My Exciting Adventure in Greece, Part 8

This is the post that many of my readers have waited months for: the eighth and final installment in my series of posts about my experience in Greece as part of the 2023 ASCSA Summer Session in June and July of this year. (For those who may have missed them, here are the previous installments: first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh.)

In this installment, I will describe how I gave my final site report about the temple of an obscure goddess who may be of pre-Greek Aegean origin and whose name ancient etymologists interpreted to mean “the Unseen One,” how some other students and I found a bunch of ancient potsherds in a random hole we dug, how I feared my life while walking to Plato’s Akademia, and how I returned home to the United States, forever changed by my time in Greece.

Friday, July 21st, 2023

It’s been a while since I made my last installment in this series, so, for those who don’t remember, I left off my account with our first day back in Athens after our trip through central and northern Greece. On our second day after arriving back in Athens, we went on our last day trip to the island of Aigina, which is located in the Saronic Gulf south of Athens.

We got up early in the morning, ate breakfast at Loring Hall, and loaded onto a bus to Peiraieus. This time, the bus driver we had had for the first part of the trip was back. Many of my fellow students rejoiced to see him back, saying that we didn’t appreciate what we had when we’d had it.

We rode a ferry from Peiraieus to Aigina. Because Aigina is much closer to Athens than Krete, this ferry ride was much shorter than the previous ones we’d been on. When we arrived on the island, we rode the bus (which had come over with us on the ferry) to the Archaeological Museum of Aigina, which had an interesting collection, but clearly had been renovated or updated in decades.

It was absolutely blisteringly hot and the museum had no air conditioning. As a result, I was very quickly drenched in sweat. The museum seemed to be doing very little terms of taking care of their collection. A few cases in the museum had pages of printer paper taped to them that told us not to take photos of them because their contents were still unpublished.

ABOVE: Terra-cotta figures dating to the Bronze Age

ABOVE: Aiginetan marble grave stele

ABOVE: Marble statue of a sphinx dating to around 460 BCE

After exploring the museum, we walked over to the archaeological site of Kolonna, which was the main settlement of ancient Aigina.

ABOVE: View of the ruins at Kolonna

ABOVE: View of the ancient Temple of Apollon at Kolonna

ABOVE: View of the beach from Kolonna

ABOVE: View of ancient houses at Kolonna

After spending some time looking around Kolonna, we got back on the bus and rode over to the Temple of Aphaia, where I was supposed to give my second and final site report. Upon arriving, I had everyone gather in the shade underneath a tree within view of the temple. Before I began my report, I made a joke: “This presentation is an edutainment double feature. The educational part is that you get to learn all about the Temple of Aphaia; the entertainment part is that you get to watch me die of heatstroke.”

Aphaia is an obscure and highly enigmatic goddess. She was exclusively worshipped on Aigina and her temple on the island is her only known cult site anywhere in the Greek world. Only a handful of surviving textual sources mention her; the travel writer Pausanias (lived c. 110 – c. 180 CE) in his Description of Greece 2.30.3 and the grammarian Antoninos Liberalis (fl. c. second or third century CE) in his Metamorphoses 40 equate her with the Kretan goddess Britomartis, also known as Diktynna. Antoninos Liberalis claims that her name comes from the word ἀφανής (aphanḗs), which means “Unseen” or “Invisible.”

The oldest evidence for cult activity at the site of her temple are terra-cotta votive figurines dating to the Bronze Age, including a large number depicting a female figure nursing a child, which are known as kourotrophoi. The fact that cult activity at Aphaia’s sanctuary seems to have been continuous from the Bronze Age into the Classical Period and the fact that ancient writers associate her with Kretan deities suggests that she may be of pre-Greek, Aegean origin.

The inhabitants of Aigina in the Archaic and early Classical Periods of Greek history were settlers from Epidauros on the mainland who colonized the island possibly in the eighth century BCE. They may have adopted the worship of Aphaia from the inhabitants who were there before them, but it is impossible to say for certain. Throughout the sixth century BCE, Athens and Aigina were bitter rivals.

The Aiginetans build the first Temple of Aphaia on the site sometime around 570 BCE. An inscription dating to the sixth century BCE that was found at the site (IG IV 15880) records the construction of this earlier temple. This temple, however, was destroyed by a fire. About a decade after the first temple was destroyed, the Aiginetans built a new temple, which is the current one, on the same site.

It used to be the scholarly consensus that the first Temple of Aphaia was destroyed around 510 BCE and the current temple built between 500 and 490 BCE. The work of the scholar Andrew Stewart, however, has now persuaded many scholars that the Achaemenid forces actually destroyed the first temple during their invasion of Greece under Xerxes I in 480 BCE and that the current temple was built in the decade after that.

The temple is constructed in the Doric order and is hewn from local limestone, which originally bore a coat of stucco. The sculptures of the East Pediment, which were carved from Parian marble, depict Herakles’s sack of Troy during the reign of Laomedon. Meanwhile, the sculptures of the West Pediment, which were also carved from Parian marble, depict the later and more famous sack of Troy by the Achaians led by Agamemnon, again with Athena as the central figure. The sculptures of the West Pediment exhibit a more archaic style than those of the East Pediment, but it is possible they may have been sculpted around the same time.

