This is what he has to say about life in Athens at the time, which was not so very different from what it is today: I was at first uncharitable towards the Greeks for dropping all activity and going into a coma from soon after midday until about four in the afternoon , when the rasping of re-opening iron shutters is heard throughout the land … Besides, we soon discovered, it is not because they are lazy that the Greeks-fall asleep during the hottest ·hours but because they are law-abiding; ·at least in many cities the law requires all business to cease from half past twelve to four! One gets so used to the siesta in Greece that it seems incongruous, unlawful, to see windmills, as in Crete, working between one and four…
Yet in Athens it is not so much the heat (though that went officially to 116 Fahrenheit in the shade one Sunday) … as it is the sun. From the instant you step out in the morning until the old tyrant sinks behind the purple hills of Attica, Apollo’s golden chariot seems to pour down upon you an incessant shower of molten metal, which bounds back at you from the pavement ·even if you carry an umbrella, striking you in the face like a highwayman with a rubber billy…
To make matters doubly Hadean , mere men are expected to wear at all times in public a coat, nay, even a waistcoat, collar and tie, and all the other ridiculous sartorial paraphernalia pertaining to the hopelessly conservative sex…
The Greeks themselves never seem to mind the heat. Even in midsummer the men revel in heavy woolen underwear; the old-fashioned country costumes for men and women include hand-knitted under-things right off the sheeps’s back, equal to the hair shirts of self-torturers in medieval days… Filial Greek sons in the United States send their discarded overcoats to their fathers in Greece, and the latter wear them even at noon and at sea-level in midsummer…
Yet even the sunshin·e that wallops you on the head from dawn to sunset would be endurable but for the incessant pandemonium of Athens. On my long overland journey from Cairo, I had grown used to, or at least learned to endure, those atrocious automobile horns in vogue all about the Mediterranean…
Athens is an endless inferno of noise, in which the incessant squawking of those silly double-action bulb horns, all of the same identical note, with a backdraft like a giant’s death-rattle, probably reaches its earthly climax. At least, I cannot conceive of mere human beings outdoing the Grecian capital in that hellish respect.
We assume, as have many wiser and perhaps more charitable travelers, that these horns were due merely to the well-known love of noise among the chattering races. We found there was another and better, or at least more effective, reason for them. A friend. of the wife of Pangalos (Mrs P having been the real power behind the throne during the late unlamented dictatorship) had a large stock of these bulb horns on hand when the general seized the Government. The stock had not been moving. What was easier, then, or more kindly toward an old friend, than to pass a law requiring every automobile in Greece to be equipped with a bulb horn? “The terrible noise” (of the automobile horn we know at home) “frightens people,” ran the official explanation of the statute; which does not quite coincide with the contention of the people themselves that our type of horn is not noisy enough to break in upon their attention in time for them to get out of the way. Be that as it may, for some reason, the bulb-horn law has never been repealed, thought Dictator Pangalos has been languishing these two years and more where horns are rarely heard. The one fact of real interest to visiting foreigners is that while there were at last count 11,222 automobiles in Greece as compared with 23,262,183 in the United States proper, it is not in the least an exaggeration to say that there is more automobile noise in Athens alone than in all our broad land…
Add to this the leather-lunged peddlers of every imaginable commodity from spitted chunks of meat to lottery tickets, each bawling his loudest in a vain effort to make himself heard above the blare of horned traffic; the endle.ss chatter of excited and noise loving citizens, who pound themselves furiously on the chest with clenched fists and shout at one another with noses a few inches apart when they are merely discussing the price of wine or glorying over Baby’s first tooth, and it will be more nearly apparent why Athens is ‘no sanatorium for frayed nerves, why the Greek capital and a good night’s sleep are quite incompatible terms.
