Ever since I met Vassilis, we’d dreamed about going to live in Greece. Now that it was actually happening, though, I was afraid it might turn out to be what it had always been: a fantasy. For Vassilis it was a homecoming to his fatherland and mother tongue after many years abroad. For me it was like a return to first love; the ground was less sure and the roots less deep. Greece had captured my imagination as a student, but no matter how much I embraced it, I’d always be an outsider.

Athenian friends had told us we were mad to want to bring up our children where they were bringing up theirs.
“Greece is good for holidays but not for living,” they said. “It’s impossible to work, and it’s unbearably hot”. I recalled various British friends who just thought that Athens was hideous and polluted. They imagined it would be hard for me to continue working as a freelance journalist in a Balkan back of beyond. The dream had already begun to look more like a nightmare.

Before our move, we had gone to Athens on a house hunting trip. Like increasing numbers of Athenian families, we’d decided to resist the pull of the centre and go for the suburbs; it was a chance to live near the sea, and to give our children some space and fresh air after years of urban existence. I risked sounding foolish, and told the estate agents that my ideal home would be something old. I didn’t add that I was picturing a slightly dilapidated little neo-classical villa, with a garden full of lemon and fig trees, because I knew such a thing was practically non-existent. One agent replied most positively. “Yes, we have something old. It’s in a block that was built at least nine years ago.”

Athens may be an ancient city, but it is also uncompromisingly modern. And there’s hardly anything else in between the two extremes. It’s almost as though the Athenians went straight from carved marble to reinforced concrete, skipping the intervening centuries. Few people live in a building which is old, and out by the sea where we were looking, many homes were barely finished.

Searching for somewhere to rent quickly got depressing. We enjoyed the fireplaces disguised as the Parthenon and the plaster caryatids and classical columns that were scattered like icing sugar confections around brand new houses like wedding cake decorations. And we laughed about the ubiquitous and horrible, dungeon-like room known euphemistically in Greek as the playroom. But we didn’t want to live in these places. Friends in the more traditional, inland suburbs of Kifissia, Maroussi and Psychiko in northern Athens were sardonic. They told us pointedly that the seaside areas we were exploring were especially popular with ex-basketball players, the nouveaux riches, and Russian Mafiosi. We’d never get through a winter there, they said.

Athens’ new areas have frilled out around the edges like a skin disease. Aerial maps of even a decade ago show the coastline to the South of the city as including great expanses of open hillside on the tail-end of Mount Hymmetus. Now the land was covered with the wound-like cuts of new roads and construction sites, and one built-up suburb followed another. There was an incongruous and bewildering collection of cheap, speculative developments mixed with the expensive ‘dream houses’ of people who didn’t know whether their dream was a Swiss chalet, a Mexican hacienda, or the White House.

Just as we were becoming despondent, an agent took us to Eurydice Street in Vouliagmeni – Athens’ version of a Riviera, about 18 kilometres to the south of the centre. Evrydiki (as the name is in Greek) led predictably perhaps, to Orpheus – a Street making a vertiginous descent to the sea, if not the underworld. We climbed up a long and steep flight of external steps past several interlocking apartments cut into the rocky hillside, until we arrived at the last one. On one side of the mezonetta (maisonette) was a gateway giving onto the open hill, which was covered in spring flowers. On the other, a spacious terrace surveyed what looked like half of Greece.

It didn’t seem to matter that the flat was new, dull and badly laid-out, with too many small rooms on too many levels. In fact we hardly bothered to look around. We just gazed transfixed, across the small, strangely tropical bay at the bottom of the hill, and the surrounding palm trees and sandy beaches. Beyond the bay was the wide expanse of the Saronic Gulf, with its distant traffic of boats leaving for the islands and returning to the port at Piraeus.

Over to the north we could see the sprawling lower end of the Athens basin, capped with a delicately lilac-tinged mist.
“Is that the nephos?” I asked Vassilis, referring to the horrible noxious cloud that had plagued the Athenian atmosphere for years. It sometimes combined with summer heat to produce air so heavily poisoned that you could wake up in the morning and feel as though you’d just smoked a packet of cigarettes in an engine room.
“No, the nephos has practically disappeared now,” replied Vassilis optimistically. “That’s just a haze. But look, come here.” He held onto my shoulder, and stretched his arm out in front, pointing at something in the massive, urban cluster.
“Can you see that little lump sticking up on the horizon?” he asked. “It’s the Acropolis.” Somehow it was ludicrously pleasing.

