Previously: Euro Pilgrimage ’85, Ch. 3: Growing up in Greece with Henry Miller.
It makes little sense, but musically, Bangkok was getting far more airplay than Athens or Istanbul during May of 1985. The musical Chess was a mystery to me (I eventually saw it performed in Louisville some years later), and every time I heard Murray Head’s voice in the spring of ’85, his glorious songs from the original Jesus Christ Superstar album started playing in my head.
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“Sprechen Sie Deutsch?”
Huh? Wait, was it still 1985? Where was I? Wasn’t I in Greece? Somewhere beyond fatigue’s dull perimeter, compounded by sweat and grit, yet sated by the roughly delectable salami and goat cheese sandwiches washed down with bottles of Amstel lager for breakfast, there came a voice, but whose?
“Bitte – Sprechen Sie Deutsch?”
I was napping in a daze atop a wooden bench in a stuffy hotbox misidentified as a train station’s waiting room, gym bag positioned as pillow, the station itself hardly more than a two-room afterthought containing a buffet counter and one solitary ticket window ― both closed ― with flies buzzing in lazy looping acceptance of the languid pace of life in Pythion, a collection of tiled roofs only a few yards from Turkey across a perpetually tense border.
Exactly why was someone haranguing me in German?
“Sprechen Sie Deutsch?”
Consciousness gradually returned, struggling for daylight through the cobwebbed netherworld of my mucky inner eyelids. The voice addressing me came from a middle-aged, olive-skinned man with a neatly trimmed, pencil-thin mustache, outfitted in a stereotypically Middle-Eastern green khaki, desert-style suit, his brow furrowed, and repetitively keen to communicate in a language I could not speak.
“No,” I mumbled. “Do you speak English?”
The man was delighted. “English?” He smiled broadly, showing rows of shiny metallic teeth. “You are American, yes? I am Hassan.”
A one-sided dialogue commenced. My new friend had no pressing questions to ask, but simply wished to talk to any available human being, settling on me after dismissing as unlikely participants the two elderly Greek women dozing listlessly nearby, heads resting against one other, their feet atop oversized cardboard boxes bound with twine.
I was about to learn that when a budget traveler is faced with the sticky morning hours of an aimless day in a tiny border village with more rail sidings and roving dogs than humans, where an unshaven man in raggedy pajamas was soon to emerge bleary-eyed from a nearby house, grabbing a Greek state railways cap from a metal gatepost before stumbling down a trash-strewn dirt path to throw a switch heralding the passage of a meandering freight train, there is no better way to pass the minutes than submission to the testimony of a garrulous Syrian traveling salesman.
In fact, there is no other way, for better or worse, thus the primary lesson held out for my approbation: freight trains would be the only traffic moving along the nearby tracks until eight-thirty that evening, when the regular Athens-to-Istanbul “express” would appear to take on passengers for its usual 10-hour overnight trip to the former Constantinople (or Byzantium).
And, furthermore, most of the people on the train due to arrive at Pythion in 12 short hours would have boarded originally in the Greek capital, where I’d just concluded three blissful days of fevered wandering, returning each evening to a modest tavern at the foot of the Acropolis to dine on tomatoes, cucumbers, olives, crusty bread and whatever main course of the day I’d point to with bewilderment, gazing in twilight at the Parthenon, this sublime symbol of Western civilization perched up on the hilltop above me, before ordering another cheap bottle of Carlsberg, which like the Amstel was brewed under license at a huge modern brewery near Athens.
To clarify, these passengers boarded the train in Athens the previous evening, not the previous morning, when I had managed to conclude with the ironclad certainty of a clueless novice that whatever official schedules were posted at the station in Athens by the Greek state railways couldn’t possibly be correct.
After all, everyone who was anyone in the travel game knew that in Europe there were frequent connections between major cities, and consequently, there’d be more than one daily train traveling the long route to Istanbul, and even if by accident or misadventure there wasn’t, I’d merely debark at Thessalonika and switch to a more conveniently timed through train to Turkey.
