This is going to be a long one, so go grab some popcorn or a pot of tea. Ready? Alright, background first. "Akropolis" is just Greek for the high part of the city, and most of the poleis had them because they made great defensive positions in the days before big stone walls. Some of them have special names, like Acrocorinth, some of them have later fortifications on them, like the one in Argos, and the one in Athens, being the center point of both the old and new cities, has had temples, churches, mosques, and at least one Ottoman palace complete with harem. Legend has it that the Athenian acropolis was the site of the contest between Athena and Poseidon for the favor of the city. Poseidon caused a salt water spring to bubble up, which, while impressive, was not nearly as useful to the people as the olive tree Athena planted. The supposed first olive tree in Athens remained up there (along with a well that was probably not salt water) and by the time of the Persian wars there was a big temple to Athena Polias (of the city), another temple to Athena Parthenos (the virgin) (the first Parthenon), and some other stuff I don't remember. In any event, the Persians destroyed all of that in 490, and the Athenians vowed to leave it all in ruins until they defeated the Persians. When they made peace a few decades later, Perikles convinced the Athenians to take all of the money their allies had been paying for them in exchange for protection from the Persians and blow it on a massive building project. The most impressive stuff ended up on the acropolis.
The ascent. The place was packed already when we got there, but they let us in a few minutes before it opened so we had a few moments of peace.
Chiselers. Marble gets really slippery when it's polished by thousands of feet a day, so they have guys roughen the stone a bit to reduce the number of falling tourists.
Looking back. The big empty spot is the Pnyx.
Inside the propylon, the big entrance to the acropolis.
A very impressed Kat shown for scale.
All of this is marble, except that one layer of rock at the bottom of the walls.
As we were making our way in, we heard some shouting and stomping. Back in the 40s, after the Germans had conquered Greece (Mussolini had already failed; apparently the Italians can't take down an army armed with anything more advanced than a sharpened stick) they had a Nazi flag flying over the acropolis. One night a bunch of Greek snuck in, risking execution, and replaced it with a Greek flag. Ever since then the army has had a detachment raise the flag every morning and lower it every evening. Even though it was only four guys and an officer, it was pretty impressive. The way they marched on the planks laid down as part of the propylon's maintenance it sounded like there were a thousand of them.
The least crowded you will ever see the Parthenon in an amateur shot.
The Erechtheion, that building nobody's ever heard of.
The propylon from inside.
The porch of the Karyatids, the famous part of the building nobody's ever heard of.
The west side of the Parthenon.
Looking out at the shrine to the nymphs on Philopappos hill.
West side. This is where we did our lecture.
If you look carefully, you can see the Saronic Gulf behind Philopappos. The shore is about an hour away by train.
The Odeon of Herodes Atticus, built during the Roman era. We were never able to go in, since it's now exclusively a concert venue instead of an archaeological site.
The long, black building is the new Acropolis museum, built to call the British Museum's bluff that they weren't giving the sculptures from the Parthenon back because the old museum wasn't nice enough. We did go in for a few minutes another day, but I didn't have my camera. Not much of a loss, actually, since they literally have nothing for public display at the moment except for cardboard cutouts. It should be opening for real in a few months.
The gaping hole in the side of the Parthenon. One of the buildings many uses was as a gunpowder storage facility for the Turks during a Venetian attack on the city. The Turks apparently didn't think through the ramifications of putting their munitions in one of the three or so places in Athens than can easily be shot by a cannon from sea. That hole is the result of the explosion of gunpower when the Venetians hit it.
The temple of Olympian Zeus. The hazy Athenian air pollution is starting to show.
Kalimarmaro Stadio. I don't know if I could literally see our house from there, but we could definitely see the neighborhood.
The theater of Dionysus. Unless you are a classicist, every ancient Greek play you've ever heard of was first performed right there.
