An Athenian Diary

1

My Year as a Whitehead Professor

at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens

August 31, 2003

In 1984-85 Edie and I lived in Athens for almost a year. I was a graduate student, just finished with my prelims, lucky enough to have gotten a fellowship to spend a year at the American School of Classical Studies. The School served as a kind a boot-camp for graduate students of archaeology; for me, an historian with only a minimal training in archaeology, the program was an eye-opener. I learned a lot of things I had never suspected, and developed an appreciation for the value of archaeological evidence that stays with me to this day.

Our home was the School. Its dorms, in Loring Hall, were Spartan; you ate in the dining hall with other students and occasional visitors. The School provided weekly maid service and paid all the utilities. Every afternoon tea was served, and the students at the next door British School always came for our tea because the biscuits were so much better than theirs. Ouzo hour came every day before dinner. It was, to be blunt, a colonial life – a walled compound in the heart of Kolonaki, the richest and most fashionable neighborhood in Athens, on land acquired in the nineteenth century, with a structure meant to insulate us as much as possible from the intrusions of mundane obligations. We were scholars, devoted to our study. Laundry was the only intrusion of real life.

Now, almost twenty years later, we’re back. Instead of a dorm room, we have the West House, an appendage of Loring but with two stories, two bedrooms, a living room, dining room, kitchen, and basement. There’s a TV and a VCR and air conditioners in the bedrooms, tonic against the Athenian August. And a back door lets us out into the street without passing through the garden of the dorm – we can come and go in disguise, almost as if we did not inhabit the walled-off world of the School, as if we were regular people.

Just around the corner is a bakery where we get a loaf of fresh Athenian bread every morning. The kids vie for the right to go alone to the bakery clutching 60 lepta (Greek Euro cents). Caroline’s made friends with the owner, who says they teach each other – she Caroline Greek, her Caroline English. Fridays the street outside the bakery reverberates with the shouts of farmers come into the city for the weekly market. We buy vegetables fresh from the fields, juicy tomatoes, melons luxuriously sweet. If we have need we can get shirts and dresses, shopping carts, wooden spoons – all the instrumenta of domestic life. The farmers give Caroline melons, roses; Alison tries to buy a carrot but the farmer says no, handing it to her with a smile: Sto kano doro, I’m making her a gift. The owner of the school supply shop where Edie bought the kids new backpacks – stylish Greek things featuring the form of the blonde “Sindy,” the likes of whom you’ll not see in the States, I’ll wager – smiles and waves whenever we pass. We’ve been here just over a week, and people in the neighborhood are starting to recognize us.

I worried, when we accepted the School’s offer of free housing, that we would be pulled back into that colonial world we had inhabited years ago. It was easy then to be in Athens but not of it, and I didn’t want to repeat that experience. Been there done that. I wanted to live more embedded in the city, in the world of Athenian life. There is, of course, something artificial about our neighborhood, Kolonaki. It’s not just still rich and stylish (the book I’m working through to improve my Greek uses an episode set in Kolonaki to introduce the word kompsos, “stylish”), but farther removed from “ordinary” life than before – the kapheneia and ouzeria where ordinary people congregated in long-standing Greek tradition have vanished, squeezed out by high rents and the pressure of development. The cheese store with twenty different kinds of feta is gone; there are now two “super markets” where there were none before. And the tools of modern life, especially the cash machine, are everywhere. So there’s a certain non-Greekness, perhaps a sort of pan-Europeanism, to Kolonaki. Yet I feel hopeful that we can be of Athens, not just in it. The kids pull us different ways from the School. I’m taking some serious Greek lessons starting Monday, September 1. We use the Metro (now there’s an innovation I’m delighted to see!) and the busses. I have Greek colleagues not associated with the School who will I know become friends, and introduce us to another world. And we will meet the parents of Alison’s and Caroline’s classmates, many of whom will be native Greeks. It’s a start.

Of course, the American School students haven’t arrived yet. There was bustle yesterday at the British School, as a gaggle of students there tramped through the gate clutching dozens of plastic bags, fresh spoor of successful shopping. Their American compeers will be here next week. I will have to be “the Whitehead Professor,” at least now and then. The dining room will open at Loring and we’ll no doubt eat there from time to time. But I think we’ve sunk some roots, maybe yet shallow and in urgent need of tending, in a different soil. It will be a challenge to keep them thriving while rooting also in the world of the School. Let’s see how we do.

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