Fourth episode: Feasting and fasting

06/15/21 • 26 min

From Farmers’ markets to kite-flying picnics. Athenians love their weekly street markets and chef and food writer Carolina Doriti takes Sofka around one to discuss Athenian culinary habits. Seasonal cooking, the monastery tradition and a recent return to traditions. Author and cookery writer Diana Farr Louis picks wild greens in a park. Why are horta the popular basis of the Mediterranean diet, while also provoking collective memories of hunger? The Greek calendar is filled with fasting days, but the first day of Lent has become a joyful opportunity to have a picnic feast and fly a kite. Sofka tries to ‘bottle’ Athens as a perfume. From ‘high notes’ of herbs and bitter orange blossom, there’s Frankincense and a plume of traffic fumes.

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Third episode: A city of villages

Athens as a collection of villagers, refugees and outsiders. Few Athenians are so-called ‘True Athenians.’ Author and journalist Diane Shugart walks Sofka around the changing neighbourhood of Pangrati to discuss this, the ‘15-minute city’ and why the kiosk or periptero is so significant. Anthropologist Roxane Caftanzoglou reveals how Anafiotika, under the Acropolis, was built by islanders from Anafi. Refugees are nothing new in Athens. Historian Nikos Nikolaides unpacks the traumas of the Greek refugees fleeing Turkey in the 1922 ‘Catastrophe.’ From Armenians in Neos Kosmos to Syrians in Kypseli, where Marina Liakis discusses how she started the NGO Zaa’tar with its refuge and falafel café, Tastes of Damascus. At the Victoria Square Project there are community arts projects for all. Young director Niovi Zarambouka-Chatzimanou says, ‘We do not talk about refugees and migrants inside our space; we talk about neighbours.’

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Fifth episode: Taking to the streets

From ancient philosophers and open-air cinema to protest marches and street dogs. Athenians have always lived much of their lives outdoors. Writer and journalist Bruce Clark gives the long view back to Socrates, and we drop by the former gasworks Technopolis to learn from Anna Gagga about summer concerts. Legendary Guardian correspondent Helena Smith meets Sofka in central Syntagma Square to look back over the many protests and celebrations that have happened there. Foteini Pipi reveals how Athens Pride is changing attitudes towards the LGBTQ community. We unpack the political and cultural significance of Athens’ Polytechnic and the edgy neighbourhood of Exarchia with Architect Stavros Martinos. And we hear the secret confessions of a graffiti tagger.