Museum of the University of Athens
When Athens suddenly found itself the capital of Greece, Greece scrambled to build institutional buildings worthy of a capital. That means a lot of temporary accommodation until the buildings were ready.
This originally Ottoman building had been remodelled into an architectural office in 1831. (And the two architects who set up shop there, Stamatis Kleanthis and Eduard Schaubert, kept very busy over the following decades.) In 1837, it housed the University of Athens for four years, until the university moved to what is now its ceremonial hall, next to the Academy of Athens and the Old National Library.
Lonely Planet says that the building is now a “missable historical museum”.
The Museum of the University of Athens, missable?
…. Plausible.
Skirting around Anafiotika
I was heading up into Anafiotika, the Greek island village perched up against the Acropolis. (Literally a Greek island village—it was settled by builders who moved here from the island of Anafi, in the early building spurt of Athens.)
However I got distracted by the topical presence of St Nicholas of Rangavas (the altar girl controversy), so I headed back towards Plaka; as far as I can tell, St Nicholas is on the border between the two.
There were more charming Byzantine terracotta churches on the way. Except, as is also the case in Salonica, later buildings look the same as Byzantine buildings, sharing brick with them. This church of the Saints Anargyri, Grange of the Holy Sepulchre, dates from 1651, making it Ottoman, not Byzantine.
Plaka
Across the road from Hadrian’s Gate, Plaka starts, the old town of Athens. When not overflowing with tourists and tourist tat, it is still charming—especially in contrast to the 20th century buildings of the centre.
Walk up a bit, following the instructions of Lonely Planet’s Walking Tour, and you come across the 11th century church of St Catherine’s, restored around 1840 (one of the first restoration works in Modern Greece).
Tourists are rather more interested in capturing pictures of the two random Roman columns scenically positioned in front of the church. But there are a lot of 11th century churches in Plaka, and they are a useful reminder that Athens in Byzantine and Ottoman times was not an abandoned village, as some popular fancy has it. It remained a major city of Greece, and it accordingly kept on building things.
By no means the biggest city of Greece—that had long since ended up being Salonica; but a respectable middle-range town. It declined somewhat in Ottoman times, but was still 9th largest city in Greece in 1815 (Nick Nicholas’ Answer to Is it true that the city of Athens didn’t exist 200 years ago?). So where Agrinio is ranked in contemporary Greece.
Popped up in the middle of a street in Plaka, the monument of Lysicrates, built in 334 BC to commemorate the poetry contest sponsored by its builder. (“Choragic” means “sponsorship-related”.)
By 1810, the monument was library for a monastery built here; Byron wrote some of Childe Harold while staying here. I see someone is still using the monument as a shelter…
Hadrian’s Gate
Hadrian’s gate, in front of the Temple of Olympian Zeus, a monument by a grateful city to the emperor that rebuilt her. Hence the inscription on either side of the gate, in elegant Greek capitals that I can just about convince myself I can read on the Temple-facing side:
Facing the old Athens of the Acropolis (and now, the cars of Syngrou Ave): “This is Theseus’ City”
Facing the new Athens and the Temple: “This is no longer Theseus’, but Hadrian’s City.”
Commemorated across the street from Hadrian’s Gate: Melina Mercouri (1920–1994), chain-smoking diva of Greek culture, film star (including Never On Sunday), and then culture minister.
For a contemporary statue, it is striking both in its likeness and its skill.
Temple of Olympian Zeus
The Temple of Olympian Zeus was supposed to be the biggest Ancient Greek temple ever: it took 600 years to build, and was ruined in a barbarian raid a century later. What remains of it are a seventh of its columns, most of them now in scaffolding.
The columns tower over the highway right next to it, and look completely out of place there. I’ve often commented about how, unlike the comforting brick of the Romans and Byzantines, the marble of antiquity looks like it was deposited by aliens (or giants, as Greek folklore maintained). More than anywhere else, it was the Temple of Olympian Zeus that has made me think so…
A seventh of the original 104 columns of the Temple of Olympian Zeus remain standing. The fallen column was the latest to fall, in a storm in 1852, and is still here.
Like the millennium-long cathedrals in Western Europe, this would have been a magnificent building site in classical antiquity, and an even more magnificent temple for the century after Hadrian finished it.
