Nehaveigur

To get to my hotel in Athens, I had to pass through a crowd composed entirely of prostitutes trying to get my attention. Many of them looked like they were from North Africa. I was 23 years old and they clearly thought they had a chance. I was curious but didn’t respond to their advances. They were there every time I left or came back, and each time I had to ignore them all over again.

The hotel itself was the cheapest one I had been able to find. It was July and the city was extremely hot. When I checked in, the man behind the counter asked me if I wanted air conditioning. It was going to be ten more Euros per night. I declined, went up to my tiny room, and immediately realized that this had been an error. Still, I was too proud to go back and pay for AC, preferring to suffer through the heat.

On top of the hotel there was a roof terrace that offered a view of Athens. One of the neighboring buildings had a roof terrace of its own, filled with tropical plants. The effect of this green oasis in the otherwise white and dry city was startling. The garden was tended to by on old lady, who moved from one flowerpot to the next with a water can.

I had a few days before the conference I had to come to Greece for and where I was about to give the first talk of my academic career. I took a bus to the town of Nafplio a few hours away. As the sun was setting, I found a deserted beach. I undressed to go for a swim, when a man with a large hairy belly emerged from behind a rock and tried to kiss me. I quickly wiggled out from his embrace and told him, in English, that I wasn’t interested. He didn’t say anything but it was clear he was disappointed. When I told someone I met in a bar later about this, she said that the part of the beach I had been to was well-known as a gay hook-up spot. I’ve learned since then that those places exist all around the Mediterranean. In Croatia, I once stayed on a tiny island off the coast, and when I was asking for directions, I was told to “go along the beach until you reach the tree under which the gays meet, then turn inland on the trail that starts there.”

The only other time I had been to Greece had been 15 years or so earlier on a family vacation. For several weeks, we stayed on the island of Patmos, where John of Patmos had written the bible’s Book of Revelation. We lived in an old house of that had its own cistern in the basement. The cistern basement was dark, had strange echoes and was the coolest place in the house. When no-one was looking, I threw pebbles into it and it took a long time for me to hear the splash. Every few days, a ship would arrive in the port and bring more potable water for the island’s reservoirs and cisterns. Trash was collected by a man with a donkey carrying big baskets on both sides that the trash was dumped into. I believe the reason for them not using trash trucks wasn’t so much the backwardness of the place that the narrowness of the ancient lanes that didn’t even allow small cars.

The old men sitting on the town’s benches would pat my head and say presumably nice things in Greece. They also smiled about my dad trying to say things in Greek. He had learned ancient Greek at school and tried to squeeze at least some use of that hard-acquired knowledge. I don’t remember us encountering other tourists. We didn’t have a car and walked down to the beach. One time we went to a secluded beach we hadn’t been to before and the daughter of one of the local farmers approached shyly with grapes and watermelon that she offered to us. Another time we went the monastery. I got separated from my family and one of the monks saw me sitting on one of the stairways. He managed to find my parents and reunited us. I don’t remember anything about him except the blackness of his robe.