Hidden Knowledge

With our first day of class under our belts Professor Finitsis posed the topic to find hidden knowledge about Athens. We then set out for the central market and the metropolitan downtown area of Athens, even passing through the center of Athens itself. We passed many banks, high end clothing stores, part of the University of Athens, and the Academy of Arts and Sciences on our way finally ending up in the direct center of the city.

It was here that I discovered the hidden knowledge of Athens that I had not known before: the center of Athens contains more immigrants than actual Greeks. This astounded me. When I think the center of a city I think of the main location in a city where you can see it's heart and soul. The city then spreads out in all directions taking on different attributes according to the influences of that specific section of the city.

As I mentioned in my last post there is a lot of graffiti around the city that is all in Greek. For example this photo on the Academy of Arts and Sciences:


But in the center of the city I found this on the roof of a kiosk:

Professor Finitsis told us a story about his mom that really impacted me about the center of Athens. One night she was traveling home on the bus and she had to change buses right in the square we were in and his next line took me by surprise: "She asked people when the next bus was coming but she could not understand any of the responses she got because none of them were in Greek". All the responses she got were in different languages other than Greek which seems weird to me because the one language I would expect to hear in the center of the capital of Greece would be Greek. Yet this was not the case. And that is my hidden knowledge of Athens: there are more immigrants than Greeks in the center of Athens.