October 12, 2000 United Airlines sleeper suites, yahoo! You never know if they'll have them. You don't find out till you arrive to the airport. A good sleep; a peek at the Northern lights; a brief layover at the Frankfurt airport and a retail experience to buy a small screwdriver to fix my glasses. I'm ready to go to Athens. October 13 From the airport we grabbed a cab and soon we were passing by the National Park and the beautiful Acropolis Hill. It looks much better in person. Our room at the Athens Palace Hotel, wasn't ready for us yet. There was an American wedding and the guests were late checking out (typical inconsiderate Americans). Not a problem though. Who cares about a hotel when you have a city like Athens out the door. And so, we walked through Syntagma Square and into the Plaka. This is an old neighborhood under the watchful gaze of the gods on the Acropolis Hill. Once the people of this area created offering to the gods, these days the offerings are more geared to tourist, ranging from jewelry to postcards, painted wooden plaques, folk art, t-shirts, deep sea sponges and lots of restaurants. I know the Plaka is a big tourist hang, but considering we've never been to Greece before, it was just fine. I'm ready to start eating and the coconut fingers, Greek salads and souvlakis did the trick. We were warned about the beggars and pickpockets, but the only beggars we saw were the cats. And there were a lot of them.
Walked up to the Acropolis. The Parthenon; elegant, serene and naked looks beautiful even without all its decoration (now in the British Museum, courtesy of that crook Lord Elgin). We attached ourselves to a English-speaking tour and learned the 4 to 9 architectural mystery of elegant proportions, that is to say if the height is 4, the legnth is 9. By the way, the width is 6. Most Greek architecture of this period is built according to this proportional equation. So let's say the height is 20' (4x5), then the legnth would be 45' (9x5) and the width would be 30' (6 x5). But this equation was based on more than principles of architecture. The ancient Greek saw a lot of power in numbers. The gods were also given numbers; Poseidon was number 9, Athena, as the patron of Athens, was number 4, and Athena ‘the Mother’ (of all Athenians) was the number 6. Mathematics has been a powerful force for a long time. Around the 6th century, the gods moved out and the Parthenon was converted into a Christian church. In the 15th century, the Ottoman empire conquered Greece and it was converted into a Mosque. Then in 1687, the Venetians attacks the city and ignited a munitions dump stored inside of the temple. KABOOM!!. In 1806, Thomas Bruce, the 7th Earl of Elgin got permission from the Ottoman empire to remove as much as he could. He later sold these pieces to the British Museum. The Greeks have been trying to get them back for a long time, but no luck so far. The Acropolis Hill is much more than the Parthenon. Another great building is the Erechtheum, with it's female caryatids holding up the roof of the portico. The temple was dedicated to Athena and Poseidon Erechtheus. Supposedly the Cercrops, a sacred half snake-half man creature believed to be the first king of Athens, lived inside of the temple and was fed honey-cakes by the Priestesses. If the snake-guy refused the cake, it was usually a bad sign. The Caryatids came from Karyae, a town in southern Greece. They were women who carried baskets on their heads as they danced to the glory of Artemis. It was such a powerful image that their likeness became a very popular architectural design. The caryatid statues holding up the roof of the Erechtheum are copies. Five of the original six are housed in glass cases inside the small Archeological museum near the Parthenon. Lord Elgin took the 6th one to decorate his Scottish mansion, but it eventually moved to the British Museum to join the plundered "Elgin marbles". Inside the Erechtheum are the remains of the salt water well struck by the the trident of Poseidon and the olive tree planted by Athena. |
Athens
October 14
