I'm new at blogging, and I am just barely learning how to use this free Lycos blog site.  For instance, I wanted things to be in chronological order, but it has all come out in reverse, and I don't think it can be switched around.  Too bad, because IMHO the best blogs are the first ones, way at the end.  Later, they degenerate into a catalog of what we saw day by day on The Tour, which is not so exciting unless you are really into Greek archaeology.

So with this blog I am breaking out of my trap to tell a story that is Greek and archeological, but only tangentially relevant to the tour.  I told it to our lecturer, Professor Bob, and he seemed to get a kick out of it.  So here it is.

I have a friend named X_ who was a conservator at the Detroit Institute of Arts.  She did her training at the British Museum in the early 60's, and became involved with an event which has come to be called The Other Elgin Marbles. This story really really belongs to her, but I am stealing it and concealing her identity because she, as a professional, can never write it up.  It casts too unflattering a light upon a certain historic personage; and besides, the art conservation literature is not supposed to be amusing.

The Elgin Marbles are excellently discussed at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elgin_Marbles, but here is a brutally brief condensation:  Thomas Bruce, Lord Elgin, was Ambassador to Turkey around 1800.  Turkey "owned" Greece at that time, but had only contempt for Greek history and culture.  No doubt in response to a small cash gift, the Turkish Pasha in Athens gave Elgin permission to remove "some marble" from the Parthenon.  So Elgin had both the East and West pediments hacked from the temple, cut in pieces, and shipped to England.  But these priceless Greek treasures were not the only thing he shipped back.  He also bought many ceramics and coins, and many statues of beautiful nude young men, which all went to England.  After 1804, he returned to install his collection in his country estate.  The house was like a museum, and the garden was particularly remarkable, decorated as it was with six of the most beautiful athlete portaits ever created.

However, he did this without taking his wife, Lady Elgin,  into account.  She was a proper English woman, and she didn't want to even mention it at first, but she really did not like a lot of Greek art.  She thought it was indecent, and certainly it was not fit for the garden of her house.  Elgin tried to explain to her about heroic nudity, and cultural relativism, and the natural beauty of the human body, and all that.  But she was not buying any of it.  All she knew was that the statues embarassed her, and they embarassed her friends.  In fact, it was all so indecent that she could no longer invite her friends into the garden for tea. Elgin countered that the statues had been selected with great care and put up in the garden at great expense.  It was not just himself who thought they were marvellous; all the most modern poets and artists approved and praised them, and they would just have to stay up.  So it festered.

We will never know exactly what the trigger was, but apparently one evening Lady Elgin could not stand it any longer.  She got a hammer and went out into the garden all alone;  and one by one, she knocked the offending penises off all the statues. Some came off nicely, but others required more hammering to make them clean and smooth (like a man ought to be ?).

In the morning, Elgin was horrified.  But what could he do?  The deed was done, and could not be undone, obviously, without a divorce.  So his man went all around the garden collecting everything.  He wrapped each penis, plus all its chips, in cotton wool and saved them all carefully in a nice wooden box.  

Well time went on, and Elgin died, and then Lady Elgin, and eventually the estate had to be broken up.  The paintings, the books, the coins, the vases, and the statues were sold at auction, and dispersed across Europe.  But nobody knew about, or thought about, that little box.

Many years later, about 1960, there was found, in the dustiest recesses of the British Museum, a small wooden box with "Elgin" written on it.  Inside, there were six marble penises wapped in cotton.  No one in the museum could explain it, so they became known as The Other Elgin Marbles.   But searching the records of Elgin's acquisitions, someone finally put two and two together, and pieced together the story that I have just related.  It was only an hypohesis, however, because nothing was labelled.  They needed proof, and there was only one way to get it.  Art historians were able to trace the Elgin statues through two World Wars to various collections in Britain and Europe.  So the owners were contacted and informed that an emissary of the British Museum would arrive, possibly bearing a broken fragment from a statue in their collection.  

That emissary turned out to be my friend X_.  She said it was a great summer;  the best job a museum intern ever had.  She got to visit all the capitals of Europe at Museum expense, always carrying the precious box, and to see private art collections never normally open to the public. At each collection, her job was to find the statue, open up the box, and see if she could make a match.  In the beginning, nothing was clear, and she had to visit the collections repeatedly, all summer long, until she began to find matches.  So I asked her, How did you know for sure when you found a match?

