Month: March 2025

More Fun Than A Pile o’ Cats

This past week was so full! It wasn’t just that we did a lot (we did); it was that there was such a variety of things. Bring it on!

Last weekend, Christina and I met up with our friend Maria (see below for more on Maria!) for a hike in Kaisariani, a gorgeous wooded mountain region on the eastern edge of the city of Athens. The mountainside has a Byzantine monastery, glorious views of Athens, and miles and miles of hiking trails. We saw hikers, mountain bikers, trail runners, and at least one film crew while we were there. I’m certain Christina and I will make it back for another hike before the end of April.

Tuesday, 25 March was Greek Independence Day, and we made a point of walking down to the center of the celebratory parade with the students. We positioned ourselves about a block away from the Parliament building and Syntagma Square, which is the real epicenter of the event. Though we arrived about an hour before things kicked off, we missed our opportunity to stake out a spot right on the curb. It was difficult to get a good view (the photo above is of half a dozen enormous main battle tanks, by the way), but it was a fantastic day for people watching, too. I realized while we were experiencing the parade that I don’t have much experience with parades of this sort outside the U.S., and though American 4th of July parades have military aspects to them, they are not usually actual displays of current military strength. But this was unit after unit of the Greek military marching, driving, and flying through Athens. There were jeeps, armored personnel carriers, main battle tanks, self-propelled howitzers, multiple-rocket launchers, surface-to-air missile launchers, and flight after flight of low-altitude military aircraft flyovers. You saw all of this equipment, but more pointedly you felt it in your chest. It made me think a lot about how the Greeks experience the parade and what they are thinking and feeling three years into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and two months into a very different NATO dynamic (to put it mildly).

On Wednesday, we all met up near the sundial inside the Athenian National Garden for a plant walk guided by Maria Christodoulou (Bucknell ’05), The Greek Herbalist. As I have mentioned before, the National Garden is where Christina and I often get our runs in, because there are miles of trails inside all of the fantastic greenery. But before our tour this past week, we didn’t know much about the greenery itself. Maria focused more on the various tree species in the park, because we’re not quite at the right season for herbs. I’m generally not one of those folks who can identify trees for you when we’re out and about, so I was grateful to learn some new things!

We met this fellow inside the museum for the Kerameikos Archaeological Site on Thursday. The Kerameikos was both the potters neighborhood of ancient Athens (due to the rich supply of clay from the nearby river), as well as its graveyard.

After spending time in the small but fascinating museum of Kerameikos, we toured the site itself, where our archaeologist Prof. Scahill asked the students to make more connections between the art and architecture of the monuments we were seeing with the other ancient structures they have already studied. Does that square grave monument looming above the students look like one of the Parthenon metopes (the centauromachy, in particular), or maybe part of the panathenaic games Parthenon relief? I think it does.

Last Friday we visited the Archelon Sea Turtle Protection Society in Glyfada, a coastal suburb of Athens. We had the chance to learn all about the three species of sea turtle that visit Greece’s coastal waters and in particular the species that nests on the beaches. Archelon is essentially a turtle hospital and rehabilitation facility, and it was amazing and uplifting to see people taking direct action to keep threatened population alive and to help it thrive again.

Maybe I’ve already mentioned that Athens is a city of cats. (There are a lot of dogs here, too, but very few neighborhood strays.) I’m sure lots of folks have cats at home here, but cats are everywhere on the streets and in the parks, and it seems like a popular pastime to provide food, water, and shelter to these lovelies. In fact, despite our routine warnings about “passengers” on these cats, our students are very quick to pet them or let them curl up in their laps when we are on archaeological site visits. We have at least a dozen neighborhood cats that we see more or less daily within three blocks of our apartment. These four are just some of them, but they are among the most entertaining for their Olympic piling skills.

Worlds with Friends

This past week has been spring break for the program, and that meant no classes (except for the Modern Greek course that I am taking as a student) and no student activities. Most of them have gone off to see other parts of Europe and will reconvene here in Athens over the next couple of days.

Brian, Andy, and CAT on the Acropolis

For us it meant the arrival of our friends Andy and Christen. We’ve been close for over twenty years, and we’ve all been fortunate enough to remain excited by and able to travel. The four of us have met in Ireland before, and we have done a fair amount of traveling together within the United States. This year we had the opportunity to host them in Athens for several days.

The walk-and-talk
The nooks of Nafplio
The streets of Nafplio
The kitten
The cats of Nafplio
The square of Nafplio with the fortress of Palamidi in the background

We started off with a brief trip to Nafplio in the Argolid region of Greece a couple of hours outside of Athens. Christina had already been there with the students on the one trip during which I stayed home to look after Nibbler when she wasn’t doing well. This trip allowed her to share most of those sights with me and our good friends. We enjoyed a couple of days and one night in scenic Nafplio where we enjoyed great seafood, walked the picturesque streets, communed with neighborhood cats, and generally enjoyed ourselves. While in the area, we also paid a visit to the Argive Heraion, the ancient theater of Argos, we drove by the Acropolis of Tyrins, and we sat for a tasting at Skouras Winery.

