So team spyked just spent a week fully immersed in Athens. Fuck me sideways if anyone can in all honesty claim to understand a town, let alone an entire people in the course of seven days, but regardless, in these paragraphs I'ma unwisely attempt to internalize my experience in the form of scattered bits of "understanding".
A taxi driver in Athens told us a couple of days ago that Romanians and Greeks are somewhat close by virtue of the Dacians (or Thracians? I don't quite recall) being closely related to Dorian Greeks. I honestly have no clue where he got this idea, but I suspect Romanians and Greeks have more in common due to their shared history within Rome/Byzantium and later the Ottoman Empire. And as informed by my experience, I have an example readily available: both (modern) Bucharest and (modern) Athens developed in a haphazard way that makes no sense to the Western mind. Within Athens one can easily find examples of an Orthodox church near a restaurant that sits quite close to a supermarket, as if that area formed a mini-village-cell among many others, all of them in turn integrated within a sprawling Μεγαλόπολις hosting over three million souls on a surface of about three thousand square kilometers. Well, even with the whole infrastructure holding it together1 there's very little resemblance between Athens and any Town of The Great European civilization (just pick one) that you may be acquainted to. A bit unexpected, wouldn't you say? given that Ἑλλάς is the cradle of Western civilization.
Anyway, I'm not sure why, but for some reason Greeks love Romanians. I'm pretty sure that Russian or Chinese tourists spend a whole lot more money over there, yet for some reason Romanians are surely among friends in Greece. Perhaps our friends remember the time when Romanians were searching for work all over Greece, in the '90s and early 2000s, back before labour migration started coming into fashion; or maybe it's just that we have so many words in common, quite a lot of them related to various foods, but in any case, enough of them so that we can understand each other despite the alphabetic barrier2. Regardless, we've heard nothing but good words from Greeks during our short stay, which makes up perhaps about half of my week-long experience.
Despite their friendliness and all, Greeks strike me as quite a conservative people. For example they've managed the feat of integrating their local postmodern taxi brokers into their taxi system -- in other words, you can't properly speaking "get an Uber", as you'll still end up with an actual taxi registered with the local authorities. Given the turf wars between taxis and Ubers over at home, I'd say that this is quite a civilized solution, wouldn't you think? But there's more: their only foreign supermarket is Lidl3 and their food markets4 are dominated by local producers -- frankly, I don't know how well they're faring, but their fruits are fresh -- especially the citrics taste way better than the Turkish stuff Romanians tend to import -- and their yogurt is amazing, so what can I say, I really couldn't complain.
The remainder of my experience consisted in the internalization of Athens itself, in all its beauty. The town as a whole is a huge museum, so much that you can define its centre based on the visibility of the Acropolis. Merely by putting a bunch of rocks into a context, one realizes how Greece's civilization was so big that we moderns merely attempted to copy it using more sophisticated means. Our main or perhaps only advance was in degree, but the quality of our current state of affairs is at most -- at most the same as that in Greece two millenia ago. While, say, the rocks in the Acropolis metro station seem to have survived the test of time quite well, I'm wondering how much of the metro itself will be in working order in, say, a couple of decades from now.
Other than that Athens is very much alive, and I suppose we have these wonderfully strange times to thank for it. These tourist traps are a fine melting pot hosting folks from all over the world, if only temporarily -- all connected by the same thread of English badly spoken in oh, so many different ways. If it weren't for the local clarinetist or bouzokiist to provide a background, you'd almost forget you were in the Balkans. To wit, during our day at the beach it almost felt like some of the kids were trying to reenact their Ibiza moments in Greece, which was funny in some sense, given that the beach was otherwise full of asians offering foot massages.
I suppose that despite all the warring going on, "the world" as a whole ain't such a bad place to live, and Athens makes no exception to this observation. They make the gyros, the feta and the calamari just as well as they did back in 2007 and 2018 and they5 prefer cash to database-coins any time of the day. They also maintain their beaches in good order so that we managed to take a bath in the Aegean Sea despite the cold April water. But most importantly of all: the vast majority of people there aren't fucked in the head6 -- I'm well aware that my observation is distorted by my tourist lens; and despite that, I've taken my time watching people interact with tourists and among themselves and I'd say that it's rather their own experience in the tourism "industry" that makes them such pleasant people.
I've also taken some photos, maybe I'll post them sometime. TL;DR: Greece is nice and I hope to go back soon.
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Bucharest, by contrast, hosts around two million people (maybe more) within about the tenth of Athens' surface. Bucharestians have done a great job of bringing the headcount up in the last two decades, only without the effort of developing the infrastructure required to maintain an actual metropolitan area -- which is why however Balkan it might be, Athens is a city, while Bucharest remains an overgrown "târg". ↩
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In all honesty, it's not that much of a barrier, especially for mathematicians. ↩
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On the public transportation side they also have something called a "freenow", which is identical in all practical respects with Uber. Anyways, the reason I'm mentioning them is that like Lidl, they're also German, which kinda makes sense in the context of Greece's debt crisis. ↩
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Not all of them, sure, but at least the ones I've interacted with.
The woman advises me to mention Costas' music shop in the town centre. When we got in, the man issued us a warning that we're entering an actual shop for musical instruments, with luthiers and all. It took him a bit, but he soon figured out that we're actually interested in musical instruments, not just local memorabilia. So he gave us a tour of his wares and when he heard we were Romanians, he bombarded us with discount offers and gifts. As a result, I now own a Greek lute called a baglamas and some basic percussion, both of which I shall definitely sample in my next works. ↩
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As just one counter-example: they have a local "antifa" that is much more publicly visible than, say, the one in Romania. Their posters certainly gave off a vibe of 1930s' Iron Guard: they seem to really, really dislike the system, unaware perhaps of the fact that the system can readily absorb and integrate them, much despite the warnings issued by some of their compatriots circa half a century ago.
But who knows, maybe the system won't absorb them this time around. ↩