A day among the ruins


Once I had sorted my stuff and done some washing I thought the Acropolis could wait, so I went to the beach. Actually, it's not quite that simple. Here you don't really go to the beach. You go to one of dozens of little private beachlets that stretch about 20km down the coast and where, for a fee, you get deckchairs, umbrellas, showers, music, a bar etc etc. A city tram runs the length of the coast and you hop off when you get to the one you want. I chose pretty badly (on the basis of the logo, now you ask) and ended up in a sort of slightly seedy sub-Wallpaper kind of joint with too loud techno music, some odd people and extortionate prices. I hung on in there as long as I could, dividing the amount I had paid by the minutes I was getting out of it, and then double-quicked it back to the hostel. Not the mellowest afternoon I have spent by the Med.


In fact back at the hostel, things had revved up a notch too. The overwhelming demographic at Athens Backpackers is twentysomething New Zealander and they do like their fun. The hostel has a rooftop bar that looks out over the Acropolis and (dumbly) I thought I might go up there a for a quiet beer and watch the sun set over the ruins. By now, though, the time was Happy Hour + 2 and you could hear the party five floors down. As I got to the top of the little metal stairs that led on to the roof, the first thing I saw was a solid mass of bodies, the first thing I smelt was beer and the first thing I heard was someone complaining in a plaintive Kiwi wail that she had just turned 24: 'I'm so OWWWWWWWWLLLLD and I hate it!' I decided to give them a miss.


Today, though, was wonderful. Unlike almost everyone else in the hostel (there are some people over 25; I saw them at breakfast) I didn't sleep in till 12 with a hangover but got up early and headed out for the culture. The aim was to beat the crowds to the Acropolis and it kind of worked.


I am not a big fan of archaeological sights but Athens is changing my point of view. It was great to see the Parthenon at last in the flesh, so to speak, though I'm still not exactly sure what went on there and obviously the best bits are in the British Museum. But I also was really taken by the Temple of Athena Nike, which sits just away from it and is somehow more elegant and compact, the Mozart to the Parthenon's Beethoven if you like. (You can pretend I didn't say that.)


What I hadn't really thought about was that the whole of the Acropolis would be a big building site. Restoaration work has been going on continually, I think, since the 1970s and there is scaffolding all over the place and cranes and hammering and a little railway that carries marble between the sites. Plus there's a constant background noise of sawing, drilling and chiseling which tend to drown out the tour guides shepherding streams of people up the hill and from site to site (I only just managed to stay ahead of the crowds). Billions have gone into this project (and when the new museum is opened they will soon be ready to have the Elgin marbles back - haha) but it turns out not everyone is impressed by the work in progress. I found myself standing next to a guy from Liverpool who said to his friend:

'I don't know why they're doing that, putting the new marble in the gaps, those white bits... I mean, I know they'll treat them with something to make them look old, like, but it's not right. You don't want to look at new stuff. What I like is what you see is what you get. That's why I like the Colosseum. I like Pompeii. There, what you see is what you get.'

After the noise of the Parthenon, the wander down through the trees to the ancient marketplace at the bottom of the hill is so quiet you wonder if your ears have popped. But while the Acropolis gives you the razzmatazz, here you get a little taste of real (ancient) Athens.


At risk of coming over all Michael Wood, I really found this place exciting. You can see where Socrates stood and spoke to the crowd. Here was were those great debates took place about what it meant to be free and what it meant to be a slave, nearly 1,800 years before the Magna Carta (and more than two millennia before the Bill of Rights). And here you can literally stand on the ground where they invented the idea of democracy. It was powerful to think that so much of what we take for granted (or at least fight to preserve) about modern liberal living came from this small patch of land by the Med. Roman ruins are interesting, especially if you have seen 'I, Claudius', but the stuff that happened at Greek ruins still influence us today.


Once you have done all the swooning over rocks and pillars and stuff, there's also a nicely presented little museum. Here, among the various pots and shards of terracotta, is a real bronze Spartan shield - captured by the Athenians in the Battle of Something-or-other. It measures almost a metre across, looks like it weighs a ton and is fantastically dented and battered by what were real Athenian swords aimed at the real man behind. There is also a clever little machine, involving black and white balls, that picked people for jury service - uncannily like the one that picks the lottery numbers now, though this was in 500BC. And, my favourite for some reason, a terracotta bucket (that's a reproduction in the pic above) with a little hole in the bottom that you filled with water and used to time people's speeches. When the water had run out they had to stop talking (this one lasted six minutes). Apparently real experts could time their conclusion perfectly to the last drop. The museum is also a good answer to the Liverpool guy's complaints. Its restored colonnade (pic below) gives you a very good idea of what Athens 550BC must have looked like.


