Impressions From Modern Greece

So, to celebrate our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, my wife and I took a two week trip to Greece, specifically Athens, Mykonos, Santorini and Crete, this August.

Some of my impressions and reactions, more or less at random, follow:

* In thirteen days, it was cloudy for all of about three daytime hours on our second to last day while we were in Athen during which it very lightly sprinkled rain for five or ten minutes. It was sunny and moderately humid (but not like the American Southeast or the American Midwest in the summer) the rest of the time (except the Lasithi plateau at higher elevations in Crete). Winds were mild everywhere but Mykonos where they were strong and gusty. Highs were highest and lows were lowest in Athens, then Crete. In the small Cycladic islands of Mykonos and Santorini temperatures were mild (70s to 80s Fahrenheit) with as little as seven or eight degrees Fahrenheit between the high and the low for the day. The only moment we were cool was in a deep underground cave shrine in a mountain on the Lasithi plateau where temperatures got down to 14 degrees Celsius (about 57 degrees Fahrenheit) for the twenty or thirty minutes we were there on an otherwise warm afternoon even in the mountain valley. Water temperatures swimming in the Aegean Sea were about 77 degrees Fahrenheit except for some volcanically heated water at the center of the active volcanic Caldera on Santorini where it got up to about 86 degrees Fahrenheit in patchy spots in an area about the size of one or two soccer fields. Water temperatures in the Aegean Sea near swimming beaches get down to about 16 degrees Celsius (about 60 degrees Fahrenheit) in the winter - wet suit temperatures but swimmable.

* This reflects the Mediterranean climate. Summers are desert dry and hot. Winters are cool (but without snow outside the mountains) and relatively very wet (like the rainiest months of spring) although total annual precipitation wasn't very high anywhere we went. Winters can also have fiercely windy storms.

* One consequence of this situation is that most kinds of traditional Greek salads have no leafy green vegetables (which are water hungry and susceptible to evaporation due to their large surface area) or use them only sparingly, more as a garnish.

* Another consequence of this is that none of the islands, even Crete in the capitol city of Heraklion, have drinkable tap water. It is sanitary, but is obtained in part by desalinization of sea water which is economically possible to lower the salt content enough to make drinkable. So, everyone, locals and tourists alike, at five star hotels and homeless camps drink bottled water. You have to pay to get water at a restaurant, although it isn't very expensive, 1.5-2 Euros for a one liter bottle with little markup, and 0.80 Euros to 1 Euro per liter for a six pack of liter bottles.

* Toilets generally have a small flush, big flush system to conserve water and many public facilities have unisex bathrooms with closable stalls and shared sinks.

* Public restrooms are free and nasty and often lack TP and soap, but there are a fare amount of them.

* Many Greek cookies and baked goods are dry like biscotti so they won't rot, or if they are moist are in air and water tight packages.

* Surprisingly, pita bread, while present, was rare relative to French or Italian style breads and no more common than other kinds of loaf leavened breads.

* Hummus and falafel were sold only at Middle Eastern restaurants, although fava, which is like hummus but made with split peas rather than chick peas and with less oil, was ubiquitous. 

* At restaurants no one will give you a check for your meal, or imply you should move along until you ask for a check. Some places (e.g. in hotels) don't accept tips, many don't accept tips by credit card by accept them in cash, and where tips are suggested on a credit card machine the percentages offered are typically 5%, 10% and 15% with 10% being normative.

* Lunch time is roughly 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. and dinner time is roughly 8:30 p.m. to 11:30 p.m. Work starts around 7:30 to 8:30 for manual work and 8:00 to 9:00 a.m. for office work. Many businesses that don't serve food or the retail tourists (and even some tourist oriented shops) close for an hour or two each afternoon for lunch. Manual laborers quit at lunch time which is 2:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. for them and don't return. Office workers return after lunch and work until about 6:00 p.m. Long slow meals are the norm although there are grab and eat places and delivery places.

* CBD products (i.e. marijuana products optimized for the medical cannabis component rather than the THC active ingredient that gets you high) are available at many convenience store counters and drink/snack/tobacco stands, most of which also sell wine and beer. There were a few stand alone CBD stores with a wider variety of options.

