Three questions: why are we here visiting the Acropolis? Why are the masses of tourists here visiting the Acropolis? What could we take away from the visit?
We are here, my wife and I, for our honeymoon. My wife particularly wanted to come to Greece, a long held desire that she can’t specifically explain. We are in Greece because it has both beaches and cultural activities. We are here because it is August and Greece is a place people go in August, a place people go for their honeymoon. We are at the Acropolis because when you are in Athens you must go. We spent on day in Athens before heading to the islands for two weeks. That one jetlagged, exhausted day we walked a bit from our hotel in the Plaka. The Acropolis truly dominates the city. You see it everywhere, unexpectedly when you turn around, when you look up from your map. Don Delillo in The Names:
For a long time I stayed away from the Acropolis. It daunted me, that somber rock. I preferred to wander in the modern city, imperfect, blaring. The weight and moment of those worked stones promised to make the business of seeing them a complicated one. So much converges there. It’s what we’ve rescued from the madness. Beauty, dignity, order, proportion. There are obligations attached to
such a visit. Then there was the question of its renown. I saw myself climbing the rough streets of the Plaka, past the discos, the handbag shops, the rows of bamboo chairs. Slowly, out of every bending lane, in waves of color and sound, came tourists in striped sneakers, fanning themselves with postcards, the philhellenes, laboring uphill, vastly unhappy, mingling in one unbroken line up to the monumental gateway. What ambiguity there is in exalted things. We despise them a little.
The answer to the question, why we are here, why any tourist visits the Acropolis, perhaps is that you must go. It is unavoidable. Surely Pericles and the other ancient designers knew the power of the location they chose, its ability to command attention. For us moderns, it is of course unavoidable in another way. The Acropolis is a cultural monument engrained in the popular imagination. My wife and I, like everyone else, are here in part to take the requisite photos: asking an Italian couple to take our picture, smiling, shoulder to shoulder, arms around each other’s waists, one picture in front of the Parthenon, another in front of the [echaralon] statues of Athena, take it twice, the second time with our sunglasses off so our children some day will be able to see our eyes, offering to take a picture of the sunburned British couple.
We are here also for knowledge. That is part of what we are expected to take away from this site. To know what these ancient people did, how they lived, how they thought. To understand ourselves by learning about what is called the birthplace of western civilization. It is almost Freudian: we search for meaning among the ruins of our cultural parents, these Greeks that have created so much of our lives in art and politics, architecture and government. We can praise them, blame them too if we choose.
The Acropolis is not only a monument to the ancients, it is a monument to ourselves, to us modern people. The signs explaining the renovations that are being undertaken remind us of this. The scaffolding and the cranes, work that was supposed to be finished last summer for the Olympics. Signs explain the work being undertaken, the work the that has been recently completed. They explain how each building was discovered, renovated, restored by the British or the French archeologists in the beginning nineteenth or early twentieth century. The signs explain how those efforts were incomplete or flawed. How the metal rods they used are now oxidizing. These signs remind us of our own power, our ability to recover the past. This is our knowledge, the knowledge of the past. It affirms our technological prowess. The Parthenon was built nominally as a religious shrine but of the many buildings on the Acropolis it never was particularly important for its religious significance. Its power was the secular wonder of money, power, and art. It demonstrated the power of Attica, the ability of the prosperous city state to create and control wealth and beauty. Today it is not so different for us. It is our wealth, our powers of our invention that have been put on display. We now use it as a temple a monument to what our knowledge, the knowledge that we posses the control we therefore have over history, that we are able to know this building, we are able to recreated, improve the imperfections of early generations. We are able to master the ancients. We are able to supercede them, for we are able to restore what they created, we can do what they did, joining their powers to our own.
What else is taken away from the visit? The memory of the hot August sun beating down on the smooth rock, the swarms of tourists, the memory of the buildings. In five years I won’t remember much of the visit. My memory of the Acropolis, the one I want to hold on to, will be looking down a street, the rows of apartment buildings on either side, then above the traffic will be the Parthenon sitting, looking back indifferently from beyond time, looking down on the, on me.
