Another busy week for us here in Greece! After a restful Easter break, featuring failed attempts to visit the Temple of Poseidon, trips to local galleries, and a delightful evening hiking Mount Lycabettus, we hit the ground running with a much-anticipated visit to the Acropolis Museum.
We began with a tour of the archaic period and its sculptures. Kouros and Kore, sculptural representations of young men and women respectively, dominated the field. These figures are usually simply standing and lack the naturalistic posture and look of later ancient Greek sculptures, as their proportions are always just a bit off and there is no sense of motion conveyed in their body or attire. Their most attractive feature (and the first one I picked up on as strikingly different from their Classical counterparts) is what experts have coined the archaic smile, a soft upturn of the lips to suggest that an otherwise stiff subject was alive and happy.
The transition from archaic to severe styles of sculpture is captured in the Kritios Boy, a marble statue that is often considered the first of the Classical period. In contrast to his archaic predecessors, the Kritios Boy has a more natural posture (his weight is unevenly distributed between his legs) and a more solemn expression. Also critical are the cavities that remain where his bronze-made eyes would have once been. This innovation in the face of sculptures offered artists the ability to convey much more liveliness without representing the same exact countenance in each of their subjects.
The museum’s main event is the Parthenon’s frieze and pediment. We were able to see them up close (at least, those blocks that haven’t been taken away to be displayed in the British Museum) and finally piece together the stories that they tell, from the battle between Poseidon and Athena for the patronage of the city to the impressive Panathenaic procession.
Our weekend excursion brought us to Central Greece for a diachronic journey into the past that began in Thebes, one of three major centers with palaces from the Mycenean period in the region (the other two being Orchomenus and Gla, the former of which hasn’t been excavated). While the rest of Greece, led by Athens, went through a process of synoecism as it embraced the polis tradition, Thebes resisted the change, standing firm in its pursuit of self-governance through an oligarchy, punishing any settlements in greater Boetia who attempted to follow Athens’ example until its destruction at the hands of Alexander the Great.
We then visited Gla, a newly excavated Mycenean palace where we were able to recognize many of the trends we had first seen in Mycenea and Nestor. Gla was impressive not because of the palace itself, but because of the massive drainage works that were carried out around it, a feat that wasn’t successfully attempted again until the 19th century AD. Standing on top of that hill, with a merciless wind blowing in our faces as the sky threatened rain, it was hard to conceptualize the enormity of an engineering project that essentially turned an island into part of the mainland.
The highlight of the trip was our tour of Delphi by Professor Edward Harris. I appreciated his emphasis on how the site was associated with broader Panhellenic identities and how it served as a display of the power and prowess of various cities – much like Olympia! Though I was disappointed we did not get to see the Tholos of Athena Pronaia, which I always imagined as being the main Delphian structure, Professor Harris’ lecture was absolutely worth it and I did enjoy the view from the mountain.
The rest of the weekend included lunch at a beautiful mountain town, a walking tour of Chalkida (Stella’s hometown!), and a visit to Eretria and its museum. My favorite part about the latter was the miniatures of the construction of the Temple of Apollo as they answered a question that has been bothering me for weeks: how did the ancient Greeks build such impressive structures were relatively limited technology? I would love for more of these to show up at all museums; I believe they add personality to the sites and are extremely useful for visualizing what life actually looked like for these ancient peoples.