Le voyage des voyages, notre modeste épopée dans la mythique Grèce s’est réalisé en mai de l’an dernier déjà. Agréable en cette période de l’année pour son tourisme raisonnablement occupé, une température chaude mais supportable en trainant notre petit bagage pour nos 12 jours en cavale: Athènes, Amorgos, Santorini et Crète. Alors commençons par le début: Athènes!
As expected, tourists are all over, all the time. In May, it was still reasonable but still, traffic is traffic especially in the center where most Athens’ major ancient Greece sites are located. With our map, we managed to walk to most of the sites within our full 1.5 days. Our CityPass included the double decker bus stopping at all the good locations but we lost so much valuable time just waiting for it the first time (compared to the other tour companies) that we took it only twice. Upon our arrival, we dropped our stuff at our place in the early afternoon and we got out promptly to explore the sites closer to us. Among them, the Agora of Athens archaeological site. Agoras are where everyone came for a number of reasons; political, religious, commercial. Archeological research on site has proven the occupancy of the Agora of Athens for 5000 years. It has an inspirational view of the Acropolis up on the hill. Today, it is hard to imagine the grand versability of the original 30 acres site with only two big buildings standing : the Temple of Hephaestus, which is the best preserved ancient Greek temples from the Classical era (480–323 B.C.), and the imposing Stoa of Attalos, a building of the Hellenistic period (from the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C. until 31 B.C.) that was rebuilt from the ground up based on its ancient appearance.
After we made our way towards the furthest area of our touristic map (and hence waiting an era of time for the bus from our company to come). The southern part of the city had a few minor sites but not necessarily less important for history. Although not all visitors make the trip to actually get themselves better acquainted with the wonders of Ancient Greece (the Acropolis citadel on the hill) and the Roman era in Athens (Hadrian’s arch).
Le lendemain matin, pensant naïvement qu’on ne serait pas trop nombreux sur l’Acropolis, on arrive vers 8h30-8h45… mais c’était sans compter sur les voyages organisés, les tours des bateaux de croisière et des touristes comme mes trois amies d’hier, les bras encore figés dans les airs. La gestion de la sécurité physique des visiteurs de cet accès au site fait cruellement défaut quand les guides touristiques pensent qu’on peut circuler facilement entre les membres de leurs tours dans des escaliers sans garde-fous. Finalement en septembre 2023 (quelques mois après notre passage), l’administration du site a décidé de limiter le nombre de visiteurs par jour à 20,000! Les billets ont maintenant une heure d’entrée précise.
Mais une fois arrivés en haut de ces escaliers, en passant par Propylaea (Portes) une entrée monumentale et conçue pour être cérémonielle, on prend un moment pour contempler ce plateau où le Parthénon se distingue parmi les autres temples autour. Le patrimoine mondial de l’UNESCO considère l’Acropole comme un “exemple exceptionnel” d’un site qui représente l’une des plus anciennes civilisations de la planète. Autant l’Agora était consacrée aux affaires courantes, autant l’Acropole a servi, au fil des siècles, à bien d’autres fins : résidence des rois, citadelle, lieu mythique des dieux grecs, centre religieux. Cette “cité au sommet”, traduction du mot acropolis, suscita aussi l’envie des nombreux envahisseurs de s’y installer pendant leur occupation de la région d’où une vocation militaire en plus.
Like the English scholar Peter Edmund Laurent wrote in his book about his 1818 “Classical” tour through Greece and Turkey; “Let him who denies the sublimity of Grecian architecture travel to Athens, view the ruins of the Parthenon, and be silent.” The ruins because the past turmoil in Greece had left Parthenon in a very bad shape (much worst than what we can see today) and had lost amongst other things, a frieze of marble carved sculptures depicting a procession of animals, horsemen, musicians, and sacrificial animals. Most of these pieces of “marble” are now part of a controversial story which is still in dispute today.
In 1801, Lord Elgin, British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire in Istanbul, under which Greece was under their rule at the time, ask “permission” to the Ottomans to take what they could find of the frieze and shipped to the UK to preserve and study them. The last of the pieces arrived in 1812 in England. In 1816, Lord Elgin ended up being investigated by a British Parliamentary Committee about the marbles and it was found that the arrangement had been entirely legal. Shortly after, Lord Elgin sold the Parthenon marbles to the British Government (to be trusted afterwards to the British Museum) for about half of what Lord Elgin said to have cost him personally to ship them to England. After 1832 when Greece gained its independence from the Ottomans, it is said that Athens has repeatedly asked for them back. It was only in 1983, that a formal request for the permanent return to Greece of all of the sculptures in the collection was recorded. London and Athens have continued disputing the ownership of the marbles diplomatically for the last 40 years.
British Museum position vs Greece Ministry of Culture: The Restitution of the Parthenon Marbles
Our last afternoon in Athens was spent at the brand new and grandiose Acropolis Museum. A full size template of the Parthenon frieze with its four sides takes the entire 3rd floor with a mix of original marbles pieces that Greece had found and plaster copies of the pieces retained in the British Museum or other foreign museums. Reference to the ongoing feud over the “Elgin” marbles couldn’t be missed.
Acropolis Museum: About the frieze
Stay tuned for my upcoming post about our ferry journeys towards the Aegean Sea!
