The wish to travel seems to me characteristically human: the desire to move, to satisfy your curiosity or ease your fears, to change the circumstances of your life, to be a stranger, to make a friend, to experience an exotic landscape, to risk the unknown. Paul Theroux
Athens is one of the world’s oldest cities, continuously inhabited for at least 7000 years, with a recorded history dating back for 3,400 years. That’s old.
Known as the both the ‘cradle of civilisation’ and the ‘birthplace of democracy’; legacies of the golden age leadership by the great statesman, Pericles in 5th Century BC.
Pericles was a leader of vision, who promoted the arts, embarked on a building program that included the Acropolis and the Parthenon, and founded democracy.
Let there be light! Said Liberty, and
like sunrise from the sea, Athens arose! Percy Bysshe Shelley
The playwrights Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides flourished in Athens during Pericles’ time, as did the historians Herodotus and Thucydides, the physician Hippocrates, and the philosopher Socrates. Just the founders of modern literature, history, philosophy, and medicine, is all!
The Greek playwrights wrote extensively about Hubris, the overweening pride – of the “pride that comes before the fall” variety – that was the tragic flaw in every Greek hero or heroine.
While my Dad is a proud man, fortunately he has more of the Australian-variety pride. The laconic, laid-back pride that enjoys lazing on a deck chair with a beer, and a terry-towelling hat, with the cricket blaring on the radio, watching the pretty girls walk by on the beach.
“Bird-watching” dad used to call it – you could get away with that kind of political incorrectness in the 1970’s.
Athens, the eye of Greece, mother of arts and eloquence, native to famous wits. John Milton
Hotel New Angleterre
Constitution Square
Athens 13/2/1960Dear Mum and Dad,
This letter will not be as long as I would like as I am leaving Athens tomorrow.
I arrived in Athens, one week ago last Sunday. Being my first taste of a European Winter, it could have been worse, but it was an unpleasant change from Cairo. My health is much improved and I am standing up to it quite well, but I am sure I am losing weight.
I hope everything is alright at home.
I have had my plane ticket rerouted to include stop-offs at Milan, Zurich, Geneva, Frankfurt, Dusseldorf, Amsterdam, Paris, London. I thought I might make the most of my plane fare.
I am frankly disappointed with Athens, it has not the atmosphere of Cairo and its treasures are not anything like as well preserved.
Whether the lack of contacts here made any difference – perhaps it did.
Fortunately I have this American girl I met in Delhi to blunder around with. We visited the museums, the Acropolis, the Parthenon, the Theseum, the Temple of Zeus – to these we usually walked and ended up taking hours longer than we should have!
On Wednesday we went on an organised tour to Delphi (home of Oedipus Rex and other heroes).
Here the mountain scenery was breathtakingly beautiful and we passed through many quaint little villages.
The condition of the exhibits in most of the museums was generally poor, badly arranged and labelled and most of the labels in English were spelt incorrectly.
Usually the famous pieces war scattered among many different museums and you had to hunt around a lot of smashed up statues to find them. There was one exception – the museum attached to the Theseum. It was beautifully arranged and labelled. Most of the material was recovered from people’s graves – generally jewellery, pottery, and other personal belongings.
On display was an opened grave of a baby and a small girl exactly as they were found, skeletons, toys etc. Other things of interest were an ancient toilet-training device for children, a ballot machine, water clock, stoves and cooking utensils. There was also a fantastic little statue of Apollo restored from hundreds of tiny pieces of bronze.
This is a mess, I am sorry. I am tired from a late night and rushing to finish this at the airport before I leave for Rome.
Love Chris
Travel is glamorous only in retrospect. Paul Theroux
Athens sounds amazing, rubble and all, but I was much more interested in who this American girl was.
So I quizzed Dad. He said she ‘dropped into his line of sight’ in India several times. Then they caught up in Athens and Italy.
“They are pretty big cities to randomly run into someone Dad, I think she was following you.”
“Well, that would have been very flattering to think so,” he replied.
Absolutely convinced of my hypothesis, I tell him of a dear male friend who I met after we kept ‘bumping into’ each other at Uni.
After we had been friends a while, he confessed he had followed me around that day, so the constant running into each over was less serendipitous, more artifice.
Dad just smiled.
Perhaps I’ll defer to the wisdom of the Greeks on this one…
Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is just opinion. Democritus
Stories like this one, that emerge as Dad opens up about this time of his life are absolutely priceless. Mythology is the study of stories, as I dig further I gain insights into Dad’s personal mythology, an archaeologist piecing together fragments of treasured memories, for generations to come.
One thing I know, that I know nothing. This is the source of my wisdom. Socrates
Source: wikipedia.org
Title image: Map wiki.totalwar.com
Athens postcard flickr.com
Athens Greece postcard rlv.zcache.com
Acropolis excursion.gr
Amphitheatre telegraph.co.uk
Athens trio trinitytheatre.net
Pericles wikimedia.org
Theseum wikimedia.org
Delphi postcard blogspot.com
Acropolis porch of the Caryatids blogspot.com
Dad's travel diaries 