Facing Athens: Encounters with the Modern City [Hardcover]

George Sarrinikolaou (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 9, 2004

A legendary city seen afresh from an expatriate's point of view

In this original and radiant book, George Sarrinikolaou, a native Athenian expatriated to America, strips Athens of its clichés to reveal a city straining under the passions and burdens of early-twenty-first-century life.

Modern Athens exists in the shadow of its ancient past: cradle of civilization, birthplace of democracy, inspiration for the Olympic Games. But as the city prepares to host the 2004 Summer Olympics, it faces challenges quite unlike those depicted in mythology and epic poetry. As Sarrinikolaou walks through the city, striving to face the Athens of his childhood head-on, he encounters people who reveal the demythologized city: newly wealthy Greeks at a Las Vegas-style nightclub; Gypsies building a middle-class house amid their squalid encampment; Kurdish and Eastern European immigrants seeking day labor in Omonia Square; aged Athenians wistfully recalling the past as their neighborhood crumbles around them. In their stories, Sarrinikolaou sees the economic, social, and historical forces that are shaping Athens today.

This is the Athens that even many Athenians see only in passing, and in Facing Athens Sarrinikolaou claims it for himself, a perennial visitor, and also for the reader, who, in effect, visits the city through his gritty, lyrical, unstinting, yet finally affectionate portrait of the place.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In this slender, frank memoir, journalist Sarrinikolaou revisits his native Athens, Greece, blending present and past narratives of a place once beloved and now wracked with greed, racism and violence. For Sarrinikolaou, it's his first extended stay since his family emigrated to New York when he was 10. He senses the city's golden age is gone: "I became a perennial visitor, neither an insider nor an outsider, but one who stares at one's life through glass." Although modern Athens may posess some of the Parthenon's ageless endurance, much of its formerly solid foundation is crumbling through neglect because of the working class's flight to the suburbs, leaving the poor and immigrants to unsucessfully deal with the inner city's decay. The prevailing Greek mood, Sarrinikolaou counters, is racist, not xenophobic, as his countrymen march refugee Albanians home across the border. In suburban bastions of old money, he contrasts the Athenian aristocracy, villas and privilege, all at a secure, safe distance from the city, with buses packed with sweaty servants and gardeners at quitting time. Sarrinikolaou's snapshot observations are significant, as he touches on frenzied soccer games, gypsies' homes, the ritual of a lamb feast, student politics and the Archbishop Christodoulos Paraskevaides's protest against government exclusion of religion on new state identity cards. His writing seems conflicted, troubled, as if he didn't want to cast his childhood recollections against the myth of Athens. Nevertheless, he tries to play fair in a somber overview of the city, regardless of its defects.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New Yorker

Born in Athens in 1970, Sarrinikolaou came to America at the age of ten; more than two decades later, as Greece prepares for the Olympics, he returns as a journalist. Trawling the ancient streets, he finds that in Athens life itself has become a competition, with almost half the national population crowded into the small capital, vying for "money, space, sex, even air." Corruption is the city's tragic flaw, as the author learns firsthand when his grandfather falls ill: a surgeon stops mid-operation and appears, bloodstained, before the family to demand more money. Writing with lucidity and restraint, Sarrinikolaou allows images to quietly resonate: in a night club, nouveau-riche Greeks shower singers with hundreds of euros' worth of carnations; it is carnations, too, which are later tossed after his grandfather's coffin into a concrete grave.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 160 pages
• Publisher: North Point Press (June 9, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0865476993
• ISBN-13: 978-0865476998
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #361,473 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #13 in Books > Travel > Europe > Greece > Athens

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Unvarnished and Necessary, December 28, 2004

By 

A. Ross (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Facing Athens: Encounters with the Modern City (Hardcover)

This slim book is most definitely not a travel guide to Athens, and anyone treating it as such is bound to be disappointed. Nor is it a comprehensive impartial journalistic assessment of the city complete with bibliography and footnotes. And unlike all too many books on European cities such as London, Paris, Prague, Venice, etc, it is not a "celebration" of Athens aimed at armchair travelers looking for insights into customs and culture. Rather, it is one man's attempt to return to the city of his not-so-distant youth and take its pulse in an attempt to understand the changes that have taken place over the last two or three decades. In that sense, it is a very reflective and personal book--more of a memoir--and yet one that will reward the reader looking for a more intimate portrait of Athens than is typically found in bookstores or travel magazines.