The sun was going down like a great blood orange slipping behind the mountains of the Peloponnese. If a film had shown these colours I’d have thought the cameraman was cheating with filters (“a bit more vermillion over there, and add some tangerine glow to the water”). Directly opposite this irresistible eagle’s nest of a terrace I identified Aegina, the island where my mother became engaged to my father at the age of 17. Her mother was supposedly chaperoning her, but was content to let her teenage daughter be swept up by a ‘mad Russian’ 10 years her senior. A few months later my parents were married in London’s Russian Orthodox Church. Crowns were placed over their heads, and the beautiful child-bride’s veil caught fire from one of the tall candles. Like the sinister bird flying over at Orpheus and Eurydice’s nuptials, this was thought to be an omen.

My parents did separate, but not before they had produced three children. I was the first, born the year after they were married. When I was three days old, a mysterious telegram arrived for me at the Royal Northern Hospital in Holloway. It read: ‘Welcome Eurydice,’ and was signed: ‘Orpheus’. Later, when a Russian Orthodox priest submerged me in the baptismal font, I was named after my grandmother, with a second name in honour of Orpheus’ tragic, snake-bitten wife.

As a child I learned of my father’s fascination with the mystifying, shamanic bard. He even wrote an epic and wildly complex libretto for an opera called ‘The Mask of Orpheus’. I used to sit in his work room, painting characters and episodes out of the myth, where I still half-believed that my first telegram had come directly from Hades or Lesbos, or wherever Orpheus had ended up, after he was torn apart by the Maenads, the crazed and promiscuous female followers of Dionysus. Later, I started to appreciate how the myth contains many of the most dramatic human emotions, which I saw lived out with an extra degree of intensity in Greece. It is no chance that Orpheus’ tragedy has been dramatised so much, with its compelling, universal elements of erotic love, accidental death, desire, grief, the ruthlessness of the gods, and the power of music.

Vassilis and I agreed that the view and the address were both too good to miss. Eurydice Street was like another welcome for me; it was a return to the enormous, bright skies of a living Greece, which the elusive, original Eurydice never managed, after Orpheus made his fatal mistake of looking back to see if she was following him out of the Underworld. But if I was getting romantic about mythological associations, the agent was quick to bring me down to earth. The realities of renting somewhere in Athens involve an annoyingly predictable degree of financial intrigue, and we had found that even the agents were playing games with us, trying out outrageously hiked-up prices to test the level of our gullibility. They all explained that we would “of course” declare one amount on the contract and pay twice as much rent to the landlord. “It’s what everyone does.”


Our first weeks in Eurydice Street were spent in a sort of limbo. Vassilis’ brother and three sisters turned up in the first days, heroically helping us unpack our stuff and put up shelves. They got annoyed when I thanked them. It goes without saying that family help you and that you would do the same; if you say thank you it cancels out the natural obligation and is almost insulting. After they left, we collapsed in a stupor. It was so hot we could hardly move.

Most of our Athenian friends were away on holiday, and we didn’t even bother to look up the others. We didn’t go exploring either, just managing to make the odd foray out for provisions or to buy a fridge. It was like being in quarantine, almost as though we hadn’t arrived at all. We spent hours during the scalding middle part of the day shut in a darkened bedroom, lying naked on the bed, with the air-conditioning blowing a cold, dry wind. Anna and Lara sprawled about watching day-time television. As nine and six year-olds they were just the right age to develop a taste for the outrageously melodramatic Mexican and Brazilian soap operas dubbed into Greek. Despondently, I recalled the fantasy that now looked pathetic – that my daughters would evolve into the wholesome-looking Greek teenagers you see on school outings, gathered happily around a guitar, singing nostalgic songs.

Every so often, there was a fire on the hills in our region, though fortunately none that spread too badly. Two chubby, yellow planes would circle over our house, before swooping down to sea level. They looked like something Noddy might fly, as they skimmed the surface to scoop up water, and returned to the burning hill to drop their liquid cargo. But it wasn’t funny. The media reports came far too frequently describing areas which had been burned by unscrupulous developers, who hoped that protected woodland would become available for building if it were treeless.

At the end of the day, when the air cooled, we’d mooch down to the sea for a swim. Lara and Anna were fascinated by the entwined couples who lay kissing on the beach, or wallowing a little way out to sea.
“Love spot,” they shrieked, pointing and giggling, each time they located one.

In the evenings we ate take-away pizzas on our terrace, and then slept fitfully. Sometimes, I woke up to find Vassilis’ feet near my face; he explained that he’d been trying to get as close as possible to the window for some air. I wasn’t sure whether it was the heat or the move which was more overwhelming; either way, there’s no disillusionment like having a dream come true.

It was in this state of dislocation that I started wondering what it was that attracted me to this country in the first place. As a young child I imagined Greece to be something like the scenes in my evocative story books by H. E. Bates, featuring Achilles the donkey, who escapes from his brutal owner and ends up with a loving, island family. The marvellous illustrations incorporated some Greek writing in shop signs and graffiti, and I was attracted by the exotic, unintelligible letters, sensing that they somehow marked Greece as being different from other foreign places.

