Whatever You Do, Don’t Dig

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This morning we’ve booked a ”mythological” tour of Athens’ highlights. I’m not sure exactly what this means, but Issy’s sensing a lot of ancient temples so elects to stay in bed. I’m a bit surprised she’s let me venture out on my own. She said last night that I shouldn’t go out after dark by myself given that we seem to be staying in the middle of the red light district. I wasn’t quite sure whether that was because she thought I might get mugged or because she was afraid I might “accidentally” get lured into one of the strip clubs. Anyway most of them seem to be closed at 8am this morning, not of course that I was taking all that much notice……

Our guide introduces himself as Evan. He says that this is short for Evangalitis, but the only people who’ve ever called him that were his mother and angry school teachers. He tells us that he studied European history in Athens and then as an exchange student at Cologne in Germany.

First cab off the rank is the Temple of Olympian Zeus and the adjacent Hadrian's Arch, both of which we stopped by briefly during our wanderings last evening. We quickly learn that there’s going to a heavy emphasis on mythology during the tour. We’re told that Zeus was the king of the Twelve Gods of Mount Olympus, and although there seem to be several versions of most Greek myths, all of them seem to acknowledge that he was the original serial womaniser. There seems to be significant crossover between myth and history. Until as recently as the late nineteenth century, the Trojan War had apparently been regarded as entirely mythical. Then in 1871 archaeologists unearthed the remains of the actual city of Troy in western Turkey. On a similar note there are many references in Ancient Greek mythology to a great flood, and the stories seem to bear a striking resemblance to those of Noah and his ark. In the Greek mythological version, Prometheus (a Titan, or pre Olympian god) advised his son Deucalion to build a small boat, and when the flood came he and his wife Pyrrha floated around for nine days while everyone else perished. They eventually came to land on Mount Parnassus 100 kms or so north west of Athens.

Next stop is the morning’s major site of interest, the iconic Acropolis. It sits on a massive flat topped rocky outcrop above the city, and dominates the skyline. It includes the remains of a number of ancient buildings, the most significant of which is the Parthenon. We’re told that construction of the buildings we can still see the remains of today were coordinated by a gent named Pericles in the fifth century BC.

It’s a bit hard not to notice that the entire Temple of Olympian Zeus and large sections of the buildings on the Acropolis, including the Parthenon, seem to be clad in scaffolding. I know it’s a long time ago, but I’m sure I’ve got black and white pictures of all of this lot from my visit here with my parents way back in 1964, and from memory there was no sign of any scaffolding in any of them. And it seems I’m right. Evan tells us that the repairs to these structures have been ongoing for somewhere around forty years, so since the 1980s. He says he finds this a bit frustrating, as forty years is thirty three years longer than it took to build the Parthenon originally. He says he’s now very jealous that I came here at a time when visitors were free to trample all over the inside of the Parthenon, which is now completely roped off and out of bounds, as it should be. He says he was allowed in there once when he was training to be a guide, as the powers that be insisted that he had detailed knowledge of every square inch of all of the Acropolis’ structures. I thought he might have been pleased about this, but it seems they made him and his fellow guides earn their stripes; they were made to spend three days up here in the middle of summer without a break, which he says was tortuous. Tour guide school sounds like a tough gig.

Being up on the Acropolis almost feels like a visit to the cradle of modern civilisation. The Parthenon’s clearly the big ticket item, but by no means the only item. The Erechtheion or Temple of Athena Polias was built sometime around 430 BC. Its standout feature is the Porch of the Maidens, which is supported by six female sculpted figures. And then there’s the Propylaea, the western gate, built somewhere around 437 BC. It might have been handy if the ancient Greeks had foreseen the volume of tourist traffic that would be coming through here in 2022 and thought to build a few more gates. This is the only way in and it’s ridiculously crowded. Evan says we need to watch out for pickpockets in the crush. It’s also getting a bit hard to keep track of Evan himself through the surging crowd, and he seems only too painfully aware of the issue. He says his worst nightmare is getting back to the gate at the end of the tour to find that all his charges have gone missing. I’m relying on being able to keep eyes on the lady from Brisbane with the bright pink top, or failing that the guy from Connecticut with the distinctive floral shirt.

Evan gives us a bit of a lesson in some English words with perhaps slightly odd Greek derivations. The word “hypocrite” apparently comes from the Greek word for actor. The original actors were seen as portraying something they weren’t, which has now turned into the derogatory English term for someone who says something but then does something else. The word “idiot” comes from the Greek word meaning an ordinary person - anyone not involved in Government. So politicians aren’t idiots.… Hmmm. Things have clearly changed a lot over the millenia ……

We’re told that all the statues up here are replicas, with many of the originals now being housed in the Acropolis Museum. This leads in to the sad and controversial story of the Elgin Marbles. Lord Elgin came to Greece in 1799 as the British Ambassador to the Byzantine Empire which ruled Greece at the time. He claims that he applied to the Byzantine Government to remove statues from the Acropolis, and that he received official assent to do so. The documentation of this is kept in British Museum, but its authenticity has long been questioned. It seems in particular to lack the formalities that would have normally been expected of edicts from the Sultan. Elgin initially took the statues to Malta, which was a British protectorate at the time, and then onto England where he intended to use them to decorate his country manor. It just so happened that at the time he was going through a messy and expensive divorce, so to help get himself out of debt he sold them to the British Government, albeit at less than half the ten million or so Aussie dollars (in today‘s terms) that he originally paid for them. They’ve been under the trusteeship of the British Museum since 1816. The Greeks finally managed to free themselves from Byzantine rule in 1832 and they’ve been trying to get the statues back ever since. The issue’s even gone to UNESCO, which in 2021 called on the United Kingdom to return them to their rightful owners.

We leave the Acropolis and head down into the maze of streets and colourful neoclassical buildings of the Plaka District. This has developed around the ruins and remains of the Ancient Athens Agora, an open space used for public gatherings, markets, and speeches by rulers. And what don’t you want to ever have to do if you live here … Evan tells us that you never ever want to have to do any digging. In fact you’re not allowed to unless there’s some sort of emergency such as your toilet overflowing through your living room. They might then let you do some digging say to unblock your sewer, but only if you’ve got an archaeologist constantly looking over your shoulder. If the archaeologist then finds anything significant such as the remains of an ancient temple, well you’re in a world of trouble. The government will appropriate your house, and it will probably be twenty five years or so until you get it back. Based on what I’ve been seeing I don’t think there’s any chance of anyone doing any digging here and not finding something; every second or third block seems to be a hole with excavated ruins at the bottom of it. I wonder what happened to those houses; when Evan said you’d get your house back he didn’t specifically say it would be somewhere else when that happened, but it’s a bit hard to draw any other conclusions.

The final part of the tour is through the main section of the Ancient Agora which is littered with ancient statues and other ruins. The most notable structure here is the Temple of Hephaestus, which is believed to have been constructed in the second half of the fourth century BC. It‘s almost completely intact, including the roof, and Evan tells us that it‘s generally regarded as the most completely intact Ancient Greek temple anywhere in the country.

I collect Issy and we head back to the Plaka District where we enjoy a very pleasant dinner in one of the main squares.

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Comments

[D MJ Binkley]

Athens Rich in History
Izzy does not seem to be enjoying the history and ruins of Athens. Maybe she saw too many growing up in Malta.

[RENanDREW]

Beautiful composition
I love this shot of the two churches... the little one was one of my favourites of all the churches we saw in Greece. You certainly hit all the big archeological sites in one go with this tour :)