Athens in April-- Visiting my friend from Bucks New Uni, Andreas Sampatakos. Here we are, walking up through a warren of streets to reach the Acropolis. The Acropolis, which means a hill, was overloaded with tourists, but it was very beautiful and awesome despite them.
On the way we passed an amphitheatre, with carved chairs for the important people, and this snail. Possibly this snail's ancestor was the inspiration for the capitals, below.
Part of the Acropolis has these piles of capitals and other pieces. The fineness of the carving of the columns and capitals is astounding, even after several thousand years. They are restoring some of it, using marble that is being quarried from the same quarry it originally came from. It all communicates the total sophistication of the ancient Greek culture. Below, I am standing in front of the Temple of Athena, and the caryatids holding up the roof.
We went to the Acropolis Museum, the Byzantine Museum, and the Benaki Museum. The best part of these museums was having Andreas as our guide, because he knows so much about conservation in general and specifically to Athens. He explained how wall paintings were removed and conserved and it seems nearly super-human what conservators are able to do, with the right glues and techniques. However, having said that, the point of all the conservation and restoration is to restore the
monument, not be a monument to
restoration -- an important distinction!
I fell in love with this woman, carved around 300 B.C.
The carved capital below was carved around 600 B.C., looking as delicate as something carved by Grinling Gibbons in the 17th century.
Here we are having a coffee, with a magnificent tile roof undulating in the background, and in the distance, the Parthenon. A view of the Parthenon happens often in Athens, unexpectedly, as you turn a corner, or turn your head. It's interesting to have an enormous, ancient, and prominent monument in the middle of a completely modern city.
The oranges in Greece are not like any orange I've ever eaten. They are so sweet; even the white part of the skin can be eaten. Here is a very fine orange mousse tart we ate.
We ate some excellent food in tavernas. Sometimes the owner comes out and just asks you what you want to eat, usually before you’ve even opened the menu. That was very charming. And never, ever does a Greek drink without eating, and meals begin with bread and olive oil. Here is Maria, cutting squid that was delectable, as it was barbecued to perfection.
We spent a most interesting hour in the workshop of one of Andreas' close friends, Giannis -- who had met us at a taverna at about midnight the night before -- a repairer of clocks and watches. He uses mostly 18th century tools and techniques, and foot and hand-powered tools, and is considered one of the finest craftsmen in Europe. The level of precision and intricacy of his work is almost impossible to imagine. He often uses a microscope just to see what he is doing.
This Byzantine church dates from around 1000 AD, just sitting in the middle of what is now a modern city street. On the inside it is nearly black from soot, although it was covered with 11th c. wall paintings. There are a number of conservation issues that arise in regard to cleaning a painted wall, as Andreas explained. The problem is both the soot on the surface and the way that churches are used: cold when not in use, warm and humid when in use. I don't remember all the details, but, more or less, the moisture (or was it salt?) within the wall is drawn to the painted surface as it warms up, causing the surface to delaminate. On the other hand, cleaning a surface has technical and ethical problems: if you clean it, you are removing the patina of centuries, and you might remove some of the painting itself. One might ask, why do things need to be cleaned at all? The answer is that dirt and soot is full of acid, gradually destroying the surface. This cleaning costs a lot of money, always a problem but especially now for Greece. But one thing Greece has
lots of are things that
bloom! Below, part of a giant wisteria garden in the National Gardens.
For the whole of Easter week we stayed in Andreas' and Maria’s house, in an area just south of Athens proper, called Voula. It was a 15-minute walk to the beach. There are lemon trees in his yard, laden with the biggest darned lemons imaginable, some the size of grapefruits. And orange trees line the streets in residential areas, scenting the air with the most intoxicating smell, or laden with fruit.
Greeks have big houses, because many meals involve the extended family. The first thing we noticed was how much Andreas’ family mingles; Maria’s father built his house, and attached to each side a house for each daughter’s family. So grandmothers feature prominently in their lives. The other thing I noticed was that all the adults in the family seem to be bringing up all the children, not just their own. When a child needed correcting, it might be done by an aunt, uncle, or a grandmother, whomever happened to be nearby.
On Good Friday, Bruce and I joined many people as they walked around Athens, going into every church they passed, lighting a candle, and, if they were Greek, kissing all the icons and crossing themselves four times. The singing we heard was so surprising because it sounded-- not knowing the language-- so much like the Muslim call to prayer, even being broadcast from speakers at the top of the bell tower. The songs and the churches are as Byzantine as they were a thousand years ago. Byzantium lasted from around 400 to 1400, and not much has changed.
At around ten o’clock at night, we went to the church nearby, and, with lighted candles and about 500 people, walked through the town, following the priest who sang his weird melody, as they carried a wooden Christ on a bier loaded with flowers. Then the whole procession squeezed back into the church. The priest had an enormous beard and a straight-sided, flat-topped hat, and most of the time he was behind a screen. The service seemed to go on for hours, so people would casually come in for part of it, leave whenever.
It was very, very different from the Anglican service, which begins and ends and there isn’t any wandering in or out. Also, the presence of icons and the intensely decorated surfaces which were blackened by centuries of candle smoke gave a close and intimate feeling that is completely absent from our English and European churches. I really felt that I was on the edge of East and West; it all looked and sounded Eastern, but it was most definitely Christian.
