My daughter  Blondie and I lived in Athens from March 1983 to September 1985. It was a follow-on assignment to Hellenikon Air Base (now closed) to a year that I spent at Sondrestrom, Greenland, forty miles north of the Arctic  Circle. All during that year of separation, I had promised her that when the year was over, we would go to Athens together, and live in a house on a hill, with lemon and olive trees all around and a view of the sea, and we would be happy.
We did, and we were, and these are the things I learned and remember.

Athens is a large and mostly modern city, 7/8ths of it built up since 1945, with smog to rival Los Angeles and sheer noise to equal New York. All the neat old historic buildings are buried among the modern construction like one of those party favor balls made of crepe, which you unwind to find various little toys hidden in the layers. The park in the heart of the city is the Zappion garden, lush and green, with a pond of ducks and a tiny children’s’ library. The Zappion is full of cats, at which we used to marvel, as they were all so fat and tame. One afternoon when my daughter and I were walking back to catch our bus to the suburbs, we kept noticing the cats slinking out of the bushes by the dozen, looking expectantly at us. A young couple came into the gardens by one of the gates from Vassilias Amelia Avenue, staggering under the weight of three or four plastic shopping bags in each hand, and the cats gathered purposefully. The young couple set down the bags, took out can openers and began opening cans of cat food. They did this every other day, or so: the young man was English and worked nearby. He and his girl friend came to feed the cats every day or so, having taken it over from an elderly Greek lady some years before, and the local ASPCA chapter, composed mostly of other expat English worked to trap and neuter as many as possible.

In another part of the Zappion garden was a duck pond, full of hungry ducks. Around midday one of the vendors of these wonderful circular pretzels, sprinkled with sesame seeds, would take his basket of unsold pretzels and sell them to parents of children who wanted to feed the ducks with them. I took a snapshot of my daughter feeding a bit of pretzel to an enormous ginger cat, which also liked pretzels, but probably would have preferred duck.

Late in summer, the street food vendors would sell whole ears of corn, grilled in the husk, and in the winter, little paper cones of roast chestnuts, eight small chestnuts or six large, for 50 drachmas, baked on a little drum-shaped charcoal grill. We would peel the cracking husk away from the “X” cut into the mealy baked chestnut and eat them whole. They had a flavor like a good russet potato, but sweeter.

The two dishes you could get everywhere were village salad made of diced fresh cucumbers and tomatoes, with a slice of feta cheese on top, and a sprinkling of oregano and pepper, and a splash of olive oil, and tatziki with bread. It is a dip, served with fresh bread, made from yogurt and cucumbers. The very best tatziki is made with yogurt so thick and rich that you should be able to turn the plate it is served on upside down, and have the tatziki stick to the plate.

Coarsely grate one medium cucumber, and squeeze out or allow the moisture from the cucumber to drain. Mash one or two garlic cloves to a paste with a little salt, and mix in a tablespoon of olive oil. Add the olive oil/garlic paste to one cup of rich yogurt, or a blend of 2/3rds yogurt to 1/3 sour cream, and stir in the grated, drained cucumber. Allow to stand for the flavors to blend, and serve with slices of bread.

I am fairly sure there are worse drivers in the world--- I hear tales of the Middle and Far East where automotive anarchy reigns supreme, but the Greeks are assuredly the worst drivers in Europe, and there are auto insurance figures to prove it. At the same base in-brief where we were informed of this, we were told that in the period of a year, 50% of all automobiles registered to American military at Hellenikon AB would be involved in an accident. We could therefore expect to be involved in an accident at some point during our two-and-a-half year tour. Licensing standards and traffic law enforcement were pretty rudimentary and given the comparative inexperience of most Greek drivers, and the custom of regarding stop signs and traffic lights-- when present at all—as being more of a polite suggestion than an enforced dictate… Let’s just say I saw Greek drivers violating everything but the law of gravity, and doing things cold stone sober in broad daylight that Texas drivers have to be bombed on their asses at 3 AM Saturday morning to do. I actually escaped without having had an accident at all, which means some poor bastard had two, on my account. I attribute my escape to the habit of yielding the right of way at all intersections to anything else on wheels, including kids on skateboards, and assuming that stupidity on the part of other drivers would always prevail. Eschew patronizing taxis with a lot of dents and patches of primer showing, especially if the driver is a young guy. The middle-aged cabby with the new Volvo or Beemer in pristine condition may be assumed to be a much more careful driver, or at least luckier.