These images of a rural idyll were supplemented by my father who made various trips to Greece over the years. His travels were usually child- and wife-free as they tended to involve complicated romantic intrigues or strenuous walks around the male-only monasteries of Mount Athos. He’d come back laden with alien and intriguing objects: kitsch, tin-framed icons, aluminium pots, boxes of island blue powder paint, rag rugs, and food that was still unfamiliar in the London of the early 1970s – bags of dark, purple olives, and wedges of sweet, sticky halva.

I had certainly never thought of Greece as my destiny. In fact if I’d been a less wayward student, I suppose I might have ended up married to a Nepali and be writing a book about life in Kathmandu. In the mid-1980s, my tutor at Cambridge suggested that I follow in his footsteps, and carry out my doctoral research in an isolated nunnery up a mountain in Nepal. He agreed that my boyfriend could go too and live in a monastery on another mountain. It sounded novel. I began to read books about Himalayan society, until one day, I realised that I couldn’t do it. I was sitting in a small formica booth in the university ‘language labs’, headphones clamped to my ears, trying to reproduce the strange, nasal twangs and tone changes of Nepali. But my stomach was tied up in knots, and I felt sick.

In a wildly uninformed and instinctive volte-face, I decided that what I really wanted was to go and live by the sea in the Mediterranean. I scraped together a new plan, which didn’t involve nuns, and with little justification (and feeling slightly fraudulent) plumped on an investigation of the ravages of tourism and social change on an unspecified but beautiful town in Greece. Thankfully, my tutor was sympathetic, and I ended up spending three years in Nafplio – an elegant, Italianate port in the Peloponnese. I arrived there with the English boyfriend who had considered coming to Nepal, but the relationship was doomed. The beginning of my joyful and intense love affair with Greece eclipsed everything else, and especially anything to do with England, which I rejected with the ease of a rebellious teenager.

England came to represent constant grey skies, the oppression of background and class, dysfunctional families, and tense introspection. I colluded with Greek friends to create an image of my country as a sort of Dickensian, fog-bound place, and Greece as a land where the sunny skies reflected personal freedoms and passions, and where families loyally nurtured their old and their young. In spring, the air around Nafplio smelled overpoweringly of orange blossom from its legendary citrus groves, and it was entirely appropriate to my state of mind that I could watch the sun setting behind the mountains of Arcadia. These unrealistic stereotypes may have missed the point, but the sentiments were real. Each step I took deeper into the Greek language seemed not only to take me into a new world, but to make me into a new person. Now, re-reading my ‘field diaries’ I am intrigued. Somewhere there, between the traipsing house visits, dutiful note-taking, the all-night partying, and a love affair, I was being transformed.

By the time I finished my PhD I was confused; I knew I didn’t want to be an academic, but I didn’t know where I belonged any more. I decided to fulfil a life-long desire, and travel to Russia to see where my paternal grandparents had lived in St Petersburg. I was also writing an article about the plight of the Pontian (Black Sea) Greeks. Like other persecuted minorities in what was still the Soviet Union, they were desperate to leave. Although many couldn’t even speak their ancestral language, they were willing to try anything to get to what they imagined would be a welcoming motherland.

On a sunny June morning in 1990, I arrived at the Greek Embassy in Moscow. I had an appointment to interview the Consul, and had to push my way through a sea of unhappy Pontians who were clinging to the railings, shouting and pleading for visas. I stood awkwardly in the courtyard, taking photographs of the scene and waiting. The Consul didn’t arrive. It was at this point that the Press Attaché emerged from the little, pastel-tinted palace that housed the Embassy. With hindsight it is annoying that I didn’t realise instantly that my future stood in front of me. Fortunately, Vassilis did, and before I left, he managed to extract my phone number in England. Later that summer, Vassilis arrived in London, and it didn’t take long to convince me. By the autumn, I had returned to Moscow, this time with my snow boots. The country of my ancestors had pulled me in through the back door, using someone from my adopted country as a lure.

After eleven years living together in Moscow, London and Rome, Vassilis and I were finally returning to Greece. It was not only a changed country; we were changed people. Vassilis had gone to study in Venice aged 19, and had only spent two of the last 23 years in the land of his birth. Anna and Lara had only come here on holiday. I’d often felt myself a kind of honorary Greek; Vassilis and I have usually spoken Greek together, and arriving in Greece I always feel a physical lurch of excitement - a sense of coming home. This time, though, I was out of kilter, floundering between the different versions of ‘my’ Greece, and looking suspiciously (and humiliatingly) like the foreign wives I used to pity with condescension in my student days.