Five months after arriving in Europe we finally made it to Greece on April 26th, flying into Athens. The city itself is a sprawling metropolis, much of it built in a haphazard way just in the last century, but the downtown area is quaint and beautiful. We spent the afternoon walking through the old town Plaka area to the base of the Acropolis hill, where the ancient Agora, or marketplace stood. Now it is a massive, fenced in park strewn with columns, crumbling walls, and giant stones. The temple of Hephaestus stands alone on the far side of the ruins in near-perfect splendor.
It was late in the afternoon as we walked the path along the Agora that leads up to the Acropolis. The sun would soon set and a bronze haze settled over the skeletal remains of the ancient city. A cool wind blew and the scent of pine trees filled the air. To be there at the moment was a convergence of information taken in over many years, of poetry and legend, of history and imagination, and now I found myself standing where it all happened. I saw the rugged land rolling in high hills on all sides, breathed the cool, heady air beneath the great blue sky. I understood what the ancient Athenians experienced at the most physical level: a landscape stripped down to the bare essentials; earth, sea and sky in their purest forms. Here they scraped a living from an austere, invigorating land and it made them resilient, hardy and intelligent.
The soft wind seemed to convey something ethereal and profound, the feeling growing of time having passed but the spirit living still. Most of the remains in Athens are mere rubble heaps compared to what still stands in Rome, but the force of the place is remarkable. I found myself asking again and again: why did so many revolutionary things happen here? Why did the fire start in Athens?
No comments:
Post a Comment