Previously: Euro Pilgrimage ’85, Ch. 2: Crawling across the borderline into Luxembourg.
Long before leaving home, I took care to equip myself with an American Express Youth Hostel card. And why not?
A clean, dry bunk bed rarely cost more than $10, and you’d usually get a light breakfast as part of the deal. There’d be a midday “lockout” for them to clean up, which was seldom inconvenient, and the places were packed with all sorts of like-minded people from all around the world, most (though not all) of them young, and amenable to joining up in informal groupings to explore adjacent terrain.
No, that comment reeks of innocence. It is not intended to be taken lasciviously.
Youth is purely relative, and I was a mere lad of 24 upon arrival in Europe. The card cost a nominal fee, promising to “open the doors” at youth hostels overseas that maintained an affiliation with the governing body, known as the International Youth Hostel Federation (IYHF; now Hostelling International), all of which reminds me that today, as I near 65 years of age, the notion of “elder hostel” (a firm now called Road Scholar) has at last come within statutory reach.
Private hostels also abounded, especially in heavily touristed areas. The quality of private hostels was assumed to vary widely, and there were far fewer rules; my own experiences with them were positive in the main. Conversely, the IYHF hostels generally could be trusted to adhere to predictable minimum standards of organization and hygiene, albeit occasionally with an overly institutional feel (and a hall monitor’s zeal).
Actually I appreciated such structure during my formative period of travel, and the price was always right. The IYHF card easily paid for itself during my first three days on European soil while overnighting in Luxembourg City, Basel (Switzerland) and Milan (Italy). It was a frenetic travel pace – by design (for better or worse), for I was eager to get Hellenic.
My objective all along was to visit three of the four corners of Europe during the course of three months: Greece to the southeast, Ireland in the northwest, and Leningrad (now St. Petersburg; northeast), and of course, see a bit of the territories in between. I decided that four corners would be too many, and so Spain and Portugal were omitted from the itinerary.
Luxembourg was the starting and ending point, and it stood to reason that in May, the weather would be better to the south, so Greece was the logical opening destination. This obviously required making a very long journey south and east, first by train to Brindisi in Italy, then an overnight ferry to Patra, Greece (the trains became noticeably slower the further south and east that I rode).
The entirety of this transit was covered by the Eurailpass (except for reservations and supplements), although first it was necessary to learn how to make use of every single thing that a Southern Indiana boy hadn’t ever been exposed to: buying tickets for trams, buses and subways; interpreting restaurant menus without a translation app (just a phrase book); navigating obscure local customs; and so many other mundane daily tasks for which I was woefully unprepared in spite of my diligent preparatory studies.
It didn’t take long to realize that while I’d been correct in imagining the first few days in Europe as a learning curve, similar to drills in baseball’s spring training, it was wildly unrealistic to think that a few hours of practice would suffice.
Comfort for a first-timer would require immersion, and immersion produced conflicting emotions of panic and catharsis, paralysis and ecstasy – all at once. Consumed with self-doubt, and still a tongue-tied and shyness-entrapped extrovert screaming for relief and release, I’d first kick myself viciously for perceived inadequacies and stumbles, then glance out through a train window, behold an Alpine vista or Mediterranean seascape, and feel a deeper satisfaction than I’d ever experienced in my life up until then.
Seeing as middle grounds have remained elusive for me, “spring training” was stimulating and exhausting, both mentally and physically, and at first I’d hit the evening’s bunk early and sleep to excess, at least when stereophonic snoring in 16-bunk hostel dorm rooms didn’t interfere with my extended beauty rest.
But as the extended (and befuddled) hike in Luxembourg had illustrated, job one was finding the hostel (or pension, guesthouse or hotel). While taxis were an available option, the expense for a single traveler made them a last desperate resort.
Gradually travel life became easier. On the second night in Basel, I remember studying the hyper-efficient tram schedules in front of the train station, concluding that one of them was perfectly poised to deposit me only a block or two away from the hostel youth, and so of course I walked there anyway, because embarrassingly enough I just couldn’t work out how to operate the damn ticket machine.
Not that I would have considered the rational stratagem of asking a passerby, or calculated the odds of being controlled aboard the tram near zero and boarded sans ticket. But it was a pleasant day, and this time around I was ready with pen and paper to jot down the directions from the public map before leaving the train station.
