Athens
Leaving Santorini, we took a very pleasant flight to Athens’ shiny-looking airport, followed by an easy train ride straight into Monastiraki Station, in the heart of the city. Emerging from the metro station we were immediately greeted by a massive classical ruin. I was to discover that this was in fact Hadrian’s Library, famous as the largest library in Roman Athens, but I began to wonder whether we would be accidentally tripping over monumental architecture everywhere we went. We walked to our hostel in the neighborhood of Psyrri, which although close to the Acropolis and other sights had a cool feel, the restaurants and bars not looking like their sole intention was to separate tourist from cash. Having checked into our room, which although not a patch on our abode in Santorini (no cave jacuzzi ☹) was still more than adequate, we sat at a pleasant jazz cafe on a little square and had some lunch.
Hadrian’s Library, apparently not a run of the mill ruin.
We then set out for the Acropolis, with some unfortunate twists and turns as we were approaching from the north and apparently all of the entrances were to the south. We were apparently not the only people to fall prey to this error, as we got stuck behind a large German family while trying to wend our way out of a neighborhood where the typical domestic adornments included spray-painting “FUK THA POLICE” in massive letters on the roof of your own house.
We showed up at a side entrance to the Acropolis by the Dionysian Theatre where a massive queue had formed. I have lived in London for long enough now to realize that the best things in life only happen at the front of a queue; the time one spends waiting forming a sort of cleansing sacrifice of one’s time that signifies the value one places on the front-of-queue activity. So I was of course perfectly content to stand in this line for as long as it took, proving to all and sundry how seriously I took the viewing of classical architecture.
Astounded by architecture
The line, however, showed little inclination towards moving, a serious breach of the compact between queue and queuee(?), and people around us were seething. A gang of American bros and brosephines, having shown a foresight generally unknown amongst their breed, had pre-bought tickets and waltzed in, leaving further irritation in their wake. At the point at which my commitment to queueing began to seriously waver, a laconic man on a segway, half-heartedly offering tours, mumbled with a faint air of condescension that we were waiting at a small entrance and would be better off going around to the main entrance. I am not inclined to trust the words of strangers on segways, but desperation dictated I set out for the main entrance. He was right, it was a much bigger entrance.
Many more learned people than I have written regarding the significance and aesthetics of the Acropolis in the intervening 2500 years since Pericles began rebuilding on top of the archaic Acropolis, which had been trashed by the Persians during their second invasion of Greece. So to add to their small thoughts I would say that as a work of monumental architecture one of the things I found interesting was the manner in which buildings were responsive to their site rather than to one another, differing sharply from more modern examples of monumental architecture where the site is adjusted to suit the needs of the buildings. This is reflective of the piecemeal method of construction of the separate buildings and the likely competing influences of the time in seeking greater prominence for one temple over another. Thus one has a juxtaposition of orderly, symmetrical classical architectural elements being placed at odds with one another (I should note here that “orderly” does not mean straight, of course- it is well known that not a single straight line exists in the structure of the Parthenon, though the architects of that building were such masters of visual suggestion that it appears to be so from many angles). Rather than creating an unpleasant sense of disharmony this enhances the individuality of each building on the site and allows the eye to observe its splendor in isolation from its neighbors. The site did have a sense of emptiness, which must have been mitigated by smaller, less permanent structures taking up some of the interstitial space. The complex of the Acropolis, extending down to the slopes, includes fascinating caves and the like; the sacred rock is host to such a variety of tiny cave shrines and offering places that the whole place feels alive still with devotion.
The Parthenon itself was under renovation at the time we saw it. It may well be one of those buildings that is always under construction, as the reconstruction update board had entries going back to the 70s. I can’t precisely applaud the conservators for leaving a whole bunch of building materials and heavy machinery in the middle of the temple as it kills the ambiance a bit, but I suppose space is limited on top of a big rock. I also must say that given that they are currently trying to rebuild a good chunk of the frieze and metopes around the top of the temple it would probably be helpful if the UK decided to atone for that dick Lord Elgin and give back the massive hunks of the building he stole.
A Brief and underresearched digression on Lord Elgin
This complete ass, Thomas Bruce, 7th Lord Elgin. He got sent to be ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. Wikipedia describes him as “showing considerable skill and energy in… the extension of British influence during the conflict between the Ottoman Empire and France.” That is all it has to say about his diplomatic career, but I’m sure he took it very seriously. He apparently even before setting off asked officials of the British Government whether they wanted him to come back with any loot, with the motive being conjectured that he was hoping to gain official sanction to steal some stuff for himself (at which he admirably succeeded! The Elgins still have a bunch of Parthenon just, like, hanging out in their house in Scotland!). So he went and asked the Ottoman Porte, or Sultan, whether he could do some drawings of the Parthenon, which he then bribed the guy into expanding to making casts and to excavate and carry away “some blocks of stone having inscriptions or figures upon them.” You ever have a friend where you offer them “some of your fries”, or “some of your dessert” and then look on aghast as they creatively interpret this to mean they can eat more of it than you? Now imagine that, but in regard to the statuary adorning one of the crowning achievements of western architecture. So Lord Elgin ripped off about 60% of the decorative work of the Parthenon (apparently justifying this as being in the best interest of the art as he would keep it safe from a Greek uprising), which an English clergyman, Edward Daniel Clarke, writing in 1810, noted, caused massive structural damage to the remaining temple and led to a whole bunch of the work being accidentally smashed or deliberately cut up into pieces for transport. Elgin then put the marbles on a boat bound for England, which promptly sank in the Mediterranean, and took 3 years to recover them from the bottom of the ocean, whereupon ensconced in London they got badly polluted and then irreparably scratched and deformed by unskilled cleaners from the British Museum. So I’m sure we all want to thank Lord Elgin for his fine work- as the British Museum puts it in a notice by the entrance to the gallery, “one thing is certain – his actions spared them further damage by vandalism, weathering and pollution.” Yes, yes, thanks very much for protecting them so well, Lord Elgin.
