Three winters ago, in a kafeneio off Acharnon Street where the ceiling fans had not turned since the junta fell, I watched an old man named Yiorgos roll the dice with the same hand that had rolled them against German officers in 1943. The board between us was inlaid walnut — its alternating ivory and ebony points worn to a polish you cannot fake, the kind of surface that takes four decades of coffee, cigarette ash, and fingertips to achieve. He did not look at the dice when they landed. He looked at the board, at the grain, at me.
The kafeneio that afternoon held maybe nine men, all over sixty, distributed among three tables. Two played tavli. The rest watched, or read newspapers whose pages had yellowed past the point of relevance, or worked their komboloi beads in slow, unconscious circuits — thumb over thumb, bead after amber bead, a rhythm so steady it might as well have been the room's heartbeat.