Greek roads are a fascinating experiment in libertarianism. On an almost empty motorway, a fellow driver used the hard shoulder to overtake me. I was doing 80 mph at the time – quite legally, your honour. If you see a yellow traffic light, it doesn’t mean “slow down it’s about to go red”, it means “speed up it’s about to go red!” A reader tells me he was once honked at and abused by an Orthodox priest because he stopped at a pedestrian crossing to let a woman go by with a pram.
I was in Greece for the Orthodox Easter and can report that the Athenians otherwise score very high on my personal civilisation scale: they still smoke in restaurants and, during Holy Week at least, they still go to church. For the vigil on Saturday night, we took the funicular up Lycabettus Hill (the highest point in Athens) to the tiny chapel that sits on its peak. We collected an unlit candle and staked out a prime spot at the back, taking in the stunning frescos on the walls (including a sounder of Gadarene swine flying off a cliff). The priest disappeared behind the iconostases; the choir sang the Easter litany. The laity did what the Orthodox do to the astonishment of tourists: mill about, venerate, pop out for a chat or a cheeky cigarette. The temple is always alive with sound and movement.