It is naive to complain about any particular piece of art and the means by which it was got; Lord Elgin is an egregious example but art museums are filled with such work. It is hard work getting together an impressive collection and even harder to do it if you have scruples. But leaving aside the moral question of what art and when art should be repatriated, from an aesthetic perspective it seems like in this particular case the value of the works in the context where they belong, at a site that is maintained and prepared for their return, outweighs its ensconcement in the British Museum next to all the other booty of empire (as Grace pointed out to me, there is basically nothing natively British in the whole of the British Museum).
Aereopagus Hill
Having satiated our appetite for classical architecture for one afternoon and walked over to Areopagus Hill to view the Acropolis from further away (wear good shoes there, the stone was so smooth it was like learning to ice-skate down a mountain) we returned to our hostel, where we found a happy hour in swing, the bar area filling with happy young things. I felt distinctly old in that environment. A slick-haired Australian bowled Grace over in his urgency to get a free glass of wine (a respect for queuing clearly not having made it across to the Antipodes or at least having missed this oafish character). We looked around at him and the other chattering youths and I suddenly felt a moment of high schoolish fear that no one would want to talk to us. I was shaken out of this reverie by Grace suggesting that we take our drinks up to the roof terrace with a view of the whole Acropolis, and reminded myself that though I may be unemployed and homeless, I do not need to stoop as low as to attempt friendship with a 20-year old bragging about the EUR 1 jello shots he was slamming back last night.
Our second day in Athens was spent strolling the ancient Agora, including the impressively complete Hephaestion and the Agora museum, which, ordered chronologically, showed an interesting decline in the quality of art and thought from the Classical Golden Age to the Roman occupation. By the end sculpture appeared either lifeless, derivative and half-hearted or grotesque, symbolic of a time when new ideas were non-existent and a population became ever-more self-indulgent. I draw no analogies except to say that movies are pretty bad these days aren’t they? Haven’t they rebooted Spiderman for the second time in 5 years?
We walked up a main street to the National Archeological Museum. It was packed with some of the most specific shops I have ever seen. Want a mop? No problem, readily acquired, but you may have to go to a different store to buy the bucket and yet a third to buy the detergent. On the way we wanted to stop into a Hellenic Post office to buy stamps, as they couldn’t be bought anywhere else. The scenes of bureaucratic nightmare, the ticket machine, the downcast eyes of those imprisoned, waiting for their number to be called, the haughty indifference with which we felt sure we would be treated, were enough to send us scrambling. We would be able to buy stamps somewhere else, we assumed.
The National Archeological Museum was excellent and allowed us to complete the story of the Akrotiri Settlement as many of the wall murals and artifacts uncovered there were removed to a special exhibition. The museum as a whole seemed well-curated given the vast collection they must have (although we did take a wrong turn into a mind-bendingly large room with nothing but black and terracotta vases) and the best of various time periods and locations were showcased.
Zeus’s big pillars
We ended our grand tour of the city by walking to the Temple of Olympian Zeus, which featured some of the largest Corinthian columns I have ever seen, Hadrian’s Arch, and the Zappeion and Panathenaic Stadium, both built in contemplation of the 1896 Olympics. On our way back to our hostel we walked through Syntagma Square, home to the Parliament Building and the rather forbidding Ministry of Finance Building- former Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis, in his excellent Adults in the Room, describes it variously as an “ugly 1970s block” and “my crucible.” Standing in that square, relatively tranquil but once home to as many as 100,000 people protesting the austerity measures imposed by the European Central Bank and the IMF, I thought about Varoufakis’s notion of super black boxes.
Super Black Boxes
Varoufakis describes certain systems as being “black boxes”- complex enough the average user cannot understand its inner workings, but whose ability to turn inputs into outputs is understood – a mobile phone, for example. The creators of black boxes – in the example of mobile phones, engineers, software designers, etc. – do understand how the internal processes work and thus retain an ability to control the systems.
Some systems, however, become either by design or circumstance so complex and large that they are no longer comprehensible to those who designed or ostensibly control them; Varoufakis unsurprisingly offers multinational banks and supranational institutions as examples. Because these structures become so complex, they begin to dictate outputs rather than produce them based on the inputs of the user. Thus was Greece’s financial crisis wrought not only, or even largely, by human perfidy, but by processes: “if our sharply diminished circumstances can be blamed on a conspiracy, then it is one whose members do not even know that they are a part of it. That which feels to many like a conspiracy of the powerful is simply the emergent property of any network of super black boxes.”
It made me wonder whether the unbelievable political events of the past year or so were a recognition of and reaction to the power of black boxes and the typical inability of the individual to force change, or whether they themselves were in a sense ordained by those same enormous processes. Do people have the capacity to move the world around them anymore or are our fates sealed as surely as the Ancient Greeks believed, not by the whims of gods but by the massively complex structures we ourselves have built? I have considered this question at various times before but am much too afraid of the answer either way to make a conclusion.
At any rate, those people in the square and Varoufakis couldn’t get what they were looking for. Austerity largely continues, unemployment and homelessness remain high, the irresponsible borrowers in Greece remain on the hook while the irresponsible lenders, mainly German banks, have been cashed out, and there is no end to the circuitous bailouts leading to further interest payments that cannot be made.
Onwards
Unfortunately, we had no time and no ability to unwind or cut the Gordian debt knot, as our time in Athens was coming to a close. We had to head back out to the airport to catch a delightfully-timed 12:35 AM flight (delayed until 1 AM) to begin the next part of our adventures, in Tbilisi, Georgia.