Wes + Marlow Travel Blog: Athens, October 23

It is our first trip to Greece. Athens is a good place to start. We have seen in Spain and Italy and Croatia Roman ruins from 2000 years ago. Hardly old at all. Here, old means 2500 to 3000 years old.

Note Agean Sea and islands in distance

Athens is a waterfront city. It has a sprawl, a white sprawl, which seen from an adjacent island looks like a carpet of white. I suppose, that implies the buildings are similar in size and color.

Temple of Zeus

Athens is hilly, too. And atop the hills is where we found the oldest temple buildings. The name Acropolis means high positioned city. The Acropolis is the famous hilltop campus which has the Parthenon plus other grand structures. A simplistic description of a temple, from that era, is a structure whose roof is supported by columns which run the outside perimeter of the building. The number of columns on the long side is twice the number on the short side plus one. The interior contains a large high ceilinged chamber where there is a super sized statue of the god or goddess honored by the temple. On the exterior, between the column tops and the two-sided pitched roof, are friezes depicting events from the life honored statue. Also there are areas up top for enormous marble statues of Athena or Poseidon.

I did not know before coming here that Romans invaded and conquered Greece about 2100 years ago. They appropriated the buildings to their own gods. This was all before Jesus and christianity existed. 400 years later, when christianity got going, the temples became churches. And when islamic forces came to power, those churches became mosques. And on and on, each conquering power adapting the old Greek buildings.

Given all the people through the centuries who made off with the great marble and bronze statues, it is amazing how much antiquity remains here in the temples and in the museums. There is so much it can overwhelm. But it is apparent how much our present day lives are influenced by what the Greeks established back then.

Marlow tuning out the noise of the City on our balcony

Our hotel is exceptional, the Hotel Grande Bretagne. Formerly a palace 140 years ago, it faces the Parliament building, which itself was a palace in 1840 when Greece won independence from the Turks and appointed a king to be ruled by. All of that is long past. Now, Greece has an elected government which has a major challenge keeping the economy stable. It feels like and the people we encounter mention that times are hard. More than one person has thanked us for coming. The Parliament building maintains a tradition of two guards who stand at attention 24 hours a day. Each pair of guards changes every hour in an elaborate ceremony where they lift their legs like formal horses.