{"id":134,"date":"2025-06-23T15:58:15","date_gmt":"2025-06-23T12:58:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/jrn350-su25\/?p=134"},"modified":"2025-08-07T18:43:44","modified_gmt":"2025-08-07T15:43:44","slug":"on-athens-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/jrn350-su25\/2025\/06\/23\/on-athens-time\/","title":{"rendered":"On Athens Time"},"content":{"rendered":"

It was five in the morning and outside the black receptacle that is SMUT<\/em>, one of Athens\u2019 premier techno clubs,\u00a0 the party was moving outside. There were still five hours left in the program for the night\u2019s lineup, but streaming out of the venue, with handheld fans and smudged eyeliner, a mass of ravers were forgoing the bass to congregate on the road, splaying on the sidewalks and leaned up against the tyres of parked cars with water bottles in hands, deep in debrief.<\/p>\n

Arriving in Athens last week, one of the first things that struck me was how the city comes alive at night. During the day, the cloying heat makes going out impossible, or, at the least, an uncomfortable exercise in jumping from shadow to shadow to avoid the harsh summer sun. But, during the night, as temperatures become cooler, the landscape \u2013 from the benches in Syntagma Square to the side streets of Exarchia \u2013 transforms into a space of connection for nocturnal Athenians. \u201cA big home,\u201d is how Anastasiia Mitrohina, a SMUT patron who moved to the city two months ago described the outdoor culture to me, \u201cespecially when it\u2019s hot.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Athenians, the outdoors has long represented a natural plane of connection. According to Panos Dragonas, a professor of architecture based out of the University of Patras,\u00a0 the phrase of the Greek intellectual Pericles Giannopoulos \u2013 \u2018life in Greece is outdoors\u2019 \u2013 has long been a guiding vision<\/a> for Greek residential architecture, made evident through the terraces and green spaces ubiquitous in and around most apartment buildings. As someone who grew up in Ireland, socialising outdoors is an unfamiliar concept. In Dublin, where summer nights rarely reach above 15 degrees Celsius and are typically accompanied by a smattering of rain, the outdoors are largely inaccessible. Social life is pushed indoors, into pubs where buying a drink is the price of entry, and limited seating means people are often turned away. In that sense, the city feels like it\u2019s behind a paywall: unlike in Athens, access to being part of the community often comes at a literal price.<\/p>\n

Back at SMUT, <\/em>it was seven in the morning. The sun had risen and all around, ravers were picking themselves up off the sidewalk and rushing into their cabs. The wait for my own Uber gave me ample time to reflect on the nightlife of Athens I had experienced thus far \u2013 from midnight runs to the local periptero<\/em> to late-night dinners at restaurants in our own neighbourhood of Pangrati. Sitting on the sidewalk, I felt certain of two things: I\u2019d sleep through the heat when I got home, and this summer, the night would be there for us always, extending an open invitation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It was five in the morning and outside the black receptacle that is SMUT, one of Athens\u2019 premier techno clubs,\u00a0 the party was moving outside. There were still five hours left in the program for the night\u2019s lineup, but streaming out of the venue, with handheld fans and smudged eyeliner, a mass of ravers were … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “On Athens Time”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6883,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-134","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/jrn350-su25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/jrn350-su25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/jrn350-su25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/jrn350-su25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6883"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/jrn350-su25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=134"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/jrn350-su25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":142,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/jrn350-su25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134\/revisions\/142"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/jrn350-su25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/jrn350-su25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/jrn350-su25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}