Home life in Hellas, Greece and the Greeks - eBooks4Greeks.gr

ATHENS 325without coming across an eating-house. Thebest are in Stadium Street. In the popularquarters they abound. Often they occupy cellarsand are approached by a steep flight of steps fromthe pavement. The Greek easily turns restaurateur.There are many establishments of whatmay be called an amateur character. A group ofUniversity students will prevail upon a shopkeeperto cater for them, and meet at noon and evebehind a screen in a corner, and the fare is oftenbetter in these extemporised dining-rooms than inthe regular establishments. Their clients alwaysbelong to the same province, and the city isof these little coteries.fullIt has been computed thatonly about a third of the population isborn.AthenianIn the early years of the nineteenth century,according to Finlay, the proportions were thesame, and of the native third, he says that morethan half was Albanian. But these conditionsare by no means new. Tacitus in his day remarkedthat the old Athenians were extinct, andhad been replaced by divers races. The modernAthenians are therefore a conglomerate, fusedinto a more or less homogeneous whole. It wasnot so in the early years of the new kingdom.the thirties, forties, and fiftiesInthe Athenians bornheld aloof from the Phanariots from Constantinople,whom they called heterocthones, they themselvesbeing autocthones. The Phanariots werelooked upon with a jealous eye and kept out ofpublic offices. Then came the wealthy bankers