The Road Least Traveled

by Jerry Cole

  “They want me to come play with them,” he explained. “But I haven’t brought you here to play basketball with children, don’t worry.”

  “How do you know them?” asked Greg.

  “This is my neighborhood,” Alex explained. “My apartment isn’t too far from here. I sometimes teach history at a couple of the local schools. Here, the children are surrounded by ancient ruins, and they walk past them every day, on their way to school or the store. So when they have a soda and they feel like tossing the can into a well that’s three thousand years old, maybe they’ll think twice when they remember what I told them about the well when I last visited their school.”

  “Makes sense,” said Greg. “Over in California I don’t think we have anything that’s more than a couple hundred years old, let alone three thousand.”

  “We have such an incredible and diverse history,” said Alex. “This evening I want to show you something very special.”

  They walked along the street to a low wall, behind which there was a drop of twelve feet onto a second large vacant area of land. Immediately it seemed strange to Greg that the land, the size of a football field, was completely untouched, when surrounding the land were tightly-packed apartment blocks, just like there were all over the rest of the city. At the bottom of the square ran a busy main road, where traffic to and from the city zipped along.

  “All right,” said Greg, after pondering over the space for a few moments. “I’m guessing there is something important here that you want me to see, but all I’m getting right now is a lot of weeds and what looks to be ten different families of stray cats with hundreds of kittens between them.”

  Alex laughed, not in the least offended by Greg’s observations. “You are not wrong,” he said. “But you are looking at the surface, and as you know, I am interested in what’s underneath the surface.”

  “Let me guess, an ancient ruin that I’m planning on destroying.”

  Alex laughed again, and shrugged. “Just one of many, my friend,” he said. “Sadly, I cannot preserve them all. Even the government is tired of hearing about building work that is coming to a quick halt because someone has found a wall or a stone slab that might once have been used to cook bread.”

  “So why is this place so special?” Greg asked, and Alex looked off into the distance for a moment.

  “Come,” he said. “Sit on the wall with me. I will tell you about the city. Don’t worry, I will not make it too boring.”

  “What about your beautiful bike?” teased Greg. “Aren’t you worried it’s going to be stolen?”

  “You may laugh, but it got you here safely, did it not?”

  “I’ll give you that one,” Greg admitted, and he did as Alex had invited him, swinging one leg and then the other over the wall, so he was sitting on its cool, flat surface. Alex joined him and their legs dangled down.

  “Aren’t you worried you’re going to lose one of your shoes?” Greg asked.

  “I grip them hard with my toes,” Alex replied. He lifted a hand and pointed toward the main road.

  “Do you know what that road is?” he asked.

  “No idea,” said Greg. “Right now, we could be just about anywhere and I would have no idea.”

  “That is Egnatia.”

  “That road is the same as the one where the site is?”

  “The very same,” said Alex. “It is the most important road in the whole of Thessaloniki and it has been that way since before Christ. This road that you see, it used to stretch all the way from Istanbul to Rome. Right across Europe. At that time, though, Istanbul was Constantinople. Before that it was called Byzantium. They seem to like changing the name of that particular city quite often.”

  “That’s incredible,” said Greg. “Why did they need to build a road that long?”

  “It was a trade route to begin with,” Alex went on. “From Istanbul, they would bring silks, spices and even gold. From Italy, they would, of course, bring wines and other metals that had not been seen so far East. But by the time Thessaloniki was built, the road was mainly used for the armies. You must remember that in the time of Alexander the Great, the Greek empire stretched all the way from India, all the way down to Egypt. To keep it under his power, Alexander needed a huge army.”

  “Is that why you’re named Alexander?” Greg asked.

  “Not exactly,” Alex replied. “I was named Alexander because of the day I was born. Do you remember me telling you today at dinner that we have a name day?”

  “Ah, yes, I’d forgotten, sorry.”

  “Well, I don’t exactly know where Alexander the Great got his name from. But after him came Saint Alexander, which is where I got my name. But I don’t mind if you want to think I was named after a mighty warrior. I will take that as a compliment.”

  Greg laughed. “What’s weird is that since I’ve arrived, I’ve met two Marias and two Nikos already. First the cop and then a guy who took my luggage to the room. Then there was the girl on the desk at the municipality this morning and a maid who brought my breakfast.”

  “That’s really not weird,” replied Alex. “The firstborn son is always named after the father’s father. The firstborn daughter is named after his mother. The mother of the baby will name her child after her own parents only when the father’s parents have passed their names on to the grandkids. It’s a tradition that’s only broken by the most daring of couples. So that Nikos you met? His grandfather was called Nikos and so was his grandfather. You get the idea. Nikos and Maria are pretty much like the Greek equivalent of John and Mary.”

  “Keep going with your story,” Greg said. “It’s interesting. I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

  “Well, after Alexander died, his empire was split into four pieces and each piece was taken by a general of the army. They weren’t as good as Alexander at keeping hold of the empire and before long it fell to other large armies. That’s another story. But the important part of our story is that after Alexander died in 323 BC, the city of Thessaloniki was built by King Cassander. And it was named Thessaloniki, after his wife, who was Alexander’s sister.”