Balconies: every apartment building has generous balconies, almost an out-door living room/garden/front-porch combined. During the summer, people sit outside of an evening, when the cool breeze blows in from the Saronic Gulf. Even when it is hot, there is always a breeze, and the apartments are built with high ceilings and generous windows. It was the custom to air ones’ bedding and sheets, draped over the balcony in the fair summer mornings. One could see quite astounding colors of sheets and duvets, hanging from the balconies all along the front of a building, It was also the custom, since building loans were hard to find, for an owner to put up the reinforced concrete pilings and floors, two or three or four stories tall, and then finish a single floor at a time, leaving an oddly skeletal concrete structure, with one finished apartment, perhaps at the very top.

They build a lot with marble, in places where we are used to wood, or linoleum or Formica, or paving. The sink and countertops in my apartment, and all the windowsills were white marble. The floors and stair treads were also marble, and particularly slippery, especially when wet. Even the steps up to the Akropolis were marble, with regular rows of chips pecked into them, in an attempt to make the footing slightly safer. I put away the leather-soled shoes, and favored crepe or other rubber soles. All the children’s shoes I bought for my daughter had crepe soles, for an excellent reason.

Children: above all else, the Greeks I met everywhere adored children: adored them, admired them, petted and spoiled them unstintingly, and were even marvelously tolerant of tantrums and other bad behavior. While we were living in billeting, and having to eat in restaurants, my daughter, who was tired and fractious, threw a whopper of a tantrum one evening at dinner, culminated by throwing a glass onto the floor. The floor, of course, was marble, and the glass shattered like a grenade. I marched her outside and spanked her, meanwhile the waiter swept up the glass, and no one else so much as turned a hair. “Kids- they will be bad”, was the attitude, “Not a problem. Here’s another glass, Kyria.” My daughter very shortly learned that the elderly were particularly soft touches for a piece of penny candy or a 5-drach piece, and that any Orthodox priest, or Pappa, when greeted with a sunny smile and “Yasu, Pappa!” would respond with a blessing and a little religious picture the size of a baseball trading card. The only people who got seats given up to them on an Athens city bus were war cripples and mothers with small children, and even if I didn’t get a seat, someone who did have one would take her onto their lap. Elderly gentleman would amuse her with their worry beads, all the way down Vouliagmeni to our stop.

" Miso kilo, parakhalo", which means "Half a kilo, please" was the single most useful phrase I learned. Every neighborhood in Athens had its own farmer’s market on a certain day of the week: in Sourmena, it was on Saturday, in Glyphada on Thursday, but in Ano Glyphada, where we lived, in a second-floor apartment set in Kyria Venetia’s garden of citrus and olive trees, our market was on Tuesday mornings. Very early in the day, around 5AM, a two-block stretch of road would blocked off, and the venders would set up their small tables, covered with faded canvas awnings, all along the sidewalks, each offering their own produce specialty: piles of seasonal fruit and vegetables, eggs, mounds of lemons and fresh-cut herbs.

There was a vendor with a specially fitted out trailer, stocked with staples like dried beans and rice, and cheap kitchen implements, and curiously enough, a flat wooden crate full of live snails, rustling and clicking their shells together. Some of the vendors didn’t even bother with a table: the man with a deuce-and a half full of freshly dug potatoes just piled up a great mound of them on the pavement, and weighed them out with an antique balance scale and a set of battered weights that looked as if he had liberated them from a museum of ancient household implements. Other tables offered mountains of fresh artichokes on long stems, great bunches of fresh spinach and carrots, a small branch of a lemon tree with half a dozen lemons on it, proving by the unwithered leaves how fresh the rest of them were. The egg vendor, presiding over flats of fresh brown eggs, packed a dozen into a large cone fashioned out of some sheets of newspaper, and presented my daughter with a tiny egg, half the size of the others. She put into a bamboo basket I had just bought from the elderly man who eked out his pension making baskets of all sizes from bamboo and willow gathered here and there, and proudly carried it home (where I made her own tiny little fried egg sandwich out of it.) The vendor with a table piled high in fresh cherries urged us to taste them, fresh and sweet, and then I looked down in horror and discovered my daughter calmly spitting the pits back into the fresh cherries: the vendor was hugely amused. After all, children are children.

