Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project (51 page)

The dogs I had to step over to go down the ramp to Bernard Tschumi’s statement glass-concrete box, the new Acropolis Museum, were crushed and posthumous, unwilling to lift their heads from the slick floor with its spindly reflections of cypress trees. They wore blue collars, tagged collaborators whose native territory had been captured. They moved, like tourists with one of those tickets granting them access to a number of ancient sites, between quotation ruins, refusing to trade dignity for a pat on the back. Inside the museum, rack-ribbed and stalking, was the thing they had once been: a savage marble hound, from 520
BC
, ‘associated with the Sanctuary of Artemis Brauronia on the Acropolis’.

I came to Athens, in the clamp of this miserable weather, because my niece by marriage, my wife’s sister’s daughter, was in town for a month; a fluent Greek speaker who had been a student in Crete and who was now working in the Athens office of an international publisher. Calling on this connection, for local knowledge and introductions, was a very Greek thing to do: who can you exploit if not your own family? Cousins of cousins, in-laws. That’s how the system works.

Some aspects of the streets around the Acropolis were reminiscent of home, of Hackney: our Olympic makeover. There were newly pedestrianized walkways, planted and primped, in place of the buses, honking taxis and competitive guides I remembered from holidays in the 1950s. Thickets of graffiti rivalled Hoxton and Shoreditch. Athens grumbles loudly to itself, on walls and hoardings: tags, slogans, territorial claims for Mao, Panathinaikos, AEK Athens, Guns N’ Roses. The most obvious differences from London were that nobody carved me up on impatient bicycles, there were no wired joggers – and dogs, unmastered, did their own thing. They were not required to gum threadbare tennis balls or crap to order. The notion that the Dionysiou Areopagitou walkway, this rock-skirting path, would inspire Athenians to splurge on Lycra and air-cushion running shoes didn’t work. The only joggers, in couples, threesomes, or pumping solo, were corporate Aussies and Coca-Cola executives. My niece, who smokes as heroically as any Greek, tried this circuit, before going to the office. She was nipped on the heel by one of the dogs.

Don DeLillo, back in 1983, in his book
The Names
, depicts Athens as a pivotal place, somewhere to hide dirty money, factor covert deals between the US, Germany and the propped-up regimes of the Middle East. Future terror as a black economy. Anonymous apartment blocks, thrown up near the airport, are exploited as hideaways for adulterous liaisons between risk-assessors and the displaced wives of international bankers, hard-boozing foreign correspondents and embassy secretaries. A tribal cluster of the over-rewarded, near-writers and part-time spooks, fly off to bad hotels in hot places, and then meet once more for drunken dinners, down by the sea, on their return to Greece. ‘Again I stopped drinking, this time in Istanbul,’ DeLillo wrote. ‘In Athens I went jogging every day.’ Couples, if they swim, do so fully clothed, glass in hand, duty-free cigarette wedged in the mouth.

The small hotel my niece recommended on Rovertou Gkalli was convenient for debriefing sessions with locals prepared to indulge my blunt interrogations. The paper-thin walls and that nostalgic bouquet of drains were offset by a panoramic view from the roof terrace, demonstrating the relationship between the Acropolis and the new museum at its foot; they were lit, both of them, to stand out against a living boneyard of white and pinkish-white buildings, the terracotta tiles and narrow apartments from another era. Breakfast was a necessary penance, the same self-service troughs you find in Liverpool and Manchester. The spitting coffee-sludge dispenser. Along with coachloads of young American college kids brought here to keep the business going in pinched times. They averaged three circuits of the dead sausage/rubber-egg trays and were very cheerful about it. ‘Sorry, sorry. It will be better tomorrow,’ the black-clad waitress whispered.

The new Acropolis Museum had 90,000 visitors in its first week. It was a confident symbol of national revival, following on from the Olympic moment. It was also a challenge to the alleged piracy of Lord Elgin, who struck a good bargain with the Turkish authorities and hacked out the Parthenon friezes now on display in their own Bloomsbury bunker. I visited the British Museum shortly before leaving for Athens. And heard, behind me at every step, the tobacco-enhanced growl of the late Melina Mercouri, the government minister and movie star who ‘conceived and proposed’ the concept of that migrating honour, the European City of Culture. ‘Culture,’ she pronounced, ‘is Greece’s heavy industry.’

Along with displays of artefacts, shards, pots found during excavations for the Metro system, the new stations with their broad platforms and clean, regular trains, featured what could only be called iconic posters of Mercouri. She is positioned in front of the Parthenon, white trench coat and roll-neck sweater, with left arm saluting, yellow flowers crushed in right hand: diva of the city, substitute for the missing Athena of Phidias. When we walked out in the evening, past a little restaurant in Thissio, we were told: ‘This is where Melina liked to hold court.’ There is a clip of Mercouri on YouTube, a weird superimposition of
Never on Sunday
and
Psycho
– in which she prowls up to Anthony Perkins, before perching beside him to croon. ‘What’s it about?’ he asks. ‘Like all Greek songs, about love and death,’ she replies. ‘I give you milk and honey and in return you give me poison.’

