Avernus

Well, today was the Acropolis trip, was which pretty damned awesome, actually :D We started out at 8.30, got the tube to the Acropolis station (Greek underground stations are damned cool, incidentally - they tend to have little displays of 'here are the antiquities which we fell over while digging the metro tunnels', sitting there being ignored by all the busy tube-users. If there were in Britain they'd probably have pride of place in a museum somewhere), and walked up to the Acropolis itself. Dashed through the Propyleion with insultingly peremptory speed ('well, I suppose it's quite interesting, but it's not really anything to do with sanctuaries. You see the monument of Agrippa on the left there? There are people who think it should probably be torn down for not being classical enough...'), and elbowed our way past crowds of Japanese tourists to go straight up to the Parthenon. (The Japanese, incidentally, seem to be the only tourists travelling in packs at this time of year. The Brits, Americans and Germans don't seem to have arrived yet, nor the French school trips, thank God.)

At the Parthenon we eventually managed to track down our guide, who was one of the architects working on the rebuilding and restoration. Then we got to do the amazingly fun bit of stepping over the barrier rope, under the resentful gaze of the mere tourists, and go up into the Parthenon itself. Admittedly, the centre of it primarily resembles a building site at the moment, because, y'know, that's what it is, and will be for the next twenty years at the least. ('How long do you think this project will take?' 'Well...the bit we're doing at the moment, the North colonnade, that should probably be finished by the end of the year, if we're lucky. That's the...fourth task of twelve urgent ones we've got to do. After that....well, anybody's guess.' I love the Greek attitude to deadlines. Also the Greek attitude to health and safety regs. No hard hats or face masks here! Men clambering around on the outside of rickety looking scaffolding, men chipping away at marble blocks without any form of eye protection, with the marble chips flying in all directions...excellent.)

But it was still ace :D Our guide spent most of her time bitching about the early 20th century 'restoration' work, which basically involved stacking likely looking blocks on top of each other (if they don't quite fit, just cut a bit off...), joining them with iron girders and iron clamps, and sticking them together and replacing any missing lintels etc with concrete. Brilliant stuff. Of course, within about twenty years the marble was cracking all over the place with the strain put on it, and the iron clamps were rusting quite impressively. There have been various other efforts over the years, none of which apparently terribly successful. As they always delight in telling us, it's taken us longer to restore the Parthenon than it took to build in the first place.

Of course, there are some problems that really couldn't be solved easily without modern technology. For example: As Any Fule Know, the Parthenon makes use of various tricks of perspective: thus the sides are slightly curved vertically, so that it actually *looks* straight, and the columns actually lean inwards slightly (they'd meet about 2km up, if you continued them) so that from the ground they give the appearance of being straight. Add to this the fact that the Greeks used what pieces of suitable marble they could find, in whatever quantity they could - so some column drumns are 75cm, some 85cm, some 90cm, the lengths just even out over the entire length of the column; and also add the fact that the fluting was carved onto the columns after they were put up, and it's not entirely uniform (of course). This means that every block is unique, and has to go in a unique position. They didn't quite realise this when they were doing the early restoration work, and just bunged them in any old how, cutting them to fit as required. *twitch*. So now the restorers have to take the old stuff apart, work out how it fits together, repair the damaged stones using local marble and thin titanium rods to fix them in place, and put them back together again. This is taking a while.

And so I got to see the Parthenon from the inside, and lo, it was cool ^___^ Seeing the frieze (or what's left of it) in situ was really cool - really hammers home the point that there's no point banging on about the complex symbolic value of the thing, as there's no damned way your average ancient Greek would often go wandering around between the two rows of columns, craning their neck back in an effort to make out what's going on a bloody long way up in the air.

The rest of the trip was the fairly standard stuff - Erechtheum, Acropolis museum ('Yes, we don't know where all these pediment friezes came from really. We certainly haven't found that many foundations'), a quick wander around to the theatre of Dionysus, and a packed lunch on the rocks overlooking the agora. (It's no good though, I still can't see the rock colour as violet. The traditional description of the Acropolis, or one of them, is 'the crown of violet.' But it's not violet. It's a kind of pleasant rose colour. Which is, y'know, nice, but not violet.) I heartily recommend coming to Athens in January, especially when you get weather as good as this. There was scarcely anyone on the Acropolis, at least not when compared with how it is even by March. It's infinitely preferable ^_^

Yes, and then this evening we had a lecture on origins and continuity of cult and sanctuaries, and blah blah blah. It was quite interesting, but possibly only if you're a spoddy classicist. Section above may also only be interesting if you're a spoddy classicist, but I don't care.

I also particularly liked the group of cats which appeared to be nesting smugly on top of a pile of archaic column drums by the Parthenon ^_^ Cats know which is more important in the universal scheme of things, them or the priceless monuments. It's definitely them. Oh, and there were a couple of the ubiquitous stupidly-well-fed stray dogs sleeping in the sun around the place too. Hurrah.

And, as a bonus for anyone who's read this far, a news story which made my day. Warning: do not read if you dislike giant squid or mansex. Though the obvious solution to that combination (tentacle porn) is not, in fact, correct in the way you think. Who said reading comic blogs wasn't educational?