Category: Greece 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!

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.

Theban So

There are many wonderful things about the Bucknell/Penn State in Athens Program, but among the top must be the fantastic weekend trips that take us out of Athens several times throughout the term. The first of these was this past weekend when a bus took us first to Delphi and then on to the monastery at Hosios Loukas and finally on to Thebes before our return.

As I remind myself and you repeatedly, I am not a classicist, but I have read a smattering of ancient texts throughout my life and education. I have certainly heard of the Oracle of Delphi. But for whatever reason, be it my own inclination to dramatize or some cinematic influence, I have always imagined the oracle to reside in a cave rather than a classical temple structure. And I certainly never imagined her surrounded by an extensive complex of structures. And yet, that is so clearly the situation at Delphi. Perhaps long before the appearance of the temple complex, there was an oracle at a site of pilgrimage in the foothills of Mount Parnassus, and maybe it was in a cave at one time. But that’s not the oracle in the ancient texts I read. No, this is the site as we have found it, and there is nothing about it that is disappointing, for all that it is different from my imagination. Instead, the reality of the site and its dramatic natural setting instill their own sense of awe and wonder while raising questions of their own. As a scholar, these are the kinds of questions that drive me rather than frustrate me. I am not upset or uncomfortable with these questions; I am fascinated.

Dr. David Scahill points out the key architectural features of the reconstructed Athenian treasury at Delphi.

Did I know that the site at Delphi included an enormous amphitheater just above and behind the Temple of Apollo? No, I did not. Did I know that well above that amphitheater there is also a full-size stadium, because Delphi was one of the four sites for the pan-hellenic games (of which Olympia was only one)? No, I did not.

Christina in front of the stadium at Delphi

And maybe it’s because I either never saw Albert Tournaire’s famous rendering of the site in its heyday, or I didn’t appreciate what I was looking at when I did. A print of this painting is on display just inside the entrance to the museum at the Delphi site, and it helped to cement the conception of the place that our climb through it had formed in me.

Albert Tournaire, 1894

Inside the museum collections, I came face-to-face with the reconstruction of the Naxos Sphinx that once sat high above the Delphi site. A replica of this sphinx almost figured prominently in the film that Christina and I made with Daniel Nienhuis over the summer, so I felt this meeting was special in more ways than the obvious. And for the record, we made the right choice not to use the Naxos Sphinx in our film.

Brian films the Sphinx of Naxos

After a long day of trekking up and down the marble stairs of Delphi, Christina and I enjoyed a wonderful dinner with our colleagues David (who teaches the archaeology course that is part of the program) and Dimitra (who is one of the fantastic staff members at the Athens Center, which manages various logistics for our program).

Christina, Brian, David, and Dimitra

Delphi is also quite close to the ski resort town of Arachova in the foothills of Mt. Parnassus. Since Christina and I spent seven years living above the Adirondacks, we immediately reacted to Arachova as Greece’s Lake Placid. It has a tremendous amount of natural beauty, a dizzying variety of ski shops, boutiques, restaurants and bars, as well as A LOT of rich people. It was a nice place to visit, but it is the kind of place that raises more questions than it answers, and maybe in that way it’s not unlike Delphi.

Arachova, a beautiful and chic ski resort

As we left Delphi and Arachova, we stopped at a still working Byzantine-era monastery, Hosios Loukas. It was a rainy day, which somehow seemed to fit, and we arrived during a service, so that the sound of the liturgy filled the courtyards as we quietly made our way through the galleries and museum exhibits as well as into the church where the service was underway.

From the monastery, we continued on to the town of Thebes. Yes, for those of you who still remember your Sophocles, Thebes is the kingdom ruled by Laius and later by his son, Oedipus. In fact, on our way into the foothills of Mt. Parnassus on Friday, David had directed our bus driver to stop at the side of a quiet and lonely road just after sunset. In the faltering light, we walked a few yards to a stone monument with a bronze plaque in ancient Greek, which identifies it as the very crossroads where Oedipus unknowingly killed his father. It was uncanny to stand in that place, yielding to the encroaching darkness, despite knowing very well the meaning of the spot, wondering if knowing thyself is sufficient and not merely necessary.

But on our way out of the Copaic Basin, our goal was to visit the Thebes Museum and learn more about its collections and the importance of the site. Thebes is particularly special to our Bucknell Program, because David and our very own colleagues Dr. Stephanie Larson and Dr. Kevin Daly have done important work on the digs at the site, and some of their finds are in the collection (again with the sphinxes!). The students have seen a lot of museum collections already, and they will certainly see many more, yet they remained eager and attentive as David led us through the museum and its intriguing displays.

Dr. David Scahill introduces students to the collections in the Museum at Thebes.

Though the students had just returned from this exciting weekend trip, Monday found all of us at the National Archaeological Museum with the intent of focusing on the prehistoric collections. I have my own interest in the so-called “frying pans” of the Cycladic culture as part of a film project about which I will be sharing more with you in the weeks ahead.

Students examine some of the key artifacts in the Cycladic exhibit at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens.

Whew! That was quite a weekend. I’m so grateful for this experience, and not the least because it is so obviously of the sort that can’t be easily or quickly processed. I am learning and seeing and feeling so much, that it feels like I am recharging as a person. Writing in my journal every morning and keeping this blog are key parts of making the most of this experience, but I also know that I will continue to learn from it for years and years to come.