This is what Kyria Penny’s Greek mother in law did with the sour cherries, used for cooking and preserving:

Dissolve one pound of sugar in two bottles of cognac or brandy, and pour over a pound of pitted or whole sour cherries placed in a wide-mouthed 1 gallon glass jar. Add a 2-in piece of cinnamon bark and three or four cloves, close the lid and put the jar in a place where the sun will shine on it most of the day for two or three months. After that time, strain out the cherries and the spices, and pour the liquor into a sterilized glass jar.

Greek men are determined and charming flirts, and actually locking eyes with one of any age is taken to mean that you are interested. They treat flirting as an enjoyable interlude: like men of any other nationality, they would adore for the flirting to actually go farther (way farther!) but if not… well, it is entirely enjoyable on its own merits. The only way to avoid it entirely is to have a large man with you. At all times. Preferably looking homicidally jealous and well armed. Otherwise, wear a serious looking ring on third finger, right hand, and borrow a small child, preferably a child with a resemblance to you. This will not stop them at all, just slow it down to a manageable level.

There was a bakery on the corner, producing fresh boules and baguettes every day or so. In the summer, I would see women coming away from the bakery with a covered casserole, or roasting pan, carrying it with potholders. When the baker was finished with the baking for the day, especially in the summer when it would heat up the apartment dweller’s kitchens to bake something, he would let housewives bring in their casserole to bake in his already-heated oven. The bakery also sold wonderful feta cheese and phyllo tarts: cheese pie, or tiropita, which my daughter loved above all other savories:

Crumble ½ pound feta cheese to the consistency of coarse cornmeal. Make a béchamel sauce of ¼ c. butter, 3 Tbs. flour, and 1-cup milk, and allow to cool slightly. Mix the sauce with the crumbled cheese and add 3 eggs and ½ tsp dill. Allow half a package of Athenos phyllo dough to thaw thoroughly. (they package it with two individual rolls of phyllo dough) Unroll, and cover with a slightly damp towel. Melt ½ cup butter, and use a little to grease the bottom of a small, square baking dish. Layer sheets of phyllo in the dish staggering the layers, draping the half of each sheet over the side if the dish. Brush melted butter after every two layers, in the dish.. When all the sheets are used, pour the cheese/béchamel sauce into the center, and begin laying the layers over the cheese mixture, buttering every two layers. Sprinkle a little water on the top of the final layer of phyllo, and bake in a 350 deg. oven for 45 minutes.

Christmas in Greece barely rates, in intensity it falls somewhere between Arbor Day or Valentines’ Day in the United States: A holiday for sure, but nothing much to make an enormous fuss over, and not for more than a day or two. But Greek Orthodox Easter, in Greece—now that is a major, major holiday. The devout enter into increasingly rigorous fasts during Lent, businesses and government offices for a couple of weeks, everyone goes to their home village, an elaborate feast is prepared for Easter Sunday, the bakeries prepare a special circular pastry adorned with red-dyed eggs, everyone gets new clothes, spring is coming after a soggy, miserable winter never pictured in the tourist brochures. Oh, it’s a major holiday blowout, all right. From Thursday of Holy Week on, AFRTS-Radio conforms to local custom, of only airing increasingly somber music. By Good Friday and Saturday, we are down to gloomy classical music, while outside the base, the streets are nearly deserted, traffic down to a trickle and all the shops and storefronts with their iron shutters and grilles drawn down.

The major Orthodox Easter service is very late on Saturday night in a darkened and gloomy church and culminates at midnight, when everyone shouts “Christo Anesti!” and lights their candles in a great wave of light sweeping from the front to the back, and outside the bells begin ringing joyously, fireworks explode, car horns and ship’s sirens sound, gunshots fired into the air. It makes a grand and happy racket for ten or fifteen minutes: Christ is risen, the tomb is empty, He lives, and death is defeated! The congregations scatters to their homes, and I am told it is good luck to bear away your candle and keep it lit all the way home, tracing a cross of soot from it in the lintel over your head as you step back into your home.