  “I had no idea the city was named after Alexander’s sister,” said Greg. “I’ve heard of Alexander the Great, sure. I mean, who hasn’t? But if you were to ask me about his life or his family, I wouldn’t have a clue.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Alex. “I don’t blame you for not knowing our history. You’re American. I have to be honest and say I don’t know much about American history either.”

  “You probably know more than me,” admitted Greg. “History was not a great subject for me at school. Science and math, now they fascinated me. History, not so much.”

  “But you can see how just one piece from three thousand years ago, is affecting you and me today,” said Alex, and Greg watched as his eyes seemed even more alert and bright when he spoke of his beloved city. “We are sitting on a wall, looking at a road that has existed for more generations that we can even begin to count. That road over there is responsible for the conquering of nations, the building of empires.

  “Of course, there were times that the Greek people were not so lucky. For instance, after years of the city being part of the Greek empire, it was lost to the Romans. In 41 BC, Mark Antony made Thessaloniki a free city of the Roman Republic. So now, the road is being used to bring Roman people from Italy and beyond to Greece. In fact, the name of the road comes from a Roman general— Gnaeus Egnatius. What we call Egnatia is from a Latin word, not a Greek one. It wasn’t all bad news for the Greeks, though. Thessaloniki was recognized as such an important landmark in the Balkan peninsula that it became the capital of all Greek provinces in the Roman empire.”

  “Not Athens?” asked Greg, and Alex shook his head.

  “No, not Athens.”

  “But wasn’t Athens the center of everything? You know, democracy, philosophy, Christianity and all that stuff we hear about?”

  “Athens is, of course, a vital part of Greek culture,” conceded
Alex, “and you are right about some of what you say. Each year in Athens they would elect a mayor and everyone would gather and the mayor would have to give an account of everything he had done over the past year for the city and its people. Each year, the city had to be left in a better state than it had been the previous year. If it wasn’t the mayor would have to pay for damages caused to the city out of his own pocket.”

  Greg snorted. “I can’t imagine our president even thinking about doing anything like that,” he said.

  “I can imagine it would not work today in any country,” said Alex, “but to the people it meant that they could have faith that the man they had chosen was always going to do his very best for the people. But when you say Athens is the home of philosophy, I must disagree with you. Aristotle was from up here, in the North of Greece. My parents now live in the little town where Aristotle had his school. And do you know who was a pupil of Aristotle until the age of sixteen?”

  “You’re going to tell me it was Alexander the Great, right?”

  “You are correct,” smiled Alex. “And I must also disagree with your claim that Athens was the home of Christianity. While Greeks in Athens were still praying to the gods in the temple of the Parthenon, the Apostle Paul was visiting Thessaloniki. He was the first Christian, and twenty years after the death of Christ he came here to speak to the Jews in the synagogue. I guess he was trying to convert them the way he had been converted. The very first Christian church was built here in Thessaloniki. So I guess you were one third right about what you said about Athens being the center of the world at one time.”

  Greg gave a sheepish laugh and looked out once again onto Egnatia. He felt relaxed, soothed by Alex’s quiet but firm voice, through which he was learning such incredible things from history without once being made to feel he was being lectured, or spoken down to. If anything, he wanted to know more. He felt he could ask Alex any question at all, and it would be answered. He didn’t need to ask, though, because Alex continued.

  “We Greeks can’t be occupied for too long, and eventually even Rome itself fell. They had a presence in the city for over five hundred years, but by 476 AD, by which time Paul was long gone but Christianity was strong, Thessaloniki was back under Greek control. And it flourished. It was the second largest city, after Constantinople, and it continued to prosper and grow. But, as much as Greece does not like to be occupied, it has a strange habit of falling into occupation, and in 1204 Thessaloniki was captured, along with Constantinople, by the forces of the Fourth Crusade. We may have been Christian by then, but Constantinople still had a very vibrant Muslim population, so the crusaders came for them and managed to take Thessaloniki too, as part of the bargain. Then the Muslims regained control again in 1430, right up until 1912, when it was finally liberated once more.”

  “Wait a second,” said Greg. “You’re telling me that the city that started Christianity was a Muslim city only one hundred years ago? That’s crazy!”

  “It’s a complicated history,” said Alex. “Not everything is as simple as saying ‘now you are Muslim. Oh, wait, now you are Christian.’ The truth is that Muslims and Christians and Jews all lived together, here in this one city. And they lived peacefully, too. They were all in their own separate parts of the city, but there were no wars, no battles, no uprisings where one group wanted to take full control. Instead the cultural diversity was of huge benefit to the area. Our food, for example, is a mixture of so many different cultures. It’s a mixture of Turkish, of Greek, even ancient Hebrew.”

  “I had no idea,” Greg said, “about any of this. You’re putting me to shame.”

  Alex paused in his very brief recounting of the history of his home, and looked at Greg.

