THE tourist season has been slow to get going in Greece this year.
Hoteliers, shop keepers, tour operators and local officials on the islands and in Athens all agree that bookings are down so far.
But despite a drop in tourist numbers, the beginning of the summer season has brought chaos to the streets of Athens once again. Public transport is chaotic, with lengthy and angry traffic jams building up each morning, and half hour delays for buses and taxis.
The chaos has been compounded by the work on building a new metro. At the moment, the Athens Metro has only one line, running from Kiffisia in the northern suburbs to the port of Pireas in the south. The long awaited work on the lateral extension has begun, but is not expected to be completed before the end of the century.
For tourists, the chaos is most visible in the city's main plaza, Platia Sindagma, or Constitution Square. Here stands the Vouli or National Parliament, built as a palace for Greece's first king, Otho of Bavaria, who was forced by political action to proclaim Greece's first constitution in 1843.
The square remains the first choice for political demonstrations and rallies, but is also popular with tourists. The Grande Bretagne Hotel, the grandest in Athens, is the main building on the north side of the square. On the east side, in front of the Vouli, goose stepping evzones in their tassled hats, short white kilts and woolly leggings change the guard at regular intervals in front of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
But in front of the Vouli, half the thoroughfare has been closed off by the metro works, leaving a one way system, and the south side (Othonos) has been closed off completely.
Athenians are putting up with the bottlenecks and the chaos caused by building work, safe in the knowledge that a new metro line will ease the traffic. But the work has already taken its toll, angering botanists and enraging archaeologists.
The National Gardens at the back of the Vouli were a private palace garden for Queen Amalia in the last century. But in recent years this was the most refreshing part of the city, with its flower gardens, duck ponds and trees, its shades providing relief from the Athenian heat and smog.
But the tunnelling under the gardens in recent weeks saw the collapse of a Roman city wall, built by the Emperor Valerian to keep out the Herulian Goths.
One archaeologist, Dr Liana Parlama, described the collapse as a "tragic event". Such a catastrophe had never occurred before in Athens, not even in the heyday of building fever, when most of the city's old houses were torn down to make way for apartments.
Up to now the main obsession of archaeologists in Athens has been the search for a formula to speed up restoration work on the Acropolis, leaving the ancient rock free of scaffolding by 2010. But now archaeologists have turned their attention to the work on the new metro, and are warning that underground building work could cause irreparable damage to ancient monuments, including Keramikos Cemetery, at the junction of Odhos Pireas and Odhos Ermou.
Although Keramikos, the principal cemetery of ancient Athens, lies less than a kilometre from the Acropolis separated from its slopes by the Ancient Agora it attracts few tourists. Like the National Garden, it has the feeling of an oasis in summer, with the refreshing Iridhanos channel, speckled with water lilies, flowing across it. The long walls once ran south to the port of Pireas, and the inner wall was hastily built by the Athenians as Themistocles pretended to negotiate with the Spartans in 479 BC. The Street of the Tombs, begun in 394 BC, contains the funerary remains of the classical world. From the terrace overlooking the tombs, Pericles delivered his funeral oration for those who died in the first years of Peloponnesian War.
The building company has had talks with the Ministry of Culture on how to tunnel under the cemetery without damaging the monuments dating back thousands of years. Its proposals include going lower than the originally planned depth of 21 metres, or digging the tunnel by hand to avoid damage caused by the vibrations generated by the giant tunnel boring machine.
However, archaeologists have been frightened by the collapse at the National Gardens. Citing an official geological survey of the area, they now claim the ground under Keramikos is very unsuitable for tunnelling to a depth of at least 35 metres. Their proposals include completely rerouting the tunnel about 100 metres to the south to pass under the bedrock of Ermou Street.
Others are even more radical, with Dr Yiannis Tzedakis director of antiquities at the Ministry of Culture, suggesting that Line 3 of the new metro should end short at Monastiraki, without ever reaching Keramikos.
But Attiko Metro, the consortium involved in the metro project, says it's too late to change the route, with a station already dug at the other end of the site. And Leonidas Kikiras of Attiko Metro points out that the tunnel boring machine "has dug tunnels under many blocks of flats with no trouble whatsoever."
Perhaps what has done no harm to the living can do no harm to the dead.
A geological study is being prepared for Attiko Metro, and the consortium promises to submit the results to internationally respected Greek and foreign scientists for evaluation. But archaeologists are angry that a proper geological study had not been undertaken before the Roman wall collapsed and before work began under Keramikos.
"Archaeologically, it would be would be a criminal act, a form of national treason, if we allow the metro to pass under the site, causing danger to the Keramikos", says Dr Parlama.