(Schlepping a bag back and forth could be rationalized as good exercise, right? During the trip as a whole, I lost 20 pounds.)
Progress came slowly and incrementally, precisely as it always had with me. The more readily I came to grips with my fundamental foot-dragging, the easier it would be for everyone, most of all me.
The fourth night abroad was spent napping fitfully on the deck of the ferry, and then, come morning, finally I found myself in Greece, strolling from the ship into a delightfully cheap, seedy and nearly dilapidated hotel so very archaic that a reincarnated Henry Miller might recognize the room just as it looked the last time he visited, bed bugs and all.
It was Miller who bore much of the responsibility – the blame, if you will – for attracting me to Greece in the first place. Who was he, anyway?
A digression is merited.
—
Henry Miller was an iconic American writer who died in 1980 at the age of 88, and is remembered chiefly for his once-banned novel Tropic of Cancer. Miller spent the last years of his long, active life portraying a theatrical version of himself, offering entertaining vignettes for an ever-eager media, and brazenly enjoying his late-blooming notoriety as only an ex-bowery urchin might.
Just before his death, wizened but with twinkles of naughtiness as yet flashing in his ancient eyes, Miller appeared on camera as a “witness” to history in Warren Beatty’s film Reds, probably my favorite film of the era, observing that while clueless moderns had trouble believing that old rascals like him ever enjoyed life, they most certainly did: “People fucked back then just as much as they do now. We just didn’t talk about it as much.”
For someone as renowned for bawdiness as Miller to pen an entire book with nary an explicit mention of the horizontal arts will come as a surprise to some, but The Colossus of Maroussi is exactly that volume.
Written and published as World War II made ready to welcome the United States as a participating belligerent, the book recounts Miller’s months-long holiday in Greece in 1939, this short-lived respite coming at the conclusion of his lengthy Depression-era tenure as a Parisian urban expatriate, and immediately prior to relocation and reinvention as a tree-hugging primitive in California’s Big Sur.
Ostensibly, Colossus is a travelogue about Greece, depicting a country caught in transition during the middle of the 20th century, with one foot in the grubby present and the other very much rooted in an epic (and happily exaggerated) past.
Much of Miller’s narrative focused on a larger-than-life Greek poet and raconteur named George Katsimbalis, and therein lurked a significant clue, because as readers have understood virtually since the book’s release, it was actually all about Miller himself.
Miller described Katsimbalis from a mirror’s eye view, and he imbued the entire Greek nation with his protagonist’s (and his own) quirky prejudices and eccentricities. Like so many Western tourists before and since, he experienced a fascinating but impoverished country and rather smugly concluded that in deprivation resided inner beauty and universal wisdom, when all the locals really wanted were dependable electrical outlets, usable flush toilets, and cars that went vroom-vroom.
On the more positive side, Miller offered some of his best pure writing in Colossus, describing Greek pastoral scenes and the country’s colorful people joyfully and without guile, his trademark glee in sensuousness and eroticism deployed not to titillate readers with sex, but to provide them with the means to smell the flowers, taste the wine and feel the ocean breeze.
Miller regarded Colossus as his best book, and in the sense of descriptive imagery, he may have been right.
When it came to politics, economics and mankind’s “larger” issues, Miller might safely be described as a non-participating Luddite libertarian. He had no time for society’s persistent and petty constraints on human expression, and little use for “–isms” of any sort, and yet he inhabited a time when these considerations were an inescapably dominant daily theme. As such, Greece was his necessary escape, and he seemed to have found in it the perfect milieu to absorb his own reflection.
Yet, perhaps even Miller recognized his own exaggerations and glibness. He presciently decamped from a personalized Greek dream before the war came to disturb it – awakening, so to speak, and thereby avoiding the multitudinous Greek nightmares to follow: successive wartime horrors, post-war ideological battles, coups, squabbles and the wrenching upheavals and dislocations familiar to those world cultures eager to join the “modern” world the writer so reliably detested.
Miller died a few years before Greece joined the European Union, its entry symbolizing the country’s belated arrival to the continent’s richer pageant. Alas, the marriage turned sour during the Greek government’s debt crisis and subsequent crippling austerity measures between 2009 through 2018, although there has been something of a breathing space since the height of the chaos (I finally returned in 2022).
