The name is absent

122

Chapter 4

At two-thirty in the afternoon on a hot Tuesday in mid-August I arrived at the
Roma compound in Halandri to meet an old friend. I walked along the hilly street that
divided the site into two halves and which connected it to two nearly parallel main roads,
one to the north and the other to the south. This was the most direct way into the
compound, but also the most dangerous. Cars usually flew blindly over and down the
sudden rises and falls of this pot-holed street at high speed: strangers to the area looking
for a shortcut between major traffic arteries often turned onto this road unwittingly; a
happening that was on the rise as in-car satellite navigation was becoming more common.
Finding themselves in the midst of the Roma the vast majority of drivers would hasten a
speedy escape - to everyone’s peril¹²⁸.

Crossing into the residential tangle, I made my way quickly over the deeply rutted
dirt path and around discarded building materials and play-things. Most residents were
milling about, bleary-eyed, unable to take their afternoon naps due to the intense heat.
Nearly four years of unusually extreme Iate-Summer temperatures had made this nearly
delirious meandering-about a common sight at the compound. The sound of
conversations, playing children, and radios bubbled in the hot air around me. The
piercing screech of folk music from a nearby loudspeaker would occasionally disrupt the
calm, jerking the few individuals on the verge of napping out of their reverie. I patted the
usual dogs and walked along the path up to my friend, Vasilo, who was sitting in an old
desk chair near her house. By the time I reached her a throng of young children had

¹²⁸ This near automatic speeding behaviour, which seems illogical considering the broken road and obvious
risk to children playing in the street, is a function of the invisible border that surrounds Romani spaces,
which, as will be explored below, most Athenians observe as marking dangerous place.

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