Date: Wednesday, March 30, 2005
Partners for the day: Peter (text), Laura (images)
Site(s): Free Day in Athens!!!!
Museum(s):
Principal Buildings/Monuments: Central Market, Flea Market, Plaka, and various others
Weather: Sunny in the morning, then cloudy and grey, but warm!
Today was our free day in Athens, and most of us took advantage of it by sleeping in a little, as Laura’s picture of poor Ben shows. I planned to wander around with the group for a while, but missed meeting them at the internet café as we had planned and wound up wandering around on my own.
Walking down a street in Athens is definitely an experience. People tend to be very fashionably turned out when you see them right near the hotel, especially in Syntagma Square. A lot of the clothing and shoe styles show an Italian influence, and long-sleeved black shirts or jackets in a variety of designs are very popular. Even though it was warm, no one wore shorts and very few people were wearing short sleeves. In fact, most people were actually wearing jackets and sweaters, even though for me this would have been intolerable. Beyond that, everyone is always wearing sunglasses, large black ones in really fashionable shapes and styles. This fashion of dress is very different from what we saw in London, and, surprisingly, the women in charge of the two archaeological sites I’ve visited so far were both wearing really trendy clothing and big sunglasses. Somehow, I can’t really envision the guards at the British Museum dressed in trendy jeans and black shirts with big black sunglasses obscuring their faces as they told the children not to lean on the glass.
Another key feature, it seems, of any true Athenian street is its wildlife. Cats can be seen climbing from balcony to balcony on a regular basis, pigeons strut about in every square and peck for crumbs people drop, and then there are the dogs. Either there is no leash law in Athens or there are a lot of stray dogs. They are very affable and easy-going creatures – you won’t bother them if you walk by or step right over them. However, they do have one peculiar habit – they like to sleep everywhere! In the squares, on the sidewalks, in doorways, even on ruins sometimes, you will find random dogs sleeping. The first time I saw a dog lying asleep in the plaza in front of the Metropoleus Cathedral, I thought it was dead. I was understandably disturbed – we were listening to a lecture yesterday and out in the center of this square lay a random dog, completely still on the marble pavers, and I kept wondering why no one was making more of a fuss about it. I guessed maybe someone had been called to get the dog’s body and that this was perhaps normal. Then another dog came along and proceeded to fall asleep near the other one. Seeing this, I realized that it must just be that dogs here like to sleep in public places. As I continued through the city today, I noticed dozens of other dogs sleeping all over the place, some of them in the most preposterous positions. There were two dogs in one doorframe, both fast asleep, and one had its feet up on the marble wall on the side. It was funny to watch people come in and out of the doorway, dodging sleeping dogs. I didn’t see one awakened or shooed away with a broom, so I guess there must be some kernel of truth in the old saying, “Let sleeping dogs lie.”
I walked down narrow streets lined with nineteenth century houses, past countless old-fashioned store fronts and sidewalk cafés, until eventually I happened upon the Roman agora and the Tower of the Winds. Having read a fair amount about these buildings and realizing that we probably wouldn’t be coming to this site at a later point, I decided to take a few minutes and look around. The tower of the winds is a first century BC structure that once had a weathervane on top of it. Each of the eight sides of the tower has a personification of one of the eight winds from traditional Greek mythology. When there was wind, the arrow of the weathervane would point in the direction of the specific wind that was currently blowing. After looking at the tower, I walked around to the other side and looked at the Agora. There wasn’t a whole lot left – a few columns supporting a pediment at the far end, a number of broken columns on top of a stylobate (basically a stone step which forms the platform for a building with columns) where the old colonnade would have been, a number of marble pavers in the center of what had been the agora, and a lot of broken stones stacked in piles. I poked about for a little while, marveling at little things I recognized from my studies and all the things I could deduce based on what little was left.
After a while, I started to pay more attention to the surroundings and the structures as a whole rather than just the specific stones. Looking around for a minute, I came to a realization that startled me. I’d always thought of ruins as being desolate, barren places abandoned by man and fortune, overgrown with thorny bushes and inhabited by ghostly specters alone. The fantasy novels, combined with the decontextualizing pictures I’d seen in my classics classes, had led me to believe I would be visiting the seared earth and charred stones of war-ravaged and forsaken places on this trip. Well, perhaps some of this was my own flight of fantasy more than anyone else’s. It was refreshing to realize just how wrong I was. Sitting in the center of the agora, I was surrounded by thousands of tiny daisies newly in bloom. Pigeons were cooing to one another from the tops of broken columns. Greek men were chatting animatedly at little café tables on the other side of the fence. A block or so away, the sounds of construction could be heard from a house being renovated. Many-colored butterflies climbed around on flowers and plants, and the fronds of a tall palm gently swayed in the wind near the domes of an old mosque off to one side. Seeing all of this made me realize in a way I never could before that ruins are in fact just a part of the living world, that Athens pays homage to its glorious past but treats its ruins less as tombstones for bygone eras and more as a living component of the city. While I’m sure some of the more rural sites we’ll visit won’t feel quite so vibrant, life will continue in the insects, the birds and the ground creatures, and also in us, because in coming back to the sites used in the ancient past, we are in effect bringing life back to them. By visiting and studying these sites, we show that we value what transpired amidst the broken stones so long ago and at the same time that we want to make these places of history a part of our own lives. As in so many things I’ve realized since being in college, what startles me more afterward is that I knew so many other things but had never managed to figure out something that seems so obvious to me now.
A lot more could be said about Athens. It’s a beautiful city, things are reasonable to cheap in price, and it’s definitely unlike anything else I’ve ever experienced. To really get a feel for it, though, you’d have to visit it for yourself.