Not only that, but communist Bulgaria was a distinct possibility for me, too, as I’d exercised foresight and acquired a Bulgarian visa before leaving home, with the original idea of returning to Athens from Istanbul via Sofia.
However, the reverse was entirely possible using Thessalonika (Saloniki if you please) as jumping off point, and with a little bit of fancy footwork anything was possible.
Except in the end, it wasn’t.
Given an absolute determination to follow my bullheadedness to its logical and purely erroneous conclusion, I boarded the morning train in Athens. It duly terminated around lunchtime at Thessalonika, providing me with a second chance to recalibrate, to perhaps spend the night, and to get the timing right next day, but no, I pushed on toward the fork in tracks, to where those big, ominous Bulgarian mountains suddenly visible to the immediate north quite frankly scared the rookie bejesus right out of me.
And justifiably so.
If buying a tram ticket in cosmopolitan Basel was too much for my fledgling abilities, then I definitely wasn’t ready to travel solo behind the Iron Curtain. Bulgaria would come later, in 1987, when I was better prepared psychologically.
I kept moving, witnessing amazing scenery on a glorious afternoon as we got up to speed in Thrace, to be disgorged well after dark at a port called Alexandropoulis, where the brightly lighted foyer of a fleabag hotel was no guarantee of human presence, so I dozed pitifully atop a waterfront stone wall for a few hours before hopping the first milk run of the day to Pythion.
There, with the Turkish border so close I might have walked across it, the reality finally sank in that I was wrong, and had been hurrying all day just to cool my heels… all day. I was effectively marooned without an alternative until the sole daily train to Istanbul bopped through.
What I didn’t know is that Pythion once was a border stop on the route of the fabled Orient Express during the time after the fall of the Ottoman Empire when the luxury express train was compelled to weave back and forth between the newly drawn boundaries of Greece, Turkey and Bulgaria.
In fact, none other than James Bond (007) reveled in Pythion’s atmospherics while passing though from Istanbul. (1)
Hot coffee from the meagre little buffet at Pithion, (there would be no restaurant car until midday), a painless visit from the Greek customs and passport control, and then the berths were folded away as the train hurried south towards the Gulf of Enez at the head of the Aegean.
–From Russia with Love, by Ian Fleming
Accordingly, it was siesta time, with nothing whatever scheduled to occur anywhere near me for the following half-day, and maybe a chance to recapture lost winks, but now my invasive Syrian ruled out sleep. The buffet was closed, and there was no more beer. It was time to go with the flow. Hassan’s English was variable, and occasionally he lapsed back into German, yet as the stories of his life and times accumulated, I began to grasp the cadence of his multinational delivery.
He spoke with emotion of places he’d visited and lived, locales I’ll probably never visit: Aleppo, Cairo, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Beirut. He described magnificent lamb dishes, thriving marketplaces, the Koran’s sheer beauty, and his wife and children back in Damascus.
By contrast, there I was, a rube from the American Midwest, dumbfounded. For a moment there, I might have been a Colonial Brit.
Soon enough I reconsidered my initial annoyance. Admittedly stuck inside of Pythion with the Thracian blues again, I’d accidentally stumbled upon the very best way to pass the hours. At lunchtime the tiny buffet reopened, and we joined the older Greek men sipping demitasses of terribly sweet espresso-style coffee between nips of ouzo. Hassan refrained from alcohol, and I drank more beer. He grabbed a paper napkin and began sketching a map of Istanbul.
“Where will you stay? Hotel? You need reservation?”
“No,” I said. “I’ll find something.”
He began scribbling furiously. “No problem with hotel! Galata bridge … hotel, hotel, hotel.”
Each “hotel” was punctuated with a stab into the napkin and a blotch of ink, as Hassan rendered it into a multi-layered tic-tac-toe sheet.