* There were very few police in public, other than people issuing parking tickets, outside the airports and sea ferry ports. Those that were around were mostly responding to traffic accidents or investigating what seemed to be theft crimes. I saw no paramilitary police (apart from two military policemen patrolling within the boundaries of an ordinarily military base away from the public). I don't think I saw a single traffic stop in progress (admittedly, we were mostly on small tourist islands and a crowded big central city (central Athens and a mostly toll road route to and from the airport), although Crete is pretty big and less totally tourist oriented and got us out of a big urban central city). We did see TV news reports of a major corruption/organized crime bust by police of a wealth kingpin of some sort that took place in Mykonos after we left, maybe a combination of smuggling and tax evasion and human trafficking, it was hard to discern the exact nature of the crime in the Greek language broadcast.

* Roads are extremely narrow, people drive very fast, cars are mostly small and narrow, and margins of safety between vehicles are tiny. It wasn't uncommon to see two trucks or buses facing each other fold back their respective side mirrors so that they could drive past each other. But, apart from one serious motorcycle accident, I saw very few accidents. Most two way roads outside of Crete (but including small streets in Athens) would have been limited to one way traffic in the U.S.

* The cars are mostly small and narrow, with the exception of tour buses and shuttle buses. There were a handful of pickup trucks, but all were being used to actually car construction or landscaping stuff around in. There were some SUVs and full sized cars, but they were fairy scarce. There were lots of Smart Cars. There were lots of French cars and some Skodas and lots of Toyotas and Nissans as well. Many of the models were unfamiliar. There were a few Fords but not many (and none of the pickup trucks or SUVs I saw were Fords). 

* City bus service was comparable to that of similar U.S. cities, which is far below par for Europe or Israel. Athens has a subway system, but we didn't have an occasion in our fairly short and structured stay there to use it.

* Greek islands all have one or more sea ports and one or more commercial airports, with the airports being surprising large. Crete has three airports with the largest serving commercial airliners at least as big as Boeing 757s.

* Ferries aren't particularly timely, but getting on and off them is organized chaos. A ramp lands on the dock and people are rushed in ten or twenty across with their luggage on foot, they load their own luggage onto the carts where they are stored on the trip, and then they have their tickets examined once the boat is underway, with no security checks or customs checks of any kind. Then the process is reversed on the way out with everyone told to go to the luggage/car hold while approaching the dock, lined up 100 meters long and fifteen meters across holding luggage and urged out the ramp as fast as possible on foot into disorganized crowds of people holding signs. Getting on and off involved really only nominal queuing. The process takes ten or fifteen minutes tops each way for many hundreds of passengers plus motorcycles and scooters that intermingle with people, and cars and trucks driven on and off. There are bus station like holding areas before you board that are ill organized chaos and confusion and bored waiting with no one sure when their boat will arrive or which boat has just come in. On board the ferry is slow but much more comfortable than an airplane with better quality food for sale including fresh squeezed orange juice and the prices are very reasonable.

* I saw exactly one electric car (parked in a store parking lot with a company livery and no charging station nearby) on the entire trip, although there were a handful of hybrid taxis in Crete. This is a shame because every single one of these islands is a perfect place for electric cars because almost all drivers almost always drive on short trips at fairly low speeds most of the time with lots of stop and go traffic. Regular unleaded gasoline costs about $8 per gallon in Greece and the Cycladic islands have only about one to five gas stations each, but every house and shop is wired for electricity and the standard voltage for household electrical outlets is higher in Europe than in the U.S.

* The Cyclades islands we saw had a single coal fired power plant each. This is a shame as these islands (and Crete and many places in mainland Greece) are perfect places to generate electricity from large modern wind turbines and photovoltaic systems on either a centralized or decentralized basis.

* Electricity is scarce. Two of the four five star hotels we stayed at, and one three star hotel, had a system where electricity can only be used in your room while you are in the room and your key is in a slot that opens up the electrical circuit to the room. Big flashy brightly lit signs Las Vegas style are absent.

