It's All Greek To Me

A student of mythology, ancient Greece and Rome takes you on her pilgrimage to Greece and shares her lyrical anecdotes about gods and goddesses, history and legend, and the wonders and ruins of the ancient world.

Saturday, December 24, 2005

Feast for the Senses: Exploring Athens



Sunday we slept in, I and my roommate Raquel, and then set out from the Central Hotel to see what the city might show us. The market squares were filled with people breaking their Easter fast on roast lamb spitted over open coals in the same manner one reads about in Homer. There was music and dancing and many folk about. At length we came to the Stoa of Attalos again, by now an old friend, but the gates to the ancient Agora just past it were again closed, so we kept wandering past ruins sunk below street level, great open expanses of blocks and marble overgrown by tall grass and flowers and bushes, submerged islands of the past lying tantalizingly just on the far side of fences and locked gates. Over the Agora in the distance the Acropolis loomed, and when at length we came far enough around it to look up at the western face of it, I had a surprise— empty scaffolding hugging the spot where the pretty little Temple of Athena Nike usually stands, perched on a high bastion just to the right of the great entrance to the Acropolis, the many-columned Propylaia.


Propylaia, entrance to Acropolis


Well, I knew what should be there, so only a little disappointed we kept edging our way around the Agora until we'd climbed the long Pnyx hill leading up to the Propylaia, past the wonderfully-preserved Temple of Hephaistos, past the little grotto where Pan, they say, used to pipe to the nymphs, past the Kallirhoe spring and right up to the olive-clad foot of the Acropolis hill, the Propylaia just above us.



Temple of Hephaistos


Turning back to face the city and the Agora, we climbed out onto a knee of the great hill that has its own famous name, the Areopagus (Mars Hill), where long before democracy set foot here the Athenian elders met to discuss the city's affairs, and where at the end of antiquity Paul preached his sermons to dubious merchants from the Agora below. I shed my shoes and we climbed up onto Athenian limestone polished by thousands of years of passage. Below the city spread out before us. Dancing swallows rode the blustery fresh wind, and we drank in the pure Greek sun and sky. Chris Downing was up there too with her granddaughter, and we shared the view and some talk, but I was too busy watching swooping swallows and thinking of Thera's flaking plaster walls.



(Click to zoom)

View from Areopagus hill: agora with temple of Hephaistos, left, Stoa of Attalos, right, our hotel in far upper right.



Descending from the heights we cut through the edge of the Agora, where a few ruins were still open to visitors, including the foundations of a temple to Hekate. There I got my first taste of what was to become a very familiar sight of which I never tired: red, red poppies overrunning the old stones, wild barley for grass rustling in the wind. Just past the temple was an orange grove fragrant with hanging jasmine, a feast for the nose.


 
Agora / Temple of Hecate foundations (click each to enlarge)


Past that came an unlikely feast for the ears. We were coming down to the ruins of a Roman forum, and we were drawn by the sound of pipes, flutes, drums, which in fact we had been hearing here and there all afternoon, but at length we finally discovered the source. Some Native American musicians from Taos, not far from Raquel's home, were giving an impromptu outdoor concert before the ancient Roman library of the emperor Hadrian, a grecophile who would probably have appreciated their music! Greeks danced to the unlikely music of a continent away, and old and new, far and near were blended together by Andean pan-pipes.




Native American musicians in front of Library of Hadrian.


For a late lunch we had Greek salad at an outdoor cafe— of course— and that ubiquitous iced chocolate drink that became a staple of my daily wanderings.

Wednesday, December 14, 2005

"My" Athens

Afternoon, Sunday May 1st


So how was the journey here? Long and far. It began at 3:45 AM two days ago with a shuttle ride to Los Angeles, an hour away from home, and then a flight six hours from Los Angeles to New York, which used up so much time fussing on the runway that I nearly got to reenact Ariadne's least favorite moment. I caught the flight to Athens just in time. Overseas flights are so long. Somehow the night seems darker with the deep ocean beneath rather than solid ground. In the morning, we flew down the coast of Italy. Below I could clearly make out the long rectangular strips of the iugera, Roman fields kept cultivated to this day, and the port of Brundisium settled by Greeks was nestled where it should be upon the heel. There was lingering snow on the Appenines, and more in the rugged heights of Greece when we crossed over the short strait of sea to the other side. Somehow I had not grasped how sharp, how rugged were its mountains.

