The Great Continental Gallivant, Part the Last: Greece

The flight to Athens from Rome was a pleasant hour and a half, which I spent looking at a bilingual Greek/English magazine to try to refresh my knowledge of the Greek alphabet. My efforts did not avail to much, but fortunately nearly all of the signs in Greece are either Greek/English bilingual, or Greek transliterated from the Greek alphabet into our Latin alphabet.
After collecting our bags, we took a bus from the airport to the center of Athens, which was a surprising hour’s ride on a highway that would have been much at home among our interstates. In fact, a lot of Greece is like America, with billboards, big open roads, and skyscrapers. There are very few old buildings in Athens, apart from the churches and a small district near the Acropolis (and the ruins, of course).
After arriving at Syntagma Square (Syntagma is Greek for constitution, and the square is so named because it was the site of a protest demanding a constitution), we walked to our hostel, which was very nice, almost like a hotel. It was then that we found that our reservations had been cancelled, which lead to an hour’s worth of headache trying to get them back. In the end, we were given a very nice studio room complete with kitchen and bathroom to ourselves, in compensation for our trouble.
The next day we did basically nothing, sleeping and going for short walks to recharge ourselves. The day after that we went on a brief walking tour of Athens, followed by a visit to the Acropolis. The Acropolis (a word which means, roughly, “high city” in Ancient Greece) was originally a fortress. The excavation of fortifications point to settlement in the time of the Mycenaean civilization (around 1200 BC). The Acropolis remained a fortress until the first Persian war, when Athens was sacked by Persian troops. It was rebuilt as a temple complex following the war, although parts of the old fortress (specifically, the column drums) were integrated into the new Acropolis as a reminder to the Athenians of the war. Currently, there are three temples reconstructed on the Acropolis: the Temple of Nike (Greek goddess of victory, not shoes) the Erechtheum (a temple dedicated to various gods, and named after Erechtheos, a legendary king of Athens), and most famously the Parthenon (otherwise the temple of Athena Parthenos, or Athena the Virgin). The other building reconstructed on the Acropolis is the Propylaea, a large gate complex.
The Parthenon is built on spot where, according to legend, the first Athenians prayed to the gods, asking which god they should dedicate their city to. Poseidon appeared first and struck the Acropolis with his trident, causing a spring to burst forth, symbolizing that the Athenians would become rich through trade if they chose him. Athena appeared next and struck the Acropolis with her spear, and on the spot an olive tree shot up from the ground, symbolizing that under her patronage Athens would be a peaceful city, as well as a place of great leaders. The people chose Athena, and named the city of Athens after her.
Currently the Parthenon, and indeed all of the Acropolis, is undergoing massive restoration, hence all of the scaffolding in my pictures. To offset this, Athens has recently (as of this writing) opened the new Acropolis Museum, although when I was in Athens it was still closed. The new museum is built in the shape of the Acropolis, and is designed to replace the tiny museum currently located on the Acropolis. The Acropolis Museum is located nearby its namesake. The museum will hold all of the artifacts recovered from the Acropolis during its excavation over the past 2 centuries, except the marbles which Lord Elgin nicked from the Parthenon in the 1820s. Their place in the museum will be held by plaster casts of the marbles until the British Museum decides to return the real ones.
Day three was our first excursion, to Cape Sounio. Located at the easternmost point of the province of Attica, Sounio is the site of an extraordinarily well-preserved temple of Poseidon, located on a small steep-cliffed spit of land which juts into the Aegean Sea. The temple supposedly has Lord Byron’s name carved into the marble somewhere, although it was lost to us amid the profusion of other names which people had carved into the marble. The temple was about 2.5 hours from Athens, but it was time well-spent. After wandering around the temple and its surrounding ruins, we clambered around the rocky, boulder-strewn seashore, then headed back to Athens.
