Easter Sunday in Athens

 Red eggs (in Greek: kokkina avga, κόκκινα αυγά, pronounced KOH-kee-nah ahv-GHAH) are perhaps the brightest symbol of Greek Easter, representing the blood of Christ and rebirth. The eggs are traditionally dyed with yellow onion skins.  

We were happy to find a bakery open to buy something for breakfast.  The woman working insisted that we all take a hard boiled egg and wished us Happy Easter.

 Traditional Easter bread with a red egg in the middle

 We walked over to the National Gardens to play before catching a taxi to the airport.

 Lillian was thrilled they had monkey bars.

 Guess who convinced her dad that she needed a kitty purse for her birthday?

We ate at outside at a restaurant on a pedestrian street.  Many of the restaurants were roasting entire lambs on spits outside.  The girls (and I) thought this looked disgusting.  I have to admit that it smelled delicious.

This is my favorite Euro.  The owl is a symbol of Athena, Goddess of wisdom.

I am so glad we had the chance to visit Greece.

Home again.

I think this is the first time it has really felt like coming home...probably only because we have booked the movers.

Athens: Children's Museum

These two were pretty good about following the adult agenda.  On Saturday, we sent Pierre to the Acropolis Museum and we headed to the Children's Museum.  The museum is not far from the Acropolis Museum; it is in two town houses that are next to each other.   It is free (they appreciate donations) and there were lots of nice people working there--many of whom spoke lovely English.

 Lots of low-tech learning and fun.

Sylvia is a tangram expert

 Unfortunately, this architect came down with a fever shortly after our visit.  We tried to visit the Benaki Museum, but had to leave shortly after arriving when we realized Lil needed to go to bed.  Because our time in Athens was short and because we visited Athens at the end of our trip, we missed many of the most famous museums.  What we saw of the Benaki Museum made me think that it would be worth a visit.

Athens: The Acropolis

 In the mid-5th century BC, Perikles persuaded the Athenians to begin a grand program of new building work in Athens.  The work transformed the Acropolis with three contrasting temples and a monumental gateway.

 The Acropolis was free for Good Friday.  We waited in a long line and the girls climbed in olive trees as we waited.

 

  

 The Parthenon itself replaced an older temple of Athena, which historians call the Pre-Parthenon or Older Parthenon, that was destroyed in the Persian invasion of 480 BC.  In the 5th century AD, the Parthenon was converted into a Christian church dedicated to the Virgin Mary.

After the Ottoman conquest, it was turned into a mosque in the early 1460s. On 26 September 1687, an Ottoman ammunition dump inside the building was ignited by Venetian bombardment. The resulting explosion severely damaged the Parthenon and its sculptures. 

 

 You can see the Temple of Olympian Zeus on the green lawn.

 The Acropolis and the view were amazing.

 Ernestos took us to a very yummy vegetarian restaurant.  Lillian recently reminded me that she has now been a vegetarian for more than a year.

And, of course, while digging the tunnels for the subway, they found all sorts of artifacts.  This display is in a subway station.  A huge thanks to Ernestos for hanging out with us and showing us around.  Thank you!

More Athens

   Here are soldiers at the parliament building in front of the tomb of the unknown soldier.

 The changing of the guard is in super slow motion.  Here is a you tube video to give you an idea of what I am talking about.

 Sylvia posing with the creepy mannequins.

 

We finally met up with our friend Ernestos who lives in Athens.  Back in the good old days of graduate school, Ernestos and I spent a lot of time drinking beer and eating brunch together.

 We walked in a lovely area not far from the city centre that offered views of the ocean and views of the Acropolis.  It was Good Friday and we walked by a small church where a girl was ringing a big bell outside.  She seemed to ring that bell for hours.  When we walked by again, she was still ringing.  We decided she must have incredible arm muscles or be an automaton.

 Following the Greek War of Independence, Athens was chosen as the capital of the newly independent Greek state in 1834, largely due to historical and sentimental reasons. At the time it was a town of modest size built around the foot of the Acropolis. 

During the 1920s a number of Greek refugees, expelled from Asia Minor after the Greco-Turkish War (1919-1922), swelled Athens's population; nevertheless it was most particularly following World War II, and from the 1950s and 1960s, that the population of the city exploded, and Athens experienced a gradual expansion.

Athens: Acropolis Museum

By the time we reached Athens, we were tired out.  Navigating within a big city, when the signs are in a different alphabet can be a little challenging.  Sylvia came down with a fever our first night in Athens, but sprung back into action the following day...and then Lillian had the fever for a day.

While Pierre heroically returned the rental car to the airport, the girls and I explored the  The Acropolis Museum. 

No Pictures are allowed inside.

 We picked up a family backpack and were on our way.

The museum, which is the modern building below the Acropolis (top right of the photo) It opened in 2009.   The top of the old museum can be seen to the left of the Parthenon.

