A Season of Wonderlust: Athens: Bathing in the Spring

[note - Chronologically, this came after Venezia and before Crete]

My time in Athens was very short, but has left an enduring impression on me. That first evening in Greece, from the moment I stepped off of the underground, I witnessed the underlit fountain of culture, which showers the city that surges and foams outward in all directions, which showers the entire Western world in its influence. The Acropolis leaps skyward in the middle of Athens, an abrupt promontory flooded in light, a head wound exploding from this mind responsible for so much of how the West thinks, legislates, makes art.

This monument is so grand, so glorious, even in its decay, even in the profoundly empty spaces - the pedestals that do not hold statues of Zeus or Athena any longer, the columns that do not stand, the roofs that have long since collapsed and crumbled.

How tragic to witness that Greece now reels so badly from a modern crisis fabricated from modern, petty myths and monetary legends - our global obsession with values that are calculated, transacted and then forgotten in milliseconds...a new height of superficiality, of expendability...an infinite array of infinitesimal threats assaulting the root of our shared, cultural tree.

In Athens, I was hosted by an out-of-work director. In Rethymnon I roomed with two younger adults - a student and a math teacher - both doing their best and hoping for the best. In between, in Irakleio, my host there (gainfully employed in the energy sector but still, needing the supplemental income that hosting affords) would express the fear that Greece might disappear entirely as a result of this enduring crisis. To think that such a rich, Protean civilization that has survived so much and transformed so many times might be brought low by failed investment plotlines and the poorly-metered scansion of currency...it grieves me, and I’m sure it grieves the Greek people even more.

Athens overwhelmed my mind and senses, from the inescapable vision of majesty which is the Acropolis, to the cityscapes still unrolling in my memory from that hilltop near to the Acropolis into every distant direction, to the layered archaeology museum that unveiled to me one ancient artifact after another (not the least of which was the amazing Antithykera Mechanism, found on a sunken ship and which they call the earliest known computer), to the winding streets slick with touristy markets, lumpy with sidewalk vegetable stalls that seemed to spring straight from the burning concrete and ready to sink back beneath the earth with the sun in the evening, to the oppressive summer heat of that sun.

The Ancient Agora - narrated lovingly by a fun Rick Steves audio tour - spoke with gentle wonder in my ears. The Roman Forum reminded me yet again of the cultural collisions seen in Southern Europe. Hadrian’s Library similarly impressed me. Yet again, civilization parking atop civilization, but here the echoes are still so loud, modulating every voice that spoke after the Greeks. They defined so much of the vocabulary, narrated the storylines, staged the potential plot twists. We are all inheritors.