The great Easter feast is served on Sunday afternoon, and the tradition is for a whole lamb as the main course, roast over a grill built outside in the garden. It was rainy, on one of the Easters we spent there, but throughout the neighborhood, they were out, huddled under tarps and umbrellas, grimly turning the lamb over the smoking fire. My daughter and I had lamb for Easter dinner always after that, served with village salad, and cheese pie, and a dish of dried beans cooked with tomatoes and dill.

Clean and wash 1lb large dried lima beans, cover with water and simmer until slightly softened, about 45 minutes. Sauté three large finely chopped onions in ¼ cup olive oil. Drain the beans, reserving the cooking water, and add to the onions with 1 lb. finely diced tomatoes. Add salt and pepper, and 1-2 cups of the cooking water, adding more as needed. When beans are wholly cooked, stir in 2-3 tbsp. fresh chopped parsley and 1 tbsp. fresh chopped dill.

Ano Glyphada, towards the hills, was pretty much the edge of town, when we lived here: there were still many open tracts, and the remnants of small farms and sheepfolds among the low-rise apartment blocks. One of them was around the corner from my daughter’s baby-sitter. Every morning the shepherd and his pair of little raggedy dogs took a flock of sheep up the street to the open hillsides not far away, bringing them back in the late afternoon, their hooves pattering daintily on the pavement. When Kyria Penny and her husband first moved out to Ano Glyphada, there had been many fewer apartment buildings, and many more flocks of sheep; her mother in law used to purchase sheep milk for a particular creamy sweet dessert. Next door to us on Knossou Street, another elderly citizen held on to his little one-story house, surrounded with a vegetable garden and his olive and lemon trees, a flock of vociferous chickens and a number of rabbits, who had a large fenced pen next to the street. My daughter, enchanted to discover the friendly rabbits, insisted on getting her copy of “Peter Rabbit” and showing it to them. She wondered why they did not wear little blue coats and slippers, like the ones in her book.
“These are Greek rabbits, “ I explained, “It’s too hot for them to wear clothes here.”

When we did a road trip, down into the Pelopponese, we visited many sprawling, and usually deserted ruins: A medieval castle at Nauplion with a thousand steps going all the way up the hill from the seaside town, the ruins of Mykenae, the sprawling Acro Corinth, and the Byzantine ruins of a whole city, Mistras,  in the hills above Sparta, all of them bare and baking in the summer sun, only Mykenae seemingly visited by anything more than sheep, and the occasional hiker. There was usually a tiny wooden kiosk at some sort of gate, someone taking a couple of hundred drachmas and waving us through, to explore the lizard-haunted, roofless rooms. It was rare to see another person, even rarer to see a facility… which explained the faint smell of urine in some of the far, deserted corners. I came around a corner in one of these places, would have sworn there was not another person within miles, and damn near gave a heart attack to a little old lady hoisting her black skirts and squatting to perform an act of nature. Even in Athens, decent facilities were few and far between: we used to have late lunch at a place in the Plaka, which had slow service, and rather indifferent food, but boasted air conditioning and a really, really nice bathroom. Luxury for a traveler and adventurer... a really nice bathroom.

This is the conversation I had many times, on my days off while we were in Athens, when we would be sightseeing here and there, or taking the city bus downtown to the Zappion Gardens, and encounter a friendly and overwhelmingly curious local citizen who spoke English:

“Ahhh, you are American!? How long are you visiting Greece?”
“Yes… I’m not visiting, I’m assigned here, I’m in the Air Force.”
“Ahh… then your husband is at the Elleniko base… you live in where? Glyphada? Sourmena?”
“Umm… I am in the Air Force… and I live in Ano Glyphada.”
“But your husband, he is in the Air Force, too?” (They usually got a little puzzled at this point.)
“He is no longer my husband… or in the Air Force.” I would say, and they would usually change the subject at that point and ask about what I liked best in Greece…. All but the dear elderly gentleman with his grandson, feeding the ducks at the Zappion Garden duck pond, who exclaimed.
“But, Kyria, you must marry again at once… your little daughter needs brothers!”

