Unpeeling the Bitter Heart of Athens
Athens' restless streets groan with oranges. These vibrant, natural outcrops are unexpected in this cacophonous, car-dominated metropolis, a city where genuine green spaces are thin on the ground. Beyond the occasional tiny, fragmentary 'pocket parks'[1], this ubiquitous urban fruit provides the only regular splash of nature.
As summer temperatures climb into the late 30°C and beyond, visitors might be tempted to pluck one of these enticingly bright fruits for refreshment. That was certainly my first instinct when I first saw them. I was brought up seeking out ‘food for free’, family brambling excursions were a regular autumn activity. In recent years, I’ve filled large glass jars with delicious pesto made using wild garlic found in abundance on the shaded banks of the Water of Leith. My foraging habits, picked up in ‘the Athens of the North,’ couldn’t be relocated, though, here in the original place. And why not?
The fruits on these trees are nerántzi (νεράτζι), or citrus aurantium, which are too bitter to eat raw. Nerántzi make an acceptable basis for a marmalade or Greek ‘spoon sweets’, but the abundance of noxious car fumes renders those in the city deeply unappetising. Instead, they are left to ripen (a cycle that repeats twice yearly) and then fall onto the pavement, where they are kicked and squished by pedestrians, and utterly flattened by the wheels of the vehicles that flood virtually every corner of the city including, in my experience, nominally pedestrianised streets. But, as with so much in this multifaceted place, not all is as it seems. The bitter oranges are, in fact, emblematic of a city where things should never be taken at face value.
The journey from the airport, passing through classic olive groves and vines, immediately fulfils prior expectations of Greece. Soon, however, the scenery shifts, revealing the vast commercial centre that is modern Athens. Factories and commercial buildings now abut the highway. The character of the road—even the term ‘highway’ feels distinctly American—along with the immense advertising hoardings, lend a strong American flavour to the vista. In part, this is a legacy of Greece’s position on the frontline of the Cold War, which drew towards it large sums of Marshall Aid, especially from 1948-52, from the USA. As is common there, the car dominates the landscape. In my four visits to Athens, I’ve seen fewer than half a dozen cyclists on the roads, the city’s ‘sleek dark octopuses’[2]. I wonder if many attempting to cycle here might suffer the fate of the bitter oranges
The National Highway was partially built directly over the Kifissos River, one of Athens' great lost waterways. The composer Mikis Theodorakis captured this essence in Sun and Time, wherein he characterized it as one of the ‘celestial rivers, underground torrents flow down rippling streets of dreams’.[3] Its disappearance beneath a concrete sarcophagus speaks volumes about the obliteration of nature in this modern city. Old, sepia-tinged photographs of the buried river show bucolic scenes; today, the highway funnels traffic directly above that entombed stretch.
Similarly, a busy three-lane avenue now cleaves the Greek Parliament building from Syntagma Square (Constitution Square), the historical stage for countless political protests. On most days, only traffic breaches the peace here, though the low rumble of political dissatisfaction persists in this very birthplace of democracy.
Athens is a city of vast, often perplexing, contrasts. The pedestrianised ancient zone around the Acropolis is magical, steeped in myth but isn’t reflective at all of the wider city, most of which is the product of a population explosion during the 1950s and 1960s. Contemporary Athens is dominated by rather brutal squat concrete ‘polykatoikia’ (Πολυκατοικία), multi-housing apartment blocks, crammed in at high density. Athens' aesthetic is often harsh, exemplified by the ‘Urbanist’ YouTube series, which recently posed whether it is 'The ugliest city in Europe'. Buildings from earlier eras do still persist, but are increasingly threatened. In all, 80% of 19th and early 20th-century buildings in the Greek capital have already been destroyed, and time is running out for what's left.
This loss is captured in the elegiac essays by the writer and flâneur Nikos Vatopoulos, collected in Walking In Athens (my copy is bookmarked with dried nerántzi leaves, collected on my strolls). In it, Vatopoulos lingers in the back streets and ‘forgotten shadowy cul-de-sacs’[4] of central Athens, contemplating the lives lived by those who spent their days in these deeply elegant buildings, capturing, in poetic words and photos, the gradual extinction of an entire era of urban history. There is a growing ‘silent list’ of ‘sad houses’ in the city, ‘double locked and ruined, like forgotten and unwanted geriatrics’.[5] As with the tempting oranges, things are not what they first appear. Behind many charming facades, there seems little to be salvaged. Gaps and holes and space appear everywhere when I try to seek out that slice of Athens’ past.