After that I went walking out into the real world again and into the Monastiraki Flea Market. It was early but I was hungry so I sat at a little corner cafe and, with 100% authenticity and 0% originality, had lamb kebab and Greek salad. (I could probably have had Demis Roussos and some tsatsiki too, but I didn't want to be clichéd.) The flea market was like a small version of Camden and no better and no worse, though I did find a cool stall of Greek posters from the 1940s and 1950s (they would, unfortunately, crumple up in my rucksack) and, for me at least, an even cooler one of instruments and bits of electronics from old military aircraft (though even I wouldn't be sure what to do with them when I got home). I did manage to stock up on some good second-hand books in English - though I had to pass on Homer when the stallkeeper, having heavily discounted Alistair MacLean and an old Simenon novel, refused to knock a cent of his original price for 'The Iliad'. Maybe that's what patriotism is.


I had almost had enough history by then but here the past seems to pull you back to it and I was wandering back to the hostel when I caught a glimpse of some towering columns on the other side of a busy six-lane highway. It turned out to be the Temple of Olympian Zeus and you can't really get much more towering than that. Rather spectacularly set apart from the rest of the ruins in a space all of its own, this temple beat all the records. It took 700 years to build. There were 104 columns, each 17 metres high and 2m in diameter (I'm reading this from the guidebook by the way; I don't actually know these details). It held a giant gold and ivory statue of Zeus and a similarly huge one of Hadrian (currently everybody's favourite Roman emperor), who finished it in AD132.

Even now, with only 14 columns remaining - and a 15th that fell over in a storm in 1852 and now lies on its side - it has a kind of mammoth presence. I loved it. It must have been a stunning building when it was finished and I thought that if I had lived in Athens in those days I might have signed up to be one of the Zeus priests. It would certainly beat cowering behind your metre-wide dented bronze shield while half the cast of '300' thundered down on top of you - though maybe you had to do that bit too. That's the trouble with democracy.

(This shouldn't be funny...)

My diversion to the Temple of Olympian Zeus (and I bet you can't believe how long this post is going on) put me in a perfect position to go to my second museum of the day - which for me must be a record. But the Benaki Museum, which sits just north of some nice gardens in the middle of the city, is a treat. It's small, it's interesting and it has a lovely rooftop cafe with good cappuccino and nice biscuits.

The collection, which I think was once the private collection of a 1920s Alexandrian merchant, traces the cultural development of Greece from almost the origins of time to the present day. And if I were Greek I would be incredibly proud - a British collection would begin around 900AD.


For me, the best stuff is near the beginning. In one of the first cabinets there is a little clay figurine of a woman from about 6,000BC and whose face is so detailed and realistic that she wouldn't look out of place on a street in Athens or London today (except that she is 6in high and made of clay, of course). A little more recent are some intricate and delicate solid gold wreaths to wear in your hair from about 600BC, when we Brits probably hadn't even discovered coracles, and - maybe to go with them? - tiny ornate earrings of winged gods holding bows and arrows and of little animals and human figures. And of course there were loads of painted vases, though, unlike most collections of Greek painted vases, these weren't (a) dusty, (b) badly lit or (c) boring.


The exhibition runs chronologically and rather abruptly (in about gallery 4) you hit 300ishAD and Christian Byzantium. I like Byzantine art but it's strange to see it next to all those pieces from earlier Greek history and you are left with the odd impression that suddenly everyone was wearing more clothes - as if the coming of Christ had caused a serious drop in temperature. Plus comedy seems to have been banned. While in the earlier Greek stuff there are plenty of satyrs and funny masks and frolicking maidens on vases to create the impression of a pretty carefree life. (And if they were wearing clothes at all, it would be those Greek-y drape-y things that look as though they have wrapped themselves in a giant Kleenex.) But come the Byzantines and it's all saints spearing serpents, dour-faced virgins contemplating the crucifixion and everyone wearing at least three more layers.

The rest of the museum I scooted round a bit more quickly, though there were some treats here too. I almost entirely skipped a gallery showing the development of Greek ethnic costume over the ages - all sashes, buckles and ethnic prints as far as I could see. But there are two genuine living rooms from 18th-century Macedonian homes that blow you away. One especially has walls and ceiling entirely made entirely of a light intricately carved wood, like a particularly beautiful church, and it reminded me why I have always wanted to live in a wooden house. If you dropped in on the owner of this room, you would simply refuse to leave.


There is also a beautiful embroidered bridal bed valance - not a phrase you find yourself typing every day - with little pictures of people and animals and rural life. It reminded me of a very similar (woven) bridal gift I saw in Peru, with the same people and scenes from life but, of course, llamas instead of goats. Greece to Peru: we are more of a family than we often imagine. Later, in the galleries dedicated to the War of Independence, there was a haunting portrait of someone called Dimitrios Botsaris as a child. He was orphaned during the war, semi adopted by the new Greek royal family (his father was a big independence fighter) and went on to become minister of war.

I've pasted him below. The reproduction is not that great but there's something in it that made me go back and look at this portrait again and again, perhaps because, even this young, he seems to know the danger and the glory that is up ahead.


I also need to find out more about the satirical Athenian shadow puppeteer Sotiris Spatharis but as that's the second phrase today that you don't find yourself typing that often, and this post has gone on long enough, I am going to go now and say hi to the New Zealanders, efharisto to you for reading this far and good night from what has turned out to be, historically at least, a pretty magical place to be.