Where do Athenians spend their time? Where do they unwind, meet friends, or enjoy their daily coffee? Where does work end and the city begin? In the new column “Meet the Athenians”, we talk to the people of Athens about the places and moments that make them love the city they call home.
In this interview Natassa Sideri, translator, writer and playwright talks with TO BHMA International edition.
1) How does your work interconnect with the city and its people?
Athens is never named in my writings – neither is any other city, for that matter. I like bare landscapes and bare people. But to write is to steal, so even when the narrative comes from elsewhere the city is present in all the details.
2) If you had only 24 hours in Athens, which three essential stops would be on your list?
Go up to Strefi. It’s my favorite hill in Athens. Lycabettus and Tourkovounia are too high, when you’re up there the city looks like a postcard. You don’t hear the noises, you don’t sense the people. The ones around the Acropolis are too crowded, too full of tourists. But in Strefi you’re in the thick of it, just high enough above to see it all happen. Τhere are plans to privatize it, so I don’t know for how long we’ll be able to access it. Walk down to Patission, turn right and continue straight a bit past the intersection with Alexandras, then turn around suddenly to face the Parthenon looming in the background. The horizon is very open at that point. I’ve always thought that this is the perfect screenshot of Athens: cars, noise, shop windows, the presence of the city’s recent history (the student uprising against a Junta in 1973 was sparked off in the nearby Athens Polytechnic) and the Parthenon in the distance trying to make sense of it all.
Come back to Kypseli, my neighborhood. But I won’t tell you where, as with gentrification in full swing, I guard the good spots jealously.
3)What’s one thing you really love about Athens, and something else you wish was different?
Athens is completely schizophrenic. Charmingly so; I think that’s its biggest asset. The contrast between the ancient and the new, between the aggressivity of its streets and the congeniality of its bars, between the mountains and the sea. So many dreams of grandeur, so many ruins. I love seeing the remnants of the city’s dreams both in its beauty and in its ugliness. And I love the sky. Every time I am away for long, I find myself missing it.
If I could change just one thing, I would bring back the rivers. There used to be three of them flowing through Athens, but they were buried in the first half of the 20th century. My generation never saw them flow freely; we only know them through paintings and gravures for the most part made by European travelers (this mediated “firsthand” testimony holds true for much of our culture, by the way). But the rivers have not forgotten us: in heavy rainfall, they come back with a vengeance, and then you see cars being carried away like boats, people holding on to traffic lights like they were trees.
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