Greek Notebook

At Athens airport, the digital noticeboard reads like the script of an agitprop play. ‘Strike, strike, strike, strike, strike,’ it announces, next to the destinations. ‘Due to the turmoil,’ says the PR person we’re talking to, ‘all the politicians you’ve flown in to interview have pulled out.’ My cameraman, driving the Audi, seems determined to break the world land-speed record between Athens and Patras, but is thwarted by the fact that the 21st-century motorway is blocked by a mudslide. This means travelling on the 20th-century road, which is really a 3rd-century bc road lined with concrete and graffiti. At Derveni, a strip of crumbling concrete villas, we find the one restaurant that is not closed. ‘There used to be ten of us, now there’s just three,’ says the manager, flipping switches to bring the heating and the folk music to life. We’re the only customers. The food is delicious but basic: garlic-laden lamb shank, together with a plate of lemons cut in halves, and a plate of beetroot cut into slices. ‘We used to be a stop-off for lawyers, doctors, engineers,’ he says. But now ‘they don’t really earn any money’. That’s a euphemism: in 2010 the Greek government raided hundreds of dentists and doctors in Athens and found, to nobody’s amazement, lots of people with €30k cars whose claimed taxable income was €30k.

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In Patras we interview illegal migrants. Mohammed leads me into a yard where the amenities are a hosepipe and the pit of an old weighbridge. He whips a book by Jean-Paul Sartre from his bomber jacket. ‘I admire Sartre,’ he says. ‘Sartre, Marx, Hegel and Nietzsche.’ He’s from Agadir, where he did his masters in sociology. He wants to go to France, but the Patras port police have other ideas. The men crowd round us, showing off their scars, buckshot wounds and bruises from numerous encounters with the ‘commandoes’, the Greek port police.