This is the fourth installment of Edmonds resident Nathaniel Brown’s recent travels to Greece. You can read part 1 here, part 2 here and part 3 here.

Athens

I’ve written about Athens before – teeming, dirty and sparkling, exhilarating, old, often all in one block Athens.  The city where it all started, as far as European history goes.  This was my fifth visit, with a two-week stay in order to give myself the opportunity to take days off for rest, or just to wander, enjoy a coffee or a fresh juice in some sidewalk eatery, watch the world go by, and just be – that lost art in the frenetic day of cruise ships and selfies, packaged tours and guided groups.  One Greek told me I’m not a tourist, but rather “part of it” because I love to sit at a sidewalk café and sip an espresso or a frappe– a compliment I take very highly. (A frappé is a chilled, frothy coffee beverage, often associated with Greek coffee culture. It’s typically made with instant coffee (!), water, sugar, and ice, and is known for its foamy texture achieved through shaking or blending. – AI)

The Acropolis and its ancient – partly Mycenaean – walls, and the Parthenon, from the rooftop restaurant at the Athen Gate Hotel.

So, in no particular order:

This year I skipped any visit to the Acropolis or the Parthenon – simply too many people crowded into a rather small space, with no opportunity to contemplate the vast history of the place.  The last time I was up there, you had literally to walk sideways in places, as in a crowded store or rush hour bus. I was told that they get up to 5,000 visitors an hour in peak season and when the cruise ships are in. It is an unpleasant chaos. If you go, and do try to – go at the moment of opening, 8 a.m., and get up the hill as fast as you can and you may have half an hour or a bit more before the crowd.  Or for only €5,000 you can go before or after closing and have the entire Acropolis to yourself! I did not avail myself of this opportunity.

Last year I hired the same Tours by Locals guide, Panagiotis Papageorgopoulos, for tours of the Ancient Agora, the Pnyx, and the Keramikos (the potters’ quarter, including the ancient gates, the street of the tombs and the Sacred Way to Eleusis (pronounced, confusingly, Elefsis – home of the Mysteries. (The letter Epsilon lifts Greek spelling up into the dizzy heights of confusion occupied by English: preceded by a vowel ύ is pronounced as “f” or “v”; preceded by a consonant it is pronounced as “I,” or phonetically “ee”. It may display other elaborate traps for the unwary Greek student, but you get the idea.) We had such a good time that I got in touch this year and arranged just to have dinner with him. He knew a good place near the hotel, where he got a long-lost-relative greeting that spilled over to me, and we had a delightful evening of good food and wine.  Panos had “Rooster with Pasta,” which somehow sounded tough and stringy to me, but tasted very good – it appears on menus everywhere. Don’t be put off by the rooster image!

Uber, the National Archaeological Museum

Don’t miss the National Archaeological Museum – it’s “all” there, all the statues, pottery, Mycenaean gold, the “Boxing Boys” (see below) – but by all means get there at opening time.  The museum can get as crowded as last-minute Christmas shopping, and the Mycenaean gold, in the first room, can be so crowded as to be hard to walk through, but there you will see the golden “mask of Agamemnon” (it’s actually quite 300-400 years older than the period of the Iliad, if not even older) and such things as the bronze daggers with inlaid gold – and they are worth seeing!

There are any number of bronze and marble statues in the museum, but somehow, to me, the funerary monuments are always the most moving sculptures – naked but dignified human grief can speak across all those centuries in ways which are hauntingly immediate, if you will let them.  While other statues represent ideals, these monuments represent a real person’s terrible but accepted loss.

Advice: don’t try to walk to the museum; it’s a longish walk from the better hotels, and to get there at opening time would mean an early start and leave you tired at arrival. And don’t take a taxi! Athenian taxi drivers see a tourist and smell blood – or dollars – in the water, and will charge astronomical amounts if they think they can get away with it. Instead, take an Uber; Ubers are run by the taxi company, not the individual bandit-with-a-car, and prices are very reasonable.

