I don’t pretend to understand the finer points of the Greek crisis. But as to some of the coarser points, I was given a crash course last week within an hour of landing in Athens airport. It began with the bus into the city, which was supposed to take us to Syntagma Square, the focal point for public transport.
Except that, as well as being the focal point for transport, Syntagma Square is also where most political demonstrations – including the recent riots – happen. And there being yet another protest the night we arrived, the bus driver had to drop us off short of the destination, with instructions (all Greek to us) about how to proceed.
Struggling with a tired, hungry family and a map, I was still trying to calculate our co-ordinates, when a friendly local man approached offering help. Yes, he knew where our hotel was and, if he were us, he’d get a taxi. It would cost “about €20”, he added, including extras. And if I didn’t come down in the last shower, exactly, it must have been the shower before that. Because I fully believed the man’s advice was genuine, until it emerged that he himself was the proposed taxi driver.
After that epiphany, we hailed a cab on the street instead, checking (as the guide-books advise) that the meter was fully operational. Worryingly, this driver refused to give an advance estimate for the job. But about 30 seconds later, we were skirting Syntagma. And two minutes after that, we were at the hotel, where – mocking my earlier precautions – the meter stopped at €3.62. I gave the man a fiver, to save us both embarrassment.
DURING SEVERAL DAYS in Athens, having this unexpected source of entertainment nearby, we fell into walking up to the square every night to watch the revolution. It was not, in any case, televised. The riots had passed and the world’s media had moved on too. The nearest we saw to violence was when several wheelie bins were set alight. And even then, the fire was put quickly, before it could turn into anything photogenic.
True, whenever crowds gathered at the Parliament Building, a phalanx of shield-and-truncheon-bearing policemen would line up before them, just in case. Nor was Syntagma’s next most illustrious address, the Grand Bretagne Hotel, taking any chances.
Athens’s multi-starred hotel has long enjoyed a ringside seat to history (Winston Churchill came close to being blown up in it before, according to some accounts, Greek anarchists had second thoughts and aborted the operation). But the location can be a mixed blessing sometimes. Which is why the hotel was keeping its ground-floor windows shuttered last week.
In the event, those at the barriers expressed themselves exclusively though chants and songs – there could be several different ones going at the same time – and verbal abuse. Trinket vendors also did good business selling a cheap, laser-beam toy that the less mature protesters amused themselves by shining on the visors of the riot squad, or at the Grande Bretagne’s bedrooms. But wheelie bins aside, all the fireworks were verbal. Behind the front line, the tented village that has occupied the middle of the square for weeks now was a hive of political activism, with open-air meetings and workshops and panel discussions.
Community and special interest groups were setting out their stalls, literally and metaphorically. There was even a radio station.
And although I couldn’t understand any of it, it was impressive to watch. As speaker after speaker commanded the floor for a few minutes, you were reminded this was the country that invented democracy, or at least patented it.
You were also reminded (especially if, like me, you’d just read it in a book) of the importance the ancient Greeks attached to public speaking: so that, 3,000 years later, the likes of Barack Obama is still consciously using rhetorical devices of that era. His habit of repeating a phrase at
the start of sentences, for example? Anaphora. Or his “yes, we can” refrain at the end. That’s called epiphora, to those of us who’ve read the book.
APART FROM off-meter taxi drivers, the other thing all Greek travel guides warn you about is pickpockets. Even so, I had to learn this the hard way. It didn’t happen in a crowded cafe, or among the revolutionaries on Syntagma. It happened on an evening stroll along the quiet lane-ways below the Acropolis, where the views across the city are stunning.
They were especially stunning from a rocky outcrop onto which we clambered, joining young lovers and other romantics for whom this is a favourite spot. And either because I was stunned – or more likely trying to ensure that my six-year-old son didn’t fall over the nearby cliff – I left my shoulder bag on the ground for a moment. From where, before you could say “ye big eejit”, it disappeared with a thief in the night.
It could have been worse. After a panicky audit of the things that might have been in it (Money? No. Passports? Back at the hotel. Camera? Ditto. Phone? At home in Dublin), the losses amounted to credit cards, a travel notebook, and my now-ironically entitled copy of the Rough Guide to Greece.
So I cancelled the cards and made the other necessary arrangements. Luckily, our hotel had several stars fewer than the Grande Bretagne.
And if there was a plus side to the experience, maybe my subsequent transactions gave me some small insight into the Greek crisis. They were, after all, part of what is apparently a large and ever-expanding sector here: the so-called “cash economy”.