Most of you are already in Greece for a good 2 months period. Maybe you have managed to dive into the modern greek craziness and for sure you have absorbed by the chaos of Athens. Unfortunately you have to search to find the genuine Greece in Athens but if you are willing to you can do it.
But what we call Greece nowadays is really far from the great Greek culture of Ancient Times. Maybe Athens has a glorious name and history but the contemporaty image is huge conrete jungle with people trying to survive the jungle that created For sure Solon, Aristo, Plato did not imagine something like that and the Athenians of that time would have build something better, something the world would be starring with amazement.
Greece as an organised society actually has seized to exist for centuries. It came back with the collapse of Ottoman empire. Modern Greeks consider themselved to be pure descentants of the glorious ancient greeks but actually their culture is so far from that. Actually what we are and what you see is the leftover of a multi national balkan neighbourhoud. Balkans are complicated. For almost 400-500 all over balkans greeks, turks, bulgarians, albanian and serbians lived together. Nowadays almost everyone denies that and claims its nationalistic identity. Balkans is the place where people love to dance to the music of the nation they hate. Slav macedonians dance to greek music, greeks dance to turkish rhythms and albanians party with serbian brass. So besides food, language, common herritage and so on music can be the most powerful link to all these fragmented national groups.
The balkan sound has been popularized ironically by a german DJ called Shantel. Balkans being so explosive is reflected to its music. Watch the following video and you will understand.
The lyrics initially are greek, then turkish, then english. Greeks will claim it as greek song, turkish as turkish. The only thing that we can for granted is that there will be a huge party on November 18th at Fuzz Club.
Come and discover the balkan soul! The StayInAthens team will be there!