* Greece has no nuclear power plants or utility scale solar power generation and wind power makes up about 0.1% of the total electrical power generation in Greece. Nationwide 20% of electricity is from natural gas, 12% is from large hydroelectric facilities, about 8% from burning renewable biomass, and about 60% from coal.

* Aside from defunct grain grinding windmills from the early modern period that look like stone silos and were used as landmarks or hotel rooms or studios or residences, and some late 19th century, early 20th century, still working primitive irrigation water pumping windmills on the Lasithi plateau we didn't see a single windmill. There were many solar water heating units, but there were only very few photovoltaic units (on a handful of houses and on some park benches in central Heraklion in Crete).

* All of Greece is littered with half finished abandoned buildings, mostly with cement frames but little else that lost construction loan funding during the sovereign debt crisis from 2009 that persisted in having big effects through about 2015. Some were going to be residences, some were going to be hotels, some are apartment buildings, some were doing to be office buildings or shops. Most were covered with graffiti. 

* In Athens, almost all of the graffiti consisted of left wing political messages. In Mykonos and Santorini, the graffiti was predominantly tagging similar in content (but with a less elaborate style) than U.S. graffiti. Crete had roughly an even mix of the two types.

* The construction projects that the loans had finances were reputed to have involved lot of featherbedding with employees paid far more than market rates for their services. As of the summer of 2019 things were just starting to return to a pre-crisis economic state of affairs.

* As one index of how bad the economic crisis was, prostitutes who would have charged 150 Euros before the crisis, were charging 3 Euros at the peak of the crisis with far more women on the streets who normally didn't do sex work, and those prices have reputedly returned to pre-crisis levels. Prostitution is legal in Greece although not everyone follows the laws related to it.

* Souvlaki (gyro pork) largely fills the place of fast food burgers in the U.S. (although burgers are available too).

* French fries and fish and chips are sold in many places, but nobody even knows what malt vinegar is, although they will happily provide you with balsamic vinegar upon request.

* The Greeks are still very aware of the Persian invasions of the 400s BCE and wary of Iranians because of them.

* The Marshall Plan filled Athens with huge numbers of "international style" "brutalist" architecture, including endless four to seven story apartment buildings where most people live, that while ugly are engineered to withstand the frequent earthquakes in the region. Heraklion in Crete was similar. But, the islands in the Cyclades were spared for whatever reason.

* There are numerous visible signs in the form of abandoned military installations or remains of destruction from World War II, especially due to Axis occupation of Greece. There is still some wariness towards Germans and Germans are quite scarce relative to the French and Italians and Chinese, although they were somewhat more common that Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders, South Koreans, Romanians, Spaniards, and people from Portugal. The number of Germans was roughly comparable to the number of people from Russia or Arab countries or India or Britain. I saw almost no one from Latin America or Ireland. Most people we saw who were black were from the United States or France. There were many more people from the United States than from Commonwealth countries.

* Santorini is wine country in addition to being a tourism mecca, and that requires immigrant labor for harvests. The main countries for immigrant farm labor were Albania and Bulgaria.

* The best Greek wines are dry whites and reds. Neither my wife nor I were impressed with the sweet wines. We had some from Santorini and Crete. They have a very "clean" taste. Not a strong mineral taste. Not oaky. Not excessively fruity, but definitely wine tasting. Very little of its gets exported to the U.S. which is a shame as these rival Italian and French and Spanish wines in quality. I presume that the problem is lack of supply rather than lack of demand. In Santorini, wine vines are grown in tubs on the ground rather than on elevated vines to prevent evaporation from fierce winds much of the year. The 2019 vintage is expected to be worse than the 2018 vintage was because it was an unusually wet winter last year.

* I believe that the drinking age is 16 for wine and beer and 17 for hard liquor in Greece. Wine is for sale at every corner kiosk and minimart and no one ever asked us for ID, nor did we see anyone else get carded. This caused no visible problems and reduced the need for criminal justice system interaction with young people.

