My ID says I was born in Thessaloniki, but never put too much trust in IDs. I am an Athenian. Of the five thousand inhabitants Athens had in 1827, one was the father of my maternal great-great-grandfather, in other words, my grandmother’s grandfather. This man had vegetable gardens – they still existed when I was little, owned by some cousins of mine – in Agios Ioannis Rentis, just six kilometers from the Acropolis.

“One day,” my grandmother once told me talking about those vegetable gardens, “my grandfather, may he rest in peace, came home and brought us a cabbage. It was a huge cabbage. He placed it on the kitchen table, playfully pulled my braids, and left. That day my mother made me peel some potatoes. While I was peeling the potatoes, I saw the head of a snake coming out of the cabbage. I froze. Then I screamed. Mom! Mom! A snake!… Not all snakes bite, some are actually good, they bring luck, in the old days every house had its snake, and you weren’t supposed to kill it, the husband of a friend of mine killed the snake they had at home, and since then they never saw any good fortune or success, but I was still little then, and I didn’t know all that…”

My great-great-grandfather gave up his father’s cabbages and opened a café at the intersection of Piraeus and Kolokynthous streets, opposite the Orphanage. His wife was from Andros, but all their children – the eldest was my grandmother – were born in Athens, which in the meantime had grown, had many magnificent neoclassical buildings, and eighty thousand inhabitants. These children, when they wanted to play a little farther from their home, which was also on a side street of Kolokynthous, went to the ancient cemetery of Kerameikos. “I was the oldest, and I looked after all my siblings. So every time the boys disappeared, my late mother would send me to see if they were playing in Kerameikos. To tell you the truth, even then I didn’t know it was an old cemetery, but even if I had known, I wouldn’t have been afraid. What can the dead do to you? God protect you from the living…”