Is a substack less presumptuous than the blog of yesteryear? I don’t know. But so far I’m really enjoying other people’s Substacks, particularly the newsletters of writers and friends which are little updates rather than perfectly edited writing. I like this little peek into someone’s life, finding out what’s been occupying their thoughts in short, easy-to-read bursts. I also like the format - having been a fashion fanatic as a teen when the blogosphere was all the rage, I’d spend hours sitting on my laptop jumping from one post to the next, and I think I’ve missed the earlier days of the internet where writing was dominant compared to Instagram and Tik Tok which have made everything much more snippety and visual.
But for myself, I’ve always been concerned about this kind of writing, and in fact any kind of writing I want to do. Why should I bother? Why do I think anyone would care what I have to say? But I guess I’ve been wanting to get into a more regular writing habit, share updates with friends and generally have somewhere to get my thoughts out. A lot has happened in the last year which I’ve not really had time to digest until now, and writing has always been my way of making sense of things. I also want to show people my view of Athens, which bears only a fleeting resemblance to the postcards and stereotypical views of Greece.
But do you care? Who knows. Read on, or don’t.
It’s been a wild 8 months. On 30th August last year, I moved to Athens. I peered out of the window of the plane coasting down over the Aegean - illuminated by an unbelievably bright moon which turned the blackness of the water below into rippling velvet. It was astonishingly beautiful, and yet cold and eerie. At the time, I didn’t know it was a blue moon, but when I landed and googled why the moon was so bright, it felt auspicious. But up in the air, I felt that the agonisingly slow descent could last forever, this state of suspension prolonging the time before reality would hit. I knew that when I landed, nobody was waiting for me. Apart from a few very loose acquaintances, I had no real friends in Athens, no family, no real tangible links apart from a month’s vacation here in 2022. As I took a taxi through the dark city, all I could think was what the f*ck have I done. I thought of my lovely London friends who had turned up to my leaving drinks at The Florence in Herne Hill, the little slice of London that had been the place I’d felt most at home in the UK. Why had I left that behind, when I’d finally felt settled?
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I arrived in Athens too late to go straight to the apartment I was going to sublet for my first month, so I checked into a small single room at a hotel in Exarcheia that backs onto the infamous Lofos Strefi (if the mythology is to be trusted, a hill designated for the purposes of drug-taking, witchy gatherings and other dark arts). I lay on the firm mattress in a clean but sparse room, turned on the tiny wall-mounted tv, and watched the end half of Interstellar (fragmented by 15-minute-long ad breaks that make Greek tv so annoying to watch). My stomach was knotted, but eventually I slept, drifting into a sleep that felt like I’d been transported into a tiny little box which had somehow floated out into the middle of the Atlantic, with no sign of land or passing ships, just that cold moon overhead.
After a rough first night, I headed over to my rental apartment and instantly felt better. It was a basem*nt apartment (which I had been warned in advance was visited by the occasional co*ckroach) but it had been decorated by the couple who owned it in colourful island style, and had a lovely view onto a quiet pedestrian street, from which the neighbourhood cats and nosey old ladies would peek their heads down from directly into the living room. What’s going on here they asked, the yiayias verbally, the cats through expressive eye contact and a sniffle of the nose. It had a little yard at the back, and the bed was mounted high on a constructed platform, with a copy of Alice Bechdel’s graphic novel Fun House sitting on the bedside table (I recommend). Over the next month, I settled into the rhythm of Exarcheia life: the sweaty heat of September, the hipster tourists stopping to photograph the graffiti, walking to the little mini market, working from some cafes and always defiantly refusing to make eye contact with the robocops stationed at each corner of the triangular Plateia Exarcheion. On Saturdays, the street above the apartment had a laiki (groceries market), so I went and bought vegetables, and lots of fresh fish (which I forgot to ask the monger to gut so ended up learning a new skill from Youtube).
One night, I was enticed by the sound of live music and rowdiness, and discovered an impromptu street party for the opening of a new bar. Cars hesitantly passed through the narrow road between a small stage set up on one side and the punters in their seats on the other. I grabbed a beer and sat on the kerb watching. I noticed another woman on her own, dancing along exuberantly to the music, her short, curly hair bobbing about. I complimented her on her dancing, and we chatted. She too was a half-Greek who had mostly grown up in Germany, and now that her father had passed away, she had taken a month off work to come here for intensive Greek classes and reconnect with her roots. This was the first of many similar encounters I’ve had since I’ve been here, with other Greek hybrids of the diaspora. While many born and bred Athenians seem desperate to escape Greece, those of us who didn’t live through the financial crisis years are starting to enact our return, tired of the depressions of our own Northern European cities. Throughout my childhood and teen years, I ached with the resentment of being torn away from the country I felt I belonged in. Yet now I start to think I’m lucky it has been this way round. Had I not been dragged back to England as a child, would I too be one of these Greeks looking to the North as an escape?
I often have to fight the urge to tell them that’s not where the answers lie, but I settle with saying nowhere is without its problems. I hope leaving will work for them, and just as they don’t understand my reasons for wanting to come here, I have not lived their lives either, so who am I to question their flight?
I started writing this naively thinking I’d get all my thoughts of the last 9 months out in one little post. Instead it’s sparked ideas for a least 10 more sub-topics. So for now, some hot takes:
Challengers - Like All of Us Strangers, I think this has suffered a bit from over-hype. There has been so much PR in the build-up that I was pretty much foaming at the mouth when I finally took my seat in the cinema this week, and although the sight of Josh O’Connor and Zendaya justified that, I felt I’d been mis sold. For some reason I thought it was set in the 80s and it wasn’t, and that it would be more of a throuple situation, rather than a love triangle. I also missed the heady cinematography of Guadagnino’s other work like Call Me By Your Name, and Io Sono Amore. That being said, the soundtrack was great, and the movie was redeemed with the pumping crescendo of the final scenes. I never thought I’d relish the touching of a ball on a racket quite so much.
Avant-Drag! - A phenomenal documentary film about Athens’ radical drag queens, which also perfectly captures the gritty reality of Athens, and the scourges of hom*ophobia, transphobia, nationalism and xenophobia (to name just a few -phobias and -isms) that are plaguing Greek society. The queens shown in the film use their drag to fight for acceptance, visibility, love and safety, while mockingly holding up a mirror for Greece to take a look at itself. It’s been deservedly winning awards at film festivals across Europe.
Λοιπον, θα λέμε,
Anastasia x
