The Fox Knows Many Things: An Athena Fox Adventure

by Mike Sweeney

  “Penny,” Markos teed up for me, “Is trying to understand the Dorian Invasion.”

  “Invasion.” He steepled his fingers. “A term of art from a previous age.”

  “If only,” I said drily.

  “You could almost say it starts with a translation error. Classical sources talked of the arrival or descent of the Dorians. European scholars, exploring the literature, interpreted one of those words as ‘invasion.’”

  “Like Schiaparelli and his ‘Canali,’ eh?”

  Socrates blinked in surprise.

  “The fox knows many things,” Markos grinned.

  The fox what? Later. I’d ask later. “And the Sons of Hercules? I mean Herakles?”

  “Use whichever you are used to. Or would you prefer to call our mutual friend Achilleus?” Pavlos snapped a brief grin, like a turtle poking his head out of his shell, then resumed. “The classic authors are inconsistent on the origins of the Dorians. In many, the Dorians and the Heracleidae are listed separately.”

  “So...” I stopped to gather my thoughts. Reached for a beer before remembering I shouldn’t. “What does archaeology say?”

  “Archaeology is largely silent,” he said. He’d cut back a bit on the ten-drachma words, I noticed. Put them on to annoy the others, I supposed. “The Dorian Migration, Invasion, whatever you want to call it, is an interpretation of the texts.”

  “And not of the rocks.” I’d been here before. I remember Howard’s comments, at the Atlantis reception that now felt so long ago.

  “It is worth noting,” Pavlos said, “That Homer lists Native Cretans, Cydonians, Pelasgians, and ‘Dorians with waving plumes’ as being on Crete.”

  “Or, that is, he has Odysseus say. Talk about your untrustworthy narrators.”

  “Hah! Oh, Achilleus, I see why you invited this one.”

  “Great.” Biro finished his beer, noisily. “Are we done now? Because this might be the last chance to get outside before the rain arrives.”

  “Almost,” I said. “So why the North? When did that happen? Why did your scholars start saying the Dorians didn’t originate in Greece at all?”

  Pavlos looked from Biro to me. The smile came slowly out of the shell. “This is better done by demonstration,” he said. “Come, Achilleus. It is time to leave this beach for the fabled towers of Illion. It is time to show this Fox of yours to the Palace of Troy.”

  “Schliemann. Of course it would be Schliemann. You ever start feeling like everything is connected?”

  “Everything is connected.” Markos was holding my hand again. I pulled away to scratch my nose.

  “That’s either really deep or really stupid,” Biro said. “I’m going for stupid.”

  Pavlos ignored the byplay. He’d brought us to the Illiou Melathron. Schliemann’s little shack here in Athens. So technically the Palace of Illion, not “Troy.” But considering it had been Hisarlik when he dug into it, I was willing to forgive that. A Topless Tower by any other name…

  It had a little garden behind it, tucked out of view in a space between abandoned buildings and crumbling residential blocks and surprisingly quiet and out of the way feeling. The building itself, according to Pavlos, was Neoclassic by way of Renaissance Revival with a seasoning of Pompeii. The inside sounded almost theatrical, with wood painted to look like marble, murals and mosaics of the Trojan War and other Greek motifs, and oh yes the collections of what these days was the new home of the Numismatic Museum.

  More coin collectors. Just what I needed. Oh, yeah, and there were swastikas all over it. In the parquet, in the design of the balcony rails and the front gates.

  “The Mycenaeans knew that motif,” Pavlos said. “Schliemann brought it to the attention of his age. Possibly to the wrong people. He himself had seen the same symbol in archaeological sites in Germany, and he couldn’t help be familiar with its presence in ancient Indian cultures; Maximilian Müller was already writing by then. It all fit perfectly into that era’s obsession with discovering the Ur-culture, the civilization that had preceded all others.”

  “I got a bad feeling about where this is going.”

  “Very prescient. In the first decade of the 20th century, these imaginings of an advanced precursor took a decidedly racialist turn. 1918 saw the founding of the Thule-Gesellschaft.”

