Leaving Mum on the doorstep, and stopping only to pick up a bottle of Grace O’Malley Irish whiskey in duty-free, we took ourselves to Athens for a three-day meze before Zakynthos, the main course of Project Frappé. Athens is a place we only ever hit on the run: last time we’d been there was pre-Covid, at the tail end of our 2019 trip. On that occasion we’d only stayed one night, down in Pireaus. Some say that’s not in Athens at all.
The Gods of Rented Accommodation smiled on our travels this time and upgraded us to an apartment in Makriyianni, near the Acropolis, which apparently cost three times the price we’d paid for wherever it was we thought we’d be staying (I don’t organise these trips, I only write about them afterwards). But as quickly as the Gods giveth, as surely as night followeth day they taketh away again.
The owners of the apartment had left the keys to our apartment in a dropbox in a different street, a few minutes’ walk away. This tenuous arrangement in which nothing could possibly go wrong did in fact come undone when, at midnight, outside a neon-lit, heavily-graffitied shopfront, we found – mirabile dictu – that the dropbox lacked its promised payload. Back in the hallway (we were let in, kindly, by an American fellow-Airbnber) of our apartment building, we sat on our weary suitcases, preparing to crash there like anarchists or lnterRailers.
While Tina tried to raise the owner by phone, Operation Plan B was put into effect. Eoin and I wandered the streets of this upmarket quarter in search of cheap hotel accommodation. When we realised how upmarket it was, we cunningly switched to Operation Plan C, which, in fairness, was heavily influenced by Operation Plan B, but expeditiously compromised on the ‘cheap’ part.
The Athens Gate said no, ditto the Airotel (sic) Parthenon. AthensWas (sic) Design Hotel said $500 euros for two rooms. We returned empty-handed, wondering to ourselves: who names these places? We even poked our noses into the Athens Backpackers, but it was the stuff of nightmares: house music, drinking, millennials.
In the event the apartment owner turned up, sorted the situation out (not before throwing her new cleaner, the guilty party who’d forgotten to deposit the key, under the bus), and we turned in. The flat was no great shakes – that price discrepancy, we concluded, was squarely down to the location. It had a cute balcony, though, from where our reading up on Athens over the next two days was frequently punctuated by the trundling of suitcases, by Americans from the sounds of things, down the uneven road. The dense orange tree canopy shielded us from view, allowing me to peer down uninhibitedly and judge people. Preparing myself for the late May gig in Patras we’d booked, I had Pyx Lax on heavy rotation on Spotify for the next three days.
Once out on the street, we found we were were right at the southern border of the Plaka, the picturesque, touristy labyrinth Tina and I had stayed in on our first trip here twenty-three oh Jesus years ago. We were only a javelin throw from the new Acropolis museum too, which didn’t exist back then. In those days, there was, rather, an underwhelming museum up top, right on the Acropolis itself. But, then or now, if you wanted to see the Parthenon Marbles, as the Elgin Marbles are known, you wouldn’t find them in either of the two actual Acropolis Museums, oh no. No, you’d have to go to the British Museum for that. Funny old world.
Despite it being early April Athens was very busy. We put that down to the fast-approaching Orthodox Easter. It’s also, we estimated, due to the growing popularity of the city. One hears it’s the new Paris.
Skirting the eastern foothills of the Acropolis as we made our way towards the centre of town we stumbled upon the tiny (50 or so houses) neighbourhood of Anafiotika. This vignette of white-washed Aegean architecture owes its existence to the master builders of Anafi, an island in the Cyclades group, who came in the middle of the nineteenth century to the Greek capital to work on the palace of the country’s first king, Otto.
By the time Greece finally came together as a modern nation in 1825 or so, any notions it might have had of following its own template for democracy must have seemed a bad joke as the great powers simply chose to foist Otto, a Bavarian prince (and teenager, to boot) on this unlucky country. Add in an influx of refugees from Asia Minor after ‘the catastrophe’ of 1922, and an earthquake or two, and it’s a wonder Anafiotika looks as pretty as it does.
When in Athens one ascends the Acropolis, one times a stroll around Syntagma Square to watch the changing of the guard on the hour at the Monument to the Unknown Soldier, one traipses around the Plaka and fends off touts in Monstiraki. One might also visit the famous Agora. Some of these one did this time. Some on previous trips. But as the boys grow older and their tastes develop, Athens reveals other charms to us. For Eoin, the tram trip down to the Georgios Karaiskakis Stadium, home of one of Athens’s two main football teams, Olympiakos, was a long-planned adventure.
Incidentally, as a travelling family we try to take public transport where we can rather than swan around in taxis or Ubers. Doubtless it would have been easier for us to get a taxi to the Georgios Karaiskakis than take the two separate tram trips we ended up taking. But then we wouldn’t have experienced that most Greek of moments where the tram suddenly jolted to a halt as its path was blocked by a cheekily-parked car right on the lines. The fact it didn’t even have its hazzies on was what was most shocking. Jail time, at least. As it happens, Uber is banned in Athens, but the app still works, redirecting enquiries to taxis. I find that weird.
Athens has two main football teams: Panathinaikos, and Eoin’s favourite, Olympiakos. There are others, like AEK, but Eoin, practical in these matters, was always going to plump for one of the big two. He’d long ago chosen the red pill, Gate 7, the collective term for Olympiakos fans. We actually walked by said gate in our visit to the merchandise shop, in which Eoin scored a scarf and a kit top. Result!
Over those two short days there was plenty of flânerie in which eponymous frappés were (for the first time in four years) ordered, such was the unseasonal warmth, and excellent taverna meals enjoyed (see above picture from Το κάτι άλλο). The struggle with the diglossia of Greek public spaces in which strange-looking words like ΛΟΣ ΑΝΤΖΕΛΕ slowly reveal themselves to these rusty eyes to be familiar words like LOS ANGELE(S) began again, as did the acclimation to the traffic and all the cats.
This was, as I mentioned, just a stopgap between Dublin and Zakynthos. On a bright sunny Saturday morning in spring we picked up the car we’d be renting till September and drove around the city, out of Attica, over the Corinth Canal, along the southern edge of the Gulf of Corinth, past Patras, to Killini, and onto the ferry to Zakynthos. After four years, Koukla House awaited.
kouklahouse.com 
Lovely!
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