Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project (52 page)

What is fascinating, as we ride so effortlessly through the underworld towards Maroussi and the Olympic Park, is a passage in the Penguin Miller, with its red-and-white cover, in which Katsimbalis indulges, through absurdist flights of fancy, the madness of a grand-project promoter. Miller recognizes that his friend is succumbing to a peculiarly Greek condition, the striving after ancient glory in a time of war: temples in place of bunkers. Olives shrivelled on the tree. Dust on the plate. Slaves quarrying marble for the latest folly.

‘He had gotten a mania for Haussmannising the big cities of the world. He would take the map of London, say, or Constantinople, and after the most painstaking study would draw up a new plan of the city, to suit himself … Naturally a great many monuments had to be torn down and new statues, by unheard-of men, erected in their place. While working on Constantinople, for example, he would be seized by a desire to alter Shanghai … It was confusing, to say the least. Having reconstructed one city he would go on to another and then another. There was no let up to it. The walls were papered with the plans for new cities … It was a kind of megalomania, he thought, a sort of glorified constructivism which was a pathologic hangover from his Peloponnesian heritage.’ It’s a pity that nobody reads Miller, because it’s all there: the damaged, wine-fired poet playing with utopian blueprints, constructing fabulous cities on scribbled sheets of paper. De Quincey nightmares that fade in the cold Athenian dawn. Dreams that know they are dreams. All too soon the German tanks would arrive and the craziest (and most frustrated) architect of them all, Adolf Hitler, would salute the proud ruins, the inspiration for his visions of apocalypse.

Changing trains at Attiki, the mad thesis is confirmed, there is only one city and it doesn’t work: blue-and-white ribbons block the stairs. Disgruntled travellers. Tunnels. Expulsion into the street. Students handing out leaflets urging immediate strike action. A bendy bus. Standing-room only. Sunday pilgrims heading out to the suburbs, to the green oasis of Kifissia, are pressed like grapes, breathless, for a lurching, swaying ride, uphill, past a seemingly endless accumulation of small grocers, hawkers of hubcaps, warehouse sex clubs, graffiti. And a billboard with a monster, finger-jabbing Quentin Tarantino pimping whisky: I WRITE MY OWN SCRIPT.

After the cemeteries, the allotments, the euro-funded superhighway, we have that familiar sense of being out on the edge of things, confronted by overloud architecture. It’s Irini and the Olympic Sports Complex: difficult to reach, half-forgotten, but serviced by handsome, flower-bedecked stations. The site looks like a brave attempt to comply with some CGI prophecy conjured up in Hong Kong. The parkland clients, such as they are, come from another story: suitcase survivalists offering tin trains to bored commuters. A wilderness dressed with elaborate and ruinously expensive structures for which nobody has any use. A buffer of generic flats assembled as an athletes’ village, a future development, then left to rot, along with random kiosks, garages, slogan-sprayed toilet blocks. An English architect with a Greek wife, who had been visiting Athens at regular intervals for twenty-five years, told me that the official total of thirteen deaths for construction workers on the Olympic project was a tactful underestimate. It was closer to seventy. The pressure to deliver the scheme on time led to a nexus of subcontracting, the employment of cheap and unskilled Balkan labour. And a plethora of brown envelopes. ‘They call it “coffee” money,’ he said. ‘Ten grand to smooth a path to the right officials.’

It is eloquent: the setting, the backdrop. Curved steel ribcages. Grandiose water features. Puffy clouds over mountains scarred with a sort of reverse glaciation: white tongues of speculative housing pushing heroically against the gradient. Sad trees withering in concrete tubs. A security person waves us through: this is a novel experience, to be granted access to a posthumous project, the symbol of a nation’s bankruptcy.
OPEN STADIUMS. PLACES OF CELEBRATION. A WAY OF LIFE
.

We are free to wander, to burn up film on the surreal conjunctions of this mesmerizing set. Patterns of herringbone traceries, wet shadows. Girdered tunnels mimicking cypress avenues leading nowhere. The structures in the park are monumental but anorexic: a futurist city that was never completed, Kensington’s Natural History Museum taken over by Disney. A museum without walls on a bulldozed meadow of mud. An island, between motorway and railway, surrounded by glass boxes, failed corporate entities, unpopular estates, scrap-metal dumps, breakers’ yards, mosaic walls with laurel-wreath symbols. The death of the grand project is the history painting of our time: W. P. Frith’s
Derby Day
, without the people, the excursionists, gypsies, toffs, gulled punters. All that human noise is missing, only the set itself is worthy of commemoration. Great fireworks, great razzmatazz. And then? Crippling debts. White-elephant stadiums that cost a fortune to keep empty. New roads choked with tractor protests. Airport closed. Angry, stone-throwing mobs demonstrating the consequences of fiscal mismanagement, chicanery by international bankers, a culture of tax avoidance and brown bagism. National pride suborned by a word the Greeks patented: hubris.

