This is Syntagma Square, and the big cream-colored building at the top of it is the Greek Parliament. The two soldiers standing dead still in front, in white pleated skirts and shoes with pom-poms on the toes, are the Evzones, the presidential guard. Keep half an eye on them. The man this building was made for ends his story dressed exactly like them.
The building was a palace, and it was built for a teenager.
In eighteen thirty-two, after Greece won its war of independence, the great powers of Europe met in London and decided the new country needed a king. Nobody asked the Greeks. They picked Otto, the second son of the King of Bavaria. He was seventeen, he was Catholic in an Orthodox country, and he didn't speak Greek. He arrived by ship with a crowd of Bavarian advisers and a Bavarian army, ready to run Greece like a tidy German province. Greeks had a word for it within a few years: Bavarokratia, the rule of the Bavarians.
One of the first decisions made in his name was to move t
he capital to Athens. At the time it was a battered town of a few thousand people, with goats in the lanes and the most famous ruins on earth sitting on the hill. They more or less chose it for the view, and then had to build a capital underneath it. This palace was the centerpiece. It took seven years, and Otto moved in during eighteen forty-three.
He got a few months of peace.
On the night of