Back in Athens, we shared as many sights as we could with Andy and Christen (the Acropolis, the Acropolis Museum, Plaka, Anaphiotika, the National Gardens, Kolonaki, Syntagma Square, Monasteraki, and more!) and did our best not to miss on opportunity for a stroll or a meal for the rest of the week. We were able to cap off their visit with a morning at the weekly laiki, or open-air street market, which is full of amazing produce stands, as well as other stalls for clothes and household items.

Next week is a return to classes, but it is also Greek Independence Day on Tuesday, so look forward to plenty of parade photos next time!

Haunted by Love and Loss

This is a longer post, but it has great pictures!

Our first stop on the Peloponnese trip was to the new archaeological museum in Kalamata (yes, the olives!) which was built to house the finds from the Griffin Warrior Tomb recently uncovered outside of Pylos, as well as other finds from the surrounding area. One of the more fascinating parts of our semester is being able to compare and contrast so many different museum exhibitions and give serious thought to hows and whys of exhibition design and execution. But in any case, the artifacts and displays were engrossing and exciting.

And just as exciting to many of the students (and to me) was the fact that the area where we were traveling was the epicenter of filming for Christopher Nolan’s new version of The Odyssey, starring Matt Damon, Robert Pattinson, Anne Hathaway, Zendaya, Tom Holland, and so on. In the photo above, you can see fully functional replica of Odysseus’s boat at the right side of the pier in Pylos, as well as a smaller black-hulled boat on the left side of the frame. There were a lot of crew swarming around Pylos for the two days we were there, and the film crews also made it a little tricky for the students to see all of the castle at Methoni when they visited there, but there were no major star sightings that we heard of.

While the students were having a free beach day in Methoni, Christina and I were able to rent a car and visit Soulinari, the village where her father grew up, and the nearby village of Kremedia/Fourzi, where Christina’s aunt, uncle, and cousin live. As always, it was great to catch up with the family.

This, it turns out, is Sparta.

Despite the hubbub surrounding Nolan and his new film, our trip has also been the occasion for much rehashing of Zack Snyder’s The 300, with many opportunities to quote from the film, though as you might imagine, the students ultimately found more opportunities than quotes. This photo is of our students posing beneath the statue of Leonidis in Sparta, which is situated next to an athletic field. Further in the background, next to the fields, is a nursery school with dozens of small children on the playground. Passing by them on our way back from the Spartan acropolis, I mused aloud about whether modern Spartans expose the weak children on the playground rather than on the slopes of the Taygetus Mountains nearby, which I suppose is more or less what happened when I was growing up in Ohio.

We then paid a visit to the mountain monastery of Mystra, which is essentially the remains of a Byzantine city atop a mountain overlooking Sparta. The students in our program have been giving on-site presentations throughout the semester, and this photo shows Livia Z. giving her presentation about the site and in particular about its art and architecture.

On our way to the larger site of Messene, we stopped at the cyclopean city walls of Messene and contemplated once again the labor and ingenuity necessary to build these kinds of structures that can endure so long after the cultures that conceived them have vanished.

Christina and I (and the students) were deeply impressed by the ancient site of Messene. The city stretches for acres and acres and includes an amphitheater (above), temples, fountain buildings, a smaller political amphitheater, as well as a stadium and gymnasium. Simultaneously, the site showed off the loveliness of Greece in the early spring with small and riotous flowers in red, white, and yellow.

Within the bounds of the ancient gymnasium and the palaestra, our students practiced boxing and pankration.

Our bus made a brief scheduled stop at a beach on the way to Ancient Olympia. This is a beach where conservationists routinely mark the egg beds of sea turtles. It was a lovely day to stand on the shore, no matter what was going on in the world or in our lives.

We finished off our Peloponnese trip with a visit to the extensive site of Ancient Olympia. This photo shows a small section of the tunnel arch through which competitors entered into the stadium. As is traditional, we were all given the opportunity to engage in an impromptu footrace on the actual stadium race course. For some, there was the thrill of victory; for others, the agony of defeat.

This past week also included a day trip to Ancient Corinth, where site Executive Director Dr. Chris Pfaff showed us around the exterior grounds, pointing out the archaic, Roman, and later Byzantine points of interest. It was a windy day, but that made for some dramatic views of the site and its surrounding geography.