Sarrinikolaou spent the first ten years of his life in Athens before his family relocated to New York. For this book, he returned to wander the streets of his birthplace, living in a rented apartment and tagging along with distant cousins and friends and friends to social events. The dominant themes are ones that are central (though hardly exclusive) to modern Greece: urban sprawl, suburban flight, immigration, and class. Some may find these themes "depressing" or "negative", however to ignore them is to ignore the primary challenges facing the city.

Sarrinikolaou discusses how the city's wealthy have mostly migrated to suburbs where larger homes can be built, abandoning the center of the city, which is in turn repopulated with immigrants eager to take advantage of the decaying cheap housing. This runs counter to the widely popular notion that immigrants are "invading" neighborhoods and somehow pushing out longtime residents (as if they had the economic clout to do so). In one neighborhood, he encounters a small group of man apparently acting as self-appointed sentries, not allowing Albanians to pass through. Albanians are key players in the story of modern Athens, and function in much the same way as Mexicans do in the United States. After enduring the bizarre and brutal totalitarian regime of Enver Hoxha during the Cold War, large numbers fled to Greece and Italy after the collapse of communism and now form a cheap labor pool for the bottom of the service sector. (The illegal immigration pipeline from Albania is the basis of the plot in Petros Markaris's plodding crime novel Deadline in Athens.) Here, Sarrinikolaou isn't afraid to call Greece's "traditional xenophobia" what it is: racism.

Indeed, nothing is off-limits, as he deals with the sacred cow of religion. Attending services at different Greek Orthodox churches, he notices that he is generally the youngest attendee (he's in his early 30s), and questions to what extent the services are empty recitations of comforting rituals, as opposed to true celebrations of faith. The national health care system is held to the light and found wanting when his grandfather is taken ill and doctors must be bribed to complete the life-saving operation (in theory, health-care is available to all citizens for free in Greece). Other targets include conspicuous consumption, the role of money in sexual relations, a nice little bit about soccer, and, of course, the corruption which is utterly pervasive. There's a certain element of airing dirty laundry going on, but one gets a Nixon-going-to-China sense that only a Greek could have written this book. Written in a deeply personal style, it's unlikely to have as much resonance with anyone who hasn't been to Athens, but it's required reading for anyone interested in the city that lies under the Parthenon.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A gem of a book, November 9, 2004

By 

A. Diakou (Athens, Greece) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Facing Athens: Encounters with the Modern City (Hardcover)

I live in Athens and I can tell you that Sarrinikolaou gets the city just right. I think that readers who have written negative reviews of this book are unfortunately letting a flawed patriotism affect their judgement. This book takes up problems of this city that get talked about on TV and radio in Greece and by many, many Greeks. But the author writes about these problems very movingly, with great care and affection. Read this book.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Don't miss this one, February 28, 2005

By 

CMS (Midwest) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Facing Athens: Encounters with the Modern City (Hardcover)

When you travel to Cairo, or Beijing, or Athens, you can focus your tourist eyes and attention on Pyramids, the Forbidden City, the Parthenon, and the people of the past. Or you can open your eyes and mind wider and also attempt to understand the cities and the people who live today in the shadows of antiquity. "Facing Athens" is for the latter group of travelers.

George Sarrinikolaou faces Athens with eyes and mind wide open, with the memories of an Athenian child, and with a transplanted heart and soul that he also must open wider to accomplish his search for discovery and rediscovery.

What results is a not only deft portrait of today's realities in a great and changing city, but a study that often can be applied, at least in part, to other cities (and countries). From it, a reader's own mind can formulate glimpses of what the future may hold for Athens and the world.

"Facing Athens" is must-read for any thoughtful traveler who believes she/he is, or wishes to be, a true world citizen...and any armchair traveler who enjoys seeing through the eyes of the beholder.