On my first full day in Athens, I ended up in a random cafe, with my phone dead, two friends absorbed in work, and a quite friendly ginger-haired man. With nothing else on me except my wallet, my only immediate source of entertainment was the massive window before me, where I sat watching, in a manner I can only liken to an elderly couple sitting on their porch on a summer afternoon, the people of Athens go by. Instead of going back to the apartment, which would have been the reasonable thing to do, I sat there for 40 minutes, in my elderly bliss. Looking through this window was better than any reality TV show — why? Because it was real.
Funnily enough, that had not been my first encounter with a large window that day. After we went for a run that morning, my friend and I went to Shake n Bake cafe, owned by the very friendly Dionysous, and sat outside their large window drinking our lattes and chatting. There was a very real sense of human relationship, which I believe is often lost in the hustle and bustle of the American cities I’m used to. Dionysous and his workers could see us through the window, enjoying our coffee, and would flash us occasional smiles until we left. If this had been New York, the barista would have forgotten about me the moment I left the cash register.
Additionally, there had been seating both on the inside and outside of the window ledge, meaning that my elbow was brushing with that of the person sitting inside. Talk about feeling human connection.
Eventually, when I interviewed Dionysous about his shop, he told me his favorite part of the store was the window.
At the cafe where my phone was dead, named Katsika Pagrati, I meditated on how these urban parts of Athens, which contradicted the tourist parts of the city I had seen in the fall when I visited on another Princeton trip, differed from the cities I knew in the States. The first thing that came to mind were these windows, and how they always remain open, acting as a bridge between the street and the business. It appeared to me that there was little trepidation in Greece about keeping a hard line between the streets of the city and the inside of these institutions, and every business felt more inviting. I began to think about the essence of this difference and what it says about American society that we tend to keep our doors and windows constantly closed, whether you’re in the town of Princeton or in the summer in Philadelphia.
Through Katsika’s window, I also contemplated how much shorter the buildings were in Athens, making the entire city feel more open and alive, rather than in New York or Los Angeles, where the skyscrapers make you feel caged and separated from the world around. Perhaps the American skyscrapers are reaching too far up, like Icarus.
Two American tourists I met, Julie and David from Texas, who were boarding a Mediterranean cruise in a few days, spoke exactly to these points, saying that the city to them has been very welcoming, and they have recognized how open and spacious the city feels — different from what they have experienced in U.S. cities. Julie described Athens as a walking city.
“I look at [Athens] as an adventure,” she said. “Walk until you find something.”
At the window in Katsika, I thought hard about how the spaces we occupy define us, and what it means to enter a new space. Being from the United States — the land where we were always told to lock the doors and close the windows; where we sat in buildings that were entirely cut off from the streets; and where the most exposure to Greece that I had gotten was it being the land where ancient gods were believed to have roamed and Sophie and Donna sang about men in Mamma Mia! — I was surprised by how open and friendly everyone seemed. Each line of graffiti, each low-level apartment, and each open window became a part of the new image of Athens I was forming.
In her book The Re in Refuge, Adrianne Kalfopoulou, an Athens-based poet, writes that “the reality of refugees reminds us that what is built can come undone, and in the undoing, the interfaces of the devastated and possible are also sites for beginnings.”
My new perception of the city was exactly that — a space come undone by the experiences I was now having outside of tourism and one that was being rebuilt in a greater social awareness.
Space, as purported by Kalfopoulou, is malleable, able to be bended at the will and eye of the beholder. Dually, it is a powerful concept, able to control how someone engages with a culture, energized by the worlds someone comes from. A part of me, over the past couple of days, had now become obsessed with understanding how the American hubris can destroy the true beauty of foreign spaces, which lay in the miniscule details of the city.
Now, I feel a small sense of guilt. When I returned to the U.S. after the fall trip, I told everyone how Athens, and the country as a whole, was this mystical place absent from social problems, where everything was cheap and the streets were pristine rows of stucco-topped houses. I had not seen any of the graffiti calling for tourists to get out or bashing Israel, because I had never been in those spaces.
Still, even as tourists, we can sometimes create our own bridges with the local community, opening our own windows of connection that help break down the barriers between us.
As I was walking through Plaka, which now seemed jarring after my time over the past week living in a non-tourist section of the city, I stopped and spoke with a teenager named Paulina, who worked at a very small cafe near the Acropolis Museum. Paulina was 19, and had just begun working at the cafe three days prior. She shared that she enjoys speaking with Americans.
“It’s interesting, because you get to see another mentality, and it’s interesting to hear their own stories,” Paulina told me. “A woman came yesterday, and she was telling me that she came with her husband, and they were saving for five years to come to Greece, so that’s — how to say, I don’t know — fantastic.”
Paulina, whose mom runs a bar near Plaka, also said she didn’t expect the work to be as physically hard, but she was getting used to it. At the end of the interview, she asked to exchange Instagrams, and when we had ended the recording, she expressed how happy she was that we came by.
For Manos Otsi, a homemade candle-maker from the island of Patmos, who sells his candles online and at markets in Athens, the city is “shitty,” which is why he hasn’t lived in it for ten years, preferring to live on the outskirts.
“I am from an island with a lot of tourists,” Manos said. “So I like tourists.”
So why does all of this matter to me? Because I feel more satisfied with understanding Athens through meeting the everyday people who live here, in the backdrop of what Kalfopoulou has called the ruins of modernity.
This space that was typically characterized by the old and crumbling ruins of antiquity has been replaced with those ruins of modernity: a space of shared liminal boundaries, through open windows, doors, and cafes where the boundaries between city, street, and building are blurred — a space where each person carries a legacy of Greece’s intertwining modern crises. I have now understood Greece as a space in the present, not the past.