* Millennials from Europe all over sport tattoos frequently and also, for men, short hair with a full but thin beard. Some man buns were in evidence. There were more dresses and skirts proportionately than at the same time in the U.S. (even more so among actual Greek people) but there was still the full range of clothing and footwear seen in the U.S. including jeans, shorts for men and women, athletic wear and sports bras, swim suits under see through coverups, etc. Muslims wore what Muslims in more liberal Muslim countries do for the most part. Chinese tourists cover up more and often use parasols. Footwear was similar to the U.S. or Europe but with more sandals and fewer boots at least in the summer.

* Tourism peaks in August when many countries have vacations and ends in late October or early November for the most part. After that, it is mostly Americans and people from China coming for destination weddings.

* In Crete, apparently, almost everybody harvests their own olives which together with tourism is the main economic driver of the economy for most people. The olive harvest is pretty much immediately following the tourism season. Maybe 90% of the vegetation on the island outside the Lasithi Plateau (where they get snow annually and have some mountains above the tree line) consists of olive trees. A young family of four needs about 50 olive trees to provide a personal supply of olives, about 500 kg, which is used to produce about 100 liters of olive oil, which is what a family of four consumes in a year. Many people harvest olives as a season, family wealth cash crop with families owning as many as 1000 olive trees.

* The Lasithi Plateau has fruit orchards, and garden/farmer's market scale fruit and vegetable and corn production, and appears to be food self-sufficient. It also has lots of ornamental flowers.

* Throughout Greece there are artificial beehives visible.

* Fishing is still economically viable and seafood options include sea bass, salmon, octopus, mussels, and other smaller sea water fish and invertebrates. In our experience, the Greek sushi was pretty awful and to be avoided (although we didn't get sick from eating food of any kind there ever).

* Crete is much less foreign tourism dominated than the Cyclades. There is plenty of tourism, but much more of it consists of Greek families on beach vacations or visiting family who are coming from the mainland. Greek speakers were a small minority on the ferry from Mykonos to Santorini and on the flight from Athens to Mykonos, but were predominant on the ferry from Santorini (and other places) to Crete and on the flight from Crete to Athens. The ratio of tourists to residents in Crete was also much lower than in the Cyclades.

* Crete is much more sexist than Athens or the Cyclades in the sense that if a man and a woman are present together all outsiders (e.g. waiters, hotel personnel, cab drivers, cashiers) communicate almost exclusively with the man and don't even consider that a woman could have anything to say. Greek women in public in Crete all over the island wore fairly "dressed up" makeup that few Americans would use except for interviews or business meetings or dates. Fashion expectations for women where much higher, more conservative, and more traditionally feminine and conservative in Crete than in the Cyclades or Athens.

* Women entering Greek Orthodox Churches are expected to wear a dress that extends below the knee, and ideally although not mandatorily, a dress that is black and a head scarf that covers her hair. Expectations for men and children are much lower with shorts and t-shirts being acceptable.

* Greek Orthodox clergy are all civil servants receiving government salaries. The official line is that 98% of Greeks identify as Greek Orthodox, although I expect that the percentage who are non-religious or atheist is greatly underreported in that figure. The World Almanac says 81%-90% Greek Orthodox, 4%-15% none, 2% Muslim. The balance is mostly split between Roman Catholics and Muslims. There was very little evidence of any other kind of religious organizations. I saw no one who was visibly an observant Orthodox Jew, although I saw many Hindu tourists. There were one or two Roman Catholic churches on each of the smaller islands, just a handful in Athens, and just one tucked away in an alley in Heraklion (the capital city of Crete which has the equivalent of U.S. state level autonomous government, while most other places in Greece had only municipal and national level government offices in evidence). The Roman Catholic Churches don't appear to get heavy traffic either. Crete has a higher percentage of non-Christians than most of the rest of Greece.

* There are countless Greek Orthodox churches, for example, Santorini, which has a permanent population of about 25,000 and a tourist season population of perhaps another 100,000 people the vast majority of whom are not Orthodox Christians, had a monastery with eight mostly elderly monks (dedicated to St. Elias and originally home to about 80 monks), perhaps twenty larger Greek Orthodox churches or Cathedrals at which regular weekly services would be held, and perhaps two or three hundred smaller churches about the size of a detached garage that are mostly (but not entirely) "private churches".

