Wednesday, July 1, 2009

The Last Weekend

Day 85; Sunday, June 28

This has been a very busy weekend.

Today I headed out to see the weekly flea market, the Keramikos cemetery, then the agora, the old marketplace of Athens, neither of which I got to see when I was first here.

I could have taken the Metro but wanted to take the bus as you can see more above ground, and on the way into the old cemetery (of course) I had to ask for directions a couple of times, then the bus driver must have thought I was looking for a place halfway across town (or maybe it was my execrable Greek) so I got sent off the bus almost a Km too soon. . . .

But I got lots of help after that from the wise women of the neighborhood





and stumbled into where I wanted to go in the first place,


Athens’s Biggest Flea (Market)













I almost bought these two books (but I didn’t want to haul them around all day in the heat); can you read the titles?



Cemetery Museum






Cemetery













This is the city end of one of the most sacred roads in ancient Athens—




Hadrian’s Library











And this obviously ancient piece of terra cotta edging attached to some really old cement



was just lying there waiting for a nice airplane ride to America . . . . but it’s still there, of course.


Agora

The name of the old market place is still used for the word “market,” and you etymologists will also see it in the root of “agoraphobia,” the fear of being outside.

There are a couple of lovely big buildings on the grounds, and lots of windy paths and old ruins. . . . and some more recent churches, and it sits right below the Acropolis (we get acrophobia— fear of heights— from that one).

















Where Are the Lions When You Need Them?

And there’s a big hill near the agora and you can walk up there and look down on it




and so I did.

And I get up there and here’s three little boys throwing rocks down over the side of the hill (there are paths down there where people are walking) and I spoke sharply to them and told them to stop.

And their parents, who spoke English, asked why and I told them.

And then we got to talking cameras and lenses some and then one of the parents said, pointing out across the city:

“I don’t see how you can see all this and not rejoice in the glory of God.”

And I said, “It’s the easiest thing in the world.”

And we were off. . . . .

So we danced through all the standard arguments and I finally asked them if they thought the Mormons were right, and they said no, they prayed for the Mormons to come to the true faith. Then I asked them if they thought the Jehovah’s Witnesses were right, and they said no, they prayed for them to come to the true faith. And lastly I asked them if they thought the Catholics were right, and they said no, they prayed for them to come to the true faith, too.

And I asked if they thought all the other religions were wrong except for theirs, and they said yes, and then I said that I wasn’t so terrible as they might think— I was only one religion ahead of them.

As I left they were praying for me, but not, apparently, for anyone who got beaned by their kids throwing rocks down a steep hill into trees and paths.


The Agora Museum















And this was the funniest thing I’ve ever seen in a museum, I think.
Here it is



and here’s what it’s for.




I’d been out just over 6 hours by then, so I headed back to the hotel (Metro this time, and only one stop) and took a nap and got a rest and wrote most of this.

But I didn’t want to waste the whole evening, so I went back out with the camera for the evening stroll, but this neighborhood, as I said earlier, is kind of gritty and scruffy, so I wasn’t out long.


Sorority Rush

I did see what looked like a kind or sorority rush party— lots and lots of hopeful-looking young women (somewhat scantily clad, I’ll admit) standing around the street intersections just kind of smoking and sometimes talking to each other and sometimes to the men who seemed to be walking past.

There were older women there as well, not quite dressed the same way, but not moving up and down the street like most of the shoppers.

Maybe they’d already done all their shopping for the day.


Day 84; Saturday, June 28

Saturday— the Archaeological Museum


After the energy cost of Friday I needed to rest more than I usually do, but there were some things that I never got to see when I was here as a kid (the summer I was 18 I spent a month here— I won a competition in the Civil Air Patrol in Washington, and was here for a month with four other state winners of identical trips— there were 130 winners from the US) and I really wanted to see them.

The first was the Archaeological Museum, which is about a Km from the hotel where I am, so I went up there in the late morning, spent same time there, came back to rest in the hottest part of the day, then went back in the evening.

And, just like the first time I was in the Louvre or the National Gallery in London or the Art Institute of Chicago, it is such a thrill to actually see something you have read about and seen pictures of for years.


The Trojan (Archaeology) Wars

Until about 140 or so years ago, the whole business about the Trojan War was thought to be mythic, with no actual historical connection.

A rich German business man, Heinrich Schliemann, who taught himself to read ancient Greek so he could tease out more location clues thought differently, and set out to find the actual city of Troy.

And he did.

His source materials were The Iliad, which was about the last few days of the war, and The Odyssey, about Odysseus’s ten-year trip home (he’s the one who thought up The Trojan Horse).

There were nine cities there, like a nine-layer cake, but in his zeal and pig-headedness and all that, he pretty much plowed through the first five cities to get to the sixth, which he thought was the right age and all that.

He wasn’t right about that, but that’s a different story.

Then he took all the good stuff to Germany.

Then he attacked other sites in the big peninsula that forms the south third of Greece, the Peloponnesus, and found equally wonderful stuff, including what he called the Mask of Agamemnon, the leader of all the Greek forces at Troy.



Agamemnon was the brother of Menelaus, the husband of Helen, whose abduction started the war.

Well, the mask is now thought to be a king’s mask, but there’s no connection to Agamemnon.

Here’s some more stuff from the Mycenean site in southern Greece.






Elegant Technology

These are cores and blades, which represent a huge leap forward in lithic (stone-based) technology.



Normally, you’d take a piece of obsidian about the size of a softball and thwack it with a hammer stone, normally something like granite (that won’t shatter like the obsidian does) and work away and pretty soon you have a chopper or a scraper or a spear-head that’s shaped like a fat leaf and has about a foot of cutting edge— the outer edges of what’s left.

And in the process, you wind up with a lot of very sharp but not very usable flakes of obsidian on the ground.

But core and blade techniques are different.

The cores



are prepared as columns, and then the tops are cleanly snapped off—now you have a column about four or five inches tall with a very flat top.

Then, if you put the point of a piece of deer antler (or goat horn) pointing down against the outer edge of the flat top, and give it just the right tap, the flake that splits off is a two-edged knife blade which is the length of the core. Then you move the antler a little, tap it again, and get another knife blade. And again, and again.

Here are the blades that result.



And you wind up with yards and yards of cutting edge from the same amount of obsidian you would have only gotten about a foot of cutting edge using older technology.

That may not sound like much, but some of the obsidian came from hundreds of miles away sometimes, and making more efficient use of it was a big deal.

So here’s more stuff from the museum.

















Including George Washington.



This is the oldest glass I know I’ve seen— it’s carved out of crystal, rather than actually created glass.





And about 20 years or so ago, some sponge divers found an ancient shipwreck, and it was full of sculptures- bronze and marble, so these made a really big splash in the world of archaeology.

Zeus (or Posiedon) here is about 7 feet tall.





And here’s the other great piece form the shipwreck—the jockey.












I got the abs—now where are the chicks?

And this poor whatever it is seems perplexed and frustrated—did all the work to get the six-pack abs but something went a little wrong somewhere.



On the way to the museum I sought out the local daily market, including the fish souk, the vegetable souk, the bread souk, and the butchers, souk, and the flower souk, which I’ll hit in the AM on Monday.









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