You might choose to walk back, however. The first quarter mile or so to the area where your hotel and the Athens Gate are probably located, is down one side of a rather nasty main artery.  But then it turns into a delightful pedestrian street with shops, cafes, bits of archaeology and the more-enjoyable kind of street life. I stopped for a juice and some water. The waiter asked me if I stayed at the Naxos Magic Village hotel, and when I said I had, he greeted me like an old friend, for some reason remembering me from Naxos last year. Then I recognized him, and we had a pleasant, if short, visit.  (Many of the staff people in Aegean hotels and restaurants are from the mainland, but work on the islands during the open season.)  The pedestrian street ends at the Library of Hadrian, on the shoulder of the Acropolis and the edge of the Plaka neighborhood. 

Pnyx

Thanks to Panos’ excellent guiding last year, I knew where the Pnyx is – a closely guarded secret if you try to locate it via Google maps, which insists it is on the opposite side to the Hill of the Nymphs from where it actually is.

At any rate, the Pnyx is a flattened area on a hill facing the Acropolis, and it was here that the Ekklesia, or Assembly of ancient Athens met beginning in 507 BC,  to debate and to make laws, although what we see today is the enlarged area made possible by in-fill at a later date. “The Assembly,” probably numbering around 16,000, meant adult males, as women were not included, but in this restricted form, here democracy began.

Glass Sidewalks

I looked up the address of a shop specializing in maps and guidebooks, thinking it might be good to have both for the next phase of the trip, visiting four Aegean islands (five, as it turned out – see below).

Walking through Athens – as in virtually every place I visited in Greece, is to move from the neglected or the squalid to the modern and fashionable and expensive with one street.  And it is to go from the most modern to something ancient in the same space.  Walking to the map store, I found myself standing on a glass sidewalk covering a hole some ten or twelve feet deep.

Below were the excavated remains of one of the ancient gates of Athens. You can barely plant a geranium in Greece without finding something antique reminder of the past, and in Greece that past can be very old – and awkward. On Milos, my driver told me that he bought a plot to build a family home on, but when excavating for the foundations they found what every Greek dreads: some potential archeology, and everything grinds to a stop while you inform the Ephorate of Antiquities – (the Department of Antiquities – more about ephors later). In his case, my driver had been waiting two years for permission to proceed, or word to desist, and to top it all off, the land owner pays the cost of investigation, and should anything significant be found, the state owns what is found. My driver was about to give up.

The Agora

It was a very hot day when I visited the Ancient Agora, so called to differentiate it from the Roman Agora, built between 27 BC and 17 BC when the old ago became too crowded, and which lies a hundred yards to the south and east of the classical agora.

I walked from the hotel to the Agora, following the broad pedestrian street up over the shoulder of the Acropolis and down past the Pnyx, a glorious walk, ruins and history on both sides, such as the Cave of Pan.

The goal of my walk was the Stoa of Attalos. A stoa was a covered porch where people would meet and talk, and there would be shops, shade in the summer and refuge from rain in the winter.  Philosophers would hold their discussions in the stoas, hence the word “stoic” for one school of philosophy.

My  reason for revisiting the Stoa was to spend some time in the museum, which houses finds from the excavation of the Agora starting in the 1930s, interrupted by World War II, but now ongoing. It’s a small but fascinating museum, housing among other things one of the very few surviving bronze shields from antiquity (there is another in the Piraeus museum and one in the Vatican museum). This one is even more special: It is a Spartan shield, part of the spoils taken when the Athenians defeated and humiliated the Spartans at the Battle of Sphacteria in 425 BC, taking 120 “unbeatable” Spartan hoplites prisoner and bringing them back to Athens in triumph. The shields were displayed as trophies, and this is the only one which survives.

Dining

Generally, it is hard to find really bad food in Greece, though I did hit the jackpot once or twice. Greek food is generally simple, and if the restaurant is conscientious about keeping it fresh, it’s hard to go very wrong. The Athens Gate Hotel, for example, has a lovely rooftop restaurant with a stunning view of the Acropolis, and specializes in authentic Greek cuisine. Their Greek Salad was my first introduction to this simple and versatile delight, with its endless small variations. (More authentically, χωριάτικηin, or choriatiki σαλάτα in Greek, meaning “village salad.”)

