CSA Spring Break Reunion

March 20, 2007

Athens, Greece

Two days ago we said goodbye to dear old Siphnos and took the five hour ferry ride back to Athens. I was really sad to leave the island, it was one of the most relaxing experiences of the trip and getting to see my family was really fun. I would definitely come back to an island in Greece, except I would probably time it better so that next time we would not be the ONLY tourists on the island and restaurants would actually be open. Although I did enjoy the opportunity to see the place when it wasn’t putting on a show. The rural nature of the island really surprised me, and I liked getting to walk up the remote mountain paths without running into anyone, although if we did we were guaranteed to get strange looks due to our clothing and the fact that we obviously did not belong. Everyone seemed to know everyone else in the close-knit little mountain community, and we would walk by groups of locals chatting, or shopping, and get a little window on how the whole place operated.

Then it was out of the quiet and the remote and back into the noise and the bustle of Athens. We took the metro back from Piraeus and dragged our multiple packages to our hotel in Monastiraki. The area was in the not-so-orthagonal, not so clean and pretty part of Athens, but the place where tons and tons of little tiny shops crowded their awnings together across narrow streets and the vendors hawked their wares. But the rooms were clean and the shower was hot and best of all there was free internet. We arrived at about 9 pm from Piraeus and stayed at the hotel just long enough to get the location of a local taverna, located in the Psiri district of Athens. Again, not so clean but there was a bunch of young Athenians there walking around and we found a taverna that was absolutely crowded. We sat down and although they had no menu we walked back to the kitchen where they showed us their selection—some meatballs, soup, gigantes, and most unusually lamb’s heads, cooked complete with teeth and all. My mom took one look and refused to eat, but we ordered a Greek salad for her and I had the gigantes and my dad some meatballs so we had a relatively decent meal before heading to a patisserie for wonderfully rich chocolate dessert and then bed.

The next morning I woke up early and we headed out into the busy Athenian morning, and walked for a good while around the Roman agora, stopping in at the Tower of the Winds, and Hadrian’s Library in search for a crepe place that my parents had eaten at before. But it was located on an obscure little windy street that we were never able to find again, and giving up we headed back up Ermou where it turned straight and broad and ate a breakfast at an outdoor café there. Then, much to my Dad’s dismay, it was some shopping for a good part of the day. The area around Ermou street had a good number of bead and jewelry shops that attracted our attention, and we stopped in a few s we worked our way up to the National Garden.

The National Garden was lovely, a bunch of green space in the middle of Athens, with tall trees and winding paths. We walked farther and ran into a small zoo- complete with a few turtles and goat and such. The park was big and the day was warm, and we really enjoyed seeing a pretty part of Athens. We emerged from the back side of the park in a pretty area of Athens that I had never seen before—widely spaced boulevards and three and four story apartments that overlooked the park. We turned in one direction down the path that circumvented the park and ran into the Panathenaic stadium, which my parents had not seen before. I think they were pretty impressed.

After that we walked back around the park toward the royal palace—an area I had run by a few times in Athens. But this time when we walked by we actually saw the guards stationed there doing their very characteristic, very unusual walk in front of the palace on a series of red blocks set into the sidewalk specifically for that purpose. They were dressed in long black jackets complete with shiny brass buttons, red berets with tassels hanging down the side, and long cream colored tights with shoes with a huge black pom-pom on the toe. On their side they held big guns, and a few other soldiers in regular olive colored uniforms watched as these special guards about-faced and began walking toward one another along the red pathway. They would raise one arm and the opposite leg high and straight in the air, would pause, and then would bend the knee, still raised, back and forth like the leg of a marionette. Then they would put arm and leg down, would stomp the ground several times, and then take another step forward. Then they finally met in the center in front of the royal palace and went through the same bizarre series of moves, which eventually resulted in the both of them crossing each other and heading in the opposite direction, back towards their posts on either side.

My parents stopped and took pictures, and then we mosied our way back toward Syntagma square and Ermou, for a last little bit of shopping—I bought a book on Greek cooking and a few tin pitchers that they use to serve wine in at the restaurants around here, my Dad bought my Mom a ring, and we stopped in at a pita gyro place for lunch. Surprisingly, this was the first pita gyro that my parents had had the entire trip! I felt that it was my duty to introduce them to one of the cheapest and best types of food Greece had to offer. They enjoyed them quite a bit, and then we all headed back to the hotel for a little bit of a siesta before dinner.

For dinner we walked down toward the Agora, past the Hephaistion, to an area with a bunch of bars and restaurants set into the open air and lit up with small lights. We surveyed the area for a while before finally deciding on a place that had a pair of Greek musicians all playing traditional Greek music. The food was great, and at the end of the night they played a few Beatles covers, an obvious nod to our presence. That night I started booking flights and hotels for the big trip after the semester’s end. There is so much planning to go into a trip like this that I can only imagine how Toumazou must have felt planning this CSA 07. I feel overwhelmed enough as it is trying to arrange for 5 weeks of travel, let alone 4 months.

