Spring is here. Even in downtown Athens, pinky-mauve judas trees thrust color into the crowded streets near the central market. The scent of Seville orange blossoms overrides the heady mixture of cumin and car exhaust as I thread my way from Omonia Square to the herb-and-spice souk.
You can tell Easter, the biggest holiday in the Greek calendar, is round the corner. The sidewalk has been squeezed into a narrow strip by cages of fluffy chicks and rabbits outside the pet shops, while the hardware stores have spread beyond their thresholds with dozens of portable BBQs and spits with plastic lambs skewered on them. Only one kiosk remains stuck in winter – its scratchy-looking long johns piled beside it for the old-timers who wear them all year long.
Three decades ago a French friend said, “Syntagma c’est l’ Europe, mais Omonia c’est l’Orient.” And this is still true, even as the rest of the city rushes into the 21st century. Moreover, in addition to the Anatolian flavor, the real Orient is making its presence felt. Red lanterns hang outside cheap Chinese clothes shops, Bangladeshi call centers and Indian groceries compete with the more typical purveyors of Turkish pastourma (paprika-coated meat), Epirot cheeses and pots of herbs.
Down here, the street names evoke ancient Greece – Euripides, Aeschylus, Socrates and Aristophanes – but there isn’t much those men would recognize except for the Acropolis looming in the distance. This is the place to come for just about anything you can think up and even things you never knew existed. Today in my wanderings around a couple of short blocks, I encounter two plastic florists, side by side, their rainbow-hued bouquets and baskets blotting out the sidewalk. Next to them a thicket of kitchen wares obliterate the shop’s facade, with wine jugs, sieves, rolling pins, breadboards and several unidentifiable objects hanging in dense profusion around its door, while tableware sufficient for a convention reaches the curb. There is no question of pedestrians keeping to the sidewalk in this district.
The neighborhood also boasts a shop selling sheepbells and tack for donkeys and mules, decorated with blue beads to ward off the evil eye, as well as places that specialize in nothing but brooms, household cleansers, maids’ uniforms, Easter candles, open sacks of loose pet food, not to mention all the food shops and stalls.
My favorites are the spice merchants, festooned with tassles of chilli peppers, dried orange slices, sage, mountain tea; shelves filled with mysterious branches and drawer upon drawer of unusual herbs reputed to heal whatever might be ailing you. Greeks have relied on herbal cures since time immemorial.
As I start making my way back to the Omonia metro, I stop to chat with the owner of a shop so tiny it’s more like a cupboard. He stands behind a counter, surrounded by more than 300 herbs and spices, in transparent envelopes neatly stacked like library books. When I comment on the extraordinary quantity, the owner says, “Oh, yes, Greece has plenty of herbs, it’s brains we lack.”
He nods towards the street cordoned off by policemen seeking to prevent vehicles heading towards Syntagma where the students have been demonstrating against university reforms every Wednesday. I’d forgotten they’d be at it again today. Sure enough, at Omonia a crowd has gathered. But in the center a bunch of kids are dancing. And they’re not shouting rhyming slogans. They’re blowing bubbles. Thousands of bubbles bob gently in the air. Welcoming spring to unpredictable Athens.
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