Modern-day Athenian heroes: the late, lamented Stereo Nova, Greece’s answer to Orbital, and the missing link between Kraftwerk and rebetiko
Athens may share an address with its glorious past, but the city today is largely an invention of the most recent 180 years of that history, roughly the age of the modern Greek state. Most historians regard this period, when they consider it at all, as an addendum or appendix to the main narrative, which for some ended over 2600 years ago with the death of Pericles. For the city’s four million inhabitants, of course, those 180 years are the main narrative. It is the period in which Greece invented itself as Greece, with Athens as its new capital; when it founded a constitution, constructed a parliament, wrote a legal system, built its first universities, hospitals, museums, galleries and libraries, and published two contradictory dictionaries of its language. While the ancient architecture and statuary have been there for three thousand years and are not going anywhere any time soon, the city is rapidly accelerating into its future. It is in the spaces between the past, present and future that we find the living Athens.
The opening decades of the twenty-first century are interesting times to be in Athens, not least in the sense of the apocryphal “Chinese” curse parading as a good luck wish. In Athenian chronology, however, if we measure it from the Golden Age of Pericles, this is the city’s 26th century, a longevity to which few other cities can lay claim. This leads us inevitably to a paradox: much of its history during those twenty-six centuries is, if not exactly blank, then largely silent, and at one point at least, in the late sixteenth century, Athens disappeared, briefly, off the cultural map of the European landmass altogether. While this book considers the ancient and classical periods, and even dips briefly into geological time, it addresses itself chiefly to those 180 years, and in particular the past half-century of Athenian history and culture.
The last thing the world, or Athens, need is another book about the splendours of ancient Greece. Age, scholarly bias and the tourism industry have made its antiquities the key reason for visiting Athens, usually at the expense of newer cultural phenomena—to highlight a few random examples: the paintings of either its Impressionist or Cubist schools; its art nouveau and deco architecture and more recent examples of modernism and post-modernism (and this in a city that has yet to acquire a proper skyscraper); generations of world-class writers who have gone untranslated into other languages; an even newer new wave of young filmmakers who are barely out of their teens; an underground music scene that is rewriting the rules of electronica as laid down in Detroit and Düsseldorf. What follows is a primer to this modern, living Athens, and its raison d’etre is simple: its author has never found a book that told him about these things and others besides.
This is not to attempt an equivalence between the modern and the ancient, merely to note that a city without a present and a future is a city in danger of becoming a theme park, and Athens is too interesting a city to be abandoned to nostalgia. Athens has, in fact, already experienced two bouts of nostalgia for its own past: around the third century BCE, before there was anywhere else in Europe to be nostalgic about; and in the nineteenth century, when it was gripped by what might be described an early example of post-modern nostalgia and began re-importing its own past—from Germany. Another bout would be three too many.
While some Greek historians have been busy burning bridges with the ancient past—to the extent, for example, of asserting that classical Athenian democracy, such as it was, bears no relation to the modern version—the past has a habit of rebuilding those bridges under cover of darkness. Two current controversies in both Athens and Greece—the status of the sizeable Muslim minority and the treatment of refugees—overlook the historical fact that Athens has been a racially mixed city since its earliest days. The city was probably founded by immigrants (according to Plutarch, no less a founding figure than Themistocles was a foreign upstart) and thrived on the complex patterns of migration and trade across the Mediterranean through the centuries. Its contemporary cultural mix, in which the Muslim community represents less than one of the six per cent resident non-Greeks in a constellation of ethnic groups from Africa, Asia, Eastern and Northern Europe, the Middle East, South America and elsewhere, is probably little different from that at the time when Themistocles thought it would be a good idea to build a surrounding wall to protect the city’s cultural mix from the barbarians outside.
Athenian thinkers during those 180 years of its modern history, from nineteenth-century revolutionaries to twenty-first-century queer psychogeographers, have all tussled with a conundrum that has persisted through three millennia: how to retain the best of the past while also embracing the possibilities of the future. Current events in both capital and country may seem to have put the immediate future on hold, but they have twenty-six centuries of the past pressing them into the future, and whatever the short-term may hold, Athens will emerge one way or another. As an unlikely refugee who himself washed up on a beach near Athens in the 1990s, the late Jacques Derrida, wrote, with deliberate ambiguity, “Athens, still remains.”
Athens is available from amazon.co.uk and amazon.com, and the independent online bookshop Word Power