Customs was easy— waiting for the bags, not so easy! In the airport I caught up with some of the other ladies who were on this journey. One of them had booked a ride online with George's Famous Taxi, and lo and behold he was more prompt to meet us than my LA shuttle had been! We decanted at the Central Hotel on Apollonos (Apollo) Street, after a bewildering ride through many narrow alleys. After unwinding in my room, I came down to find Chris welcoming arrivals on a balcony above the lobby. She recommended that I set out and begin my explorations at once. So, armed with a detailed map in hand, I ambled out into tiny streets, most paved with flagstones and flanked by shops and friendly people. There was an amazing (well, not really) amount of replica Greek art: statues and red-figure vases, even Cycladic figurines, most of which I was more used to seeing from the opposite end of a slide projector.




At length I found my way to the... Stoa of Attalos! Not a name the casual tourist would know, but for me it was strangely surreal, like finding an old school friend having lunch at the bottom of the grand canyon. It was built about a hundred and fifty years after the time of Alexander the Great by King Attalos II of Pergamon, one of many dynasties founded by the generals of Alexander carving up his empire. By that time, Athens was already considered a classic, dwelling on her former glories. Petty tyrants, kings, and emperors would pay homage to her by paying for fine monuments there. Hence the stoa, whose long arcade would have housed shops or perhaps an art museum, which is how it functions today. How strange to find it side by side with a modern metro service, the ruined blocks of a Roman forum just on the other side.



The stoa faced onto the Agora, the civic heart of ancient Athens, now a green tumbled wilderness of bushes, flowers, long grass, and ruined marble. Alas, this was the day before Orthodox Easter, so I found it closed. So I wandered on, disappointing various merchants by looking, not buying. I stopped in a random shop at 3PM, hungry and tired and confused about time, and had my first Greek salad and lamb, a staple in these parts. Obviously I was an out-of-towner; the rest of the city was fasting for the next day.

I found Raquel my roommate for this expedition in the room when I returned. At sunset we climbed up to the hotel's rooftop for orientation, and there we gazed at the rock of the Acropolis looming up behind us with the Parthenon solid and real in the distance. Chris began her lectures by speaking of “her” Greece, her lived experience of this place, and how it’s new each time. She spoke of hopes and fears of coming to a land steeped in legend, of how we might fear that real Greece might not match the imaginal one. Turning to Greece itself, she spoke of two strata in its culture and history— early Greece, steeped in ritual and cult and reverence for goddesses, and the Greece of classical times, a patriarchal world where mythology and gods were the stuff of literature as much as cult.



The sunset behind the Acropolis was a stunning backdrop for dinner, although the evening air was biting cold. Some of the group went out into the city to attend late Easter services and drink in the pagentry, the singing, and the local custom of breaking eggs dyed a deep dark red; a tradition to honor rebirth and spring that most certainly predates the name they called out while doing it. I had wondered why our hotel had left us two eggs in a basket! I was cold and tired and wary of walking city streets at night, but there on the rooftop we had a view of the whole city laid out before us. Athens is no more level than Rome, so up and down the hills we could see many people processing or holding candles. The soaring choruses of hundreds of voices singing from cathedral and church and square made the city resonate. Chilled and wondering, we stood entranced.

Around midnight, bright fireworks and gunshots went up all over the city, and the many layers of bells ringing and interweaving from all directions brought tears to our eyes. The sound echoed off the cliffs of the Acropolis. There alone, an island of silence in a sea of music and thunder, the shrines and monuments of a different world stood stoically abandoned, their marble columns bathed in golden light from many spotlights that illumined them all night long.

