Facing Athens: Encounters with the Modern City

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Return to Book Page. Preview — Facing Athens by George Sarrinikolaou. Encounters with the Modern City by George Sarrinikolaou. Modern Athens exists in the shadow of its ancient past: But as the city prepares to host the Summer Olympics, it faces challenges quite unlike those depicted in mythology and epic poetry. As Sarrinikolaou walks through the city, striving to face the Athens of his childhood head-on, he encounters people who reveal the demythologized city: In their stories, Sarrinikolaou sees the economic, social, and historical forces that are shaping Athens today.

This is the Athens that even many Athenians see only in passing, and in Facing Athens Sarrinikolaou claims it for himself, a perennial visitor, and also for the reader, who, in effect, visits the city through his gritty, lyrical, unstinting, yet finally affectionate portrait of the place. Hardcover , pages. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up.

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To ask other readers questions about Facing Athens , please sign up. Lists with This Book. This book is not yet featured on Listopia. Jan 02, Dankistler rated it really liked it. Home always looks different For anyone who goes home after a number of years away will see their home in a much different light. This book does just that as the author pokes around his home town of Athens, Greece and sees what he never saw as a child. Yes, Athens has all kinds of problems—what modern city does not—but in many ways the people of Greece are best suited to solve these problems as almost everyone there that is everyone who stayed understands that it will take years of work and eff Home always looks different For anyone who goes home after a number of years away will see their home in a much different light.

Yes, Athens has all kinds of problems—what modern city does not—but in many ways the people of Greece are best suited to solve these problems as almost everyone there that is everyone who stayed understands that it will take years of work and effort to turn things around. This book is a good hard look at Athens from a number of years ago and the city is still facing most of these problems and even more with the influx of refugees from the Middle East. Well worth reading before you head off to Athens for you summer vacation. Aug 10, Jessi rated it really liked it.

As part of a class that I was taking, I was required to read this book and write a 12 page analysis of it. Overall, I enjoyed the book very much, although I probably would not have read it if not for this class. I felt like it offerred a very refreshing and "real" explanation of Greek society as it was in It was a nice change from the instructors other course material, which by and large painted a rosy glow on all things Greek.

I think that the current crisis in Greece shows that things th As part of a class that I was taking, I was required to read this book and write a 12 page analysis of it. I think that the current crisis in Greece shows that things there are not rosy and beautiful, and that Greece has some serious issues to contend with moving forward in the future. I'll spare you my 12 page research analysis, and just hit the highlights: He writes about this place from the perspective of an American returning to his homeland, which he has been away from for 20 years.

Sarrinikolaou picks over Greek culture piece by piece. He alternates between sharing stories of the Greece he remembers as a child, and analyzing how Greece is today. He also keeps in the minds of the readers the historical context for the current status of Greece. By and large, his analysis is not positive. He describes Greece as a place that was dominated by xenophobia, racism, and corruption.

He laments Greece in as being riddled with basic disregard for the safety and necessities of a functional society. He explains some of the difficult problems that Greece faces and attempts to somewhat illuminate the historical path that Greece took to get there. Oct 20, Brett rated it it was ok Shelves: Sarrinikolaou paints modern Athens as a city of contradictions.

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While this juxtaposition has great potential, it is done sloppily here, giving the reader t Sarrinikolaou paints modern Athens as a city of contradictions. While this juxtaposition has great potential, it is done sloppily here, giving the reader the feeling of reading two disjointed works. Sarrinikolaou is quite critical of many of the changes in Athens, and many of the attitudes he encounters.

However, the difficulties and dereliction found in central Athens, for example, only mimic the pattern set forth by other major European and American cities perhaps a generation later, due to slower development in Greece. Very little of what Sarrinikolaou describes is unique to Athens. The author comes across as condescending and lacking any sense of evenhandedness. Jul 07, Louis rated it it was ok Shelves: An American immigrant returns to the city of his birth after living in New York for 20 years.

From the "racism" of the Greeks towards the immgrants Albanians, Kurds etc. I guess this is not what I expected and maybe he was trying to find the Athens seen through the eyes of a 10 year old when he left G An American immigrant returns to the city of his birth after living in New York for 20 years. I guess this is not what I expected and maybe he was trying to find the Athens seen through the eyes of a 10 year old when he left Greece but the problems he found are in every city in the world.

