The Rooftop Gardens That Feed a Street and Argue All Summer

ATHENS — The tomatoes come down the stairwell at eleven at night, still warm from a day of stored heat, and the argument starts before the baskets hit the courtyard. On rooftops across the warm belt, the block-level garden has become a fixture of the inverted summer — planted, watered, and harvested in the cool hours after dark, because the midday sun would cook the leaves and the gardeners both. In this Exarcheia building the yield feeds a dozen households, and dividing it has become the neighborhood's nightly parliament. Who watered when the Tsakiris family was away? Should the shaded corner go to herbs or to the widow on the fourth floor who cannot climb to the market anymore? The debates run past midnight and settle nothing permanently, which everyone seems to prefer. "The food is half of it," said one resident, weighing a bag of peppers on a hand scale by lamplight. "The other half is that for one hour a night the whole building has to talk to each other." In a hot century that drove people indoors and apart, the cool-hour harvest has quietly done the opposite. The tomatoes are excellent. The arguing is better.