What is left here is not magnificent. It is more awe-inspiring than that. And yet, there’s really so little of it left. It speaks more through what isn’t here, than what is.
Surplus column capitals and/or statue bases; Roman baths on the precincts (with the appearance of comforting Roman brick.)
Zappeion Hall
The Zappeion, Zappas Hall, Athens Exhibition Centre, is not named for Frank Zappa, but for national benefactors Evangelos and Konstantinos Zappas. (The cousins were from what is now Southern Albania, and their surname is Zhapa in Albanian; so the similarity with Frank is coincidental.)
The gardens of the Zappeion were a gay beat, which made the Zappeion a familiar topic for the speakers of Kaliarda, the Romani-based queer cant of Greece.
Kaliarda-speakers were both erudite and deeply cynical in their humour, and their name for buildings like the Zappeion is one of many gems they came up with.
To name such buildings, they had to come up with a name for people like the Zappas cousins: National benefactors. As far as they were concerned, though: τζαζ-μπερντέ-πουροι.
- dzaz, Romani džas: “to leave, to drive out”
- berde < Turkish slang belde, anagram of bedel “price”: “money”
- pouros, Romani phuro: “old”
Old men throwing away their money.
Hence the Zappeion was a τζαζμπερντεπουρότσαρδο.
- tsardi < backformation from Turkish çardak “villa”: “hut”, (also in mainstream slang) “house”
A house built by old men throwing away their money.
There is a respite of greenery, small as it is, in the National Gardens next to Parliament, that continues on to Zappeion Hall, and concludes on this light rail walkway to its south. The Acropolis towers over one end of it; the Panathenaic Stadium over the other. There’s a small cafe here that would make sense as a hangout.
Greek Parliament
The Greek Parliament. It started life out as the royal palace, and it is a stately, reassuring presence in the city, even if it attracts permanent aggravation from its citizenry.
In theory, the central point of Athens is the square that Parliament faces, Syntagma (Constitution Square, because King Otto was forced at gunpoint to adopt a constitution in 1843, and proclaimed it in the square that was his palace’s at the time.)
I get the symbolism: the people’s square, where the people gather to protest for their rights, takes priority over the palace, and the people still haven’t come to regard Parliament as the people’s house instead of a palace.
But that argument, prioritising the square against the building towering over it, never made sense to me. Nor to the tourist buses, which all gather on this side of the street.
Standing guard over the Parliament, the statue of Eleftherios Venizelos, the statesman who defined the course for the country for the first thirty years of the twentieth century.
To the side of Parliament, the grand old lady of Athens, the Grande Bretagne Hotel. Lovely on the outside, even lovelier on the inside, though I haven’t ventured in this trip. I do remember it being a wonderful respite from the chaos outside. (I also remember the top floor bar being full of Russian oligarchs and blonde women seeking the… companionship of Russian oligarchs. Presumably there’s a bit less of that now.)
Greece in the 19th century translated everything, so the Greek name of the Grand Bretagne is of course the Megali Vretania. Greece also has a tradition of liberal translation of Hollywood movie titles. So when the movie The Grand Budapest Hotel came out, it was obvious to me that it should have been rendered as To Xenodokhion I Megali Vudhapesti, with a nod to the grand old lady of Athens. Only a literal-minded automaton, drooling in their braindead slavishness towards the West, and completely blind to the resonances of the name, would pass such an opportunity up.
So of course the movie was released as Xenodokhio Grand Budapest. There’s just 16 hits on Google for the more Hellenic rendering.
In front of Parliament—but still very much on the parliament side of the street—the Greek monument to the Unknown Soldier. Photo-op for every passing tourist with its rigid guards.
What’s always captured my attention is the Ancient Greek font rendering of all the battles the Modern Greek army has waged (and yes, the listing does go around the walls), including places that don’t quite fit with the Ancient Greek font, whether because they were bureaucratic (Hill 731, on the Albanian front), or because they’re not that Hellenic to begin with (e.g. on the Albanian front in WWII, Mt Morava; Korytsa = Korçë; Mpoumpesi = Bubësi massif; Fort Rupel on the Bulgarian front—the neighbouring Greek village had already been renamed to Kleidi in 1926, but the fort kept its WWI name; El-Alamein; Rimini. The Rubicon, at least, would have been familiar to Pericles).
