An Athenian Diary

35

Aspra Mera in Athens

"Aspra mera" means "white day" -- it's the expression the Greeks use to describe snow days. Last night the snow began falling in earnest. I first noticed it when Caroline, in the kitchen with me, suddenly stopped talking and her mouth dropped. I followed her gaze out the window, and there they were -- light flakes reflecting the light of the street lamps as they twirled down from the dark Athenian sky.

After breakfast I grabbed the camera and headed out. The streets were almost deserted, except for a few souls like me who wanted to see Athens under snow. A few flakes continued to fall, steadily, out of a leaden sky. The usual sights of the Athenian horizon -- Mount Hymettos, the sea, Mount Pendeli -- were invisible.

Fridays are the usual day for the street market by us -- full of stands with vegetables, fruit, fish, you name it. Today they hadn't even bothered to move the cars, and only three hardy vendors -- the fish guy and two vegetable men -- had braved the cold.

Cars covered with snow on the streets, orange trees heavy with fruit bending down even further under the weight of the snow.

I climbed up the slopes of Lykavettos -- everything buried under snow, including the cacti and the century plants; strange sights! The path is paved with marble at the top, slippery with a sheen of water under the snow. On the way up I stop and chat for a while with a lady who's doing the same as me, and tells me that in all the years she's lived in Athens (all her life) she's never seen anything like this.

Back home I call my Greek teacher, just to confirm that today's lesson is cancelled. She lives way out east, on the Attic coast facing Euboia. She tells me they got 80 cm -- that's about two and a half feet! -- of snow, there are power outages, and the storm was so fierce -- she uses the English expression "snow storm," I suppose because there's nothing in Greek to register the ferocity -- that they couldn't see out the windows.

For the kids, this meant of course snow day! No school. The only sad thing about that was that they were going to distribute Valentines Friday, which will now have to wait till Monday.

There are no snowplows or other equipment here to deal with storms like this. We'll just have to wait for everything to melt. Of course, it won't last long -- within a few days the temperature will have remained steadily above freezing, and the snow will disappear; already as I write this on Saturday, a stream of meltwater is pouring down Aristodemous, outside our kitchen window. In the meantime, we enjoy the rare sight of a Greek city silenced and stopped under a blanket of snow.

It's a rare sight to spy the Akropolis with snow swirling around it, through a frame of snow-laden trees. Or Rizari Street, spied from the top of Lykavettos, with hardly a car moving on it.

Or palm trees sagging under the snow, and penthouse apartments wearing odd white caps.

Such is an "aspra mera" in the capital of Greece!

February 14, 2004

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