“Sultan Ahmet … hotel, hotel, hotel. You must ask for price, but then pay less. This is our custom. Understand?”
Ah, yes – the art of haggling. That was sure to be fun for an overwhelmed shy guy.
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After lunch, mass area napping began anew, and I awoke to find that Hassan had disappeared. On a siding, additional passenger railcars bound for Istanbul had been pushed into place for eventual coupling to the arrival from Athens. Suddenly Hassan’s voice boomed into the void. He was leaning out a window, waving.
“Come visit me!”
In Hassan’s first class seating compartment, he was using Sterno-like fuel to heat a tin of water for tea. He offered me a drink ― it was sweet, fragrant and citrusy ― then reviewed my marching orders, adding a few more squiggles to the sadly tattered napkin. My second-class seat was elsewhere, and when I went to look for it, we parted with genuine affection.
A lesson I’d be taught again and again in 1985 was to cherish the intensity, unforgettable at times, of brief passing acquaintances.
The train left roughly according to schedule, stopping almost immediately for border formalities, and entering Turkey around midnight. At morning’s first light, Istanbul’s outer suburbs yielded to the predictable urban railway tableau of factory back lots and limp laundry affixed to the crooked balconies of old, gritty housing blocks. At last, the train halted inside Sirkeci station, undoubtedly the grandest I’d yet seen.
Alighting, I saw nattily uniformed porters and smelled tobacco, coffee and perfume; weary, I imagined the scene alongside James Bond during previous eras, although Sean Connery would have been better, and these visions abruptly dissolved into reality when I heard the familiar voice of Radio Free Damascus hail me for a final time.
“You okay? Good sleep?”
Good enough.
“You have map?” Hassan asked, and without waiting for an answer, made a sweeping gesture with his arms: “Many hotels. No problems here. Goodbye.”
“Goodbye, Hassan.”
Out the door and into a crowded street, I floated toward Sultan Ahmet, and an overdue appointment with the Levant.
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This is how a plane, trains, a boat, buses, a taxi and my own two aching feet brought me to crowded, confusing and utterly beguiling Istanbul. Twelve days earlier, I’d never even been outside the United States except for brief forays into Canada. Now my bunk was set up in Turkey, and like most Americans of my generation, too many viewings of Midnight Express abruptly regurgitated into my subconscious, reminding me this wasn’t Kansas any more — or for that matter, even Otisco.
In 2025, tourists plot their routes on mobile devices or various other electronic gadgets. In 1985, we pulled out dog-eared copies of Europe on $25 a Day or Let’s Go: Europe and tried not to look too conspicuous while seeking to determine who and where we were, and what we’d be doing.
Train stations and tourist shops sold city maps, but why purchase one unless you were sure it would be needed? After all, a couple thousand Turkish lira saved might well be two or more Efes Pilsens earned.
I bought a map anyway, yet the Sultan Tourist Hostel was fairly easy to find, and upon checking in and agreeing to occupy a three-bedded room with two complete strangers for the absurdly cheap price of $2.50 a night, I was introduced to my roomies, an engaging pair of Japanese architectural students who’d just arrived, too, and were loitering nearby.
Their broken but priceless English-language commentaries on the construction techniques and design features of the Blue Mosque, Topkapi Palace and Hagia Sophia, three historical attractions lying mere blocks away from the hostel, immeasurably enlivened our subsequent visits to these shrines. I’m still grateful to them.
I went to Hagia Sophia at least three times. The equivalent of a quarter gained admission to a fully intact, 1,500-year-old monolith described at length in The Uses of the Past, an inspiring 1950s-era book by Indiana University professor Herbert J. Muller.
The monumental structure was built in the sixth century by the Roman Emperor Justinian as the world’s largest cathedral. Later, it became the central building of Greek Orthodox Christianity and the Eastern Roman Empire, known as Byzantium. Hagia Sophia came under Catholic control for a few decades in the 13th century during the Crusades before the Byzantine emperor took Constantinople back.
