It was an overwhelming first week in the Mediterranean! We began our immersion into Greek culture with a visit to the past – the iconic Athenian Acropolis. At the site, built on a hill so as to be admired from almost every corner of Athens, we were bombarded with information about the rich history of one of the most emblematic spots in all of Europe. I was, for example, both shocked and embarrassed to learn about Greece’s relationship with the Ottoman Empire and the Venetians’ rule. It quickly dawned on me how little prior knowledge I had about my host country and how much there would be for me to learn in the coming weeks.
Friday brought our first field trip outside of Athens; our destination: the Mazi Plain, a small valley that in antiquity was a key route between Attica and Thebes, and between Boetia and the Peloponnese. We stopped at Oinoe, one of the Athenian demes that we had heard about during the Acropolis lecture. The settlement has three phases represented in its architecture, making it a fundamentally diachronic site. Alex explained to us how we can detect the various phases through the remains: the earlier buildings use limestone while the later ones switched to conglomerate stone, perhaps because it was cheaper and allowed them to fortify the walls faster in a competitive race between the Athenians and the Boeotians. We also find a lot of shards from the late Roman and early Byzantine times, signaling an increase in population during those times.
The Mazi Plain was the first point of attack and thus the launching point of the Peloponnesian War in 431 BC, a historical event that keeps coming up and, I now suspect, must have played a tremendously important role in Ancient Greece. In addition to towers in Oinoe that were strategically placed so that potential attackers were always within shooting range, the Mazi Plain was protected by the impressive Elutherai Fortress.
Despite controversies as to who originally built the fortress and for what purpose (Alex laid out compelling evidence for what it would have been the Boeotians, however), the consensus is that the fortress was traded back and forth between the aforementioned and the Athenians. This debate sparked my curiosity about how academics answer questions that pertain to a time and place that we cannot know much about. The exchange of ideas and dialogue that these enigmas give rise to must be constantly rewriting our understanding of history, forcing me to ask how confident I feel about this knowledge.
Our day concluded at Aigosthena, one of the three best-preserved fortresses in Greece (Elutherai being one of the other two!). The walls of the site enclosed and protected a town next to the sea built either by the Megarians with the help of the Athenians or by the Macedonians. In any case, though one of the walls is preserved to this day, the other might have never been built to completion, perhaps due to a lack of time after an enemy invasion.
The stories about the archeological projects conducted in Aigosthena, particularly those of its restoration after a tragic earthquake in 1981, was the highlight of the trip for me. I had never before realized just how much interdisciplinary work goes into bringing a structure of this magnitude back to its glory days. Touring the inside of one of the towers and learning about its impressive architecture (did you know that it had two walls, an interior and an exterior one, that were somehow not bonded with anything other than the friction of the stones?) left me in awe not only of the modern professionals who reconstructed the place but of its original engineers. Much like our discussion about the Parthenon at the Athenian Acropolis being slightly tilted, so that it would appear straight from afar, these revelations have presented ancient minds in a whole new light. For reasons that I have yet to examine, I have always conceived of the past as a dumber time than our present, but these past few days have been a necessary reminder that humans have always innovated and that social evolution is not always an upward trend. I am excited to see in what other ways ancient intelligence will continue to surprise me this term.
