Day+2-Athens!

May 26, 2012

Our first day in Athens!! First, it started with a great breakfast buffet-filled with eggs (scrambled, fried, or hard boiled), mini-tyropitas, Greek yogurt with a plethora of toppings (honey, cherry marmalade, fresh fruit, granola, etc.) and two of my favorites-fresh squeezed orange juice and freshly-made, still warm traditional Greek donuts called loukoumades which you pour honey over! DELICIOUS. Our first visit of the day was the Acropolis. As we climbed up the slopes of the Acropolis, the early sun already beating down on us, we passed the Theater of Dionysis, which still has some of the seats still in situ, along with the orchestra and some fragments of the ‘skene’. What was pretty amazing was the fact that you could tell, just like today, where the important seats were-right down in front! These seats were ornately carved and looked quite regal.

Continuing up the slope, rather slowly at this point, we reached another famous theater called the Herodion (the namesake for our hotel!). This theater was even better preserved and we learned that plays and concerts are still performed there! Amazing. We finally turned the last corner, and there was this massive, gorgeous gateway made completely out of beautiful white marble! It simply was amazing to walk up these steps of worn marble and through the forest of columns. It was so early in the morning, hardly anyone else was there. For the next hour we walked all around the Acropolis, looking at and exploring all the buildings. The Parthenon had a lot of scaffolding around it since the Greeks have been working on restoring the Parthenon to look like when it first was built. We learned about some of the history of the Parthenon through student presentations including the themes of the metopes, the themes of the Panathenaic Proccession and the cult statue made out of gold and ivory which stood inside the Parthenon. Being up on the hill of the Acropolis we could see all of Athens, as it stretched out before us in a sea of white buildings to the surrounding mountains and out to the edge of the Aegean sea.





After we went to the Acropolis we went to the newly built Acropolis Museum that was just finished and opened in 2009. Here we were able to see artwork from the Parthenon including the Ionic Panathenaic frieze, which is very familiar to us since sections of the frieze adorns the walls of TA’s own Main building. It was kind of awesome seeing the real deal after walking by the copies in the halls of Main for so long! We also learned a lot about Nike and her temple on the Acropolis and how the Greeks had spent close to 10 years taking the building apart, conserving the blocks and putting it back together. There was also a short movie that we were able to watch that showed us the way the Parthenon used to look including its colors and statues that were on the top of the building in ancient times. Its amazing how different our idea as to what it looked like, all white, to what it really looked like-full of vibrant colors! We also learned about how the Parthenon had been stripped of a lot of its sculpture (like the metopes and parts of the pedimental sculpture) by a man known as Lord Elgin, who had made a deal with the Ottomans who were in control of Greece in the 1800s. He took all this stuff back to England and has been displayed at the British Museum for some time now. The Greeks want the sculptures back…..but not sure if that is ever going to happen.

We finally took a lunch break in a part of Athens called Monastiraki-we all went to the same restaurant and tried a bunch of Greek appetizers, like tzasiki, olives, zucchini balls, cheese balls, grilled lamb and chicken, grilled stuffed eggplant….Curtis even tried grilled octopus! Around 2 in the afternoon we visited the Athenian Agora-the political and cultural center of the ancient city. We were able to see the shrine to the Eponymous heroes, the altar of the Twelve Gods, (known as the center of Greece), the Temple to Hephaistos, the ‘wandering’ Temple of Ares, and we finally we were able to see the museum at Agora which is in this building called the Stoa of Attolos-a full copy of the original building that once stood there.

After a ‘siesta’, late in the afternoon we took a walk and visited the Temple of Olympian Zeus. All that remains are these huge, massive Corinthian columns, though one of the column had fallen after being struck by lightening on October 26, 1976 and is now in smaller pieces (kind of looks like fallen dominos!) next to the other columns. Then we went to the Parliament building where we were able to see the Greek soldiers on duty guarding the Tomb of the Unknown Solider-just like what we have. Luckily we were able to see the guards switching out in between shifts so we were able to see their marching routine. The soldiers wore the old uniforms that date back to the time of their fight for independence and though impressive, they look very uncomfortable to wear and they had pompoms attached to their shoes! These soldiers act like the ones at Buckingham palace where they have to remain still and can’t have any reaction-just to stare straight ahead. A bunch of us were able to get our pictures taken standing next to them, but they wouldn’t smile!





Our day ended with a long, leisurely dinner on the roof top a restaurant looking up at the Acropolis-there was lots of food and people were adventurous in what they ordered, trying some of the local Greek dishes like mousaka, pastichio, and gemista! Everything was delicious and we were all full, though some of us still had room to grab some gelato on our walk back to the hotel!

Whew….what a day!!