Nick Mamatas
Home is Where...
My Greek is terrible, but it was good enough to say, “I am not a tourist. I am a visitor,” when I was walking through the anarchist neighborhood of Exarchia in Athens, where graffiti reading Die, tourists, die! in English decorates the walls. I have the vocabulary and syntactic ability of a child, but my Greek accent is convincing, and authentically rustic. In Ikaria, the home island of my father and relatives on both sides of my family, I was complimented on my American accent when I spoke English. But Exarchia felt more like home than the horio.
There are two simultaneous bottlenecks for the Greek-American; family and time. Nobody is a perfect exemplar of a culture; we all just practice some personal version of it, even as we declare that the reason we think this or say that or make a certain gesture is because of some essential Greekness. And time is like amber; the prior generation is the fly in the Greece of the early 1970s, or 1948, or 1922—the political or religious concerns, the music, the slang or regional idiom. Ah, but surely all Greek-Americans return to Greece every summer, Nick, and get a refresher on all things Greek! There we go again, insisting that there is some essential Greekness that all Greek-Americans practice. My family just didn’t go to Greece, save once, in the early 1990s. Politics, thrift (what?!), egoism, family conflict, anxiety—pick a reason, any reason. I was reading a biography of Trotsky at the time, and brought it with me. My father warned me that I might be arrested; for him the junta never ended. He also made me cut my hair before the trip, which was very long at the time. I was in my twenties, and he’s dictating haircuts.
My parents (one Greek immigrant, one Greek American) are much like other Greeks and also not at all like other Greeks. Is it all food and family and Easter and paranoid politics? Sure. But, let me put it this way: my parents didn’t even dance at my wedding, despite them hiring a Greek band to play it. Even the food servers (not Greek) got swept up into doing the Ikariotiko! Dancing is just not a thing my parents enjoy doing, so I needed an aunt to quickly teach me the steps.
I grew up barely knowing the language as my father needed to learn English, relatively irreligious as my sister has a physical intolerance to incense, in public schools after two years of Greek parochial school for some still obscure-to-me budgetary drama in the church, and—this is one of the few things my father ever expressed pride in me and my sister over (though he never told me, just my sister)—I’ve never worked in a restaurant. What I had instead of all things Greek was the left of the FM radio dial, Marvel comics, and the Village Voice. I was always interested in the underground, science fiction, and other “crazy things” that, according to my mother, who’d perform all the hectoring, my father “didn’t understand.” That’s what being Greek was—not understanding anything that wasn’t Greek. And that even included the typical practices of Greek American culture. I didn’t even know what FDF was until a few years ago. I told ya I didn’t dance.
Meanwhile, in Greece...
The ferry to Ikaria got an actual dock. (In the old days, the days of family stories, small boats would meet the ferry a hundred meters out.) Then the island even got an airport. The runway is shorter than the dead-end street I grew up on.
And the hospital was refurbished and modernized thanks to remittances from Ikarian-Americanizes and a new building constructed. Many of my relatives are nurses. (“Is the hospital any good?” I asked my cousin, who works there, as we drove past it last year. “No,” she said.)
Several of my cousins who didn’t speak English thirty years ago, when I’d met them last, do now. I took my son to meet his same-age cousins, most of whom don’t speak English, and he doesn’t speak any Greek. I thought soccer would be the universal language and organized a game. When I grew tired, I went to wash my face and freshen up in the bathroom. Five minutes later I returned to find that my son and his cousins had all managed to communicate video game preferences and had their devices out to team up on some shoot-’em-up phone game. There’s your universal language.
I foolishly hadn’t even considered that the home we were visiting had wi-fi. The future is here, in Greece, but so is the present and the recent past as well. I’ve been Facebook friends with everyone for years. Messenger starts chiming every evening of December 5th, because it’s already my name day in Ikaria. The future is there!
But I’m shown family photos not on phones, but via photo albums. When, before this trip, did I last touch a photo album? Not in the twenty-first century. In America, photo albums are essentially haunted. Not flies in amber, but souls nailed to backing in the manner of captured butterflies. It’s amazing to see all that I’ve missed. In one photo, I see my cousin’s brother, who was a teen when I last met him, all grown up playing bouzouki. (“Is he any good?” I asked her. “No,” she said.)
Then, off to Athens and Exarchia. I pick up my son’s roller bag as we walk down the street as I didn’t want the sound of plastic scraping jagged sidewalk to attract unwanted anti-tourist political attention. We go to a comic shop, just as we might at home. We eat loukoumades at a hip little joint, but it’s loukoumades with a zillion different offered toppings, like the obnoxious specialty doughnuts here in my neighborhood. I pick a soccer team (AEK) based on anti-Nazi stickers on a lamppost to pretend to care about. At home, anti-Nazi stickers decorate lampposts too—and I’ve stuck a few up (please don’t deport me to El Salvador)—but sports teams are not involved. I’d warned my son not to pack his own kiddie team’s jersey, which he loves to wear, because it is green; I just didn’t want to get thrown out of the car of an Olympiacos-supporting cabbie. This isn’t any different than having to pretend to know what happened at last night’s Red Sox game when I lived in Boston. Whaddaya mean yah don’t like spawts!
In Exarchia, the cops have invaded the neighborhood and sealed off a major center to develop it—a Metro station.
Back here in Berkeley, California, the cops here have done the same thing to a local park so the state can develop it into college dorms. American cops moved with less brutality, but installed larger barriers. Now, a city block is ringed with shipping containers. My father came from Greece to America to work as a longshoreman. His job—and aren’t maritime trades very Greek jobs?—was to maintain the gantry cranes that lift shipping containers off the boats and plop them down according to the dictates of global capitalism. What can I tell you? The future is here, in the present, and on the Internet. Greece is here, in America. America is there, in Greece. Capitalism is everywhere, but so too is the underground, beneath the cobblestones.
January 13, 2026
Nick Mamatas is a novelist, anthologist, and playwright. His latest novel, Kalivas! Or, Another Tempest combines Shakespeare, science fiction (SF), and the fate of the last Greek-American on Earth. His latest anthology is 120 Murders: Dark Fiction Inspired by the Alternative Era, and his one-act play "The Failure of the Century" recently had a staged reading in London with Cyborphic, a company specializing in SF and Greek theater.