Well, she said, two of them had fractures that fit perfectly, so there was no question.  After that we could be sure the other four had to match somehow, even though the mating surface had been hammered smooth.  In one case, we matched them up on stylistic grounds.  But the other three were more questionable, and in the end, we just had to assign them on purely intuitive grounds.  I suggested a neutron activation analysis on the trace elements in the marble, but she thought it was unnecessary now that the problem had already been solved by feminine intuition.

The way I happened to meet X_ is also a bit of a story.  A few years ago the Detroit Institute of Arts had a real scientific collaboration going with our Chemistry department.  In those days lasers were quite new, and I had the only really powerful one in town.  A guy out in California had reported that high powered lasers could clean dark stains off of works of art, and the DIA physicist (yes, they used to have a physicist on the staff !) wanted to try it out. They had a fairly worthless Egyptian stone, hewn from a temple far up the Nile in 1904.   It was a soft sandstone caked with Nile mud;  so soft that if you rubbed it with a toothbrush, the inscription rubbed away before it was really clean.  The DIA lab had given up on it, so it seemed reasonable to give it to me and let me zap it with my big laser.  As it was, it was not worth any museum space, so there was nothing to lose.

To make a long story short, it worked billiantly.  The Nile mud was dark and the stone was nearly white, so when the laser hit it,  the mud absorbed all the energy and vaporized, making a literal zap sound, taking only a microscopic amount of stone with it.  As the mud zapped away, the spot got lighter and lighter and the zap got fainter and fainter, until the clean stone was quietly reflecting every bit of the very intense laser light.  As we cleaned it, a very nicely carved profile of a goddess emerged from the mud.  This was really exciting.  Now the curator wanted to display it, so it went to one of the DIA conservators for display preparation; namely, Conservator X_.  She became a good friend as we worked together to make this stone into something worth displaying. It was indeed displayed for many years in the Egyptian collection, though it has now rotated into the basement.

Sunday and Monday, May 27 & 28   Athens

Glorious Greece #3

On Sunday we did not do very much- We packed up at the Filoxenia and went by taxi to the Divani Palace, met the first members of the tour group, and went for a nap until about 6 PM. We all met for the orientation lecture at 6:30 and then had a buffet dinner after.  Bob Stieglitz has a slight foreign accent-   Austrian, as it turned out  His speciality is the excavation of river and harbor sites, and he has done a lot of work in Israel as well as Greece,  His lecture was on the structure of the Polis, and why Athens was such a special Polis.  There were hundreds of these city-states in ancient Greece.  Every one had a well defended acropolis for temples and military purposes, then a larger  undefended part that was the actual living part of the city, and then a third very large part, a countryside full of agricultural villages that it more or less owned and protected.  Stieglitz is an excellent lecturer, always bringing a concept up in his own mind before putting it into words.  The words were sometimes a little ragged, but that did not matter, because you could see that he was struggling to express an idea that was well formed in his mind.  So it was easy and interesting to follow him.  He is nearly retirement age, and like all old professors, he may be a bit disillusioned about what he does at the University.

Ancient Greek professors also used to complain about the declining quality of their students.  On this evidence, students have been getting steadily worse since about 400 BC, at least.

Archeological Tours always has an American lecturer and a local guide.  The "local" is Dr. Kostas Kolizeras, who is Greek, but actually is also an American professor of Archeology, at Boston College.  Kostas is an amazing person.  The bronze age fortress of Mycenae was part of his grandfather's farm, and his gandfather worked as Schliemann's foreman in the first unearthings there, which Schliemann took to be the grave of Agamemnon.  Kostas himself as a teenager worked on other shaft graves at Mycenae, and became an archaeologist because of these experiences, unearthing amazing golden teasures on what had been his grandfather's farmland.  He inherited and now owns a plot adjacent to Mycenae that contains two unopened beehive tombs.  We will see Mycenae later in the tour.

That night we had a nice view of the Parthenon from our balcony while we sipped cold red wine,  cooled in our little room refrigerator.  We have now seen it up close, and I must say the Parthenon looks better and better the farther you get away from it.  From our balcony, all lit up at night, way up high on the Acropolis, it was indeed glorious.

