Stray Dogs Are A Problem In Athens

Stray dogs are a problem in Athens. Not because they will attack you or chase you through the city streets. It is mostly an image problem. You have this big modern city and wandering around, lounging in the shade, solo and in packs, are dogs. Some are pets, some are former pets and some have never been pets at all.
The downtown dogs are pretty well behaved. Many are streetwise, literally. My mother was curious as to how they could cross some of the big Athens avenues so she watched them. She discovered that the dogs would go to the pedestrian crossings and stand there. No they did not know that the little green man meant it was OK for them to cross. They would wait until some humans came and then cross with them. Plaka and downtown dogs are very good natured. They are around people all the time and have few needs, all of which are available in the neighborhood: food, water and shade.
Some of the dogs have hob-knobbed with the rich and famous. Bill Neil, author of Southern Cooking, told me of a night on the Acropolis when he and REM's Michael Stipe snuck in and befriended the strays that live on and around the ancient rock. I have seen stray Plaka dogs grooving to the Chieftans at the dirty corner in front of the monument to Lysacratus. Those of you who have seen the movie FOR THE LOVE OF BENJI may recall that when Benji gets lost in downtown Athens he is befriended by one of the Plaka dogs who took his siestas in the ancient agora. In fact it was the Plaka dog that protected Benji when the mean Dobermans that belonged to the bad guys came searching for him to find the micro-chip implanted in his fur, or collar (I forget which).
A few years ago Kiki Zikou at Dolphin Hellas told me I needed to write an article about the dogs in the old airport. The next time I left Greece, sure enough there were dogs wandering around the terminal. With the new airport so far out of town it is unlikely that you will see any dogs and I am off the hook for the article I never got around to writing. Even so you have to wonder about a country that had dogs wandering around the airport. Maybe they were undercover police dogs. Maybe they belonged to an airport employee who could not leave them home in the apartment because they barked and bothered the neighbors so they just came to work with him. Most likely they were like any other stray dogs in Athens. They are such a part of the landscape that you don't even notice them.
I remember coming home early one morning from the Plaka to my neighborhood in Agia Paraskevis in 1972. As I was walking up the hill I saw a pack of about twenty dogs coming towards me. This made me a little nervous. Who knew whether these were pets, or strays looking for a lone human to rip to shreds and devour without a trace. How many people, whose disappearance off the face of the earth had fueled stories of alien abductions, were merely eaten by packs of wild urban and suburban dogs? As these thoughts went through my head I realized that leading the gang of dogs was Reinhart, our family dog who lived in a suitcase on our back porch! He came up and greeted me with a sniff and a wag of his tail and then continued on to do whatever it is that packs of dogs do at four in the morning. (I was actually proud that our dog was the leader of the pack).