I love Athens for her bloodiness. She is the most blooded city I have ever been. Not like Rome, where everything is perfectly cute, even the ugliness and neglect. In Rome, the chaos is sophisticated, there is an order of no cappuccinos after eleven, of primi, secondi and dolci courses, of impeccable dressing and well-orchestrated operas. Athens has none of this. She just is. If Rome has amore, Athens has érota. Rome is beautiful, delicious, interesting. Athens turns you on.
It has taken me some time to come here. Scoured, dry, hot, sweaty, barren. Undone. The idea of Greece simultaneously scared and fascinated me. I had hardly come across anything Greek that was not ancient, but I could tell it would be quite intense, like freedom, allowing you to stand your ground and to know what you want. I came to the right place. There is something about the Greek soul that is both deeply religious and irresistibly sexy–her incredible love for life.
It is the lively debate on how to love life that ties Athens together, making sure you won’t forget. The anarchists remind the elite, the old remind the young, left reminds right, right minds left right back and the Acropolis reminds everyone. Its presence fills the city with a holiness carrying both peace and threat, as if whispering to the Athenians that they are doomed forever to live in the shadow of their ancestors. It fills them with a mixture of pride, resentment, inferiority and a dark humour characterized by disarming honesty. A postcard featuring an ancient running after a modern Greek man, bearing the title: “haunted by your past”. That is Greece in a nutshell, one of them.
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