The weekend was windy, by Athenian standards, and the flags flew proudly in the squares and rippled by the embassies and the shirts hung from the gridwalled thoroughfares of Monastiraki fluttered too. The sun, for once, was welcome. In the Fokianos Sports Park, over by the Panatheletic Stadium, Stavros B. was working on his shot. From the three-point line he raised his elbow to his chin and rose an inch or two into the air and snapped his forearm forward like a tongue. Silence, for a moment, and then a muted clank. “Opa!” I tossed him the rebound. “It was wind,” he said, glaring at his disobliging ball. I’d told him I was from New York, the chain-linked holy land of pickup basketball, and the slight embellishment (I mean, I go to New York) was worth the respect of this wiry, sharp-nosed athlete. “Windy day,” I said. And so it was.
Deeper in the park, by the benches and the marble busts of Swiss-Greek bankers (“Ioannis G. Enyard: Benefactor of Greece”), a leaf-green bird flew overhead. A brief consultation with my birding app of choice pegged this fellow as a Monk Parakeet, a noisy and endearingly chubby species of parrot that was originally native to South America. They arrived in Athens in the 1990s, courtesy of the exotic pet trade, and the city’s pine trees and power poles are now festooned with their large, communal nests. The birds are beautiful enough that some Athenian transplants have, upon encountering them for the first time, phoned the Ornithological Society. Unfortunately, they’re also considered an invasive species. In 2018, Greek authorities removed scores of parakeet nests from the National Garden. The effort turned out to be mostly symbolic. Eight years later, the Monks remain, chirping from on high.
These parakeets, of course, make up but a sliver of the Athenian soundscape, which is dominated by the wheezing growls of the city’s buses, the buzzing of its motorbikes, the multilingual hubbub of the doorway to the West. In the air on a recent Saturday was one voice in particular: that of Hussein Haji Dafat, an Iranian refugee who fled to Greece in 2015. He was standing out in front of the Panatheletic Stadium between two large speakers, and reading a list of names into a shotgun microphone. He held an iPhone in his left hand, and a ten-foot flagpole in his right — this was the Pahlavi flag, used in Iran before the Islamic Republic took power in 1979. For half an hour, Dafat read the names of victims of the Supreme Leader’s regime. “In January 8th and 9th” of this year, he told me, “more than 40,000 people were killed” (only 4,000 of these killings have been verified by international NGOs). From 9am to 9pm, Dafat and a handful of his Iranian compatriots worked in shifts to read their list. “As an Iranian,” Dafat told me, “we have one choice, and our choice is king Reza Pahlavi.” Despite the zeal of Dafat and his Athenian compatriots, domestic support for Pahlavi, the exiled, 65-year-old son of the former Shah (and a staunch advocate for a secular Iran), is muted, at best. Other choices may well have to be considered.
Dafat wore a henly and a bucket hat. His eyes were large and brown. His gums were raw, and his lower incisors were streaked with blood, as if the names he’d read had caught and snarled on his teeth. He considers himself lucky to have immigrated back in the 2010s — today, many Iranian asylum cases are “frozen,” he said, “because of the situation in Iran… I don’t know what’s coming, because I don’t know the rules.” Even so, Dafat will lend his support to baldly xenophobic actors, so long as they are working against the Islamic Republic. “We trust Trump,” he declared, “and Netanyahu.” His eyes rose briefly — very briefly — to the sky. “We have hope.” During our conversation, dozens of people, tourists and locals alike, passed through the plaza behind us. Not one of them stopped at the protest.
Due West, however — past the marble columns of the Hellenic Parliament, past the cafes where jowled septuagenarians blow cigarette smoke up toward the gathering clouds — Syntagma Square was thronged. Here you could find not a rally but a celebration: Athens Pride, 2026. Merch tents and Heineken-branded umbrellas swayed lazily in the wind. A band was playing, loudly, on an elevated stage. I declined, to my eventual regret, an invitation to join a free pilates session from a woman wearing what was truly an astounding quantity of rainbow face paint. I was there for a reason: I had come to see SNAP, Athens’ only explicitly queer comedy club. Upon meeting the exuberant bunch, who were filming some kind of informational video in the center of the square, I was referred to their spokesman of choice: a lively and mustachioed comic who introduced himself as Yannis.
Yannis joined SNAP in 2022, the year it was founded. The nice thing about the group, he tells me, is that, “linguistically speaking,” his jokes can be “a little bit gayer.” SNAP’s audience is self-selecting. Greece, Yannis says, “is deeply homophobic. And this current government loves old-fashioned things, they love their… old customs.” While same-sex marriage was legalized in 2024 (Greece became the first Orthodox Christian-majority country to do so), its parliament recently re-instated a ban on plasma donation for men who have sex with other men. In response, LGBTQ+ communities have resurfaced some of their old customs, too. Yannis told me about “Kaliarda,” a slangy dialect that queer Athenians have used since the 1940s. “That’s a factor now,” he said. It was present in the park, though — like the small opposition rally that had formed by the Syntagma metro station — it was drowned out by the noise.
This is how it is in Athens. Things are in the air, but they come from both directions — from high and low, from sea and sky. I was reminded of the country’s myths: the Gods feud upon their mountaintop, descend to the earth to make mayhem, and find there mortals trying charmingly, appallingly, almost always hopelessly, to meet their deities halfway. The holy places of Athens are built upon its hilltops, which jut from the dense and low-slung city like monumental fingertips. Up there, it’s windier still.
At the headquarters for the Melissa Network of Migrant Women in Greece, I met a Ukrainian refugee by the name of Halyna Zhohan. She wanted me to find her sons, who both go by “Alex,” and who live (apparently) in Michigan. I do not know why she thought I was the man for the job. Before I left, she gave me one of her watercolor paintings, with her name scrawled on the back. It was a simple image, well-painted but childish in form — the sun rising over the ocean, a seabird soaring through the cloudless space. She told me that she’d painted “hope.” She’d put it where the wind-roughed ocean met the open air.
