communal advice from his building, and I hear someone practicing a Schubert song with a pretty touch. At the summit of a hill, there is a fine neoclassical mansion, stucco wreaths under the windows, handsome entrance doors unhinged but held together by a piece of wire between one handle and another, a cat lying thirstily in the overgrown garden. The neoclassical houses followed the Bavarian king assigned to Greece by the great powers after the country earned its independence from the Turks. Otto, the son of the classicizing King Ludwig of Bavaria, who had envisioned Munich as the “Athens of the North,” reimagined Athens as—Athens. The city had begun to lose all but its symbolic significance when Constantine created the eastern Rome in Constantinople in the fourth century. Athens did not give him the geographical advantage in building an eastern empire that Constantinople did, and its association with the old gods that Constantine had abandoned made it even more inappropriate as the imperial capital of a newly conceived empire of religion. Under the Ottomans, whose most significant cities remained Constantinople and Thessaloniki, as they had been for the Byzantines, Athens metamorphosed into a provincial Turkish village. Otto and his Bavarian architects set out to rebuild it—few houses were left standing after the years of the War of Independence, so they had a remarkably blank canvas, in a dilapidated Turkish town with hardly an important public building. They set about to reinvent the city, and although there are those who claim they fatally misunderstood the site, and turned Athens into the Munich of the Mediterranean, the domestic scale of the neoclassicism they inspired is endearing—these villas can take so many tones and responses toward classical architecture, witty, tender, mocking, silly, affectionate. The neoclassical houses of Athens are like a flock of young girls wearing their first evening dresses and their first formal necklaces and earrings—some graceful, some giggling, someof them awkward in their mother’s “classical” clothes. These houses give a youth back to a city that can seem exhausted.
Athens is a city that brims with people, but it can often seem like a city no one lives in; it has a haunted quality. All the unseen worlds of the past, classical, medieval, Ottoman (of which there are few reminders left, except in the language, because the Greeks so hate the evidence), surround you, above and beneath. The underworld is always present, the world of the dead. And the jumble of houses—the abandoned nineteenth-century mansions in odd corners, the tiny houses that were built at the turn of the century by villagers and look exactly like village houses, the whitewashed boxes built for refugees from Asia Minor in the 1920s, now overshadowed by large apartment buildings on either side like grown-ups holding the hands of a child about to cross the street—gives Athens the feeling that everyone here is both himself and his own ghost.
I walk through an unexpected piece of countryside, apartment buildings going up on land that clearly belongs to the modest empty farmhouse still standing. Emerging from this cool shady lane, I find myself caught up in a throng of people on a paved plaza. They are carrying banners and enormous wreaths of flowers on tripods. Some are throwing handfuls of bay leaves onto the pavement. They are shouting a word over and over again: “Immortal, immortal!” I think for a moment that my Greek must be failing me, but they repeat the word often and furiously: “
Athanati, athanati!
” Tears are streaming down the cheeks of some of the women. There is no way to go forward through the throng, it is so dense, and they seem to be waiting for something.
“Please, can you tell me what is happening?” I ask a couple next to me. The man holds a small Greek flag. “We are burying our Jenny Karezi,” he says. “We are burying our great actress. She will pass this way.” He
Athens is a city that brims with people, but it can often seem like a city no one lives in; it has a haunted quality. All the unseen worlds of the past, classical, medieval, Ottoman (of which there are few reminders left, except in the language, because the Greeks so hate the evidence), surround you, above and beneath. The underworld is always present, the world of the dead. And the jumble of houses—the abandoned nineteenth-century mansions in odd corners, the tiny houses that were built at the turn of the century by villagers and look exactly like village houses, the whitewashed boxes built for refugees from Asia Minor in the 1920s, now overshadowed by large apartment buildings on either side like grown-ups holding the hands of a child about to cross the street—gives Athens the feeling that everyone here is both himself and his own ghost.
I walk through an unexpected piece of countryside, apartment buildings going up on land that clearly belongs to the modest empty farmhouse still standing. Emerging from this cool shady lane, I find myself caught up in a throng of people on a paved plaza. They are carrying banners and enormous wreaths of flowers on tripods. Some are throwing handfuls of bay leaves onto the pavement. They are shouting a word over and over again: “Immortal, immortal!” I think for a moment that my Greek must be failing me, but they repeat the word often and furiously: “
Athanati, athanati!
” Tears are streaming down the cheeks of some of the women. There is no way to go forward through the throng, it is so dense, and they seem to be waiting for something.
“Please, can you tell me what is happening?” I ask a couple next to me. The man holds a small Greek flag. “We are burying our Jenny Karezi,” he says. “We are burying our great actress. She will pass this way.” He
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