An Athenian Diary

16

How Does Athens Work?

Part 3: Making pretty for the Olympics --

athens, the beautiful city

The Athenian municipal government seems only too aware that in just over a year the city will be seeing more visitors than it ever has at one moment. The folks who will flood Athens for the Olympics will differ in a number of ways from the standard Greek tourist. Typically, most tourists spend only a few days at most in Athens before heading for sun, sand, surf, and sex at one of the beach attractions, Mykonos or Kos or Santorini. During their brief stay they lope up to the Akropolis for the obligatory obeisance before the Parthenon; in the days when it was open, they trudged stunned through the National Museum, whose exhibits were probably the worst organized and least informatively labeled of any major museum I have ever visited; then, of course, came the relief of shopping in the Plaka followed by a night of rembiko and smashing plates. Not to mock such tourism; it's not just a major industry here, which provides both some cultural experience and relaxation for millions of people, but also forms the only dam stemming an even greater flood of Greeks out of the countryside into Athens -- tourism is the only growth industry in many places, and the only source of local employment for young people. (About the depredations of this tourism, however, much can be said -- later.) The vast majority of these folks never see anything of Athens beyond the small, cute circuit of Akropolis and Plaka.

The Olympics tourist will be a different breed. The new Olympic Stadium, where much of the action will take place, is located not at the center of Athens, but out at Maroussi (the suburb made famous by Henry Miller's best book, The Colossus of Maroussi). Hotels throughout Athens and the suburbs will be filled. (The American School is considering closing and renting out its really quite luxurious digs to the rich for exorbitant figures.) To get to the games people will take the Metro, the trolleys, the busses, the taxis. Some events, like rowing, will take place well outside the city. On the back and forth, these people will see parts of Athens that rarely see tourists. And those parts of Athens, from an aesthetic point of view, often leave much to be desired.

Hence the effort to beautify the city. The municipal government and the state are providing together funds to help owners of apartment buildings to improve their appearance. There's money for painting and repairs, for restoration of facades, and a special fund for buildings old enough to be "historical." The property owners have to pony up a considerable share of the costs, and the money is aimed not at Athenians in general but at owners of buildings on the main thoroughfares through which most traffic travels -- that is, exactly those places that will be seen by the Olympics tourist. Altogether the initiatives don't seem badly planned, despite that; but they have so far attracted fewer than 200 property owners, and there's well under a year left to go. And the part of the effort aimed at emptying roofs of unsightly antennas seems, well, Quixotic -- for everywhere you look up in Athens you see a forest of cell antennas, and no one can really imagine that property owners will surrender the surely lucrative income renting their otherwise profitless roofs must bring, any more than you could imagine Athenians standing a city where cell service might not be available everywhere, all the time.

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