An Athens State of Mind
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The intersection in front of the National Gallery, heading toward the center of Athens. (Photo by Criselda Yabes)
Athens was going to be my writing place. Every writer must have a writing place. I learned that from the late Polish writer Ryszard Kapuscinski when I visited him in Warsaw during that year-long travel around most of Europe, including the eastern part that broke away from the crumbling Soviet Union. He wrote in an apartment above the one he shared with his family.
Before flying home to Manila after that sojourn, I wanted to unburden all that I had experienced, and my Greek friend Tina lent me the perfect place to write my personal essays – in her apartment in the center of Athens.
Looking back, it was that summer of 1993 that I nurtured many dreams of traveling and writing. I wrote feverishly in the evenings, my adrenalin unable to calm down until the hour just before sunrise. (I don’t do that anymore; after curing my insomnia with meditation and homeopathic medicine, I am much more active in the mornings). After a bowl of yogurt at past noon, which was my breakfast as it were, I’d set off walking in the streets.
The city’s center was accessible from Tina’s apartment on Diocharous Street. I could go around Syntagma Square any time to look at the shops, restaurants, bookstores. I’d veer off towards Plaka to soak in the pastels and ochres of the architecture and to check out the bazaars. And, of course, there was the Acropolis, the grand house of the mythological gods, the seat of the wise woman Athena. It wasn’t as crowded with tourists as it is now.
Tina’s apartment: my first writing place (Photo by Criselda Yabes)
Over the past years after that European journey, Athens has become my pit stop, so to speak, between Europe and the Philippines on subsequent, shorter trips. I would spend time with Tina before flying home, as I had done the first time around. Tina later moved to the suburbs, making our excursion to the center limited even though it was only a bus ride away. Whatever our errands were – shopping for this and that – we had to visit the bookstore selling English-language books and then promptly sit in a café for her cigarettes and coffee, and to continue our never-ending chats.
Late last year as the pandemic rules eased up, she moved back to her old apartment on Diocharous Street to be closer to her aging parents, Heracles and Fefi. Her only son, Alkis, was also preparing to go to the university. So I had my deja vu in her apartment; it was just as it was in the summer of 1993, only this time I was sleeping in Alkis’s bedroom while Alkis was spending more of his time with his new girlfriend.
Whereas before, I had stuck to my usual routes towards the center, this time around, during the Easter week of the Greek Orthodox (which followed the Catholic Easter), Tina showed me the back corners where we had lunch at the 5Fs restaurant, which served cheaper dishes marinated in olive oil that I couldn’t resist. The local bakery had tons of baklava that I stuffed myself with. There, we got our haircuts from an exotic-looking, high-heeled hairdresser named Marilou and paid virtually nothing for our new look, compared with prices at hair salons in Paris.
Fefi’s cooking: lunch for Greek Easter (Photo by Criselda Yabes)
Tina’s niece Fenareti, the artist in the family who re-painted Tina’s apartment, had been our stylists, but she had had enough of doing the favor of cutting everyone’s hair. She was just a newborn baby when I first came to Greece. Tina kept a picture of me holding her in my arms. Evangelia, Fenareti’s older sister, still resembled the little girl that she was when she would accompany Tina’s mother who knocked on my door to check in on me in the apartment.
It was Evangelia who willingly joined me for a walk after our sumptuous Easter lunch prepared by Tina’s mother, from whom she inherited her instincts in the kitchen. The night before, Tina’s younger sister, Viki, took me to the monastery for the Easter Mass, none of which I understood. I went for the intimacy of the courtyard, with celebrants carrying brown candles, and the stunning icons in the altar.
It was Evangelia’s turn to take me through empty and quiet streets for some fresh air. Because it was a holiday, most everyone were indoors. A few houses belted out traditional songs from their stereos. We walked to a park, Skopeftirio, in the neighborhood of Kesariani where in 1944 the Germans executed 200 members of the Greek Resistance. During the pandemic, this was where their neighbors went when they had had enough of the lockdowns. Nearby was the university campus where green parrots scampered about. Evangelia said they were released from their cages because there was nothing left to feed them.
Evangelia read to me the Greek graffiti in the park, clearly anti-fascist statements against rightist extremism sprouting in many parts of Europe nowadays. In Tina’s apartment, politics was always part of the conversations with her son and his friends, her nephews and nieces, and their boyfriends and girlfriends. We think it showed the healthy, refreshing mind of the youth. The current wave in Europe – anti-immigration, radical Islamism, racism – has been a drastic change from the democratic fever we experienced in the 1990s. Greece survived its economic crisis, and there remains evidence of that in the city’s street art.
What stayed the same was the farmers’ market on Fridays, right on the street behind Tina’s apartment building. Strawberry was in season. Olives were a given; I particularly like the green ones in lemon juice. I got more almonds than I could finish, and pistachios and caramel-coated nuts. There were the usual vegetables for salads and cooked dishes. Tina does not leave the farmers’ market without buying flowers; that day it was a dozen yellow roses she set in her living room vase.
And what I found amusing was the small park nearest to the apartment, closer to the National Gallery on the main avenue leading to the center. The park was donated by the Japanese embassy, landscaped in a Zen fashion, complete with the torii gate. I showed it to Tina when she took her dog, Avra, for a walk.
The new zen garden donated by the Japanese embassy. Tina with her dog Avra by the torii gate. (Photo by Criselda Yabes0
We have seen other grand designs that are for Athens and Athens only: the museum by the Acropolis, for example, can’t be missed, as well as the new glass-paneled national library that from the top has a view of the Acropolis.
The gray city: an overview of Athens with the Acropolis in the horizon. (Photo by Criselda Yabes)
No one could possibly ignore the Acropolis. Everything else might change in bits and pieces, but never the Acropolis. For me, it is best seen from afar (after you have actually been there, of course), in a dream-like state of gray Athens is known for. I think it’s more like beige. In the far distance lies Mount Lycabettus, which I climbed again, re-enacting what I had done when I first arrived in Athens one summer almost 30 years ago.
The flag and the church on top of Mount Lycabettus (Photo by Criselda Yabes)
Reaching the top was my homage to a city that is like home to me. If only I had learned to speak the language fluently. It was a sentimental meander, reminding me of when I first sat in Tina’s apartment years and years ago to write essays that would be published in a book, about ideas and histories and philosophies of ancient days, because it is my writing place.
Criselda Yabes is a writer and journalist based in Manila. Her most recent books include Crying Mountain (Penguin SEA) on the 1970s rebellion in Mindanao and Broken Islands (Ateneo de Manila University Press) set in the Visayas in the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan.
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