  Oh, I knew that name. Both of them. “The Thule Society,” I sighed. “From Mycenaean ceramics to The Lost Ark in one turn of a hooked cross.”

  “The ideas are not without precedent. Even as the Romans learned from the Greeks, they suspected the roots of civilization lay further out. Egypt was at the time the logical choice.” Pavlos sighed. “The same scholars who dedicated careers to pouring through ancient texts were also philologists. Their search for the roots of languages led them into the East, into what today is Proto-Indo-European. And thus was born the Aryan super-race.”

  “Who weren’t white enough for Hitler’s buddies and had moved North to Cimmeria by the ’30s,” I said.

  “I believe you mean Hyperborea.”

  “Same thing.”

  “Hrm.” Pavlos frowned. “I see your point. Equally mutable, convenient…”

  “…and fictional.”

  “Damn.” Biro had been looking at his phone.

  “What’s up?”

  “Well,” he flashed an unconvincing grin, “I was thinking of introducing you to some real Greek culture. I know Achilles probably wants to take you to the Dora Stratou to watch those oh-so-traditional dances. And then you can go to the new Acropolis Museum. I hear it is very educational.”

  “Ooh, kitty-cat,” I murmured, not quite softly enough.

  “But my friend NASmini, who is a rising star in the local Electronica scene, well…he’s not picking up and I need to check up on him.”

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  “You got what you needed?” Biro didn’t seem to believe it.

  “I did and thank you Pavlos.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  OF COURSE I said, “Let’s go.” Biro had said he wasn’t jealous but oh, yes, he was. If I hadn’t ended up on the world’s longest fetch quest out to the fringes of the Black Forest, he would have been the one who got to show me around Athens.

  So now he was going to show me around Athens. His Athens. The Athens as far from the big museums and polite music and tourist-fare souvlaki as he could manage.

  And I was fine with that. I still had questions. Well, one big question. So the Dorian theory was basically shit, and it was racist as all hell as well. It had started among educated Europeans who loved their Homer and Aristotle and got antsy at the thought of all those hairy uncouth peasants all over their noble white marble palaces.

  Time moved on, Chadwick and others proved hieroglyphs and other ancient writings weren’t mysterious magic rituals but the records of a robust culture of their own. And then a new crop of idiots rose to power in Germany and refurbished all that 19th-century nonsense for a new world tour.

  And some among our modern crop of basement dwellers zapped the twice-made corpse back to life once again with the power of the Internet. And Edward Sharpe had made a second career out of re-fighting the lost war, elevating the traditions of generations of scholars over the now large body of archaeological evidence. No wonder Xander, his protege, had been forced to ignore his own MGR data in order to commit to dig.

  But, in the end, why did it matter? Haters gotta hate, and was the truth of whether the two Greeks by my side had sprung from Ultima Thule or the very soil of Athens itself ultimately important to anyone outside of an argument over beer and meze?

  I didn’t know.

  This time we took the Metro. M2 through Omonoia and to Central Athens; surprisingly close to the National. Man, I was getting my full value on that Ath.ena transit pass. We were heading to the City Plaza Hotel.

  “They’re still there?” Markos asked Biro. “I thought Georgio’s friend had shut them down.”

  “He means Alexis Tsipras,” Biro told me. “O
ur current Prime Minister, if you haven’t been paying attention. His radical-left Syriza party turns out to be a lot less radical left than we thought.”

  “We had two terms of the same thing back home,” I said.

  “And now look what you have.”

  “Well, yeah.”

  The building was tall and beige and had a 1970s feel about it, the name spelled out on square panels that jutted out from one corner. The lower floor and lobby was shuttered off, although decorated with only a bit of tasteful graffiti.

  “Bankrupt and closed in 2010, at the top of the European Crisis,” Biro explained as he pushed his way in. “Hey Cristian: what’s cooking?”

  “Here to visit Nasim again? I think he’s out.” The tall, muscular-looking man with the full black beard saw the other two of us. He smiled but there was a wariness behind it.