Acrocorinth looms behind the students in this shot, shrouded in clouds. Chris Nolan filmed here recently, using the amazing and indubitably cinematic Frankish citadel as a stand-in for Mycenae. Sure, the citadel that still stands atop the mountain is over two-thousand years younger than the citadel of Mycenae and sports utterly different architecture, but Hollywood.

Ioulia (the Associate Director of the Corinth site) and her graduate student giving us the hands-on introduction to some of the artifacts from Corinth. We were able to examine ancient representations of body parts (hands, feet, eyes, ears, etc.) that were used as part of the healing sanctuaries to Aschlepius. We also got to look at a couple of ancient curse tablets (in the orange box).

This is not Nibbler, but it is also not not-Nibbler.

I posted about this on Facebook earlier, so I won’t say much here, but Christina and I lost Nibbler this past weekend (on Sunday afternoon, our time). She had been in decline since the summer, and this past week she chose to leave us on her own terms. She wouldn’t eat, and it became harder for her to move. This period was mercifully short, and she was surrounded by love and care when she passed away. This is precisely why we brought her to Greece with us, because we couldn’t bear the thought of being that far away from her during this time. We’re so grateful to everyone who helped make sure that happened. It means we can focus on the eighteen years of utter joy that we shared with this superlative tiny panther.

My students and I are discussing Euripides’s Iphigenia at Aulis today, and the finale includes a heart-wrenching discussion of mourning and why Iphigenia doesn’t want Clytemnestra, her mother, to mourn her once Iphigenia has been sacrificed so that her father(!) can appease the goddess Artemis and finally set sail for Troy. Her daughter asks Clytemnestra not cut a lock of her hair or cry at the grave (which will be a sacrificial altar). And then we come to this:

CLYTEMNESTRA: I don’t understand. I am not to mourn for you?
IPHIGENIA: No. I shall have no grave.
CLYTEMNESTRA: What of that? It is not the grave we mourn, but the dead.

This is what kept coming back to me as Christina and I dealt with the loss of our beloved Nibbler while surrounding ourselves again and again with the monuments of people long, long dead. It is not these things and places that hold our attention, not of themselves, but rather our imagination and/or memory of those connected with them. We are mourning for Nibbler because of who she was to us.

Our love for her is the sanctuary she leaves behind to mark her passing.

Swift-Footed Professors

It’s easy to imagine that Athens might be a good place for running, what with its historical associations with Marathon, etc. But that’s all that they are in my admittedly limited experience: mere associations. Modern Athens is not particularly friendly to runners, at least in terms of infrastructure. Sidewalks are of wildly varying widths, uneven, and surrounded by highly unpredictable and therefore dangerous traffic. It’s a big city with some fun/challenging topography, but ultimately it’s a bit too deadly for Christina and me.

But we have not been forced to give up our passion for running. There are, fortunately, two very solid options for safe running on something other than a treadmill. The first is the one we use most often: the National Gardens that abut the Parliament building. The gardens are extensive, lovely, and honeycombed with well-maintained meandering trails. If you run the trails the more or less trace the park’s iron fences, each lap is very nearly one mile in length, and this route offers some fairly serious elevation gain (I think around 450 feet over the course of the loop). There is a shorter, flatter loop that comes in around 0.85 miles, and this is the one I use if I not up to the hills, or I want to work on speed.

The National Gardens also offer a tremendous amount of excellent people watching (and occasional fist shaking) and even some animal watching. The park is full of cats and also features a small zoo with a small collection of maybe half a dozen different kinds of animals. But one of the really striking denizens of the park is a fairly massive flock of green parrots that would normally be found in the foothills of the Himalayas or in sub-Saharan tropical forests. Supposedly, these parrots either escaped a large shipment that were headed to Greek pet stores, or they are the result of pets that were lost or released by individual owners (this feels less likely than the Big Bang version of a shipment getting loose).

Just a few minutes closer to our apartment is the Kalimarmaro, also known as the Panathenaic Stadium. This is the enormous ancient marble stadium that was refurbished prior to the first modern Olympic Games in 1896. It is still used as the end point of the Athens Classic Marathon, and it played a role in the 2004 Olympic Games as well as playing a continual role in the handover of the Olympic flame from Greece each time the games take place. It is an imposing and evocative structure, but you do have to pay an entry fee to get into the stadium itself with its track and stands, etc.

However, the stadium is built into a natural valley between two hills. What this means is that the top of the stadium is ringed by an asphalt path that in practical terms offers a sort of emergency exit from the structure. Now, however, the asphalt path is a near-perfect 500-meter U-shaped track. This kind of repetitive running route is something that I can do pretty well, but I discovered the first time I tried it out that you can catch some serious wind in the face up there at the top of the stadium. If all I wanted was to mix up my running routes, I would certainly come back to the Kalimarmaro, but the truth is that it is an inspiring place to run with its history and with the enormous set of Olympic rings looming over the center of the stands.