Tragically, the Aiginetan people did not survive long after they completed building the temple. In 458 BCE, the Athenians conquered Aigina. Then, in 431 BCE, they expelled all the Aiginetans from the island and began sending Athenian klerouchoi or colonists to resettle the island. The Spartans resettled the Aiginetan refugees in the borderland between Lakonia and Argolis. Even there, though, the Aiginetans did not survive long; in 424 BCE, an Athenian army led by the general Nikias killed off the vast majority of them in a brutal act of mass genocide.

After the temple fell into ruins, the sculptures that decorated its pediments fell to the ground. In 1811, the English architect Charles Robert Cockerell and the German baron Otto Magnus von Stackelberg removed these sculptures, carted them off, and sold them for profit to the crown prince of Bavaria, who would soon become King Ludwig I. As a result, the pedimental sculptures are no longer in Greece, but rather in the Glyptothek in Munich.

The temple is important because it is one of the best-preserved temples from the Classical Period in Greece itself and, in particular, the best-preserved temple in Greece that predates the Periklean building project of the mid-fifth century BCE. The pedimental sculptures are some of the finest and best-preserved examples of late Archaic/early Classical Greek sculpture and they are vital for understanding the transition from the late Archaic to the early Classical style. The fact that the temple is dedicated to Aphaia specifically also reveals the often-overlooked importance of local deities in Greek religion.

ABOVE: View of the Temple of Aphaia from where I gave my site report

ABOVE: Photo one of my fellow students took of me in front of the Temple of Aphaia after giving my site report about it

ABOVE: Another view of the Temple of Aphaia

ABOVE: Another view of the Temple of Aphaia

ABOVE: Another view of the Temple of Aphaia

ABOVE: View of the well-preserved east side of the temple

After seeing the Temple of Aphaia, we got on the bus and rode to Palaiochora, which was the main settlement on Aigina from the ninth century CE until 1826. The settlement is built on a steep hill and has been described as similar to the site of Mystras, which, as I cover in this earlier post, we visited earlier in the trip during our time in Lakonia.

Unfortunately, we were not allowed to go inside the Palaiochora site because, due to the extreme lack of rain and extremely hot temperature, there was a danger of wildfires and the authorities had banned anyone from going in to keep people safe. We were, however, able to see the settlement from the outside.

ABOVE: Photo I took of the medieval and early modern Palaiochora settlement on Aigina from the outside

Since we were not able to explore Palaiochora, we got back on the bus and it took us back to the modern town. There, Glenn gave us the rest of afternoon to find lunch and visit the beach near the archaeological site of Kolonna. I ate lunch at a local restaurant with some of my fellow students. Afterward, I got gelato on my own and it was the best gelato I had on the entire trip.

After that, I changed into my swimsuit and joined the others at the beach. The water was very shallow and the bottom was all sand with hardly any rocks. One of my fellow students, an undergraduate in between her sophomore and junior years at Brown who was the youngest one in our group at only twenty, started digging a hole in the sand under the water in a random spot and some of the rest of us joined in.

While digging, without even trying, we happened to find five ancient potsherds just in that little hole in the sand. Meanwhile, one of the other students found a full amphora handle just lying on the beach. We left all the ceramic fragments there, though, and did not remove any from the site, since that would have constituted illegal looting of antiquities.

ABOVE: View of the beach where we went swimming, with the site of Kolonna in the background

After spending the afternoon on Aigina, we boarded a ferry back to Peiraieus. From Peiraieus, the bus took us back to the school’s main campus and we ate dinner that night at Loring Hall.

Saturday, July 22nd, 2023

We ate breakfast at Loring Hall and then took the Metro to the ancient agora. There, we met in the Museum of the Ancient Agora in the reconstructed Stoa of Attalos. There, we met Dr. Laura Gawlinski, an Associate Professor of Classical Studies at Loyola University Chicago who specializes in ancient Greek religion. She gave a fantastic presentation about the Stoa of Attalos and the contents of the museum.

In a funny coincidence, Dr. Gawlinski already knew who I was because she had accidentally stumbled across this series of blog posts about my experience in the Summer Session and had read some of the posts in the series that I had made up to that point. She and I had a nice conversation after her presentation in which I told her a little about my blog, I asked her some questions about the Metroön in the agora, and she told me more about scholars who argue that part of the Metroön may have been converted into a Jewish synagogue sometime in the third or fourth century CE.

After Dr. Gawlinski’s presentation, we were originally supposed to visit Plato’s Akademia, the Benaki Museum of Islamic Art, and the First Cemetery of Athens, but it was already dangerously hot and the forecast for that day held that the temperature that afternoon would be 108°F (42°C), so Glenn gave us the rest of the day off instead.

Nevertheless, I took some time to walk around and explore the agora on my own, since I knew that this would be one of my last chances to do so. I took the time to walk over to the Metroön and take photos of the site.