The building "floats" over a current archaeological dig.  There are a lot of glass floors throughout the building.  In some places on the top floor of the museum, you can look down  to the dig several floors below! 

 Who is this mature girl?  We had a memory game with different statues of Athena that we played while we waited for our drinks.  The café overlooks the Parthenon.

 Our backpack contained a map to various statues of Athena.  We also had cards that told us some facts and some history about each Athena.  The girls liked the statue that was painted to look like it looked like when it was new.  I imagine everything white like it is now, but almost everything was painted with bright colors.  We also liked the display that showed the different colors of paint used and what mineral, etc. the paint came from.

The top floor houses the Parthenon Gallery which contains the relief sculptures of the Parthenon frieze.  There is also an excellent movie showing what the Parthenon would have looked like when it was new.  The frieze is displayed with room for the missing pieces.  

The majority of the frieze is in the British Museum.  We saw the pieces at the British Museum last March.

The Parthenon Marbles, also known as the Elgin Marbles is a collection of classical Greek marble sculptures (mostly by Phidias and his assistants), inscriptions and architectural members that originally were part of the Parthenon and other buildings on the Acropolis of Athens Thomas Bruce, the 7th Earl of Elgin obtained a controversial permit from the Ottoman authorities to remove pieces from the Parthenon while serving as the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1799 to 1803.

The Greeks would like the British to return the rest of the frieze.

Archaelogical Museum of Mycenae

The museum is amazing because it only includes things found on site.  Many of the more valuable items have been moved to Athens and reproductions are shown in their place. 

Heinrich Schliemann (1822-1890) has been credited with finding many of the artifacts.  He is a controversial German millionaire who discovered Troy and demonstrated the factual basis of Homer's epics.  He was self-educated and some believe he destroyed many artifacts by using a lot of dynamite while digging.  On discovering a gold death mask which had preserved the skin of a royal skull, he proclaimed: "I have gazed upon the face of Agamemnon!"  Archaeologists have since dated the mask to 300 years earlier than any historical Trojan warrior, the discovery corroborated Homer's description of "well-built Mycenae, rich in gold."

Here is Schliemann's wife wearing some of the jewelry he found at a Turkish site.

Gold!

I have a weakness for seals. 

Mycenae, Greece

Mycenae was the main centre of the Mycenaean world, and gave its name to a period and a civilization that evolved throughout the entire Greek world between the 16th and 12th century BC.  The Mycenaean acropolis, dominating the surroundng area and Argive plain, uniquely placed to control the commuication routes in all directirections.  It was the strongly defended royal house of the Atreidae and their people.

 

 This is The Lion's Gate.  It is the oldest monumental relief in Europe.  It is dated circa

 1240 BC and was built during the second building stage of the citadel.  The lions heads were made of a softer material and have disappeared.

Life on the hill goes back much further.  The site was already inhabited in the 3rd millennium BC.  This is said to be the city of Agamemnon.  Artifacts have been found from the Middle Helladic period (1900-1580 BC)!

 Me and two lions

 The "Cyclopean" walls, up to 14 m (46 ft) wide were unbreachable.  Later Greeks imagined that they had been built by giants.

This is the entrance to a tholos tomb (circa 1250 BC)

This is looking up at the ceiling inside of the tomb.  A 9 m (30ft) long lintel stone stands over the entrance to the tomb.  It weighs almost 120 tonnes (264,550 lb), and nobody knows how it was hoisted into place.

 This grave circle contained six royal family shaft graves containing 19 bodies.  The 14 kg (31 lb) of gold funerary goods are on display on Athens (many reproductions are on display at the museum here).

In Greek mythology, Agamemnon was the son of king Atreus and queen Aerope of Mycenae, the brother of Menelaus, the husband of Clytemnestra and the father of Iphigenia, Electra or Laodiki (Λαοδίκη), Orestes and Chrysothemis. The myths make him the king of Mycenae or Argos, thought to be different names for the same area. When Helen, the wife of Menelaus, was abducted by Paris of Troy, Agamemnon commanded the united Greek armed forces in the ensuing Trojan War.

Upon Agamemnon's return from Troy, he was murdered (according to the oldest surviving account, Odyssey 11.409–11) by Aegisthus, the lover of his wife, Clytemnestra. In old versions of the story, "[t]he scene of the murder, when it is specified, is usually the house of Aegisthus, who has not taken up residence in Agamemnon's palace, and it involves an ambush and the deaths of Agamemnon's followers too".In some later versions Clytemnestra herself does the killing, or they do it together, in his own home.

 Slightly less drama than Agamemnon's family

A flight of 99 steps drops to a cistern deep beneath the citadel.  It is linked to a spring outside and provided drinking water in times of siege.  We stopped going down when it got dark.