  “Penny.” I held out my hand.

  “Markos.”

  “They’re friends of mine from Vakalo,” Biro said.

  “Go on up,” Cristian shrugged.

  This was a squat. Of course it was. Biro had just said it had closed in 2010, and the condition of the outside said it was abandoned. Inside, the desk was manned but not by a concierge. They had posters and a bulletin board and a couple people that I was pretty sure were volunteers.

  Well, and there was a little boy vacuuming.

  From what we could see on our way to the stairs, the dining room and other common areas had been re-purposed. I could hear the voices of children. From the kitchen came the smells of cooking. Highly spiced cooking. Middle-Eastern maybe? The sounds were different, the language different.

  We made it to a room on the fourth floor and Biro had a short conversation with the woman within.

  “This is Shirine,” he introduced her. “She is shy in English and prefers Greek.”

  “Kalimera,” I said politely. She seemed worried. She was pacing as she cradled a small child. The room looked small but comfortable with fabric over the walls and low furniture on the several worn rugs.

  Biro pressed her with more questions. He rolled his eyes at the answer. “She says he’s gone to the march,” he told us. “She’s very worried.” He didn’t need to add that.

  “Protest march?” I guessed.

  “Good place to stay away from.” Markos shook his head.

  “Oh?”

  Biro flashed me a grin. “We Athenians take our politics seriously.” He sobered. “Sometimes too seriously. Shirine is worried he will get hurt.”

  I stepped forward. “We’ll look for him,” I told her.

  “She was in Elliniko before,” Biro was telling me. “That’s the official refugee camps, built at the old international airport.”

  “Where they built the stadiums when the Olympics were here. Now it is mostly ruins.”

  “Sounds like quite a palimpsest,” I said.

  “The conditions are very bad there,” Biro continued. “Overcrowded. Everyone is sick. And there is violence. They come from countries at war and some of them can’t leave that war behind. That’s why the Anarchists came to open up some of the abandoned buildings around Athens and create something better.”

  “You know the City Plaza Hotel isn’t actually abandoned, right?” Markos chided. “It still has an owner. Aliki can’t sell it while the city is trying to decide what to do, and now she can’t afford the mortgage.”

  “And I care, why?”

  “Are you trying to be a Georgio here? If people like her can’t afford to build, then who are those anarchists of yours going to steal from?”

  “Robin Hood needs the rich as much as he needs the poor,” I commented. “Does Georgio really hate everyone?”

  “No, just anyone in government, anyone rich, and anyone who isn’t like him,” Biro told me.

  “Biro,” I said quietly. “Are you okay? Is this...?”

  “They used to beat up Giannis Antetokounmpo. Of the Milwaukee Bucks. Every day, they’d beat him up on the way home from school. His parents are Nigerian. Then he started winning basketball games and now they are proud to call him Greek.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “It shouldn’t be like that. Not anywhere. I’m sorry that it is.”

  Biro flashed his smile. It didn’t have the strength it usually had, but it was there. “It is getting better. Athens is a good place. Maybe better than most.”

  Markos was still looking sour. I caught his eyes. Held contact.

  “It’s not that,” he said. “This demonstration.” He made a sort of half-wave. “There is storm in the air. This is the kind of day when people go a little mad. The light is already gone and the sun will soon be down. You should stay away from Syntagma.”

  I decided not to answer that. “There are a lot of demonstrations?” I asked instead.

  “You should have been here earlier this month!” Biro crowed.

  “She should not have been here earlier this month.”

  “Okay, I’ll bite.”

  “Commemoration for Pavlos Fyssas — Killah P. He was a great musician. Spoke out against fascism and racism and in support of immigrant rights. You’d like this, Penny. When they marched, they also held up a picture of Heather Heyer.”

  “The woman who was killed at Charlottesville?”

  “Fyssas was stabbed by a member of Golden Dawn.”

  “Golden Dawn?” That sounded like something out of a pulp novel. I know my life had taken an Indiana Jones turn lately, but that was getting ridiculous.

