iPhone Photo Diary | Athens, Greece

Athens. Every time I start to write about the Greek capital, I wonder what I can say that I haven’t already said.

…but then I realise that no matter what I’ve already said, it hasn’t been enough. I still haven’t figured out how to properly convey in words the nuances and eccentricities of this place that I love so much precisely because it is so flawed in so many ways, and yet still so beautiful, almost stubbornly so. When it comes to describing Athens, the entire English language somehow feels inadequate.

It’s the language I have to work with, so I’m going to keep trying, anyway.

My love affair with Greece began, improbably, in Paris. It was the experience of climbing the old stone stairs towards the Winged Victory of Samothrace at the Louvre that captured my imagination. I was fifteen. I didn’t really know what it meant to feel awe, until that day. It was staring up at the ancient, headless queen at the top of those stairs that I learned. She stood defiant in the face of time and gravity, wings spread for a take-off that felt imminent even though she was carved out of the heart of a stone. I’ve returned to her hundreds of times. The sensation, the pure wonder of it, never changes or fades.

But it wasn’t until 2017 that I actually set foot on Greek soil. We were living in Paris at the time, while I took a desperately needed break from life in the corporate world. The trip was a last-minute addition to an already packed schedule. The impulse to see Athens overcame me one winter evening, and I couldn’t shake it. After years of travel without giving much thought to visiting the country whose philosophers and politicians first conceived the (imperfect) systems we still live with in the western world, I suddenly needed to visit. Urgently.

I don’t suppose it really matters what compelled me to book those plane tickets. The fact is, it was a decision that changed my life, again, and for the better. If Paris is the place where I found the home I’d been searching for, then Athens is proof that the world I imagined, the one that came alive in my head when I read books, is real somewhere. The city feels foreign and familiar at once. Sometimes, it feels like I conjured it by just squeezing my eyes shut tightly and wishing. But I didn’t, of course. Not just because that isn’t possible. Even in my wildest fantasies, I could never have come up with a place like it. It’s so utterly ordinary in some places, and so breathtaking in others, lit with sun flares from the extreme heat, that it seems imbued with magical properties.

The thing is, it’s not just that in Athens all things are possible. It’s that in Athens, everything is possible all at once. Even if some of those things directly contradict each other. (And they very often do.) The place seems impossible – but it isn’t, it exists. And what a marvel, to experience it, to be able to return and discover it all over again.