 Athens has been in the news lately, and not necessarily for the right reasons. A couple of home-grown troublemakers fired a rocket at the American Embassy at 6 am on January 12th. Although they caused a minimum of physical damage – a hole in the ceiling of the ambassador’s private bathroom – they may create doubts in the minds of foreigners thinking of visiting Athens. The Embassy was up and running a few hours later, but what about the city’s reputation?
My advice to would-be travelers: don’t let news like this worry you. Those guys are more interested in making statements than in harming anyone, Greek or American. As one commentator put it, if they were Al Qaeda, they would have left a lot of carnage behind them. Instead, they broke a window.
Actually, now would be a perfect time to come to Athens. We seem to be enjoying a long stretch of perfect sunny weather. Some might call it global warming. I prefer to think that these are our halcyon days – a phenomenon known since earliest antiquity. Alkyoni was one of Zeus’s paramours. His jealous wife Hera turned her into a seagull to spite him, but Zeus was able to arrange for calm seas during the time his exmistress would be building her nest and hatching her eggs. These gorgeous days arrive, almost without fail, every January or February.
 We were enjoying them last Sunday (Jan. 14) as we walked below the Acropolis. I always love the back alleys in the Plaka, where no cars are allowed. We strolled by a sunken Byzantine church surrounded by cypresses, the so-called Lantern of Diogenes beside a new strip of red earth marking the location of an ancient street, an inexplicable decaying shack, which turned out to be government property (a storehouse for spare marbles) and dozens of beautifully restored 19th century houses. We daydreamed about having the cash to own one and sit under a pergola in the shadow of the Parthenon.
But we were headed for a new exhibition on the site of the new Acropolis Museum. The museum isn’t finished but while excavating the foundations, contractors and archaeologists worked together to record the layers that establish the time frame and to make sure nothing valuable was damaged in the digging. They discovered streets, homes, wells and graves of a neighborhood lived in from the 5th century BC to the 12th century AD. Most of the finds will be on display when the museum opens in 2008, but as an appetizer a fraction of them can be seen right now. Mosaics, pottery, statues, jewelry . . . they gave us a sense of the daily life of ordinary Athenians from the age of Pericles, when the Parthenon/Temple of Athena was being built, up to the late Byzantine era when the center of gravity had shifted to Constantinople and Christianity ruled a provincial town.
Food for thought called for something more substantial. We popped into a fairly new restaurant in the area. Called ManiMani, it specializes in dishes from that middle finger of the Peloponnese but with a modern twist. I had baby squid with a pesto sauce, zucchini fritters, a huge salad of mixed greens, and mille feuilles with sour cherry preserve. It might not have been traditional, but we can’t wait to go back. Tempted?
First image by Mahmoud Al-Yousi; second image by Piere Metivier on www.flickr.com.
|
