Atonement

March 21st, 2001 was a Wednesday. Having not found tickets for the game and given there was some kind of TV broadcasting ban, I had no option than to stay at home and listen to it on the radio. My father sat at the other side of the table, smoking unstoppably. Ten minutes after kick-off we were down 0-2 and the hope of securing a soothing victory against Olympiakos was already gone. By that time we had been beaten by them in every possible way. Within a period of five years, we had lost to them four league titles, more than a handful of derbies, including a humiliating Cup Final in which they played with one man down for most of the game. But an astonishing 1-4 defeat in our home ground, with no excuse about a terrifying atmosphere or biased refereeing could only mean one thing. We had reached the bottom.

It's been almost seven years since then. Things between us (Panathinaikos) and them (Olympiakos) have not changed considerably. They still win the league, we still do better in Europe. Over these seven years we have had victories over them, won back a Cup Final in 2004, got the double that same year and have not lost to them in our last 4 encounters. But, in spite of all that, the stain of that distant 1-4 remains.

They say that football is about winning, just like any other sport, that winning is all a matter of consistency and that the best is the one who wins trophies at the end of the season instead of achieving solitary victories in the middle of it. But for a helpless romantic like myself, -even more, one with a painfully good memory-, there are some victories or defeats that somehow are more important than a series of trophies. They mark a before and an after, they set a time-mark in the history of clubs and consequently in the lives of the funs. They become part of a legend, where game results become historical events, wins are now called "triumphs" and losses qualify as "disasters", in the strict footballistic sense. They don't happen very often, therefore the shame can last for years.

Fortunately it's the strict footballistic sense that allows to avenge the shame and regain the pride. There are opportunities in the form of re-matches. Tonight's game is one such. A one-off Cup quarter-final at their ground, with our lads in high moral and the strong belief we can do it. It's no easy task, given that a 0-1 victory will not mean revenge. Most of today's players were not there with me on that Wednesday, some of them were not even aware that tere is a team called Panathinaikos. It's not their job to carry the memory of that game for seven years. They may be unaware of the fact that they have a chance for atonement, a chance to make up for that disgraceful 1-4, seven years ago. And it may be better like this.

All they have to do is play good football tonight. And let me long for the atonement of their predecessors.

today

"...que no hay tórtolas, que no existe Lucília, que no existe el Residencial de la Praça da Alegría, que no existe el chulo negro, que no existe la Pide, que no hubo comunistas, que no existió mi pasado (...) que tampoco existe usted, amigo escritor, y que nos encontramos ambos, óigame, no en el Campo de Santana, que jamás existió, con sus pavos reales, sus mendigos y sus locos, sino suspendidos en una especie de limbo, conversando sobre nada, rodeados de tejados y árboles y gente sin substancia, en una Lisboa imaginaria que baja hacia el río a lo largo de una confusa precipitación de callejones inventados..."

Antonio Lobo Antunes
El orden antural de las cosas

People live here

The cloudy weather we have been experiencing in Barcelona over these last days, combined with some post-holiday, new year's melancholy had sent me in a really grey place by yesterday morning. I woke up sleepy and tired, got dressed while swearing in all languages I can pronounce, mumbled "good morning " to my flatmates and went out the door, hating my job, the moist sticking on the tiles of Plaza de la Merce, this humid winter and the complete universe. As I rushed down Carrer de la Merce, hoping to make it on time for the seminar I passed by this place, a small strip of the street sheltered beneath an arch, where usually I see a couple of homeless people sleeping.

Yesterday they weren't there. But there remained signs of their existence in the form of a smoked wall. Signs that someone had built a fire to get through a chilly night. I thought that in my native Greek tongue, the fireplace is actually used to mean "home" and then I thought that the place I was looking at, the remains of a fireplace I was taking a photo of, IS the actual home of some people. I remembered the sign I had once seen in the nice, nearby neighborhood of el Born, "Aqui viu gent", meaning "People live here" and imagined it pasted over this smoked wall.

And then I gave myself a moment to think about this unknown neighbours of mine, who spent each night a few meters away from my front door, covered up in anoraks, blankets and sleeping-bags, trying to keep warm by building fires in the middle of the street. I thought about them, being rudely awaken by the cops much earlier than when I lazily decide to get out of bed. I imagined them telling stories to each other to forget their agony in the face of one more rainy night, or even worse, having told all the stories so many times and having got so drunk that there are no more stories to tell.

I thought about all these things going on right next to my doorstep and decided that it probably was the wrong day for me to bitch about the weather, or the seminar or everything. Or perhaps it was a perfect day to bitch about all that but I was the wrong guy to do it.

where the streets have a name

Saturday afternoon found me strolling down the streets of Barceloneta seeking refuge from the wind that looked as if it was destined to strip away the beach of all its sand. It is funny how places close to the sea exposed to strong winds tend to have a similar architecture, with small narrow streets, where one can still find some peace even though a few meters away the palm trees are bending and the waves are roaring. Like many of the Greek islands, Barceloneta is also built in a grid of very narrow streets, packed next to each other, providing shed from the tramontana, while allowing the sea breeze to blow through and cool things off during the hot summer days.

