1 Picture 1 Thousand Words: The Parthenon

The Parthenon

This post was originally published March 29, 2018.

My friend Jill looked over at me. Her skin was turning red under Athens' sun. "I know," she said, as we looked back at the Parthenon. "It's not that great."

My first encounter with the Parthenon was in a computer game. My older brother spent his free time playing Age of Empires, and I spent my free time watching him, pestering him to let me have a turn. One day, he brought home a new edition of the game--one titled: Age of Mythology. I knew what mythology was, but only through the grapevines of a small school and the classes I had not taken yet. But like every edition before, I was entranced. As I was captivated by stories of gods, heroes, and monsters, fantasy had reached a new level, breaching into faith.

The Parthenon turned from CGI into two-dimensional paintings in books I borrowed from the library and begged my parents to buy. People walked in and out of the temple, dressed in their chitons, bearing offerings of fruit and gazing upon the great statue of Athene inside. Athene, the Greek goddess of wisdom and warfare, was the patron goddess of the temple and the namesake of the city. She became the focal point of all my mythological interests. Athens became the place I wanted to visit, even live in for some time. I tried to learn Greek, filling notebooks with scribbled Greek letters forming English words.

Before I knew it, I was making spreadsheets of mythological gods---who everyone represented in Greek, Roman, Egyptian, and Norse mythology. How they were all related interculturally and how they all stemmed from an earlier belief in one another. As I studied mythology more, I learned that faith is fluid. One religion could not exist in its form without the presence of another. Sumerian goddesses became Egyptian goddesses became Greek goddesses became symbols and references for contemporary religions.

I found my niche in religious ritual and symbolism. I spent college writing papers on cannibalism in New Guinea, blood sacrifice in the ancient Maya, and for my mythology class, I created a ten page paper and presentation on religious architecture. One of my examples, of course, was the Parthenon.

There was a time I knew almost everything there was to know about the Parthenon. Why the Romans stole that giant statue of Athene, what the friezes above the columns might represent, and what the temple meant to the people who built it, lugging stones up to the top of the Acropolis for their Goddess.

I don't remember these things anymore.

"I want to walk through it." It was not the first, nor the last time I said this. The thick rope kept the hoards of tourists from getting within a dozen yards of the temple. Scaffolding kept the columns standing. Some of those columns, restored to the point where the boundaries of calling them an original were beginning to be blurred. Guides ushered people along like cattle. You could stop and stare, but not without feeling like an inconvenience, at least if you lived without a sense of entitlement.

I sat on one of the weathered, carved stones of a purposeful overlook. One with incredible views of Athens and all the monuments within it. I ran my hand along that rock a few times, took in the slipperiness of the stones across the Acropolis, the ones that had been trodden on for thousands of years by millions of different people.

But it was just a stone, and I couldn't remember what it meant.

When I touched down in Greece, I felt two juxtaposing things: anxiety and overwhelming relief. Anxiety because it was the first time I had ever traveled internationally alone, and overwhelming relief because no matter how many times I told myself I was going to Athens, part of me feared I'd never be able to get there. I cried in the airport bathroom and met my Airbnb host with tired, red eyes.

In the morning, I walked. Down the streets, past the vendors, and along the perimeters of ancient sites. I walked through the trees and tall grasses to the top of Filopappou Hill. I stared out at the Mediterranean, wanting to touch it, to sail it, and I stared back at the Acropolis and the Parthenon, a still rock in a sea of people. I thought it was beautiful, even with the metal structures and long missing pieces. I gawked at the unattainable. I was so close. Soon I would be standing up there with it.

"I want to touch it." It felt like a childish thing to say. "To feel it like all those people did when it was built." But I couldn't because somewhere along the lines of protecting history from us, we were shunned from it. Instead, I was left resting my hand on a stone block, grappling with the crushing disappointment that this is as close as I get.

I did not forget everything I knew about Greece at once, and my realization was not sudden. It began in museums, where I was told not to touch, not to interact, and, sometimes, not to take pictures. It ended with the money: the most profitable pieces and stories curators and news media could show, the pleading for grants and preserving artifacts and sites despite money loss or a derailed business plan. I didn't want to participate in a system that treated history like an investment instead of a lesson.

I did not expect to rekindle my dreams of being an archaeologist in Greece, though part of me might have hoped for it. I left the country with none of what I expected when I was sitting on my bedroom floor years ago, studying the letters in the Greek alphabet. But I did not leave unfulfilled. Gazing upon the Parthenon, I understood that my purpose was never in any ancient artifact but, instead, in all the things I had to say about it.