Monday we were on the bus at 9 AM for a tour of the city, basically to kill time until 10 AM, when the new Acropolis museum opened.  They are four years behind schedule, and even Kostas had never been inside.  They now are letting people in from 10 to 11 for a peek at the building and some mock-ups of the exhibits, which are still not in place.  But the building is very impressive, with lots of glass floors that let you see archeological finds still in place at the level of the museum's foundation.  Our hotel also has such an exhibit, a strech of Thucydides' defensive wall that the hotel was built over.  In Athens you must by law preserve any ancient foundations that you may find when building something new.

The Athenian agora...   Stoa of Attalus...    the Hephaesteion...   too much to write about.  But the Hephaesteion is especially interesting because it is the best preserved ancient temple in Greece.  All its columns are in place and the inner sanctuary is intact.  The only thing missing is the roof, and of course the great cult statues that once lived inside.  Ordinary Athenians did not go to the Parthenon to pray for personal things like love problems or arthritis cures.  They did all this down at the Hephaesteion and other small temples nearby, below the acropolis.  The Parthenon and the Erectheum were for State occasions and annual festivals, more or less like Thanksgiving and Christmas and Easter.  On these occasions, a procession of thousands of Athenians would go up to witness the sacrifice of a bull, or some purification ceremony, or a reading of the omens if the city was getting ready for war.

After the agora we walked a long way through the Plaka district to lunch.  Plaka is full of tourist shops and retaurants, and quite upward sloping because it is the rising approach to the foot of the Acropolis.  After lunch we "did" the Acropolis, a steep climb even after you get to the edge of Plaka. The final and steepest part of the climb takes you up into the Propylaea (entrance gate), which is famous for giving the weary procession a sudden view of the front of the Parthenon, only a few hundred feet beyond, and not visible until you climb up into the gate.   We did not really get the full effect because on top, it is mainly a construction site right now, with fork lifts and huge cranes and  scaffolding all over everything.  Both the Propylaea and the front of the Parthenon are covered by scaffolding.  The back part, the part that looks so good from the city below, was not covered, but most of the rest was.  I'm sure it will all be very beautiful some day.  

The main thing new to me was the relation between the Parthenon and the Erectheum (the small temple with women holding up a porch on their heads).  The Parthenon was the temple of Athena Parthenos (Athena the Virgin), while the Erectheum is a temple of two gods, Athena Nike (Athena Victorious) and Poseidon.  It was built  on ancient foundations after the Parthenon was finished.   Stieglitz says it was the most holy place on the Acropolis, and was the main structure up there when Xexres razed and burnt the whole place.  Pericles rebuilt it as a visual reminder of the old democratic Athens, to be compared against the mighty Doric power of his new Parthenon and his new Athenian Empire, unconquerable by anybody. Or so he thought.  With such hubris, Pericles died in a plague the year afte the Parthenon was finished, and his empire, the "Golden Age" of Athens,  lasted only 50 years.

The climb up was long and hot, but interspersed with shady rests.  But after you get to the top and through the propylaea, there is no shade at all and it is so hot and bright that most people just want to see it quickly and get down.  In Pericles's design, there were only three things up there:  the Propylaea, the Parthenon, and the Erectheum.  That left plenty of open space that was filled up by various Roman structures later on, plus a small museum built in modern times.  The current idea is to restore the Acropolis to Pericles' design, on the theory that less is more.  The Roman structures will be taken down to a site near the foot, and the museum will be demolished.  Its contents are already down in the as-yet unopened big new Acropolis museum.

We were getting sunburned, so after one circuit around the Parthenon we went painfully (my right knee) back down to a restaurant in the parking lot below the Acropolis to wait for our bus back to the hotel.  I ordered a small bottle of soda water with ice and Carol ordered an iced latte.  The bill was 10.70 Euros, over $16.  But I might have died without that soda water.

Today, Tuesday,  May 29, we are going to the Athens Archaeological Museum, and then to the Cycladic museum after lunch.  No more sun for a while. 

Saturday, May 26, 2008

Athens

For anybody who enjoys word puzzles, Greece is an endless source of entertainment.  Yesterday we were walking through a theater district, and I was able to read two signs without even looking up a word.  The first one said Molierou Philargentou,  Now "ou" is a genitive case ending, so the first word is Molier's:  Aha, they mean Moliere's.  Now what did Moliere write?  Phil is friend or lover and any chemist knows that Ag stands for argentum; i.e., silver, or in genitive case, of silver.  Now we are down to Moliere's Lover of Silver; Aha!  Of course, Moliere's "The Miser"! 