The inscription next to the relief of the soldier makes a point of echoing antiquity by being run-in: no spaces for words, and words running over lines. Appropriately enough, it’s citing Thucydides’ Funeral Oration of Pericles: “An empty bier has been made up for the unidentified dead”; and “the whole earth is the funeral monument of famous men.”
Syntagma Square itself, and its subway station.
As with much of the very centre of Athens, a bit too crowded for me to just hang out in, like I do in other squares.
Theatre posters
It’s Summer in Athens!
And Summer in Athens, and indeed all over Greece, means lots of cultural events. (I’m likely to switch back to coming here in winter in future, as less disruptive for work. And there is a lot less of this in winter.)
And there’s lots of music concerts, like in the Anglosphere.
Unlike in the Anglosphere, theatre is a lot more prominent as a summer outing choice. And not just any theatre: overwhelmingly, it’s canonical Classical Greek plays (in translation of course). You can see why that was taken up in the antiquarian 19th century, but it has persisted: the classical canon is the foundation of theatre practice here, just as Shakespeare is in the Anglosphere—even if most theatres most of the time aren’t staging them.
And in Summer, that means staging Ancient Greek plays in Ancient Greek (and Roman) theatres: Herodes Atticus here in Athens, and Epidaurus down near Argos. It’s just bums on stone seats, after all; it’s not like those ancient theatres will ddddddbe ruined.
Of course, just as with Shakespeare, the text is what it is, and the innovation is in the direction. And the posters.
So, middle row, after the Tiger Lillies: Sophocles’ Electra; the Chainides (nouveau Cretan folk); Panos Vlachos (singer); Roberto Alagna & Aleksandr Kurzak (opera snippets, at the Herodes Atticus). Bottom row: Tsiou (theatre revival of a 2005 movie about a drug addict and his random encounters); a multimedia art installation in Eleusis; Euripides’ Bacchae; and the Rockwave Festival, featuring Robbie Williams and Deep Purple.
Kazantzakis: The Ascent
Oh. New Kazantzakis novel out, “The Ascent”; he chose not to publish it while alive. I noticed it in bookshops while in Sitia.
Just from the blurb, I recognised its heroes as minor characters retreaded in Captain Michalis: the author stand-in, Kosmas, and his Jewish wife, Naomi.
What he was trying to do in this novel was awkward and stupid. Like every intellectual in Europe, he was faced with a “now what” after WWII and the Holocaust; I’m pretty sure Naomi suicides in it. Kazantzakis was still desperate to articulate a Nietzschean answer, and went to London to interview intellectuals, so he could copy paste them into his novel as responses, with his stand-in talking to them.
Nobody in London, of course, gave him the time of day, and he shelved the project. Just as well; it sounds like it was heading towards being a Nietzschean version of The Fountainhead. All speeches and lack of narrative.
What he did with the same heroes in Captain Michalis is narratively a lot more coherent. Morally, it’s repugnant. The novel is about the 1889 Christian Cretan revolt against the Ottomans (the last one before 1897, when it was the Muslim Cretans’ turn to be massacred); it’s Kazantzakis’ recreation of the Iraklio of his childhood. And of course it is recast as a Nietzschean jihad of self-improvement through self-immolation.
So of course Kosmas, and his effete uncle the teacher, cast off their Western clothes to join the battle and certain death. Because that is to be heroic, and that’s what Nietzsche is about.
And of course chicks don’t get Nietzschean self-improvement. Especially if they’re foreign chicks, like Naomi, or the Circassian Emine. They represent all the corrupt decadence and sapping of precious bodily fluids that holds the menfolk back from their true destiny.
Of course the furious antisemitic ghosts of Kosmas’ ancestors topple her down the stairs.
I don’t hold with cancelling problematic artists for having the constraints of their time. There remains a lot of value in Kazantzakis, not least his style.
But there is some stuff that has not aged well, and that we can’t just lump as modern readers in a different culture. His treatment of women—and foreigners—falls in that category; he was a cosmopolitan Western intellectual, who kept wishing he was a peasant bigot.
He wrote a ton of love letters to a couple of Jewish girlfriends in Berlin in the 20s. All “Liebe Genossin.” And part of him felt so guilty about his race-mixing, he atoned for it by having his ancestors throw their stand-in down the stairs.