Then, in 1453 after the Ottoman Empire had gained control, it became a mosque. After the founding of the modern state of Turkey, Hagia Sophia was converted into a museum in 1934.
(It became a mosque again in 2020. Thanks, Erdogan.)
One morning I hiked from the hostel out to the remains of the city walls, following them down to the Golden Horn and then back to quarters.
Another gloriously sunny afternoon was spent on the local ferryboat, zigzagging back and forth through the Bosphorus from Europe to Asia, and halting finally at the fishing village of Anadolukavağı, with the ruins of Yoros Castle, a Genoese fortress, looking over the adjacent Black Sea, eating cheap skewers of grilled lamb and peppers, stuffed tomatoes, and a chaotic bazaar where finally, after nearly two weeks on the road, I paused long enough to take a cue from Hassan and half-heartedly bargain with a merchant over the price of a gaudy yellow Turkish-made bath towel.
A buck and a half, if I recall.
The five days allotted for Istanbul passed far too quickly. I walked and slept a lot, and found myself overwhelmed by history. Having learned from the inbound experience, now I trusted the posted train schedules, and the rail trip back to Athens proved idiotically simple, with two memorable stopovers along the way.
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The first was Kalabaka, itself a nondescript modern town, but the functional gateway to the spectacular, otherworldly monasteries of Meteora, which are man-made complexes of Orthodox holiness and isolation perched like Technicolor mushrooms atop tall shafts of sheer volcanic rock.
They’re accessible by local bus thanks to the wonders of 20th-century roadway engineering, but previously reached exclusively by rope and basket conveyances, pulleys and profuse prayers.
Next came mountaintop Delphi and earnest considerations of the famous hallucinogenic oracle, whose cryptic riddles were puzzling highlights of antiquity. The youth hostel was situated across a narrow street from an Orthodox church, its bells ear-splittingly loud; the hostel used solar power to heat water, and a staffer would come around at intervals to announce the temporary availability of hot showers.
From Delphi, the serene view southwest over the Gulf of Corinth closed each evening, alongside beers, moussaka and a group of entertaining Kiwis, all crowded together on the veranda of a small taverna, enraptured by the intensity of the sunset. I wasn’t the only one who’d perused Henry Miller’s seminal The Colossus of Maroussi before arriving in Greece, and the book came to life as we discussed Miller’s late-thirties experiences and compared them with our own.
Leaving Delphi meant an uneventful local bus ride to a nearby town to access the railhead, providing no advance warning of the scene at the station, where swarms of excited people were streaming aboard the train bound for Athens. I’d completely forgotten that Sunday, June 2 was a parliamentary election day in Greece.
It was fast becoming post-election afternoon, and the celebration was beginning in earnest. Andreas Papandreou’s green-coded Socialists, scourge of the Reagan administration, were about to triumph over the conservative, blue-colored New Democrats and evil red-cloaked Communists.
It would require far more space than I’ve allotted for this segment to properly assess the Greek political situation before, during and after the 1985 election. Fractious, vicious, dog-eat-dog and dazzlingly corrupt come fairly close as descriptors. The communists were the oldest formally organized party; both Papandreou and Constantine Mitsotakis, leader of the New Democrats, had famous political fathers and sons.
Previously in both Patras and Kalabaka I’d experienced late-night campaign rallies, but nothing like the slow train ride to Athens. Bottles of wine and ouzo were everywhere. Trays of food were passed up and down the slowly moving train cars. Tickets were not being checked, which hardly mattered, as train seats were non-existent, even in first class, and rail workers partied just as unreservedly as the passengers.
The festive atmosphere more than made up for the discomfort, and I enjoyed hearing the observations of a few Greek passengers who spoke English, as well as the dryly humorous comments of my fellow traveler for the day, a Swiss woman roughly my age who I’d met while staying at the hostel in Delphi.
