“Intimate and toxic,” Valentini Anagnostopoulou, our course assistant, who is a journalist and resident of the city, described her relationship with Athens. A city of historic preservation and present-day destruction, hospitality alongside animosity towards tourism; a city where locals see beauty while feeling anger, refugees smile while struggling; Athens is a city of contradictions.
The ruins of antiquity precariously preserved stand out beside ruins of modernity, buildings covered in graffiti and torn down to create anew. The pinnacle of Athens, the Acropolis, is delicately protected. The Parthenon is being repaired so carefully that construction is still in progress after 50 years for a structure that took 15 to build in antiquity. Athenians are fighting for ancient artifacts housed in the British Museum, after being taken from the city in the early 19th century in a legally dubious move, to be returned. In cleaning statues that naturally grey through time, conservators use lasers to remove grime, careful to ensure even the oils from hands are not contacting any deeply meaningful historic artifact.
That shining hill can be seen from a former squat in the Exarchia neighborhood. There, a squat that once housed hundreds of refugees, now remains unused following a police closure of the building in 2020, with doors incapacitated by cement. Promises of turning the building into a music hall, which residents were told at the time of its closure, have yet to be fulfilled six years later. On the side of the building, an inspirational message has been covered up by graffiti, all that remains of the initial mural is the word “Hope” written in black against a pink background. It led me to wonder what the message under the graffiti said.
In Athens, tourists are a problem, but also a major contributor to the economy. The industry drives up the cost of living for local residents and crowds the city, but supports businesses that are heavily reliant on tourism. Graffiti artists along the streets have written obscenities, like “Fuck AirBnB.” A bright yellow sign that I have seen in many neighborhoods reads, “Tourists, hipsters, digital nomads, investors, zionists go home,” “Don’t expect from us to play the role of welcoming local.”
Seeing these messages, I expected to be treated with less care by some. Instead, I have experienced nothing but hospitality and kindness. I met Tota, a woman from Crete who had traveled with her husband and two daughters to Athens, while waiting for the Lysistrata opera performance to start at the Odeon of Herodes Atticus theater. Sitting next to me in that ancient structure at the foot of the Acropolis, Tota told me she thought the ruins housed in Greece are a part of the history of the world that must be shared with all who seek it. While she recognizes the real problems caused by tourism, she believes changes should happen at the policy level. Tourists should be welcomed to Athens amid the crowding they cause, she said. I also spoke to Vicky Palliou, who works at a bakery in Pangrati called Shake n Bake. She was more than eager to share the story behind the pastries we bought: they were handmade by her everyday using a traditional Greek recipe but with her own contemporary twist. As I bit into the airy pistachio treat, I tasted her added flourish in the filling. Beside the register, there were multicolored sticky notes with messages written in all different languages from happy customers, with phrases like “thank you from Texas.”
Walking through the touristy Plaka area at the base of the Acropolis, I entered a small, empty art shop. Canvases covered the walls with realistic depictions of the shades of blue in ocean waves and the alleyways between white buildings. The man at the counter, Liapakis Yanis, said they were all his original works. He had been living in the city his whole life and painting ever since he was young.
Yet, while he paints the beauty of Athens every day, he couldn’t answer when I asked why he loved the city. He said he hated the city, and wished he had instead been born in a suburb or on an island of Greece. Younger people enjoyed the city more, he told me, but it lost its sparkle through time. Through our conversation, it seemed he had become disillusioned with Athens over time, caught in a reality that didn’t match up to his dreams.
At a workshop for female refugees held in Exarchia, a dozen women gathered around a table and shared memories of childhood toys. Many were from Ukraine, others from Morocco and Syria, undoubtedly all with personal hardships that brought them to this country. They read stories around the table, and one woman even shared how her house was burned down, taking with it the objects she treasured as a young girl.
In her blue and green top and brown hair back in a bun, one woman stood out to me, smiling through the whole workshop. While hearing others share, she was preoccupied, playing with a barbie doll. I spoke with her after everyone had finished sharing, her cheerfulness contagious. It didn’t matter that she could not speak my language nor I hers. She mimed to me the deliciousness of her bowl of strawberries as she had poured sugar, intended for the tea, on top, and motioned for me to have a bowl of my own.
Acceptance and openness in Athens is felt by some, but maybe not all. Immigration policies are tightening in line with the rest of Europe and the US, and online, the far right is targeting refugee groups. One popular influencer named Afroditi Latinopoulou, a young woman who is a member of the European parliament, regularly posts produced videos of herself talking into the camera, blaming the nation of Islam for problems in Greece.
In contrast to this digital landscape, my impression of Greece has been one of warmth and welcoming. I talked to Sara Marcus, a professor at Notre Dame who was visiting Athens with her husband and daughter, on the rooftop of the National Museum of Contemporary Art for an exhibition opening. Her initial impression of the city was one of openness, how she felt there was so little judgment and prejudice towards different types of people. A few days later, a woman working at a tourist shop even felt comfortable enough with me, upon first meeting, to share that she and her husband used the “Sex in Ancient Greece” cards deck depicting different sex positions that she sold at the counter.
The city and the people of Athens leave me with far more questions than answers. How does the government decide how much of their budget to allocate towards preservation of antiquity versus renewal of the present? How do Athenians working in hospitality balance their treatment towards tourists with financial struggles? In my first week experiencing the city I have only been able to see some of the most visible layers of the onion. Peeling further down will come with time and conversations.
