harles Baudelaire wrote that ''No human
heart/changes half so fast as the face of a city.'' Although the
line refers to 19th-century Paris, it certainly applies to
21st-century Athens as it prepares for this summer's Olympics. The
metamorphosis of their capital runs so deep that some citizens
question what has happened to the sprawling city's distinctive soul
and psyche.
In the past, whatever Athens's shortcomings, it remained
resolutely Greek. Now, critics claim, it's becoming just another
European city, with a McDonald's across from Parliament and designer
boutiques surrounding the 11th-century church of Kapnikarea. The
celebrated Cafe Zonars, for a century a hangout for writers and
intellectuals, recently shut down to make way for a mall; streets
are clotted with S.U.V.'s; sushi and feng shui knickknacks have put
in implausible appearances; and men have quit letting their pinkie
fingernails grow long to prove that they're city folks, not country
people who work with their hands.
All wrong! Athens's defenders argue. Such faultfinding is
simple-minded Zorba-ism, a mindless misreading of reality. With a
boost from the Olympics, Athens is becoming a fusion city, a bridge
between Europe and the Middle East. When the Games begin this August
in front of tens of thousands of visitors and millions of television
viewers, Greece will showcase its entrepreneurial spirit,
contemporary arts and surprising culinary sophistication.
True, Olympic preparations have been unnervingly slow, disruptive
and expensive, but in the end, optimists say, the last screw will be
in place for the first event. As the smallest country to host the
Olympics since Finland in 1952, Greece will recapture its ancient
glory with games on a human scale. And if Stavros Lambrinidis,
director of the International Olympic Truce Center, has his way, the
2004 event will revive the classical ideal, which calls for a global
end of warfare during the 16 days of athletic competition.
To decide who's right -- the cynics or the optimists -- one can
do no better than take a pre-Olympics trip to Athens and sample its
ambience, its food and street life. My own exploratory journey in
late November started with a flight to the new German-designed
international airport, followed by a taxi ride on a toll road that
rivals any American Interstate. But there was no mistaking that I
was in Greece. The cabdriver smoked, as does apparently every man,
woman and child in the country, and he fretted with worry beads as
he tuned in bouzouki music on the radio.
At the distant fringes of the city, we encountered other forms of
local folklore -- gridlock more infernal than in Bangkok and smog
(known here as nefos, or toxic cloud) more asphyxiating than in Los
Angeles. To complicate the chaos, many streets are blocked by
construction, and traffic moves around Olympic sites-in-progress
with the ponderousness of a millstone grinding boulders to dust.
It's estimated that Athens has more than two million automobiles
and 500,000 motorcycles, and at any given moment all of them appear
to be stalled in anaconda coils of exhaust. For more than 20 years,
motorists have, in theory, driven only on alternate days, according
to whether they have odd- or even-numbered license plates. But
rather than halve the volume of traffic, this law has prompted many
people to buy two cars. As for the much-vaunted Metro, a remarkable
system with state-of-the-art equipment and exhibits of antiquities
in each station, it has mostly siphoned passengers from other modes
of public transport. What's more, no branch of the new Metro serves
Olympic sites. Hordes of fans this summer will have to ride on the
trash-ridden, flyblown old Electric Railway.
When I asked a Greek how people would weather the heat and nefos
this summer, he laughed and said the athletes are already polluted
with pills and performance-enhancing drugs. ''A few exhaust fumes
shouldn't hurt them.''
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