A Dog in Drapetsona

 

A dog was barking in Drapetsona. It had been barking for a few hours. It was evening, and I could also hear the neighbours’ television through the walls, and the engines and announcements of the ferries.

I’d searched on Airbnb for a place to stay overnight in Piraeus before taking the ferry home to Tilos. I was delighted to find a dog-friendly house within walking distance of gate E1, the dock for Blue Star ferries to the Dodecanese. And it was on St Fanourios Street: my favourite saint, the finder of lost things. I booked it, and Savvas arranged a transfer from the airport with Mr George.

The plane had been delayed a little, and on arrival in Athens there was a vast queue for non-EU passport holders. I felt anxious thinking of Lisa waiting in her crate. I eventually made it through, released Lisa and dragged all our things outside. My backpack was heavy with the winter clothes I’d taken to Romania. Now it was Easter.

Mr George had been circling the pickup area for a while. He turned out to be driving a very small car, and with an attendant trying to move us on, I didn’t have time to dismantle the crate. We somehow squeezed everything in, then Lisa sat happily at my feet with her nose out of the window, and an hour later I was thrilled to see blue sea. Finally, we arrived at a terraced house in Drapetsona, on a small hill above the port.  

Savvas welcomed me and showed me around the house which he’d described as ‘old-style’ and ‘homely’; it had been his grandparents’ house and was now his. Like all the houses on the street, it was a two-up-two-down terrace with a little garden in the front and the back. Savvas said there were lots of cats. It smelled a bit smoky but I knew I was back in Greece when I found in the kitchen cupboard a small water bottled filled with aromatic olive oil.

I was excited to spend the afternoon exploring Piraeus. Drapetsona didn’t seem the easiest neighbourhood to navigate, though, at least with a dog. The pavements were a bit smelly and broken, and I was abruptly reminded that in Greece pedestrian crossings are meaningless, seen by some drivers as a challenge to speed up and mow you down. I was tired from a few days of travelling and I needed to adjust to the city after six weeks away in a rural, mountainous area of Transylvania.

 

There, we’d been staying in a wooden cabin at the end of a steep-sided, forested valley with a monastery above and a river below that gushed out of a cave. Any livestock in the area were kept behind fences or protected by shepherds because of the threat of wolves. With no roaming goats or sheep, Lisa could be off the lead all the time. Seeing her racing around the hills was a joy for me as much as for her.

Someone told us that in Romania, ‘a village isn’t a village without dogs’. In our area, some had owners and some were strays, but they all wandered freely and had tight little communities which they organised along their own lines. We’d often be joined on walks by the two strays we fed, but just as often by dogs with owners that just fancied a walk with company. Lisa thrived on it. People seemed to love animals and the few cars around slowed down when the drivers saw dogs on the road.

Ian had discovered the place as a new refuge for his extra-Schengen adventures. For his first month there, the water in the pipes was frozen and had to be brought from the spring or the river. Lisa had loved the deep snow when we got there in March. By mid-April, the days were warm enough that I took a very fast dip in the cold river, I’d started learning a bit of Romanian and those empty hills and rural places were beginning to feel like another home. But it was time to leave Romania for now – Lisa and I to Greece, Ian for now to Bulgaria.

Dogs are welcome to travel on trains in Romania for a half-price ticket, which costs barely anything. It was around two hours to lovely Sighisoara, where we stayed in a historic building on the edge of the citadel and I found a ‘cabinet veterinar’ where a very gentle vet stamped Lisa’s passport saying she was fit to travel.

We continued for a long six hours by train to Bucharest, yet in comfort and with views of lovely farmland and snowy mountains. Back in March we’d stayed at Old City NF Palace in a vast room with a chandelier. The exceptional young staff had organised to keep Lisa’s airline crate in the left luggage of the hotel until the next month, which meant we could travel across the country unencumbered. Now we were reunited with it and had one last night there. I almost wished we could stay longer but was excited to get home.

Because it's not so easy or pleasant to travel by train with a dog in Greece, we were flying. Checking in for the flight to Athens, I met a Romanian woman who was travelling with her dog back to Greece where she lived – and speaking to her dog in Greek as he was from there, like Lisa. They met with much tail-wagging, and hopped in their airline crates together. I remember how much trouble Lisa used to give me getting in there. Now she knows it’s OK, and although I still worry for her, I know she’ll be OK too.

On the short flight, in Aegean’s in-flight magazine Blue I was pleased to find a feature on Piraeus. I jotted down the addresses of interesting-sounding shops and eateries. There was an ‘art hub’, someone making furniture from reclaimed marble, someone making furniture out of recycling plastic nets and other plastic waste from the sea. When I got online again and looked up BlueCycle, alas, I was sad to see a coffee table cost 650 euros.