 On my first visit to Greece I stumbled with great good luck on Daphne’s, in the Plaka neighborhood, five minutes’ walk from the Athens Gate. (Plaka is the old neighborhood clustered on the eastern side of the Acropolis. Very touristy, but there are good things as well to be found. Try exploring up — there are real houses in steep and twisty streets of the upper Plaka.)

Daphne’s is superb and welcoming.  You can dine inside, surrounded by walls of an uncertain antiquity, or in the alley/courtyard with it view up toward the truly ancient walls of the Acropolis. After dining there numerous times last year, I got a touching and warm welcome, especially from Yani, who works the tables where I like to sit. Greek hospitality again.

Another restaurant I loved is Diogenes, which pessimistic name seems peculiar for a friendly restaurant! (Diogenes was a stoic, renowned for his ascetic lifestyle – he is said to have lived in a barrel or a large pithos, or jar, and is remembered for carrying a lamp around Athens, “searching for an honest man.” When [Alexander the Great] greeted him and asked if there was anything he wanted, Diogenes replied, “Yes, that you should stand a little out of my sun.” It is said that Alexander was so impressed by this — and by the arrogance and grandeur of spirit of a man who could treat him with such disdain — that he said to his courtiers, who were laughing and joking about the philosopher as they walked away, “But I’ll tell you this: if I were not Alexander, I would be Diogenes!” — Plutarch, Alexander, XIV

However, the food is good all day – try the meatballs; a varying and ubiquitous  Greek dish, but so good at Diogenes that I had it two nights running.  The meatballs are variously described as “hamburgers” or “biftek” in various places, but those at Diogenes were the best I found.

Cats are universal in Athens, indeed in all of Greece, and at Diogenes the waiters skillfully step over or around the semi-official house cats, which they also feed.  The Head Cat divides its time between the steps to the kitchen, where it achieves maximum inconvenience, and visiting guests.

Side trip to Eleusis

Elefsis – (see pronunciation of the Greek “u”, above), the home of the Mysteries, was one of the three greatest religious sites in Ancient Greece, together with Delphi and Delos. For centuries there was an annual procession up the coast from Athens to Eleusis, a distance of about 20 kilometers.  There were shrines to visit along the way, and once at the Eleusis complex, there was a five-day series of preparations for the final revealing of the Mysteries. To this day, what those mysteries were we do not know: it was forbidden to speak of them, and no one ever did. All we know is that they had to do with Demeter, rebirth and a journey toward the light, with the final revelation taking place inside the dark hall of the Telestrion, capable of holding 3,000 initiates. (“The Mysteries represented the myth of the abduction of Persephone from her mother Demeter by the king of the underworld Hades, in a cycle with three phases: the descent (loss), the search and the ascent, with the main theme being the ascent (ἄνοδος) of Persephone and the reunion with her mother.” – Wikipedia)

The Mysteries, scholars believe, may date to the Mycenaean period, and were possibly celebrated down to the destruction of the precinct in the 4th century AD. All we know is that there was “something done, something said, and something shown,” and that the Mysteries were so renowned and celebrated that even the Emperor Hadrian was initiated, along with his lover Antinous, in 124 AD.

The sanctuary at Eleusis is one of the forgotten sites of ancient Greece, just far enough from Athens to discourage day trippers from the cruise ships, less visually impressive than Delphi with the cliffs of Parnassos, and less accessible than the 20-minute boat ride from Mykonos to Delos (an adventure in itself when the wind is up and the swells are chaotic). The day I visited there was a couple in the distance and a loan woman who arrived as I was leaving – the solitude is a gift to anyone inclined to contemplation.

Next — Part 5:  Off to the Islands

 

Nathaniel Brown taught and coached cross-country running and skiing for 16 years before joining the US Biathlon Team as wax technician, switching to the US Cross-Country team in 1989. He was the first American to take over technical services for a foreign team (Slovenia) and worked also for Germany and Sweden. He coached at three Olympics and 14 World Championships, edited Nordic Update for nine years and Cross-Country Skier for two. He has written three books on skiing and training; the latest was The Complete Guide to Cross-Country Ski Preparation (Mountaineers Books) which has gone through two editions and a Russian translation. He owned and operated Nordic UltraTune, an international freelance ski tuning service, until retirement.