* Private Greek Orthodox churches are incredibly numerous and everywhere. They are typically built by and at the expense of an individual or family and are dedicated to a Saint, often a Saint to whom someone has appealed in prayer and had their prayer granted with one or more icons of the Saint and others, and a physical object representing literally what was prayed for (e.g. a partial statute of a woman's breast if someone prayers that breast cancer would go into remission to a saint and this was granted, or a statute of a child or young man if the person had prayed for their safe return after being missing or going to a war zone) used as a meditation or prayer space except on the Saint's day when a more elaborate service would be held. In some ways, it is helpful to think of these little churches as an "optional" part of the homestead of a middle class or more affluent family in much the same way that someone might have a home art gallery or pottery studio or yoga room or home theater or home office or wine cellar or granny flat. The small churches are typically locked most of the time but can be accessed with a key kept in the car of a nearby responsible person such as a homeowner, or in any urban area, a nearby cafe manger, and can be accessed by strangers for the purpose of praying in and venerating the icons in the small church. Lots of these small churches are new, a reflection of periods of post-WWII affluence. But, there was also considerable continuity from pagan Greece (up to around the end of the Roman period ca. 300 CE) to the Orthodox Christian era in terms of modes of prayer with veneration of icons of saints (often identifiable with a pagan analog in some way) replacing appeals at a pagan shrine to a major or minor pagan deity, with the older Orthodox churches often located at the sites of previous pagan shrines.

* There were lots of blond white people from Eastern Europe working in low level janitorial and other similar low status, low paying jobs.

* The predominant secondary language after Greek was English. Next most common were Mandarin Chinese signs. Then French. Other secondary language signs and writing (e.g. on menus) was very rare. American English is much more common among second language learners than British English. In part, this is because other Europeans often know English as a second language while Americans do not. 

* Music almost everywhere has lots of English language songs. There are Greek songs on the radio on some stations, but there are lots of English language songs on Greek broadcast radio stations even in Athens and Crete. There are a smattering of songs in other non-Greek languages (especially French and Spanish) but maybe 5%-10% of the English language content and rarely exclusive. I can't judge how much true native Greeks listen to English language songs however due to bias in what I was exposed to no doubt. The mix of English language songs ranged from week old pop to 1960s rock and bassa nova. EDM was particular popular everywhere including a little non-English EDM and Euro-rap.

* Overall, Greece shows signs of a weak government and weak systems in all endeavors despite individual people who are fairly competent. Where there are well organized disciplined systems they are often in precisely the areas where thinly regulated chaos works well (like getting people into cabs). Greeks are good at working out disputed with each other face to face, however, without official involvement and maintain well run private spaces. Public space, in general was fairly scarce, everything has been owned by someone for thousands of years.

* The population of Greece today (12 million) is about the same as it was in classical times (10-11 million) although it is now much more urban with 50% of the population in the three largest cities (Athens has 4 million), and most people of the 12% who live on Greek islands in urbanized areas of towns. There are plenty of rural areas even on the islands, but it is all fenced off and demarcated with stone walls that in some cases are many centuries old.

* Athens and a few other major cities have an industrial base and shipping industry, other places are more focused on primary agriculture, fishing and mining activities and our service industries.

* Urban planning wasn't much in evidence with crazy twisted roads and little separation of uses with one exception. Every single city we visited had a substantial pedestrians only outdoor district mostly for shopping and dining and tourist oriented businesses. In Athens and Heraklion these were a lot like the 16th Street mall in Denver, but without a free shuttle bus. Beach areas had beach fronts closed to vehicles. In Mykonos and Santorini, there were labyrinthine mazes of narrow pedestrian alleys designed that way in the Middle Ages in order to make it easier to confuse, isolate and narrow the ranks of invading pirates. Most of the park areas in Athens appear to have been dedicated by the Royal family or religious orders in the 19th century at a time when Greece was a Kingdom.

* Lime brand electric app shareable scooters were ominpresent, widely used and treated well by the users.

* Many vendors do not accept American Express in Greece (although some do).