Ancient Athens
Temple of Hephaestus
This post was originally published May 11, 2017.
I think I’ll always be lost for words when it comes to Greece. When I was probably 10 or 11 years old I fell in love with Greek mythology while playing a computer game. My love for writing and adventure intersected, and my journey into archaeology began. I told myself over and over again that I would go to Greece to see the truth in the stories I once knew by heart. I’ve since forgotten most of those stories, and by the time I finally boarded the plane to go, I was looking for more answers about myself than about ancient Greece, but I think that was for the better. I wanted to hear what Athens had to tell me.
Athens immediately told me two things: (1) it’s like the energizer bunny—it just keeps going and going—and (2) it smells really good. The streets around the acropolis were lined with orange trees, and though the fruit was bitter, they left the air smelling perpetually sweet. I had a week in the city, so I took my time exploring. That being said, the acropolis was the first thing I visited.
I fancied myself a smarty pants when I was younger, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that Athena was my favorite Greek God. I’ve written papers on the Parthenon and to stand before it in all its faded glory made me want to cry. People were swarmed around it, taking pictures, and reading informational signs, but it felt so empty. There’s so much history in Greece, but so much of it feels like it’s been reduced to a tourist attraction. We can’t know the importance of the temples like those who built them knew them, but it sure felt hard to try.
I did enjoy some of the less crowded monuments though, like the Temple of Zeus and the Panathenaic Stadium. The Temple of Zeus is often skipped by a lot of tourists because it can be seen pretty well from the street. Unlike the Parthenon, I could get really close to the temple, and appreciate its size and the amount of work that was put into constructing it, even if most of it had toppled over. I visited it at the end of a long day of walking, so I sat near the fence in the grass and looked up at the clouds, imagining people years ago doing the same and thinking it proof of the God they built that temple for.
I loved the Panathenaic Stadium. It was the only place I could crawl all over. I hiked the steep steps all the way to the top and then all the way back down. Underneath, a tunnel led to an exhibit with original posters advertising all the past Olympics. The torches carried at those Olympics were displayed too. At the exit, there were three marble stones with the carvings of the locations and dates of every modern Olympic games back to the first one right there in the Panathenaic Stadium in 1896. The stadium itself is hundreds of years older and was used for the Panathenaic games, which included everything from wrestling to reciting poetry.
Of course, I could not spend a week in Athens without going to a museum. I visited the National Archaeology Museum, which was so big I got lost more than once. I saw countless statues of the goddess of beauty, Aphrodite, and an overwhelming amount of statues of Hermes and Nike as well. I found Paris from the infamous Trojan War, holding up an invisible apple. Theseus was no more than a battered torso next to a more put together minotaur, and for some reason, Heracles was hanging out next to the cafeteria.
The statue of Odysseus was recovered from a shipwreck, and now sits in his own exhibit, along with statues of sirens and old nautical artifacts. I think it’s a funny coincidence that it took Odysseus 10 years to get back to Ithaca, and it took me 10 years for my dream of going to Greece to finally come true. Travelling the world makes you realize the value of home, and soon I’ll be returning to my own Ithaca.