ABOVE: View of the ruins of the Metroön in the Athenian agora

ABOVE: My attempt at a selfie in front of the ruins of the Metroön in the Athenian agora

After that, I decided to walk on my own from the agora to the Akademia, which in antiquity, was an area of land allegedly once owned by the mythical hero Akademos that housed a grove of olive trees sacred to the goddess Athena. By the fourth century BCE, a few buildings existed in the sacred grove of the Akademia.

The Athenian philosopher Plato himself taught his students somewhere in the Akademia from around the mid-380s BCE until his death in 348 BCE. (The exact location within the Akademia where Plato taught is unknown to this day.) As a result, its name is the source of the English word academy. The Akademia remained the center of the Platonic school of philosophy from Plato’s death until the Roman general Sulla utterly destroyed the precinct during his sack of Athens in 86 BCE.

Today, the Akademia is a public park with lots of trees and shade. All that remains of any of the buildings are foundation blocks and none of the exposed ruins date to Plato’s own time. (The foundation of the Square Peristyle, the only excavated building that actually dates to Plato’s time, is covered up.) There are no impressive ancient remains, so not many people who visit Athens go there, but I knew that I would personally regret it if I went home without seeing it.

It was about a thirty-four-minute walk from the ancient agora to the Akademia. As I walked, I noticed how the neighborhoods visibly changed around me. The area around the ancient agora is full of souvenir shops and restaurants that cater mostly to tourists. As I got further away from the agora, though, and entered Psyrri, the city grew discernably more local.

Then, as I headed further north into Metaxourgeio, Profitis Daniil, and Kolonos, the neighborhoods grew visibly poorer and the buildings more poorly kept. I saw dilapidated fences, grimy and sometimes broken windows, and some buildings that looked to be abandoned. This is clearly a part of Athens where tourists don’t normally go.

The Akademia is located in Kolonos, which, in antiquity, was a rural deme located northwest of the city proper, outside the city walls. It is where the great Athenian tragic playwright Sophokles was born sometime around 497 BCE. It is also the eponymous setting of Sophokles’s last surviving tragedy, Oidipous at Kolonos, which he wrote shortly before his death in winter 406/405 BCE and which premiered at the City Dionysia in 401 BCE, produced by his grandson. Today, Kolonos is a densely populated working-class neighborhood with a large population of immigrants.

I was using Google Maps for directions and the directions happened to take me underneath an underpass, where some men happened to be sitting. As I walked past, one of them shouted something at me. I didn’t understand most of it, but I’m pretty sure that it was directed toward me because I was able to pick out the word κορίτσι (korítsi), which is Modern Greek for “girl,” and there were no other women in sight.

After shouting this, the man started walking toward me. I panicked and ran away as fast as I could in the same direction I had been heading. The man did catch up to me when I came to a busy road and had to wait in order to cross, but, by that point, we were in public view. He ended up crossing the street and heading off in a different direction. I have no idea if I was in any actual danger, but that incident scared the living daylight out of me regardless.

Shortly after that encounter, I arrived at the Akademia. The park is quite lovely, but it is not very well maintained and there are unfortunately almost no signs to help visitors navigate and understand the site.

ABOVE: Entrance to the Akademia

ABOVE: View of the site of the late Hellenistic and Roman-era gymnasion

ABOVE: Another view of the site from where I sat

After visiting the Akademia, I walked south (carefully avoiding the underpass where I had encountered the men earlier) to the neighborhood of Kerameikos to see the Dipylon Gate. The site was closed due to the extreme heat, so I could not go in, but I was able to look through the fence and see it.

ABOVE: Photo I took through the fence of the Dipylon Gate

After that, I walked around the flea market in Monastiraki for a while and looked in the various shops. I went inside one shop that was selling used books and looked around in the back of the shop, where I found books dating back to the 1800s. Among various other works, I found a copy of Théophile Gautier’s Poésies Nouvelles in the original French printed in 1866. The price written in pencil in the back of the book was €8, but the shopkeeper sold it to me for €7.

Finally, overcome with exhaustion from walking around in the heat, I took the Metro back to Kolonaki and returned to the school.

Sunday, July 23rd, 2023

We had no meals at Loring on this day, so we were on our own for breakfast. At 9:00 a.m., we were supposed to meet Dr. Dylan Rogers, the same scholar who showed us the Hellenistic art collection in the National Archaeological Museum, so that he could give a tour of the Roman agora of Athens, which is located east the Classical agora and which wealthy Athenian aristocrat and philanthropist Eukles of Marathon (who was a direct patrilineal ancestor of Herodes Attikos) constructed between 27 and 17 BCE using funds donated by the Roman emperor Augustus that had originally been promised by Julius Caesar.

I ended up heading out late and missing Dr. Rogers’s lecture, but I still wanted to visit the Roman agora on my own, so I took the Metro over to Monastiraki. Before I went to the Roman agora, I went to see the Library of Hadrian, a massive public library which the Roman emperor Hadrian constructed in 132 CE. By this point in the trip, I had, of course, already seen the library from the outside numerous times, since I had walked past it every time we went to and from the agora. Nonetheless, I wanted to take a closer look.