The museum was deserted. The entrance fee had recently been increased by 400 per cent, but it was still good value. Men in dark suits, with laminated accreditation, stood about among the marble heads on plinths, among the shock of white, confirming, if you asked, that it was not permitted to take photographs. The narrative was direct and convincing, the structure was open to an enfolding geology, the temple on the hill; it was both event and quotation. This, against the incontinent stacking of trophies in that great cabinet of curiosities, the British Museum, is such a coherent pitch. The building is not separated from the city, it’s not a respite, a dream with too many chambers, collisions, compartments; it tells one story, the rock. The temple and its vanished gods. At each ascending level, a floor-to-ceiling window sets the modelled Parthenon against the structure on the hill, with the dominant colour of the Doric columns shifting through the day from the yellow-brown of smokers’ teeth to burnt orange to a blueish white. Sculptural fragments, torsos, limbs, blocks of stone skewered on poles, are presented like a bead curtain, between viewer and city. Entering the museum, and looking down through the glass floor, excavations are visible, earlier layers as a part of the present structure: in the same way that, wrestling with another kind of history, they have preserved a slanted glimpse into Gestapo cellars for the Topography of Terror exhibition at the Hotel Prinz Albrecht in Berlin. Hitler, as his troops advanced on Athens in April 1941, gave the order that no bombs should fall on the city. ‘If we are asked about our forefathers,’ he said to Goebbels, ‘we must refer to the Greeks.’ The neurotic compulsion to construct museums, to combine postcard art with skull-faced warriors and nude bodybuilders roaming among the stumps of broken columns, was deep in his pathology.

We followed the blue-collar dogs to the Temple of the Olympian Zeus and the National Gardens. Inspired by what I had seen, the casts of the missing Parthenon marbles, I felt the strength of the argument for their return. The experience of the actual Acropolis, windswept, expensive, hustled by tour gangs, is grim: far better to stroll the floors of the museum, to take coffee in a room with a view. Police cars screech around the tight curves of the Acropolis ascent, and the trinket-seller Asians with cheap guidebooks and concertinas of photographs, scatter among the bushes, to regroup in time for the next coach.

On the shaded approach to the Panathenaic Stadium, an African man is throwing rubber-solution blobs at the pavement, demonstrating a novelty pedestrians greet with all the enthusiasm of being invited to sample freshly gobbed, gingivitic bubblegum. There are not many walkers to be found, it takes courage and athleticism to cross furious roads. The stadium of 1896, built on the site of the stadium of antiquity, involved some new marble cladding, some restoration, but no major devastation: the elegantly banked structure was set in parkland at the heart of the city. These were the first games of the modern era. The promoter, the Lord Coe of Athens, was a Paris-based scholar called Dimitrios Vikelas, a novelist and publisher of pamphlets. They found the ideal man, an exile with a passionate sense of national identity, and no knowledge or experience of sport. Economically, the idea was madness; the currant trade had collapsed and Charilaos Trikoupis, the prime minister, told parliament that the country was bankrupt and that there could be no financial support from the government for this Olympic revival. An obliging patron was found in the person of the Alexandrian merchant Georgios Averof and a young architect called Anastasios Metaxas was commissioned to carry through the reconstruction.

Averof gets his statue. The stadium, open to view, is still in use. Thin as a steel ruler, and too tight in the curve to be in much demand for contemporary athletic championships, the Panathenaic Stadium witnessed the close of the 2004 Olympic marathon. The rightness of the placement, against pine-thatched hills, a theatrical public space within the polis, is confirmed by sight lines, the cushion of gardens and broad avenues: a civic benefit rather than a crude intervention. Anybody can stroll to the entrance, see what is to be seen: the Olympic rings are not a threat and the sleeping dogs do not stir at the gates. Flagpoles are bare. Joggers, if any can be found, are free to make the elongated circuit or to run up steeply banked terraces. But noble as the site appears, it is not entirely benign. The poet John Lucas, in
92 Acharnon Street
, reminds us that the old Olympic stadium is where ‘the colonels assembled schoolchildren for parades so that they might learn to salute the Greek flag’.

Beyond the metal stream, motorbikes cascading from tributaries, is a canine salon, a defunct beauty parlour advertised with a wolfish yellow-and-blue portrait. Many small businesses of this quarter are shuttered, signed off in a blizzard of graffiti. The single functioning enterprise offers cushions featuring doggy pin-ups, pert chows and shivering, ratty, handbag things. Red-and-white ribbons giftwrap the latest auto-shunt. Even the flashiest motors are bruised and battered like old prize-fighters. But the fug, the sulphurous fume blanket of legend, seems to have lifted, and the narrow streets as we climb towards Lycabettus Hill are dressed with trees in winter fruit. I pick an orange and relish its sour, enamel-stripping bite. Nobody, I am told, devours this harvest, the urban largesse; the comfortable folk of Kolonaki set their own trees right up to the wall, but abhor as unclean the fruit of the town. Trucks, in poorer districts, fill sacks to manufacture a syrup that might as well be used in soap as in sickly cocktails.

