Winter in the City of Gods, Lovers and Protestors

Claire in Crete goes on tour in Athens

No-one thinks of Athens as a winter city. In summer it’s a honey pot for tourists, jostling to see their ‘top ten’ sites - shuffling up the crowded steps of the Acropolis towards the Parthenon in their thousands - spilling out of the cafés and bars on the smart edges of Thiseio - streaming through the marbled streets of Plaka…. But in the short weeks before Christmas, when the blazing colours and the busy-ness of summer have faded, when festive lights shiver on the boulevards, and the evening wind draws the scent of jasmine and woodsmoke from the balconies down into the residential squares, Athens is a city where the light is softer, where your senses become sharper, and where exploring means having the time and space for richer, deeper experiences….

Winter might bring short bursts of rain to punctuate the sunshine - along with beaming smiles from guardians at the main site ticket offices, as you shake raindrops off your newly bought ‘Mati’ umbrella - but at the Acropolis rock, winter also allows you to explore the unique and the unusual, and to notice, perhaps, that there is barely a straight line in the whole of the Parthenon temple. The columns taper out and then in again, an optical illusion that draws the eye skywards, and each corner column is slightly wider than the rest. The decoration and scars of shell fire on the columns are clues to all of the Parthenon’s former lives too – as a temple, a fortress, a treasury, church, a mosque and as a munitions dump. Fought over for centuries, it is now an occasional film set, and one of the most recognisable landmarks in the world.

Beside it, the smaller temple of the Erechtheion, appears to have been smashed together from several different architectural styles – but unless you look for them, you might miss the most important features of the building’s story. This temple to Athena and Poseidon has a hole in the roof, and a fissure in its rocky floor, but these aren’t signs of ruin, and they won’t be repaired. The space between the two marks the trajectory of Poseidon’s trident, thrown during his contest with the goddess Athena to become the protector of the city. Poseidon’s strike opened up a spring - but when Athena stuck the earth and an olive tree rose up, the king of the city declared her to be the winner; olives proving to be a preferable gift to a spring of saltwater any day of the week. The olive tree that still stands beside the temple walls, watched over by the colossal Korai maidens, grew from a cutting taken from an older tree during World War II - insurance to protect the sacred symbol of Athens from the enemy.

This period of history is also remembered a few steps away, at the far eastern end of the Acropolis rock, where there’s a small brass plaque often missed by visitors. It commemorates the patriotic vandalism of two teenage boys, Apostolos Santas and Manolis Glezos. Learning of the fall of Crete on May 30^th 1941, they scaled the cliffs, ripped down the Nazi Swastika that had been flying over the city, and replaced it with the Greek flag. For their act of resistance, the culprits were sentenced to death – but the youths were never caught, and their identities remained secret until after the war.

In mid-November, this spirit of resistance is still alive and kicking in Athens, as we discovered the first year we visited, crossing the edge of Syntagma Square at dusk. The space was flooded with people - the sound of chanting and whistles, deafening. As Brits, used to places where the police are still (mostly) unarmed, there’s nothing quite like the deep unease of passing a row of crash-helmeted policemen, guns slung around their waists, batons and riot shields raised. The tension in the air was the kind that you can smell! We’d arrived on the weekend political protests often take place, when Athens remembers the Polytechnic Uprising of 1973 - a student demonstration that turned into a bloodbath. That year, the Colonels of the ruling Junta responded by using snipers to assassinate student leaders, then sent a tank crashing through the gates of the university. Forty people were killed in the aftermath, and the massacre led to a new wave of opposition. Within the year, the Junta had collapsed, and the first free elections in over a decade took place. These days, Athens’ protests are a clue to the mood of the country. This year, thousands of workers marched to protest low wages and the cost of living, on a day of general strikes.

Close by, in Ermou, the main shopping street, the winter windows are decorated for Christmas, and the scent is of toasted vanilla and warm chocolate oozing over fresh cakes - roasted chestnuts and caramelised sugar almonds tumbling into paper packages at the street stalls. The flea markets and antiques shops in Monastiraki’s backstreets provide clues to the interiors of the neoclassical apartment buildings all around, with a tumble of ornate antique sofas, glass lamps, and gramophone trumpets. And in the clothes store, Zara, in Stadiou, the remains of a Roman tomb lurk in the basement beneath the glass floor – the ancient and the modern displayed side by side, as boldly as Athens’ modern street art alongside architectural wonders.

If you can find it, this end of town, the rooftop bar Couleur Locale, with its entrance tucked away in an arcade off Normanou, provides a spectacular place for lovers to watch the sun go down over the Acropolis - the watercolour-paintbox hues of the sky a spectrum away from the primary colours of summer sunsets. But the best daytime views are still in the ancient places, where the soft light of winter sets the Pentelic marble of the city buildings aglow. We’ve walked in the footsteps of gladiators in the subterranean passages beneath the Panathenaic Stadium and then mounted rows of gleaming marble seats to gape at the Parthenon dominating the skyline….

At Mount Lycabettus, the hill said to have been formed from a rock dropped by Athena on her way to fortify the Acropolis, the spectacular view has another welcome surprise. Down in the backstreets it’s easy to forget that Athens is a city intimately connected with the sea, but when you exit the funicular station at Lycabettus’ paved summit, 277 metres above sea level, the ocean is right there - the air fresh and sharpened with the scent of pine. Avenues lined with white buildings fan out towards the coast, like a trail of white dominoes waiting to be toppled, and on a clear day, Aegina glistens on the horizon, a streak of misty silver against the sky.

Filopappou, the ‘Hill of the Muses’, close to the Acropolis, is the place where the capital’s national treasures were hidden in the six months leading up to the arrival of the Nazi army in 1941. Despite interrogation, the museum guardians never gave up the hiding places of their art, cemented deep inside the cliffs. Now, it’s an atmospheric viewpoint to stroll and reflect, especially on the hour, when all the city bells strike together - as in the lyrics of Konstantinos Argiros’ haunting anthem, Athina Mou¹. Like Lycabettus, the view from Filopappou offers that dizzying sense of having the capital spread at your feet. At the same level as the Acropolis, but closer than any of Athens’ other historic ‘seven hills’, it’s the best place in the city for photographs.

There are more sights that conjure the experience of winter Athens for me, but few of them would make it into any guidebook. Writing at my desk, back home, I think of the tortoise crawling unhurriedly along stone steps at The Temple of The Olympian Zeus - the ‘Bubble Man’ chasing giggling children with his shimmering soapsud ‘net’ in the cobbled pedestrian street of Dionysiou Areopagitou - and of the filmstar sports cars gunning their engines in smart Kolonaki while we people-watched with coffee and cake. Later, in pedestrian Plaka, we ventured along streets of competing smells – grilled lamb with squeezed lemon and salt, bubbling stifados with cinnamon - and settled on the mezzanine of a smart, white-washed restaurant, just as the rain began to pour outside. It cascaded from tiled roofs to the tables on the street, washing the dust of the summer down into the sewers, while the Athenians stood in the doorway marvelling at the deluge…

“The first rain since Easter”, the owner told us as he threw up his hands in delight. In this winter city of wonders, it was a last gift from the gods.

• If you enjoyed Claire in Crete, you may also like my short story, Ann Hilder, available as a paperback and ebook on Amazon at https://amzn.eu/d/bMidwmh

1. Inspired by the deserted, windswept streets of the pandemic lockdown, and the style of Rembetiko from the 1950s, Athina Mou is the haunting story of a man searching Athens for his lost love. You can pull up English subtitles on YouTube by clicking the captions symbol on the bottom right next to ‘settings’.