Hadrian’s Library originally bore an imposing façade on the western side with a massive propylon (i.e., monumental gateway) of Corinthian columns. Upon entering through this propylon, one entered a lush peristyle courtyard containing a garden with a decorative pool at the center. At the east (i.e., back) end of this courtyard were rooms containing the library’s collection of scrolls.

The Heruli destroyed much of the building when they sacked Athens in 267 CE. Later, in the fifth century CE, a Christian church was constructed in the center of what was once the courtyard. Today, of the façade, only the northern half remains.

ABOVE: Photo from Wikimedia Commons showing a model of what the Library of Hadrian originally looked like when it was constructed in 132 CE

I was able to go inside the site for free with my museum pass. Although the building is no longer nearly as imposing as it once was, I still marveled at how much of the façade remains intact.

ABOVE: View of the remaining part of the façade of Hadrian’s Library with the Tzistarakis Mosque directly next to it

ABOVE: View of the library’s partly reconstructed propylon entrance

ABOVE: Closer view of the Corinthian-order columns of the façade

ABOVE: Back of the remaining part of the façade

Entering into the space that was once the courtyard, the remains of the early Christian church stood at the center in the space where the decorative pool was originally.

ABOVE: View of the remains of the early Christian church built inside the library

I then progressed to the back, where the shelves bearing scrolls used to be. Sadly, nothing remains of any part of the library’s collection.

ABOVE: View of the back of the library, where the “stacks” used to be

ABOVE: Closer view of a room at the back

After that, I left Hadrian’s Library and headed over to the Roman agora. The main entrance to the Roman agora is a towering Doric propylon built of Pentelic marble at the western end known as the Gate of Athena Archegetis (meaning “Founder”), which Eukles commissioned in 11 BCE using the funds donated by Julius Caesar and Augustus in honor of Athena.

ABOVE: Gate of Athena Archegetis

ABOVE: View of the Gate of Athena Archegetis from the other side

The main space of the Roman agora consists of a large peristyle courtyard, which was originally lined shops.

ABOVE: View of the Roman agora

At the eastern end of this peristyle stands an Ionic propylon built of Hymettan marble known as the East Propylon. Less of this gate survives than of the Gate of Athena Archegetis, but it was probably more imposing in antiquity.

ABOVE: View of what remains of the East Propylon of the Roman agora, with the Tower of the Winds in the background

On the east side of the East Propylon is the Tower of the Winds, which is easily the most famous structure in the Roman agora. The Roman antiquarian Varro and architectural writer Vitruvius, both of whom flourished in the first century BCE, record that the Makedonian astronomer Andronikos of Kyrrhos designed and constructed this tower around the middle of the first century BCE, around a quarter of a century earlier than the rest of the Roman agora.

It is an octagon-shaped tower built entirely of Pentelic marble. Around the top of the tower is a frieze depicting the eight gods of the primary winds, with one wind god depicted on each of the eight sides of the tower. Each of the eight sides also originally featured a sundial. In antiquity, a bronze wind vane shaped like the sea god Triton stood atop the tower. Inside was a water clock. It served as the ancient equivalent of a clocktower, telling people in the area what time of day it was and which direction the wind was blowing.

ABOVE: Eighteenth-century black-and-white reconstruction of what the Tower of the Winds would have originally looked like with its original weather vane (The relief sculptures would have originally been painted.)

After Christianity became the dominant religion of the Roman Empire, the Tower of the Winds was converted into a bell tower for a Christian church. Sometime between 1749 and 1751, during the period of Ottoman rule over Greece, the tower was converted into a tekke for Qadirî dervishes and remained in use as a Qadirî tekke until the Greek War for Independence broke out in 1821.

ABOVE: Illustration made by the Irish traveler Edward Dodwell showing Qadirî dervishes performing their rituals inside the Tower of the Winds in April 1805

I walked around the tower and saw all sides of it.

ABOVE: The Tower of the Winds as it looked when I visited it this summer

ABOVE: View of the Tower of the Winds from the other side

The inside of the tower was roped off, so I could not go in, but I was able to look in through the doorway. There seemed to be some kind of art exhibit inside with a couple of metal trees and sculptures of owls. There were, however, no signs explaining who put the metal trees and owl sculptures there or why. I left feeling rather puzzled.

ABOVE: Interior of the Tower of the Winds

Monday, July 24th, 2023

On this day, we ate breakfast at Loring Hall and then went to the Stoa of Attalos in the agora for the last time in our trip. We went back to an area on the second floor of the stoa that is not accessible to the general public and there Dr. Kathleen Lynch (the same scholar who gave us our tour of the pottery collection at the National Archaeological Museum) and Dr. Susan Rotroff had laid out a large quantity of real ancient pottery fragments that were excavated in the agora on a table and had us sort and try to identify which kinds of ceramic vessels the fragments were from.