The site has its own microclimate: melancholy. Unnatured winds gusting around the struts and piers, the slippery walkways and mounds of unused chairs and broken barriers. Two or three swimmers completed lethargic lengths under the instruction of dark figures with hands in their tracksuit pockets. Other pools, a vast gymnasium, an indoor tennis centre, a steepling stadium overlooking a puddled garden with limp palm trees, were all deserted. The highlight of our dazed perambulation was an encounter with a small troop of men with bulging rucksacks, who emerged like phantoms out of the desert, and vanished again behind an improvised fence of corrugated iron. There was no obtrusive CCTV monitoring and no visible security presence. This was a dreamscape out of Giorgio de Chirico, who lived in Athens as a young man, attending the polytechnic, and who understood all too well that great cities achieve their essence as ruins. The Agora, Acropolis, Temple of Zeus, and all the Olympic parks and fields have museum ambitions; to be spectres of themselves in perpetuity. Labyrinths of memory made from broken columns. De Chirico was present during the first Olympic Games of the modern era. He witnessed the arrival of Louis, the Greek man who won the marathon. The crown prince embraced his champion. ‘The public was delirious.’ But the attempt to invoke the ancient tradition of a parallel cultural Olympiad was a fiasco. ‘Dreary, tedious and above all artificial,’ De Chirico wrote in his
Memoirs
. ‘A destructive atmosphere of intellectualism lay over the public and the actors. It looked as though everyone was stifling huge yawns … But the organisers of open-air spectacles do not want to understand and continue, more through stupidity than through obstinacy or conviction, to give these clumsy performances in all countries.’

The security man in the office of the main stadium, now taken over, despite the running track, by the football team AEK Athens, gave us permission to inspect the empty, rain-slicked bowl. The recycling appeared to be successful, another example of a commercial enterprise surfing public funds. The Markopoulo Equestrian Centre, I was pleased to discover, had also found a use: corporate Australians staged inter-firm cricket matches there.

Our arrest came at the site of the former Athens airport, on the coast, near Faliro Bay. The whole curve of shoreline, despoiled by the perverse aesthetics of grand-project architecture, was a natural wonder. The new tramline dropped weekenders at their pine-sheltered seaside clubs. Nobody cycled or jogged on the official city-centre paths, they were out here: slow men playing football in a communal dance. A shuffle, a feint, a cigarette, and a long rest in the shade. There were hardy swimmers in the clear water. Men with comfortable bellies in tight polo shirts paddled balls with considerable force, but no venom, across high nets. Gentle exercise was a privilege, enjoyed without nannying endorsement and vainglorious expenditure.

It was suicidal to cross the road between coastal strip and airport. A bridge led directly from the abandoned zone to the runways with their grey-blue blocks given over to obscure trade fairs and expositions. The bridge was padlocked. Walls and concrete ramps were dense with graffiti: HEZBOLLAH GAME THE FUTUER. FUCK YOU HERE. MY LIFIE.

Reaching the far side, I discovered that the airfield was open to inquisitive walkers, the fence was down and there were no obvious prohibitions. Following traces of runways where we once landed, en route to the islands, I snapped tyre marks, avenues of light poles and shelters made for the 2004 Olympics. The derelict airfield was a retail park waiting for finance. I was lining up a shot of a grid of cracked tiles, in front of some glorified container sheds, when the car screeched up. The driver didn’t speak much English, just two words: ‘Get in.’ As we bounced across the field, I remembered the fate of the twelve British plane-spotters arrested on spy charges for taking photographs at an air show on a military base near Kalamata in southern Greece; perhaps it had not been such a great idea to make a survey of this public wilderness. Anna, I thought, was looking rather tight-lipped. Images are always contentious. The idea of a lengthy interrogation, and whatever followed, was not appealing. In the Lower Lea Valley, as I heard from so many locals, film was seized and digital captures deleted: not here, photography was not the issue. The driver had no idea what we were after, unlanguaged aliens doing crazy stuff in the middle of nowhere. He dumped us back on the main road.