Nice idea, but unlikely to have a big impact.

 

So, by the afternoon, I was in Piraeus.

There was something in the name of the district, Drapetsona, that sounded like something else and made me wonder about its history. I looked it up and found what might be a link to Trebizond, now Trabzon, in north-eastern Turkey on the Black Sea. Founded by the Greeks in the eighth century BC as Trapezunda.

I tried figuring out the best route to take to the ferry the next day. One way the pavements were narrow and the roads busy, which would make it impossible to trundle a huge crate and hold a dog safely on a lead. The other way went past an archaeological site and an abandoned building along a road so quiet that it seemed to be used exclusively by driving schools, but at the end was a system of roundabouts where even the drivers seem unsure which way to go, and when I attempted a trial run with Lisa, aggressive stray dogs dashed in front of juggernauts to snap at our heels.

It was a bit intense. Being tired wasn’t helping. Deciding to leave the discovery of the interesting shops and art hubs and eateries for now, I did some shopping at the supermarket around the corner.

I tried taking Lisa for another walk later but she got spooked by some almighty bang that sounded like a very loud gun. It was already Easter week, and everything from firecrackers to dynamite is deployed in the Greek celebrations, making it a time of misery for many dogs and their owners. I left her in the house to snooze, and went for a wander down side streets for half an hour until I reached, amidst some abandoned industrial buildings, a park that ran down to the sea. It would be a perfect place to take Lisa tomorrow. I returned feeling curious about the area again, opened a bottle of wine and studied the map.

It was a little later when a message came through from Savva, my host, telling me that the neighbourhood was one of the poor neighbourhoods of Piraeus, ‘where our grandparents came from Turkey from where they were kicked off in 1922’. Of course – these were some of the prosfygika, houses built for Greeks from Asia Minor who came here as refugees.

It was a hundred years ago that the complex and terrible events of war between Turkey and Greece led to what is known as the Asia Minor Catastrophe, when many lost their lives in Smyrna and other cities with Greek populations. This was followed by the population exchanges along religious lines, ending thousands of years of Greek Orthodox presence in Asia Minor, as well as Muslim presence in Greece. It made refugees of many thousands of people, who had to leave behind all they had, as so many Ukrainians are doing today.

The people who came from Asia Minor a hundred years ago doubled the populations of Athens and Thessaloniki. As Auguste Corteau wrote in The Book of Katerina:

‘… in Samsun, Turkey … at the beginning of the 1920s the Konstantinidis pack is practically well-off: the girls at a good school with piano lessons and foreign languages, meat on the table every day, and thanks be to God. And then the Asia Minor Catastrophe happens and they suddenly find themselves in Upper Town, Thessaloniki, without two pennies to rub together. Gentleman and businessman Dimitrós is overnight a spawn of the Turk, and young Irini, who used to be at the top of her class, is suddenly cast amongst smart Greek girls who look down on her and whisper behind her back: “Her family lives in a shack. Can you imagine?”’

Savvas sent me another message.

‘Nowadays the area is still poor but authentic persons are living there.’ He said the people who came from Turkey were given small temporary houses and in 1974 the state gave them the opportunity to live in these houses – I guessed he meant to keep them.

‘In this neighbourhood is born the rebetiko,’ he said, referring to the underground blues-type tradition of music. And the film that made Melina Mercouri a star, Never on Sunday, in which she plays a happy, romantic prostitute, was set here. The song in which she sings of the magic of her favourite port was ‘Ta Pedia tou Pirea’, the Children of Piraeus.

 

Next morning in the sunshine, workmen were painting next door and neighbours passing one another calling Easter greetings, ‘Kali anastasi na echoume!’

Feeling happy to have learned a little more about the history of the area, I walked Lisa all the way along Ethnikis Antistaseos (‘National Resistance’) Street, past nice neighbourhood shops selling bougatsa or wine from barrels, to the park covered in wildflowers that led down to the open sea. There were rusty ships in a harbour, and an abandoned factory. I’d noticed the name of the area was Lipasmata – ‘Fertilizers’. It was the site of a fertilizer factory, part of Piraeus’ industrial past, and in recent years the land has been allowed to re-wild and turned into a park with a couple of cafes looking out to the big blue and the islands.

Lisa was desperate to find a way into the water – and she did. An attendant said, ‘All the animals do the same!’ People of all ages were strolling and enjoying the sun and sea breeze. Dogs had to be on leads, another attendant told me later, but you can't have everything. By then at least she'd had a run around. She'd be more relaxed for our onward journey to our island home. What a wonderful adventure we'd both had.