Siestas are Serious Business
When I was seven years old, our family moved to Athens, Greece. My dad was an airline pilot and his company contracted with Olympic Airlines to do some teaching/training. The plan was to stay there for a year, but life happened and we had to return to the states after about three months. I posted about it previously here The Summer of 1972. As young as we were, the summer in Greece left a big impression on us.
We rented the bottom apartment in a three story flat topped house. Our landlords, Constance and Sofia, lived on the top floor. The house was a wondrous place for a seven year old and her brother. Lemon trees, an aviary full of birds, the cats, a Koi pond, a guest house which also had a flat roof and was covered with lattice and grape vines. I loved to spend time up there in the shade where we could also look behind the house and watch kids playing in the neighborhood park. We could access the roof of the main house by climbing the iron spiral staircase at the back of the house. From the rooftop, you could see the sea and if I remember accurately, you could also see the Parthenon. The house was along the flight path, so we spent a lot of time up there watching for dad to fly over.
Sofia, our landlord
On the front porch
Some of the yard cats
The glassed in porch/breakfast nook
The main stairs to the upper floors.
My dad, fishing in the pond
DJ trying hard to pull up the fish
Oh, it was another one of dad’s jokes!
I remember eating the lemons from the yard, mom cut them up and would give me some sugar for dipping. Yum! Constance teased me about it, saying that the lemons were perfect fresh from the trees and would regularly pick and eat them, rind and all, just like an apple. I tried, and failed, to copy him.
One thing that I will never forget was when DJ and I were playing with a hose and a tub in the front yard one sunny afternoon. I am guessing that we were laughing and squealing, as kids tend to do when playing in water, because what I really remember is Sofia leaning out of her third floor window. Angry. Yelling at us in Greek, waving her hand. I was confused. We hadn’t broken anything. Later, I found out that we had disrupted siesta time. A very serious infraction. We tried to respect siesta time from then on and I do believe that she eventually forgave us.
I found this online:
It is not only considered very bad manners in Greece to make noise during the period from around 2 to 5 pm (and especially after 3 pm), but there is a law against it (though broken sometimes by those doing construction or using rototillers, because work is often excused if the workers have no other time to do that work). This is less so and rarely enforced in the city of Athens much to the chagrin of many local residents. In theory it is quiet time. Siesta time!
So if a visitor to Greece is staying in a rooms complex that is near the houses of local Greeks, it is not appropriate to sit outside talking loudly and playing a radio or live music at that time.
The same need for quiet holds for those renting apartments in Greek towns or cities. During the hot summer months the midday meal and nap may get pushed forward until it cools off a little, with the meal even as late as 4 pm, and the nap to 5 pm or so. Few rules are ‘set in stone’ in Greece, but to be on the safe side, in the heat of summer, one should be aware that many Greeks are still napping until maybe 6:30.
Many visitors to Greece learn to do as the Greeks do, and find that this way of patterning one’s day makes perfect sense, given the climate.
For years, if we were in trouble, or about to get into trouble, my dad would lift his hand like Sofia did and we knew that we had better stop what ever we were doing and shape up!!
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”! Starr managed to make it back to the sorority house before losing it and felt horrible the rest of the day, she ended up missing all of her Friday classes.