Just way too negative for my liking and for anyone who has not been to Greece, I would take it with a grain of salt.

Facing Athens: Encounters with the Modern City

Athens does have many faults but is still the cradle of modern civilization and there are wonderful archaeological sites and museums to see. Don't really want to recommend it but it is one point of view. Dec 03, Lisa rated it it was ok. I lived in Athens 20 years ago, and was interested in reading about how someone who also had been away from the city described it. Old neighborhoods are being destroyed as, nearby, new, modern construction springs up. The city, which until recently seemed to keep a firm grasp on its history and heritage, is suddenly elbowing its way into the twenty-first century.

It would be simplistic to say there are now two Athens old and new , but it is certainly true that modern Athens is looking less and less like its old self every year. An insightful if melancholy look at a great city from the eyes of one of its own. In this slender, frank memoir, journalist Sarrinikolaou revisits his native Athens, Greece, blending present and past narratives of a place once beloved and now wracked with greed, racism and violence. For Sarrinikolaou, it's his first extended stay since his family emigrated to New York when he was He senses the city's golden age is gone: The prevailing Greek mood, Sarrinikolaou counters, is racist, not xenophobic, as his countrymen march refugee Albanians home across the border.

In suburban bastions of old money, he contrasts the Athenian aristocracy, villas and privilege, all at a secure, safe distance from the city, with buses packed with sweaty servants and gardeners at quitting time. Sarrinikolaou's snapshot observations are significant, as he touches on frenzied soccer games, gypsies' homes, the ritual of a lamb feast, student politics and the Archbishop Christodoulos Paraskevaides's protest against government exclusion of religion on new state identity cards.

His writing seems conflicted, troubled, as if he didn't want to cast his childhood recollections against the myth of Athens. Nevertheless, he tries to play fair in a somber overview of the city, regardless of its defects. Sarrinikolaou will do media interviews out of New York, and his book is bound to get special coverage due to the summer Olympics. This work offers a grim and gritty portrait of a city making an uncomfortable transition to the 21st century, told through the eyes of a returning native. When he was a child of ten, Sarrinikolaou's parents uprooted the family and moved to New York, but not long afterward, his abusive father abandoned them and returned to Athens alone.

Although the author has visited Athens many times and has family there to whom he remains close, he is an outsider with a critical and cynical eye.

He longs to be a part of the city and to recapture what was taken away from him as a child, yet he finds many reasons to separate himself from a place he sees slowly being ruined by uncontrolled urban development, destruction of the environment, and a corrupt medical system. He reports that Athenians are status-conscious, shallow, bigoted, and more interested in soccer than religion. This is a compelling series of essays but not a first choice for libraries looking to bolster their collections on Athens in time for the summer Olympics.

For libraries with large travel-writing collections. Thank you for using the catalog. Greek Americans -- Biography. Athens Greece -- Social life and customs. Booklist Review Even though he immigrated to the U. Publisher's Weekly Review In this slender, frank memoir, journalist Sarrinikolaou revisits his native Athens, Greece, blending present and past narratives of a place once beloved and now wracked with greed, racism and violence.

Library Journal Review This work offers a grim and gritty portrait of a city making an uncomfortable transition to the 21st century, told through the eyes of a returning native. Where they landed, modern Athens was formed. Now the toys, in revenge for their neglect, seem to be multiplying, filling every nook of the Athenian basin and slowly climbing the mountains to the north, east, and west. In the crevices between the myriad jagged little white cubes, I look for traces of human life.

When I focus more intently, I find a stream of cars silently heading north. Only what's left standing of the Parthenon and the Aegean to the south have escaped the giant's sloppy hand. I turn tothe ancient temple, honey-colored in the dull sun, and back to the glistening sea to the south, seeking something to counter the architectural frenzy below.

Soon enough, I know, I must descend this hill. It's April, and the tourists scaling the ancient site are few. But even in the off-season, jet travel makes the small crowd polyglot. The mix of tongues is different now than in the latter decades of the twentieth century. With disposable income, sneakers, and Japanese electronics in hand, Poles, Russians, and other recently Westernized peoples are climbing around the ruins.