Arrival in Athens

I had to scramble to get my affairs in order, seek permission from professors to skip their classes on epic and folktale and Jung for the sake of a soul’s journey. Yes, one professor said, I might skip the class on Homer’s Odyssey for my own pilgrimage. A comedy of errors meant that the trip’s organizer did not read my queries until almost too late, because my emails were flagged as spam, and so help me UPS really did lose my check in the mail— but at last I found myself bound for Hellas.

Now I pick up the tale from my little handmade leather-bound journal.



30 April 2005


Athens.

At the floor-length window of a tiny room, I sit late in the night in the glow of the Acropolis. The fireworks that sprinkled the city are over. Gunfire and the sound of Greek Orthodox hymns have died away. The city is very quiet, although I still hear a few glad voices, the swish of a car below, and the soft squeak of bats.

The Acropolis is golden. The Erechtheion and the Parthenon peek over the top by their head and shoulders. What did they think tonight with the hymns booming out: Christos aneste, “Christ has arisen!” I suppose Athena is glad the fireworks don’t come too near; the Parthenon is looking a little worse for the wear nowadays.
First picture out hotel window

Echoes of Atlantis


Thera. How long has that island held me in its spell? I remember stumbling across its legend as a child. Back in the days before the Trojan war, before Greece was Greek, a thriving people we call Minoans lived on the big island of Crete. They plied the seas with ships, visiting many shores. They traded with Egypt and Babylon and the Bronze Age peoples living where Greece would one day arise from its marble-bedded hills. Minoan art abounded with flowers, colorfully-dressed courtiers, leaping bulls and dolphins, royal gryphons, and the double-bladed axe that was their chief symbol.

Santorini, ancient Thera, was a smaller island north of Crete where the Minoans had settled, mixed with other islanders and seafarers, and built a cozy city that seemed to blend the best of many of the oldest civilizations in the world. Their furniture was ornate, their pottery beautiful, and the rooms of their homes were painted with charming vignettes of fishing and sailing and boxing and flower-picking, or the natural world they seemed to love. They were a prosperous and flourishing people.

Then, sometime in the 15th century BCE, the island awoke, like Vesuvius looming over Pompeii. Stairs cracked and walls fell. The people struggled to stay, but their rich fertile soil was a volcano’s gift— or rather, a loan only. When the caldera gave way, seawater rushed in and met with molten rock and exloded, blowing out the entire middle of the island and leaving only a ragged circle of land which had formerly been shore. It was much like Krakatoa, that awesome cataclysm that robbed the world of one summer in 1883, save for one thing— Thera’s magma chamber was four times larger. Or at least that was the tale told in Atlantis: the Biography of a Legend, an early book on the discovery and excavation of Thera's ruined city. More recent scientific studies have downgraded the severity of the disaster somewhat, but as a child I was gripped by the tale's power. I had written tales and poems of the city that fell into the sea. For surely, garbled and mangled as it was, this was in part the root of the legend Plato retold a thousand years later.

When you receive a summons like this, you had better answer. It's like the poet's Muse.

Saturday, December 03, 2005

The Summons


"So, are you coming to Greece with us?" my friend Lisa asked over lunch in February.

Greece? A few doubletakes later, I found myself sitting crosslegged on the floor of a lecture room at Pacifica with tears in my eyes, shakily holding a flyer for Greece with Chris Downing. Chris Downing, professor of Greek and Roman myth, author of a more than a dozen books including The Goddess: Mythological Images of the Feminine. Chris Downing, who had taught with Z. Budapest and Carol Christ. A crone with a sparkle in her eye and a passion for literature and the soul, who at 74 thinks nothing of walking thirteen miles a day. Her suggested reading list included Mary Renault and Euripides and Aristopanes.

The itinerary was a hit parade of many of the places I've studied or helped catalog for the Perseus library: Athens, Eleusis, Delphi, Mycenae, Epidauros, Delos, Naxos, and...last but not least, Santorini. Thera, its proper name. A speck on the map in the middle of the Aegean Sea. It was that name that made me sit on the floor and shake.