On the fourth day we went on a tour to Delphi, site of the legendary and cryptic oracle. The bus ride was quite long, approximately 3.5 hors one way, and the weather went from cloudy and overcast in the lowlands to blizzard in the mountains where Delphi is located. Fortunately, the blizzard petered out by the time we got to Delphi, leaving a constant drizzle in its place. The ruins are not typical of your standard Greek temple-complex, as all of the buildings are constructed from the local black volcanic rock (a kind of basalt, I believe) rather than marble. The Delphi complex is build on the side of a mountain and is many-tiered. The lower parts contain monuments donated by various cities as offerings to the oracle, as well as treasuries to hold the individual votive offerings from citizens of various cities or regions. The middle level contains the temple of Pythian Apollo, seat of the oracle (who was in reality a woman who hallucinated due to breathing in toxic volcanic gases), as well as various shrines and monuments. The upper levels are home to an amphitheater and stadium, built for the Pythian Games. These games were competitions like the Olympic Games, but held in the off-years (much in the same way our Summer and Winter Olympics are held), and not quite as prestigious. The Pythian Games also had theater (in comedy and tragedy) as listed competitions.
Our tour snaked up to the stadium and then down below the Delphi complex to the gymnasium used for the Pythian Games, and to the nearby ruins of the temple of Athena Pronaia. After the conclusion of our tour, we stopped in the nearby village of Arachova for an hour, and then proceeded back to Athens. That night we ate out at a restaurant in Athens called Damigos, which has been in the past a film set for practically every movie set in Greece.
Our second to last day in Athes was a Sunday, noteworthy because Museums and archeological site are free of charge on Sunday. I visited the Archeological and War museums, followed by the Temple of Olympian Zeus. This temple is absolutely gigantic; if completed it would rank among the largest free-standing religious structures in the world. After the temple I went back to the Acropolis for another visit, and was there able to take far better photos due to the improved weather.
My last day in Athens was filled with last-minute sightseeing. I first visited some caves said to be the prison of Socrates, although actual archeological investigation has shown that they were actually storehouses. It was, though, a pleasant fantasy to imagine myself standing in the same spot where the legendary philosopher kicked the bucket. I then climbed up the hill behind the so-called prison, to the ruins of a shrine to the Muses which provided me with an excellent view of the Acropolis. The hill which I climbed is part of a massive “archeological park” which is located southwest of the Acropolis. There aren’t very many actual or recognizable ruins in the park, but those which do exist are open to the public. A stroll through the park carried me through the ancient neighborhoods of Athens, and along the old walled road which ran between Athens and the port city of Piraeus, before bringing me to Pynx Hill, the birthplace of democracy and the place where orators such as Themistocles, Pericles, and Demosthenes gave their speeches. Nearby Pynx Hill is the Areopagus, a massive rock and the place where Socrates debated philosophy and St. Paul preached to the Athenians. Now the rock is a place where people go to enjoy lunch in the Grecian sun and where vendors hawk their wares.
Below the Areopagus, and my next destination, are the Ancient and Roman Agoras. Although the word “Agora” means “marketplace” in Ancient Greek, the Agora was much more than that. It held law courts, governmental offices, gymnasiums, schools, businesses, and more. Regrettably, it has suffered untold damage over the centuries and the ruins of the Agora are far less complete than those of the Roman Forum. The only complete building is a temple to Hephaestus, although the markethall built in Roman times has been reconstructed into a museum, filled with artifacts of pottery and stone. The Roman Agora is in slightly better condition, and contains the Tower of the Winds, the first known meteorological station which when intact was equipped with eight sundials (for all times of day), a water clock, and a weathervane.
My last stop was the Amphitheater of Dionysus, built on the eastern slope of the Acropolis. The theater is mostly ruined, and although it sat over 5000 in its prime, it is now partially overgrown with grass and weeds. It is the next target for excavation and restoration, but the effect of this work has yet to be seen.
After I left the Amphitheater, my odyssey back to Innsbruck began with a bus ride from the center of Athens to the airport. My flight from Athens to Milan got me there at around 11:00pm, followed by a bus ride from the airport to the train station. I then boarded a train from Milan to Verona, arriving there at 2:30. I then waited in the train station for 3 hours before boarding a train to Bolzano (arriving at 7:30), followed by a train to Brenner (arriving at 10:25), followed by one last train to Innsbruck (arriving at 11:45). This frantic dash of around 18 hours concluded my gallivant around the Mediterranean. The last few days of my February traveling were spent in Vienna, and as they were mostly relaxing days filled with museum-visiting, I feel no need to comment upon them further. Refer to the webalbum for a pictographic account.