The glory that was Athens

After spending four days in Rome, the overland portion of our trip through Europe was ending and it was time for our group to part. My sister and niece were leaving for London while my family and I were on our way to Greece.

I arrived in Greece with a sense of anticipation after an absence of 18 years. On my last trip, which I had taken with some close friends, I had the time of my life and was looking forward to sharing what I had enjoyed about Greece with my family. Upon arrival in Athens, I was pleasantly surprised to see that we had landed at a brand-new airport. It’s about time. The old airport was more suitable for a destination like Malaybalay, not an international destination like Athens. Driving from the airport to our hotel though, it was quite apparent that not much else about Athens had changed: It was as characterless as ever.

For anyone who has never been to Athens and has romantic visions of seeing all the glories of its classical past, perish the thought. There is nothing left of Pericles’ Athens except the Parthenon. Athens is otherwise a haphazardly planned (if you can call it that) modern city with a thin Ottoman overlay and poverty written all over it, something Filipinos are unfortunately all-too familiar with.

Our hotel’s location did not help matters any. The Athens Novotel (which I had booked through Yahoo Travel as I had no guidebooks to help me navigate through Athens) was right in the middle of a thoroughly nondescript section of Athens. Stores that seemed to have been lifted from Communist East Berlin, apartment buildings way past their prime, and the occasional grimy machine shop surrounded the hotel. It was like being set up in a hotel in the middle of España, except that Manila is more polluted, suffocating and debased.

There are pockets of relief from Athens’ overall lack of charm, though. There is of course the Acropolis, the fortified hilltop that Pericles transformed into the greatest expression of Greece’s political and cultural achievements. Atop this hill, one will find the inspiration for the thousands of tacky tourist curios being sold in the shops down below. Nevertheless, the Porch of the Caryatids (where statues of women were used in place of columns), the Temple of Athena Nike (meaning victory, not the rubber shoes and just DOH it), the artifacts in the Acropolis Museum, and of course the Parthenon have not lost their evocative power. They are still impressive despite the depredations of time.

The Parthenon is currently undergoing a controversial restoration program meant to restore it to some measure of its former self. It may come as a surprise to some but the Parthenon was intact until only 316 years ago. At that time, the Venetians, who were besieging the Ottoman overlords of the city with their cannons, hit the Parthenon and blew up the ammunition stored within. Prior to that unfortunate cannonball, the Parthenon was still in use, having been converted into a church, a mosque and finally an arsenal.

Athens also has a number of interesting museums such as the Benaki and Byzantine Museums and the Museum of Cycladic Art. But to me the best one is the National Archaeological Museum. It has a formidable collection of art and archaeological treasures, which anyone with even just a cursory knowledge of ancient Greece, would have read about. Among its many masterpieces are the golden treasures of Mycenae, the famous frescoes of Thira and some of the most magnificent bronze sculptures ever created. Suffice it to say that the glories of ancient Greece may have come and gone but those that have survived are on display at the National Museum.

Another area of interest is Monastiraki, the former heart of Ottoman Athens and home to the bazaar whose goods range from junk to jewellery. Then there is Plaka, the historic center of Athens and the oldest continuously inhabited section of the city. Plaka is home to several small museums, Byzantine churches, antique shops and tavernas. This is a great place for listening to the bouzouki and drinking lots of ouzo (Greek firewater).

On the night before we left Athens for the island of Mykonos, my wife discovered a restaurant called Archeon Gefsis (Ancient Tastes). Its brochure invited us to "enter into the mysteries of ancient Greek cuisine." The menu boasted ancient Greek recipes and a "unique and mystic" kitchen with ingredients such as grain, honey, milk, goat’s cheese, pomegranates, seafood and spices, honeyed wine, lots of lamb – and no forks. When asked why the restaurant did not provide forks, our waitress (who was dressed like an ancient Greek maiden and looked somewhat like Melina Mercouri, moustache and all) replied that the ancient Greeks never used forks because it would offend Poseidon, god of the sea, whose symbol was the trident. Well forks or not, we had been ensnared by Poseidon’s net in this tourist trap. But it was a fortuitous entrapment as our meal was delicious.

Athens has been treated by most tourists as just a jumping-off point to the Greek islands. But, if one were to remember that Athens is the progenitor of so many of the principles that we hold so dear today, enduring its many shortcomings is well worth the trouble. This city, at its height, produced the artistic, political, scientific and philosophical underpinnings of today’s world. Ancient Greece was the most literate of the ancient cultures and its most significant contribution was an inquisitive attitude of mind and a unique approach to political life. So visiting Athens would be tantamount to paying homage to those ancients to whom we owe so much.

As we left Athens, I wondered what would have happened if Pericles had moved to the Philippines from Athens and proposed to invest in the construction of the Parthenon. He would unknowingly have stepped into a political system that is a hideously deformed offspring of the Athenian ideal.

The opposition would immediately grandstand for the media, blowing a lot of hot air and empty rhetoric against the project and demanding an investigation. The nationalists would be screaming bloody murder, upset that the building would be so foreign looking and seething at the effrontery of a foreigner proposing such a preposterous waste of funds. The leftists would blame the United States for sending a Greek to interfere in national affairs (besides blaming them for everything else that is wrong with this country). The Church would fulminate at this Greek as probably being homosexual, pro-abortion and pagan. A lawsuit would be filed and TROs and injunctions issued.

Congressmen would file bills banning the project unless relocated to their districts. Pericles would be declared an undesirable alien and banned from entering the Philippines. Some addled senator would try to repeal the law of supply and demand. Huge capital flight would ensue, the peso devalued, interest rates raised. Exchange controls would be imposed. The opposition would declare People Power 23 and one-third. The MNLF, the MILF and the Abu Sayyaf would coalesce and secede from the Republic. A state of emergency would be declared. The military would declare its loyalty to the administration. The President would vow never to resign before his term is over.

The earth would have shifted its axis. Empires would have come and gone. The Parthenon would have been forgotten and never be built. But the lawsuit would still be languishing in some flea-bitten, dusty courtroom 2,500 years later.