The other one was a movie named Thesauros Siera Matres.  In English, a thesauros is a word-hoard, and thesauros itself in Greek just means hoard or treasure.  Matres means Mother's.  So you have Treasure Siera Mother's.  Then you see a grizzly beard on Humphry Bogart, and realize that this is The Treasue of the Sierra Madre.

And so it goes.  I could really get into this, but I won't.  We have been here long enough to notice that except for all the ancient beauties, Athens is a lot like any town in Mexico.  Narrow twisty streets, horrible traffic, lots of grafiti and garbage, and a really bright hot sun that brings out the essence of the garbage.  But they have one nice thing here that goes right back to ancient Athenian architecture, that I have never seen in Mexico.  That is the stoa, or porch.  Many tall buildings have a deep set-back off the sidewalk that gives a cool shady space that becomes a broad extension of the sidewalk.   In this space  shops put out their wares, and hawkers to try to pull you in.  Or you can just sit on a bench and drink your iced latte.  The ancient market (the agora) had a series of stoas around it; one, the Stoa of Attalus, has been rebuilt in modern times and still seves as an art gallery plus lecture hall.  Only today the lecture is more likely to be a guide and tour group, rather than a bearded philosopher and his adoring young disciples.  The stoas are a wonderful thing in all this too-bright sun, and it is nice to see them in so many new buildings.

One other random observation.  Athens is just chock full of stray dogs and cats, and they are treated with an almost Hindu degree of reverence.  At any little outdoor cafe, there are a few dogs looking in with drooly anticipation; mostly they know to stay out but at the slightest motion they will come in and eat your scraps.  These are not starving dogs; some are seriously overweight.  Last night I had my seventieth birthday dinner in a fairly upscale outdoor place that had a family of four cats brushing back and forth under the tables.  I will do another whole blog on the food, which is amazing.  But not now.

Yesterday we saw the changing of the guard in front of the Parliament building.  It is a Big Deal.  The soldiers are those efzones who wear white tights and a frilly little skirt and shoes with a big pom-pom on the toe.  This sounds silly but the rest of them is quite fierce, and nobody, but nobody, laughs.  There were about a thousand tourists waiting with a thousand cameras at the ready, and you could hear the military band marching way down the street.  Behind the band came about a hundred efzones, all doing that extremely peculiar strut. They stick one leg way out on every step, give the pom-pom a little toss with their foot, then bang the foot down a loud as possible.  Then the same thing with the other leg.  It must take years to master this.  (When Nixon came to Greece and saw it, he tried to get the Marines at the White House to do it too.  They refused, point-blank.) 

The police had of course stopped traffic for blocks all around so the parade had the whole street to itself.  I wouldn't go into all this except that out in front of the whole parade, even in front of the special fancy strut and twirl of the drum major, the whole thing was led by a large stray dog, wagging his tail enthusiasically.  He seemed to think the whole parade was for him.  He knew the routine, and led the way for the drum major when they turned into Parliament Square.  I hate myself for not getting a picture of that dog.  I might go back just for that.

These are notes written up in during our Archeological Tours trip to Greece, May 21 - June 16, 2008.  Carol and I flew to Athens a few days early to just enjoy roaming around before we get herded into the tour agenda.  We will endure the herding when it comes because we expect a super guide, one Prof. Robert Stieglitz, Department of Archaeology at Rutgers.  He has done this tour 16 times before, so he should know what he is doing.

This first blog is basically for Anna Savvides, my sweet and patient Greek teacher in Detroit, who fears that I am going to humiliate her by trying to speak to the natives of this country.  The trip to Athens was not great;  30  hours from bed to bed,  with two long layovers (Chicago and Madrid) with only a little sitting-up sleep; also the worst airline food I have ever been offered (AA, it was somewhere between Spam and tofu), and some really down and dirty luck on the way in from the Athens airport. 

But let's skip over all that.  Consider Martin and Carol, sitting exhausted at the end of a 28 hour day in a little neighborhood sidewalk cafe, seriously in need of a drink and a shower and a bed, but putting  first things first.  There is a trendy twenty-something threesome at the next table and a Greek menu.  You must realize that up to that moment I had never uttered a word of Greek to anybody other than Anna, my teacher.  So this was the test.  The waitress came over, long brown hair, bare midriff, long legs, a peek of a tattoo, and a Blackberry.  So I said to her  Ena potiri kokkino, poly stifno, parakalo, ke ena potiri lefko, me pagos, parakalo.  (A glass of red, very dry, please, and a glass of white, with ice, please.) This was all in Greek letters of course. I did it pretty smoothly, and with the right accents and with my very best Greek vowels, a la Savvides.  