Ordinary people from disparate lands and I, a displaced native--all of us looking more and more alike--gather here, drawn by a single image. Up close, the Parthenon validates the virtual foundations of life. For a moment, at least, our anxiety dissipates; we have not been fooled. The magic processes that embedded this Athenian logo in our psyches, before we ever stood before it, were benevolent. For some, however, gazing at the actual site must be too much. And so they negotiate the moment through viewfinders, lenses, and digital circuits.

When two Greek men walk by, one explaining to the other the intricacies of his new mobile phone, I think that the Parthenon is becoming more and more necessary for this city. It is not that technological advances have been more disruptive here than elsewhere. If anything, Greeks embraced technologies such as mobile phones and the Internet because they were cool, and because they offered opportunities to circumvent bureaucracy. It used to take years to get home telephone service in Greece. Technological change has been accompaniedby revolutionary developments in the economy, the physical environment, the social fabric of this city, and even the political geography of the region.

Many of these changes have benefited Athens, but they have also created serious problems. People here say that life is rotten. The theme is a favorite of radio disc jockeys and anyone who learns that I am writing about Athens. Nothing works; nothing ever gets done; the government is corrupt; people cheat; traffic is unbearable; crime is on the rise; blame it on the Albanian immigrants.

In such circumstances, it is not so much the Parthenon's beauty, or the strength evident in its survival that is necessary. Rather, it is the sanctity of the place, which beauty and strength only fortify. It is as if the ancient Athenians built this temple with their modern descendants in mind, providing them with a spiritual refuge in their time of need. Athenians send their children on school trips here, they guard the place, charge admission, preserve it, light it up at night, drive around it, damage it with their smog, make love in its shadows, ignore it in their daily perambulations, and take pride in it.

Here is the flow of life, "the whole catastrophe" as Nikos Kazantzakis writes in Zorba the Greek , everything that these people have. The Parthenon shrinks, becoming part of life, and reigns unperturbed above it all. This duality is the holy spirit of the place, and if you look, you will see the temple radiate. Early in Kazantzakis's novel, Zorba, in a letter, summons an English friend to Greece to show him a magnificent little green pebble he has found.

Had Zorba visited the Parthenon this afternoon, he would have summoned his friend to see the poppies--you'll never see a brighter red--growing alongside the temple's marble pieces that are strewn around the Acropolis. Ifind one in the Parthenon's shadow, and then a small grove of them under the wooden steps that lead to the exit. Outside the gate, I take the south walkway and head down the hill. Olive and pine trees cover the hillside, but it is the poppies that make the place magical.

And, as if the red starbursts were not enough, chamomile grows here too. Red poppies, white chamomile, green grass, patches of blue-and-white sky, the creamy-golden marble columns showing through the trees: I have walked into a pastoral landscape that stubbornly, serenely claims its space in this concrete city. The swallows, too, know this place. They fly chirping overhead, back from their winter interlude some place warmer, farther south.

My assignment is to draw a picture of "Spring," but the swallows are really all I can manage. I draw slender, lowercase gammas, whose ends form the birds' scissortails. I make them slender for swallows and fatter when I have to draw fish. I try my hand at flowers, a tree, even ants, but I know they are no good. When she decides to help, Mother sits at the kitchen table next to me and draws a bird of a different kind, a sparrow perhaps, perched on my tree.

The bird is pretty, and it looks unlike anything I have drawn. That I will have something so pretty as part of my drawing reduces the embarrassment I feel when I think that the teacher will notice I got help with my homework. A third of the way down the hill, modern Athens begins. At the borderline, a new pedestrian walkway softens the transitionbetween the ancient and the modern.

See a Problem?

I head west along this path, keeping the Acropolis on my left. The path is deserted--a street musician, up ahead, the only other person on it. In the distance to the east, the clouds drift over Mount Ymittos. For more than twenty years, I have known Athens only during its hot and crowded summers. In April the place has a simpler, introverted feel. A stray dog wanders by. As I approach, the music gets louder. The musician, hunched over a dulcimer, sits by the side of the road. He works the hammers, making an airy music that sounds both familiar and distant.