After that, we had an hour to walk over to the Panathenaic Stadium. On the way there, the group of students I was with happened to pass a fountain with a bunch of turtles in it.

ABOVE: Fountain with turtles

At the stadium, we met Dr. Georgia Tsouvala, who gave a presentation about the history of the stadium. Some form of stadium has stood at the site ever since the sixth century BCE, when it was constructed a simple racecourse with wooden benches. The stadium was used for the Panathenaic Games, which were held in Athens every four years during the Great Panathenaia.

Sometime around 330 BCE, an Athenian statesman named Lykourgos (who is not to be confused with the more famous Spartan lawgiver of the same name) had the stadium rebuilt in poros stone (i.e., a kind of soft limestone). Centuries later, between c. 139 and c. 144 CE, the ultrawealthy Athenian aristocrat and philanthropist Herodes Attikos financed a massive refurbishment and expansion of the stadium, rebuilding it entirely in Pentelic marble with ashlar masonry and expanding it to have a seating capacity of 50,000 people.

In the late fourth century CE, the Christian Roman emperor Theodosius I abolished the Panathenaic Games, along with all other traditional pagan athletic festivals. As a result, the Panathenaic Stadium lay abandoned for over a millennium and a half. Then, in 1869 and 1870, the German-born architect Ernst Ziller excavated the remains of the stadium.

In the mid-1890s, in preparation for the first modern Olympic Games in Athens in 1896, the Greek government commissioned the complete restoration of the stadium using funds donated by the Greek businessman George M. Averoff. The architect Anastasios Metaxas designed the reconstructed stadium based on the plan of the renovated second-century CE stadium of Herodes Attikos.

When the first modern Olympic Games were held in Athens in 1896, the opening and closing ceremonies both took place at the Panathenaic Stadium. Over a century later, when the 2004 Olympic Games again took place in Athens, the archery tournament was held at the Panathenaic Stadium, which also served as the finish point for both the women and men’s Marathon runs. The stadium remains in use for athletic events and occasional cultural events today.

ABOVE: View of the Panathenaic Stadium

ABOVE: View from the stands of the Panathenaic Stadium

After Dr. Tsouvala’s lecture, we walked from the Panathenaic Stadium over to the Lykeion, where one of my fellow students gave the final site report of the program.

In antiquity, the Lykeion was a sanctuary dedicated to Apollon Lykeios. The famous philosopher Aristotle, who was a student of Plato, founded a school there shortly he returned to Athens sometime around 335 BCE and taught there regularly for over a decade until he was forced to flee Athens in 322 BCE, leaving the position of head of the school to his student Theophrastos of Eresos. Aristotle also amassed a large collection of books for the Lykeion library.

The Lykeion is similar to the Akademia in that the visible archaeological remains at the site aren’t especially visually impressive and the excitement of visiting the site comes more from knowing that one is walking in the same place where a famous philosopher once taught.

In contrast to the Akademia of Plato, however, the Lykeion of Aristotle is located in Kolonaki, which, as I mentioned before, is one of the wealthiest neighborhoods of modern Athens. In fact, it is located not far away from the ASCSA’s main campus.

ABOVE: Entrance to the Lykeion of Aristotle

ABOVE: Ruins of the Lykeion of Aristotle

ABOVE: Closer view of the ruins

We were originally supposed to visit the Kerameikos and the Goulandris Museum of Cycladic Art that day, but those events were removed from the schedule due to the heat. I didn’t want to miss out, though, so I went to the Goulandris Museum of Cycladic Art on my own that afternoon.

The museum is housed in an imposing Neoclassical building located in Kolonaki directly across the street from Aristotle’s Lykeion. It is a private museum, so I wasn’t sure if my museum pass would be able to grant me free admission. When I went in, I showed my pass to the man at the desk by the door and asked, “Does this work here?” He smiled and said “Of course.” He was exceptionally friendly and gave me helpful directions for navigating the museum. He told me, “We close at 5:00. Until then, enjoy the museum!”

ABOVE: Photo I took of the entrance to the Goulandris Museum of Cycladic Art

The Museum of Cycladic Art houses four permanent galleries on four floors. The lowest floor houses prehistoric art and artifacts from the Kykladic Islands, the second floor houses art and artifacts from ancient Greece in the historical period, the third floor houses art and artifacts from Kypros, and the fourth floor houses an exhibit on life in ancient Greece. I managed to visit all four floors before the museum closed.