Once in Athens, she intended to take a boat from Piraeus to the Greek Islands, while my plan was to move south into the Peloponnese region. The election “express” arrived in the capital late; only one nighttime departure to Argos remained among the already scant connections. I accepted my Swiss travel companion’s invitation to share a bottle of wine, cheese and bread, and we passed time at her hotel until my evening departure.
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Had I been thinking clearly, spending the evening in Athens made the most sense, although it didn’t seem to dawn on me that I already had a bed and could use it if I wished (and she did). It all seemed so damned awkward, and because I can always be relied upon to think too much, such was a predictable opportunity to out-think myself again.
This time it was by arriving very early on Monday morning in Argos with nothing to do except wait patiently for the first bus to the scenic Aegean coastal city of Nafplion, collapsing in a complete state of exhaustion atop a wooden bench in the providentially warm Argos train station, and at some point realizing that the Monday after an election was a holiday in Greece. At least the buses were running, but the banks were closed, and I was short of cash.
I rallied in Nafplion, finding an inexpensive guesthouse where payment wasn’t due until leaving. Using most of my remaining drachmas, provisions were purchased (raisin bread, pastries and a two-liter bottle of water) at a bakery with savvy owners who decided to open on the holiday and greet land office business.
As for what to do, looking up into the sky revealed Nafplion’s craggy, sprawling 16th-century Palamidi fortress, a hilltop assembly of bastions built by the Venetians, and open for hiking to the top for stellar views of the ocean. There was a bar up there, and I had enough money for a single beer.
Several restaurants by the harbor accepted Visa. I hadn’t used my debit card yet, and couldn’t indulge in it very often, although now seemed to be the time for a minor splurge. The weekend had been eventful, albeit without a real meal. I chose one of the small square tables by the dock, and within minutes a man sat down adjacent to me.
My seafood stew, bread and salad came first, then what appeared to be an oversized lump of rubber landed atop his table.
At this point in my life, I’d not seen octopus parts cooked, much less tasted them, and evidently my fatigue got the better of my manners. I was openly staring at the tentacles and suction cups, much as if a space alien had beamed down next to me. Thankfully my fellow waterfront diner was amused, not offended.
In English, he remarked that I was welcome to a taste; had I not eaten octopus before? How do you sayin Greek, “Are you $#*!-ing kidding, I’m from Indiana.” He passed over some of it, and it was fine. Suddenly it occurred to me that European food and I were destined to become intertwined.
Two days remained in Nafplion. On Tuesday I did some laundry, cashed traveler’s checks, found the city’s bus depot (the chalkboards chronicling departures and arrivals were quite literally Greek to me) and took one of them to Epidavros, home to one of the best-preserved ancient theaters in Greece (the acoustics were amazing). Mycenae was Wednesday’s day trip, replete with Trojan War imagery and a much-noted tomb.
The sites from antiquity in the Peloponnese were like the dessert cart following the main course of two Athenian afternoons spent exploring the Acropolis, which in retrospect was mind-bogging for a relative paucity of visitors and the fact of our being able to roam the grounds at will, subject only to periodic whistle blasts from the minders/referees.
Combining with the National Archeological Museum in the capital and meditative moments with the oracle in Delphi, these experiences brought my adolescent View-Master dreams to fruition, and provided ample opportunities to muse on the many differences between our often romanticized views of the past and the helter-skelter reality of modern Greece.
My objectives briefly sated, Greek time was running out, and it wouldn’t come back around for 37 years, to be exact. In 2022, just as in 1985, letting go of Greece was a very hard thing to do, and I knew exactly what Henry Miller felt like. He’d prepared me well.
But Rome was waiting. To get there, it was back to Patras and aboard the boat for a second sea voyage.
Next: Euro Pilgrimage ’85, Ch. 5: A critical Mass in Rome — and the famous Pecetto bus incident.
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(1) As of late 2024, rail replacement bus service has replaced the real thing in Pythion and much of Greece as a whole, and that’s a shame.
