The first thing that strikes you in Athens is the traffic noise. The roar of old buses and taxis with no lead controls or exhaust pipes, driven at speed with honking horns, thru' the heat and dust that gags the morning air. I look around to see the glories that were Greece only to find a city in a mess. Dreadful concrete buildings inhabit the entire city which is set in a beautiful parabola, now vulgarised and hideous.
The pavements are dirty, smudged concrete, abutting high rectangular boxes for hotels and offices, grey and drab. Half built structures are everywhere. I passed a piece of construction with an office open and workers on telephones going full steam ahead on the completed ground floor while above them reared the pillars of the rest of the building yet to be finished, with only the steel reinforcements sticking out; no other floors yet added on.
Paper, cardboard, plastic cups and containers litter the streets. Then you see through the smog some splendid Doric or Ionian columns of an archaeological site haphazardly fenced off. How could things have come to this? You recall the perfect town of Corfu and you wonder how you can have such a contrast within the same country. Henry Miller said the white brilliant light of Greece obliterates the dirt - that was in 1939. That was then. This is now. In the intervening years everything has gone out of control. You feel under siege here: crowded, bustled, smoked out, smogged. I stand at the corner of Ommonia Square, a downtown landmark, and listen to a sudden argument over politics that develops among rival factions, and I get a flashback of Socrates or Aristotle or the great general, Pericles, haranguing the multitude. I thought they were discussing football until one man laughingly tells me otherwise. He is a tall, grey-haired, patrician figure, who seems to hold the stage. I ask him can I take a photograph. He warns me off. I later read that Greece is a divided country. A fierce civil war was fought from 1944 to 1949. Eventually the right wingers defeated the communists in a bloody battle. After 50 years both sides are attempting to bury the hatchet. Most official files on people have been burned. There were 75 million files. After the civil war people spied on their neighbours, reporting them going to tavernas and having clandestine meetings. This caused a lot of bitterness. Any wonder that my orator friend doesn't want his photograph taken?
Hotels vary wildly in price from 2,000 drachmas to 70,000. One can be as good as another. You have to be lucky. I moved from the Cecil to the Greco down the street. The upper end of the scale is the Hotel Grand Bretagne in Syntagma Square, but not for budget travelling. In this area are many luxurious stores selling very fine rugs, jugs, urns, plates, statues and vases in gold, silver and bronze, which remind you that Greece is a two tier society: fabulous wealth sits cheek by jowl with grinding poverty. High above the mayhem of the city, the Acropolis stands imperious and alone. An everlasting monument to the centuries when Greece was the cradle of Western civilisation, from 500 to 200 BC. I prowled around the huge rock at least twice. As you walk in the resiny tang of the juniper, the sweet oleander, the stinging ommonia trees, the spirits of the giant historical figures: Orestes, Socrates, Euripides, St Paul, cast long shadows down the centuries. With the weather fine, the song of the cicadas, a full moon over Athens, standing atop the Acropolis you feel a sense of wonder that the hideousness of the modern city cannot erase. It is as if everything is for a moment swept clean and pristine and the cocks of Attica are once again crowing before the dawn.
On the western slopes of the Acropolis is an area of tiny quartered streets called the Plaka which has been the old market of the city for the last 200 years. Near it are the ruins of the Ancient Agora, the original marketplace of Athens dating back 3,000 years.
Next evening, I shipped on board a clean new ferry from the port of Piraeus, bound for Mykonos in the Aegean sea, six or seven hours away. The ferry was cheap, the sea was calm and as darkness fell the island of Syros our first stop, seemed full of lights, like a village hanging in a hammock between two black hills. Next port of call was the little island of Tinos where the bells of the churches chimed at midnight.
Mykonos is mystical. A place of cubist houses and alleyways climbing to nowhere in ever increasing spirals. Twisting, winding lanes, cocks crowing in the dry September air. Nothing sharp except the white and the blue light. Graceful old windmills with the cloth sheets folded away dot the island. There is no wind today. Nor green trees or broad meadows or running streams. It is a strange, dreaming place.
On this island there are no reference points, as Laurence Durrell used to say. The place is suspended in time. The swallows patter and chirp and scream; boats lie far out on the glassy ocean. I have a splendid view of Delos across the way from my little hacienda high above the town, and as I look a ray of golden sunlight shines on this cradle of commerce like an arc light at a rock concert. But the Greeks can build on Mykonos. It is perfect. Precise yet amorphous, masterful. Neat or nettoye as the French say. It does not need anything. It is complete with its winding stairways to heaven. Why is modern Athens not like this? One can only shrug in bafflement.
There are no remains of antiquity on Mykonos. From April to October, it is completely overrun with tourists from all over Europe. The place is full of restaurants and stores selling vests, T-shirts, pants, sandals, suntan oil, sweaters and all kinds of bric-a-brac. It is an expert money making factory. Delos was even more expert. This is the tiny island about three miles away which, from 500 to 50 BC, was the Wall Street of the ancient world. The greatest trading and banking centre under the sun.
The Mediterranean can change from being a placid lake to a mighty raging ocean when storms blow down from the high mountains of Greece. The little boat pitched and tossed in the swell as we approached Delos and the landing was even more precarious as there is no harbour and apparently never was. This is one of the mysteries of the place. How could such a major centre of commerce have no harbour?
Delos is now totally eerie. All is rubble: magnificent palaces and once golden temples, all pulverised. Except for one row of Mycenean lions in stone, miraculously preserved as if guarding some long lost Pandora's box that might yet burst open and destroy us all. Cleopatra lived here it is said, and the sun god Apollo was born here, but no mortal. It was forbidden to either be born or die on Delos. You still are not allowed to stay overnight. It is a museum forever locked with its black secrets in the unreachable ancient world. Laurence Durrell says he bribed a boatman and swam at midnight there once in the 1960s. He says a cry awoke him that sent a shiver down his spine he would never forget. Delos at night was "dead silent and ominous with the slither of snakes and huge green lizards among the stones". The only explanation is that Delos must have been destroyed by man's invading armies.