For me, it is axiomatic. Had the self-described anarchist Miller been around to witness this recent period of German central banker hegemony over Greece, he surely would have sided with the radical leftist finance minister Yanis Varoufakis:
(The Eurozone) resembles a fine riverboat that was launched on a still ocean in 2000. And then the first storm that hit it, in 2008, started creating serious structural problems for it. We started leaking water. And of course, the people in the third class, as in the Titanic, start feeling the drowning effects first.
—
For all its flaws, The Colossus of Maroussi remains essential and compelling reading, and I cannot underestimate its profound influence on me during the early 1980s. The book reflected my own maturation, sliding seamlessly into a minor obsession that had taken root during childhood with visits to the library for books about Greek mythology, and was furthered when I received a Christmas gift of the three-reel “Greece” set from View-Master.
When the European travel bug first started biting me, I investigated a study program called College Year in Athens, which might have been arranged to support graduate-level university credits at Indiana University. I applied and was accepted. However, it simply made no sense to pay tuition and lodging for credits that may or may not have been needed, and as the record shows, I ultimately refrained from pursuing a graduate degree.
Instead, upon request in 1984 the Greek tourist office in New York mailed perhaps the biggest package of brochures and maps I’d ever scored from such a portal, and as I read Miller’s account, his progress was plotted with their assistance for my prospective benefit as a prospective visitor. Back then Ernest Hemingway meant more to me as a writer, but he hadn’t written at length about Greece. Spain would come much later for me.
And so there I was in 1985, finally standing on Greek soil, well aware that the intervening decades had rendered Miller’s descriptions completely obsolete. To be sure, everything had changed, but happily there were moments of timelessness evoking the pre-war mood, when not unlike the writer, I paused at Mycenae, Epidaurus and Delphi, brushing off the dust from the bus journey and perceiving the weight of preceding millennia … when I’d hear a tinkling bell and see a shepherd’s profile on a hillside, and later devour tomatoes, cucumber and feta doused with olive oil, and kick back with a beer … watch the grizzled old men nursing their cloudy drams of ouzo at breakfast … and then be reminded that back at the hotel, I was officiously instructed to keep toilet paper out of the commode lest the too-narrow-by-half sewage pipes became clogged.
Following two nights in Patra, a time spent resting, collecting my thoughts, boarding the wrong train to Olympia (I never made it there, sadly) and enjoying simple meals at an ordinary local eatery adjacent to my hotel, I boarded an early morning train for Athens.
However, these inaugural forays into the delicious Greek cuisine – lamb with orzo, souvlaki, and impossibly exotic stuffed grape leaves – prompt a closing rumination pertaining to Arthur Frommer’s 1985 edition of Europe on $25 a Day, and specifically, his budget travel advice on food and restaurants in Athens (and Greece overall); my italics added.
The best street (in Athens) for budget restaurants serving palatable food is Jan Smuts Street (also known as Voukourestiou Street), which juts off Venizelou Street, only a few steps from the top of Constitution Square. There are, of course, many much cheaper restaurants than these, most of them, however, serving dishes that simply aren’t acceptable to Western tastes.
Because there’s a vast difference between the meals a Greek workingman eats (heavily oiled, often sour), and those we’re accustomed to, Athens is the only city in Europe in which I’ve specifically sought out the tourist restaurants. But don’t expect corned-beef-and-cabbage; these are moderately priced tourist restaurants, and therefore the food is still Greek, although a few concessions are made.
Frommer also rejected retsina, the famous Greek wine flavored with resin (read: “pine sap”), observing that it was “death to American tastes.” But I enjoyed my initial rendezvous with retsina in Patras, and later, on the ship back to Italy, I instructed a handful of German and Australian travel companions in the dubious “art” of the drachma-bounce drinking game, the de facto Hoosier national pastime (using quarters) prior to the advent of corn hole.
Up on the observation deck in the gorgeous open air, we made do with bottles of retsina, a weathered camp cup, and the largest available Greek drachma coin.
I chose not to follow Frommer’s advice during my two weeks in Greece, and never once experienced an inedible meal. Overall I ate far better than expected, with the added bonus of a joyfully inexpensive price structure. Language differences occasionally intervened when it came to interpreting an eatery’s menu, but usually someone was around to translate, and on one happy occasion the waiter guided me into the kitchen to point at whatever looked good, just as Frommer said they would.