Near the city centre, Victoria is home to the magnificent National Archaeological Museum, the superb Pedion tou Areos (Πεδίον του Άρεως) park, and a vintage Metro station. These days, Victoria has a mixed reputation. Once a highly desirable neighbourhood, a number of its elegant blocks (including that containing Maria Callas’ childhood home) are now mothballed or semi-abandoned. Again, there is a sense of a loss of control, of decisions affecting Athens and its people being made elsewhere. A severe lack of democratic accountability in the birthplace of democracy.
Remnants of Plato’s Academy
I register loss, unease, of history being disposed of in a place where the past is so rich and deep. Athens is a city where archaeological remains of great significance are more numerous than the authorities can cope with. For instance, the remnants of Plato’s Academy, a place of world significance, lie in the undergrowth of a scruffy public park, dominated by stray cats. The ancient site of Eleusis (in West Attica, part of Greater Athens) is a key historical location, once regarded as equally important as the Acropolis and a powerful link to the spiritual heart of the classical world. Yet, its location in a major modern industrial centre means that its remains are often sadly overlooked by travellers. Therefore, perhaps it's no surprise that Athens’ early 20th century architecture is overlooked and uncared for. The sense of neglect and dismay is hard to shift, including in the heart of the city.
One of Athens' most glorious segments is the trilogy of neo-classical buildings at Panepistimiou (Οδός Πανεπιστημίου) Street. Flanked by soaring columns and capped with pediments echoing Classical antiquity, they form a marble trinity dedicated to Enlightenment ideals, scholarly counterpoint to the chaos of the modern city unfolding just beyond their steps. The trilogy includes the Academy of Athens and the original building of Athens University. The third is the Vallianeion Megaron (Βαλλιάνειο Μέγαρο) which housed the National Library until 2018.
Yet the bulk of the collection has since been moved to the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Centre (SNFCC) on the Phaleron Bay "Delta"—yet another face of the modern city, another segment of the orange. In stark contrast to its neoclassical predecessor, the new library is a light-filled, modern space scattered with colourful and movable furniture. Built on an old race course, the SNFCC is a vast urban complex featuring a series of sleek, sustainable buildings, a landscaped park, and a central plaza built around a 30-meter-wide seawater channel. Located about five miles south of the city centre, this calm, 170,000-square-meter oasis provides a stark contrast to much of Athens. The park also houses the National Opera and hosts innumerable events, including large music festivals like ‘ease Athens Festival’ in July 2024, where crowds swayed rhythmically in the balmy evening air, with little sense of the disquiet that lies beneath the surface.
The relocation of the National Library was not a state-led decision but the whim of a plutocrat, exposing a feeble public domain supervised by an impoverished Greek state. The largely empty shell of the library’s original building now stands as a physical manifestation of this civic hollowing out. This clear sense of control wielded by seemingly unaccountable elites is a deep source of public bitterness.
The desire to pick up one of the bitter oranges and hurl it simmers not far below the surface. Nerántzi oranges have a long history of being used as projectiles by demonstrators—against occupying German soldiers, junta policemen, or contemporary riot police. As the economic crisis in Greece deepened, many trees in Athens’ city centre were divested of their fruit in an attempt to deprive protestors of ready ammunition. An art project, Bitter Orange Sweet (Γλυκό Νερανρζάκι), by Ino Varvariti and Persefoni Myrtsou in 2013, involved harvesting nerántzi from the trees that line the roads of Athens and Thessaloniki. The aim was to identify ‘the taste of the economic crisis’. This bitter taste lingers still.
Yet it is true that most visits to a place barely scratch the surface. And viewing the bitter oranges as I did, as an emblem of waste, is simplistic. Neratzia are planted because their crown remains dark green throughout the year, and they have sweet-smelling blossoms in the spring. Their small size and hardiness also make them ideal for the narrow pavements of Athens where they provide cool shade during the summer. Grenades they sometimes may be, but so too do they make Athens vaguely pleasant and liveable during mid-summer which increasingly is marked by lengthy ‘heat episodes’. The nerántzi enhance the urban spaces.
No other plant would have the magic I associate with the nerántzi. No other plants would bring back memories of strolling through the streets after midnight, noise still emanating from local bars and eateries, the warmth of the preceding day lingering in the air. But the yellowing street lights that bring out all the brutal shapes of the squat concrete blocks that dominate the city are softened and ‘naturalized’ by the bitter orange trees. The nerántzi, as with Athens, is a city layered with hidden qualities and inherent, unscripted reasons for being. My first instinct—the desire to pluck that bright, forbidden nerántzi—is now tempered by a broader vision of its covert qualities. The lasting insight is this: in our culture obsessed with acquisition, we must actively acknowledge the profound value of things we cannot, or should not, consume.
Note. The author expresses gratitude to Michalis Strongilakis and Eva Vaporidi for exposing him to the deeper layers of Athens.