The man on the desk of our hotel, with an effortless show of boredom, a refusal to acknowledge any of the nuisance traffic through his lobby, must have wondered what was going on. Every evening I perched on the sofa while a procession of young women turned up to engage in excited conversation, before slipping back to the street for cigarettes. The lawyer, on Sunday, was late. Even on her modest salary, she managed a car. She drove in from Falirou, on the coast, parked with all the rest in an unoccupied low-rise development in Fix, and took the Metro for a couple of stops. But, really, she didn’t like it: this mingling with the poor people, the immigrants. Central reservations and traffic lights were enterprise zones run by Africans and Asians: cellophane-wrapped blocks of cigarettes, instant valeting. Walking on those gentle hills was never an option, the tram obligingly stops every hundred yards or so. Old folk cross themselves when they pass a church.

When she arrived, in a flurry of unnecessary apologies, my informant explained that traffic had gridlocked. There had been another bomb incident, she was hazy about the details. Nobody was killed. These things happen most weekends and are unreported. The 17N group, responsible for the assassination of Brigadier Stephen Saunders, the British military attaché, in June 2000, had been rounded up, so it was claimed, just in time for the Olympics. Savvas Xiros, the alleged motorbike gunman, was arrested after a lethal device he was carrying went off prematurely. From his hospital bed, he made a long and detailed confession, naming a list of accomplices. Bundles of explosives, along with an assault rifle and ammunition, were found buried on a site being cleared for the 2004 Games. The current bombs, it’s thought, are intended to signal the active return of 17N, which took its name from the date, 17 November 1973, when the Junta’s security forces drove a tank through the gates of the Athens Polytechnic and stormed the grounds, killing a number of students. After the United States, which was blamed for propping up the Colonels, Britain and Tony Blair were 17N’s principal targets, for supporting the Nato bombing of Serbia. Curiously enough, as Michael Llewellyn-Smith, a former British ambassador, reports in
Athens: A Cultural and Literary History
, the young Blair, on a student holiday in 1974, had witnessed the triumphant return of the exiled Constantine Karamanlis, after the fall of the Colonels. Blair, as we know, is not immune to the theatrical potential of flag-waving processions, the glad-handing of mesmerized supporters: the rhetoric of regime change, messianic populism. Eyes flashing, teeth barred with threatening good will. The Man. The Chosen One. The Infallible Leader.

I enthused to Anna about one benefit of the Olympic extravaganza, the Metro system: trains appeared within minutes, tickets were modestly priced and uncomplicated, stations were smart and well lit. Too many nightmares underground, stalled in overheated viral torpedoes, kept my wife well away from the London system, but here, deep below Athens, it was a pleasure ride, an outing, as we sailed towards Maroussi and the major, multi-stadium Olympic complex, built to showcase both the top-dollar panache of the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava and the visible pride of the Greek nation. The Olympic Park, as I tried to explain, had been sited on a significant patch of ground: the memory-field of Henry Miller’s undervalued travel journal
The Colossus of Maroussi.
It was written in the shadow of war – time out for Miller, the last of old Europe – and published in 1941. This was the first Miller title that Penguin felt brave enough to place on their list. Apart from some nude sunbathing with the Durrells, whose marriage was going through a stormy patch, and many life-affirming meals and marathon drinking sessions, the tone is melancholy and estranged: bad roads in worse weather, radiant ruins guarded by forgotten eccentrics. A dollar goes a long way: Miller takes a room in one of the grand hotels on Constitution Square, from whose balconies it would now be possible to look down on the massed tents of protesting unionists alarmed by threats of cuts and redundancies. Through Lawrence Durrell, Miller meets – and loathes – members of the British expat community, effete classicists and cultural carpetbaggers whose practised ironies he fails to appreciate. He also encounters, and embraces, Greek poets of the Plaka, talkers, drinkers: George Seferis and George Katsimbalis. It is the Falstaffian Katsimbalis whom Miller christens ‘the Colossus of Maroussi’: war-wounded, ever thirsty, a large, limping man whose life is the excuse for a cycle of epic performance pieces. So successful was Miller in mythologizing his friend from the quiet suburbs that the poet was set up with lectures for life. Durrell records Katsimbalis, his ‘blood roaring with cognac’, crowing like the king of the city from the Acropolis rock until, from the ‘silvery’ darkness, all the scattered roosters of Attica answer him.