Ah, The Siren Song of A Cat at 0430

Until this morning, and aside from a standard couple of days of jet lag, I have been sleeping very well here in Athens. I don’t generally, so it has been a welcome change, and part of that change was doubtless due to the fact that Nibbler was not waking me up sometime in the three o’clock hour, as is her wont. Maybe she was dealing with jet lag, as well, though we all know from Miyazaki that this is unlikely.

Regardless, Nibbler’s trills and occasional yowls woke me at 0430 and eventually roused me out of bed entirely by 0545. We have lived together long enough that I know better than to think I could just feed her and then go back to bed, and this is even more the case these days when her food is such a fraught issue. Nibbler is well into the kidney disease stage of her life, and this has upended her relationship with food. She clearly wants it, but she has little interest in most food we put in front of her. She has an intake appointment with her Athens vet tomorrow morning, so we hope to make the transition to prescription food over the next week. It may be a challenge, though. Well, this is another reason why Athenians’ love/need of coffee is so convenient.

I taught the first session of my course, Mythology in the Films of Yorgos Lanthimos, at The Athens Centre on Monday afternoon. We won’t get to the Classics content of the course until the third week, so for now we were starting out with Lanthimos’s feature directorial debut, Kinetta (2005). It’s not an easy film, but not for the usual reasons when it comes to Lanthimos. Instead of potentially uncomfortable depictions of sex and violence, or the hulking specter of psychosexual taboos, Kinetta offers vaguely mysterious characters shuffling through a virtual anti-narrative with very little dialogue. As one of my students observed (without precisely complaining), it’s boring. I don’t entirely share that assessment, but I come to it with my own interests in independent film, so I’m not exactly impartial. Still, the students were great. They paid attention, and we had a rousing discussion of the film, what it does, and how it does it. It was a solid start to the course, and I assured them that, whether or not they enjoyed any of the future films in the course, none of them will be boring.

I’m also using this opportunity in Athens to really dig into modern Greek. I have been using Duolingo for Greek for over a year now, and that has given me an excellent context to begin more formal learning. I have a moderate vocabulary and some very basic grammar, but I haven’t forced Christina to speak Greek with me, and so my natural reluctance to sound stupid in public has kept me from trying to speak much Greek when I am out and about. To help me with that, I have enrolled in a Greek I class while I am here, and my first class (I’m joining late, sorry!) was last night. It’s been decades since I was in a language classroom, but it felt familiar and in this context a lot of fun. I’m excited to keep going and sound stupid even more often than I already do.

I can’t let this update pass without acknowledging the death of Tom Robbins this week at the age of 92. I didn’t find my way to his novels until I was in college (Thank you, Stacy!), and even then I read most of them after college while I was in the Army, since my English major kept my TBR pile Seussian if not Cyclopean. Robbins has always stood apart like authors I most admire. It’s not that he did something very well that other writers were doing; it’s that he seemed to be doing something entirely his own. Sui generis. On top of that, he was knocking it out of the park. I admire him a great deal as a writer, and from what little I know of him as a person, he seems equally admirable. He found joy and love and reasons to laugh and dance at every turn, and yet he didn’t back down when taking a stand was necessary. This is a model I’d like to emulate more. It’s easier to imagine being one thing or the other: a warrior for a cause, or a jester who keeps people’s spirits afloat in dark times. Robbins seems like an example of someone who could do both as needed. Maybe it’s something about dancing…

You’ll Myth Me When I’m Gone

Some of you know already, but for those who aren’t aware, Christina and I are in our first week of leading our first study abroad program: Bucknell/Penn State in Athens! Christina is the official faculty-in-residence leader of the trip, but as her partner and the instructor of one course this term, I am obviously helping her with the formal and informal duties and obligations related to shepherding ten undergraduates on an 89-day adventure into Greeces both modern and ancient.

Christina is teaching two of her own political science courses related to Greek political development and democracy in theory and practice, while I will be teaching a course on the films of Yorgos Lanthimos and their often fraught relationship with Greek myth. Christina is also responsible for overseeing a Culture and Environment course that brings students (and us) into more direct contact with experts in the modern Greek context, including experts on wildfires, sea turtle conservation, various agricultural concerns, and more. In addition, all of the students take an archaeology course on ancient Greece, and they are given the option of enrolling in a modern Greek course, too.

The students are fantastic, animated, and engaged. We’re all getting over our jet lag, settling in to our surroundings, and finding our bearings around the Pangrati neighborhood of Athens near the Kalimarmaro Olympic stadium and the Temple of Olympian Zeus. Christina and I have already twice returned for solid runs in the National Gardens next to the Parliament building, where we ran when came to Athens in December of 2023.

The program is facilitated partly through the Athens Centre, a local philanthropic organization that provides logistical support to academic programs of varying length and focus. There is a large classroom there where I found this wonderful framed poster from a film screening from decades past. It made me feel at home to be part of an organization that cares about sharing modern culture as much as it cares about introducing students to ancient civilization, as well.

One of the other extraordinary parts of this experience is that we chose to bring our elderly cat, Nibbler (she’s almost 18!), along with us on this adventure.

This was the first time Nibbler ever flew in an airplane, and she pretty much handled it like a pro. She was a bit cranky on the second leg of the journey from Frankfurt to Athens, but we all arrived in one piece. Now she is getting to know her new stomping grounds.

Meanwhile, our other adorable feline, Madeleine Albright (the tortie), is back at home in Lewisburg with our house sitters, one of whom comes with a cat of her own, the relatively kittenish Annata (gray and white). We get photographic evidence with some regularity that Madeleine Albright is warming nicely to her new housemate.