ABOVE: Kykladic “frying pan”

ABOVE: Female Kykladic marble figure attributed to the “Goulandris Master,” dating to the Early Kykladic II Period (c. 2800 – c. 2300 BCE)

ABOVE: Kykladic marble figure of a “cup bearer,” allegedly dating to the Early Kykladic II Syros phase (c. 2800 – c. 2300 BCE)

ABOVE: Greek pottery from the Geometric Period

ABOVE: Black-figure vase painting of the god Dionysos accompanied by a pair of satyrs dating to the sixth century BCE

ABOVE: Attic red-figure vase painting of a komos (i.e., a ritualistic drunken procession) dating to the fifth century BCE

ABOVE: Hellenistic marble votive relief depicting Kybele holding a phiale and tympanon with a lion at her side and two male figures standing on either side of her

ABOVE: Marble head of Kybele from the Kykladic island of Thera (Santorini) dating to the second century BCE

ABOVE: Kypriot female figure wearing a necklace and holding a tympanon, dating to the late sixth century BCE

ABOVE: Kypriot ceramic objects

ABOVE: Terra-cotta Kypriot rattle shaped like a pig, dating to between c. 600 and c. 480 BCE

ABOVE: Kypriot limestone sculpture of a bearded male head dating to between c. 480 and c. 400 BCE

After the Museum of Cycladic Art closed at 5:00 p.m., I went over to the Benaki Museum of Greek Culture, which is located just next door to the Cycladic Museum and is housed in an equally, if not even more, impressive Neoclassical building. The Benaki Museum closes at 6:00 p.m. on Mondays, one hour later than the Cycladic Museum, meaning that the museum was still open when I walked in.

ABOVE: The Benaki Museum of Greek Culture

ABOVE: The entrance to the Benaki Museum of Greek Culture

I walked up the front desk and showed my museum pass to the woman sitting there. I asked her: “Does this pass work here?” She looked up at me with a skeptical expression and asked me: “How old are you? Are you over eighteen?”

I replied that I was almost twenty-four.

“This is a private museum. The pass gets you a discount, but it won’t be free,” she explained. “Even with the discount, admission is still seven euros. We’re closing in an hour, so you won’t have time to see much of the collection. I don’t think it’s worth it, but you can make your own decision.”

I decided that it wasn’t worth paying seven euros if I wouldn’t have time to see the museum, so I left and went back to the ASCSA’s main campus.

Tuesday, July 25th, 2023

This was my last full day in Greece. We ate breakfast in the dining hall at Loring and then walked with a group of fellow students to the last appointment on our itinerary: the Jewish Museum of Greece.

The Jewish Museum is located in in Syntagma, the same neighborhood of central Athens where the Old Royal Palace, the building which houses the Vouli or Hellenic Parliament, is located. In front of the Old Royal Palace stands the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, which is perpetually guarded by members of the Greek Presidential Guard known as Evzones, who dress in a traditional costume that includes the fustanella, a kind of kilt which was historically part of the Greek national dress. We walked past the Old Royal Palace and Tomb of the Unknown Soldier on our way to the Jewish Museum.

ABOVE: Photo I took of the Vouli and Tomb of the Unknown Soldier from a distance when we passed them on the way to the Jewish Museum of Greece

When we arrived at the Jewish Museum of Greece, we had to go through a quick security check. I remember being somewhat surprised by this. We had previously been required to go through security checks upon entry at the National Archaeological Museum and the Archaeological Museum of Herakleion, but those are both vastly larger museums with enormous collections that include lots of extremely valuable artifacts.

As far as I can recall, other than those two big museums, the Jewish Museum of Greece was the only museum we visited that required a security check. I suspect that the heightened security was due to fear that the museum might be the target of an antisemitic attack.

After we were inside, Zanet Battinou, the director of the museum, gave us a tour of the museum’s collection and told us about the history of Jews in Greece. Greece has historically been home to two distinct Jewish communities. The older of these are Romaniote Jews, who first emerged in the third century BCE and constitute the oldest continuously existing Jewish community in Europe. For most of their history, Romaniote Jews spoke the Greek language and, apart from their religion, were culturally very similar to their pagan and later Christian Greek neighbors.

Meanwhile, Sephardic Jews are the Jewish community that emerged in the Iberian Peninsula (i.e., what is now Spain and Portugal) during the Middle Ages. Historically, Sephardim spoke dialects of Spanish, Portuguese, and Catalan. In 1492, Queen Isabella I of Castile and King Ferdinand II of Aragorn issued the Alhambra Degree, which ordered the permanent expulsion of all practicing Jews from the territories of their two kingdoms.

Sultan Bayezid II of the Ottoman Empire, which ruled Greece at the time, sent the Ottoman navy to evacuate the Iberian Jews whom the Catholic Monarchs had expelled and resettle them in Ottoman lands. He granted them Ottoman citizenship and sent orders to his governors ordering them to welcome the Sephardic refugees with hospitality. A large proportion of these refugees were settled in Greece, especially Thessaloniki. Thus, Sephardic Jews came to vastly outnumber Romaniote Jews.

Over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, circumstances for Jews in Greece made a turn for the worse. In the 1820s, during the Greek War for Independence, Greek supporters the cause of independence, who believed that Jews did not support independence and were loyal to the Ottoman sultan, perpetrated brutal massacres of large numbers of Jews in southern mainland Greece. After Greece became an independent state with Greek Orthodox Christianity as its official state religion, many Jews who lived in the territories then controlled by the state of Greece left for the territories that the Ottoman Empire still controlled.