Out towards Piraeus, near the Karaiskaki Stadium of the Olympiakos Football Club, the derangement is absolute. The argument between vanity architecture and post-architectural infill, self-designed termite colonies wedged into every nook and cranny, is presented in all its naked absurdity. The great white monsters, with their choked plants withering in stone beds, are a beached fleet. The Peace and Friendship Stadium (which hosted the volleyball in 2004) has docked from some totalitarian regime that got lucky with oil and gas. Peering inside its cavernous depths, the acres of waxed board, I find a solitary depressive shooting hoops like a Category C prisoner enduring his hour of sanctioned exercise. Families, enjoying their Sunday at the seaside, manoeuvre around these useless mastodons, to cluster in a beachfront bar with a panoramic window on the yachts of the oligarchs, the marine-insurance brokers.

What is beautiful, in this urban steppe, is the way the official narrative is subverted. The overpasses and underpasses, the stilted highways and giant hoardings, the irrigation ditches and empty canals, the mesh fences and graffiti-splashed junction boxes, form an edgy parkland where anything could happen. Permitted paths vanish into dunes of landfill, into neurotic traffic, into functioning rail tracks and tramways. But the old road, the ghost road, the one that was here before all this madness, has become a favoured route for joggers and cyclists. The Olympic Park, that corrupted legacy, is like mid-period Fellini: kite flyers, moody urbanists in long coats, white cars parked in unlikely places, a glitter of sea you can never quite reach.

Across the coastal highway, over the tracks, is an area of balconied flats, steel-blue offices and sex clubs with screaming scarlet promises:
STRIP SHOW LIVE
. Multiples of Tarantino with his bottle of booze and his accusing finger. The final doodle on a white board marking the end of the Olympic zone confirms Neo Faliro as a theme park without content:
THAT HEAVEN WOULD WANT SPECTATORS
. A film-maker called Aristotelis, a former student of architecture, explained it to me. ‘The Games are just empty buildings, we have no use for them. But they have become monuments, so we can handle them and live with them. We are used to living among ruins. They are just ruins, they were never anything else.’

We learnt to time our breakfast raids between coaches. It was the last morning and I wanted to go to the Museum of Cycladic Art. I was intrigued to see a businessman in an ostentatiously well-cut pinstripe suit lurking in the doorway of our fast-food bunker. The clientele were otherwise slogan-T-shirt Americans or crinklies like ourselves, dressed down for the culture tramp and wearing trainers. Was this an economic indicator? Were there still deals to be done, power breakfasts to be made, even in such a do-it-yourself cafeteria? The man, tanned, trim of hair, swept impatiently through the tables, giving off an aura of barely controlled annoyance, that his contact had failed to arrive on time. Turning from the coffee dispenser, on the far side of the room, I was surprised to see Mr Pinstripe choosing to sit back to back with my wife in an otherwise quiet corner of the restaurant. I saw him dip under the table, get up and move rapidly away. ‘Did you have something on the floor?’

And of course Anna did: her new bag. Credit cards, euros, spectacles. I had witnessed the whole slick operation and failed to put it together in time to prevent the theft.

The man on the desk didn’t want to know. ‘Such things do not happen here. Evidently, the bag remains in your room.’ They had a CCTV camera, he admitted, but such people are clever, the critical moment would be masked by the sweep of his jacket.

‘I saw it all, I could recognize him again,’ I said.

‘You want to become involved in a court case?’

We were permitted to use the hotel phone to cancel the credit cards, but we must pay for the calls. The manager couldn’t be sure where the nearest police station was to be found and he wouldn’t recommend making a report: the time, the formalities.

‘Insurance,’ I said. ‘We have to do it.’

‘Greek people do not have insurance.’

On the streets the mood was threatening. The National Gardens were closed, the entrances guarded by black-beret soldiers with Plexiglas shields. Union protestors, with placards, were gathering on the other side of the road. But there was no difficulty about wandering through the opposing lines, we were unchallenged. Because the park through which we wanted to walk was secured against intrusion by those whose jobs were threatened, we found ourselves opposite the presidential palace on Irodou Attikou as the prime minister’s gleaming limo swept in. For another crisis meeting. The Museum of Cycladic Art was selling itself on an exhibition of erotic sculptures and images. There were posters for the new show in town: Gilbert and George. Pride of Spitalfields.