The next day (Bruce’s birthday), the family made a great big meal with meat (which they had been avoiding for 40 days, along with all fat including olive oil), then waited until midnight to go back to the church, more candles and weird singing, and at midnight, firecrackers went off, and everybody turned to everybody else and kissed them and said “Christ is risen”, to which the response was, “Yes, he really is!” but, of course, in Greek. We boldly tried to say the right things at the right times. Then we went back to the house and ate a huge meal, which ended at two in the morning.
The next morning, Andreas was up at 7 tending the goat roasting on a spit. At about 11, the whole family came back, and by early afternoon, everyone was eating again: a whole goat, lamb, pork, hearts and livers, and a little bit of vegetable! And, of course, wine, ouzo, beer in abundance. The fast was assuredly over.
Above is Andreas' mother and sister, with wife Maria in the doorway.
The PeloponnesusWe had intended to rent a car and tootle around Delphi and Olympia and various other marvels, but discovered to our horror that there’s a new law that Americans need an international drivers license to rent a car. So we had to come up with an alternate itinerary, which we did, and within two hours of this discovery, we were on a bus to the southern tip of the Peloponnesus, going through massive orange groves, tiny villages, and passing startling mountains.
We went to Gytheio, a little town on the centre finger of the Peloponnesus and found a little lady with a room for the night; she spoke no English at all, so I had to make use of my Greek phrase book. She brought us delicious Greek coffee and little s-shaped rolls for breakfast. We had a dear little balcony overlooking the harbour.
I managed to learn a little Greek in two weeks. It’s the first time I have ever been anywhere that the language is incomprehensible to read even slightly, the alphabet being almost indecipherable. It rather makes one feel like a child! But Greeks seem to be a very open, friendly bunch, so we got on all right. One aspect of Greek that was difficult to adjust to is that “ne ne ne ne” means “yes yes yes yes!”
Next day, we took a bus to Monemvassia, a strange enormous rock with an ancient walled town on the south side.
I realized when I saw it that I had thought that
all of Greece would look like either
this town or the
Parthenon! What surprised me was how ugly a lot of the housing is, just cement and stucco rectangles, and, in Athens, a lot of graffiti. Compare that reality to the pictures below.
The entrance gate to the town is so narrow that no cars can get in, so we spent two idyllic days there, enjoying the peaceful, beautiful old town and taking a lot of pictures of tile roofs.
A typical Greek breakfast of yogurt and honey, bread, Greek coffee:
A donkey is the only means of bringing in heavy materials:
From Monemvassia we took a bus to Neapoli, where Andreas and the extended family have a sort of family compound. Below, Bruce is waiting for the bus:
Neapoli is on the beach, but it was too cold for us to consider swimming. We had several days there, and a spectacular meal at a taverna in the nearby mountain village. Below, on arriving in Neapoli after a long bus ride, I am eating one of many, many Greek salads:
Above, we are having a most excellent meal at a taverna near Neapoli, high up the side of the mountain.
After eating to the bursting point, we came out and there was a funeral procession going by on foot, with the strangely clad priest in front, singing those weird songs, and what appeared to be the whole village walking behind. After our hours of eating and drinking and toasting life and friendship, it was a supreme contrast to come out to this Greek funeral. We watched silently with hats off, and they in turn peered at us as they walked by.
A few days later we took a ferry to the island nearby, Kythera, about which we knew nothing except that it was “very nice.” Above is a view of Neapoli from the ferry, with Andreas and Maria bidding farewell from the dock.
KytheraWe landed and immediately realized that without a rental car, this was not going to be fun, as the landscape is rocky and the villages are few and far between, and we were very far from any of them. Bruce bravely walked up to a house with a really grumpy big dog (read: man-eating); a man came out and it turned out he had a rental business and would gladly rent us a car without international license rigmarole. Ah, island culture. What a nice man! So we spent two even more idyllic days on this Greek island in the off season, enjoying the beaches and hilly towns and flowers to boggle the mind and good taverna food.
We were warned by the car rental man that the chief danger on the island is goats, and within a few minutes of setting out, we saw his point: hundreds of them, including adorable kids.
The following pictures are of various scenes from Kythera. I took several hundred pictures of the flowers of Kythera, but I haven't included more than a few...
On a completely different note, a funny thing about the ferry was that when the ramp was lowered it was a complete free-for-all, nearly a thousand people surging onto the boat in a melee, before any vehicles had driven off yet, and the cars had to scrooch slowly through the crowd just to get off. No one was hurt, nothing unpleasant happened, but how different from the English or American lines on the pavement and neat rows of cars and people. It was the first time I have been in anything so uncontrolled.
We took the overnight ferry back to Pireaus, which has to be the largest ferry port in the world, and spent one last day in Athens, going to the Agora, which is the ancient marketplace, and drinking Greek coffee, which I believe to be the best in the world. Below are a few pictures of the Agora and our last day in Athens:
We had one last night at Andreas’ house, with his mother and mother-in-law, one of whom spoke some French, so we were able to converse, more or less. It always pays to have a French or Spanish in your back pocket, because sometimes it is the only common language.
Having picked a bagful of lemons from Andreas' lemon trees, they now sit on the window sill in Lane End!