In 1912, during the First Balkan War, Greece captured what is now northern mainland Greece, including the city of Thessaloniki with its very large Jewish population, from the Ottoman Empire and formally annexed those territories through the 1913 Treaty of Bucharest. The Great Fire of Thessaloniki in 1917 destroyed the Jewish quarter of Thessaloniki. As a result, roughly half the city’s total Jewish population, with their homes and livelihoods destroyed, left the city, with many leaving Greece entirely.

During the Axis occupation of Greece during World War II (lasted 1941 – 1945), as part of the Holocaust, Axis and collaborationist Greek authorities orchestrated the systematic deportation and murder between 83 and 87% of the total Jewish population of Greece, including nearly the entire Jewish population of Thessaloniki. Before the war, the Jewish population of Greece was somewhere between 75,000 and 77,000. By the time Greece was liberated in 1945, only somewhere between 11,000 and 12,000 Jews remained in the whole country.

Many Greek Jews who remained immigrated to the Israel and the United States, further reducing the size of Greece’s Jewish community. As a result, today, the total Jewish population of Greece amounts to only around six thousand, a minute fraction of what it once was.

The ground floor of the Jewish Museum features the restored interior of the old Romaniote synagogue of Patras, including the Torah ark. This ark is normally kept closed and visitors are not allowed to touch or open it, but, for this occasion, the museum permitted Katie Fine, the assistant director for our Summer Session, who is Jewish, to open the ark so that we could see the Torah scroll inside. They gave us permission to take photos.

ABOVE: View of the Torah ark from the old synagogue of Patras while closed

ABOVE: View of the Torah ark opened with the Torah scroll visible within

The museum’s permanent collection includes all kinds of artifacts pertaining to Jewish life, culture, and religion in Greece dating mostly from the sixteenth century to the twentieth, including illustrations, manuscripts, clothes, textiles, ritual objects,

ABOVE: Illustrations of Ottoman-Era Greek Jews

ABOVE: Manuscripts in Greek and Hebrew scripts

ABOVE: Historic Greek Jewish clothing

ABOVE: Historical Greek Jewish women’s clothing

When we were there, the museum was having a special exhibit of ancient and medieval inscriptions mentioning Jews, which are on loan from various museums and institutions throughout Greece. Many of the inscriptions in the exhibit have never before been put on public display.

The oldest object that the exhibit contains is a stele that was set up at the Amphiareion in Oropos in East Attike sometime the first half of the third century BCE recording the manumission of an enslaved man who is described in line 11 of the inscription as “Μόσχος Μοσχίωνος Ἰουδαῖος” (“Moschos, son of Moschos, a Jew”). This stele is the oldest surviving material evidence of Jewish presence in Greece. It is normally held in the Archaeological Museum of Oropos, but it was on loan to the Jewish Museum of Greece for this special exhibit.

ABOVE: Manumission stele of Moschos

Another very ancient inscription in the exhibit is a marble honorific stele that the Samaritan community of the island of Delos erected on that island sometime between c. 150 and c. 50 BCE to honor a man named Sarapion, son of Iason, from Knossos on the island of Krete, for his generosity toward their community. It bears a carving of a wreath with a six-line inscription underneath.

This stele suggests that a Samaritan synagogue may have existed on Delos as early as the second century BCE. It is normally held in the Archaeological Museum of Delos, but was on loan to the Jewish Museum for this special exhibit.

ABOVE: Samaritan honorific inscription from Delos

Another exciting object in the exhibit is a fragment of Pentelic marble inscribed with the figures of a seven-branched menorah and a date palm frond dating to the fourth or fifth century CE that the archaeologist Homer Thompson discovered near the Metroön in the Athenian agora. This marble fragment is the strongest piece of evidence that, in the third or fourth century CE, part of the Metroön may have been converted into the earliest archaeologically-attested Jewish synagogue in Athens.

ABOVE: Fragment of Pentelic marble found near the Metroön in the Athenian agora dating to the fourth or fifth century CE bearing the figure of a menorah

I cannot stress enough how extraordinarily generous the people at the Jewish Museum of Greece were to us. Before we left, they set a bunch of brand-new books on the counter by the door and told us that any of us who wanted any of them could take as many as we liked for free.

I took a copy of the guide to the special exhibit of Jewish inscriptions, a flash drive containing the complete Corpus Inscriptionum Judaicarum Graeciae (Corpus of Jewish Inscriptions of Greece), a bilingual book in Greek about Jewish inscriptions found in Greece from antiquity through the Middle Ages, and the book Jews in the Byzantine Empire by Nicholas De Lang.

They tried to give Glenn a free print copy of the complete Corpus Inscriptionum Judaicarum Graeciae, but he turned it down because he said that his suitcase was already pushing the weight limit for his plane back to the U.S. (I suspect that he probably also didn’t want to carry the book back to the ASCSA, since it was quite a hefty volume.) They insisted that, because the book had been out of the case, it was not going back in and said that whoever of us wanted it could have it for free. One of the other students ended up claiming it.