Yuck.
And the sad thing is, even with its blemishes, Captain Michalis still sounds like it’s 10 times the novel The Ascent would ever hope to be.
PS: As the erudite Stephen “Language Hat” Dodson pointed out to me:
It’s not just Kazantzakis — the entire modernist movement worldwide (as far as my knowledge extends) is rife with blatant misogyny and weird varieties of male triumphalism. (See Eliot Borenstein‘s Men without Women for examples from Russia in the 1920s.) Someone should figure out what that was all about and explain it for me, because (as a belated but stubborn modernist) I am troubled by it.[…] There was much less misogyny (to the extent I’m aware) in the late 19th century. It’s like once they decided to throw off the shackles of Victorian gentility (or whatever the local equivalent of “Victorian” might be), they decided women and their female weakness was the cause of everything that was wrong with literature and the world. I have no idea why, except that misogyny is like kudzu — almost impossible to eradicate.
As I responded:
Sadly I can see why they thought it, not least because I read Kazantzakis as a kid. But it is no more sophisticated than alt-right Return To Tradition, Go Make Me A Sandwich stuff.
Athens, 2023: recap
I found I’ve already written a more extensive version of “Athens, 2023” on Facebook. So:
I did my walking tour of Central Athens on June 17 (and at the end of it, left my Lonely Planet in the last venue I visited). Before I go on:
Things I like about Central Athens:
- The surviving book culture. Not just bookshops, but used bookshops are everywhere downtown. Greece is a couple of decades behind in the passing of the book as a cultural artefact (that’s a good thing!). Nonetheless there are fewer bookshops even in Athens than there were 10 years ago. It’s just that, unlike everywhere else (including Salonica), there were so many bookshops to begin with, that you hardly notice here.
I’ll note that that is not the only aspect of book culture that survives here longer. As I’d already noticed last visit, the book launch remains a big deal here as a social event; indeed, compared to the Anglosphere, I get the impression that it is a much more socially inclusive kind of event.
- Tsakalof St, Kolonaki, where I go to work in one of the bars along the street (my AirBnB is unusually unsuited to sitting and working: not even a couch).
- Ermou St Mall, and the less touristy bits of Plaka
…
Yeah, that’s it.
In Crete up to the 60s, social capital demanded you could not badmouth a place, without naming some group as an exception. “Chania is a complete hole—excepting any monasteries that might be there” (given the piety of the past age); “Iraklio is the very den of Satan—excepting the Alexiou family, those are fine people”.
So. Central Athens is dreadful, and deserves its Kaliarda name of Γκρεκοκάθικο, The Chamber Pot of Greece—excepting the linguists of the Academy down Alexander Soutsos St, they are wonderful people (and, after all, they are why I am staying in Kolonaki, walking distance from them. Athens Uni proper is out in the burbs, it doesn’t count.)
As I’ve noticed on previous visits, there are bits of Plaka that speak of a formerly more liveable, altogether more pleasant city. But the non-descript high-rises of the city? The cars weaving around people and double parked? (Last night at My Fair Penteli taverna in Plaka, what would have been the dance floor was a road, cars slowly meandering between the band on one side and the diners on the other.) The noise, the irascible drivers, the relentless grey of the residential areas? (Punctuated, at least, by endless cafe–cum–bars.) It is a stressful, unlovely place to be.
(And bits of downtown have a clear snootiness about them. I haven’t noticed it here in Kolonaki, though this is traditionally the epicentre of it. Its high-rises are just as grey as neighbouring Exarchia’s, just less graffiti’d; so I don’t know what they’ve got to be so snooty about. But I’m an oddity, someone on a laptop in a party street; so the waiters just leave me alone.)
Thing is, Salonica is not truly different to Athens. The same bad Greek urban stuff is there. It’s just that, with Salonica a third the size, the bad Greek urban stuff is still sufficiently outweighed by the nice stuff. And Athens was last the size Salonica is now sometime in the 1940s. Just before the high-rises started.
The outer suburbs of Athens, like Glyfada—in fact, even New Smyrna, an inner suburb, where my uncle and aunt live—are a lot less stressful and more liveable. And Greece does not treat its suburbs as dormitories, the way the Anglosphere does, so you can have a life there without going downtown.
Well, one can; I can’t. The books are all here, after all.