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This house I will make a home: Athens

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I am sitting on a balcony – about two hours outside of Athens – where my sister is building a brand new refuge. I am sitting on the Bios roof terrace – the Acropolis in full view opposite us – with my best friend, and the alcohol comes to the rescue. I am sitting on a couch in the fiery center. Things are explained to me – the people who love us see us sometimes as they’d like us to be and sometimes as we are. I am walking alone in Exarcheia late at night, returning to somebody else’s house and for two weeks in a row I’m home and I’m not. And yet, while London is like a comfortable coat to me, this place is different.

Athens is memory. I left the city 22 years ago and since then I’ve seen it decline and get reborn, I’ve seen the place insist on its peculiar combination of decay and ascent. “Nothing changes”, we immigrants lament and indeed nothing does when the pull of a life abroad is stronger. Some things do and usually it’s us, countries being slower to change and impervious to any few people who would like to bring about any meaningful shift.

Athens is a type of trampoline, I place my feet on its dirty pavements and while for a few days I seem to sink back in, it catapults me back to wherever the hell I came from. “You”, she promises late at night, “will always carry this sting with you” and then she lets go.

Athens is a labyrinth longing to be explored. She calls from the bars and the cafes, she calls from the top of its peaks, she calls from the small theaters, the infuriating congestion, the closed shops and the old people slowly climbing the steep streets of the city center. She calls and we all answer. Some of us enter the passageways and blind alleys and never find the way out. Some of us break through.

Athens is a constant battle, a joyous Sunday, and infuriating Monday, a breeze coming through the burning streets, an ice cube slowly melting in a crystal glass, a neighbor’s shout in the middle of the night, a first bite of chocolate cake. A drug.

As I was saying, I am sitting on a balcony. Or rather, I am standing, because there are no chairs, there is no light bulb in the kitchen, dead cockroaches litter the floor and this house is too old but also too new (to me) to hold any memories. Oh but you see, as I step onto the balcony and I turn my head to the left – to see all the way to the church of Saint George of Lycabettus, perched on our rock precariously – this house holds a promise. This house, this particular house, I will make into a home.

And then, dearest Athens, we shall see how long and how far you will dare toss me.

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55 thoughts on “This house I will make a home: Athens”

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