  “Far-right party. Hyper-nationalist, anti-immigration. They lost a lot of seats over the killing.”

  “And Antifa bombed their offices.” Markos sounded like he wasn’t sure he approved.

  “Twice.” Biro most definitely did.

  “Slow down, guys! So a bunch of Neo-Nazis are an actual government party? And people go around planting bombs?” The guys nodded at both. “Athens is a weird town,” I said. What else could I say?

  A bus whipped past me, cutting me off. I looked. The light was in my favor but nobody was stopping.

  “Come on,” Markos tugged. We stepped out into the street and the cars politely stopped for us.

  “Signs are just a suggestion, eh? Well, as long as everyone is paying attention.” I reflected it was the same thing I’d seen my first day, up on the Acropolis. They might not believe in traffic rules but Athenians had situational awareness. And courtesy. Well, compared to my home town!

  We could hear the chants by now. Unlike the big march in February, this was more a loose conglomeration of different demonstrations. One group was waving signs with a fancy yellow star on it. “Vergina Sun,” Markos explained. “The Star of Macedon. Found on Philip’s grave. The FYROM tried to put it on their own flag until we protested.”

  “Hey, I know those guys! That one there with the long gray hair? He’s an Anarchist from Thessaloniki. Here’s your Macedonians, Penny.”

  “Who is that up on the platform there?”

  “Might be Mikis Theodorakis. He spoke in February. Took a lot of heat for it.”

  “Why?” Greek politics was bewildering.

  “Mikis — in his music, he resisted the Junta. But then he goes up on stage with them.”

  “Biro, it is not the same. You guys always do this. This is the Syriza government. The cops make a living just like you do. You just want to keep reliving the student rebellions.”

  Biro shook his head. “You are the most conservative art student I know. I think you were born in the wrong century.”

  “What, is this because I enjoy good music?”

  “Boys! Boys!” I stretched out, and managed to get an arm about both their shoulders. “Let’s check it out,” I said lightly. “And keep an eye out for your friend.”

  We crossed another busy street, dodging around the tour buses double-parked at one edge. We had reached the shade trees, the carefully manicured squares of green, and the busy Syntagma Square, the Parliament Building in front of us. And wouldn’t the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and its g
uardian Evzones be in that direction, too?

  It was quite a crowd. There were a lot of flags waving. And banners. I had never seen so much blue and white in one place. I even saw a few people painted up like soccer fans with the cross and stripes of the Greek flag.

  There were older people, children, students, sophisticated looking business types, people that looked like they had driven up from their farms just this morning. It was a rather inspiring scene of patriotism and solidarity.

  “Who is that group over there?” I pointed.

  “Georgio’s buddies. Golden Dawn.”

  “You forget, Biro. They worship Metaxas. Georgio wouldn’t have anything to do with them.”

  “They haven’t been the same since old Spyros died, anyhow. His daughter doesn’t seem interested in bankrolling them the way he did.”

  I was trying to wrap my head around it. Of course. Nationalism. Rejection of FYROM’s claims. Politics made strange bedfellows. No wonder Mikis…Mikis?…got in trouble. “Mikis is a musician?”

  “Oh really, Athena?”

  Biro merely rolled his eyes.

  “You know his music. You danced to his music.”

  “You? You danced the sirtaki?” Biro looked first at me, then at Markos. “He danced the sirtaki? He danced it with you?”

  “Yes, Biro.” Patiently.

  “You’re more hopeless than I thought!” Biro was losing it. “The sirtaki! What, bingo and shuffleboard not traditional enough for you?”

  Markos was about to say something. Then something caught his eye. “Hey, isn’t that…”

  “Yeah, it is. Hold on. I’ll go talk to her.” He was back in a moment. “We’re in luck. She saw Nasim earlier. He’d hooked up with some Polytechnics.”

  “That isn’t good news,” Markos said.

  “Sure it is. Wanna go visit Exarcheia now, ‘Athena?’”

  I made a “See what you’ve done now?” expression at Markos.