So it has remained. In the ensuing years, Athens and Athenian life have changed drastically; the foreign community has greatly increased and its interests and needs have become widely diversified. To keep abreast of this continually evolving world and readership, The Athenian, too, has altered in content, format and policy in seeking to satisfy its audience and reflect accurately the life of a city in its unceasing act of change.
Amid the tumult and transience of Athens in the last decade, The Athenian has made frequent migrations. It started off sharing the premises of a friendly travel bureau in Diakou Street. After a few issues, The Athenian began its own travels. Its first flight took it to Alopekis Street setting up house just above one of Kolonaki’s most fashionable maisons de joie. During these last months of the junta when self-censorship was law, the editors had to disguise their anti-junta sentiments in articles devoted to veranda gardening and recipes for eggplant salad.
The first really integrated issue of The Athenian was its much labored over yachting issue which came out in August, 1974. Coinciding with the call for general mobilization and the invasion of Cyprus, not only were all yachts firmly tied up to their mooring in Piraeus, but nearly all the summer tourists had fled the country. Of the issues distributed to kiosks, all but a handful came back. In this moment of trial the fledging Athenian had its first portrait painted, the Nikos Stavroulakis cover of a green bird carrying an olive branch which became The Athenian logo.
In 1976 another crisis arose when the eminent publisher, Eleni Vlachou, came out with her anglophone monthly, New Greece. Yet this proved beneficial, for it brought attention to the existence of the ‘other’ English language magazine, and when New Greece folded a year later, The Athenian gained many new readers.
So The Athenian in 1978 went ‘uphill’: two blocks to Spefsippou Street where the address was as grand as the offices were humble. Later it winged over the Ilissos to a charming cottage with blue shutters in Mets. But as most clients, advertisers and contributors didn’t even know where Mets was, communication became seriously interrupted. So the bird flew on, this time to Plaka whose restoration had been so often promoted in its pages. And there it continues to nest, hatching its monthly brood.
The regular staff of The Athenian has never exceeded seven in number at one time, though over the years a hundred staffers have come and gone. Some have risen to higher things (one is a mountain guide in the Brooks Range, Alaska), some have descended into the depths (another is a seabed geologist), but only one is on record for having risen and fallen at the same time (she left The Athenian to go to parachuting school).
Though all these deserve credit, six must be mentioned by name: Helen Kotsonis, the founder, who could have put the magazine together by herself (except that she enjoyed having people around watching her do it); Stephanie Argeros who for five years managed monthly to paste up cosmos out of chaos; Grace Edwards who deepened its heart and heightened its spirit (and corrected the editor’s atrocious spelling); Cathy Vanderpool who put a professional stamp on the beginning, the middle and the end; Despina Samaras who has answered 654,321 telephone calls and guards the petty cash box like a dragon protecting its hoard; and Niki Karambetsos who won’t take ‘no’ for an answer when it comes to bill collection and whose pedometer at latest reading registers 22,222 kilometers, equal in distance from Athens to Tokyo and back.
Nor could The Athenian have survived and prospered had it not been for all those involved in the mechanics of production whose long hours and endless patience have far surpassed any reasonable limit of duty; the hundreds of contributors who have provided what, after all, is the magazine’s reason for being; and the faithful friends and supporters whose number is legion.
The ups and downs, the ins and outs, the comings and goings of The Athenian are not untypical of the vicissitudes of small business ventures in this growing, fluctuating, maddening, endearing, improvising, dynamic and international metropolis. Indeed, The Athenian is itself a product of this growth, change and internationalization.
So, on the 150th anniversary of Athens as the capital of Greece, a ten-year-old – with astonishment, affection and awe – salutes its mother city, of which it was said many centuries ago, and can still be said:
“We lay our city open to all and at no time keep the stranger away… in short, our city is an education for every individual, an it… and, when it comes to the test, she surpasses what is fold of her…”
