First Days In Athens

We landed in Athens two days ago and had a much smoother transition than we did with the last two legs of the trip. We're getting better at the initial setup, and the internet was working, which removed a lot of stress. Our apartment here is much more comfortable than the previous two, thought it's not in the greatest neighborhood. The weather is pretty warm and very sunny, though, like in Italy, the humidity is surprisingly low. The same temps and sunshine at home would be a bigger drag.

We've had two great days since then soaking up a lot of archaeology. You may know that Greece built and opened a new Museum of the Acropolis about 7 years ago to display material from the Acropolis still in the country and to shame England into returning the Elgin Marbles. (Which we saw and loved at the British Museum in London.)



We spent all day there yesterday. It's a rarity in any circumstances to see a new large world-class museum, and this one is beautiful and, to my amateur eyes, does a great job. The key architectural and design decision was to site it with a view of the Parthenon from the top floor, to imitate that temple's footprint, and to lay out the surviving fragments in their relative position. Less frequently noted about the new Museum of the Acropolis is the presentation of artifacts from temples prior to the Parthenon and a gallery that imitates the climb up the hill. Also, the cafe there must be the best deal in the city.








I'm not going to take sides in the Elgin debate, but I'll share a couple of observations. One, the presentation of the new museum is gorgeous and more "accurate" in scale than the gallery in London, so when you're standing there, it does seem like a shame not to be able to view them all together. Two, when we were in the Egyptian collection at the National Archaeological Museum today, most of it "gathered by Greek collectors" in the 1800's, I didn't see any case being made for repatriating all of that to Egypt.



The National Archaeological Museum is also very well done, by the way, despite a pretty shabby exterior. (More on signs of the recent economic troubles here in a later post.) We spent hours there today just following the sculpture path and never got to the second and third floors. After nearly two months of museum going and reading, we've just about got to the point where we're connecting all the periods, understanding who was influencing who, and can develop our own informed questions and guesses.

We also spent a lot of time in a special exhibit on the Antikythera Machine. I had never heard of it before.

Leaving aside that we haven't climbed the Acropolis yet, laying eyes on it is the culmination of a long dream for us. Ilene, of course, was a studied this subject avidly in college after a formative experience with a Western civ class in high school, and for as long as we've known each other we've been planning a trip to Greece without ever pulling it off.