That was the last night my parents were here. They left very early the next morning and I sleepily waved goodbye to them from the comfort of my bed, and fell asleep until much later. I had the entire day in Athens to myself!! There were many things that I wanted to do so when I woke up on my own at around 7:30 I decided it was time to start the day so I got dressed and headed out into the bright Athenian morning.
I had decided earlier that I wanted to go see the Byzantine Musuem. I figured it was only appropriate after having read The Secret History and having seen Istanbul to see the Byzantine art and architecture that we had completely missed in Athens. The museum was really empty that early in the morning, and I had all of the exhibits to myself as I walked along the echoing hallways. The museum was not very big, but it contained a good number of mosaics and carvings from the entire Byzantine period, ranging from Justinians’s time which is considered by most to be the official beginning of the Byzantine empire, when it splits from the Roman empire and begins to develop a life and culture of its own. Very early on there is a lot of overlap between classical and Byzantine art—the angels look like the winged Nike figures, Jesus looks like the CalfBearer, and everything is rendered in a highly realistic style, with Roman looking clothing and facial features. As time goes on, however, the clothing and artistic style changed, it become more rigid and iconographic—the importance lay not in the realistic depiction of human beauty but in the symbols and the message of the story. The images become much more readable—this is the beginning of the tradition of the Greek Orthodox icon, which we have seen that up even to the modern period has great significance.

Then there was the period of the iconoclasm, when one of the Byzantine emperors made it illegal to depict any god, and there is a resurgence of floral and spiral motifs—the only symbol visible anywhere is the cross—the Greek kind that is as wide as it is tall and sometimes flares out at the tips. I saw the floor plans of a number of Byzantine churches—the traditional Greek ones with a cross-in-square plan and a dome at the center. Others were converted from earlier pagan temples—the Parthenon was one—with the addition of an apse on the east end and the division of the cella into three aisles.

Finally, I reached the end of the Byzantine empire, where with a final classicizing resurgence under the dynasty called the Paleologans (I think) which were big hellenophiles and brought the art around closer to its beginnings, with a focus upon the realistic depiction of figures, and the realistic fall of drapery and weight and mass and light. Then it was out of the museum and into an auxillary exhibit dedicated to Dali.

I couldn’t understand much of what the purpose of the exhibit was except that it was related to Dali. I walked down into the basement of another building into the Byzantine museum complex and first saw a number of prints of Dali’s work—the Hallucinogenic Toreador stood at the end of the hallway at about ¼ of its actual size. Then I turned sideways and entered a room filled with statues, one titled “Nude Ascending a Staircase—Homage to Duchamp” which did indeed show a nude ascending a staircase that resembled a conch shell. All of the rest of the room was filled with statues of varying sizes, and judging by the names and the dates on the placards these were homages to Dali—cubist angels that struck angular contrappostos with their hard edged arms outstretched, the big elephants of Dali with legs of toothpics, women whose bodies looked like they had been turned into dressers, and all manner of Dali-esque stuff, down to the melting phallic symbols and the ants. Lining the walls were a series of pen and ink drawings of the Dali style also with the same recurring motifs, and the signature of Dali in the lower right hand corner of everyone, although on the left another set of initials described themselves. I think based upon this that it was another homage a Dali. The exhibit was very interesting though—I was especially drawn to those initial classicizing figures that had been turned cubist, or in another instance had been turned surrealist—with holes in the middle and spindly arms and legs. But although the external expression had changed, the shift of weight in the figures were clearly drawn from the likes of Praxiteles—a huge s-curve and the typical posturing of the Greek nude, expressed in a modernist form. Cool.

By then it was nearing 10:30 and I had to go check out of my own hotel in Monastiraki and check into the one that the group was staying in, so I hauled all of my things several blocks through the streets of Athens to reach the safety of the Astor hotel lobby. I ran into Dan there, sprawled on one of the couches, bags in tow, waiting for a room himself. People were coming back!! Within a few hours we had reunited with about half of the group and heard lots of stories about spring break and how weird it felt to be in Athens with a whole day to ourselves. I got pretty restless at some point so Dan and I walked over to a huge famous bookstore in Athens, whose name is in Greek. We spent about an hour and a half there--- the bookstore occupies 7 stories with a café on one floor and the rest divided by category. I browsed every floor, picking up and putting down books as I went until I finally met back up with Dan and had to narrow my selections down to two—I picked Around the World in 80 Days, which I thought was a good book to read while traveling like we were, and 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam in the West, a history book with a big title but hopefully not too dry and academic, that would give me more information on the Byzantine period. All of the stuff we learned about stopped with Justinian, and I was curious to know more. I have only read a couple of pages so far but it looks interesting and will give me a history that I have never learned in school—everything I know is about the west and this will be a neat change of pace. The first few pages deal with a description of Istanbul and I was so excited to have recognized the places in the book! Things like that are so much better when you can picture them from having seen them…. One of the benefits of this trip.

We came back and met up with more people and headed out to a familiar restaurant close to the Agora for kebabs and tomato and cucumber salads before the last big event of the night—a movie showing of 300. This is a movie based upon a graphic novel of the battle of Thermopayle, in which 300 Spartans under the rule of Leonidas with the help of a number of Boetians single handedly defended Greece against the Persian invaders under Xerxes. For a while, the combined Greek forces held off the Persian attack, but a turncoat told the Persians where there was a secret path to come behind the Greek troops and surround them in a very narrow pass. Knowing that there was no way to win, the 300 Spartans chose to die in defense of their country.

The movie was highly unusual, the whole format had the appearance of a comic book, with its overblown characters, luminescent skies, and heroicism blown way out of proportion. I had no idea what the movie would be like before I saw it, because the surrealistic quality threw me at first. But once I got over that, the idea of seeing a comic book movie was fascinating aesthetically, even if the characterization was minimal.

The movie got out pretty late so there was just enough time to head back to the Astor for an early bedtime. We were waking up super early in the morning so we had just enough time to share some more stories before turning in.