There was at the same time a city-wide electricity failure. The combination fog and blackout was quickly picked up as symbolic of the country’s economic condition, while aesthetes pronounced that Athens had never looked prettier in the past 20 years.
One of the many oddities about Greece is that its intelligensia takes such a gloomy view of things, when, as every Brussels-based opinion poll consistently shows, Greeks on the wholeare the most optimistic people in the EC.
It has become fashionable to apply to Greece the witticism that the fin is coming early this siecle. In a similar vein Professor Achilleas Tourkantonis, chairman of the Second Panhellenic Congress on Hypertension, said that a million and half of his fellow citizens are suffering from high blood pressure. His conclusion agreed with a widely-held opinion: “The entire population needs a check-up.”
Luckily there is a large section of society, at least 40.67 percent, which isn’t the least bit tense, spends much of the day in agreeable indolence, mainly in state offices, enjoying a cigarette and a cup of coffee and believing in ever better days.
It is this relaxed feeling of optimism which The Athenian tries to reflect and encourage in the first month of the first year of a new decade.
In January, 1980, this page endeavoured to describe Athens as it would be 10 years later with all the promises which governments had made in the previous decade fulfilled. And now, as we enter the last lap of this ‘fun’ century, a similar description will be attempted from the promises of the decade just past, at the turn, that is, of the millennium.
There follows a condensed versionof that 1980 description. It was written in the form of a tourist pamphlet:
Welcome to Spata International Airport! Just pick up your rented car and drive right through the Mount Hymettus tunnel, emerging at the other end into the crystalline atmosphere of Athens. Note on the left, as you descend into the city, the ladies in traditional costume, reviving classical and post-Byzantine dance around the newly-restored Isadora Duncan Museum. Straight on, note that not a single apartment block has risen nor a tree been cut in the last 10 years from the greenery of Mount Lycabettus.
Why not park your car at the CCCC (Constantine Caramanlis Cultural Center) garage just opposite the Hilton? It is one of 16 underground car parks located in convenient areas around the city.
Then, step down into Rigillis Station on the spotless Athens Metro. For a first jaunt take the Peristeri “A” train as far as the handsomely landscaped Pedion Areos Park; plunge into its Olympic-sized pool or ramble around the galleries of the Passas Museum next door and gaze at all the Oriental masterpieces. Or, if you want the performing arts, just hop on the Ambelokipi Line and take in a concert at the Hall of the Friends of Music.
If antiquity is your ‘thing’, take the express south to Makriyiannis Station and enjoy the Elgin Marbles in the New Acropolis Museum. We recommend a visit at sunset when the Swiss-built Bubble Dome over the Acropolis is at its most evocative…. So much for Athens today.
The most superficial review of promises of the last decade can only begin to suggest the delights of Athens in the year 2000, but here goes:
Welcome to Spata International Airport! As soon as we touch down, please light up all your smoking materials and inhale deeply the glories of Greece. And thank you for flying an Olympic 707 which is of museum quality. PASOK, which is here — as it is everywhere — hopes you’ll enjoy your ‘rendezvous with history’.
Now help yourself to one of the 20,000 luggage carts and amble out to the taxi-stand. The fare to midtown is about 70,000 drachmas (unless there has been another devaluation since this writing),
We hope you’ve made your reservations early for, as you know, the 1996 Golden Olympics were so successful that Greece has had 20 million tourists a year ever since, and the Games are being held here again this year by universal demand. For example, the Grand Bretagne has had to add on nine new floors just to take care of back-to-back bookings until 2010.
The Athens Metro is so extensive and efficient today that people only come to the surface to enjoy rambling in the parks and listening to the twittering of birds. It was a foregone conclusion this year that Athens would be once again named The Quietest City in the EC.
As for the nefos, it is a thing of the past, trashed like the Right into the rubbish bin of history. So successful were measures taken by the PASOK socialized scientists that no cloud, polluted or benign, has ever darkened the city for years, enabling it to enjoy 365 days of annual sunshine, and whose greenery is entirely watered by the RiverAheloos which has been diverted via Thessaly right through Attica.
The reconstruction of the Parthenon was such a success that as soon as it was completed, President and Mrs Papandreou decided to move right in. Their happy brood of children (the eldest is almost nine; how time flies!) love romping about the Portland stone pediments. But the presidential couple loves company, and every year on November 30, endless queues of pilgrims zigzag their way up the Sacred Way like the Panathenaic procession of yesteryear, to wish the Ecumenical Peacemaker chronia polla.