As I walked down from the Plaza de Barceloneta towards the sea I came across this street sign on the corner of Carrer de Sant Miguel and Escuder. An old building stood there, its walls grey and dirty, no tiles or fancy colours, just a patine of what looked to me like the sepia toner of old photos. There, next to the sign reading the name of the street, someone had used black paint and old-style calligraphy to write a name: "Miguel Pedrola". From that point of view, it looked as if this street had two names, two Miguels, one who was a saint and another one about whom I knew nothing. Who was Miguel Pedrola?


As I normally take pride in earning my living as a researcher, I felt it was time for me to prove it. I took a shortcut to the office and started digging into google-land. A first search gave me some hints. Miguel Pedrola's name was listed in some old marxist archives as leader of the POUM youth during the Civil War. Further search in the Civil War archives revealed that the young Pedrola fell in the front of Aragon sometime early 1937. This would mean he had no chance to see his comrades being stigmatized as trotskyist-antirevolutionaries during the incidents of May 1937 in Barcelona. Staying away from this tragically ironic conflict he fought his good fight and fell for what he believed. Therefore, even though not a Saint he might have deserved a street with his name.

Some more of library-digging at home today shed more light into the story of this street with two names. According to the City Hall's registry this street is listed with two names although the official street sign reads only the first, more divine one. The story behind this is that people from the neighborhood of Barceloneta, where Pedrola came from, wanted the name changed but some dispute with the municipal authorities at some distant time prevented that. The street is shown in all maps and guides as Carrer de Sant Miguel and the name of Pedrola is slowly drifting towards oblivion.

The person who painted the sign on the wall, might have never met Pedrola himself. He might have been the son of one of his comrades, a distant cousin who grew up listening stories about him, or the girl Pedrola never married, or her daughter, or a neighbour with whom they would play football on Sundays. In any case it was someone who remembered, someone who would like us to remember also.

So, next time you pass by Carrer Sant Miguel, take a short moment to take a look at the corner dedicated to Miguel Pedrola, a youngster who, being no Saint, died for democracy some sixty years ago, somewhere close to Teruel.

a day like today

Over the past two years I have grown so used of flying back and forth between Barcelona and Athens that I can practically set my flight sleeping schedule according to the cruising altitude, knowing exactly when to bring my sit to the "upright" position before even being told. Today in particular I was quite reluctant in doing so, mostly because it was sometime around 5 in the morning when we started our descent to "El Prat" Airport.

In any case, this late -or early depending on one's point of view- flight was actually better than what I expected. The weather I encountered upon my arrival, on the other hand, was not. I picked up from where I left, almost two weeks ago when it was cloudy and windy. Only now it was very cloudy and very windy. As I tried to give myself as many tasks as possible to avoid going to bed at 11 am, I found myself riding a bike up on the Rambla only to remember that a day like today, four years ago I was walking down the same street for the first time in my life. Back then in 2004, Barcelona was just a -promising- holiday destination, I was a tourist and in the company of Kostas enchanted by this beautiful city. Today, I have been in this place for almost two years, enough not to consider myself as a "guiri" anymore. Nevertheless, the joy of walking down the Rambla remains unspoiled by any habitual interference, like having to go to the supermarket or carry 10 kilos of groceries back home, while "bicing" (yes, I still do that) through the tourist-infested streets of the Gotico.

It looks like, 4 years after that first acquaintance with the city of Gaudi, the magic is still here.

today

Avant d' etre aveugle, Oedipe n' a fait toute sa vie que jouer a colin-maillard avec la Sort.

Marguerite Yourcenar
Feux

Where is home?

Bloc Party, wonder about it, maybe less than I do. Where it is? Where is home?

Late Friday night, the bus from the airport takes me through familiar avenues, sites of a seemingly distant everyday commute, towards the center of my favourite birthplace, which could be the most beautiful city in the world, -and perhaps at some point in history actually has already been. As we go down Vasilissis Sofias Avenue, I become aware of what never left this place. People eager to party 24 hour days without being separated from their cars are infesting every small street from here to Syntagma Square at 4 am!

In front of the Parliament I step off the bus and take a deep breath of the thin, dry air of my old capital. I am home.