I suspect that they showed us this generosity in part in order to thank the ASCSA for having loaned them many of the inscriptions they had in their special exhibit.

As I was walking back on my own from the Jewish Museum of Greece to the ASCSA’s main campus, I happened to pass the Vouli and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and I noticed that a large crowd had gathered in front of them. I realized that the changing of the guard in front of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier was probably about to happen and, although I was still carrying all the books I had gotten at the museum, I decided to stick around to watch, since I know that it is something tourists normally come to see when they visit Athens and I wanted to be able to say that I had seen it.

To be honest, the changing of the guard was kind of underwhelming. If I had come there specifically to see it, I probably would have been disappointed. Because I just happened to be passing by right when it was able to happen, though, I’m glad that I stuck around a few minutes to see it.

ABOVE: Changing of the guard in front of the Vouli and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier

ABOVE: A later stage in the changing of the guard

After the changing of the guard was finished, I continued my way back to the ASCSA’s main campus and, along the way, I happened to pass the Kotsanas Museum of Ancient Greek Technology, which is another private museum in Kolonaki. The museum features modern reconstructions of devices that are mentioned or described in surviving ancient written sources.

I stepped inside the museum and showed the woman at the desk my museum pass and asked if it worked there. She told me that it would get me a discount, but admission would not be free. I thought about paying the fee, since I would have had plenty of time to walk around and see the museum, but I was exhausted from walking around outside in the blistering heat, I was hungry and hadn’t had lunch, and I still carrying the three books I had gotten at the Jewish Museum of Greece.

I therefore decided to head back to the ASCSA’s main campus so that I could sit down and rest, eat lunch, and set my books down in my room, thinking that I might go back to the museum later that afternoon. I ended up not going back, but I did take some time to walk around Kolonaki one last time that afternoon.

ABOVE: Photo I took of the entrance to the Museum of Ancient Greek Technology

Beginning at 7:00 p.m., there was a farewell party in the garden in front of Loring Hall, which I attended. At the party, I found out that, by pure coincidence, the student who had been my roommate in the hotels for the second half of the trip and I were both scheduled for the same flight from Athens to Atlanta the next day.

Wednesday, July 26th, 2023

At 7:00 a.m. that morning, we ate breakfast in the dining room at Loring Hall for the last time. There were many emotional farewells, hugs, and well wishes. My roommate and I shared a taxi to the Athens airport and stuck together at the airport until we were separated before our flight because we were in different parts of the same plane. It was a twelve-hour flight from Athens to Atlanta and I got almost no sleep on the plane.

We arrived in Atlanta around 6:00 p.m. EST and then we had to go through customs. My roommate and I managed to meet up on the other side of customs. Unfortunately, for some reason, the people who were supposed to be unloading the luggage from our plane were not able to get the luggage door of the plane open and, as a result, they didn’t even start unloading the luggage from our flight until around 7:20 p.m. I didn’t get my luggage until around 7:25 p.m. My flight from Atlanta to Indianapolis was set to leave at 7:50 p.m. and was running on time.

After getting my suitcase, I was required to recheck it for my next flight and go through security again. Security was extremely backed up due to all the people who had been held up waiting on their luggage and there was a massive line. They tried to speed up the process by having everyone leave all their electronics in their bags, leave their shoes on, and leave everything in their pockets, but it still took ten minutes for me to get through.

Once I made it through, the plane I was supposed to catch was on the other end of the airport in a different terminal, so I had to dash through the airport as fast as my feet could carry me to get to the airport train, take the Plane Train to the right terminal, get off, and run to catch my flight. I arrived at the gate around 7:42. The plane was still there, but the gate had just closed. The man at the desk by the gate told me that airport policy forbids them from opening the gate after it has closed and that they could not allow me onto the plane.

Thus, I was stuck at the airport and had to wait for the next plane from Atlanta to Indianapolis, which was set to take off at 10:30 p.m. that night. That flight ended up being two hours. Thus, I arrived in Indianapolis around 12:30 a.m. My parents and sister were there waiting for me. They took me to the car and drove me home. It was about half an hour to get back to the car and about an hour’s drive from the Indianapolis airport to our house. Thus, I finally arrived home around 2:30 a.m. EST after a very long and exhausting day.

Conclusion

This finally concludes my series of posts about my experiences visiting Greece for the first time in summer 2023. This series has charted a journey which has taken me (and, by extension, you, my readers) all over Greece, from the Gorge of the Dead on Krete to the remote height of Bassai to the base of Mount Olympos and now even to the sketchy underpasses of Athens.

Although writing about my experience this summer has been far more exhausting and has consumed far more of my time than I originally anticipated, I am very glad that I chose to write about it this time. The trip I have recounted here will always be special in my memory and different from any future trips I may take because it was both my first ever time visiting any foreign country and also specifically my first time visiting Greece, the country that I have most longed to visit for most of my life.

If I am lucky enough to go on another prolonged trip abroad, I’m not sure if I will decide to write about it publicly, let alone in such detail as this. That being said, I hope that readers have found this series both entertaining and educational.