I couldn't have guessed what happened next, but I swear it is true, and Carol will back me up:  The trendy twenties at the next table broke into a round of applause.  I guess it was just so obvious that these were my first serious words in Greek.  So I said to them Efharisto, efharisto.  (Thank you, thank you).  The waitress was too cool to take any notice; she was busy punching our order into her Blackberry. It's always kind of astonishing when somebody understands some new silly way of talking that you are just learning.  To us it's a game, but to them it is real life.  Then the spell broke: the trendy twenties said something to me and from my blank look they switched immediately to English, which of course they spoke perfectly.  They knew quite a bit about Michigan. U of M administers the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) in Greece, which one of them had just taken, not to come to America, but to get a job in Greece that requires English.  I was really a bit surprised at that.  Pretty soon the red and the white and the ice appeared, so I must have done OK, Anna. In fact, I think I carried the flag for America for a little while that evening, and I may have even impressed my wife, which is not easy four days before your seventieth.   We Americans have our work cut out for us now. The rest of the world has to remember that a few of us at least are not moron barbarians, though Texans we may be.

In Detroit, no vans are allowed at the airport, and the cheapest taxi is $40.  It is all totally corrupt between the taxi companies and the Wayne Count Commissioners, but we don't seem able to un-elect them.  But I was a little surprised when a well spoken Greek man, suit and tie,  approached us and offered us a ride into Athens for 95 Euros.  At $1.59 to the Euro, that is a $150 taxi ride  (30 minutes or so).  We turned him down. Americans are now the poorest people in Europe, more or less like Albanians.  A coffee and a sandwich can easily set you back $20.  (Thanks, all you folks who vote Republican, we really appreciate it.)  But Greece is the cradle of civilization, and Greece did not let us down.  There is a Metro station right at the airport, so for 6 Euros, plus of course the anxiety of finding your own way and the struggle of doing your own bags, we got into Athens, three blocks from our hotel.

Now you have to hear the rotten luck: I was pickpocketed on the metro, and lost a bunch of cash and a credit card, but not my passport, thank god.  I had been warned by everybody, and I was thinking about it, and I was going to transfer my money to a body belt as soon as we got to the hotel, but I seriously underestimated the pickpockets.  Looking back, I know exactly who they were and exactly when it happened.  There were three young Arab guys who crowded in beween me and Carol just when we were about to get off the metro.  They were very rude and kept shoving me and shoving my bags around on the floor; Carol saw it too and was immediately suspicious of them, but they were too good to let her see the actual hand in the pocket.  That's why there were three of them; two to cover and one to pick. I just could not help looking like a dumb fat pigeon, because that is exactly what I was.  So now I am giving everybody else the same advice I got, but with just a little new twist:  Silly as it may feel to you, put your body belt on before you leave the States.  Otherwise, the 95 Euro taxi ride might actually be a bagain.

The next day we were walking around, drinking coffee in sidewalk cafes  (kafe ellenico, sketo) and stumbling across ancient stuff at random.  (We are saving the biggies for Prof. Stieglitz.)  This is the way we love to do a new city.  We ran up on Hadrian's library 132 AD, a Roman gift to Athens from a very Hellenized Emperor.  Sitting under a cool arch in the library courtyard, a little four-line poem came back to me.  Hadrian was dying of congestive heart failure as he wrote these Stoic words, addressed to his own soul: 

"Little soul, little sociable partner, little friend and companion of my body, you are looking poorly now, naked and cold.  Are you getting ready to resign your office?  You have stopped making jokes like you used to." 

In the original, it rhymes and is very clever.  If he had had a few of my little pills they would have saved him.  This is a good age to live in.

More later-  we are going out for our second day now, and for an internet cafe adventure. (The internet cafe was a complete disastrous failure.  I went back three times, and every time the same Greek louts were sitting and playing Grand Theft Auto.  Truly, America rules the world.  But there was no way this cafe could read my USB memory.)

Regards to all   Martin, and Carol too.

P.S. to Anna:  You have to say kafe elleniko now, not just kafe, because otherwise they assume you want some Starbucks concoction. As I say, America rules.