I recently took a two week vacation to Greece (Athens and Crete) with my wife Alli. I jotted some notes while we were there, and now I’ve put them into shape a little.
“Dull” architecture in Athens
Repeatedly, the author of the guidebook we were using for Greece complained about the ugly, dull concrete housing blocks in Athens. I came to resent this for a couple reasons: For years, I illustrated these floor plan articles in City Lab, and I was always really taken with the terraced, plant-covered balconies of Athens apartment buildings. I really looked forward to seeing them!
It’s fine if they’re not to your taste — whatever. But these neighborhoods look so green and alive! We should be so lucky to be able to build housing that’s half as dense as this in many US cities. It’s not a perfect system, but these polikatoikia allow Athens neighborhoods to be impressively economically diverse, mixed use, and affordable. I even went to an outdoor movie theater and saw “One Battle After Another” nestled between two of them, covered in ivy.
Marble cutting
We visited one of the preeminent marble statuary workshops in the world, and it was fascinating! The process is extraordinarily complex, labor intensive, and stressful: a small error or misjudged piece of marble can ruin months or years of work. The methods, besides a few power tools, are largely the same from ancient times, and they proceed from clay statuette, to plaster model at scale, to marble stone statue. After the tour, it was our turn to cut a simple design into a block of marble, and we were laughably terrible. They make it look so easy, and it was incredibly difficult. I can draw, but Alli and I were equally out to sea.
Driving / beeping
Sometimes driving in another country can be stressful or complicated, but in some cases it’s the only way to get around that makes sense. We had rented a car for Crete, after Athens. On a food tour in Athens, we heard our Greek guide bragging about how hairy driving in Crete can be and we thought… uh oh. Alli did some research on Reddit and learned that it’s customary to pull over to the right, halfway into the shoulder, to allow people to pass. Unfortunately, whenever we did this, our rental car beeped loudly and tried to pull the steering wheel back towards the road, but we made it work. We saw other rental cars (they have agency stickers) struggling with this pretty much everywhere we went, to the frustration of locals. “Must be rule-following Germans,” we would say to each other. Crete is big, and having a rental car gave us so much flexibility. Because we could drive, we were able to stay in the middle of the country, visit a donkey sanctuary, etc. Worth it.
Mizithra cheese
I love cheese, and not in a casual way. I’ve worked in three cheese shops as a monger, and once I was paid to put on a little hat and be the fancy cheese guy at a restaurant with a Michelin star. So it’s always cool to learn about a new cheese. Greek cheeses, besides feta, haloumi, and manouri, are not too widely known in the US. Meet mizithra, a fresh sheep or goat’s cheese that’s often nicely seasoned with olive oil, salt, pepper, and oregano. It reminds me a bit of really good sheep’s milk ricotta. We came to really like dakos, with mizithra, tomatoes, and hard barley bread. It can be assembled like a bruschetta, or presented as more of a salad, like this.
Leather goods
Personally, I’m not anti-leather, but I do try and avoid buying cheap leather. So in Greece, where they still have artisan leatherworkers, I picked up a few things. Our bike tour in Athens was right across from the shop of “Celebrity Sandal Maker, Pantelis Melissinos.” How could I resist getting custom sandals, just like Sarah Jessica Parker and Bob Saget? It was fun, weird, and expensive. Sorry, no feet pics on main.
Joni mitchell
We went to Matala, a beach in Crete where a bunch of hippies lived in caves for a while. This included Joni Mitchell in 1970, fresh off her breakup with Graham Nash. I’ve loved listening to the album “Blue” for most of my life, ever since I bought it for my mom for a gift and eventually stole the CD to listen to. So it was really cool to be at a place she’s singing about in “Carey” and “California”.
Via Wikipedia, I found these amazing memories of this place, and the writing is so flowery and amusing:
Their corrugated faces hunched over kerosene lamps and candles, they huddled together, samples of all the migratory hordes gone A.W.O.L. from the anthills of the world: campus Guevarists in Fidelista fatigues, sexual Leftists and sanyasins in long-flowing robes, minstrels of sunburnt bohemianism, aspiring earringed gurus, the Eminences and Prometheus-poseurs of Hip-- all fixated in the dim waxen light like mannequins from Madame Tussaud’s.
Knives
The knives they make in Crete have a notch at the bottom of the handle for the thumb, for extra grip when stabbing downward. (!) According to our bike tour guide, small knives were given as gifts to babies, and men used to propose with a knife instead of a ring — women would wear the knife on a chain around their neck. Residents used these knives to take down Nazi paratroopers in the Battle of Crete in 1941. Used to be a whole industry, now down to two artisans in Chania. I did not buy a knife.
Roof dog
In the village Agioi Deka on Crete, we kept seeing this dog up on a flat, one-story roof. We only saw him or her on the roof, never on the ground. I saw it sleeping up there once. Why was it up there? Did it ever come down? Did it like being up there?
The Phaistos Disc
I became obsessed with this disc. It has 45 unique characters in a pictographic script, spiraling in what appear to be sentences or paragraphs. The thing is covered with over 200 images, stamped onto clay from carved stone seals. There’s a guy with what looks like a mohawk, a bee, a cat, and all sorts of identifiable stuff. We saw the disc at the Heraklion Archeological Museum, which was awesome. I read NYT obituary legend Maraglit Fox’s excellent 2013 nonfiction book on the decipherment of Linear B, and I would highly recommend it if you like language, mysteries, ancient cultures, or anything like that.
Off to Texas for a work retreat! Have you ever been to Greece? Where? Now that we’ve gotten a taste we’re eager for more.
–Josh