I pull some of the recently circulated euros in coins from my pocket and try to make sense of their value. Before the euro replaced the drachma in , fifty or a hundred of the local currency would have been the right amount to drop in a street musician's hat. The coins in my hand now are in ones and twos.

I place the money in this man's knit cap, which lies on the ground before him, and sit a few feet to his right. He goes on playing, never looking up. The music softens my chest; it seems to soften everything. For the first time since my arrival, I let down and breathe deeply. When he stops playing, we turn to each other and smile. He is in his thirties, with a handsome dark face, black hair, and a neatly trimmed moustache.

He wears a worn plaid flannel shirt, blue pants, and no-name sneakers. In Greek, I tell him he plays well. He nods and shakes a cigarette out of a pack of Winstons. When I ask him, he says, in simple Greek, that he's from Persia, and that is where he learned to play the santour. I tell him I live in America. But I don't ask him why he is here, or how he got to Greece from Iran, why he chose to stop in Athens, how he survives, what he hopes to do, or if he misseshis home.

The answers to these questions would only point to what I already know. Living an immigrant's life is one of the most difficult things a person can do. Being an immigrant in Athens must be especially hard. This city has forgotten that it is itself made up of internal immigrants and Greek refugees. It has forgotten that, for much of the last century, emigrating abroad was the only way to survive for countless Greeks, and that the country's economy relied on the money immigrants sent home.

Now Greece, and Athens especially, has unwillingly become an immigrant destination. Greeks call their treatment of the new inhabitants xenophobic, but, really, it's racist. We sit quietly for a while as he smokes and as I watch some stray dogs try to mount a yellow Labrador retriever, which looks resigned at the end of her owner's leash. The musician picks up one of the hammers with his free hand and begins to play a melody I recognize. It is his way of communicating with me. When he stops, he tells me that the music in Greece and in Persia is the same.

But when he puts out his cigarette and begins to play again in earnest, the music speaks of an infinite distance between this spot under the Acropolis and his homeland. I sleep next to my father on our first night in New York. But I wake up often and peer out the window.

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The streetlights cast an orange glow on the row of houses across the street and on our faces. Nothing looks familiar; everything seems bigger, uglier. My father and I look at each other, but we don't speak. We are finally in America. A middle-aged Japanese woman appears just in time to complicate the scene. In full tourist regalia--silly hat, knapsack,camera, and walking shoes--she kneels before the santour and leans her head inches above the undulating hammers. She is so close to the musician that I feel uncomfortable.

When, at that close distance, she starts asking him questions in Japanese, her rudeness has me scanning my college learning of multiculturalism for some adequate definition of tolerance. He nods and keeps playing. When she, with some broken English, manages to have him say that he's from Persia and that he plays the santour, I feel like a fool for having asked the same questions. But the bathos of the moment has no end. The word santour, to her ears, sounds like Santorini.

And she proudly announces that she has visited that Greek island by pointing to herself and repeating the island's name. The music goes on long enough for the Greek woman with the Labrador to join the show. After a moment, she, too, has a question. The Japanese woman pulls a few coins out of a change purse and puts them in the hat on the ground. Before leaving, she wants confirmation of her payment, which she elicits by talking to him in Japanese and pointing to the knit cap.

He smiles to her as he plays, whereupon she rises, bows, and walks away with her male companion, who has been standing out of view the whole time. He and I are alone again. The Persian immigrant, who is likely a Kurd, and the Greek immigrant with an American passport are sitting under a pine tree, which grows under the Parthenon, toward which the Japanese tourists head.

And then there is the Greek woman. In a city with nearly as many stray dogs as people, she walks a well-fed Labrador down the hill. The notion that Labradors make the best friends of the urbanprofessional class has apparently traveled beyond the confines of Manhattan.

For a few minutes, all the forces of the world converge: And we, for a moment, give flesh to that unfathomable complexity. But I am here, I tell myself, because of something outside that calculus. Instinctively, I turn to the west, wondering which among those countless houses used to be mine. The sprawl of Athens fades in the haze. The santour player stops and smiles. He tells me he will take some time to tune his instrument. His hands work the strings. I set out again. The road is deserted once more.

Down below, among the jagged little white cubes, a survival experiment is in progress.

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