The Athenian

“A Greek magazine in English to serve the foreign community in Athens.” Such was the aim of The Athenian when it was founded ten years ago this month.

At a press conference on February 10, the Association of Greek Archaeologists together with technicians from the Ministry of Culture made a formal protest. This came in reaction to a recent government proposal that responsibility for the protection of historical monuments and sites be transferred by Presidential Decree from the Archaeological Service, which is under the Ministry of Culture, to the Ministry of Planning and Environment.

In the early ’50s, before the transistor radio had arrived in Athens and before electricity had arrived in most villages, it would be rare of a day (and especially of a night) not to hear wherever one was in city or country, ‘live’ voices raised, expressing the longings and laments, the hopes and sorrows that lived in the songs of Vassilis Tsitsanis.

Last month an opposition newspaper carried a large advertisement which may be appropriate here to quote from at length, for it shows to what extent this advanced, forward-looking country has left George Orwell’s modest predictions behind.

In moments of nostalgia or irritation, Athenians complain that the uncontrolled growth of their city has deprived them of the intimacy of a small capital while providing them with all the inconveniences of a megalopolis and none of its compensations.

Living, as we do, within that puzzling dimension known as Greek reality, we grasp at facts as a drowning person does at flotsam, or, in its absence, jetsam.

A visitor arriving in Athens in the mid-fifties might easily have been struck by a certain resemblance which so many young women in the streets bore to one another.

Business is tough. What with increasing costs in paper, labor, postage, electricity, typesetting, printing, and all the other services that go into making a magazine, it’s a small miracle that so many make it to the newsstands each issue, especially since it seems to be a rule that revenues never rise as fast as the costs.

Writing this month’s column fills one with a special sense of responsibility; for, since July 1, “Our Town” is no longer the noisy, dusty, crowded, smelly and otherwise disagreeable city we have been used to. For the next six months, all these trivial inconveniences will fade before the city’s new glorious status as the “Capital of Europe.”

After a spring of holidays and labor strikes, early summer brought on a spate of intense political productivity.