Scenes from wonky Greece 2.0
I’ve been looking at them for months; but perhaps they’ve been this way for years, showing different wrong times. I’m talking about the two big round clocks at the tram’s Syngrou-Fix stop on Kallirois Street in central Athens.
The stand on either side of a strip of greenery that a bygone mayor had inaugurated as the “Park of the Olympians.” I google it, just to be sure that my memory serves me right. It doesn’t. It’s actually the “Park of Greek Olympians of 1996” and you can even get directions on how to get there. I don’t need them, though, because I live less than 500 meters away in Neos Kosmos – not to mention the fact that directions to Utopia have always got me nowhere.
“Park” it says of this narrow strip of grass and a few trees stuck in the middle of a dual carriageway, “where the Ilissos once flowed” until it dried up to a trickle in the 1950s. Then came progress, growth, asphalt and cement. And the city of three rivers was left bereft of the beneficence of their waters, with nothing but signposts to remember them by.
Be it what it may, this “park” is now used by the residents of Neos Kosmos and Koukaki to walk their dogs. Residents who, like many others in other parts of Athens, are watching the transformation of their neighborhoods into unaffordable sleeping quarters for tourists, who are coming in droves. Droves that are prompting celebrations of yet another record broken – alas for us.
I look at the clocks at the tram stop again. The one on the side of the road heading north reads 3.20. The other 1.10. The real time is 6.30 p.m.
I watch many of those residents look admiringly at their dogs as they do their business and then walking away, leaving the solid results behind. I’ve been observing people’s stance on this issue for years, even discussing it with friends. What I’ve observed is that the majority of these “relaxed” dog owners are male and usually young or old. The teenagers are too cool to scoop, just as they’re too cool to use trash cans. The older ones don’t bother picking up after their pets, possibly because the notion of having a pet came to them later in life, before there was any awareness about such matters, or because the village might see them stooping and scooping. But I also find kindness in these vignettes of life, like a bright clearing in the gloom. There’s one old-timer who takes his very elderly dog out two or three times a day. He’s attached a sturdy cardboard box onto the top of his wheeled shopping basket, where the small dog sits in splendor. He places the dog on the ground every so often so it can sniff around as much as its weak legs allow it and do its business, and then returns it to its throne. I say hello every time I see him and our respective dogs bark their greetings, before we continue our strolls around the neighborhood. I’m so touched to see someone doing something so important, unexpected and rare – not because they have to but just because. Just as I am touched by the stooped old lady who appears every evening with a shopping trolley filled with tinned food for the cats she’s adopted. I’m ashamed to say that I have never managed to say hello to her; it’s as if she wants nothing to do with the world of humans.
I look at the clocks at the tram stop again. The one on the side of the road heading north reads 3.20. The other 1.10. The real time is 6.30 p.m. My phone tells me so, because I haven’t worn a watch since I used to buy them for 500 drachmas at a kiosk in Omonia last millennium.
We’ve been promised modernization for decades, promised that the country would catch up with the times. How will this happen when they can’t even keep two clocks telling the proper time? I don’t know who is responsible for these poor wonky clocks. Some company? Local government? A ministry? The European Commission? They will all be ready to plead ignorance, burying their responsibility in the Park of Greek Olympians of 1996. I think the clocks are deliberately wonky. They are symbols of our slumbering state apparatus, of our wonky Greece 2.0. Two clocks that have absolutely no sense of the times; no sense of reality.
Yet governments continue their boastful myths: Greece is a leader of the fourth industrial revolution, a leader of the Balkans, a leader of the Mediterranean. With so much leading to do, who can bother with two wonky clocks? Enough with all the griping. At the end of the day, so many people sit there every day, waiting for the tram. Why hasn’t one of them thought about getting a stepladder and moving the hands to their proper position? What happened to individual responsibility?