  “I do not mean to shame you,” he said, “but it explains why I am so passionate about preserving the history of this place. If you dig down a little, you might find a Byzantium school from eight hundred years ago, with stones engraved with the names of the children who attended that school. If you were to dig underneath that, you could find a Roman fort from two thousand years ago, where you could find swords, or shields, or even the leather bridles of the horses that were kept there. And even if you went past that, and you wanted to dig even deeper, you might just find an ancient Greek house, and pieces of pottery where a man would store the wine he bought from a market three thousand years ago.”

  “I see,” said Greg. “There are layers to the city.”

  “Yes,” said Alex. “At least three layers. And when someone comes with a machine and wants to smash through it with a tunnel, he does not just destroy one of those layers. He destroys all three.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Greg was silent. He couldn’t think of a way to reply. He couldn’t begin to explain his own position, giving reasons like “it’s my job” or even “I want to bring more convenience to your city.” How could either of those points have matched up to the impassioned story that Alex had told? Only he knew it wasn’t a story. From one simple conversation and a lesson in history, Greg knew that Alex was speaking the truth. He could tell from the dusty clothes and the battered old motorbike that Alex wasn’t making anywhere near the kind of money in one year that Greg made in a single month.

  Alex noticed that the air had become still and he placed a hand on Greg’s shoulder.

  “I am not angry with you any longer,” he said. “I understand that you are fighting for your own cause, whatever my feelings toward the cause are, and whether I feel it’s justified. I, too, see the cars, the chaos and the pollution. I know that the city needs an answer to the problem. But I cannot sit back and let it happen like this until we have looked at other ways.”

  “Why are you so sure we would be destroying something on the line we’re taking?” Greg asked. “Because it’s such an old road?”

  “It is partly that,” said Alex. “And it is also because I believe that right here, this piece of land, holds the key to a secret that has not seen daylight since before Christ walked the earth.” With that, he indicated the innocuous piece of waste ground below them.

  “There’s something special under here?” Greg probed. “I imagine that’s what you’re telling me, seeing as this is where you brought me, but you could have been showing me your neighborhood. Where you grew up, where you try and make life a little better for the kids.”

  “No,” said Alex. “The reason is bigger than me. Bigger than all of us. What do you see, when you look out over this piece of land, Grigoris?”

  “I have to say, while you’ve been talking, I’ve been trying to guess what it is,” said Greg, “only now you’ve asked, all I see is a piece of land. I don’t know… maybe Alexander the Great played football here?”

  Alex laughed. “With Aristotle on the sideline, telling him to be the ball?”

  “Sure,” said Greg. “Why not?”

  What if I were to tell you that the most precious commodity in this city is land?”

  “I could understand that,” said Greg. “You guys clearly have to build upward instead of out. That’s pretty common in cities by the sea. If you think about it, they’ve already lost twenty-five percent of their building capacity simply by the location. It’s not easy to construct cities in the water.”

  “Exactly,” said Alex. “And yet here we have what, maybe seven thousand square meters? And not a single building has been raised on this ground. It is overgrown, of course. And the long grass is home to all kinds of trash and stray animals. This town, it is called Vardaris. If you are a single man, and sometimes even if you are not a single man, and you get into a taxi cab at midnight, and ask the driver to take you to Vardaris, he knows he is not taking you to see your mother. He knows he’s taking you to see a different kind of lady.”

  “Right,” said Greg, slowly, not understanding. “I don’t get why that means you couldn’t build here.”

  “The people in this part of the city are living in apartments where ten, maybe twelve members of the same family are living. Because they c
annot afford to rent anywhere else outside Vardaris, but they also cannot find any empty apartments to rent either. There are people who live on the streets in the winter and who sleep on the beaches in the summer. Now imagine how many affordable apartments could be built on this piece of land alone, and nothing is done.”

  “Well I can’t say social housing has been top of any politician’s list of priorities over the last few years,” said Greg. “It’s about power, I guess. The poor getting poorer?”

  “I would agree with you if we were talking about any other city,” said Alex. “But here in Thessaloniki, we have a mayor who has come from Vardaris. He has lived the life here and he wants to change it. But he is being blocked at every turn. He wants to make this piece of land into enough apartments to house hundreds of people. But he is not able.”

  “What, is it like sacred ground?” Greg asked, “like how there are places we can’t build in the U.S. because it used to be Indian burial ground?”

  “It’s an interesting comparison that you make,” said Alex, with a tilt of his head that once again gave him an air of mystery. “A sacred burial ground that nobody may touch.”

  “Are you serious?” asked Greg. “A city this size and this piece of land is sacred?”

  “For many years archaeologists have mapped Thessaloniki, and they know from ancient maps and other texts that there were markets, and houses, and temples all over the city. And in all of those texts and maps, this piece of land is always strictly off limits. It is called The Sacred Square. It can’t be built on and we can’t find out why. At first, I was skeptical. I thought it was some huge conspiracy. If you’re familiar with Greek politics, you will know that such an idea is not beyond the realms of possibility. But then, I hit on a theory.”