I believe Frommer’s Greek culinary caution was a rare misstep on the part of my preferred travel guru. His reference to the unacceptable foods eaten by the typical “Greek workingman” reads overtly classist in retrospect, although in fairness few of us knew then as we do now about such distinctions.
What was Frommer trying to say by describing Greek food as “heavily oiled, often sour”? The oiliness has a readier explanation. Greeks still consume more olive oil than anyone else in the world, at around 5.3 gallons per person each year, and I absorbed my fair share of it in 1985, often by sopping it from salad plates and stew bowls using delicious crusty bread.
(But wait: Hasn’t this become standard appetizer procedure at upscale restaurants the world over?)
Sourness in Greek “workingman’s” food is a more difficult characteristic to pin down. However, there are plausible hints, foremost among them being the ubiquity of pungent (by American standards) Greek yogurts and cheeses, most of them using sheep’s or goats’ milk.
Perhaps “sour” also is an imperfect synonym for “strongly flavored,” as in the heavy use of native herbs like oregano, mint, savory and mastic (crystalized sap from pistachio trees), especially in conjunction with tart lemon juice.
Another theory is that traditionally, sugar has not been used as an additive in Greek cuisine apart from the desserts, where sweetness traditionally was achieved by the use of rich local honey.
To me, Frommer’s words in 1984 almost surely must be interpreted as a warning to Americans against the flavorful authenticity of Greek country (read: peasant) cooking, hence the rampant irony, because four decades later, regionally-based Greek peasant cooking is universally regarded as admirably healthy, forming the basis for the “Mediterranean” way of consumption.
As such, what did Frommer mean by “concessions” at those dining spots he considered suitable?
In a July 2021 podcast at The Splendid Table, culinary author Diane Kochilas explained that traditional Greek cooking changed considerably a century ago when an influx of refugees from the former Ottoman Empire came to resettle in Greece as an aftermath of the WWI-era conflict between Greece and Turkey.
According to Kochilas, these ethnic Greek newcomers brought with them a modified, more urban-oriented way of thinking about food, in contrast to the still-prevalent rural way of life in Greece. To generalize, a Greek shopkeeper in Istanbul wasn’t eating the same foods as a shepherd in Thessaly.
For instance, Kochilas cited two of the dishes we all probably associate most intimately with Greece, moussaka (eggplant lasagna) and pastitsio (pasta casserole), as having come to the country in earnest with those refugees a century ago.
Kochilas noted that preparing moussaka would have required knowledge of French cooking techniques in order to properly make the signature béchamel sauce, reflecting an experiential background missing in rural Greece at the time.
So, albeit inadvertently, those many years ago Arthur Frommer was pointing his readers toward cosmopolitan culinary “concessions” like these — and, decades later, the typical Greek workingman has had something akin to a last laugh, given that regionally-based Greek country cooking has become the envy of health-conscious diners globally.
All I know is that in 1985, I enjoyed every last morsel in Greece, from street souvlaki to harbor-side octopus, and not to omit salami, beans, raisin bread and baklava.
My first-ever Greek salad in Athens of cucumbers, tomatoes, Kalamata olives and feta cheese was dusted with oregano and drenched in olive oil, and I’ve been making it at home ever since. I still enjoy cooking moussaka and pastitsio, irrespective of their precise origins.
A final thought: one thing that I did not do in Greece in 1985 was photograph my food. Maybe I should have, although it wasn’t common to do so at the time. Nowadays most of us know what these dishes look like, so instead of swiping a shot from the web, merely imagine being surrounded by these wonderful dishes.
As for Frommer, the grand old man of travel writing died at 95 in 2024. He may have been off course with his verdict about Greek food, but I can never thank him enough for encouraging my travel vice.
(Cover photo credit: A great Greek News Agenda website article, “Rethinking Greece | Welcome to the Greek 80s: Interview with Panayis Panayotopoulos” from 2017.)
And a song for Ch. 3: It doesn’t matter whether Wham! or George Michael is credited (it varied by release), but I heard a lot of “Careless Whisper” during the latter half of May in 1985.
