This is Athens…

Sezane dress
Flattered sandals
Mango handbag
Celine sunglasses
Muru Jewellery necklace (c/o)
Madewell rings
Delphine Pariente ring
Urban Outfitters earrings
Location: Aeropagus Rock – Athens, Greece

This is Athens – and despite all the traffic, which you don’t see in these photos, and the graffiti, which I edited out, because it was a poor example of what Greek street artists are capable of, and the general sense of mild chaos that pervades daily life, it is probably the place that I feel most a peace. Particularly in the early mornings, when you can still see the constellations overhead until the rising sun creeps over the mountain peaks.

This is Athens, a place I never expected to love. And, if I’m honest, a place I never even thought to visit until 2016. I’d been to Europe more than half a dozen times by then, and twice lived in Paris. But Athens, when I was growing up, wasn’t so much a place to visit as it was a place you saw in news stories about the worst effects of the 2008 economic crisis. My visions of the cradle of Western civilization were visions of extreme hardship. And I will not deny that extreme hardship remains very visible in the Greek capital, particularly given that Greece is the first place that many refugees land in Europe, hoping for a better life. But that is only a small part of the whole.

“Rome represents conquest. Faith hovers over the towers of Jerusalem. And Athens embodies the pre-eminent quality of the antique world, art.”
– Benjamin Disraeli

We didn’t learn much history in school. After eighth grade social studies, none of my teachers spoke about ancient Greece or ancient Rome. Not even in the context of explaining why democracy works the way it does today. Most of our lessons were about our own country, a place with a short history that cannot be taught without at least some overlap onto the history of England and France. Canada began as a French colony, after all. It subsequently became an English one. And so, quite naturally, the two places in Europe that I most wanted to visit when I was in my teens were London and Paris. I’d checked both off my travel wishlist by my eighteenth birthday, which speaks, there is no doubt, to the position of immense privilege I grew up in.

That I fell in love with both cities, and Europe in general, is well-documented. I’ve seen much more of it than many people, but much less of it than the whole. So much less of it than I want to. And what’s fascinating to me is that although I first stepped on European soil in the year 2000, I don’t think I fully understood Europe, and the Western world, as a concept, until I sat on Aeropagus Rock for the first time in 2017 and looked out over the Acropolis. It wasn’t until that moment that I could fully grasp where it all began – where the system of values and beliefs that I grew up with, that all we North Americans did, first took root to grow.

This is Athens. A place brimming with history. But also a major city. An enormous city, bustling with life, bursting with new ideas, where history is made every day. Greek people remain among the most progressive and politically engaged that I’ve ever encountered. Unions are strong. Protests are regular. And in Exarcheia, art and anarchy reign – not in the sense that the neighbourhood is lawless, but in that is politically extreme. A hot bed of philosophical and creative activity, it is home to socialists, anti-fascists, musicians, all of whom share a general anti-establishment sentiment.

(I make it sound more romantic than it is, so let me be clear – life in Exarcheia is hard for many people. For some it is hard by chance, and for others, by choice. The neighbourhood serves, time and again, as a backdrop for riots, police violence and questionable treatment of migrants. It is the Athens we saw in the news so often.)

But mostly, Athens is just a regular city full of people going about their daily lives in the best way they know how. It is an undeniably imperfect place. And those lives are often not easy. They just happen, by accident of birth, to take place in a city where ruins rise up at the end of residental streets. Those ruins are a tangible testament to who we were and how far we’ve come, as human beings, on the strength of ours desire to create – art, philosophy and, ultimately, a better world.

“Athens, the eye of Greece, mother of arts and eloquence.”
– John Milton

This is Athens… a place a might never have seen for myself. A place many visitors don’t love because it isn’t always pretty. But there is beauty in imperfection. And Athens will, if you look at it the right way, stretch your ability to find that beauty. It is a city like all others because it is the blueprint for all others that came after it. And in that way, it is the city that defines all others. A chaos of concrete, corrugated iron and marble. And, for me, a place where I could finally clearly see how we became, as a collective, who we are – both in our faults and in our strengths.

This is Athens, but Athens is so much more than this, too.

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