The front (east) side of the Parthenon. Now's probably a good time to describe the building. In form it's basically an exceptionally fancy temple, made of solid marble, with the best sculptures in classical Greece and every single architectural innovation the Greeks had made to that point. The question is, was it a temple? We know that it was used as a treasury, which was common in Greek temples, since everything took place outside. The Parthenon doesn't have an altar outside that we know of, which essentially means that there was no actual worship done here. It's quite possible, since the Erechtheion was also dedicated to Athena, or the two buildings might have just shared an altar. In any event, the Parthenon was the headquarters of the priests of Athena (who were not nearly as important as Egyptian or Near Eastern priests, to say nothing of later Christians) and it held the second nicest cult statue in mainland Greece, sculpted by the same guy who made the nicest one (one of the Seven Wonders of the World (tm)).
A close-up. Some copies of the sculpture the Greeks have, and those big round holes on the bottom row are where those captured Spartan shields were fixed. The big groups of tiny holes are from a dedication to Nero the Athenians put up for the emperor's visit and then took down later.
The Erechtheion from the southeast.
The front. The keen-eyed will notice that the columns and frieze are in a different style than the Parthenon. These are Ionic, as are, if I remember right, the interior set of the Parthenon. The outer set was Doric, and that combination of the two was pretty common in Athenian temples of the period. Most Ionic-speaking Greeks stuck to Ionic order temple and the Doric-speakers had their own style, but 5th century Athenians, despite speaking a basically Ionic dialect, felt like they were in between the ethnicities.
Looking inside. The floor's not the best preserved. Anyway, what's this building for, you ask? It's a mutant. Unlike the typical single-god Greek temple, the Erechtheion is dedicated to a half-dozen of them and doesn't look like any other building in Greece. It's partially built over the temple of Athena destroyed by the Persians, and is the real religious center on site. It's named after one of the more obscure of Athens' excessive number of founder-figures, Erechtheus, who's kind of but not really a child of Hephaistos and Athena.
The north porch.
The south porch, which isn't even accessible from the main part of the building. The columns shaped like women are called Karyatids after a lesser known myth, and while they weren't unique to Athens these are the only ones we saw outside of a museum. Even then, they were pretty rare. Like I said, the Erechtheion is a really weird building and this doesn't help that.
Three things to point out here. First, look at how intricate the ceiling is. The Athenians were filthy rich in the 430s, when this was built, and didn't cut any corners on the decoration. Second, you see that hole? That's actually where lightning struck, and was never repaired because the ancients were pretty hesitant to rebuild something Zeus personally blew to smithereens. Last, the black gunk is marble's reaction to air pollution. The only way to get rid of it is to dab at it with a wet sponge for a few hours.
Again, they didn't spare any effort when it came to these buildings.
Athena's olive tree! Well, ok, it's a modern replanting of the original olive tree. Well, ok, it probably wasn't the same tree all the way through from the Mycenaean period to the Christian era, and it probably wasn't planted by Athena, but the ancients thought it was and that's good enough for us.
From the southwest. That rubble in the foreground is what's left of the temple of Athena Polias destroyed in 490BC. The Erechtheion only overlaps one corner, and probably only that much because they didn't want Athena to think they were snubbing her by abandoning her site entirely.
A picture with me actually in it. These are so rare that they should put it in the national museum.
The horde. Romans, Vandals, Goths, Turks, Moors, Huns, Venetians and every people under the sun.
Exodos.
The view of Athens was better going down than coming up.
The Aeropagus, everyone's favorite big rock.
The agora, temple on the left and stoa on the right.
I kinda have an obsession with the stupid thing.
By this point we had a very low opinion of the Athenian postal system, because none of us ever found the post office in our neighborhood, and then invariably outside of Athens our hotel would be right next to one. This, fifteen minutes uphill from the nearest residential building, did not help. Apparently it's for the cruise ship passengers who want to send a postcard right now, though to be fair I guess "Greetings from the Acropolis" is more sincere that way. About three days before the program ended we realized that there was box down the street from the girls' apartment on Eratosthenous and another twenty feet from the grocery store we used.
