AthensScapes: Psyrri

by Kathryn Koromilas

IT’S early afternoon in Psyrri. The streets are quietly enjoying a lazy siesta before a busy evening when hundreds of feet will traverse them in search of their evening entertainment in the numerous restaurants and bars that have emerged here in the last couple of years.

I’m sitting with a friend in an unassuming little place called Kafeneion I Revekka, a “mum’s kitchen”-type of place on the corner of Miaouli and Pallados streets. Vangelitsa casually strolls over to clear our table. She recognises us even though it’s only our second time here and greets me with “hello sweetie”.

We are hungry and so we cut to the chase, “What’s on the menu for today?” Vangelitsa pulls up a seat and drawls, “Hold on, what’s the hurry? We’ve got all the time in the world.” She sits with us and begins telling us of a colourful Saturday night we missed, when a couple of local boys propped themselves on the upper level of the cafe-restaurant and jammed through to the wee hours. Today, however, we are listening to Tsitsanis on her cassette player.

On Sunday, the barbecue was set up on the pavement just outside - as usual. She finally begins to reveal what’s ready to be served. Her mum is in the kitchen. I ask questions about the food and, unlike most waiters around town these days, she enjoys describing the traditional Greek dishes. She strolls back to the kitchen forgetting to bring us an ashtray. I get up and grab one. It’s just like being at home.

There are two sides to Psyrri: the inner-city area defined by the streets of Ermou, Athinas, Evripidou, Epikourou, Pireos and the archaeological area of Keramikos. Two stark images living side by side in bold contrast: old and new, traditional and contemporary, neglect and renovation, and the authentic and the fake.

The formal recognition of Psyrri in 1979 as part of the Historic Centre of Athens slowly began to see plans to preserve and restore materialise - more through private than public initiative and investment. It goes without saying that an area like Psyrri is a goldmine for developers and those after the tourist dollar. The people behind Psyrri’s online promotional guide state their aim “to promote the cultural, artistic and commercial value of an area which is rapidly being transformed into one of the most attractive locations of the Greek capital”. In fact, the last two years have seen a good hundred places of entertainment sprout from the decaying area.

If you look carefully amongst the glam restaurants and bars, the ghosts are on walkabout. Psyrri was a place of heroes, of the dispossessed, of workers and craftsmen, of manges and the mood captured by the rembetika (the music that originated in the hashish dens of Piraeus by the displaced peoples of Asia Minor). Start with Plateia Iroon or Heroes Square, a place where fighters of the Greek Revolution during the Turkish occupation would meet to chat and work out their strategy. Over the years, Psyrri developed an underground and marginal appeal, a result of that stroke of luck that had the Royal Palace built at Syntagma Square and not Koumoundourou Square, where it had originally been planned. This attracted the well to do away from the area and the working and marginal classes to the area - lending a helping hand to creating what is now dubbed “the Soho of Athens”.

The streets of Psyrri soon became ripe with a volatile vibrancy what with a Mafia-style of street war between the “gangs” of the Trambouki and Koutsavakides. Known for their unkempt looks, the Koutsavakides walked with a characteristic limp and wore black jackets hanging off one shoulder - my grandmother recalls how the police would cut off the sleeves in an attempt to impose civil order. The strict code of honour that developed in areas like Psyrri made a murder over the request for a song in a tavern quite possible.

The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw the construction of factories in the neighbouring areas of Metaxourgeio and Gazi that meant the infiltration of trade and light manufacturing in the region.

As we walk out of Kafeneion I Revekka and into the grey winter afternoon we are humming Tsitsanis’ “Synefiasmeni Kyriaki” (Cloudy Sunday) and get instantly nostalgic. We peer through windows covered in traditional white embroidered fabrics not unlike my grandmother’s. Inside one place a crowd is dancing to Epirot music - that proud and stoic sound of my mother’s mountainous terrain. It seems somewhat out of place. We pass another tavern and a young long-haired singer interprets a Pyx Lax song - moody Greek rock. From the next a bouzouki is playing. And then there’s just restaurant after restaurant of the same kaleidoscope of music.

A group of Gypsies sit on the pavement outside an old Byzantine church with cardboard boxes full of red roses. They are laughing. I am reminded of that young Gypsy girl I met the other night who entered Bee - a bar-restaurant of retro appeal - to sit at our table and flirt with the boys just like a Lolita. A laughing young boy is selling helium balloons in the shapes of all my favourite cartoon characters. Teenagers group together on top of a car bonnet. An elderly couple hold hands as they stroll languidly through the streets. Classic suits mingle with the latest alternative street gear. Crisp bars blaring out the latest dance music huddle near traditional Greek restaurants, offering light mezedes and rembetika - if you are lucky you’ll hear Tsitsanis’ melancholic songs of love, Markos Vamvakaris’ bold lyrics often referring to hash smoking or streetwalkers or the moody voice of Marika Ninou.

Buildings that have fallen to disrepair stand humbly next to those that have been remembered and renovated. Piles of garbage line streets. Antique stores hide in corners. A girl with braided hair is lost in an animated chat. I buy a packet of cigarettes at the local periptero and the elderly lady “trapped” in that claustrophobic space exclaims “geia sou koukla” and wishes me a great day.

In one of the tiny streets of the Psyrri labyrinth we chat with a lady who reminds me of Kazantzakis’ Madame Hortense. She’s sitting on a chair on the pavement outside her home with hair wrapped in a flowered scarf, bright red lipstick adorns her face and she is painting her nails. Don’t ask her for a photo because she’ll reply with a neurotic fear of the technology, “and how do I know that you won’t put my face with a naked body and publish it on the Internet?” Indeed, how would she know? The confusing beauty of Psyrri is precisely this quiet presence of the old world in the forefront of the encroaching new world that has arrived, giving the rundown neighbourhood that artists and musicians have recently made their home a flashy and glossy makeover that has attracted the stylish youth in search of superficial entertainment in the guise of something authentic: those that Greeks call “dithen”, literally “the so-called”. They come to embrace the rembetika (some say the word comes from the Turkish rembet meaning “from the gutter”) but most of what is on offer is a watered-down version, and I wonder whether Psyrri will turn into that superficial and commercial Greece offered to tourists in Plaka. Ask an orchestra in one of Plaka’s popular taverns to play something heavier and more authentic and they’ll reply, “We can’t, the xeni (or foreigners) don’t enjoy it.”

For now, the genuine Psyrri is still present, especially via the trades that developed last century - trades like leather making, shoe manufacturing, gramophone repairing, picture-frame making and even carriage making are still kept on by skilled tradespeople. You’ll find everything here from bronze workshops and furniture restoration to Viennese handmade weaving and collectibles to books and comics and even religious paintings and icons. Let’s hope we don’t see the postcards and kitsch paraphernalia that have plagued Plaka. And let’s hope the lady at the periptero continues to smile and call us “koukles” and “leventes” and that Vangelitsa continues to forget the ashtray because she’s too busy telling stories.

[Published in the Athens News, 2000, as part of my “AthensScapes” series] [View it here]