Kosta, a new acquaintance, met me in the rehabilitated pocket park in front of the museum. We paused at its newfangled water fountain, testing the different levels—one for adults, one for kids, and one, activated with a foot pedal, for dogs. As Kosta kicked it unsuccessfully, an old man on a nearby park bench yelled, “There’s water, press harder!” Nodding at the old man, Kosta, who is half French and was raised in France, said, “That’s why I moved here. That would never happen in Paris. It’s the spirit of the place.”
By which he meant not that the soul of Athens is an old man yelling from a park bench, but that it’s a collective of people trying to help each other get the sustenance they need. Eager to learn more about the new Athens, I arranged to meet with the mayor, Kostas Bakoyannis. He shared Kosta’s sentiment. “People see Athens from 15,000 feet, and they think that it’s a huge, endless city, where everyone is lost and no one is found,” he said. “In reality, Athens is 129 neighborhoods, compact and dense. If you work here, it has to be bottom-up, on a community level.”
The trick is to preserve that community—to sustain a balance between the boutique museum with its doggy water fountain and the old guys on their park benches. Roaming Athens’s center, I found buzzy new spots that seem to meet that challenge: hotels and restaurants that would fit in all over the world but stand out because they embrace the qualities that make them quintessentially Greek. It’s a marked shift in a city where, for decades, most of the fine-dining restaurants were French or Japanese.
We stayed at Xenodocheio Milos, an elegant boutique hotel opposite the Academy of Athens, a block from Syntagma Square. The central location was perfection—every morning before the kids woke, my husband would walk and return with updates: “I found a rock where Socrates taught and Saint Paul preached. Are you ready for breakfast?” But what struck me most were the touches that made us feel like we were staying with family or friends. A pitcher of iced herbal tea awaited us at the front desk for cooling off after coming in from the dusty street. Afternoon treats were left in each room daily: spoon sweets, nut cookies, loukoumi, poached pears.
One night we strolled to LS and Sia, which bills itself as a “simple restaurant and candle factory” at the back of St. Demetrios church in Psyrri, a neighborhood not far from the Acropolis that seems to be perpetually both down at the heels and full of gentrifying hipsters. The restaurant is simple, as in reliant on tried-and-true Greek moves—tables on the pavement, classic dishes, a treat brought out at the end. But there was so much attention paid to every detail. The chairs’ back legs had been shortened to rest comfortably on the sidewalk surrounding the church. The butter arrived in a column with a wick that was lit to melt it. Instead of a traditional fruit or digestif to cap the meal, the thanks-for-coming gift was a package of candles made on-site, with a note describing them as an offering and a dedication, a godparent’s gift, “the answer to a power cut…the bright light of life.” We took ours and strolled over to Monastiraki, passing the church of St. Demetrios, then walked under the Acropolis, all manner of temples gleaming in the moonlight.