Of all the places I lived or traveled in, Greeks got down to the most intensely personal stuff on shorter acquaintance than anyone, even small-town Southern Americans. I think it is because even the city, most were just a short time removed from a village where everyone knew everything there was to know about everyone else, back to any number of generations. Home, with a capitol H was a whitewashed stone and tile-roofed little village out in the islands, or in the mountains, to which you went in the summer, for Easter and over long holiday weekends; one merely lived in the city.

All around the edge of the Plaka, was the shopping district, each block or street specializing in one thing or another: there would be cluster of electrical repair shops, and then nothing for a block but little shops specializing in auto accessories. There were one or two of these covered with little red reflectors and lenses for every imaginable make of car headlight, running light or brake and taillights. Another street had nothing but shops selling embroidery thread for a sort of local crewel-work, one block over were the mercers, with ribbons and lace and buttons, and beyond that, several more blocks of fabric stores. An acquaintance of ours had a shop there, selling retail and wholesale to manufacturers of children’s clothing, so everything he stocked with particularly suited to what I sewed for my daughter. Jake loved talking politics, international relations, literature and the latest news, and he loathed the Papandreau government, being convinced that his telephones were bugged and that they were out to frustrate his ambitions to open new premises.

He was a big, jolly Greek, with a last name which was the same as that of a Greek Jewish family, who (according to an article I read on one of the English language monthlies) had run a thriving business manufacturing silk in the 1920ies and 30ies, before being deported and murdered by the Nazis. I asked Jake if there was a connection, and he told me they were cousins, but very distant, and then we talked of other things. He would send the office boy for some soft drinks and cookies whenever we stopped by so a visit to his shop had to be fairly leisurely. (He also had an adequate restroom on the premises).

Nearby, off Ermou St. was a large souvlaki place, where we first ate a Greek specialty- souvlaki, with a side of fries, done in olive oil, which gave them an odd but not disagreeable taste. Fries in olive oil were one of those things which were easier to like than retsina, the local harsh red wine with a flavor like the way turpentine smells. You could get pretty much the same effect by chugalugging some red jug wine and then licking a pine tree. It was also the custom for wine to be served along with mineral water, which I speculated was a throwback to classical times. It was thought very decadent in the ancient world, to drink wine straight. Those huge, punch-bowl containers in the museums are called “krators” and used to mix the wine for consumption.

One day we stepped into one of the shops in the tourist part of the old town, which specialized in reproductions of ancient pottery. They had set up one of their artists at the front window, a young woman with a huge vessel on the workbench in front of her, painting thousands of tiny shield and spear-bearing stick figures, with a tiny brush dipped in black slip. I pointed out the gods and warriors on the main facet of the vessel, between the bands of stick figures above and below, and explained to my daughter how the pot would be glazed and fired in a kiln, and how they used to do this by piling wood all around the finished pots. On the shelves behind the artist were finished samples of the various sorts of pottery: the classic black on buff, the brightly colored Minoan things painted with flowers and fish… and a row of classical replica pornographic plates. My daughter remained fascinated by the stick figures, fortunately and never looked up at the shelves. I am not sure at all what I would have said if she had asked what those men and women were doing.

We departed Greece on a September day, driving out of Athens very early in the day, and taking the coastal road, past Corinth, past Rion and Antirion, where there was no bridge across the narrow channel between the Peloponese and the mainland, but a number of ancient LSTs, ferrying cars back and forth at a frenetic pace from the vast paved staging areas where the roads ended at the water’s edge, where perhaps one day a bridge would be built. In Patras, we spent a day at a campground picnic area just outside the city, waiting for afternoon, time to load the car into the car ferry to Brindisi, spending the last few drachma coins I had on sandwiches and salad in a restaurant close by the ramp to the car ferry. The last of the mountains were painted golden in the sunset, and sank into the sea behind us as the ferry shouldered out into the dark blue water.

Goodbye to Greece, which had been our home for a while, and yes, we had been very happy there indeed.