But am I really? As I walk down towards Ermou Street to catch a taxi home I run across young people coming out of the nearby bars which are closing down. They all look so elegant and happy, dressed up with smart and expensive clothes. Most of them are maybe 10 years younger than me but make me look like a high-school student with my anorak and my hiking boots and the backpack I am carrying around. I get a feeling my compatibility with Barcelona is starting to become incompatible with my hometown. And as soon as the youngsters, all fun and laughter, rush by me to get a taxi before me, this feeling gets stronger. I stand there, suitcase in hand, as they pass me by with the most naturally innocent way and then I cannot but wonder. Am I a tourist in my own city?

Three days later, I have still not gone out that much. I am spending time with friends and family, mostly because it is them that mean home to me more than anything else. But I still wonder whether I am staying in because of a fear -or to put it milder, an anxiety- to face reality. Starting from tomorrow I 'll try to get as much more of AthensBios as I can, just to make sure, that even if I cannot undoubtedly state where home is, Athens is still part of it.

Submitted. What now?

This image is to celebrate closure.

Of course as in most things in life, closure is relatively hard to define and this becomes even more complicated in science. A paper submitted, after almost a year and a half of trying, does not signify closure at all, but it is at least a relief. And given the holiday spirit, just about to consume everything (literally) and everyone, hence the fireworks.

But as since noon yesterday, after having pressed this "approve submission" button I was longing for, I keep remembering a poem by my favourite Kavafis, entitled "Waiting for the Barbarians". It is because suddenly, I feel I have been so much consumed by work that I find it hard to come back to everyday life after finishing with too many pending issues. Sunday afternoon I almost enjoyed cleaning up my flat, since Saturday I have watched four films on TV already but still I find myself too tense to even go to bed before 3. It is what the poem is about -more or less-. Once a threat, (or a challenge, or a thing you had to do in any case) is not there anymore, what remains to keep you going? You suddenly find yourself feeling empty and useless and it's probably entirely your fault for having shut out every other activity just to get your stupid work done. And now, with your work simply done and you have no idea of what to do. You find yourself, a one-dimensional man, with all your interests suppressed under the weight of everyday obligations. And for this brief moment that these obligations seem to vanish you just stand there half-bored and half-overtensed, insomniac and dizzy.

And you simply wonder if two weeks of holidays are enough for you to regain perspective.

"Devil's week" for "tender feet"

As I am getting close to 30 I still have not served my -obligatory- military service. Only to be the next to last of all my friends to still have escaped and probably the last of all that will finally do it. Among those who have suffered it already, as well as for us outsiders, the concept of a "devil's week", a 7-day military ordeal set to distinguish real men from boys is nowadays a distant legend, a story older guys in high-school would constantly recite, enriched every time with some new kind of torture to scare us off.

We are grown-ups now and we know devil's week does not exist unless you are a US Marine corps "afficionado". Nevertheless devil's weeks keep occurring, with some increasing frequency, in our everyday work life. And the last one I had, would certainly qualify as such.

The 100 hours that separated Monday morning from Friday afternoon, included the culmination of more than a year's attempts in terms of my -otherwise boring- work, the final preparation of a manuscript, rewritten as many times as Kazantzakis' "Odysseia" and a public talk in front of my colleagues -which eventually I may have convinced that somewhere inbetween parties and "happy hours", I actually try to do some research. On the margin of all that, I had to attend seminars and a number of meetings with possible future collaborators, in all a number of activities that would probably make my over-active boss feel at home but for a poor post-doctoral fellow like myself proved simply too much.

By Friday afternoon, I felt dizzy, confused and totally unable to focus even on the simplest communicative activity. This had been my devil's week and there was no doubt about it.
By Friday night, I felt all this was past already. As I was dancing in the middle of a room infested with students and post-docs, eager to see the end of this last month of 2007 and the beginning of holidays, I realized the "tender foot" I have become. There was I, having just had a week that to some hard-working people would not even qualify as rough, having beer with my colleagues, not worrying about Monday or the house's mortgage payment at the end of the month, having worked a bit more in one of the best places, in one of the most beautiful cities of Europe and I had the nerve of talking about "devil's week".

I forgot about it all, as alcohol was finding its way through my circulation to meet with fatigue and loss of sleep somewhere at the back of my head. I had a few more beers and went straight to bed.

Then, the next morning while having breakfast, I read Dorris Lessing's Nobel acceptance speech only to remember once more the extent of the privileges we relish and how "tender feet" we are becoming.

today

L'art n'est pas à mes yeux une réjouissance solitaire. Il est un moyen d'émouvoir le plus grand nombre d'hommes en leur offrant une image privilégiée des souffrances et des joies communes. Il oblige donc l'artiste à ne pas se séparer ; il le soumet à la vérité la plus humble et la plus universelle.


Le rôle de l'écrivain, du même coup, ne se sépare pas de devoirs difficiles. Par définition, il ne peut se mettre aujourd'hui au service de ceux qui font l'histoire : il est au service de ceux qui la subissent.

Albert Camus
Nobel Lecture