, fully waxed eyebrows.”

“Greeeekkkk,” a few slur. “European!” insists one woman, loudly, twice. Consensus reached.

“Greek dudes who are on the back of their friend’s scooter, and they’re holding them like this”—Moulos puckers his lips, knees bent, hips forward, arms laced around a phantom torso. More cackling than clarity, but it’s not leaning Greek. 

Fanny packs, or, as the Aussie self-corrects, bum bags? Decidedly Greek. (I glance back at the anti-journalist.) Carrying little bottles of olive oil everywhere? Also Greek. “So, apparently I’m not gay,” Moulos deduces. 

Benjamin tells everyone to grab more drinks. The music turns back up. Ten minute intermission.

Mo, from Manchester, recognizes me. Earlier, Benjamin had clocked me on the outskirts—thanks, notebook—while trying to fill the front barstool. I declined. With prodding, she gleaned I was a Seattleite who didn’t drink coffee. (“Stereotypes aren’t real, you guys!”)

“This might be, like, an insider view,” Mo starts. “I don’t know if Americans know this. So: the Schengen Area.”

He can’t give specifics—his parents told him not to—but outlines a general path: a land crossing from Iraq into Greece, a flight to France, a hop across the Channel. He was born two years after they arrived.

“I love geography, all things countries and cultures,” he says, a month into two years of pilot training in Athens. “When I heard that my parents lived in Greece and all these countries, I was like, ‘Damn, I missed out on that trip.’”

We’d have kept talking, but Benjamin’s back at the mic, now sizzling, riffing on an A.I.-generated song that’s been stuck in her head all week. “Have you heard about Pam,” she unleashes, “in love with a twenty-six-year-old Greek man?” The crowd howls, briefly. ♦