Although on paper this week’s schedule was less packed with activities, I decided to try and venture to a few museums with some friends, as well as on my own. The owner of Kekkos—a charming and cozy cafe frequented by CYAers, tourists, and locals alike—Dimitri recommended to me the Numismatic (Coin) Museum of Athens. I am not sure if Dmitri sensed that I had a deep affinity for coins (I would not put it past myself for having let it slip, since we have had a good many conversations over the many hours I have already spent at Kekkos), but nevertheless, his recommendation was spot on: despite being a relatively small and unassuming museum, I think I can safely say that it has been in my top three museums so far in Athens.
Housed in the Ιλίου Μέλαθρον, (“Palace of Ilion”) the former mansion of Heinrich Schliemann, the museum boasts a collection of over 500,000 artifacts, the majority of which are coins, but also includes figurines and other types of artifacts.
The first thing I noticed, even before I got to any of the artifacts, was the way the curation of the museum countered my current understanding of one of the discipline of archaeology’s many questionable figures: Heinrich Schliemann, German businessman and amateur archaeologist.
The first room that visitors are pointed toward is a small exhibit on his life and work. In Alex’s class, we have discussed this infamous figure in the context of his poor conduct when handling the excavation of Troy. In a rush to excavate what he identified as the ancient city of Troy (which today is on the northwest coast of Turkey on the Dardanelles Strait), Schliemann tore through the excavation with reckless abandon, ruining the remnants of the city he set out to find. What he did find—that is, a trove of treasures he incorrectly identified as belonging to Priam, the legendary king of Troy, but actually predated Homer’s Trojan War by over a millennia—he looted, smuggling it from Turkey to Greece, and draping his young Greek wife, Sophia, with some of the gold jewelry.
Schliemann may have identified the location of Troy, but he also destroyed it. Thus, he remains a contested figure: while many of the archaeologists and academics that I have had classes / worked with see Schliemann as a paradigm of malpractice in archaeology, he is still considered one of the most influential figures in archaeology, and his name never goes unmentioned in beginning archaeology classes. That is why I found it extremely curious that the museum all but eulogized his name in the parts curated about his life and work. “… his finds were to clad Myth with History. He gave History its missing childhood. To the scholarly world he bequeathed the Homeric epics rich in gold. This great visionary’s career was accompanied by glory and fame and the fortune he had amassed on earth revealed o him the ancient wealth buried for centuries. But fate is hard and hubris is great,” reads one of the first signs about his life. While it makes sense that his old house, constructed by the famous architect Ernst Ziller, clad with mosaics and murals depicting themes from Classical Greece or the Trojan War, would be used to commemorate his name in some sense, it surprised me that there was not even a mention of the damage he caused to our knowledge of archaic Greece. This made me wonder how much who funds a museum affects the information we receive as museum goers, and how the general public’s perception of not-so-great people can be skewed by a myopic curation. Nevertheless, I did not let that stop me from enjoying the hoards of coins that awaited me (no pun intended!).
The first collection of coins at the museum came from Aegina, which in 1829 was the short-term capital of the newly formed Greek state. Over the next 150 years, the Numismatic museum amassed more than 50,000 coins from excavations, including those from Delphi, Olynthos, and Corinth. The coins in the museum range from dates going back to the 7th century BC, all the way to the 20th century.
According to the exhibit, the territories of Ionia and Lydia are believed to have been the birthplace of the coin in the second half of the 7th century BC. Aegina is believed to have been the first to uniformly produce stater coins, which featured turtles engraved in high relief. The turtle is thought to be symbolic of Aegina’s naval prowess, but it also represented fertility, as well as the goddess Aphrodite. These turtle coins lasted until Athens conquered Aegina in 480 BC, replacing the turtle with the Athenian owl tetradrachms. In 404 BC, by the end of the Peloponnesian War, the land tortoise had replaced the sea turtle.
Because they were mass-produced, coins provide a unique source of knowledge about the past: they provide information both on the economic situation and monetary policies of a state, as well as the values and priorities of past political leaders. Hoards of coins excavated from archaeological sites may indicate that someone was preparing for a time of uncertainty or hardship. Further, the context in which coins are excavated can reveal to us aspects of ancient culture: for example, some ancient Greeks left coins for the dead to pay Charon, the ferryman, to cross them over the river Styx.
What I found most interesting about the museum was that I got to see almost three thousand years of time pass in such a small amount of physical space—and I only made it around the first floor! One thing that I did notice was how many of the earlier coins used flora and fauna or other nonanthropomorphic symbols on their coins. Although I am not too familiar with which gods are represented by which animals and plants, I am inclined to think that many of these had to do with the deity most fervently worshiped by each respective city-state. I would like to look into this further. As I progressed chronologically throughout the museum, the use of anthropomorphic figures seemed to proliferate. Then, the use of the faces of leaders became the dominant type of symbol on the coins. To me, coins seem to be a token of Greek city-state identity: by placing a picture of their leader on the coin, Greek city-states distinguish themselves from all other city-states, and in a way promote their own prestige.
Although I only finished the first floor of the museum, I would like to go back, and this time pay more attention to the change in the style of depiction of leaders: which way are they facing? What are they wearing? What physical characteristics are on their face? How complexly are they depicted? Because the sheer amount of artifacts in the Numismatic Museum is so great, honing in on specific time periods and aspects may help me to delve more deeply into the practice of minting coins in general.
My week 4 ended with a stunning trip to Aegina on Friday. We visited the Temple of Aphaia, an old Byzantine village (which supposedly once had 365 churches, one for each day of the year!), and a gorgeous beach. Although time seems to move much more quickly in Greece, I have been enjoying every minute of it.