We also had a short museum trip. Unfortunately, on the subway on the way there Rachel got her pocket (well, her backpack) picked and lost everything up to and including her passport. The bright side is that, other than the initial distress and two or three embassy visits, it didn't mess up the rest of the trip for her. Anyway, while she and Dr. Farney were tending to that, Dr. Bloy showed the rest of us around.
While we were all incredibly sick of pottery and moderately sick of classical sculpture (naked athletes or women wearing 50lbs of clothing lest some poor guy be attracted to one) by the end of the trip, at this point it was a welcome relief from dark age pottery (etch-a-sketch) and archaic statues ("Alright, looking at the butt cheeks we can tell this one in a 6th century because of the shift in weight to one foot...").
This is either Zeus or Poseidon (or some schmuck with a javelin) and, unlike most statues in the museum, is actually from the classical period and not a later Roman copy. Archaic statues were boring because they were made of marble, and in any pose besides standing straight up, hands by the sides, stuff has a tendency to fall off. So when the Greeks got the hang of sculpture they started working with bronze, which doesn't have that problem. Unfortunately, bronze is both useful and easily melted down, so even fewer of these survived than marble statues (which are only useful for making lime). Incidentally, the Greeks got very good with bronze and this guy probably had sculpted eyelashes that he lost somewhere between sinking into the sea and making it to the museum.
A big, bottomless funerary urn depicting the deceased. It was standard practice to make liquid offerings to the dead, at least for a little while, and so these were common as both grave markers and convenient pipes for libations. Every other century or so the Athenians got fed up with the wealthy people throwing vast amounts of money at grave monuments and would make laws preventing it.
Hermes. The Romans liked marble sculpture and, unlike the Greeks, were not above adding stuff just for the sake of support. This is, more likely than not, a copy of a Greek bronze that didn't have the tree stump or the support between his calves. Even with those additions, you can still see how he arm fell off.
Aphrodite. Probably just a straight up copy of a classical bronze, especially since Hellenistic and Roman sculpters preferred the naked or scantily clad look for younger women in general and love goddesses in particular.
A small marble copy of the cult statue from the Parthenon. The real thing was significantly bigger (3x, I think?). All of her skin was solid ivory, and everything else was gold. Phidias, the guy responsible for the real statue, was chased out of Athens along with Perikles because either A) they embezzled some of the gold or B) Phidias depicted them on the inside of her shield, a religious no-no. Eventually he ended up in Olympia, where he crafted, again in gold and ivory, a statue of Zeus which is a contender for the nicest statue ever made by human hands. As in Wonder of the World good, and as in he was so revered that they turned his workshop into a hero cult honoring him good. Sometime shortly after that, though, an Athenian hit squad killed him for robbing and/or desecrating their favorite building.
A copy of a statue of the goddess Nemesis that was originally in black marble. Just because the female statues in this period got the Greek equivalent of burkas while the men got athletic, idealized bodies doesn't mean that the clothes were poorly made. This is one of the better examples, though even being one solid hunk of marble her head and arms have broken off.
White vases. These were buried with the dead. Unlike the black figure and red figure vases, the coloring was painted on these instead of fired into them.
Someone's giving something to the goddess Demeter. This probably has a connection to Eleusis, which will be in the next update.
An example burial. I think the skeleton's fake.
A prize. Olympic victors got several of these filled with olive oil from a particularly sacred tree, or maybe they only got one but could fill it up multiple times. The style was often imitated but the Greek seem to have been pretty honest about only putting the "this guy won at Olympia" inscriptions on the real deal. They all show the competition won and Nike (Victory) flying down to crown the victor.
And, just as a bonus, an Athenian drier.
That's three updates today, and this is probably all for tonight. Not only do I have my old loves Rome: Total War and Mount & Blade now that I'm back on my computer, but Kelly gave me something to play on dad's Wii. Tomorrow: updates on Eleusis and Olympia, and maybe Bassae and Messene.
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