The Parthenon gallery, Acropolis Museum, Athens
Disclosure: I had been intending to book a Context Travel tour when I found out a friend of mine works there, and the next time we saw each other I plied her with alcohol until she agreed to put me on a tour to review. So I didn’t pay for this but I was going to, and I’m booking another (paid) tour for my next holiday; it’s not something I only did because it was comped. I’ve also just realised how many Greek-related posts there have been here lately! It’s just been a Greek few months for some reason!
Like a lot of people, I watched what was happening in Greece this summer and went “gosh, that seems a bit not on?”, then “how can I help?” and the answer came: go on holiday! So in July I took a last-minute solidarity holiday (…holidarity!) to Athens. It was a spectacularly good time to go, both for weather and for politics, and left me with a mostly unearned sense of heroism – saving the world, one souvlaki at a time – and a very immediate desire to go back. So I booked another visit for September, and as above somehow persuaded my friend to put me on one of Context Travel’s tours.
Both trips involved a lot of late nights at tabernas (helping! helping!) and after closing out a rembetika and ouzo night at 3am, it was a bit of a struggle to peel myself up for the Acropolis Seminar‘s 9am start. In this case Context’s small group sizes – all tours are six people or less – was less of an upside and more of an accidental public shaming since there was nowhere for me to hide and whimper.
The docent, Natassa, also looked like she’d come from a night out, but in a glamorous TV show way where that meant being extremely cool and put together: long flyaway blonde hair, bright red lipstick, chatty jabbing gestures. She pulled out a flipbook of illustrations and maps and sped through several thousand years of history as we walked up the hill towards the Acropolis (clarification: the other tour members walked, Natassa strolled, I lurched).
The three-hour tour is split between the Acropolis site (top of the hill) and the Acropolis Museum (base of the hill). I wasn’t sure about spending just 90 minutes at the Acropolis site, but it can be kind of nice to do a bit of Outdoor Old Stuff and then have someone affirm, “yes, you have finished this Outdoor Old Stuff, now level up to the museum, you do not have to stand around in the sun for fifteen minutes staring at a ruined theatre trying to commune with Sophocles.” (As I did in my July trip, and got sunburned and a bit grumpy.)
Anyway the most interesting part of historical sites for me usually isn’t the history, but the historiography – how the site and museums address and interpret the history they’re telling.
Athens is a really good place for this. If like me you grew up with parents who listen to NPR, and read Greek myths as a kid and Homer and Sophocles in school, you may expect Athens to feel like a grand archaic city. In fact most of Athens is quite young – it was mostly built up in the mid-20th century, as you can see from the Acropolis, all the boxy white concrete buildings across the plain. When the Greek War for Independence started in 1821, only about 5,000 people lived in Athens, and it wasn’t even the first chosen capital of modern Greece; that was Nafplio, a pretty, breezy coastal town. Athens isn’t an ancient capital city like London, which has been ticking along evenly for more than a thousand years, with present rolling over into history at a fairly steady pace. Athens is a major capital today because about 200 years ago people decided to make it one, and they decided to make it one because they were excited about its ancient past. Which means the way Athens and modern Greece treats that past is especially telling.
Like – the Acropolis used to have houses on it! During Byzantine rule, there was a community here, where people cooked and slept and argued. It was stripped off when Greece wanted to emphasise its ancient history and not its more recent one: that’s the sort of thing that can be lost when societies decide what stories they want to tell about themselves. The Acropolis site today is spectacular – moving and awesome, really, awe-creating, even when full of dazed people holding selfie sticks and crunching plastic water bottles – but it’s also a kind of artificial, theatrical space created by clearing away other parts of history.
Acropolis view: ancient Theatre of Dionysus (front), new Acropolis Museum (centre), modern Athens (behind)
The other reason Athens is such an interesting place to look at self-mythmaking is that the Acropolis is involved in one of the most notable spats of modern museology – the dispute over the Parthenon Marbles, also known as the Elgin Marbles. These are the sculptures pried off the Parthenon by Lord Elgin and shipped to the UK in the 19th century, when world archaeology was a bit more of a free-for-all than it is now (especially if you were British and called ‘Lord something’). Most of the surviving sculptures are in the British Museum, and Greece has been agitating to get them back. The UK said they couldn’t possibly send them to Greece until there was a proper place to put them, so in 2009 Greece built the Acropolis Museum, including a big room on the top floor called the ‘Parthenon gallery’, with empty spaces for the absent sculptures to slot in. The British Museum looked down and started shuffling its feet. In 2014 UNESCO offered to moderate the dispute, but the UK declined. In May 2015 Greece ruled out suing the UK in international courts over the issue. (Here’s what the British Museum has to say about the issue.)
The Acropolis Museum is built to feel like the Acropolis – not a reproduction, but to give a similar impression of open space and classical pillars. The ramp up to the first floor evokes the ascent to the temple, it’s very airy and clever. (Also, it has free wi-fi.) Upstairs in the Parthenon gallery, there are some of the sculptures and some very pointed plaster reproductions. Where the British Museum has the original, the copies are pure white – very pointedly artificial. I love this. I love that the curators are throwing shade on another museum through the literal shade of the plaster in their exhibits. This is what kids who want to be museum curators when they grow up dream about.
We talked about the Parthenon Marbles conflict on the tour; the Americans were outraged and I was a bit embarrassed, but Natassa shrugged: “They’re taking good care of them over there – it’s a really beautiful room there too. Anyway, it’s easy to say this should go back or that should, but if it started, the precedent – it would be really hard to manage.”
It does make me think about where we draw the line. One of the reasons it was a bit off this summer to hear Germans lecturing Greeks about fiscal management is that part of why Greece is struggling – by no means the only reason, or the main reason, but one of them – is that during the Second World War, the Nazis occupied Greece and forced the government to ‘loan’ them lots of money, and in 1953 Greece agreed to write off the debt – explicitly to help heal European relations after the war. And when, in July, the German finance minister suggested Greece send €50bn of public assets to Luxembourg as debt collateral, no one brought up how many Greek public assets are already held in rich EU countries – in private collections, in museums, artifacts that were taken out of Greece throughout history often without compensation.
I don’t think that these are necessarily bad things! There isn’t a point of History Starts Here that we can work back to and say “OK, things are all fair now!”, and it’s sensible and positive for countries and institutions to play it as it lays. For me, it just raises the eyebrow a bit that the line of forgetting often seems to fall just after Greece has handed something over to a northern European country, and never the other way around.